The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  ‘I should hope I’ll never earn my living so. A gentleman wants a profession to keep the mind sharp, that’s all, and perhaps to see him into Parliament.’

  Ah, she thinks, Bel was incorrect: of course he has means. God be praised, for he is so handsome. She smiles as he goes on, ‘One travels, of course, but it wears after a while; such an endless round of scenery and curios. I was glad to leave Naples by the end, I can tell you. Full only of sightseers, dilettantes, pleasure-seekers, not a one of them with a real appreciation for the place.’

  ‘Oh, of course – of course.’

  Their heads nod closer together until their fascination envelops them; they forget their friends and their old lovers, pains and anxieties as their worlds telescope into this one space where he is her best friend and she his.

  ‘Mrs Neal,’ their friends say, ‘Angelica, ’tis your turn.’ She is not listening; they have to prise her fingers open and press the die into her palm before she will drag her attention from her dark-haired friend.

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘Throw! Throw the die!’

  ‘Very well, very well.’ She turns away from the man with reluctance – for I am yours really, her manner tells him – but she is pleased for him to see her sportive side. She presses her lips together and closes her eyes as she warms the die between her hands, and flings it down on the table.

  It leaps once, twice.

  It stops just short of diving onto the floor, and balances on the table’s inlaid edge, one single dot smiling up at the room. The company howls. The men’s wigs are all askew, those that remain on their heads at all. It is strange to see these bloods reduced to tousled boys; their cropped heads are fascinating, touchable, this one a fuzz as close as a puppy’s belly; this one a nest of coppery curls.

  ‘Drink!’ they call. ‘Take a drink!’

  ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘I want no more of it.’ She is comfortably drunk; she wishes to tinge her judgement no further, but her companions have no mercy.

  ‘Rules are rules. Drink!’

  ‘What was the game?’ She turns appealingly to Rockingham.

  ‘Hi-jinks!’ roar her friends. ‘And you could roll no lower. Drink! Drink!’

  She utters an unwilling bleat. ‘I cannot! Do not make me!’

  ‘Drink!’

  Rockingham, though not a lieutenant at all, remains gallantry personified. He puts a hand boldly upon her elbow and says, ‘If the lady does not want a drink she should not be obliged to take one.’

  His comrades boo, and she wafts her fan, for her face has become suddenly hot. The lieutenant lets go of her elbow. ‘Rules are rules,’ he continues. ‘And we all agree that she who will not drink, must pay a forfeit.’

  ‘A forfeit!’ she gasps, and swats at him, which act of daring makes her giddy. ‘What have you got me into?’

  ‘What’s it to be, boys? Ladies?’

  Elinor Bewlay and Polly Campbell are whispering together, and squawk with joy. ‘I know,’ says Elinor. ‘She’s to play mermaid.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘If we can do it, so can you,’ says Polly. Her fingertips are still stained green. ‘You must go outside …’

  ‘… into the garden,’ chimes in Elinor,

  ‘… down to the fountain.’

  ‘… and swim three times all the way around it.’

  ‘Naked,’ says Polly with satisfaction.

  ‘Quite naked.’

  ‘I shan’t,’ says Angelica. ‘I can’t. The fountain is barely two feet deep.’

  ‘Mermaid!’ the girls set up chanting. ‘Mer-maid! Mer-maid!’

  ‘’Tis October,’ protests Angelica, but they are up from the table and she is running with them, laughing now. ‘You are absurd. I shall keep my chemise on.’

  ‘Mermaids do not wear chemises,’ says Polly as they burst out into the dark garden. The men are behind them, calling for lanterns; only Rockingham accompanies them, for he can be nowhere but at Angelica’s side.

  ‘Well, I am not a mermaid,’ says Angelica. ‘I’ll go in the water but I’ll not strip down to nothing.’ In other circumstances she would have no such qualms. She loves to go naked before an admiring party: in her career she has danced on tables and rolled on petal-strewn couches wearing not even so much as a pair of garters, but now she hesitates. She does and does not wish to be naked before this man. Letting him glimpse her body in a moment during which he may not touch it or betray himself is tempting to her, but she had hoped to savour this unknowing a little longer. Tonight she would have flirted for hours more, and coaxed him into a dark corner to kiss her until they both trembled. She would have let him touch her first over her chemise, in the warm dark of her bedchamber, and then undress her or not as his passions dictated. It would take them a long time to discover one another. If he looks upon her now, half the fun is gone before they have begun. ‘I think I shall not do it,’ she announces.

  He hands her a bottle of brandy. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘I’ll close my eyes.’

  The men are coming out with torches and lanterns, which dredge the little garden with yellow light. Their voices have a crispness that comes with cloudless nights, and bounce off the high walls. It is cool and fresh but not so cold the feat cannot be done.

  Angelica takes off her slippers, and then her stockings. The flagstones ice the soles of her feet, but she detects, perhaps, the last of the sun’s warmth aching through. ‘’Tis not so bad,’ she says. ‘Help me, girls,’ and they swarm over her to unpin her bodice and shuck her of skirts and petticoats which they trample carelessly underfoot as they tug at the knots of the bum-roll that girdles her hips. Elinor holds it aloft, a long satin pudding, and all are convulsed with laughter.

  ‘Do not lose that,’ Angelica says sternly, as the men toss it between one another, horrified and intrigued, ‘nor abuse it; I had it made to my own measurements and there is not another like it. I said, there is not another like it; do not take such liberties; it does not go on your head.’

  She has on only her stays over her chemise, and the girls’ busy fingers are all over them, loosing their strings, easing them open to shake out the creases from the chemise beneath, the only thing now separating her skin from the air. It falls to just below her knees, its sleeves tight and plain, which makes her look as spotless as any of Mrs Chappell’s newest acquisitions. The girls fumble to denude her of this too, but she shrieks and slaps their hands away.

  ‘Into the water with you,’ says Captain Carter. ‘They have you outnumbered!’

  The fountain is fifteen feet across, a great shallow basin scalloped like a shell. The water cascades down from an acrobatic dolphin in its centre, churning the black pool up silver in the dark. At the bottom of the pool drift golden fish, dim ghosts in their sleep. Angelica scrambles onto the lip of the basin. Inside it is dead cold, and slippery with algae to the point of greasiness. ‘Ugh! So I am going in, am I?’

  ‘Yes!’

  Her hair wafts about her. The water spatters her face and arms, and across her bosom so her nipples tighten as if a stitch had been tugged in them. ‘’Tis fearful cold.’

  She swings her legs over the edge, and her feet are in the water, and her ankles and her calves. ‘Ay, me!’ she gasps. The marble ledge numbs her buttocks. Then she slides all the way in.

  It is cold, cold, cold. Cold so her ribcage contracts and she gasps a quavering indrawn breath. Leaden cold on her commodity, the warmest part of any woman, and under the cusp of her breasts, and up the insides of her thighs, and gripping cold into her armpits and the crooks of her knees. She raises her hands up. ‘I am in! Am I not in! I am your very mermaid!’

  ‘Swim!’ shout the party, bottles aloft. ‘Three times round,’ and this reminds them of a song, deliciously forbidden to any mariner, which they begin to sing lustily and in all tempos at once:

  ‘And three times round went our gallant ship

  And three times round went she

  And three times round went our gallant ship />
  And she sank to the bottom of the sea, the sea, the sea.’

  She feels her very organs are quaking. She cannot swim the shallow pool but walks it with her hands, grit under her nails and her palms slithering, her stomach grazing the gravel and her chemise floating like the skirts of a jellyfish. The fish are alarmed from their doze and dart about her, their cold bellies bumping her forearms. The falling water thunders about her and strikes her shoulders hard as pebbles, dragging her hair from its powder and pins. Her teeth begin to chatter, but she circles again, and rolls over onto her back, singing to the best of her quaking lungs’ abilities:

  ‘We there did espy a fair pretty maid

  With a comb and a glass in her hand, her hand, her hand.’

  Then, ‘Where is my comb?’ she demands, leaning over the rim of her great scallop shell. ‘Where is my looking glass?’ but by now she is fairly keening with the cold. ‘Oh, I can take no more. Was it not bravely done?’

  She reaches out for her handmaidens but they recoil.

  ‘My silk,’ cries Polly, pulling her splendid wrap about her. ‘’Twill stain, ’twill quite ruin.’

  ‘There will be the devil to pay,’ says Elinor. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘I know, I know, you turn over three hundred a year and you do not own the gowns on your backs,’ groans Angelica. ‘A sorry state, when a woman of means may not spoil a dress or two.’ Turning to the gentlemen she cries, ‘Which of you is man enough to volunteer his arms to a siren?’

  Which of them, of course, but Mr Rockingham, who is at her elbow before she has finished speaking, with a great linen towel and a twitch to his handsome eyebrow. He grips her forearm and lets her lean her wet hands against him as she scrambles onto dry land. ‘Oof,’ she gasps, as the gooseflesh erupts across her arms, but although he holds up the towel like a barricade to the company, he does not cover her up straight away. Her chemise is transparent and plastered to her body, with bubbles of air where it stretches between her breasts and the hollow between ribcage and belly. His eyes flutter across her without a word, and she feels no shame nor disappointment, only that this is the greatest caper she ever took a part in. A smile bursts across her face without her bidding it there, and she feels the tips of her ears grow hot. His smile mirrors hers, although he puts his chin down to hide it, and for a moment they stand together while webs of mirth and desire and joy stretch between them. Then he wraps her up and tussles the coarse linen over her shoulders and back.

  ‘Come,’ he says, ‘I shall find you a cup of negus to warm you up. But then you have nothing to wear.’

  ‘Not a stitch,’ agrees Angelica. There are currently ten young ladies resident in Mrs Chappell’s home, and a great wardrobe room laid on for them to choose from upwards of three times a day. This is, therefore, a barefaced lie.

  ‘There is nothing for it. We shall have to take you to bed.’

  ‘What a shame,’ she whispers, the water pooling about her feet. ‘I had been so enjoying myself.’

  SEVENTEEN

  The wool curtains are pulled flush around his bed, and if the dawn is approaching – and the great conversation of the birds suggests so – not one ray of it reaches him. He lies in his shirt, his breeches discarded and his cuffs flung into a corner, and keeps his eyes fast closed. Perhaps he is inclined to throw back his covers and pace the room, or take up a candle and a book. He might remove himself to his counting-house if he chose, or walk the dawning streets. He might but he does not dare: this is the hour for sleep, and so he dutifully adopts its attitudes.

  And still he cannot help thinking.

  I have made a terrible mistake. To put my greatest asset into such a den of iniquity; to associate my name with that level of barbarism.

  He groans aloud. His eyes are closed, and at the corners of his vision clouds of colour roll. But what am I to do? If I wish my mermaid to succeed, I must learn to conduct myself in these circles. ‘I have such losses to recoup,’ he announces to his woollen chamber, and he lies thinking on that dreadful thought until the bells of St Nicholas’s sound on one side of him and those of St Paul’s sound to the other, and he knows it is time at last to rise. And yet why must my mermaid succeed at all? Can I not put it away like so much old lumber, and forget this sorry episode?

  He raps on Sukie’s door as he passes it: ‘Up! Get up!’ he calls, but he cares little whether she does or no. Because of the money, of course. Because my sister is disgusted with me and my niece depends on me. I have nothing else of note in my life, and now that I am saddled with this freak I must profit by it. And indeed he has profited, for one of England’s most skilled priestesses of love, one of the very finest models of womanhood, was last night willing to take him to her bed. As if a man of his sort – a merchant, a son of Deptford – might have the opportunity to touch her! And like a fool he was appalled. I rejected her and humiliated her. Is not that a judgement upon my own self rather than upon her? Is it merely that I lack the sophistication that comes naturally to another quality of man?

  Bridget is up, he knows by the cold air that nips past him as he comes down the stairs, for as usual she has left the yard door open while she goes to the pump. He has had words with her about this before but she will not change. ‘Takes too long,’ she replies, looking at her toes, and he thinks, a woman of the house would know how to make her obedient. She has not yet opened the shutters, and only a little daybreak slips through them: Mr Hancock has to lift his bunch of keys to within an inch of his nose to make it out at all, and as he peers and paws at it, a piece of the darkness unfurls from the skirting and wraps itself, velvet-soft and purposeful, around his calves.

  ‘God’s teeth!’ he exclaims, picking up his feet like a stout old maid jumping rope. He wrenches open the front door: light floods in and the cat scampers out.

  ‘What are you at?’ Mr Hancock fumes, but he follows her onto the street and grinds the lock fast behind him. Overnight, Deptford’s heady miasma had begun to settle, like silt in a puddle, but sunrise stirs it back up again and Mr Hancock stumps through that great rich stink of baking bread and rotten mud and old blood and fresh-sawn wood with the cat trotting on her tiptoes beside him. What sort of a world can this be, he is fuming to himself, in which a whore stoops to an honest man? The end of the mortal world is heralded by signs of such disorder, a man yoked to the plough, a fox pursued by a hare. He has seen it etched on gravestones, too: a heart turned upside down.

  He will not suffer a ferryman today, nor crush himself into the public coach that will bear him joltingly into the heart of the city. Nor does he desire to take the path along the stinking river, where every shipbuilder in every yard, and every waterman at every step, knows his name and his business. He chooses instead to walk the long way, spurning Southwark’s crush and reek for a stride across open fields, and thus turns up Butt Lane, where the boys from the bakery run giddy on the flagstones, their shirts untucked and flapping. There is a heap of oranges outside one of the little shingle-clad shacks, all puckered and foxed, the saddest oranges in Christendom, their innards no doubt fibrous dry. They are by no means fit for sale but this makes no odds since they will never be sold. They are moral decoys, merely, for above them swings the sign of the jolly mariners, and within, the last raddled drab may yet be rinsing her shift before falling into her bed alone at last. Mr Hancock’s lips twitch at the thought: he would like to spit on the threshold.

  On the parcel of land next door, the shipwrights are at work, singing together as they haul up beams. The world turned upside down indeed, he thinks, beginning with my own town. For here the shipwrights take their work upon dry land, and amongst them there is not the usual hierarchy of kings and lords, but only that of skill, no class but what is ordained by one’s work group. Here labourers prize their fine china and shelves of books; here wives are husbandless two seagoing years in three; here ship-masts tower over church steeples; here he is, sorry Jonah Hancock: a husband without a wife; a father without a son; paterfamilias of a she-ho
use ruled by little maids, and whose years of faithful work have accrued no fortune to compare to what a freak goblin can bring him.

  It is half a mile up to the New Cross turnpike, the road already moderate busy. A small boy bobs out of the whitewashed tollbooth to heave open the gate at the swift approach of the Dover stagecoach: behind it creeps a wagon laden with sacks and rope-lashed boxes, on top of which ride pale-faced newcomers to the city: an old man, with only a flour sack tied about his pitiful body, mumbling his toothless gums; a mother who draws her infant close beneath her shawl; two pretty country girls turning out their bundles in search of coins to pay their final stage. They look about themselves in bewilderment – ‘Be we in London now?’ – and pinch the blood into their cheeks and straighten their kerchiefs, ‘For the fine ladies don’t want maids as don’t look healthy, don’t look decent,’ one says to the other as the wagon lurches onward.

  To the west, towards the city, the fields are picked brown and bare, and the trees stand open-armed and stripped of fruit. Even the blackberries in the hedgerows are gone now, the coils of brambles that bore them sagging into wayside ditches full of grey water. Far away to the south the masts of ships are fewer on the river, and stand in tall huddles with their sails drawn close about them.

  As he strides onward, another thought strikes him. Confound the rest of the situation. It is a fact that last night a pretty young woman – remarkable pretty, alive with her very prettiness – put her hand on his and gazed into his eyes. She kissed him on the lips, this buxom lovely girl. He might at this moment be basking in her embrace: her bedclothes tangled around them and her soft arm flung across his chest. She might lean above him so her golden hair streamed down around them, and the sunlight took fire in its strands. He had, in fact, the opportunity to lie skin upon skin and limb upon limb with another living body, to be the focus of another’s touch and thought. This is what he turned down, last night. Not a whore, and not a prize, but a moment of contact between man and woman. ‘Damn you!’ he spits, kicking the dirt of the road, and alarming the old spinster sisters who have just toddled up from their cottage in the beetfield. ‘Excuse me, ladies,’ he says. ‘I have a great fear of ants. A great and unreasonable fear.’