Bertha Shelley

Bertha Shelley by Aubrey Burnage is about a young Hubert Clayton lurking in the back alleys and plotting with friends at the bars about his planned revenge against Sir John Greville for stealing his girl away. Excerpt: «IT was night. No moon nor stars shed their pale beams upon the silent streets of York; and that grand old city of a thousand memories lay in placid slumber, wrapped in a mantle of thick darkness,—save here and there in some of her narrow back alleys, where taverns of questionable respectability still drove a stealthy trade in the „cup that maddens“ with the abandoned wretches at their gaming tables.»