The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  It is in this very fug of confusion and rage that he strides the leafy Kent road, where other men of his sort descend the steps of handsome brick houses to their waiting carriages. This new breed of man keeps his home in the countryside in preference to squashing his family into the apartments above his office: his children learn to paint and are sent away to school, and yet even after plucking up the courage to append an audacious ‘Esq.’ to his name, none of these men would stand for such behaviour as Mr Hancock witnessed last night. For shame, he thinks, we live on a different scale of morality. And which is the correct one? He regrets his solid provincial decency; he is sorry that the memory of the priapic sailors brings such a wave of horror to his soul; for those people are so much happier than he is.

  Furthermore (he reflects as he comes upon Borough and the fields melt away to tight alleys and sunless yards, and the city begins to loom and to crowd, and thence with aching calves across London Bridge and into the mercantile crush of Lombard Street), furthermore, by whatever moral compass one chooses, his treatment of Angelica Neal – rebuffing her generosity at a function organised in his own honour – is reproachable. I shall seek an audience with her, he tells himself. Apologise for my behaviour; she may be understanding of my confusion. Yes, this seems to him a good plan. He tries not to think too hard about the other possibilities of being permitted into her lodgings: if in such privacy she will once again guide his hand across her body; if with the curtains drawn and her servants dismissed she will remember what business was left undone the night before.

  It is, however, this thought that continues in his mind as he completes his morning circuit of the coffee-houses, an action he has methodically repeated for twenty years, checking off one by one the news-sheets he has read and the men he has whispered with until his routine is complete. A tiny alley behind Gray’s Inn Fields leads him to the counting-house wherein the mercantile business of Mr Hancock and his partner Mr Greaves is gravely attended to by six clerks and their crook-backed overseer Scrimshaw.

  The counting-house is a long red-brick building about a hundred years old, which might once have been imposing, but the city has crept up on it from all sides, and now it sits three storeys tall in its cramped court like a rhinoceros in a rabbit hutch. While the dwellings around it are better-built than those ramshackle edifices that grow up nearly overnight in the rookeries of St Martin’s – and which are liable to topple over in a shower of brick-dust if any inhabitant turns over too heavy in their bed – they are hardly to be admired, being unornamented thin-walled places with mean lightless windows. They are home, however, to decent unassuming people: two sisters in crocheted mittens, erstwhile mistresses of a failed dame school; and a law stationer who has somehow contrived to fit his shop, wife, dog and seven children behind his narrow front door. Three of these children are in the yard as Mr Hancock approaches the offices: two boys and a little girl, who stand around a set of arcane chalk marks on the flagstones, and take turns to throw down small twigs and pebbles with some energy.

  ‘Good day,’ he says, and they tumble to bow to him.

  ‘Good day, good day to you,’ they chirrup, nice children in clean mended clothes, and he thinks without meaning to, had I children of my own, I would bring them here. He feels an airy rush about his coat-tails as if some little beings, buoyant with their play, were running to keep up with him. It is not merely a Henry who walks beside him today, but a whole gaggle of putative children, those who through his own inaction were never born. He mounts the steps of his building alone, and lets himself in.

  The counting-house is habitually quiet and dry, never more so than with the departure of Mr Greaves and the removal of his wife to the country. The footsteps of the Greaves children are no longer audible from the lodgings above; the workday is not punctuated with domesticity – deliveries of cheese and milk and music teachers – the hall empty of visitors and of kitchen aromas. The counting-house now smells only of whitewash, parchment and sand, its only sounds the rustle of papers, the scratch of nibs, and the persistent sniffing of Oliver, the youngest clerk.

  On the left of the entrance hall is a dining room, installed for the purpose of entertaining clients; its polished tabletop and empty candlesticks are peaceful in their abandonment. On the right is the counting-house where Scrimshaw the Beak hunches at his pedestal swathed in the black gown he had made up during the reign of a previous George, and the clerks balance on stools before him. Two are middle-aged, in the company through its permutations (for the Hancocks and the Greaveses, like all effective merchants, must be pliable in their ventures and their choice of business partners) since boyhood; the others are newer additions, steady young men with good prospects, among them always a Hancock nephew or two. He prefers not to take on any man with too evident an ambition, they being wont to make extra work, but he enjoys the satisfaction of watching faltering boys become confident men, training up a promising young clerk into a fine businessman on his own account.

  The men all rise when he enters.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  They look at him expectantly. Although the arrival of the mermaid has little practical connection to the office – beyond the paperwork pertaining to the loss of the Calliope and its promised cargo – they have taken a keen interest in its fate. Now, they regard him in the polite but intense manner of well-trained dogs watching their master eat a plate of mutton chops.

  ‘What news?’ croaks Scrimshaw, fossicking drops of candle wax from his wig.

  ‘Regarding?’

  ‘Last night,’ says Oliver.

  ‘You went to King’s Place, did you not?’ says Jonathan, the nephew.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And?’ No other man in this room has ever seen within a King’s Place nunnery, nor are likely to unless they are to ascend quite phenomenally in their lives. This is, however, the age of unlikely ascents. ‘What was it like? How was it done? What of the women?’

  He considers. ‘’Twas well done. The mermaid was greatly admired; they had displayed it in a manner theatrical and yet tasteful.’

  The men nod in satisfaction. ‘But what of the women?’ The coals on the brazier shift and rattle.

  ‘I …’ He thinks of Angelica, her back against the closed door, looking up at him. Nausea surges through him; he feels feverish, prickly. ‘I found it a most immoral place.’

  ‘Foul-mouthed, were they? Drunkards?’

  ‘I cannot tolerate a woman who drinks,’ nods the clerk his own age. ‘That’s the real evil. The lack of delicacy.’

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ he says. ‘They are good girls.’

  ‘They always are, or start off that way,’ says his clerk Brown, who took his wife the same year Mr Hancock married Mary, and who has twelve lusty children with her. ‘I never met a doxy as started out wicked, but I have come upon a fair few who have become so. Stealing and such.’ The other men murmur in agreement.

  ‘What it is,’ says Scrimshaw, ‘is the bawds. They are the truly corrupt; spent their whole lives in the trade and now they will not save their sisters but draw them into greater sin.’

  ‘Aye, ’tis the bawds who begin it all,’ agrees Brown. ‘Who makes the whores but they? A jade I’ll forgive, she has her own reasons – but a madam?’ He sucks his teeth. ‘Never. She’s out for her own profit. Profits by us, profits by them. Where’s her punishment?’

  ‘It was the luxury,’ Mr Hancock says. ‘I did not like it.’ He feels the eyes of his employees upon him and adds grandly, ‘There was something of the Fall of Rome about it. Such an excess of wine and naked women.’

  ‘The rich!’ grunts Mr Scrimshaw. ‘The well-connected! Politicians! Idleness and excess curdles their brains. They live in a world of fantasy.’

  ‘Yes,’ he nods. ‘Yes, that is it entirely.’

  ‘No place for a man of sense,’ says young Oliver wistfully.

  ‘We are all best kept ignorant of it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr Ha
ncock says, ‘that is what I thought. I shall not call there again. Is my fire made up?’

  ‘And burning merrily,’ says Oliver, who sees to all the office comforts.

  ‘Then I shall get to work. Good day, gentlemen,’ he says.

  As he passes into the adjoining partners’ office and closes the door behind him, he hears the clerks burst into excited whispering, to dissect all he has said and cast their own opinions upon it.

  Mr Hancock regrets that Greaves himself is in Boston, for the silence sits heavy with him today. He sits down at the desk, beneath the portrait of his father, and the portrait of his wife Mary’s father, and under the gaze of a feathery miniature of his brother Philip who drowned in Deptford Creek while rollicking home one night. And he touches to his nose a handkerchief worked by dear Sukie and thinks, this is a good honest place to be. And however wealthy I do become, I shall be no other sort than this.

  The morning’s letters are on his desk, but he hesitates to read them. First he sharpens a new quill with unusual care; little coils of white shear away from it until he is satisfied that its mark will be both bold and firm. Then he lays out a sheet of fine white paper, and inks the following:

  Dear Mrs Chappell,

  It is with regret that I find I must withdraw my Exhibit from your Home. You and I navigate very different Worlds, Madam, and after last night’s Proceedings I can no longer suffer my name to be associated with yours. I waive my right to the full balance of my fee and I will be pleased to have my Creature returned to me by to-morrow Morning and no later.

  He looks over it a moment, then draws out another sheet to make a fair copy, minus the sentiment of ‘regret’ and with addition of the word ‘demand’.

  For class is a type of bubble, a membrane around one, and although one might grow within this membrane, and strain against it, it is impossible to break free from it. And a man of nobility is always such in his soul, however he may fall; and a man of humble sort is always such in his soul, however he may climb.

  He signs his name with a hand so exuberant it sends a spray of ink across the page; sprinkles it with pounce to hasten the drying; blows upon it, shakes it clear, folds it and seals it. Then he rises.

  ‘Oliver,’ he says, stepping into the office, ‘convey this to Mother Chappell.’

  He retreats into his office before he can be prevailed upon to elaborate. He has set things right; that is all. He will be what he was before. He will not entertain baubles one moment longer. And he still cannot decide, as he sets about his books and slits the first of the day’s letters, whether he is content with this, or tormented by it.

  EIGHTEEN

  And what a joy it is to bask a-bed with a man of one’s own choosing! To have one’s face cupped in his warm hands, to have him marvel at the dilation of one’s pupils and linger over the rosy tenderness of one’s lips, to have him chafe the warmth back into one’s fingers and feet.

  And what a joy it is, in turn, to observe the creasing about his eyes when he smiles, and to kiss the little margin of skin, pale and tender as a girl’s, between the pink edge of his lips and the first of his carefully shaved bristles. And to discover the scar on his chin, which he received falling out of a tree when he was six; and the crook in his right little finger, which he received falling out of a club when he was nineteen. To learn these secrets about him.

  They sleep at first at Mrs Chappell’s house, in one of the bedrooms designed for receiving. The bed is so large it is almost a room in itself, and sprung with a buoyant ingenuity to which Mrs Chappell herself holds the patent. Angelica divests herself immediately of her wet chemise, slopping it onto the floorboards without a second thought. If the lieutenant glimpses her naked body before she burrows beneath the covers, it can only be for a moment; her desire to be warm trumps all thoughts of seduction. It is not, after all, as if any seduction is necessary, for this occurred all at first sight and now they are only eager to be closer together. The lieutenant strips as dawn breaks in King’s Place, and Angelica watches out of one eye, already beginning to drowse. He is a lean and long-limbed person, with a furze of dark hair along his thighs, which curve like a taut bow.

  When he slips into the bed she is already nearly asleep, and she nestles her spine up against his belly. They knot naked around one another, but nothing is done: they are delighted by the bliss of their bare skin, this is all, and his fingers tangle loosely in her thick hair and she glides her fingers along the back of his thigh. He puts his face by hers, his nose grazing her ear and his lips just upon her neck, until each of their breaths slows.

  Thus they sleep and thus they wake. There ought to be little else said on the matter, for lovers are all the same, and only of interest to themselves, but on this count it is remarkable: Angelica Neal has not felt this way before.

  Or if she has, she has forgot.

  She who has made it her living to be touched thus, looked at thus, and rarely found it onerous, has forgot until now the joy of it. She feels as if she were made of glue – or magnets, or kindling ready to take the first spark that leapt on it – and is astounded by it as if this were an entirely new discovery. Later she will whisper that she will never want any other man again. Such is the drug which, dewed on the eyelids, makes yesterday inconsequential, and tomorrow certain, and today golden.

  Angelica and George (for overnight they have dispensed with honorifics) sigh smugly together in the bed until mid-afternoon, hearing far away the clatter of the girls loaded into the carriage for their exercise, and the scamper of servants in the passages behind the wall as they set right what was made wrong during the night. They take of one another for the first time as a persistent little dog scratches and whines outside their door to be let in, and then doze before doing it again. Their only disturbance is by a maid who brings them chocolate and rolls, and retreats in haste.

  ‘We should leave,’ whispers Angelica, touching her fingertips to his as they lie face to face.

  ‘Do not make me part with you,’ says George.

  ‘I have no intention of it,’ she says, ‘but I do not wish to be overlooked by Mother Chappell.’ They are silent a moment. ‘What are your engagements?’ she asks. Their palms press flat against one another.

  ‘None I cannot break, for the next two days.’

  She grows brighter. ‘Nor I. Come back with me.’

  He draws her to him, his fingers finding their home in the small of her back, for truly every part of his body finds its correspondence in hers. ‘Let us stay together as long as we can,’ he says. ‘I could not wish to be anywhere else.’

  ‘I have an apartment,’ she says. ‘We’ll not be disturbed.’

  ‘A little longer here,’ he says. ‘A little longer.’

  By the time they are dressed it is late in the afternoon, and the sun has gone from the courtyard. They emerge into the city as if they had been gone from it a long time; its customs unfamiliar and all but irrelevant to them, in their republic of two. They take a carriage and press close against one another within, and kiss and whisper as they watch the strange new world pass by outside.

  NINETEEN

  Not two hours after his message is sent to Mrs Chappell’s, Mr Hancock is returned to the Exchange, and upon hearing his name called turns to see one of her beautiful footmen striding through the crowd towards him. His livery shines blue as the most virgin winter morning. His wig is white as angel’s wings. His skin is brown and smooth.

  ‘Mr Hancock,’ he repeats. ‘Sir.’ The crowd parts as he advances. This man, whose name in fact is Simeon Stanley, is not the only black in the room, but he may be the very smartest. The most peculiar thing about him is his scent. He smells of starch. He also smells of lavender-water, tallow soap, damp wool (for the mist has left its dropples on the sleek shoulders of his greatcoat), and a sparing dab of middling-quality eau de cologne, but what he does not smell of, not one atom, is his own man’s body. He is so miraculous clean it is as if he fell direct out of the blue sky: not even a whiff of armpit
emanates from him, not a hint of onions on his breath, not a notion that he has traversed the streets in haste. His Adam-blue breeches must be fresh on, for a man’s trousers become swiftly seasoned with the chafed, perspiring intricacies of their owner. Simeon Stanley may look like a man of flesh and blood, but for all his scent betrays it, from his crisply folded stock to the toes of his stockings, he might be made complete of feather-packed calico.

  ‘I am sent by Mrs Chappell,’ he says.

  ‘She has received my letter then?’

  ‘Aye, and is much troubled by its contents. She begs that you inform her what made you change your mind.’

  Mr Hancock struggles what to say. ‘You know the nature of that house yourself,’ he says.

  ‘Certainly I do, and I am proud to represent it,’ says Simeon. ‘Mrs Chappell has the ear of men who—’

  ‘Aye, they are my betters,’ Mr Hancock cuts him off. ‘Mine and yours. I have heard it many times, only I find I have left off believing it. I am not less honourable than those men I saw in attitudes of the most appalling degradation.’

  Mr Stanley clings to his original message. ‘Do you feel you were misled? My mistress would be much grieved to think so. If there is something we can do – what would set this situation right, Mr Hancock? What will please you?’

  ‘Nothing, but to have my mermaid returned to me.’

  The black man turns his eyes up most earnest. ‘Mrs Chappell is anxious that you are happy.’

  ‘That is easily settled,’ rejoins Mr Hancock. ‘Now leave me be, for I am a busy man.’