He is not the first visitor to Mrs Chappell’s nunnery this evening: the alley into King’s Place is narrow in the extreme, so that a peevish crush of carriages must await entry in the street, horses wickering and coachmen squabbling, emblazoned all with crests identifiable to any observer as those of noble families. As Mr Hancock watches from his chair, a gentleman whose face he knows well from its regular appearance in print-shop windows leans out of a carriage and hails a passer-by by name.
‘And in full view of the street,’ he tuts. ‘For anybody to see, as if they were proud of’t.’ To the chair men he raps on the ceiling and says, ‘We shall never get through the crush. Set me down here.’
He walks into the courtyard and up to a fine stuccoed house with torches blazing on either side of its steps and lights hung up all around in blown-glass bubbles. He feels as anxious as if he were sixteen years old and this his first visit upon Venus. But this is merely the gentry’s version of the same, he reassures himself. Underneath the show, ’tis an amusing evening with sympathetic women, and the end result will be no different.
He is ushered in by a negro footman, of uncommon height and elegance. His powder-blue livery is almost angelic to gaze upon and when he says, ‘This way, sir,’ his voice is musical but modulated, soft yet penetrating. He is better spoken than Mr Hancock, and he smells of lilac-flowers. All at once Mr Hancock is acutely aware of the fraying cuff of his own good jacket, the gold threads on its pockets that have tarnished black. ‘For who will be paying attention to me?’ he had reasoned as he dressed at home, not bothering to light the candles for such a perfunctory undertaking. He sees now that this was a mistake. There is a splash of walnut ketchup on the calf of his stocking.
The marble floor of the atrium is polished as a frozen pond, its inlaid tables almost concealed beneath cornucopiae of flowers gaudy as jungle-birds: he could not name even one single specimen. There are a great many candles set about the place, and mirrors and chandeliers that double their light and double it again. Up above him, where the staircase spirals into darkness, he hears the whispers of girls, and the officious cloppeting of their cork-soled shoes on the parquet.
Mrs Chappell is there to greet him, a vast toad in white muslin, her stubby arms outstretched and her legs churning up her skirts as she paddles across the gleaming floor.
‘Dear sir!’ she says. ‘Delighted, delighted.’ He does not like procuresses – women debauched in their own youth who usher the next generation to the same fate – but he is relieved that his mermaid’s entrée into high society has been overseen by an expert. She has launched numberless girls onto their glittering careers: she can be assumed to manage the same for his wizened freak.
‘I believe you will approve of what we have done with the little thing,’ she is saying now, patting his hand. ‘’Tis upstairs, in the salon. But first, a drink? We are having a little merrymaking in my private rooms. Just a cosy gathering, you know, but ’tis rarely now that all these luminaries are seen together in one place.’
‘Does my mermaid please them?’
‘Ah, they are addicted to novelty. This is the most uncommon sight since Mr Lunardi’s balloon journey. And before that I daresay we’ve had nothing like it since Cook’s return.’
‘And so you would judge that I might make a true success of this creature?’ he asks.
‘Sir, if the Ton is enchanted by it, and London enchanted by it, the world will be enchanted too. ’Tis already settled: the mermaid is a sensation.’
He blinks. ‘Much obliged,’ is all he can think to say.
She claps him on the back with a phlegmy roar of mirth, revealing once again those yellow teeth arranged like a string of knucklebones. ‘The gentleman is obliged! It is I who am obliged to you. But come with me, sir, do come this way. Take a glass –’ for a tray has appeared from nowhere – ‘take two.’
It is a relief to find Mrs Chappell’s parlour so neat and proper, with a parquet floor and the walls papered with a green trellis design such as might meet the approval of any of his matron sisters. Tonight it fairly glows with richness, thanks in some part to its population. In the corner are a little brood of her younger girls, the red-haired one assiduously nodding over the harpsichord, the Creole (or mulatto, or whatever she might be, for this categorising age must have a name for every permutation) who first approached him, sullenly turning the pages. Mr Hancock has heard tales that the junior girls earn their keep by scrubbing the grates and making the beds themselves, in which case the faint clank and splash of buckets behind the jib door speaks for the narrow distinction between housemaid and whore.
His attention barely brushes across these girls, however, for here sits a group of women, splendidly dressed and languorous in the way of Olympian females, and lit warmly by shaded candles. They have been talking quietly together, but when they see him they fall quiet. They do not drop their eyes but look straight at him without abashment.
‘Ladies,’ says Mrs Chappell, and they rise without a moment’s hesitation, elegantly and silently the way the sea gathers itself into a fresh wave, and in unison drop a curtsey with the same slow and elemental grace, and a long hissing of satin and lace. They smell of port and bitter almonds.
They watch him gravely, their fans fluttering, and he thinks they are not like any women he has seen in his life before. There are five of them, and each truly handsome, not with the clean prettiness of the younger girls he has seen thus far, but each with her own singularity. One is tall and slender, boyish and wistful; one bold and sleek as a kingfisher; one soft and fondly smiling like the perfect memory of an adored mother. Each of their faces is familiar to him, and yet each is entirely new, delightful and uncommon to look upon. He apprehends, perhaps for the first time, what taste and intellect the appreciation of true beauty entails, for these women are complex in their loveliness. Mrs Chappell speaks their names as he kisses their outstretched hands, but he knows them already: the first is a lady of the court who stooped to become a lady of the world; the second a comic actress; the third a one-time mistress of the Prince himself. The fourth is a keen little creature, with soft dark eyes and a russety glint in her coiffure. ‘Mrs Fortescue,’ says Mrs Chappell, and the ostrich feathers in her hair nod. And finally the fifth, whom he first observes is small and then observes is radiant: a buxom bright-cheeked froth of a woman, with hair falling over her shoulders and drifting around her face gold as sunset clouds.
‘You,’ he croaks, and a little crease appears at the top of her nose.
‘Forgive me, I do not … Have we met before?’
‘No, no.’ Heat rushes up his neck and suffuses into his ears and cheeks. He believes he recognises her – her face is somehow very familiar to him – but he cannot say from where.
‘I know. You saw my picture in the Academy. It was very popular the year it was displayed.’
He does not go to the Academy. He does not like the jostle of it; he has no desire to crane to look upon a painted duchess he will never have call to recognise, or a landscape so unlike the vista of London that it must be fanciful; the history paintings are too huge for him, overpowering in their crammed, twisting bodies and urgent movement. But he knows where he has seen her: a yellowed print, curled at the corner and smeared by many fingers, tacked up in a coffee-house. The Comic Muse, it is titled, and a girl with Angelica’s pointed chin smiles out, her robe falling from one plump shoulder, rippled chiffon only skimming her bosom. He had not thought it showed a real woman, only some tumbled mirthful fantasy, but yes. That woman is this woman.
‘I have seen your portrait,’ he says.
Her smile is like stars on water. ‘So I am still recognised! And on the strength of one single picture. I have been out of the world for some little while, and yet I am not forgotten. Do you know my name?’
He looks at his shoes. She chortles, but he feels that she watches him more sharply than she might; he feels he is being weighed up, his worth gauged.
‘Mrs Neal,’ she says. ‘And I k
now all about you: you are Mr Hancock, the mermaid man.’
With Mr Hancock’s rusticity in mind, Angelica has dressed herself as a sort of courtly shepherdess: her creamy silk mantua is bordered with chenille flowers, which crowd around her wrists and neck like blooms along a country path. She has a healthy out-of-doors glow to her cheeks and her eyes. As the party resumes its seats, and he is encouraged into a wing-back armchair, she appears at his elbow with a glass of ratafia. It swirls viscous up the sides of the glass and burns his throat when he takes a sip. Angelica Neal pulls up a cane chair beside him.
‘These are all my girls, or were once,’ gusts Mrs Chappell, unwilling to leave off her introductory speech. ‘I summoned them back to me for this important night – for your night – and without hesitation they came. They never cease to be my girls, you see, though they go all ways in the world.’
‘Some ways more salubrious than others,’ says the actress, and although a ripple of amusement passes through all the women, none seek to quip further.
‘It takes a special sort to stay the course,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘Although, as we were just raising a glass, our little Bel is leaving it ere long.’
‘Don’t say so,’ says Bel Fortescue, resuming her seat. ‘I am only getting married.’
The women are sleek as ever but the air prickles: Mr Hancock cannot guess what it is they communicate to one another but he knows when women are speaking through means other than words. Mrs Fortescue knows too; the corners of her lips twitch upward.
‘Mr Hancock,’ says the regal Whig mistress, louder and with more emphasis than is necessary in that small room, ‘I have been desperate all night to congratulate you on your mermaid.’
‘A wondrous creature,’ the ladies chime in, turning to him like a clan of kind aunts.
‘Oh, fabulous.’
‘Of great value to science, I don’t doubt.’
‘How lucky we are!’
‘Mr Hancock,’ persists Mrs Fortescue, turning the intensity of her eyes and the sweetness of her smile upon him, ‘do you agree that women are doomed to servility?’
The dazed smile remains on his face for some moments after his mind has begun to panic. He did not expect to be asked questions, and his head is very empty. In his general life, Mr Hancock sees no need or benefit in questioning how things are, and avoids the society of what he calls ‘clever men’ – that is, men who reflect on the why of things and who wish to discuss it. To now be confronted with a clever woman is beyond his preparation. He must grapple with what her meaning might be before he can even think to give her a reply.
‘… servility?’ he mouths.
‘It is a philosophical question,’ Mrs Fortescue says cheerfully, but if she means to soothe him her words have the opposite effect.
‘You do not have to answer her,’ snaps Angelica Neal, a waft of rose-otto at his side. ‘She is too serious. Nobody wants her sort of debate here.’ She places a hand on his sleeve.
‘But we all are servile,’ he blurts out. ‘Men also.’
‘Servile to what?’ Bel Fortescue fixes him with her keen dark eyes as her questions press him into a smaller and smaller space. ‘What are you servant to, sir? Do you, Mr Hancock, believe in the notion of free will?’
‘Hold your tongue, Bel!’ snaps Angelica. ‘We are having a pleasant evening; why you cannot simply—’
‘The woman is touched,’ whispers the Whig, which sets all the women off a-muttering.
‘… I have been saying it for years …’
‘… altogether too absorbed in her own intellect …’
‘… why is she still invited …?’
‘Money,’ he says.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Money. If you are asking, am I in command of all my doings, I say no. I am guided by money.’ He does not know if this is his honest answer, only that, once he made sense of the question, it was the one that leapt from the top of his head. He thinks too late that the correct answer is ‘God’, and makes a note to pray more often.
‘And does this trouble you?’ asks Mrs Fortescue.
‘No. This is how things are.’
‘Yes,’ nod the women vigorously. ‘Yes, this is how things are.’
Bel Fortescue is still frowning, but Mrs Chappell stirs in her chair. ‘And so we are all free,’ she says with finality, ‘free in this small little world of our own design.’ She swings her head to Angelica Neal, who all of a sudden snatches up Mr Hancock’s hand.
‘I cannot wait one moment longer,’ she cries. ‘I want to see your mermaid! For can you believe it, I still have not had the opportunity. Will you accompany me?’ She is dragging him away without waiting for an answer, her hair bouncing around her shoulders. Her hand is warm and slightly damp, but the sensation of being clasped by her delicate fingers is enough to set a slight kindling feeling in his breeches.
She leads him up to the first-floor landing, another vast space hung with red damask and the sweatier sort of history paintings – torn drapery, upraised cutlasses, and rearing, white-eyed horses: he cares for them as little as any others he has seen, but judges nonetheless that these are quality copies, done from the source and no doubt specially commissioned.
‘That little vixen!’ Angelica is saying. ‘I never know what she is at.’
He does not know how to respond. ‘You have known her a long time?’
‘Aye. We were raised together in this house for some number of years. Of course, she was not called Bel then: her name is Harriet and she is quite flat-chested.’
There is a pair of closed double doors on the landing from where the sounds of a party emanate: there is a string quartet, laughter, the clinking of glasses. Another negro as cool and statuesque as the first swings these doors open, and ushers them within with a pair of spotless kid gloves. This is a new kind of intimidation, Mr Hancock thinks. No lantern-jawed bullies to keep the clients in their place, only handsome blackamoors to strike them into apologetic silence.
Angelica rattles on. ‘Oh, she has ever talked this way, “indentured servitude” and “legal prostitution” and la-la-la – one wonders how she got to be where she is, for she is not so very beautiful …?’ Inflecting this last phrase as a question, she looks back at him over her shoulder with her wide clear eyes. Her powdered cheek is apricot-soft, but his tongue is fat in his mouth, his mind too slow; he cannot say the words he wishes he could, and which she is waiting for: ‘Not as beautiful as you.’
Whenever Mr Hancock feels overpowered by his situation, he turns his mercantile eye upon it. And so, on entering Mrs Chappell’s great salon, he does not note the shards of rainbow-tipped light that bounce across the walls, but the rock-crystal pendants of the chandelier that scattered them, and he does not see the bare throats and bosoms of the girls but rather the gauzy muslin they are swathed in. He sees barley-sugar glass sconces and says to himself, Murano; he sees the pretty pink-and-green-painted porcelain vases and thinks, Bow; the fine silk upholstery … he sniffs. French, without question. Smuggled. Now, is that not the measure of the woman? In his mind he strips the place down into its many precious parts – the swagged silk at the windows; the decanters of sack and port and shrub; the leopard-spotted heartwood tables – names them carefully and prices them up, as if by understanding the machinery he might also understand its effect. He marks the people, of course, but both sexes are a bafflement to him. They are not his sort, although perhaps I must now try to be theirs, he thinks to himself. Each of the women is dazzlingly turned out in fashions quite new to him, and he endeavours to commit to memory the particular ways they dress their hair and wear their gowns, so that he might describe it to Sukie later. She is always hungry to know the fashions of the city, but he has no eye for them: ‘No, but what kind of train?’ she demands, or, ‘And you did not note whether she carried a fan?’ and so he finds he has let her down once more.
‘Mark that,’ says Angelica, ‘Parliament is in session here if not yet in the House.’
He lo
oks, and yes, indeed, these men now filing in are all great men, their faces so well known to him that it feels as if he has stepped through flat paper into a moving version of the pamphlets passed around his coffee-house. He has furthermore seen some of them in person on occasion, when business sends him to the westerly end of Oxford Street or the fine leafy squares to its north, and sometimes in the reeking bellowing crowd at cockfights or exhibitions, but they are of a different water, he knows that, not to be touched or spoken to however close they pass him by.
‘Are they all – are they here for me?’ he asks weakly. ‘For my mermaid?’
‘Aye,’ she says. ‘It’s the talk of the town.’
‘All their important doings,’ he says, ‘and they set them by to come here?’
‘To see your mermaid.’
He cannot credit it. Members of Parliament, titled men, with the most sharpened intellect and loftiest ambition, have been drawn to something he, Mr Hancock, brought before them. ‘I had never expected such a thing,’ he says, and she squeezes his hand as if he were a little child brought as a treat to the menagerie.
‘You may expect this sort of thing now,’ she says.
All this being said, to him they do not appear splendid. Their blue-and-buff costumes are too much of a muchness for him to tell one from another, although some of them are young and tall and others bent old men, or corpulent in their middle age. Furthermore they are neither clean nor tidy; they look as if they have not slept at all, and from their stained shirts and unfurled stocks comes the acrid smell of bodies so soused in liquor that it now emanates from their pores. He rasps his hand across his jaw; it is smoother, probably, than some of theirs, which straggle with three days’ growth or more.
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Page 11