The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock

by Imogen Hermes Gowar

  And, furthermore, upon descending she finds the house below is suddenly fearsome busy, with footmen everywhere, and lines of hired women called up from Deptford and Greenwich to roll up their sleeves and do unguessable things to the folly on the lawn, which to her knowledge has remained firm locked since the house was bought. They file down the hill laden with buckets and brooms and brushes, and emerge some hours later weeping into their aprons.

  ‘What’s afoot?’ she asks Mr Hancock, who is reading a newspaper in the library. He is hunched deep into his chair but even so there is something more expansive about him than she has detected in some time; he seems almost to smile when she comes into the room, or at least he troubles to turn up the corners of his mouth. ‘Something very strange is happening,’ she says.

  ‘My wife,’ he says with hesitant hope. ‘She is solving all our problems – at least, she says she is.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Go, go!’ He wafts his paper to her. ‘To the folly – you will find her busy in there. Quite extraordinary things, dear niece; she means to reverse our fortune entirely.’

  Sukie squints at him. He is certainly altered. He wears an air of fragile optimism, as if he were at last recovering from an illness that has diminished him for many months, and the blood once more returning to his cheeks. ‘Uncle?’ she asks. ‘Are you – are you happy?’

  He reaches for his pipe and sets about packing it. ‘I believe I mean to be.’

  She hesitates. ‘I’ve not seen you so in a good long time.’

  At first she thinks that her observation has angered him, for he pauses in his activity for a moment, and gazes without seeing upon his pouch of tobacco. Then he reaches out his hand to her. ‘Here – come.’

  She lingers yet some yards away from him. To speak would be to betray her emotion.

  ‘Do you think I have forgot you?’ he asks softly, and in response she only tips her face down. ‘I forgot everybody,’ he says. ‘But I will remember; I am remembering. And when I am restored to myself—’

  ‘Then you will be happy with her.’ And Sukie finds herself racked with great distress, for what is she but a spare daughter, a fortuitous pair of hands to be sent wherever life cannot be managed? She strives always for harmony, for order, for contentment – that is her usefulness – but where it is restored, her usefulness ends. Must I live all my life in this manner? she wonders. For how long can this be borne? Aloud, she says, ‘I know you will send me away.’

  Still he reaches to her, and observes, she knows not why, ‘Perhaps it has got to you, too. Sukie, Sukie, have I not had sorrows in my life before? And were you not always my first joy?’

  A secondary joy, she thinks, a compensation for those he lost. She shakes her head – ‘I do not know, sir, I cannot say’ – but crosses the room to him and cautiously takes his hand.

  He squeezes it hard. ‘You have a place here always,’ he says. ‘You are my family, and Mrs Hancock’s too.’

  She can do nothing but squeeze back, and look in the other direction, and mumble, ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Not perhaps! Most certainly! Even when I had little else, I had you; you think I shall abandon you now?’ He pats her hand and releases it. ‘You are mistaken. Now, go on with you. See what my wife is about.’

  She ventures into the garden with great trepidation, and steps apologetically past the gardeners, who are now wheeling in a number of white-painted classical statues to place in the wilderness behind the folly. Sukie has never spent much time at this ornamental and neglected end of the grounds; she has certainly never before noticed the little wooden door at the back of the building, which now stands wide open, the voice of Mrs Hancock clearly emanating from within.

  ‘Higher up,’ she is saying as Sukie descends the stairs. ‘Just so – just so,’ and she enters the darkness of the first great chamber in time to see a bright apparition whisk across one of its walls. Sukie is astounded past speech: she never saw such a place, and situated under her very home! And yet, and yet, the strangest thing of all, is the vast green mermaid, fanged and terrible, that hovers upon one wall, its edges all radiant with strange light, its body knobbled and quivering. It looks so very much like the mermaid brought to Union Street that Sukie staggers, and gasps, but Angelica is laughing and clapping.

  ‘Oh, bravo! That is how I wanted it! Lights up, now! Sukie is here.’

  Some hired woman lights the sconces, and here is Angelica as finely made up as ever she was in her life; a blue sash in her heaped hair, and dolphins embroidered on the cuffs of her dress. She looks at her niece’s face and clasps her hands with joy: ‘Now that is the effect I wanted.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Enjoying my grotto. Look. I have had transparencies made up.’ The gentleman who works the magic lantern holds out his work with pride. Sukie cannot but admire the glass sheets painted each with underwater creatures: here a whale, its tail flipping joyous; here a school of bubbling fish; here a terrible mermaid and here a voluptuous one with long tumbling hair. ‘So lifelike, when projected. You were afraid. But see, see what else I have done!’

  Angelica leads her forth, and indeed the changes to the grotto have been most extraordinary. A chandelier is rigged to the vaulted ceiling, and one alcove has been fitted with cool marble shelves, upon which are arrayed goblets of Bristol green, and a vast punchbowl painted with goldfish, and decanters of every sort of spirit.

  ‘Musicians will go in here,’ says Angelica, leading her through to the next chamber, whose walls are lined with elegant little chairs all painted with dolphins and putti, ‘although the sound wants something. And I shall have real tanks of fish, and there will be dancing while the illuminations shine over the walls. Can you imagine what fun it will be?’

  ‘What is this for?’ asks Sukie. ‘What has come over you?’

  ‘Darling! Dear heart! You do not know! I have finally been brought my own mermaid.’ Angelica shoots a vicious little glance at the furthest chamber, which flickers a strange green light. ‘I own it. And I am going to show it to everybody.’ She begins to gabble. ‘Our meeting with those Crawford women set my mind right: I am a grand lady now, and I must behave so. A lavish party is the sort of thing I can do very well indeed. I have until Midsummer Day to have this perfect, so you will forgive me if I pick no fruit with you today.’

  ‘Is it in there?’ asks Sukie. She has grown bolder, but there is something about the space that troubles her – she feels here a great and peculiar lostness, one she remembers from the day she was taken from school; and again when Bridget would not accompany them from Deptford; and again when Angelica Hancock touched her toe to the fallen plums and pronounced them all rotten.

  ‘Aye,’ but Angelica’s pride is evaporating a little.

  ‘I want to see,’ says Sukie, and would march straight in if, from the darkness within, a great and awful sob had not just rung out. Sukie backs into the arms of her aunt, and a hired girl rushes blindly from the chamber, racked with tears and beating her breast as if she were bereaved of somebody precious. She careers from the grotto before they can stop her, slipping and scrambling upon its steps, and groping at its walls for the blindness of her tears. ‘What is she about?’ Sukie cries. ‘Is she so afraid of a magic lantern?’ She steps forth to call after her, ‘It is only a painting, you know! Only a bit of trickery!’

  All in a moment, the jubilance has leeched from Angelica. She tugs at her finger joints, her old vulgar habit.

  ‘Silly girl,’ says Sukie, and heedless of her aunt’s altered mood advances again on the chamber.

  Angelica swoops towards her and seizes her arm. ‘No, no,’ she says.

  ‘Allow me in,’ Sukie argues. The room breathes something mesmeric; she cannot help but peer within, and pull towards it. ‘I want to see.’

  ‘Come, dear,’ says Angelica, all of a-flutter. ‘I think – perhaps you should not see it until the place is quite done. It is not as I would like. You know how particular I feel about these th
ings.’ She has, for the first time, a misgiving; she thinks, no, I cannot wish this thing upon an innocent girl. ‘Let us go above.’

  ‘But what sort of creature is it really?’

  ‘It is a mermaid.’ She is pleasant and even as she walks her niece to the steps, but her heart is uneasy; she feels as if she shepherds her away from a great danger. Do not turn back, she wills her. Do not go in there. She finds that she is shivering, and recognises the strength of will she has exerted in order to remain composed in that chamber. She thinks of the hollowness in her husband’s eyes, and what vast grief rolled over her when first she contemplated the mermaid in its tub. And she feels again the urge to cast herself between the creature and the one she loves; her fists in fact are clenched, her teeth gritted, as she locks the door behind them. She will not have this creature touch her niece, no, not for one second.

  As she moves up the lawn, Sukie appears to regain some sunshine, and her questions become more prattle than impulse. ‘No, but what?’ she asks. ‘Is it alive?’

  ‘You must wait and see.’

  ‘And you are to have a party?’

  ‘’Tis my intention.’ Angelica puts her arms about the girl’s narrow shoulders and squeezes her briefly as they stroll together up the hill. ‘But don’t you look until I say you may. I am mistress of this house. Do you remember? Now come, come, back to the house.’

  And once they are within she is gripped with a terrible relief.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The invitation delivered to Mrs Eliza Frost’s nunnery finds quite a different scene. A gentleman has lately complained of a certain heat and tingling in his organ such as very often betokens the growing displeasure of Venus. ‘He has visited no place but this,’ she says, striding before her girls who have been all gathered together in the parlour for an interrogation, ‘and so one of you must be the source of his affliction.’

  The girls are at their most innocent at eleven o’clock in the morning, which is their time for sewing and French conversation. They stare at her but none dares open her mouth, for they are all mightily afraid of the whip they have seen propped in the corner of her chamber. ‘Speak up,’ she says, and her shoes click as she paces from one to the next, inspecting their faces for signs of guilt or lesion. ‘Which of you is it? Stomach ache, pains, foul secretions? One of you knows what I am speaking of. At least one of you.’

  They shake their heads, most honestly, since none of them suffers a thing.

  ‘If you do not volunteer yourself, it will be the worse for you. If you have gave it to one gentleman you will give it to another, and word will spread, and then who suffers?’

  None of them can say.

  ‘I suffer!’ she bellows. ‘My name is besmirched. Not yours; you who were never any better than you ought to be. Nobody will be surprised that a whore is dirty, but I am a businesswoman, and it is my reputation you destroy.’ She stalks back to her spot in front of them all. Spittle glistens at the corner of her mouth. ‘Would you have us closed down? Hmm? And you all thrown out on the street?’

  They shake their heads.

  ‘No, it is not pleasant out there. Not for a girl all alone. And yet that is the danger one of you has chose to put all your sisters in.’ She looks from girl to girl. ‘It pains me that one of our number would be so disloyal as to bring us all so close to penury.’ She pauses to study the effect of her words. The girls are agitated; they do not move about but they fret where they stand, for everywhere is the tremble of embroidery and the flutter of books, and the girls who have nothing in their hands suddenly feel a great desire to touch their faces or to put their hands to their own throats. Mrs Frost narrows her eyes. ‘Can you guess what else I have deduced from this?’ she asks. ‘No? One of you –’ she points from face to face – ‘at least one – has broken a rule. What is our first rule?’

  At last a question they can confidently answer. All, to a woman, intone, ‘Sheath up!’

  ‘Sheath up!’ She claps her hands. ‘Sheath up, indeed. If you all made use of the armour provided at a very reasonable rate, we would not have mishaps like this.’ She brings her voice to a sing-song nursery-rhyme bounce, as if she were talking to infants or idiots: ‘A gen-tle-man has caught the clap. And it is to my great embarrassment that this occurs immediately after he – having a great deal of influence in the running of this city – has undertaken a great favour to me. He protects us and you have infected him.’

  A footman appears with a silver tray, on which are piled a number of wax-sealed letters. ‘Put it on the table for the present,’ says Mrs Frost, gesturing to the heart-wood bureau at the far end of the room. ‘I shall read them when I have dealt with this trouble.’

  It is a large room, with a hard polished floor, and the footman sets out upon it, his feet tap-tap-tapping while the girls watch him in dumb desperation. Tap-tap-tap he goes, and at last lays his tray down with a muted clunk. Then tap-tap-tap on his expedition back to the safety of the landing, and a row of female faces follows his progress like a field of sunflowers. Once he has retreated, one of the longest-serving girls clears her throat. She has been a streetwalker since she was thirteen, and is loath to stir up trouble, but her senior experience outstrips (although she does not think of it) even Mrs Frost, who has had a single lover in her whole life, and he of little enthusiasm. This girl clears her throat again, and speaks up: ‘Not all men can be easily persuaded to wear a sheath, madam.’

  ‘Oh? Is that the case?’ The girls nod in agreement, and burble amongst themselves: ‘Fuss,’ they say; ‘Angry,’; ‘Don’t dare …’

  Mrs Frost rubs her chin as if deep in thought. ‘So perhaps I see how it might have been. I know what men can be like, once they are thoroughly provoked. You asked the gentleman to protect himself, but he said, no, I don’t care for that, or, I’ll have none of the expense … Perhaps you did not dare ask him at all, you being a little nothing of a girl and he being a gentleman of some years and standing. Is that how it was? Do I come close?’

  At this one of the very youngest girls lets out a small hiccough. All faces turn to her; her eyes are large with guilt.

  ‘Sarah? Is this what happened to you?’ Mrs Frost demands.

  The child nods meekly. ‘He did it all of a sudden, madam,’ she says. ‘I did not have a moment to—’

  ‘You are the one who has imperilled this entire establishment?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Listen to me! Each and every one of you!’ She claps her hands again, once, for emphasis. ‘If a gentleman wishes to go without, you say no. And I shall always support you in this matter, you may depend on that; if he will not comply, you need simply pull the bell, and the bullies will come, and that man will be removed. A visitor who cannot keep to our rules is no longer welcome, whoever he is. Do you all understand?’

  They nod, and murmur.

  ‘Very well.’ She smiles. ‘We are all here to protect one another. You were brave and good to tell the truth,’ she says to young Sarah.

  Those Cyprian comrades standing nearest to the afflicted girl gather about and touch her briefly here and there; Sarah herself smiles very faint. Mrs Frost catches the eye of the footmen who hover just on the staircase, and nods. ‘Take her to the attic.’

  They surge forth and seize the girl by each arm, which action is unnecessary since she is very tiny and gives every impression of going quietly. She gasps, though, and stumbles between them as they frogmarch her out of the room.

  ‘That is five guineas docked from her, and a beating to add to my list of duties,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘She has put me to a deal of trouble.’ She turns back to the remaining girls. ‘Our Sarah is going to the attic for her good and ours,’ she says, ‘and there she will stay until she is recovered. And fortunate she is that she has not been immediately ejected. She spreads her filth about the place, and yet I shall pay for her physician and keep her fed and watered even as she does nothing to earn her keep. When I add up the money she has already lost me, it far surpasses anything I
could dock from her. You are fortunate girls,’ she says. ‘You are by no means disposable; I have trained you and I mean to keep you. We are a family now. All right, back to your work. You have an hour until it is time to dress for the afternoon.’

  She sweeps away, stopping to inspect the letters that have come for her. ‘An invitation,’ she observes. ‘I do not receive many of those.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  And so to King’s Place, where Mrs Chappell, comfortably bailed for some months, is summoned to be sentenced on charges of running a house of ill repute. The pack of little dogs greets the constables’ arrival with clamorous excitement, but Mrs Chappell is less pleased.

  ‘Oh, for the love of Christ,’ she exclaims, caught as she is in her green-papered parlour, with a mound of kedgeree just placed before her, and having mere moments ago found the position in which her bandaged foot can be balanced on its stool with only a modicum of agony. ‘Is that today? I wish you had set a more convenient date; we are all but ready to quit the city. My girls need their sea air, same as anybody. And these –’ she gestures to the dogs who busy themselves about the visitors, sniffing and yepping and waving their tails high, their claws all a-clatter on the parquet – ‘are in sore need of a good run.’

  ‘I am sorry, Bet,’ says the constable, Mr Trevithick, who has had cause to visit her house for both business and pleasure going back some twenty years. ‘But what’s to be done? Today is the day.’

  ‘I do not know why I cannot send a proxy,’ she says. ‘You know how it will go. I have paid out more in bail than whatever trifle I shall be charged today. ’Tis easy money for you, that is all. Why do you not spend the time dealing with real criminals?’