‘Come on.’ She hoicks her up by the armpits, carefully unlooping the sheet from her legs. Angelica cries as it falls away from her. ‘Now, then. It’s all right. Don’t look, don’t look; I’ll see to that.’ Somewhere in the streaked folds of the sheet might be found – if it is large enough to be seen, if it can be recognised, if it even exists in one piece – the tiny clotted froglet that Angelica carried. ‘Come, into bed. I’ll get things to bathe you.’
‘It’s too late,’ Angelica repeats.
‘There is nothing as could have been done. This is just what happens sometimes.’
‘Oh, how would you know?’
‘How would you?’ snaps Sukie.
Angelica dissolves into tears. ‘Your uncle …’ she says. How pleased he would have been to have a living child. How delighted. And how he would have loved her for it. She cannot have it – her two-months family prised apart like an oyster shell. ‘You must not tell him,’ she says.
‘But what shall I—’
‘If he comes home this morning, tell him I am unwell. Tell Bridget so, too. There is no need for him to know anything yet. I shall sleep it off. I shall be all right. I do not wish him to see me lose my composure.’
‘And if he sends for you? He will want to show you the mermaid.’
‘There is no point even considering that possibility,’ says Angelica, climbing into her bloodied bed. ‘There is no mermaid. I do not believe there ever was one.’
ELEVEN
‘Well, what is she like?’ Angelica asks her husband at dinner that evening. He has stumbled in late and peculiar flat around the eyes, but she is in no state to mark this, she being only an hour out of bed herself, and less than an hour rinsed of the last traces of her loss. She feels those smears and fingerprints of blood as a mark of guilt: standing over the tub in the kitchen she scrubbed at them and clenched her teeth with sorrow. And so it is a peculiar meal, not their usual happy troughing, although she has put on her prettiest chintz and had Bridget puff the powder into her hair.
‘Hmm?’ he says.
‘Your mermaid.’
‘Oh!’ He toys his fork across his plate. ‘’Tis hard to explain.’ In truth he does not know what to make of it. He had wanted to dash back to her bed, to tell her about this thing he can make no sense of, but something had rooted him quite to the spot. Instead he found himself standing over that vat for minutes that stretched into hours, searching the water for the shifting creature within.
She does not press him. Indeed she hardly hears him; her thoughts have crept somewhere deep inside her, a little fist of pain at the centre of her body. She returns again and again to her own disbelief: that no sooner has this small thing been given to her, than it is taken away again. And could she have done differently? Has she walked too often in the evening chill? Has she been too active, or not active enough? Or was it her own thoughts that poisoned the child; did it taste her lack of fitness; did it starve for the love she had been slow to extend to it? Oh, God, or is this a judgement on my past deeds?
The food is ashes in her mouth; she pushes her plate away.
Her husband hardly looks at her. Perhaps he knows, and is angry. She tries to catch his eye, but he sees nothing in the room at all. He is thinking, in fact, of how to keep his new-found mermaid, for it is clear she cannot stay at the whaling dock for ever. What is required for her is a good-sized pool, but this answer of course breeds more questions. How long do mermaids live? This one seems hardly to be alive in the usual sense, so perhaps she cannot be presumed to die. And must the water be saline? She is, after all, from the sea.
He wishes he were a scientific man.
And yet surely this phenomenon cannot be explained by science. His mind creeps to the feeling he had as he leant over the vat. He thought it contained something far larger than it appeared; as if a huge void were opening up where before all was solid and dull. A strange prickling rushes over his whole body, and he thinks suddenly of Henry, of Mary, who in the midst of life were in death. Futility creeps on us everywhere, he thinks. Flourishing one day, cut down the next. And if a man may be taken from his work at any moment, the only thing that can be hoped for is that he will leave some mark of himself behind, in the footprint of a building or the pounding heart of his own child. If he leaves nothing, who can say he lived at all?
His mouth is dry. He has not felt it at all since his marriage, but all of a sudden he is fearful, and most certain that these fragile things he has will soon be snatched again from his grasp. There are words in his head that he did not put there, but he cannot quite make them out. He sighs, and reaches across the table for his wife’s hand.
TWELVE
May 1786
He is absent every day. She does not know where he goes, but he is not in the bed when she wakes up, and she walks his house all day knowing she will not find him in any of its rooms. It grasps at her heart as if he has abandoned her. She tries to make ready for their removal with Bridget and Sukie, but her pace is so dull and directionless that they soon lose patience.
‘Stir yourself!’ Sukie says, the day Angelica stands for twenty minutes in the middle of the parlour, holding a single tea bowl in her cupped palm. ‘’Tis not right that I must do everything. The lists I write that you do not care even to read! The arrangements I have made that are surely more your business than mine. And he is no better.’
‘I am sorry,’ whispers Angelica. There are dark shadows under her eyes.
The loss of the child feels to her an omen, and the closer the day comes for them to depart, the greater her dread grows. Her husband would have her installed in a great house, the shining jewel at the centre of a finely worked setting, and she thinks, it cannot be. I am no match for any of it; I shall fail greatly there as I failed humbly here. The fear quite chokes her; she sits down and cannot find the life in her heavy legs, or the activity in her mind, to rise again.
The room is pale and strange, white sheets hung over every piece of furniture. Angelica, clutching a sheet to her bosom, turns to Sukie with agony in her eyes. ‘Please, please, do not tell him about – about what has happened.’
‘He must know soon enough.’
But her aunt hangs her head. ‘Only give me a little longer. I cannot let him down so, I cannot do it.’
And Sukie, now carrying the sick anxiety of Angelica’s secret, must continue with the great business of their home all alone, pattering up and down the stairs on errands without cease, with such scratching in her pocketbook as to make her mother proud. When Mr Hancock returns home in a trance, Sukie rages at him. ‘Where have you been? Look to your wife! She is not well.’
‘Oh?’ He has spent all day standing over the mermaid’s tank. His feet are pearled with chilblains from the dirt floor, and his eyes ache for searching the black surface of the water. He has not powdered his wig or visited the barber or changed his clothes for many days, but he feels that the longer he gazes upon the mermaid, the better he can hear the words she whispers. At night, lying sleepless by his sleepless wife, he fancies he hears the mermaid’s voice – it must be her voice – no louder than the mutter of somebody deep in dreams. Soon he will understand what she is saying.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Sukie stands before him, but even as she speaks he fades away from her, as if he were slipping down into deep water. ‘Your wife needs you. And yet I think that has no meaning for you.’
And no, no, it does not; for he does not go to her and he does not ask her how she goes.
It is on this day that a messenger arrives at Mr Hancock’s London counting-house.
‘A note for the gentleman,’ he says.
‘Regarding?’ asks Scrimshaw.
‘His use of the outbuildings at Greenland Dock.’
‘He is not here.’ He is there so rarely now; he has made no arrangements for another voyage and no attempt to go in on any other. The clerks fret, and pursue business as best they can. Perhaps this is what happens to a man when he attains gentility.
The messenger heaves his shoulders a little. ‘My master wants this message delivered to his own hands. We have pasted up bills on the building itself but he persists in using it. What does he have in there?’
‘As if that concerns you,’ snaps Scrimshaw, who has positively no idea. ‘’Tis not for you to wonder what a gentleman does with his own property.’
‘If it were his own. In fact, Captain Tysoe Jones has relinquished the lease on it, and left it cluttered with rotten rope and rendering drums and Lord knows what else. We are not a common tip, you know.’ He thrusts the note out more vigorously. ‘We are businessmen, same as you. Won’t you see he acts on this information in short order?’
‘You couldn’t give it to him yourself? How is this practical?’
‘He don’t listen to a word we say,’ says the messenger. ‘He goes his own sweet way. He can’t very well disregard what is written on vellum and sealed –’ he puffs up his chest – ‘with wax.’
‘Leave it with me,’ says Mr Scrimshaw. ‘He’ll be here by and by.’
‘No. I want it took to him now.’
‘So you take it to him.’
The clerks are stirring themselves, watching the conversation with some interest. ‘Yes,’ they murmur, ‘you take it.’
‘I am paid by the letter,’ says the messenger. ‘They will not pay me more for a long walk. Besides,’ he adds, putting the letter on Scrimshaw’s lectern, ‘’tis your business.’
Scrimshaw sighs. ‘Oliver?’ He rolls his eyes to his youngest clerk.
Oliver looks mournfully out of the window, at the heavy sky and the first spits of rain on the glass. ‘I shall take it when I go to deliver the other papers to Mr Peyton,’ he says. ‘I’ve not the time for two errands.’
Scrimshaw squints challengingly at the messenger. ‘Well? That must satisfy you. We are busy men.’ In the corner, Mr Jarrold puzzles over the bawdy riddle Mr Percy has doodled for him on the back on an invoice.
And so this note is crushed into the pocket of Oliver the clerk as he departs on an errand to the docks at St Catherine’s. He strides swiftly with it as far as the top of London Bridge, but the sky is darkening and spits of rain are misting upon his face: on such a rough night he wishes to go no further in his errand, but take himself into a tavern and see out the weather with ale and laughter. He presses the note and a few wafered coins into the fist of a small boy sheltering in the porch of St Magnus the Martyr, and this boy scuttles onward over the bridge, wrapped about in his older brother’s greatcoat, whose tattered hem drags on the ground and soaks up the puddles. His nose runs prodigiously, and he blots it once or twice upon the ink: about him the wind gets up and the river churns and leaps in its crenellated bounds, like a horse nervous before a storm.
At Greenland Dock, the rain is the least of the boy’s concerns: here he is suddenly engulfed in a cloud of mood, which lies as heavy as a foot across his windpipe. Oh! What is it? It is like a mist; hangs heavy over the buildings and the ships, puts tears in the eyes and a sob in the throat. The boy, whose mother lies coughing and white in their cellar lodgings, is near-blinded by his own anguish. He wants nothing more than to run home to her, but in the rain and mist and sorrow loses his bearings, and circuits the squat dark buildings once, then twice, in the stink of murdered whales and the looming sight of tall ships. It is a labourer who seizes this boy by the shoulders and points him homeward, and who eventually delivers that crumpled paper to Mr Hancock’s shack.
The merchant leans so studiously that his nose almost touches the water. The mermaid trembles and glitters within, and her largeness has become a fume that escapes from its surface and intoxicates him. Mr Hancock has himself never seen the sea, but at the mermaid’s side he feels it: vast and boisterous, freezing and impassive.
When this message is brought to his elbow, he is not surprised by its contents.
Even so, ‘Why was I not told of this?’ he demands of the labourer who stands at his elbow.
‘You were told.’
‘So where am I to keep my goods?’ He grips the rim of the vat in panic.
‘It don’t signify. But we are bound to pull down this place come Wednesday. If it does not tumble down of its own accord.’ He puts his hand upon a beam, and the whole building rattles and lurches in a most satisfying demonstration of its own dereliction. A great nest of old rushes and one decayed mouse rattle to the dirt floor.
Mr Hancock begins to sweat. He gazes again into the water. What is to be done? ‘I need more time,’ he says.
‘There is no more time.’
‘I can pay you.’
‘No.’ The labourer twists his chafed fingers together and looks embarrassed. ‘If you want the truth, we are all agreed that this place must go. ’Tis haunted; everybody feels it lately. The ghastly sadness as comes off it, and can be felt within it.’
‘No, no,’ says Mr Hancock in some panic.
‘You must feel it. I know you do.’ He clears his throat and leans nearer. ‘Mr Wattle, the overseer – he lost his little girl two weeks ago. Drowned –’ he jerks his head yonder – ‘in the river not a hundred feet from here. Nobody’s fault; she must have wandered in her play. But that sadness – such grief, we all feel it, a loss like that does tend to touch every body – has grown ever stronger since. We are all agreed; we shall burn the place. There’s no price will change our minds, sir.’
Since the men of Greenland Dock have formed their own convictions as to the source of the strange miasma, Mr Hancock feels entitled to ape outrage. ‘And so I must remove my stock?’ he demands.
‘Aye.’
‘Then I need –’ he thinks, rests his hand on the rim of the vat – ‘I need to move this.’
The labourer snorts. ‘’Tis not my job.’ He glances curiously at the vat of dirty water. ‘That?’
‘What of it?’
‘Why, ’tis just a filthy discarded thing. Why you should want it—’
‘It was doing no harm here until you determined to pull this building down,’ Mr Hancock says aggrievedly. He digs in his pockets and draws out a wad of clean notes. ‘Here. How much would it cost you? I want it done at night.’ He is thinking quickly. Where to move the thing? Are there other likely outbuildings? Can it be concealed somewhere about his offices? ‘I need it brought to Blackheath,’ he says with decision. ‘To Blackheath, and then no more need be said about it.’
‘I do not understand,’ says the labourer.
From the vat, a gasp; a sigh; a leap of liquid into the air.
And thus it is done, very swiftly and under cover of darkness. Mr Hancock seals the rendering vat with a discarded piece of mainsail and sees it loaded onto castors and thence a raft by four bleary workmen kept from their beds to do they-know-not-what for the promise of a purse of money apiece; thus it is transported by raft along the river to Greenwich, while he sits with his back against it, rocking gently upon the black water. Thence he and the vat are taken up the hill to the heath by bullock cart. It is dark beyond darkness: not a light on the road, just empty nothing before them and the whistling of the dry grass in the wind. He is alert to footsteps, and flinches at the heard swoop of some night bird passing near, mistaking the sigh of its feathers for a blade unsheathed. Surely he is glad to see the gable of his own empty house come into view; he feels no guilt that, before his wife sleeps her first night there, he has already concealed a secret within it. The grass hisses.
‘Good to be in the clean air,’ says one of the men Mr Hancock’s labourer friend has hired.
‘Aye,’ says another, tight-lipped. He is afraid of the contents of the vat; wanted nothing of it. ‘You’re to help,’ Mr Hancock snapped at him. ‘You want to see the thing gone, do you not?’ He sits now hugging his own shoulders, chin tucked into his collar.
The third man hesitates. ‘But the queerest thing,’ he says, ‘I still do feel sad.’
‘Ghosts are tenacious,’ squeaks the labourer.
‘Aye, that’s so.’ His mate shrugs, shivering
off a shaft of sudden chill. ‘My wife’s mother, God rest her, followed us to three different lodgings when first we were married. We knew she was there by the smell of burnt porridge. What fools! It took us seven years to perceive that she was attached to the hearth brush all along, and after we gave it a Christian burial she troubled us no more.’
They pass along the drive, skirting the stables, and draw the cart to a stop at the edge of the lawn. ‘It is to go in the folly,’ says Mr Hancock, gesturing to its shadow at the far end of the garden. ‘I want no wheel marks on the grass.’
‘What, and we are to carry it down the hill?’ says the labourer’s mate, leaping down from his seat.
‘I’ll do no such thing,’ says the first, backing away. ‘Oh no. I’ll not touch it.’
‘Say, what’s your trouble? Are you averse to hard work now?’ But the second workman is apprehensive himself, a peculiar dread taking up the space of his heart. Something is amiss, although he cannot say what.
‘Bring it down,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘I shall help you.’
The five men stagger with the vat through the enclosing trees. The moon being slender, there is little to be seen, but something peculiar to be heard. A tapping from within the metal, as if tiny bubbles were popping against it, a sweeping sound as if flesh brushed against it; and once a long, sonorous note of metal struck, which trembles through the vat and through again. At this the first labourer nearly bursts out weeping.
‘Hush you,’ says his mate, unwilling to express the perturbation he feels. ‘You are entertaining demons.’
It takes some hours to manoeuvre its dead weight and fearful splosh down the staircase. The copper sides of the barrel scrape against the mussel shells and the canvas covering rucks up. Cobwebs and birds’ bones spin on the surface of the water and then are gulped out of sight.
Dawn is coming in by the time they have heaved and panted the thing into the furthest chamber of the grotto. ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ says Mr Hancock as he leads them back into the light. ‘You have done me a great service.’
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Page 35