‘But there is nothing amiss with them.’
‘Better something amiss with the jewels than with me. I need the money. That might settle whichever bills come in first. Then we shall see what steps must be taken. And oh …’ She reaches up to her throat and unpins the twinkling dart from her fichu. Her hands tremble, and she cannot look Mrs Frost in the eye as she turns Rockingham’s first love token over to her. ‘See what you can get for this.’
Her voice cracks and gives out. Mrs Frost has the decency to take the pin without a word, and quits the room as Angelica lowers herself onto her sopha and perches trembling there as if it were already no longer hers. She traces the place on its arm where an entire glass of ratafia was upturned. I am not ruined – never ruined, she assures herself. There is always a way through.
TWENTY-ONE
The alley is not three feet wide, and within it that air peculiar to the rookeries; cold, certainly, but palpably damp, and with a vegetable-ish smell to it, as if the hand of a drowned man had been placed across one’s nose and mouth. There are other smells too; first the smoky runnels of old piss; then a dark foul scent, of things rotting unknown and unseen. Polly cannot think whether she is grateful for the concealing darkness or not; were it better to not see what dreadfulness lies so close to one?
Behind her the breath of this man who has claimed her next ten minutes; she is glad not to look upon him, some journeyman carpenter who stared at her coldly when she asked him the questions Mrs Chappell taught her. ‘Flatter a man with conversation. Engage first his intellect; it will make you all the greater a prize. Any girl can fuck; that is not what he comes to you for.’
‘Here,’ he says in the darkness, and no more.
‘Oh, but sir, I’ve a room just this way – would you not prefer a bed and a glass of something? I shall sing for you …’ she trails off.
‘What, and have you rob me? I know your sort.’ He presses her up against the wall, and she shrieks before she can help herself. He claps his hand over her mouth as she begins to tremble, whispers, ‘No, please, do not hurt me,’ and bridles away with a cowering curl of the lip which is her best attempt at a smile. ‘Forgive me,’ she whispers, ‘forgive me.’
His breath reeks so strongly of decay it were as if his mouth were a meat-safe that some sluttish housewife had abandoned a flitch of bacon within.
‘Command first of all his admiration, and second of all his appreciation. Never let him forget what a rare and valuable item you are. Display yourself to your best; you are an envoy of Venus herself, and he cannot enter the temple without your first beckoning him in.’ She need not conceal her own disgust, which on the one hand is a mercy; on the other, at Mrs Chappell’s she never had so much disgust to mask. For not only does this man’s mouth smell but his clothes do as well, of stagnant water and sour milk, gravy splattered from the crust of a pie, and his own dreadful odour, of an animal lived too long in one small space, turning around and around in its own sweat and filth.
The wall is lichenous and wet against the back of her head. She has lost count of how many men she has taken in this way, with a sort of numbed horror, thinking each time, this will be the last one, but the coins are like elf money, which vanishes from her hand not hours after she has earned it, for the sake of her daily needs. Bread crusts, candle stubs, gin, and it is all gone again, and she forced back onto the street for another round. How quickly it has become routine for her! Hitching up her skirt, she thinks, this must change. Simeon’s note remains in her pocket, although she had determined not to look at it again. After tonight I shall go out of the city at once. I am too easy to find here.
He is unbuckling his trousers, and she makes to guide him but he pushes her hand away and, bracing one elbow across her chest, presses himself upon her. He holds her so hard against the wall that she thinks he will do her a mischief; his arm holding her shoulders too far back, bruising, she thinks, her breastbone. When she wriggles to seek greater comfort for herself, he curses and holds her tighter. Her head knocks against the wall behind her as he fucks; she would raise an arm to cushion behind it but cannot risk his patience. And will it not be done in a trice? she says to herself. And then the sixpence will be my own. And so she remains there, the back of her head bumping the wall, wondering how this all has come to be. When she walked from Mrs Chappell’s care it was as if she – all unknowing – passed through a door into a world that, although it is like London, is nothing at all like London, and its natives nothing at all like the Londoners she knew before. Some bewitchment, she thinks, a glamour. The man is pounding at her faster now; she hears his teeth click with the determination and the breath all rough in his throat. He has seen his quarry and he is closing in on it. Or perhaps – and this thought comes to her with some surprise – it was my old life that was the glamour. Feather beds and courteous gentlemen; hot milk for breakfast; riches beyond riches, there for the taking. How can that have been real? How could I have credited such good fortune?
When he is done, she walks alone up the alley. Her knees feel wobbly and her sex hot and smarting; his leavings trickle down the inside of her thigh, warm at first but cold where the air begins to touch it. She stops to mop herself with her petticoats, and stooping smells the roe-and-fungus fug of strange men’s spending, all crusting in the folds of her silver-spangled gown. Perhaps I shall hang for this, she thinks. The petticoats alone worth fifteen shillings. Milk for breakfast! I must have been dreaming, and her stomach rumbles. She stops to lean against the wall, bending as if she would vomit, but she only spits, and closes her eyes against the spinning world. To comfort herself, she reaches through her skirt and into the pocket that hangs upon her bare hip, to touch once again the scrap of paper that bears Simeon’s neat hand. She had not thought to make use of it, but now, brought low, the mere kindness of his intentions is a balm to her, and she draws it forth, although it is too dark to make out those small and crooked letters of his. Does he think of me? she wonders, pulling her scanty shawl about herself, and then, as she returns to her place on the street, shaking out her shimmering skirts, is now the moment I go on to the place he directs me?
Ah! How many worlds there are contained upon the earth, and how many will she pass through before she reaches the next?
TWENTY-TWO
A week later, a remarkable letter is delivered to Mr Hancock’s office, which has travelled by stage all the way from Oban. He tears it open all unsuspecting, to find the flamboyant hand of Tysoe Jones unfurling like creeping ivy all over the page. It reads:
Dear Friend,
Wonder of wonders! Forgive me if I do not stand on Ceremony, but I have such Marvellous things to tell you that I cannot think how to begin this Letter. I would prefer to plunge immediately into my Story – would you not prefer this also?
I made enquiries and befriended the crew of a whaling ship far north of the Scottish isles, and on my third day out with them we came upon a true Mermaid. She had been caught up in the Nets of a fishing-boat, which mistook her at first for a school of Herring, so vast and glinting was she. They hauled her aboard all silver & shining, but no sooner had they done so, then she burst the Net and sprang out again. They catching her once more, she shrieked up and down the Bay like a Mistral, dragging the Boat behind her, and she continued in this manner all through the Night, until finally at dawn she was exhausted.
She is very large & fine, and nothing indeed like you have ever seen in your life, and yet there is no mistaking what she is.
Yours,
Capt Tysoe Jones
He thinks for a moment that he may faint, but then he recovers himself. He does not stop to put on his hat, or file away his letters, or check his diary. He simply rises from his chair, pulls on his coat, and leaves the office.
He has never walked so fast in his life. He ought to hail a hansom but it would save no time; the roads are crammed as ever. Instead he weaves between wagons and sedan chairs and yoked milkmaids, trotting so vigorously he fears his heart will burst. He is
taken unawares by a half-wild pigling – a lean little thing with coarse black hair – which gallops from a yard and into his knee: its weight sends him reeling, and he staggers at the burst of pain, but the pig goes on, shrieking hoarsely, leaving a smear of something foul on his breeches.
At Dean Street he seeks out Angelica’s door, raising his stick to rap against it. But something is wrong. The door stands ajar, and from within emanates some sort of commotion: the pattering, it seems, of anxious feet; raised voices. He pushes the door open and steps into the little panelled hall. Nobody there, not even the sharp-faced Mrs Frost, usually so officious about what visitors make their way up the stairs.
He stands for a moment and listens. The running noise again, coming from overhead, and Angelica’s voice, cracked and hysterical: ‘Oh! What shall I do? What am I to do?’
‘Calm yourself!’ comes Mrs Frost’s voice, quite as shrill as Angelica’s.
‘But he told me he loved me! He gave me his word!’
‘And you did not secure an agreement – now that was careless,’ says another voice, quite calm. Mr Hancock recognises it as that of Mrs Chappell.
A flurry of sobs, and Mr Hancock can hold back no longer; he hurries up the stairs. When he enters Angelica’s parlour he finds it almost empty of furniture: the sopha is gone, and the wardrobes, the writing-table, the glasses, the golden mouse-cage, all vanished away. In its newly emptied state the room has a strange quality of sound in it: a hollow ringing. Here and there are little heaps of debris – crumpled dresses, piles of books – and Mrs Frost scuttles hither and thither cramming what she may of each heap into a large sack.
In the centre of the room stands Mrs Chappell, hands on doughty hips, looking down with distaste at Mrs Angelica Neal, who kneels at her feet in pitiful supplication. Her curls are knotted and wilting, and her chintz wrap falls open to reveal merely a chemise beneath it. Mr Hancock has never seen her in her loose clothes before: he tries not to stare, but he can see the outline of her bosom and her buttocks quite plainly through the thin fabric.
‘Oh, Mrs Chappell, dear Mrs Chappell,’ Angelica weeps, ‘take me back to King’s Place. I’ll give you everything I earn. I won’t begrudge you a penny. I’ll teach the girls for you, anything. Anything! Only save me from penury!’
‘I have no space for you.’
Angelica embarks on a fresh bout of sobs and wraps her arms around Mrs Chappell’s calves. ‘Save me!’ she whimpers. ‘You are the closest thing I ever had to a mother—’
‘Oh, spare me!’ the bawd snaps, shaking her off. ‘Even if I were your mother, you have exhausted my patience. No, you have let me down too often; you have been petulant and unreliable. I cannot have you in my house: every man knows you spend twice what he can lay on you. I am only here to choose what of your effects I might take for myself, which will go some way – only some way – towards recompensing me for the money I laid on you. This is the last favour I will do for you.’
‘… the money?’ asks Angelica. ‘But we are all settled. The duke, he bought me out.’
‘The money I donated to support you these last few months, since Mr Rockingham could not.’
‘But I do not … Eliza?’ Angelica turns to her.
‘We needed it,’ says Mrs Frost helplessly. ‘What could I do?’
‘You accepted money from her?’ And Angelica is quaking, her wrists and elbows gone to jelly, so that she subsides onto the floorboards. ‘Oh, Eliza, how could you have done it?’
‘With remarkable few scruples,’ Mrs Chappell interjects with relish. ‘And you owe me a hundred and twenty-five pounds, so you will appreciate my desire for recompense.’ She shuffles into the bedroom, Mrs Frost close behind her.
Angelica’s shoulders heave; she lowers her face to the floor and rests her brow there as if she were a Mosselman at prayer, and indeed she whispers, ‘Oh God, oh God, what is to be done?’
At last Mr Hancock ventures, ‘What has happened here?’
Angelica’s head whips up. Her face is damp and blotchy, her eyes very swollen.
‘Sir? Mr Hancock?’ she stammers, wiping her nose on the back of her wrist. She tries to smile, and gabbles, ‘Mr Jonah Hancock, the mermaid man, I was not expecting you.’
‘What is afoot?’
She rises to her knees, hunting about for her handkerchief. ‘To be frank, sir, I believe I am ruined.’ She pats her face, then ventures a laugh. Mucus is trailing from her nose; she snatches it into her fist but more runs, and then her eyes fill up again. ‘I have been abandoned by a – by a most inconstant friend, and consequently my rent has gone unpaid, and I have creditors all over town that I knew nothing of until this week. Even Mrs Chappell –’ she stops to gulp breath like a landed mackerel – ‘even she has contributed to my penury. Even Eliza. They have hurled me into the jaws of my debtors! They offer me no assistance.’
‘Oh.’ He dithers in the doorway. From the bedroom can be heard those two ladies picking over what belongings remain.
‘There is a better bolster than that,’ comes Mrs Frost’s voice. ‘You see, that one has a mend to’t. But let me see, I believe there is another drawer of linen that may be of use to you …’
‘There,’ scowls Angelica, wiping her nose on a fistful of her own skirts. ‘What d’ye think of that? I might be dead – the vultures. They waste no time.’
‘Perhaps it were better if I left,’ he says.
Her raw swimming eyes are fixed on her hands, which she clasps in her lap. ‘No question of it,’ she sighs.
He retreats onto the landing. Within, he hears the soft slump of her collapsing back to the floorboards, and then a string of half-suppressed sobs. He wrings his hands, agonises in the unlit passage. Then he returns softly to her parlour. He crouches down beside her and presses his own handkerchief, large and coarse as a sail, into her small fist.
‘But who will look after you?’ he asks.
She shrugs, her face quite buried in the folds of cloth. ‘I shall fare quite well,’ she says. ‘There will be a way.’
‘You mean there is nobody?’
‘Look about yourself,’ she says. ‘Do you see any kind helper here? No. Rats from a sinking ship, sir. Even my faithful toadeater Frost has abandoned me.’
‘And what of your debts? Who pays those?’
‘Who but I myself?’
‘But you have no means to do so.’
‘Then I shall go to prison.’
He is a pecunious man; this is what it comes down to. The very word ‘debt’ strikes cold fear into his bones; it is a black spot, a curse, a dreadful reckoning. No man could hold his head up after being ruined, with everybody knowing what a judgement that was on him. Only death itself could be worse, and that by a slim margin. But it is not her fault; she has fallen out of the order of things, and the network of wages and inheritance that ought to keep her safe has failed her.
‘I shall pay your bills,’ he says.
She blows her nose fruitily. ‘You will?’ She nestles up against him, resting her head on his shoulder. When he puts his arm around her he feels again the delightful softness of her body, now freed from its stays. ‘My debts are very large, sir. It was hardly of my doing.’
‘It don’t signify. I can pay.’
She turns her wet face up to his; she is presently unlovely, it is true, but the redness about her eyes brings up the sharp blue of her irids. ‘Why would you do it?’ she asks.
Because it is obscene to him for a person to be ruined twice over, and if he may put right this imbalance in the world it were all to the good. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘I have found you a mermaid.’
‘A mermaid!’ she scoffs, dabbing at her eyes and hiccoughing with the last of her tears. ‘You have done no such thing.’
‘I have.’ He pulls out the letter and she frowns to read it in haste while he rhapsodises, ‘It is a sign! Two mermaids in one lifetime, what do you reckon the odds to be on such a thing?’
‘It sounds an utter nonsense,’ she snorts. ‘
What is this gibberage he has written? I expect when it arrives it is no more than a little dead monkey, like the one she rented from you, and which brought us to all this.’
‘No, no, nothing like that …’ Although he can barely credit it; a living mermaid, slick as a fish, strong as a whale, no grotesque mockery but the beast of London’s dreams, to be delivered to him and nobody else.
‘Who is this gentleman? He dupes you, that is certain. This is the language of a mountebank, make no mistake.’
‘I trust him implicitly,’ Mr Hancock bridles. ‘This creature is genuine, there is no doubt. And it will be yours.’
‘Why would I want it now? This affair has quite ruined my appetite for mermaids.’ Angelica gazes again across her denuded apartment, but catching sight of Mr Hancock’s face which is all at once utterly disconsolate, she is contrite. ‘Well, I don’t care.’ She sniffs hard, and sets about raking her fingers through her hair, until she looks altogether more herself. Her skin has lost its patchy look, and her eyes, although red-rimmed still, are bright and lively. ‘The very thing I asked of you, you have delivered to me, although I had thought it impossible.’ She squeezes his hand: her fingers are damp and hot. Then her bottom lip wobbles apparently without her bidding, and she chokes out, ‘Take me away from here, I beg of you.’
‘Yes, indeed, you must come home with me,’ he says. Then hesitates. ‘Do you know that my house is not grand? It is not at all like your current situation.’
‘My current situation! What do I have? What part of it was ever mine? Please, please, if you are certain you would have me, I do not care where you will take me.’
Mrs Frost and Mrs Chappell return, their arms full of goose-feather pillows. They incline their heads to Mr Hancock: Angelica shoots a glance at them but remains on her knees, clutching Mr Hancock’s hand. ‘I have one request,’ she says, ‘but it is an important one.’
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Page 28