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had him by the ear, twisting it mercilessly. “Good sir, enough with that, enough!” I batted down the nobleman’s hands, and the ingrate looked as if he just might twist my ear too, though I was clearly trying to help. Brute.
    Turning back to Theodore, I pushed down his hands as well, even as he sought to massage his own battered head. He looked as if he’d been on the losing end of a fight with a mule. “What have you gotten yourself into now, William?” I wailed at him, my voice as raucous as a fishwife’s. I turned back to the puffing brute of a man and poked a sharp finger into his round belly. “And you! Beating a poor bedlamite. For shame sir, for shame!”
    As expected, the word bedlamite caught the entire churchyard up short. For all that Leeds was a good two hundred miles from London, everyone knew Bethlem Royal Hospital and what sort of people it housed behind its imposing stone walls. I could tell that I had the crowd in my hand, and I pressed my advantage immediately. “That’s right, all of you,” I said, wishing there was a stage on which to speak.
    And suddenly there was. With a swirl of a rich purple cape, Master James was suddenly in front of me as if from out of nowhere. He dropped a thick oilskin-wrapped bag of raw wool to the ground, ostensibly to take his ease as he listened to the caretaker of the crazy man hold forth.
    Where Master James had gotten a bag of wool on a Sunday is not something I could guess, but I stepped lightly up onto the bundle and gained myself a good foot of clearance.
    â€œâ€™Tis a desperate tale. A tragedy indeed!” I cried, pitching my voice loud and high. “Small wonder that William has such a hard time of it, having spent five long years of his life in that pit of poor, possessed lunatics. But he did not start such a sad wreck of man.” I gestured imperiously to Theodore, who now stood, clearly at a loss at what I was saying. He looked stunned and credibly insane. That worked to my benefit.
    â€œIt’s true !” I proclaimed. “He was a good lad, my eldest auntie’s youngest son, always getting in trouble as boys are wont to do, but never with any guile or malice. He just had an eye for pretty things, oddities too, baubles and trinkets and the like. He would pick them up everywhere, he would, and then like as not put them down again with neither rhyme nor reason, in the most inconvenient places. Birds’ nests in the church pew, eggs in his father’s chair, feathers in the stew.” This got a few of the women chuckling, clearly mothers as well, and I nodded. Laughter was good. Laughter built sympathy. Sympathy could save a skin not worth a lick of salt.
    So I plunged on. “One day my dear cousin William picked up the wrong pretty and deposited it in quite the most unfortunate place. A brightly colored cup filled with lye he dumped into a flagon of wine, and our sharpest needles he dropped into the roasting suckling pig.” A few gasps of shock, and now even the men looked intrigued. This was a fine pickle for anyone to be in, for sure. The fat, blustering lord began consciously drawing away from Theodore as if I’d just introduced a murderer into his midst. “The fact that he did these both at the same meal was bad enough, as you might imagine,” I allowed. “The fact that we were serving the local magistrate and his family was just poor timing.”
    â€œOhhh,” someone groaned, and finally Theodore got it. You could see the clarity rush into him and then rush right out again, the better for him to play his role. He put his head in his hands and moaned pitifully. For being a lily-livered criminal, he acted the part of a shamed lunatic rather well. Nothing like a beating to knock a sense of urgency into you.
    â€œIt was terrible inside—terrible!” he moaned, swaying now as he held his head. “They didn’t understand. Nobody understands. And