The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  ‘Is this why you sent for me?’ says Angelica, much put out. She had wavered, indeed, over responding to the abbess’s summons, Mr Rockingham being so very much on her mind, but I promised to oblige her, and there is always something in it for me, she had told herself. Two days in the otherworld of his arms has made her ebullient, and proud of herself: she is in the mood to be amongst friends and revel in her own magnetism. If she had recalled that Mrs Chappell did no entertaining at all before two – that the first part of her day has ever been devoted to the driest of business – she might have prepared herself not to be greeted with perfect civility at King’s Place, the site of such recent and dazzling triumphs. The house is rather unusually silent, as if the girls and dogs running about upstairs were not so lively today, and the footman who steps forward for her cloak lacks a certain sprightliness. ‘And what are you talking about?’ she asks. ‘I have lost your mermaid? If I have, I am afraid I know nothing of it.’

  Above, there is a rustling on the stairs, where Elinor begins to descend. ‘Good morning,’ Angelica calls, ‘or has it yet struck noon?’ but Mrs Chappell shoots the girl a look of dark warning, so that she turns tail and vanishes the way she came. ‘That don’t bode well,’ quips Angelica, who has experience of that expression. Guilt now tweaks at her, and she thinks for the first time of Mr Hancock, the mermaid man, who was in her care and departed it – she now recalls – far from easy. Still, there is no reason to admit fault until it is proven beyond the possibility of denial.

  ‘My room, if you please,’ says Mrs Chappell stiffly.

  ‘You are dreadful cross,’ observes Angelica lightly, but she follows the abbess into the green-papered parlour without protestation.

  The curtains are open and the fire is burning, but there is no tea laid out there, no Madeira or biscuits, and Mrs Chappell calls for none. ‘You have lost me a mermaid,’ she repeats.

  ‘Will you permit me to sit down?’

  The abbess harrumphs, and Angelica takes her place on the sopha, slumping over its arm. In this attitude she marks suddenly the ache in her commodity, and the rawness where her thighs touch. Too much fun. She cannot keep the smile from her face. Perhaps it is to the good that Rockingham has returned to his studies for a few days: although she is already drafting her first letter to him in her head, her body could not take much more of his ardour.

  ‘Sit up straight,’ snaps Mrs Chappell. ‘And you can wipe off that saucy look too. I never was so vexed with you. Never so vexed with any of my girls.’

  ‘I cannot bear the suspense! Madam, what have I done?’

  Mrs Chappell extends a furious finger. ‘You have—’

  ‘No, no, do not repeat it! I mis-spoke; you made yourself clear. I have lost you a mermaid. How did I effect such a thing?’

  ‘Mr Hancock has removed it from exhibition in this house.’

  She recalls his foolish panicked stagger away from her, and how he blundered through the crowd. ‘You cannot blame that all on me,’ she scowls. ‘Any number of things may have displeased him. You orchestrated the entire night, after all; my role in it was very minor indeed.’

  Mrs Chappell narrows her eyes. ‘No more of your babble,’ she says. ‘Your pertness today is not at all to my taste. You did not take care of Mr Hancock, as I requested …’

  ‘He did not like the show. What was I to do?’

  ‘Set things right! If I had thought that nothing could upset his ease I’d have put him in the charge of our silly Kitty. I chose you because I trusted that whatever went awry, you would know how to bring things to his satisfaction.’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘No gentleman should leave this house disappointed,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘You know that. But Mr Hancock was sorely disappointed. I directed him to you the next day, that you might put it right – and mark me, he was willing to go to you; that’s half your job done for you. Why, you sent him away again!’

  ‘I never did!’

  ‘No?’

  Angelica searches her memory, a blur of wine and bedsheets and sweat. ‘I never so much as saw him,’ she says firmly. ‘Never heard him, had no notion he had called.’

  ‘Eliza Frost was under the strictest instructions to let him in.’

  ‘You spoke to her?’

  ‘Simeon did.’

  ‘Then the blame is on them! I knew nothing of it!’

  Now is the moment to retreat graciously from the argument: ‘A misunderstanding,’ one or the other should say, ‘a misfortune. It could happen to any body.’ But the words stick in both their throats. Angelica cocks her head in invitation of an apology; Mrs Chappell looks in the other direction.

  ‘You ought to run a tighter ship,’ she snaps. ‘’Tis down to you to make sure these confusions do not occur.’

  Angelica’s judgement is swayed by her wounded pride. ‘And you, madam!’

  ‘I do not need you the way you need me,’ says Mrs Chappell, and although her tone is measured, it demands to be heeded. ‘I have been celebrated in this world since before you were born; since before even your mother was born I don’t doubt; I have standing. Your reputation rests only on what I have sent your way. You would do well to please me.’

  But Angelica is not heedful. ‘You may believe that if you wish,’ she says. ‘But when I first returned to London, you and I were in accord that I was a valuable asset to you. And now that I am all about the town again, I’d reckon my value has only increased. Why, I could do as well as Bel Fortescue if I chose; so you had better not keep me down by assigning blame where there is none.’ Will she relate this conversation to Georgie? She has not yet decided. It may indeed be indelicate to speak of such matters around him; she would not wish to seem a haggling street-wench. No, more graceful to say nothing of it, and let him see the new respect with which her old bawd must treat her. ‘You struck the deal,’ she finishes with relish. ‘You hired the mermaid from the gentleman and he took it away again. That is not my lookout.’

  Mrs Chappell claps her hands, less in real mirth than in the knowledge that it will goad her erstwhile protégée. ‘Oh, you wish to equal Mrs Fortescue, do you? You might start by emulating her humility, for you know, dear, ambition comes to naught without it.’

  ‘Ugh!’ Angelica stamps her foot like a girl of thirteen. Mrs Chappell’s company arrests her in a certain daughterish petulance, and even in the face of such advice she adopts the mantle of wounded party, and the generations-old cry, ‘You always favoured her!’ She flounces from her seat, and succeeds in screwing out a few tears as she continues, ‘How I strive to please you! And it is never enough, Mother Chappell. Never!’

  ‘None of that,’ says the abbess, who over her career has raised hundreds of girls. ‘She may rail against it, but Bel Fortescue owes her current fortune in no small part to having always acquiesced to me.’

  ‘No, that is not so. You built her up so far, but then she went her own way. It don’t signify now whether she is with you or against you.’ Angelica does not have the words, but she both covets and resents what Bel has got, which is to take her own space in the world, to have come by some alignment of charms to be celebrated for her own self.

  ‘But you are not Bel,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘You are Angelica Neal. I have served you right so far, have I not?’

  Angelica draws herself to her full height. ‘I think I do very well on my own. As I told you I would.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’

  ‘Aye. And I have met a wonderful kind man, who will take care of me.’ She crosses her fingers in the folds of her skirt. ‘You forget, Mrs Chappell, that I will never be a mercenary, and I will do no business of yours that don’t suit me.’

  Mrs Chappell has heard speeches of this sort before, and is robust enough to pay it no particular heed. ‘Go, then,’ she says, ‘and make your own way. My door is always open to you. But dear girl, we are all mercenaries; there is no escaping it.’

  ‘Not I!’

  ‘Indeed you; you have need to be the most mercenary of us a
ll. Every kindness has its price, Mrs Neal, and one so precariously set up as you would do well to know your own means.’

  ‘There is nothing precarious about me,’ returns Angelica. ‘You mean only to unsettle me.’

  ‘So hold fast, dear girl. Hold fast.’

  TWO

  And thus it is that Mr Hancock comes to sell his mermaid.

  It has been returned to his office by Simeon’s own hand, and sits on the sideboard beneath its glass dome, waiting for him to bear it home once more to Deptford. He is damping down the coals when he hears a rapping on the front door that carries all the way through the building to his private office as if somebody has taken a brass-headed cane to it. He has picked up his coat to leave, but hesitates at the sound of strange voices ushered into the outer office.

  ‘Mr Hancock,’ a man says, ‘the mermaid man. Where can he be found?’

  He is expecting no visitor. He puts down his overcoat and opens his door. ‘Why, I am here,’ he says.

  In the plain outer office there is a party of four of the most splendid men. They are not dressed extravagantly, but the quality is evident: their greatcoats are of a deep rich indigo, their cravats the snowiest and gauziest white; their wigs pristine, uncrushed, unstained. And each wears a badge of a jewelled coronet on his arm, flanked with rampant gold-thread creatures.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he says, although his mind is all a-fumble. ‘What can I do for you?’ He is thinking, foolishly, are they sent by Mrs Neal? Does she summon me to her?

  ‘We are here on a matter of business,’ they say. His clerks’ quills are twitching industriously but they are alert to every word: they are not unused to visitors of some grandeur, but the organs of aristocracy – let alone equerries of the Crown – are something new in this quiet office. He notes with some disconcertion that Oliver Hay is scribbling without removing his eyes from the company.

  ‘We can speak in my own office,’ he says, and they troop past him one by one. Within, he has not an idea of what to do. The mermaid watches from the sideboard. ‘Be seated,’ he hazards.

  ‘Oh, we shall not trouble you long,’ says their leader, the most clean-shaven man Mr Hancock ever saw. There is hardly a shadow upon his face; he is smooth as a youth although he must be forty. ‘We wish to speak to you about your mermaid, which was recently removed from the house of one Mrs Chappell.’

  Mr Hancock nods towards it; the men turn too, and he notes a flicker of discomposure in their demeanour, swiftly suppressed. ‘Well, please,’ he says. ‘Speak.’

  ‘Do you intend to sell it?’

  In matters of commerce he is rarely unprepared for such questions, and although the business with the mermaid first undid his senses entirely, he has passed into a new and absurd sharpness; an understanding that the point at which he judges his demands to be unreasonable is the point he must push beyond.

  ‘That depends,’ he says. The men are impassive. ‘You must appreciate that it brings me revenue: I had expected it to turn a profit for some time longer.’

  ‘We have money.’

  ‘Who has sent you?’ he asks, although he may judge it well enough from their jewelled badges. In the past he has arranged for such a coronet to be etched onto one hundred mother-of-pearl gaming chips.

  ‘An interested party.’

  ‘And it will go into a private collection? Some Wunderkammer? It’s my belief this creature will be of scientific use.’

  ‘It will not go anywhere that scientific men cannot find it.’

  He might laugh aloud. Its little grasping hands have brought uneasiness into his small bubble; he realises he never wants it back in his sight again. ‘Well, you have heard my reservations,’ he says. ‘Make me an offer.’

  The leader takes a sheet of paper from the desk. ‘May I?’ He dips Mr Hancock’s own pen in the inkwell, and writes with lovely fluid movements under the eyes of the dead men hanging on the walls. Mr Hancock glances up at their painted faces as if they were co-conspirators: the strangest sale I ever did make, he confides, as if any of you would have believed it.

  The visitor hands him the piece of paper and Mr Hancock regards the figure in a second that feels as if all the air has been sucked from the room, so still it becomes, and so sluggishly his heart squeezes. The sum is two thousand pounds. This is above what his mermaid cost him. He looks at the number again.

  ‘Please,’ says the equerry. ‘We are open to your counter-offer. Go on.’

  Dare he double their proposed sum? Quadruple it, even? Eight thousand would purchase a ship the Calliope’s equal; would finance a new voyage entirely, if he chose. Sukie’s dowry would be safely set by; his modest empire expanded by another house or two. He will sit in his office and Tysoe Jones will sail his ships, and it will be as if the mermaid never crossed his threshold at all.

  Ah, what to do? Six thousand, eight thousand, ten thousand?

  He thinks of himself in his counting-house, the evening before the mermaid arrived, alone and silent, surrounded by such unbearable lack.

  He walks to his desk and sits down.

  He takes up his pen, warm from the visitor’s hand, and he adds another zero.

  Thus amended, he pushes the sheet of paper back across the desk, so trepidatious it renders him almost blind.

  The visitor glances at the new sum, and then says, ‘Very well.’

  Mr Hancock must steel his jaw to prevent it from flapping open. He had not thought it would be done so easily. He has sold Captain Jones’s whim for twenty thousand pounds: enough to pay off a nobleman’s debt; enough to hire a cook to run his kitchen for a century; enough to be another sort of Jonah Hancock than he has been hitherto.

  ‘Your master,’ he says to the leader of the strangers, ‘whoever he may be …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Has he – has he seen this specimen?’

  The company, to a man, turns once again to contemplate the beast. ‘He has heard excellent things about it,’ says the equerry, ‘and so what does it matter?’

  ‘Its appearance is unbeautiful. It is not what people expect of a mermaid.’

  The visitor is impatient. ‘But it is a mermaid. He desired one and now he has one.’

  ‘It is, if I may say, monstrous.’

  ‘But it is real.’ The visitor straightens the collar of his coat and looks to his men. ‘It don’t matter what it looks like. It is desired by everyone and yet it belongs only to him. May we now be away, Mr Hancock? Or did you have other questions?’

  ‘Please. I am more than satisfied.’ He notes that the men’s eyes linger on the mermaid, and steps before it. ‘You’ll not take it away today. I shall wait for your payment.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’

  ‘Let me see you out.’

  He ushers them through the office, where all his men sit up goggling. In the yard the stationer’s children and their black dog are playing some sort of chasing game, and pelt across the flagstones shrieking while their pet gambols in pursuit; the visitors are obliged to stride stiffly amongst them, executing little nervous side-steps when one child or other runs too close to them. Eventually one of the smaller boys wallops into the leader of the visitors’ legs, which throws him sprawling to the ground clutching his knee. It is at this point that Mr Hancock closes the door on his benefactors. When it is fast, he leans against it and tries to quiet his breathing so as not to arouse the curiosity of the clerks so nearby. He cannot decide what to think. He holds his hands up before him, and they shake.

  THREE

  Little boys’ fingers patter against the window of Mr Hancock’s counting-house. He hears the chime of their sticks dragged along the grilles in the pavement, and the high earnest wondering of their talk. If he turned from his desk he would see their figures slithering in the whorl of the glass, swimming and dispersing in its waves: he would see the light of their sunny hair and the stockings wrinkling down their legs as they break into a run, and thus vanish from each pane’s vortex.

  It is a Sunday, a day
of exodus, and the families of Deptford are setting out upon their rare pleasures with redoubled determination, it being an unseasonably fine day, perhaps the last they see this year. The women don their gay dresses and fresh-trimmed bonnets, and the men hoist their babies onto their shoulders, and they walk out with children and dogs running about their feet, all equipped with bats and balls and nets and fans, their bread bound in clean cloth, their pennies carefully counted. Stout matrons take their husbands’ arms with girlish pleasure, and suitors attend bashfully to their sweethearts, and bands of lads from the yards unbutton their shirts and uncork their first ale of the morning. Out they stride, one and all, bound by river and road for the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall or the tumbled green hill of Greenwich or the breeze of Blackheath, where the sky dances with many-coloured kites. They fill the street with the tramp of their feet, and their shouts and laughter waft across the twinkling river-water, no matter that it stinks. In the little rowing-boats the women shriek and clutch at their bonnets; the boys spring from stern to pitching prow without anxiety.

  Mr Hancock remains at his desk. He is rich now, in the manner of a man long-apprenticed in handling other people’s money. His wealth drives him to no feverish excess (besides the ordering in, as the weather grows colder, of spiced currant buns and new woollen underwear): he has laid money aside for Sukie’s dowry and her boy cousins’ apprenticeships, but for the most part his ambitions remain unaltered in their substance, merely greater in their scale. He will still build houses, oh, most certainly, but he will build not one terrace but two, and they will not be here. What man builds in Deptford, after all, who has the means to build in London?

  And so there is much to be done, and so he remains at his desk.

  Furthermore, who would he walk out with?