The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  The air is so still he hears the front door of the house open and close as if it were at his ear, and her feet moving over the gravel.

  She will look at the front of the house only; she will look at the stables to see if a horse is gone. She will not come back here.

  But he hears her voice, ‘Mr Hancock?’ and then she comes glimmering around the side of the house. She holds a lantern close to her bosom, her hand cupped about its frail flame. ‘Sir?’

  His blood throbs. His heart is pinned to his chest, its spasm surely audible. He holds his breath and takes another step backwards, but there is something under his foot – a dead leaf or a bird’s decayed wing – that betrays him with a crunch.

  She stiffens, then darts, her shawl and her nightgown and her hair flying behind her as if her movements leave a pale residue on the air. She is running down the lawn but is still some distance away; she cannot see him from his vantage point. ‘Where are you?’ she cries, moved suddenly to anger, and surges immediately towards the summer house, her lantern swinging high. ‘I will have no more of this!’

  Although she is very close she cannot quite discern where he hides, and he is able to look at her for a good long time as she stops before him, her hair standing out as if it were electrified, and her feet spread and her face furious. The dawn light makes her unfamiliar; there are dark blooms in her eye sockets and under the shadow of her hair; her skin is luminous here, greyed there. She is panting hard; he hears her swallow with exertion or fear, he cannot tell.

  ‘Here I am,’ he says quietly.

  ‘What are you about?’ she demands. ‘What are you thinking? Creeping round at all hours, never here when I seek you, and what secrets you are keeping I cannot begin to think. If you mean to drive me to madness, it is very skilfully done.’ She waves her hand with such energy the lantern goes out; she drops it to the ground with no further thought. ‘Enough! I demand your behaviour changes, or I will quit you. Do not imagine I will not. I do not need you, sir!’

  ‘Come away,’ he says, hurrying forward. He takes her wrist. ‘Come indoors. We shall talk about it. Whatever you wish to say, I shall listen to you.’

  She is craning to look past him. ‘What have you down there?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He pushes her onward.

  ‘Not nothing. I ought to know my outbuildings; I am mistress of them, am I not? And yet I never wondered why you kept the key to that one. What is it?’

  ‘Come away. Do not raise your voice; you will wake all the household.’

  She pushes him away. ‘And what if I do? I have nothing to hide from them.’ She lunges into the stairway and almost loses her footing; he hears the shale scrabbling down and then she – still not three steps in – says, ‘Oh.’

  ‘Be careful,’ he says. ‘The stairs are very steep; the light is not good.’

  He takes up the lantern from the grass and reignites it with shaking hands. Then he approaches behind her, holding it aloft to light her way.

  She is poised on the steps. She touches one mussel shell, then another. She traces their bull’s-eye circles. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Go inside,’ he says. And she advances slowly, he following behind, and her hair in the cold breeze washes back upon his hand. She descends and descends, and in the chamber exclaims.

  Something has happened there in that earth-enclosed chamber. The sorrow pours from the vat as if it were steam or smoke; it is invisible but it churns in the air, and fills the lungs; there is the simultaneous sensation of being so full of grief as to choke with it, and yet an emptiness, a dreadful lonely howling void.

  She seizes his hand convulsively. ‘Be with me! I cannot bear it!’ and turns to him, fearful. ‘What is this?’

  ‘I do not know,’ he says. ‘It came from the sea.’

  ‘It is a trick,’ she says, not too far gone to remember her suspicions. But then she turns this way and that to look at the lions, the peacocks, the fans and arches all picked out in so many thousand shells, and how the lantern light flickers over them so they seem to creep. The shine of the pool in the furthest chamber sends reflections of its ripples scurrying over the walls: in the dark, everything moves.

  She thinks a great hand has seized her. The feeling is – she cannot say – longing, or grief; that thing which is called by sailors Nostalgia, whose sufferers sicken for their home and fade away still weeping for it. And if they have no home to go to, it hardly signifies: the pain is just as deep and sweet. Her footsteps are loud and cold on the flagged floor; she tips her head up and her sigh resonates off the vaulted ceiling and comes back to her own ears a hundred times. It rolls also around the belly of the great copper vat, which crouches black and unadorned.

  ‘Is it in there?’

  ‘Look,’ he says.

  He keeps a three-legged stool nearby for his nightly communions with the creature, but Angelica rejects all assistance. She hooks her fingers over the rim of the vat and hoists herself upward with all her strength. She can only remain for a short moment, before her slippers give up their grip on the copper and her arms tremble too violently to hold her. She turns to him, her fright compelling her as ever to anger.

  ‘Water?’ she spits.

  ‘No, no.’ He spreads his hands. The moment has come. ‘That is your mermaid.’

  Her poor face expresses a thousand feelings and none. She shakes her head and knots her fingers. ‘I have thought for some time,’ she says, ‘that one of us is becoming insane. And I feel more confidently now which of us it is.’ But she looks about herself. She does not believe it.

  ‘Please. Look again. Your mermaid came. It is real.’

  She twists her face. ‘Real as Mrs Chappell’s; real as a dead ape ever was. I am finished here, sir.’

  He reaches out to her. ‘You cannot pretend this creature has had no effect on you. Let me help you up, and you will see what I see.’ He steps towards her with his arms outstretched, not a gesture she has known for some time, and this is why she acquiesces. Holding his shoulder to steady herself, she scrambles onto the stool. Her slippers are thin and precarious; she wobbles but she is up. She leans over the vat and frowns.

  ‘I see nothing,’ she whispers.

  ‘I swear.’

  And she is quiet. She leans forward as still as a figurehead, hair ruffled by the breeze that has played through those chambers for who knows how long, and was born nobody knows where. Her eyes are dark and downcast; her fingers dig into his shoulder, and he feels the tremble of her arm as she holds her weight steady.

  ‘What do you see?’ he asks.

  ‘I see her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘When I was a little child,’ she whispers, ‘I lived by the sea. On stormy days, I would to go to the wall at the edge of the harbour and look at it. I sat very still, as I am now, and I would stay there for hours.’ The wind outside picks up and comes hissing down the hill, stirring the grass with its invisible fingers, and sweeping down into the grotto. Her arms break out in gooseflesh. ‘It was so buoyant,’ she says, ‘energetic and terrible. I was so afraid of it that sometimes all I wanted was to leap into it.’

  As the first streak of dawn nudges the horizon, he nods. ‘Yes. You do see it.’

  She does not alter her position, but her whole body trembles, for it is a cold night to be abroad in only a shawl and a cotton wrap. ‘What are we to do with it?’ she whispers.

  NINETEEN

  By the time the sun has come up, and they have quit the mermaid’s lair for the house beyond, Angelica’s doubts are all flown away. ‘I will have it rule us not one minute longer,’ she declares to her husband. They have not slept, but sat together at first simply wondering, and she asking many questions, and he shaking his head and sighing, I cannot say. I do not know, while she becomes increasingly giddy in her relief. ‘For this is the cause of our misfortune,’ she says, ‘and where the cause of a trouble is plain there can be found a way to set it right.’

  ‘I cannot find it,’ he says tragically.
/>
  ‘Oh, can you not! Well, that is just like you.’ And indeed, there is only one present in the room who has made a living of thrusting through disaster. ‘It may all be set right. We are neither of us dead, are we? And all our household fine in fortune and fettle.’ She rings more vigorously for the maid than she ever has hitherto in this house: ‘We shall need rolls and chocolate, to eat here, yes, here in this very dining room; I shall not hide away in my rooms any longer. Hurry, hurry!’

  Then, still in her night attire, she sits by him at the broad polished table by the French windows to eat. Her sleeves are rolled up, and there are crumbs on her cheek, but she appears as composed as one of the old queens of legend preparing to do battle, and spreads her hands flat on the tabletop as if she stood over her campaign. ‘Your judgement in concealing the creature was very poor, I think; you should have told me at once. We must devise a plan by which to deal with this creature as firmly as possible.’

  ‘Can we not simply—’

  ‘No!’ she snaps. ‘We will do nothing simply. I outlaw simplicity, from this moment forth.’ Her muscles quiver. ‘I am going to check this creature. It will pay for what it has robbed me of.’ And indeed, in the face of its gusting despair she feels the most invigorating hatred; if it had been a tangible thing, a beast or a man, that had attacked her contentment so, she would have flung herself before it and fought with all the strength in her body. But there is no doing such a thing, and so she is frantic for action. How may the thing be controlled? How may she exert her will upon it? How is such a creature’s power diminished?

  To the maid, she says, ‘Fetch me notepaper. I must write a plan.’

  ‘A plan for what?’ asks Mr Hancock.

  She looks at him as if he were touched. ‘A real mermaid, sir, a true curiosity, and you meant to hide it away? There is no denying the veracity of this creature, whatever it is.’ She flicks her hair out of her face and looks up at him smiling imperiously. ‘I shall display it.’

  ‘Now, Mrs Hancock,’ he says, ‘I cannot think that is a good—’

  She opens her eyes wide. ‘Oh, why ever not? I am mistress of it, am I not? It belongs to me.’

  ‘I acquired it—’

  ‘For me!’

  ‘For you, but certainly I had no idea—’

  ‘I cannot imagine what else you thought I would do with it.’ She reaches to him. ‘I shall parade it like the beast it is. Like a tiger with its teeth pulled out, or an elephant all addled in the head. Everybody can come to stare at it, and see how powerful it is, and yet how helpless, trapped in its horrid vat, and buried under the ground, with us its masters.’

  He twists his face.

  ‘You are afraid of it,’ she says.

  ‘It is dangerous.’

  ‘Aye, I shan’t pretend not. But I am going to find a way to crush it.’ She bends over her paper and then looks up again, alight with pleasure. ‘And sir! Think what people will make of it! All those who cast me off! And I shall certainly invite our neighbours the Crawfords.’ She feels a sharp and savage delight when she considers Mrs Frost’s fright, Mrs Chappell’s confusion, Bel Fortescue’s quiet bafflement. They will be unsettled; they will be undone. ‘Oh, I will show them!’ She scrawls madly all the society names she can recall, the fine people of London and of Greenwich, and then indeed all the great ladies of the demi-monde, and the shipwrights of Deptford, and the niggling Crawfords and Flowerdays of Blackheath. ‘Well, they will see what I am made of. Here. Lists. Invitations. Send for an engraver – the best – a stationer, somebody who can design me a very very fine card.’

  ‘Must it be displayed? Is it not better to conceal it? It does awful harm.’

  ‘Just for one evening, sir – I’ve no intention of opening a menagerie. I only want people to see what I have got.’ She looks up into his face all beseeching. ‘Just one party? Very exclusive. Here we are in this great house; with our great fortune; well, the time has come for me to be a lady. Besides, I own the beast, and since it seems to have had no compunction about exerting its powers over us, I see no reason why I may not do as I please with it.’

  Still he hesitates. ‘Do you really think …?’ he tries, but without conviction, and in fact partially to provoke her retort, which is swiftly forthcoming:

  ‘You have no say. ’Tis my mermaid; you are my husband; and you must merely stand by me. Oh, they will never believe it!’ Seeing her so much herself again strikes a thrill through him. ‘We must proceed quickly – very quickly – before every body leaves London. I’ll not wait for next season. Now, do I have your leave to spend as I see fit? You may be quite easy that there will be nothing to reproach in my decisions.’

  ‘I leave it to your judgement,’ he says, and she smiles as she has not smiled for a great long time, and settles down to her preparations.

  TWENTY

  Your company is desir’d

  At the house of Mr and Mrs Jh Hancock

  On Midsummer-Night 1786

  To observe

  A MERMAID

  The invitation is printed on thick ivory card, and is more border than text. Angelica has had it decorated thickly with scallop shells, writhing dolphins and bare-breasted sea nymphs: the lines are so crisp and black, the ground so velvet soft, she cannot stop looking at it. It is simply the most perfect and precisely formed thing she ever saw. ‘I think I shall have one framed,’ she says.

  Mr Hancock looks over her shoulder. ‘That is not what our mermaid looks like,’ he objects.

  ‘Oh, the picture is merely there as an assurance that the thing exists; it is for them to come here and see for themselves whether ’tis true to its portrait or not. Besides, how would you draw it? Get away, get away, leave this to me.’

  ‘How it will be made enticing I cannot think,’ he says to himself, and he leaves hurriedly, before he can think any more on it at all.

  Angelica now comes to make use of her small retiring room, laying out a pile of cards on her desk and filling her inkwell for the first time. At first she only sits before them, regarding her own efficiency with great satisfaction; then she sets about her task.

  The first card she writes is for Bel and she inks the title carefully, sorry that hers is not a more beautiful hand. She writes on its reverse:

  Truly, dear, you must come. You will be astownded. I am sorry to have seen so little of you.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The former Mrs Fortescue has had a deep tiled bath built in the basement of her house at Chiswick, and here she may be found several mornings a week while she resides there; she would do it even more often if she could only shake off the suspicion that full-body immersion must present some risk to her health. There is at least no possibility of the water leaching poison through her pores, it being beautifully clean, and steaming, and steeped with sage and camomile and other herbs whose essence might very well be absorbed to her great benefit. It comes up almost to her shoulders; she propels herself with her feet on the bottom, and her shift puffs up with air and inflates about her chin. Her hair is bound up and covered, her face scrubbed clean as a little child’s: she is stripped, in short, of all possible identifiers, and unashamed to drift there quite as God made her, an arresting little person with her small full mouth and long-lashed eyes and stern dark brows. Of less pleasure to her, but surely no less as God made them, are her aching back, and feet, and breasts. The child quickening in her belly is cause for rejoicing, but her discomfort is not: if God had made her with gills she would stay in the bath all day.

  In come her maids, all gowned and bewigged. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Aye, yes.’ Bel’s head in the puff of her wet chemise drifts to the steps. She strips naked and the two women chafe her down with coarse linen sheets. ‘What post for me?’ she asks, leading the way into her resting room, which smells of roses and Castile soap and where a fire is burning and a white-draped bed made up. She always reads her messages after her bath.

  ‘Three letters this morning,’ and they each seize an arm and r
ub her well with lovely unguents: they are brisk and vigorous in their work and she relaxes into the squeeze-and-slacken of their hands over her elbow, ribs, the backs of her thighs, and the smart dome of her belly. Then the one woman helps her don a fresh whitework shift, still warm from its pressing, while the other measures out drams of strengthening tincture into glasses as fine as sharded ice on winter puddles. And she perches on the bed to take her doses, and at last pivots her legs up, and reclines.

  There are hemispherical windows high up in the wall, and all about their frames on the other side of the glass blow filigree leaves of herb-Robert and forget-me-not. Yonder is the bluest of skies, and from time to time the feet of gardeners tramping past. She rests a hand on her stomach and reaches for her letters; shuffling the envelopes she recognises the hand of Angelica Neal, who is now Angelica Hancock and in her own great house.

  Lady D—, Bel Fortescue as was, gives a great smile.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Sukie is at a loss as to what can be happening, except that all of a sudden Mr and Mrs Hancock are never about the house; they abandon her to her walking lessons while they do she-daren’t-think-what at the far end of the garden, or vanish to London for the day, returning with mysterious crates and proceeded by endless waggoners delivering more of the same. She is dully acquiescent to being shut out of such intrigue: her loneliness and melancholy increases day upon day, until she can suppose it no less natural than the other curses of womanhood she has been rudely surprised with these last few years.

  One morning, however, she awakes at her accustomed hour, and hears a sound to which she is perfectly unaccustomed: the rhythmic swish of four strong men swinging their scythes in time on the damp lawn. Peeping between the window frame and the fold of the curtain, she further observes a master gardener in wire spectacles move stoopingly behind the team with his golden shears, to snip with infinite studiousness any blade left tall.