The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins

And then, too, Wakley had recently been elected Coroner. Yes, if there was a man in London who could dispose of human remains, it was Thomas Wakley.
    But no.
    Tilly . . . Tilly didn't know what to do, redy. He was a happily married, kind, gentle, perhaps indecisive fellow—not like his fire-breathing old boss had been—and with Cobbett gone he'd drifted back into work as an itinerant London tailor. And as to where to put Paine, returned after all these years . . . well . . . He was busy as it was. He was struggling just to get by. In fact, he needed some kind of stool at work, something to park himself on as he pinned up pant legs and chalked inseams. And now on top of everything else he needed a way to guard these bones. Until the idea hit him . . . that nice wooden box they were in . . .
    Why . . . not . . . sit on it?
    I think you'll agree that the sight of people hurled off the top of St. Paul's and sent screaming through the air seems an odd way to benefit London schizophrenics. But that is indeed what they were doing not too long ago here in Queen's Head Passage. It was a charity event, of course: they had a zip wire strung from the cathedral dome and down into the street. But long before all that, this passage was where James Watson kept his bookstore. Tilly was still over on Bedford Square fitting customers with clothing, propping their feet onto a box that—unknown to them—put their toes just inches away from the face of Tom Paine. But Carlile's old shopman kept checking in on the tailor, just to make sure the bones hadn't been lost again. Watson even put out a pamphlet, A Brief Histoy of the Remains of the Late Thomas Paine , and ended it with the simple hope that Tilly would get around to burying Tom.
    None of the old passage is left now, except for the perfect cross-section of the transept and dome of St. Paul's Cathedral that fills one entire end of the street. It's a modern business neighborhood now of workers leaving the BT Building and suits drinking over in the Paternoster pub. But for centuries this was a street of stationers and booksellers. In the 1850s you could find Watson over in number 3, welcoming customers to his stock of radical pamphlets and books. For years he'd lived the simple, ascetic life of a Quaker activist—-running co-op store, sleeping on a sofa in the back room behind his bookstore counter, cooking his own lonely bachelor meals, and printing and binding his publications entirely by himself. He dressed simply and still addressed people with the traditional Quaker thee and thou . But he'd become a little more domestic now, having finally gotten married well into his thirties-his honeymoon was spent in prison for selling The Poor Man's Guardian —and now he and his wife Ellen worked together, printing up Thomas Paine tracts and hand-stitching them. Strolling out of his shop, he'd turn and face the irony of it all: the great looming mass of St. Paul's, home of the largest crypt in Europe. And still Paine went unburied.
    It was money, always money, that shook the bones loose from their owners. First the Cobbetts lost them in a bankruptcy auction to their neighbor George West. Then West, fallen on hard times and moving off his farm, had dumped them into the lap of Ben Tilly. And now . . . well, by 1853 Tilly was broke too. The tailor's employer had gone under and his wife had died: Tilly fell upon hard times, and at length his goods went to an auctioneer over on Rathbone Place. An onlooker in the saleroom might have noticed a curiously familiar face bidding from the crowd-a plainly dressed Quaker, his fingers stained with printer's ink and callused from folding and stitching. Going once . . . Going twice . . . Sold! Down came the hammer. The unassuming gentleman made his way through the crowd, paid for the wooden box, and then disappeared into the crowded streets of London.
    The travels of Thomas Paine, it seemed, might finally be coming to an end. But an ocean away,