It is as if she is a ghost, her voice unheard, her touch unfelt, while Mrs Frost ties her apron a little tighter around her waist, picks up the tray of the whores’ leavings, and removes from the room.
‘Oh no, no,’ says Angelica. ‘Do not leave me in this manner. Have pity.’ But she hears Mrs Frost’s steps retreating without so much as a pause, and reminds herself, she will be enjoying this. I, begging her. What nonsense. Out loud she spits, ‘Suit yourself!’ and then, going to the head of the stairs, shouts down, ‘You are a foolish, stubborn woman! Surely you are.’
But Mrs Frost is long gone.
THREE
In the evening, Mr Hancock stays in by the fire with his niece Sukie as he has all week.
‘Would you not go to an alehouse?’ asks Sukie, and she can hardly be blamed, for he is not restful company. He cannot remain in his chair three minutes before rising as if a wasp has crept under his seat, to pace the parlour opening and closing boxes whose contents he has made himself familiar with five times over already; he leans upon the mantel and opens a book but its pages are gibberage to him and he lays it down again. Twice he goes to stand on the landing and has Bridget the maid hammer at the front door from without to satisfy him that no caller could possibly go unmarked. ‘A few hours will not hurt,’ Sukie pursues, thinking wistfully of her own plans for the evening, viz.: to make free with his tea caddy and skim spoonfuls of cream off the milk basin in the larder.
‘But if there is news of the Calliope, and they cannot find me …?’
‘I should like to meet the man who ever succeeded in hiding in this town.’
‘Hmm.’ He sits down, his chin on his fist. Then he stands up again. ‘Perhaps I had done better to have remained in the city. In the coffee-house, they will have the most reliable news.’
‘Uncle, what difference does it make?’ says Sukie. ‘If word comes tonight, what can be done before the morning?’ She is shrewd, like her mother; she quirks her eyebrow in the same way.
‘I will know,’ he says. ‘I cannot be easy until I know.’
‘And you are making certain that nobody else can be either. Sir, we may hear nothing for a good long time …’
‘No. It will be soon. I am certain.’ And yes, he is quite certain. Every nerve of his body hums like a strung viol. He advances upon the window and looks out onto the darkening street.
‘Your ceaseless mooning!’ she exclaims, a phrase straight from her mother Hester’s mouth, and his muscles go tight, for her white cap and pursed lips have melted forty years from the room as if she were his great sister and he a little boy. But Sukie sparkles with mischief. ‘Aren’t I just playing?’ she says, and he is so relieved to breathe again that he lets out a guffaw.
‘You saucy miss,’ he says. ‘What if I were to tell her how you ape her?’
‘Then I might tell her of all the time you spend in taverns.’
‘You never would.’
He acknowledges that it does him good to have a young person in his household. It gladdens him to hear her and Bridget’s shrieks as they chase one another down the stairs, and to see them stroll out together on errands, arm in arm. He will even tolerate an apple-pie bed every now and then, for what else is to be expected of a girl of fourteen? In all other particulars Sukie is, after all, an excellent housekeeper, and infinitely preferable to the surly hirelings who came before her. If she were his own daughter he would have had her cast her sharp little mind over his ledgers, but he must assume that what she knows her mother must shortly know too. He has taken the precaution of buying her a fine silk day dress and allowing her to wear it about the house so that, by its constant rustling, he will know her presence.
Sukie, meanwhile, is secretly pleased to have been sent to her uncle: of all the situations that might have called for a spare daughter, this is the best by far. She dreads the day her brother will get another child on his fat wife and she, Sukie, will be called to Erith to scrub the nursery and mop drool. Here she has her own room, and she and Bridget find themselves often at their leisure, for a modest old man makes little work.
‘Will I read to you, then?’ she sighs. ‘The evening will not pass itself.’
‘Very well. Pope’s essays, if you please.’
‘Oh, yawn! Uncle, it don’t please me even one bit. No. Choose something else.’
He sighs. ‘I think you have something in mind.’
Indeed, she wastes no time in whipping from behind her chair a handsome little volume of the sort sold all down Fleet Street.
‘This is a good one,’ she says, bending close to the firelight to riffle through its pages. ‘I am halfway through so you will have to guess at what adventures came before.’
‘So many novels,’ he wonders. ‘Such a mob of Emilias and Matildas and Selinas: I had not thought the exploits of young ladies could take up so much print.
‘I am addicted to them,’ she says happily.
‘I am not.’ (But this is untruthful: he is a sentimentalist, and furthermore he enjoys Sukie’s reading aloud. She has a high bright voice, and bobs her head with narrative energy.)
‘You will like this one, Uncle! ’Tis full of excitement. And highly instructional.’
‘Your mother is right, I allow you too much pin money. Your library is larger than my own.’ Mr Hancock’s books number eighteen in total, excluding his bible which may be classified as an artefact. Then, because he enjoys her company more than he does Alexander Pope’s, he says, ‘Well? Will you read it or no?’
She wriggles in her seat to get comfortable, and clears her throat: ‘Heh-eh-eh-hem.’
This is the moment there comes a great thundering at the door. Mr Hancock scrambles with his pipe, spilling tobacco over his shoes in his haste to rise.
‘Sit down, Uncle!’ says Sukie, who is on her feet too.
‘It sounds important.’
‘Even so, ’tis not proper for a gentleman to answer his own front door. You want to hire a man,’ she says, and while he is stammering and grappling with the question of whether he is or is not a gentleman, and furthermore the cost of a liveried footman, and furthermore the absurdity of it, the hammering starts again.
‘Don’t go,’ Sukie warns him, adding in her mother’s voice, ‘Bridget must see to it, that is what she is for,’ but she cannot help kicking off her slippers and creeping across the room in her stockings. She nudges the door ajar with her toe and presses her face into the gap: she will have a clear view across the landing to the front door at the foot of the stairs.
‘What do you see?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Bridget!’ she hisses into the darkness.
When the door sounds again it is with a true pounding: the panels tremble and the iron bars across the fanlight set up a high resonant hum.
‘Open up, sir!’ calls a voice from outside. ‘’Tis Tysoe Jones!’
‘He himself! He has not sent a boy. Confound it. Something is amiss,’ says Mr Hancock, and he barges past Sukie and down the stairs. It is dark as doomsday but he has run up and down these stairs since he first learned use of his feet, and there is a flutter of light behind him as his niece comes forth with a taper to light the sconces.
‘He must not find our house unlit and we sitting only with the fire,’ she is muttering.
Mr Hancock is down the stairs with a scuffle and a clatter, his lungs juddering in his chest as he repeats, ‘Something is amiss. This is not the usual way of things,’ and thinks, what will we do now? If the ship is lost, and the cargo with it, ah! that will be a blow. Is it one he can absorb? And what of his investors? Many men stand to be disappointed on his initiative. He is ticking over the figures in his head even as he reaches the hall and comes to the front door. God be praised, he thinks, for bricks and mortar: if it comes to it I may sell my tenanted houses – this one too, but God forbid, God forbid, that I be the one to sell my father’s house.
He unlocks the door with palsied hands, the big key from his bunch first, followed by bolts t
op and bottom. The metal is heavy and uncooperative in his fingers: he wrenches once, twice, at the top bolt that always sticks – ‘Oil, Sukie, fetch me oil for the door –’ until it shoots home too fast, nipping the side of his palm so he curses. Outside, he can hear Captain Tysoe Jones stamping and swearing on the step.
‘I am here!’ Mr Hancock calls, clasping his injured hand.
As he opens the door, there is a little crescendo of light as Sukie puts the taper to the last of the candles, and here is Captain Tysoe Jones, ruggedly lit. He is in his sea clothes still, a jacket so faded by salt and sun that it appears dove-grey except for wedges of its old blue preserved under the lapels and the cuffs. His person is equally stained and faded: his face brick-coloured and tough as the soles of feet, with white creases about his eyes and mouth. The stubble on his cheeks twinkles as if a light frost has settled there. He clutches a canvas sack and looks mightily irritated.
‘No time like the present,’ he says.
‘Forgive me. I could not – I was unable to –’ Mr Hancock gestures at the door helplessly.
‘Let me come in. I have walked from Limehouse.’ His arms are crooked up to his chest, and he holds the sack as one holds a sleeping infant. ‘I wish to stand no longer.’
‘Did you come home on the Calliope?’
‘No.’ Captain Jones steps past him into the house. ‘My letter explained everything.’
‘I received no letter. I have had no word from you since you left London in January last. Nothing!’
Captain Jones removes his hat. He holds his bundle easily: it is neither heavy nor cumbersome. ‘Good evening, young lady,’ he says to Sukie.
Her curtsey is perfunctory, not her most elegant although she practises it often enough in the bubbled mirror that hangs above the fire. She has lost her composure and is dumb as a child, mouth firm shut and eyes wide. ‘You must have tea,’ she says at last.
‘Ale,’ says Mr Hancock, feeling cruel for correcting her. ‘And have Bridget bring out the blade of beef.’
Sukie scuttles into the kitchen, her head ducked. He thinks, if the ship is lost, her father has lost the five hundred pounds he invested. What will Hester say?
He waves Captain Jones into the counting-house, remembering too late that the candles within are extinguished. He wishes to be a good host but in the thick-wadded darkness the words burst from his mouth: ‘Where is my ship?’
‘Hanged if I know. Might we have a little light?’
His hands tremble as he lights the candles on the great desk. ‘And what of its cargo?’
‘I took no cargo,’ says Captain Jones, seating himself with a long groan of relief. ‘I sent you a letter.’
But there has been no letter! He is stupefied within, and he must appear stupefied without, for Captain Jones prompts him: ‘A letter. I sent it with the Rosalie, which departed Macao shortly after I arrived.’
‘The Rosalie was lost with all hands. I received no letter.’
‘Ah. And so you will not know.’ They sit in silence. Captain Jones fills his pipe. Its feeble light magnifies his frown of concentration as he draws upon it, darkness creeping into every crease and wrinkle. There is the suck and smack of his lips on the pipe stem, and the tock of the clock, and the tiny creaks and ticks of the old wooden house easing itself into a more comfortable position. The canvas bag sits on Captain Jones’s lap all the while. ‘I sold your ship, sir,’ he says.
Mr Hancock’s innards seem to liquefy. Sweat cools his palms. He reminds himself, I trust this man. He is my agent; my fortunes are his. He will act only in my interest.
‘It was for good reason,’ Captain Jones says. ‘I found an extraordinary thing, but it cost more than I had. You always gave me leave to make whatever choices I see fit.’
‘Aye, within the bounds of sensible cargo! A bolt of fabric, some novelty to try in the market; when one thing cannot be got, to substitute it with something of no greater risk … To have lost my ship – that is my income.’
‘And mine too.’ Captain Jones is at his ease; he has had a long voyage to make himself comfortable with this new situation, and besides he has always had an eye for extravagances. He sits forward in his chair, and starts to grin. ‘But I assure you, we shall recoup it numberless times! You never saw the like of what I have found for you. Nobody saw the like.’
‘What is it?’ He thinks, some idiot thing I will not be able to sell. A kitten with two heads, or a new type of poison, or a set of obscene etchings that will put me in jail.
‘Where is the girl? Have her come in here.’
‘Do not make a spectacle of this foolishness,’ he sighs.
‘This spectacle wants witnesses! Bring in your entire household. Light all the lamps.’
Mr Hancock is too rattled to stand up for himself any further. He stumps out to the hall but there is no need to shout out for Sukie. She and Bridget – this one bleary with sleep, her cap askew, she must have nodded off in the scullery again – are hovering by the door already, the tray of ale set down on the floorboards to keep it from rattling. In the darkness their faces are pale echoes of one another, two ovals turning to him in enquiry.
‘You heard,’ he says. ‘Light the lamps.’
‘Yes, sir,’ says Bridget. He can hear the quiver in her voice: excitement has made her breath knot up in her throat. The pewter mugs on the tray clink and splosh as she picks it up, but her steps on the floorboards make no noise.
‘Put your shoes on,’ he says. ‘Any body might think you had been eavesdropping.’
He brings the tray in himself and after scuffling for their slippers the girls follow him. Captain Jones has put the bag on the desk. By the way the cloth falls, Mr Hancock thinks there is no softness to the thing it conceals. Light as a bird and small enough to carry in the crook of a man’s arm; how can it be worth a tall ship and all its promised cargo?
Behind him, Mr Hancock feels the girls shift closer together, for they are always touching, these girls, pressing against one another as kittens do when their mother leaves them. He hears the tentative movement that will be Bridget closing her hand around Sukie’s elbow, and squares his shoulders. He is sorry that he has no kindly friend to touch his arm.
‘On my voyages,’ says Captain Jones, ‘I have seen many strange things. Things that you cannot begin to imagine, ladies. I have seen cows with necks as tall as trees. I have seen ordinary-sized Chinean women with feet no bigger than hot cross buns. And I have—’
‘Out with it,’ Mr Hancock interrupts.
‘Is it in the bag?’ asks Sukie.
‘You are a young lady of striking perspicacity.’ Captain Jones observes the faces of his audience and sighs. ‘Very well. Let us get this over with. Perhaps once you see the marvel I have brought to you, you will be more enthusiastic.’
Captain Jones eases the canvas away, and at first they cannot think what it is they see. For it is brown and wizened like an apple forgotten at the bottom of the barrel, or like the long-dead rats Mr Hancock once found bricked up in the kitchen wall, parched and cured by the elements, skin that cracked under the pressure of a thumb.
It is the size of an infant, and like an infant its ribcage is delicate and pathetic beneath its parchment skin, and its head is large, and its fists are drawn up to its face. But this is as far as the comparison may be extended.
For no infant has such fearful claws, and no infant such a snarl, with such sharp fangs in it. And no infant’s torso ends in the tail of a fish.
‘I bought it from a Dutchman I met in Macao,’ says Tysoe Jones. ‘And he from some Japanese fishermen, who captured it alive. I am sorry it has not survived.’
‘A vicious thing,’ says Sukie.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I know how it looks.’ By the time she goes to her bed tonight, she will have forgotten that it is dead: in her imagination it already quivers with rage, clawing to escape a fishbowl, lashing the water in the face of its impotence. As surely as if she had seen it with he
r own eyes, she knows that the water around Java teems with thousands of little creatures just like it: she hears their hoarse cries and feels their fury.
‘It can’t harm you now,’ says Captain Jones, but she stares at him. He spreads his hands. ‘Didn’t I bring it all the way across the ocean? And it did not sink me, as they say mermaids do, and it did not bite me, as I know that apes do.’ He chuckles, but she is not reassured. ‘Come closer. You must take a better look.’
They crowd in. There is a little squeak in the girls’ breathing. They want to peer at it, inspect it, but at the same time they cannot but recoil. It is so perfectly dead.
‘I don’t see a single stitch on it,’ says Mr Hancock, at length. ‘No glue, no paint. How is it done?’
‘Done? You think it is done?’ Captain Jones is aggrieved. ‘Like a conjuring trick? No, this is not done! It simply is. If it were done by any hand, ’twere God’s alone.’ He warms to his theme. ‘After all the trouble I have taken! After I crossed half the earth twice! Which is, in a practical sense, the entirety of the earth. When, sir, have I ever brought you counterfeit?’
‘No, never, never. Of course not. But you must appreciate that a mermaid – well, it is quite impossible.’
‘Not so much as a blade of grass in all the tea I’ve ever borne safely to your warehouse,’ Captain Jones laments.
‘No, no, no. I did not mean to imply—’
‘This is not a toy,’ says Captain Jones. ‘This is not a – a – a bauble. You cannot buy it at a fair. This is a genuine mermaid.’
‘I do see that.’
‘Take it in your hands, sir. Inspect it at your leisure. I assure you, you will not be disappointed.’
It lies on the table, desiccated and furious, its mouth open in an eternal apish scream. Mr Hancock cannot help checking its little breast for the twitch of a pulse.
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Page 3