more than, I would admit. It was she who had been behind recruiting me to the effort – and I was embarrassed to learn that my “assistants” really considered themselves adjoints à Mme. Graveau, and it was she, not I, who in truth coordinated and directed their recherché. (The French nomenclature now made more sense.)
My amazement and indignation distended steadily as I learned more about Mme. Graveau, and before long it rose to fury. Mme. Graveau had never encouraged a single word said against the Crown – let alone uttered one herself. Her enemy was the Bloody Code, not the men who enacted it, nor even the men who induced them to enact it. She wanted allies at Old Bailey and Westminster, not enemies, for the love of God. Take all that as given, and her persecution was nothing more than an attack on the freedom of speech – a right engendered by that same loving God, and inuring to all free men and women in England.
I wrote and caused to be published tract after tract, four in one month, defending Mme. Graveau (and her Adjoints), agitating for her release, and promoting her message about the evils – unforeseen consequences, as Mme. Graveau would have it – of the Bloody Code. I found houses to print the first two, and printed the others with my own coin, leasing a press at night from publishers deliberately uninterested in what I was doing. I was putting the money I saved on Mme. Graveau’s gin to good use.
As the weeks passed, my fear grew that I would be jailed next. The Adjoints, some of the life wrung from them by the loss of Mme. Graveau, were on tenterhooks themselves. But I was their leading indicator: Surely, if I were not yet arrested, they were safe. Even so, there was a palpable sense of resentment from “my” assistants that Mme. Graveau resided at Newgate, and I in my home.