The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  ‘Out,’ says Mrs Frost to Maria, who retreats at pace. ‘We can save this,’ she continues, and sets about tousling the powder through Angelica’s abused hair with quick deft hands. And she paints her friend’s face, and pins and hooks and stitches her into her layers of petticoats and skirts. She must stoop before the transformed Angelica to secure the jacket of her gaudy striped redingote; she grasps her at the waist and runs pin after pin through the silk and into her stays.

  ‘You came back,’ says Angelica, and Mrs Frost sticks her again, right above where her soft navel must be, until she feels the shaft of the pin come up hard against whalebone.

  ‘Did you think I would abandon you?’

  ‘Oh – not for ever. But –’ Angelica allows herself a laugh – ‘I thought you meant to hurt me a little.’

  ‘I would not do that.’ Mrs Frost is still terse.

  ‘You are a good friend. We may have our differences in opinion but—’

  ‘One more thing.’ Mrs Frost seizes the long ivory busk from the dressing table and rams it down Angelica’s front with such briskness that she staggers. ‘There. Now I am satisfied you are fit to be seen.’

  Angelica sighs with pleasure at her reflection. ‘Ah, Eliza. My love. You know I cannot be grand without you.’

  And this provokes a little smile.

  When Angelica returns it is almost dawn, and her link-boy so tired that he can barely run before the chair, but trudges alongside it, taking the weight of his guttering torch in both hands and upon his shoulder, so that it sizzles and spits alarmingly close to the too-large wig that swivels about on his head and every now and then slides down over his eyes. At her door she is overcome by charity for the poor child, and gives him a shilling. I shall not account for that to Eliza, she thinks with a little triumph. How provoking she will find it, to have her books out of order by so small a sum.

  The ground-floor rooms of her lodgings present as a mantua-maker’s, but down the passage a woman’s moans are audible, and the squeaking of a bedframe rises in rapidity and vigour. So somebody’s work is soon to be done, she thinks as she climbs the stairs, which idea she finds comforting, as if she were part of a great benevolent order. The whore’s day ends as the baker’s begins, and there is a time for every purpose under heaven.

  This present moment’s purpose is reconciliation, and she goes direct to the dressing room, where Eliza Frost sleeps flat on her back with her toes turned up and her arms at her sides: her plain white smock, ruffled at the neck and wrists, does not detract from her resemblance to a corpse freshly laid out. She does not groan or grope about when awakened. Her eyes flick open in silence and she turns her face calmly to the door.

  ‘Good morning, slugabed,’ Angelica hisses. ‘Here I am, alone. Come and keep company with me.’

  Mrs Frost follows her into the bedroom, and lights a candle while Angelica kicks her shoes under the wardrobe and sets about peeling her stockings off.

  ‘Ay, me, what a night, what a night. I was grateful you did me up so marvellous fine, for Mr Jennings’ box may be clearly viewed from all parts of the theatre. One might have believed that I was the sole entertainment.’ Mrs Frost helps her out of her striped gown while she chatters on. ‘In fact, there was one woman spent the whole evening staring at my hair and clothing, and in the third act she took out her pocketbook right there in the theatre and made a little note to herself. Imagine! It was almost too flattering. I was not moved to make any notes myself, for I believe there was not one woman there better presented than I.’

  ‘How was the play?’ asks Mrs Frost. ‘Did you take in even a line of it?’

  ‘Oh! I regret I watched a great deal too much of it, knowing I was only invited there for one night. I should have looked more about myself; I believe I missed some gossip. I must find a gentleman who has a good box, Eliza, and who will let me sit in it every night; that way I need pay no mind to the play unless there is really nothing else to see.’ She sighs mightily. ‘I am at least satisfied that I myself received attention of the most felicitous sort. You may be sure that everybody knows I am in town, and I would not be surprised if I now receive a great flood of invitations. Hmm, then what?’

  She wears only her white lawn chemise now, her body a shadow beneath it as she fills the basin from the ewer. Mrs Frost is shaking out the mantua and petticoats, checking them over for rips and stains before putting them aside to be sponged in the morning. ‘Oh, then dancing, and then the men were playing at cards – I did not put any money down, you need not worry about that, I merely acted as Mr Jennings’s luck, and he did very well by me. Mark you, I did well by him too.’ She puts her foot up on a stool, and the candlelight glows in the filaments of fine hair on her thighs as she rinses her commodity. ‘My pocket is on the chaise; I think you will be pleased by the sum you find in it.’

  They slip under the sheets. Angelica curls up like a little creature, but Mrs Frost is wide awake. She rolls onto her side and says, as if there has been no break in conversation, ‘You will not consider it?’

  ‘What? Oh, not now, Eliza. Let me sleep.’

  But Mrs Frost is set on it. ‘You are fortunate that Mrs Chappell would still have you.’

  ‘I’ll not go back to a bawdy-house.’

  ‘Not any bawdy-house,’ Mrs Frost says pleadingly.

  ‘All cats are grey with the candles out. It comes down to the same thing.’ The relief of being in her own bed and wrapped in the arms of sleep makes her soft and affectionate; she wriggles close to her friend. ‘I know you think it is the prudent thing to do,’ she mumbles, ‘but if I go back there, I may never get out again. At least not before I am old and raddled and poxed, and she discards me as so much trash.’

  ‘You will command higher fees,’ Mrs Frost perseveres as her friend throws an arm across her. ‘You can earn your way out in a moment.’

  ‘She will never allow that to happen.’

  ‘Why not consider it?’

  Angelica, cross, must surface again from her pillows. ‘You make me sorry that I brought you in here. This is a delicate moment for me, which Mother Chappell apprehends quite as well as I do. I can return to a brothel, or I can seize my liberty. The doings of tonight make me surer than ever that I shall do well.’

  ‘’Tis the rent I worry about.’

  Angelica’s irritation gets the better of her. ‘So go down onto the street and start earning it yourself. Go on. A clean-looking woman like you, well spoken, you might make two shillings before breakfast.’

  Mrs Frost blanches. Angelica’s eyes are wide again, enamel-blue. ‘No?’ she asks. ‘You don’t like that idea?’

  ‘That is not the arrangement,’ mutters Mrs Frost.

  ‘No. This is the arrangement, isn’t it? And if you don’t like it …’

  Mrs Frost hangs her head.

  ‘Yes, dear. You can go back to your husband.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘Oh, forgive me. You would have to find him first.’

  ‘I’ll not stand for this.’ Mrs Frost is out of the bed and making for the door.

  ‘But you do,’ Angelica mocks her. ‘You always do. You purport to disdain this life and yet you always return to it. What am I to make of that?’

  And then she is satisfied, and she falls asleep without another thought.

  SEVEN

  Mr Hancock takes out adverts in newspapers and pastes up bills about town. On Mr Murray’s advice, he procures a tall glass dome, under which they balance the mermaid upright. ‘So as to look its visitors in the eye,’ Murray explains with relish. They set it up on a small table in a room just large enough for visitors to pass all the way about the creature, and satisfy themselves of its authenticity before leaving the way they came in. ‘There need be no more adornment than this,’ says Murray, but even so Mr Hancock commissions a nearby draughtsman to imagine the dramatic moment in which the Japanese fishermen caught the creature in their nets. The waves rear up and the fishermen wear triangular straw hats; in the background there are many pagodas. The
mermaid, in this image, claws its fists to its mouth and seems to be chattering in the most menacing manner, while its brothers squirm to safety. Mr Hancock, well pleased with this rendering, pins a copy up on the wall, and sends for coloured prints to sell as souvenirs.

  Thus, they are ready to open.

  ‘No need for you to be here,’ says Murray. ‘’Tis all taken care of.’ But Mr Hancock wishes to observe for himself the effect his strange protégé will have on the city, and besides, Sukie is wildly excited.

  ‘You might let me accompany you,’ she murmurs as she stands at his elbow for morning prayers; ‘Your mermaid’s first social engagement,’ she persists as she brings in the day’s loaf; ‘We might make a day of it,’ following him up to the turnpike as he departs to his business in the city. Even without her persistence he would have unbent to her: he likes the sherbet stand in Seven Dials as much as she does, and he is glad to have her find his business interesting, even glamorous.

  He gives her leave to walk to her eldest sister’s house in Wapping, and there spend three nights pillaging Rebbie’s wardrobes for a suitable mermaid-launching costume and catching up on what mysteries whispering sisters miss when they are kept apart from one another. He therefore may blame nobody but himself when he rises on the morning of the mermaid’s debut to the smell of burning cloves, and finds an unfamiliar woman leaning over the parlour mirror blacking her eyebrows with some alacrity.

  ‘Christ’s teeth, Sukie, what are you about?’

  She turns with a grin on her painted mouth, and although she looks mightily pleased with herself he cannot tell why. He had expected her to seize upon a gaudy yellow taffeta, or a painted silk, something showy and indulgent, with all manner of ruching and scalloping such as might appeal to a bright-eyed young girl. In fact she has chosen an ensemble that unsettles him in its refinement and simplicity: a little jacket of white quilted cotton, printed with small black sprigs. Its tight sleeves have not so much as a ruffle upon them, and the body of it ends at her waist with a single flounce and nothing more, as if it were a practical riding jacket. He cannot even complain about how much of her bosom it exposes as she has tucked a fichu of sheer muslin about her shoulders.

  ‘Well?’ she asks, holding out the edges of her good blue skirt, which to him looks dreadful flat without hoops beneath it.

  ‘You need not have restrained yourself so,’ he says. ‘I would have paid for something finer.’

  Her lacquered eyebrows lower and he knows he has said the wrong thing. ‘This is the finest,’ she says. ‘We cut up Rebbie’s bedspread for’t. I know how to dress for an occasion.’ She is frowning at his somewhat threadbare stuff jacket.

  ‘Very well. I would not have the first idea, of course.’

  But sitting in the carriage, she still huffing, he keeps catching a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of some slim, neat, fashionable lady. And it is a shock, time and again, to turn his head and be sure it is only his little niece, wearing a smart jacket and with a vast plumed hat on her head, her eyelashes lowered and her nose tucked into a novel. He likes it less when they arrive on the corner of the Exchange, for once in London there is no arguing: she is certainly à la mode. He fears he might lose her amongst the grown ladies who are admired as they stroll the pavements, each in their figured white gowns or their glove-tight redingotes and white stocks at their throats. On an impulse, he seizes her hand and holds it tightly.

  ‘You are a good girl to accompany me,’ he says. ‘And you look very fine.’

  ‘Ah, you are a sentimental old man,’ she says, taking his arm, her feathers bobbing over their heads. They walk together and she gazes about her, for the passers-by are of great interest to a visitor, comprising of ringletted Portugal Jews, and Mohammedan Turks in strange draperies and turbans, not to mention the gaudy gibbering Italians and the haughty French all there for reasons of trade or genteel asylum. She stares too at the passing ladies; their array of bright chintzes, their hats and their jewels and their blowsy wigs.

  ‘Do you think they are all here to see our mermaid?’ Sukie whispers, tightening her grip on his arm.

  ‘Since they are walking in the opposite direction to it, we must assume they are not.’ He is steering her towards the Pineapple coffee-house on the corner when a hawker, an old woman with a wart on her upper lip, thrusts a rush basket of scraggled flowers, plucked from the ditches of Stepney, into his path.

  ‘A nosegay for the lady?’ she croaks.

  ‘Thank you, no.’ He bats her aside.

  ‘Ah, now, don’t she deserve it? Flowers for your sweetheart? Pretty girl like her, she deserves something for her troubles.’

  Sukie is peering back over her shoulder at a sumptuous merchant’s wife borne past in a chair painted with roses; she seems not to have heard, but Mr Hancock is disturbed.

  ‘What can you be thinking!’ he snaps. ‘She is a child!’ and he drags Sukie onward, all his joviality evaporated.

  ‘A change is coming,’ the woman calls after them, and he feels the muscles clench about his spine where, if he were a dog, his hackles would have risen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I believe something unlooked-for has already come to you, ain’t that so? You have been surprised of late.’

  He strides on, not betraying his perturbation, but Sukie tugs him. ‘Your mermaid!’ she whispers. ‘How does she know?’

  ‘Who in this city has not received some windfall?’ he snaps.

  ‘A change in your station! A change in your fortune!’ the hag persists, and she totters after them, her flowers lolling on their stems. Her shortgown is much patched; her arms poke from its flapping sleeves, broomstick-thin. ‘I have the sight,’ she calls, ‘and the spirits whisper news of you to me. If you would know more it will only cost you—’

  ‘Begone!’ He turns to flap his hands at her. A cold perspiration has settled upon the back of his neck. He drags Sukie down the next alley, and she squeals as she steps into some unnameable sludge, slithers, stumbles.

  ‘A change in your fortune,’ she gabbles even so. ‘Did you hear that, Uncle? An unlooked-for change. I think today will be auspicious indeed.’ They emerge into the light, and she turns her ankle one way and then the other to inspect her ruined shoe. Muck has sprayed also up the back of her stocking. ‘Ugh.’ She curls her lip; then, looking up, ‘Is this it?’

  ‘Yes.’ For they are indeed arrived at the Pineapple coffee-house. There is a bill advertising his mermaid posted to one window, but otherwise it appears as it ever did, and Sukie’s face grows all the sourer.

  ‘But it is so quiet,’ she says. ‘There are no crowds. No lines of people.’

  ‘Is that what you expected?’

  She straightens her absurd hat. ‘It may be better inside.’

  When he holds the door open for her, a few middle-aged middle-sort men in sober felt jackets look up from their broadsheets, but they do not appear to be a-buzz at the prospect of witnessing a marvel. The most animation they collectively display are those groups who gather along the benches, muttering together: ‘What do you make of this tip?’; ‘Has the Richard passed Kent yet?’; ‘And what of your own stock, hmm, or do you mean to take our news and refuse to share your own?’ But even they are barely moving their lips.

  This being territory that Mr Hancock likes and feels easy in, it is little wonder that young Sukie is disappointed. The air is coffee-toasted and fragrant, cosy and quiet, and nobody obliged to spend anything in order to exchange gossip and speculation in comfortable masculine quietude. Mr Murray has sense to dabble in freaks; the money is not in coffee.

  ‘Nobody is here,’ says Sukie, lowering her very black eyebrows.

  ‘Come, that’s not true. See all these gentlemen?’

  Those at his favourite table – plain and honest and solid like himself – are waving and beckoning. ‘Hancock!’ they call, and he joins their group although he feels the mortification of Sukie behind him. ‘Hancock, what is this we hear about a mermaid?’


  ‘I own one,’ he says.

  ‘You’re short a ship, though, ain’t that true?’

  ‘No ship.’ He buttons his lip. ‘No ship, but a mermaid.’

  ‘A courageous trade-off.’

  He shrugs. ‘That you may decide for yourself, for a shilling. ’Tis upstairs, ready to be viewed.’

  ‘Oh! Mark this, gentlemen, he is already a true showman, no concessions for his old friends. And are you to run a circus now, Hancock? The business of honest trade too plodding for you?’

  He laughs along with them but his palms are clammy and his stomach sour. On the landing outside the mermaid’s chamber, ‘Those men are jealous,’ Sukie says, and he turns to her gratefully.

  ‘Think you so?’

  ‘Of course! Think of their disappointment when their next shipments come in and it is only miserable tapioca as usual, when Jonah Hancock was blessed with a mermaid.’ She ruffles her skirts cheerfully. ‘I know I am right.’

  The landing is empty of people, save for Mr Murray’s boy Daniel who has a cashbox to take payment and sits with his legs splayed before him, picking at his teeth with a little blade. He barely raises his eyes at their entrance. Equally deserted is the chamber in which the mermaid lies. Sukie puts open the door and walks all about it, her footsteps loud on the floorboards. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘’tis still early for the crowds. What shall we do now?’

  They sit on the landing for over an hour. Nobody comes. The boy Daniel rolls up his jacket for a pillow and commences to doze; Mr Hancock bites his nails until he tweaks a hangnail and it begins to bleed. The pain is insistent. Sukie perches and reads her book, rising every now and then with a sigh to wander into the little room and look again upon the mermaid.

  ‘Why do you keep going in there?’ her uncle asks, blotting his bleeding thumb on his handkerchief. ‘Nothing has changed.’