The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  Simeon clears his throat. He is not particularly heavyset, but he is tall, and now straightens his back so that his shoulders broaden. With perfect mildness he forms a fist – whose knuckles are notably scuffed and scarred for one so otherwise refined – and touches it into the pale palm of his other hand. There is the pat of skin upon skin. ‘My mistress begs you recall the agreement you made with her,’ he says quietly. ‘The contract she signed to hire your mermaid for one week, and the sum of three hundred guineas she agreed to pay you in good faith.’

  ‘Do not think to intimidate me,’ Mr Hancock says, his eyes upon Simeon’s clasped fist. ‘I am a man of business, and I do not deal with bullies.’

  This rankles. ‘You call me a bully, sir?’

  ‘What else were I to call you? You are employed by a madam to menace her clients. If you know of a better word, please, I should like to know it.’

  ‘I am a professional,’ Simeon says sulkily. ‘A servant as good as any to be found in London’s finest houses.’

  ‘Right you are. So let us have no more of this thuggery. I am not in the habit of breaking my agreements, but needs must, do you not find? Sometimes for the sake of one’s good standing ’tis better to break a contract than to honour it.’

  ‘She will pay you more,’ says Simeon promptly, for Mrs Chappell has briefed him thoroughly on what might tempt the merchant back into tractability. ‘Another fifty pounds, what say you?’

  ‘Guineas, she and I agreed …’

  ‘Fifty guineas then.’

  ‘… but that’s a detail. I still refuse.’

  ‘A hundred.’

  Mr Hancock turns away; the footman watches him attentively for his next parry but none comes. He puts his head on one side; a smile of gentle bafflement splits his face.

  ‘Surely, sir,’ he says, ‘that’s acceptable to you?’

  ‘I want my mermaid back,’ says Mr Hancock, and turns to walk away, pushing out onto the street.

  The footman follows with some effort, dodging amongst the convocation of businessmen and recalling to himself the next part of his script. ‘If ’tis influence you want,’ he pants, ‘connections, why, she can help you …’

  This gives Mr Hancock a moment’s pause. He looks at Simeon with renewed interest. ‘Say,’ he clears his throat, ‘you move about the town a great deal, one fine house to another, do you not?’

  ‘I do.’ Simeon wonders at this change of tack but determines to humour the gentleman.

  ‘Then what would you say will be the next most fashionable neighbourhood? If a man were to build houses – if he had money, perhaps, but had never speculated in London before – where ought he to build?’

  Simeon conceals a smile at this hobnail bumpkin with his threadbare wig, and endeavours to respond kindly. ‘Perhaps Snow Hill, sir, or out on the Mile-End Road: a great many sea-captains and merchants in those parts are wanting great houses.

  Mr Hancock shakes his head crossly. ‘No, no no. I wish to build houses for fine people. No cits, no trade. Leisure.’

  ‘Forgive me. A fashionable neighbourhood in town? I would say Mary-le-Bone, north-west of here. Fine clean air. Halfway into the country already.’

  ‘That is where you would build?’

  ‘I daren’t think of such a thing.’ Simeon puffs up his chest. ‘But I shall have a tavern there some day, God willing. A fine pretty situation it is.’

  ‘Mary-le-Bone,’ repeats Mr Hancock. ‘Much obliged to you. Much obliged. Mary-le-Bone.’ Then he claps his hat back onto his head. ‘As to the trouble with the mermaid, I regret you are wasting your time. I’ll be wanting it back. Relay to your mistress—’

  ‘Mrs Neal!’ blurts Simeon. And this does stop Mr Hancock in his tracks.

  ‘What of her?’ He touches his unthinking fingers to his lower lip.

  This is Simeon’s last card, and he is sorely aware of it. Angelica’s tools of persuasion are very different from his own, and may in this case achieve better results; either way, he will be glad to palm this trouble off. ‘She desires to see you,’ he says.

  Mr Hancock shuffles his feet. ‘She …?’ He shakes his head. ‘No. No, I do not think so.’

  ‘Aye, yes!’ says Simeon. ‘Very eagerly. Will you not visit her this evening?’

  ‘I cannot.’

  ‘Sir, do you know how often Mrs Neal requests the company of a gentleman? Almost never. They present themselves to her. But she waits upon you. You should go to her.’

  Mr Hancock sighs. ‘This is all part of your mistress’s persuasions.’

  Simeon shrugs. It is a fair hand; no need to overplay it. ‘She waits upon you. Go or do not; here is where she may be found.’ He takes from inside his jacket a card upon which is already written (in Mrs Chappell’s own hand, although Mr Hancock does not know it) the address of Angelica’s rooms. ‘Take it.’ He holds it out.

  Mr Hancock eyes it. ‘I have work to attend to.’

  ‘Take it! Take it! What harm can it do? And then I shall leave you be.’

  Truly, what choice does Mr Hancock have? With shaking hand and faltering heart, he reaches out and accepts Angelica Neal’s summons.

  TWENTY

  Simeon, once he has watched Mr Hancock vanish amongst the crowd of his own sort, sets off apace. He is a figure of some interest, he knows, for his livery is the colour of heaven and he is half a head taller than most about him, but this – he observes – is due in part to their own slouching. If they would take some pride in themselves, he thinks, they would not look so much at me.

  As it is, some jeer. ‘Young prince! Young prince!’ calls an apprentice. ‘Mr Snowball, pick up your feet!’ And yes, he must tread most scrupulously across the filth, wincing with disgust as he strides over the channel of effluvium that runs down the centre of the roadway. He passes the seafarers’ hall, within whiff of the water, with alleys here and there that afford him a glimpse of great white sails. He passes the workshops of the cordwainers, the print shops at St Paul’s, the fruit wagons of St Clement’s, and everywhere he goes, with his quick, light step and his head held high, every pair of eyes in the great population of the streets sees that here is an important man; knows by his finery that he must be the most favoured messenger of an influential house. Simeon, swatting soot from one shoulder, strides onward.

  He skirts the edge of St Giles, a low sort of a place where he might come by an accident at the wrong end of a blade. He hurries past an old Lascar begging on the street, who raises the leg of his pantaloon to show a great ulcer embedded like a yolk in the twiggy bone beneath. The man is naked beneath his jacket, and his dark skin slack and meagre over his ribcage. His eyeballs have a discoloured look to them, as if they had have been dipped in tea, and the corners of his lips are pale and scurfy. Simeon himself was never a sailor, but he perceives that this man will not join another crew. ‘Brother,’ calls the Lascar, holding out his bowl, ‘brother, help me,’ but Simeon wrinkles his nose. He thinks how he might describe this later to his friends, the footmen and grocers and cabinetmakers of his own race, with their elegant wool jackets and embroidered waistcoats and powdered hair. He puzzles over what words he might use, but he knows he will say nothing. For how can it be said? And what good will speaking it do? He strides away from the Lascar without looking back, but the memory of him will crouch in Simeon’s belly for quite some time longer.

  Do not imagine that he betrays any perturbation in his demeanour. He arrives at Dean Street cool as a china dog, and there is Mrs Frost’s peevish face half lost in darkness behind the first-floor window. When she sees him, she raises it open and leans out at once.

  ‘I’ve a message for Mrs Neal,’ he says.

  ‘Well then, you have wasted your journey, for she ain’t returned from King’s Place.’

  ‘I am sent from there.’ He gestures to his blue jacket, in case it has escaped her notice, but Mrs Frost’s expression does not alter. ‘Come down. I shall not shout it.’

  She vanishes smartly, and in seconds emerges
from the front door, like an automaton in a novelty clock. ‘What is it then?’ she snaps. She does not waste her courtesy on servants.

  ‘Mrs Neal met with a gentleman last night,’ says Simeon, ‘and my mistress is anxious to persuade him of something. I bade him call here on her behalf, that Mrs Neal may flatter him as I may not.’

  ‘So I must expect a gentleman?’

  ‘Yes, and obstruct him by no means. He must be free to unburden himself; he is troubled by some business with my mistress.’

  Mrs Frost harrumphs. ‘Mrs Neal has her own interests to attend to. How many more favours does Mrs Chappell expect?’

  ‘’Tis all the one favour.’

  ‘Well, it makes a great many demands on her time.’

  He spreads his hands. ‘Take it up with my mistress. Or with yours.’

  ‘My mistress! Impudence! She is not my employer, she is my friend.’

  Simeon looks her up and down. ‘Much good it does you,’ he says, and bestows upon her the most delightful of smiles.

  Mr Hancock is a man of particular impressionability, this is true, but it takes him less than four hours to set his mind on visiting Angelica Neal that very evening. He knows not what he will say or do, but she awaits me there, he thinks, I cannot do her the double dishonour of snubbing her invitation. Certainly I will not give way on the question of the mermaid, but is it not a fine pretext to see her again? He has come to the conclusion that however disgraceful her circle, he must display courtesy beyond it. For I, although not so socially elevated, am the better man. I would treat no girl that way; I would never disport myself so amongst my peers; I am cognisant, as those gentlemen are not, that all pleasures have their cost.

  He makes his way there as swiftly as he may, but all along the Strand the girls are coming out for their evening’s work: they perch on doorsteps and window ledges, or stand in small groups, passing a bottle between them and flirting their brightly coloured skirts up to show their frilled petticoats beneath. There are some as stand on the edge of the pavement (if there be pavement at all), nervous and watchful, their eyes flicking from one man to the next as an animal’s eyes will dart in search of safety. Every man who passes they try to meet his gaze; every gaze they meet their faces twitch into a smile. Mr Hancock strides with his head down but they approach him still, laying their hands on his sleeve as he passes.

  ‘Walk me home?’ one asks.

  ‘I’ve something you want, sir,’ confides another. The ones out in daylight have little besides the obvious to be ashamed of, their faces youthful and only lightly painted, the state of their dresses respectable at first glance if not at second. The ghastly ones – the toothless, the rotten, the old and the filthy – are not to be seen: they conceal themselves in their crooked alleys or wait until the small hours when they might conjure their lost charms with drink and darkness.

  He is turning up Half Moon Street when a young one steps into his path. She is neither exceptional pretty nor exceptional plain; just a little brown-haired country girl of perhaps sixteen years, with a faded kerchief knotted about her neck and her stays all shiny with wear. She starts to trot alongside him, and although he picks up his pace she picks up hers too, her borrowed hoops rocking this way and that.

  ‘Sir,’ she says. ‘You’ll not stop a while?’

  ‘Thank you, no,’ he pants, for the exertion to escape her is more than he is accustomed to. Still she does not fall back.

  ‘I know an alehouse near here,’ she says. ‘A decent place to pass an hour.’ She twists her fingers wretchedly: she wears no gloves, and her hands are white and bony, with crescents of black under the nails. ‘It has an upstairs room.’

  ‘Be off with you,’ he says. ‘This won’t do,’ but the little jade pursues him still.

  ‘Sixpence and a jug of wine, that’s all I ask,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you right.’

  He stops, and she fairly trips over her feet: no wonder, for her shoes are too large and slither up and down her heel as she walks. He looks into her face. She is all unpainted, a spray of freckles over her nose.

  ‘Who runs you?’ he asks.

  ‘Nobody,’ she says.

  ‘Is that the truth? No bully, no bawd?’

  ‘No, sir, I do trade alone.’

  He sighs, and rummages a shilling from his pocket. He holds it up for her to see. ‘Enough to find somewhere warm and a bite to eat. Perhaps a candle. This is for nobody’s spending but your own, d’ye mark me?’

  She does not move. He has never seen anybody stare at a coin so intently.

  ‘Go,’ he says, holding it out to her. She looks at him stupidly. ‘I want nothing of you, only that I shall not see you on the street again tonight.’

  She holds out her palm, and when he drops the coin into it her fingers snap closed like a trap. She brings her fist close to her chest. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  She drops a curtsey, and hastens away, he hopes to a pie shop but perhaps back to the spot on the pavement where she began. As if she will spend it on anything but gin, he thinks to himself as she vanishes into the crowd. As if a mere twelvepence could help the child. Where is her family and why does she not return to them? Confound it, a respectable man ought to be able to walk down the street without being accosted.

  And onward into Soho he goes, irritated by his own softening. All the way to Dean Street he finds women’s hands on his cuff, their entreaties in his ears. It seems there is not one woman abroad who might not open her legs given the opportunity: the milliners’ girls with their goods parcelled up whisper, ‘I have time to tarry,’ and the dressers who have been turned away superfluous from the theatres call, ‘An unusual evening, that I am at my liberty! This chance will not come to you again.’

  And yet all about them is industry. He sees printers’ apprentices with their inky fingers, blacksmiths and pie-men and builders and lawyers. Doctors bustle the streets in their cauliflower wigs; apothecaries scoop from great majolica jars; furniture salesmen sit happy behind mullioned windows. But amongst all this brave order there are those who have fallen loose from it, as screws from a fine machine. In this city of a thousand trades, there is only one that the women return to as if they were called to it.

  He comes to Dean Street; at Angelica’s address the first-floor window is open and a narrow, tidy-looking woman sits within, leaning an elbow on its sill.

  ‘Good day to you,’ he calls up, raising his hat.

  She does not look up immediately, preferring to finish whatever she is scribbling in her pocketbook, and then her irritable blink is something like Hester’s when she has lost her spectacles, although she is much younger.

  ‘May I help you?’ she asks.

  ‘I am after Mrs Neal,’ he bellows. He is painful conscious of the other people in the street, the good washerwomen and tradesmen, the mantua-maker’s seamstresses who are quick to gather at their window below Mrs Neal’s as if it were a theatre box. It is unfortunate that he is unconscious of Angelica’s giggling return to her rooms, not two hours earlier, wrapped in a wool blanket and with her soaked underclothes and Mr Rockingham in tow.

  ‘This is the gentleman you met at Mrs Chappell’s, I suppose,’ had said Mrs Frost once they were alone in the dressing room.

  ‘I don’t see what it is to you,’ Angelica retorted. ‘Here, my gown must be left at Mrs Chappell’s. What larks! You might send and see if it has been found.’

  ‘But the gentleman—’

  ‘Yes! For pity’s sake, Eliza, yes, he is from Mrs Chappell’s; I met him there yesterday and I shall keep him with me tonight. Does that satisfy you? Well, leave us be.’

  Mrs Frost now raises the sash and leans further out, eyeing Mr Hancock carefully. ‘And what are you wanting with her?’ She is always judicious in her assessment of visitors. This man, his thumbs notched into his pockets, looks like neither a gentleman nor a bailiff, but if she had to choose she would lean to the latter.

  ‘Why, I … I wished to see her. To talk, if I may. I met her last nig
ht.’

  ‘That hardly sets you apart. Your name?’

  ‘Hancock.’ He removes his hat and turns it around in his hands. The mermaid man, he wants to add, but he bites it back as folly.

  ‘Never heard of you.’ She turns her head from the window. Within, although he cannot know, Angelica Neal is locked in her bedroom, cocooned in love. ‘Well, she is not at liberty.’

  ‘I met her last night,’ he repeats. ‘I did not treat her as I ought, and I—’

  ‘Not today,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘She will see nobody.’

  The girls in the mantua-maker’s below seem to Mr Hancock remarkable short of occupation; they now push their own window as far open as it will go, and prop their elbows on the frame to watch the back-and-forth on the street. Mr Hancock, standing not two yards distant from their beady interest, shuffles his feet and endeavours to hasten his enquiries.

  ‘But if you would perhaps tell her that I—’

  ‘If I were to run every entreaty left with me for Mrs Neal, I would wear my feet to stumps,’ snaps Mrs Frost. ‘This is not your day, sir. Come by again, if you must.’

  Then she pulls the window down, and leaves him confounded on the pavement.

  ‘What now, sir?’ asks one amongst his audience of seamstresses. ‘Surely you’ll not go home so insulted?’

  He straightens his jacket and says nothing, but they lean out further to him.

  ‘You’ll not be refused entrance here,’ one of the girls says.

  ‘I beg your—’

  ‘We’ll give you a good price.’

  ‘Come in, come in!’ They jostle and whisper, and emit a great spray of laughter, and he retreats quite burning with shame and perplexion.

  VOLUME II.

  ONE

  ‘You have lost me my mermaid!’

  Mrs Chappell’s chins quiver with rage as she slops across the marble floor in her wrap and her rabbit-fur slippers. She has forgone her wig for a starched and frilled cap, and wears spectacles very low down her nose: denuded of her rouge and jewels, she appears less imposing but far sterner. There is no weakness in her bare slackening skin or the furrow of her brow: in fact, she never looked more of a matriarch.