The girls dither. ‘Be seated,’ says the abbess, and they crush in where they may, the sopha being occupied. Rockingham takes up his newspaper, and absent-minded takes up Angelica’s hand as he reads, caressing its fingers one by one.
Kitty leans so far forward her elbows balance on her knees. She clasps her hands and stares. Stop it, mouths Polly, but it goes unmarked.
‘I’ve not seen you in a good long time,’ observes Angelica, stroking Mr Rockingham’s palm with her own even while looking deeply and frankly into Mrs Chappell’s face. Of course she has come to make amends, she has already assured herself. ‘Are you staying long?’ she asks.
‘Why?’ asks the abbess. ‘Have you another engagement?’
George looks up from his paper to meet Angelica’s eye, and they both smirk. ‘No.’
‘We shall not keep you,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘We merely came to remember ourselves to you.’
‘Good of you, good of you.’ Rockingham’s fingers visibly tighten upon Angelica’s waist but his eyes return to his paper. She is dressed exotically à la turque, with a scarf wrapped most becomingly about her head. The colours are ones she has never been in the habit of wearing – oxblood, mustard, jade – and Mrs Chappell thinks she cannot quite like it, what with such hectic colour in the girl’s cheeks and lips, such spark in her eyes: everything about her seems brighter, sharper, fuller. Presumptuous, she thinks, to make such a show of herself. Too much. She likes her own girls in charming white gowns. Sartorial daring is for women who may choose how they are looked at.
Even now, under the abbess’s scrutiny, Angelica bristles. ‘Hmm?’ she asks sharply.
‘I merely look upon you.’
‘Merely.’ Angelica stretches out her arm to show off the drop of her sleeve, so busy with embroidered tendrils and fronds, and cupping within it a foam of white lace. Her knuckles are dazzling with jewels. ‘You are always thinking something,’ she says, ‘I know. What do you think now?’
‘Very fine, I daresay.’
‘Georgie bought it me.’
Mrs Chappell looks at him. He is transfixed on his reading, but runs his fingertip along the edge of Angelica’s ear: she shivers and squeaks.
‘Oh, you did?’ says Mrs C. ‘And all of this –’ the Turkey rugs, the coloured prints, the piles of books and ribbons and shawls and flowers – ‘you pay for it?’
‘She’ll want for nothing,’ he says without looking up.
‘But I want to keep house, Georgie.’ She thrusts out her bottom lip. ‘You and I, in our own home.’
‘Patience.’ He folds the newspaper over and shakes it at Polly, although he has hitherto given no hint that he has noticed her presence in the room. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘what do you make of this?’
‘Of what?’
‘The problem of the blacks. There are too many of them in this city; they will not work.’
‘I know nothing of it.’ She lowers her face.
‘You’ve no family? They cannot be rich, or else you would not very likely be in the position you are—’
‘No family,’ says Polly. Elinor is trying to catch her eye, but Polly will not look at her; she feels her face burn with what exact emotion she cannot tell. She tries to feel nothing.
‘Then it were well you are where you are,’ he says, ‘for your brothers the Lascars and the Africans can find no work here, and are begging on our streets. Look –’ he flaps the newspaper towards her again – ‘there is a public subscription to help them. Public subscription! Food and beds and whatever they demand this cold winter! A suit of clothes, if they asked for’t. Some say they have earned such charity, I say—’
‘Certainly they have,’ says Elinor bravely. ‘They have fought for us in the war with America, and they have sailed our ships and been all manner of use to us – we who enslaved them, and who brought them here. We grant them their liberty, but what does liberty count for when its condition is destitution?’
‘A very pretty speech,’ says Rockingham, ‘but you cannot understand the half of it.’
‘We owe them a fair living,’ says Elinor.
‘A great many of them are nothing more than runaways,’ he says. ‘We owe them nothing; in fact, they have positively stole from us. My uncle keeps a plantation in Jamaica and he cannot bring even his most favourite slave with him when he visits here, because what will the fellow do? He will escape at the first opportunity. And furthermore, the people here will protect him! They’ve no loyalty, not a grain of respect: they might be kept by a good family their whole lifetime, and educated, and clothed, and given a place in the world, and yet none of this means a thing to them when they see their chance to escape.’
‘No man is a slave on English soil,’ says Elinor.
Rockingham turns to Mrs Chappell. ‘Is this something you encourage?’ he asks. ‘Her tongue is too ready; no man wants that in a wife.’
‘Men keep their wives at home,’ says Mrs Chappell most pleasantly. ‘They do not come to us for more of the same.’ To Elinor, she says, ‘Do not contradict the man; he don’t like it.’
‘I was not addressing her anyway,’ says Rockingham. He gestures again at Polly. ‘I was asking her opinion of her people’s plight.’
‘I know nothing of it,’ says Polly.
‘Put them all on a boat and send them away where they came from, that is my solution to the matter. If they cannot earn their keep, we’ve no room for them here.’
‘In that case we would do best to put all the beggars on a boat,’ says Elinor triumphantly. ‘The white ones too, and all the destitute mothers that we cannot keep, and the blind and the idiots and the cripples who are passed from one parish to the next until they fall down dead, and set off a new argument as to who should pay for their burial. It is not only the black poor who cause nuisance and expense.’
‘Who are you,’ asks Rockingham, ‘to think you know anything of this? Ah! You are the favourite of an abolitionist, is that it? Does he talk fine words of emancipation as he beds you?’
This is closer to the truth than Elinor is pleased to concede, for she has taken the eye of a man who writes many letters to newspapers on the subject. ‘I read,’ she says. ‘I observe the world about me,’ and to her credit this is also true.
Angelica has not been paying much attention to the conversation, but when it strays to the bedding of another woman besides herself, she bridles. ‘We mean to keep house,’ she repeats, ‘and we are kept from it by absurd circumstances, for do you know Georgie will not get all the inheritance that is due to him until he is twenty-five? It is a scandal, when you think of it, that he has been deprived of what is rightly his in such a manner, and kept on an allowance as if he were a child. You are not a child –’ she turns scoldingly to Georgie – ‘you ought not to be held back from your own fortune.’
‘Perhaps those who hold the purse strings know what he would do with it,’ says Mrs Chappell.
‘And what do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, come. When young men are so inclined to women and dissipation? They make a very wise choice.’
‘I am hardly dissipated. If they only met me …’
At this Mrs Chappell can only laugh, a great choking bark that leaves her breathless for some moments.
‘I am much in favour of it,’ insists Angelica. ‘George has spoke to his uncle – to all of his people, in fact – of the true domestic happiness we have found, haven’t you, Georgie, but they positively refuse to see me.’
‘They positively refuse,’ he says, acquiescing to her fingers twining through his hair while the girls make cutty eyes at him.
‘And the only reason for it is the unhappy accident of my birth! Why must I suffer all my life for my father’s lack of standing?’
‘You should not,’ says Rockingham, foolishly besotted. ‘You are as refined in your intellect and your sensibility and your beauty as any heiress.’
‘Thank you for your compliment,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘She was a stubborn student.’
‘Oh no, madam, you misunderstand. She is a true daughter of nature, where others must resort to art. Her perfection comes from within.’
Angelica preens. ‘You see? He understands me. We are serious in our desire to marry, you know. Truly his uncle treats him as if he did not know his own mind, as if he were a mere boy. Well, madam, I have no hesitation in declaring that we will do it with or without that man’s approval.’
A ripple passes through the girls, of appreciation or it may be horror; they hardly know.
‘Well …’ says Mr Rockingham. ‘Perhaps if it were—’
Angelica claps her hand over his mouth and squeezes his cheek. ‘Fussing!’ she says, touching her nose to his, with only the flat of her palm to keep their lips from meeting. He looks up at her as the magi look up at the virgin. ‘Fussing, fussing,’ she croons to him. ‘How you fret.’ She turns back to her audience and continues, ‘At any rate, he will be of age in only two years, and then quite beyond their control. So we shall have the last laugh. I say, Eliza! Eliza, dear, would you bring me some of those pretty biscuits we had?’
‘There are no more,’ says Mrs Frost wearily.
Angelica whines like a dog. ‘But I want some!’ She rolls over on the couch, stretching from its arm to see where her companion is at. Her gown, twisted about her legs, rides up to reveal her bare calves. ‘What else have we? Any cake?’
‘No. We have apples,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘There is a cheese on the slate. Or I can—’
‘No, no, no. I must have a cake! The little chestnut ones … you like those, Georgie, do you not? Eliza, Georgie is hungry, will you not go out and bring us back—’
‘Where is the maid?’ asks Mrs Chappell sharply.
‘Maria? Oh, ’tis hardly worth having her, the little she does.’
‘I bade her come only mornings and evenings,’ says Mrs Frost. Angelica is in whispered communication with her lover; behind her unseeing back, Mrs Frost rubs thumb and forefinger together meaningfully. ‘So I run the errands.’
‘And what if a visitor—’
‘There are no visitors,’ interjects Angelica. ‘I do not take visitors any longer, do I, Georgie?’ She cranes over the back of the sopha. ‘Eliza? You are still here.’
Mrs Frost eyes the chilly street outside the window and reaches for her cloak.
‘We shall take our leave,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘Girls.’ She lifts up her elbows and they haul away, their fingers digging into her armpits as her face bloats and her breathing accelerates to a shallow pant. When she lets out a moan of exertion Rockingham barely stifles a snigger: Angelica eyes him for a moment and then conceals a smirk prettily behind her hand.
The girls in their great pelisses fill the whole of the staircase, a rustling sighing host about Mrs Chappell, leaving behind them a fragrance of roses and lavender. Mrs Frost follows their laborious progress; at the bottom Mrs Chappell seizes the newel with both hands and clings to it, winded, as a shipwrecked mariner to a providential shore. Her breath is painful to listen to, so light and rapid, and when she speaks it is with a rattle of phlegm in the back of her throat.
‘Frost,’ she says, ‘tell me how is that dandyprat keeping her?’
‘That I cannot say,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘I do not trust him, madam; he says we may depend on him but he has not the first idea …’
‘Anything set down in writing?’
Mrs Frost hesitates to report her friend’s foolishness where it will be so quickly condemned. ‘Some agreement shall be,’ she says. ‘She is not so stupid as that.’
‘I suppose you receive a regular stipend from him. Punctual, an agreed sum on an agreed date? Monthly? Quarterly?’
Mrs Frost’s muteness speaks all that is required, and Mrs Chappell groans.
‘’Tis all right for fancies,’ Mrs Frost excuses him, ‘sweetmeats, ribbons, gowns – whatever she has a whim for. He would buy her anything she asked, but you see she will not ask for pins, or stay-tapes.’
‘An absurd arrangement,’ commiserates Mrs Chappell. ‘Indeed, ’tis no sort of arrangement at all – domestic disarray of the worst sort.’
‘He cannot fathom how quickly stockings wear through,’ says Mrs Frost, warming to her topic, for she has had many resentments piling up in her mind, and nobody to air them with, ‘and yet she will not allow me to mend them – we must have new, Angelica says, always new and nothing darned.’ Her voice rises in pitch, and her face breaks out in white-and-pink blotches as she proceeds. ‘And when I ask him for more he becomes certain I am swindling him: “You have the maid sell them on,” he says. “No two women could run through so many.”’ She raises her skirt to show the scars of neat darning in her stocking; a new hole opening up on her calf. ‘And so she wears the new stockings, and I take them once she has worn them out.’
‘Fie, for shame!’ Mrs Chappell comforts her.
‘I cannot continue to apply my requests for his approval – as if he knew better than I what this household needs!’
‘He has not the first idea, of course he don’t.’
‘No bread but cakes,’ laments Mrs Frost, and indeed now she is most thoroughly distressed, almost hiccoughing with emotion, ‘no beer but sack, no pins but what have diamonds on their heads. And the bill with the collier yet to be settled although they would burn the fire day and night without cease. If they would only wear more clothes!’
‘You are an excellent woman. ’Tis an affront to your work that you should be under such duress.’
‘I manage as best I can,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘But I am so ill at ease as to the bills, and the laundry, and the maid – how shall I continue to run this household when they believe I may do so on a farthing, and mock my asking for any more?’
‘What do you need?’ says Mrs Chappell, swinging about the drapes of her pelisse until her pocket comes into view and she is able to seize it in her little pointed fingers.
‘Pardon me?’
‘You ought not to have to ask him. What sum will cover your needs for the moment? Ten pounds? Twenty?’
‘Are you certain?’ Mrs Frost puts her fingertips to her throat. What would Angelica say if she knew she had spoken of her finances to the abbess? And what else, if she secretly accepted money from her? ‘… I …’ She shakes her head. ‘I cannot. To put her in your debt … it does not seem …’
‘Nonsense. She will never know. Let this be a gift, from me to you – to ease your mind.’
‘I am ashamed,’ says Mrs Frost.
‘No need! I know how it is. In this world, we have nobody but one another; I seek to protect Angelica, for our collective reputation.’
Within Eliza Frost’s soul the pecuniary takes mastery over the honourable. ‘It would reflect worse on her,’ she says slowly, ‘if there were no money. If bills were not paid.’
‘There you have it. There is nothing so shameful as a woman who cannot keep her own house. Here, you do the right thing. She will not have to know.’
‘Still I feel …’ Mrs Frost glances aloft, as if Angelica might be peeping through the ceiling joists. She tucks her bottom lip inside the top.
‘Trouble yourself no longer,’ says Mrs Chappell. She takes Mrs Frost’s hand and closes it around a clinking purse. ‘Only pray that in time the gentleman will come to a better arrangement with his finances.’
Holding the purse, Mrs Frost is enlivened with a new spirit. Indeed, she almost giggles. ‘Or melt away entirely,’ she says.
‘Humph. I fear that is inevitable.’
‘Thank you.’ Mrs Frost inspects the purse and presses it tightly to her bosom. She feels a prick of conscience, but relief from want is a great balm. ‘Thank you, madam, I will not forget your kindness. If we can repay you—’
‘Hush you! Do not consider that at this moment. Simply go on as best you can – the wheel will turn. It always does.’
NINE
She is jovial until they are out of the door, but as she is hoisted into the carriage Mrs Chappell allows herself to
express some provocation. ‘Wilful,’ she says to the girls who wedge themselves into the seat opposite her, their eyes blinking in the depths of their swansdown. ‘They are wilful in their infatuation.’
‘They are in love,’ says Elinor, who despite her altercation with Rockingham is still a mite impressed: compared to certain of her regulars he is a veritable homme comme-il-faut, so handsome and so young.
‘Only because they have both chose to be,’ sniffs her mistress, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. ‘Ay, me! I should not have drank so much tea! I shall never last until home. Stop, girls, stop – Pol, pass me the thing.’
Mrs Chappell’s bourdaloue is made from fine white porcelain with dragons rampant about its rim. She has a great abundance of skirts and petticoats so that it is almost impossible to discover her legs beneath them; above her garters, Mrs Chappell’s thighs are vast and dimpled as dough, and faintly mauve. ‘They each went out in search of an affaire du coeur, and it is no accident that they found one another,’ she huffs, heaving herself up so as to accommodate the vessel against her coarse and greying cauliflower. Her legs brace upon the boards and she trembles with the effort; she plucks with small fat hands at her skirts as they subside over her knees, and the sound of her pissing fills the carriage.
Elinor looks kindly out of the window, but Polly wrinkles her nose; she pulls her hood further over her face and scowls to herself. Kitty, so very lately plucked from Billingsgate, does not mind it, and sees her chance to contribute to the conversation. ‘They are marvellous well suited,’ she observes foolishly.
‘Pish posh,’ says Mrs Chappell. Her water has a mineral, creaturous smell that creeps into the nostrils; it tinkles to a cease and then spurts again. ‘They are both young and handsome. What is marvellous in that? They spur one another on, that’s all; they give one another licence to abandon good sense. Take this.’ She passes the piss-pot to Polly, who stares at it for a long and haughty moment. ‘Well?’ She brandishes it with vigour, so that its amber contents leap within.
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Page 21