All you that in the condemned hold do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
Watch all and pray; the hour is drawing near
That you before th' Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent,
That you may not t'eternal flames be sent:
And when St 'Pulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls!
Past twelve o'clock![26]
A fellow-prisoner or a keeper bade Sarah Malcolm heed what the bellman said, urging her to take it to heart. Sarah said she did, and threw the bellman down a shilling with which to buy himself a pint of wine.
Sarah, as we have seen, was denied the honour of procession to Tyburn. Her sentence was that she was to be hanged in Fleet Street, opposite the Mitre Court, on the 7th of March, 1733. And hanged she was accordingly. She fainted in the tumbril, and took some time to recover. Her last words were exemplary in their piety, but in the face of her vindictive lying, unretracted to the last, it were hardly exemplary to repeat them.
She was buried in the churchyard of St Sepulchre's.
V: — ALMOST A LADY[27]
Born (probably illegitimately) in a fisherman's cottage, reared in a workhouse, employed in a brothel, won at cards by a royal duke, mistress of that duke, married to a baron, received at Court by three kings (though not much in the way of kings), accused of cozenage and tacitly of murder, died full of piety, 'cutting up' for close on L150,000—there, as it were in a nutshell, you have the life of Sophie Dawes, Baronne de Feucheres.
In the introduction to her exhaustive and accomplished biography of Sophie Dawes,[28] from which a part of the matter for this resume is drawn, Mme Violette Montagu, speaking of the period in which Sophie lived, says that "Paris, with its fabulous wealth and luxury, seems to have been looked upon as a sort of Mecca by handsome Englishwomen with ambition and, what is absolutely necessary if they wish to be really successful, plenty of brains."
It is because Sophie had plenty of brains of a sort, besides the attributes of good looks, health, and by much a disproportionate share of determination, and because, with all that she attained to, she died quite ostracized by the people with whom it had been her life's ambition to mix, and was thus in a sense a failure—it is because of these things that it is worth while going into details of her career, expanding the precis with which this chapter begins.
Among the women selected as subjects for this book Sophie Dawes as a personality wins 'hands down.' Whether she was a criminal or not is a question even now in dispute. Unscrupulous she certainly was, and a good deal of a rogue. That modern American product the 'gold-digger' is what she herself would call a 'piker' compared with the subject of this chapter. The blonde bombshell, with her 'sugar daddy,' her alimony 'racket,' and the hundred hard-boiled dodges wherewith she chisels money and goods from her prey, is, again in her own crude phraseology, 'knocked for a row of ash-cans' by Sophie Dawes. As, I think, you will presently see.