But being old, and fat, and sick, she moves slowly, like a snail when it is trapped by a child, which casts its head about stupidly to taste the air or see an escape, and rears its heavy body up. She rises from her knees, hands out, groping, but somebody kicks her in the flank and she falls down again, slack cheek grating in the dirt. By some miracle of effort she rises again, to her feet this time, and totters blindly through the crowd, as if there were any escape to be found.
‘Look, fellows! Watch me!’ A boy of about thirteen lifts his tricorn from his head and sprints towards her. The crowd parts about him; two yards away from where she staggers, he leaps gracefully into the air, hat held aloft, toes pointed. He comes down with all his weight upon her; his foot connects with her head and she is down again, he leaping and tripping clear of her all a-burst with hilarity, and his friends running to join him with their mouths wide. She is moving yet, though all the intelligence be gone from her eyes, her small hands with their tapered fingers fretting in the dirt, reaching and flexing as the hands of a newborn.
This is when Mr Trevithick’s officers catch up with him. He has turned his back on the scene and is packing his pipe. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s away. There’s nothing to be done.’
‘Should we not intervene?’
‘Are you mad, man? With only three of us? No, no. If we take her from them now they will never forget it. Let them have her, let them have her. They will be quieter after this.’
As they turn away, a second boy makes his run-up, and flies both feet first, arms whirling behind him, to crunch into her ribs. How can it be that after each fresh blow she manages once again to rise? It must be by the energy of her will alone, for she has taken such a pummelling, and is so very old and weak, it cannot be her body that propels her. She utters not a sound; her face shows no expression; she is a machine, it seems, set only on survival, so that each time she falls she turns her face mutely again and again to the edge of the crowd, and compels herself towards it, although her mouth hangs, and there is a fluid dripping from her nose.
The boys and men about her are equally determined that she will not get away; they jostle one another jokeously, and laugh, but their eyes are very firm upon her, and whenever she looks to be making too rapid a progress, another of them launches from the group as arrow from bow, to knock her down again. Each time she rises more slowly than the last, each time takes fewer steps before subsiding to the ground once more. The last time she hauls herself to her knees, something on the outskirts of the crowd seems to catch her eye, crusted as it is with blood and dirt, and she lifts one arm – through which exertion she trembles, as if it were made of stone – to stretch her fingers towards a flash of white. If anybody in the crowd had turned, they might have observed a dusky-skinned girl in a broad straw hat, holding her starched white gown clear of the ground. Mrs Chappell is alert to the last to a remarkable face or a fine form, but it is this girl’s singular poise that now arrests her attention. She moves like a dancer or a duchess, her back quite straight, as if movement were for her a long-studied art, or an expression of intellectual delicacy. At the edge of the square she pauses, and, seeing Mrs Chappell collapse once more, presses her hand to her mouth. Then she bows her head and hurries onward, and does not look back.
Mr Trevithick and his men, now hastening down an alley, hear a roar from the crowd. ‘Poor Bet,’ he says. ‘We’ll not see her like again.’
TWENTY-SIX
The night before the party, Angelica wakes at some small hour. Something feels awry. She reaches across the bed, but Mr Hancock is there at her side, snoring gently. She lies for some time, frowning up into the dark as she listens to the noises of the night-time. An owl’s hollow call; the rattle of tree branches; a clank, perhaps, of a carriage passing somewhere on the heath. Nothing that might cause alarm. She rolls onto her side, but cannot settle; she rises at last from her bed, and not knowing why, crosses to the window and puts her head through the curtains, where the glass is cool.
At first she sees nothing beyond. Even at this witching hour, the sky is not yet dark: it is almost midsummer after all, and the place where the hill descends into the trees glows yet, whether with the vestiges of dusk or the first rays of dawn it is hard to say. The clipped lawn is black and still; the white statues seem to waver upon it, their limbs not quite discernible, not positioned quite as she remembered. But this is a deceit on the part of her eyes; she blinks hard and peers again, although she shivers there on the wrong side of the curtain from bed and hearth. And now she sees it; one of those white figures, vague about its borders, striding across the grass. She swallows her own breath, trembling as she watches its fixed and purposeful progress through the wilderness and across the lawn to the folly. There it stops.
‘Mr Hancock,’ she whispers. ‘Mr Hancock, wake up.’
The white figure attempts the door, but it is locked. It rattles once again, and utters a phantasmic moan. Then it paces the building’s circumference, as if it sought entry another way.
‘Mr Hancock!’ Angelica is loath to leave the window, but presently she feels him at her side.
‘What is wrong?’ he asks, still blinking with sleep.
‘Out there!’ she hisses. ‘Look!’
He leans beside her, and together, their cheeks brushing one another, they stare out.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘That is Sukie.’
And so it is. She wears her thin chemise, and moves about the folly slowly and carefully, her hands trailing against the wall. She goes again to the door at the back, and they hear a great thud as she kicks the panels. She kicks again and again, and puts her shoulder to it.
‘She will break it!’
A thin cry of real grief rises to them on the wind as Sukie pounds upon the door. The Hancocks do not hesitate. They hasten from the room and down the great stairs; Angelica slips on an unexpected step, and almost wrenches her arm from its socket as she stumbles, clinging to the banister, but she barely feels it; she is up and running across the hall in her bare feet without a thought. The pair rattle at the French windows that lead from the dining room onto the stone steps to the lawn, and spill into the dark, calling out, ‘Sukie! Sukie!’
At first they do not see her, and run down the lawn beside one another, an exertion neither is well prepared for, their lungs protesting mightily. Angelica’s gown flies about her as she cries out, ‘Where are you? Sukie, go no closer!’ while her husband stumbles ahead, wheezing, to get a sight of her. He vanishes into the shadows at the back of the folly and cries out. There is crouched Sukie Lippard, her chemise soaked in dew, keening with the truest grief. Her knuckles are skinned from pounding at the door; her bare feet bruised, their nails torn and bleeding where she has kicked and kicked for entry. Mr Hancock lumbers to his knees beside her and draws her into his chest; she quivers with cold, and with the sobs gathering still in her throat. Her skin is terribly cold, but when he seeks to lift her up, she shrieks, ‘No! Do not take me away! No, no, I need to go in! I must go inside!’
He is not accustomed to lifting heavy burdens, and particularly not those that writhe and flail, and claw at his face, and kick his gut with bony feet when he attempts to hoist them over his shoulder, but he struggles back up the hill nevertheless, grunting with the effort of it, until a vein throbs in his temple and his face is quite scarlet. Angelica runs alongside as Sukie strains her arms towards the folly, howling as if she were being snatched from her own parent.
‘Hush,’ she comforts her. ‘All will be well.’
‘No! Let me go back!’
‘You will be better when we are away from it.’
But Sukie sets about weeping anew. ‘I will never be better! The only peace I can find is there. Please, oh, please, let me go.’
‘Get her inside,’ says Angelica, and Mr Hancock bears her up the steps and into the house. In her bedroom, with the candles lit, she is a dreadful sight, with her lips blue and her skin mottled grey; her fingernails are quite purple with cold, more as if she had
been half drowned by a North Sea squall than merely wandering abroad one dewy summer night. She is bruised all over, and streaked with her own blood, and even once Angelica has stripped her of her drenched gown and wrapped her in blankets, she slumps shivering like a mouse released from a cat’s jaws, her eyes quite glazed, her mouth slack. She is more than subdued; she is dejected. All the vivacity is drained from her. When Mr Hancock tries to speak to her, or coax a little caudle between her lips, she turns her face away in perfect exhaustion, and closes her eyes.
‘Oh God –’ Angelica hunches at her bedside, chafing her cold fingers in her hand – ‘oh God, did I do this?’
Mr Hancock squeezes her shoulder. ‘I did,’ he croaks.
‘Oh no – no. You only brought me what I asked for.’
‘I should never have brought it here.’
‘I should have proceeded differently when I discovered it. Oh, sir, do you think she will die of it? She is so awful still.’
But the doctor who comes just before dawn, and takes her faint pulse, and inspects her broken nails and bloodied knuckles, only raises an eyebrow. ‘A nervous complaint,’ he pronounces tersely. ‘The night wandering – the rages – the lack of care for her own person. One sees it often enough in girls her age, although what they have to weigh so heavy on their minds I am sure I cannot guess.’
‘What can be done for her?’ Angelica sniffs.
‘I shall give her a draught to help her sleep. But you must train her better. It is evident she has been indulged; you are making a rod for your own back if you do not take her into hand. Strong passions are troublesome in a girl, but intolerable in a woman: check her now, Mrs Hancock, before she gains a reputation.’
‘We shall do no such thing,’ Angelica storms, and the doctor meets her husband’s eye with pity as he departs.
With Sukie at last sleeping, Angelica folds her arms. ‘We must put an end to this,’ she says. ‘Immediately. Come with me.’
They lay another blanket over Sukie, and take the precaution of locking her door before descending to the hall and through the servants’ door to the back of the house, where hangs the row of leather fire buckets. ‘Fetch some down,’ says Angelica, who is too short to reach them herself. ‘Quick, quick. I am meant to be your helpmeet, not you mine.’ Together they bear two buckets each out onto the lawn. The sky has taken on a greenish dawn tinge, fading into cobalt and bright white, and then the most blushing orange of a ripe apricot. Down the hill, the mist sits on the river. In the garden of their house, morning is flourishing: daisies unclench before the sun and bees hum amongst the overgrown roses. ‘A strange wedding gift you gave me,’ she muses as they reach the folly. ‘A real creature too sorrowful to display. A thing that tells us what we really want is out of reach. Give me your key.’
‘What are you about?’ he asks, looking askance at her, but he puts his buckets down and takes the key from his chain.
The staircase descending is swept and newly mortared, fine and regular so as to trip nobody up. And down within, the vaults are musty no more, but fragrant, and scrubbed, and camphor-smelling from the rugs laid on each brick floor. There have been many sconces fitted to the walls, and Angelica parades around, lighting the candles in each one.
‘You see?’ she says. ‘As if there were need for a mermaid in this place. It would only distract.’
She darts into the last room, lined with chairs. The vat, in the centre of the room where it was left, is large and ugly, soot-blackened and – he sees now – much dented. Its canvas cover is lashed on with a rope that is unravelling back into flax, and Angelica wrenches it off at once.
‘What are you doing?’ he demands, and now a sense of real panic seizes him.
‘I do not want this. I cannot bear this. To be content as best we can must be enough for us.’ She fetches one of the elegant little chairs that line the walls, drags it to the vat, and scrambles up on it. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘it will be easier than you think. For she is not a solid creature.’ She plunges her arm into the vat and makes a fist. He thinks he will faint. She remains there for a moment, her eyes fixed intently upon his. ‘See? See?’ and then brings out her empty hand, dripping. She swoops again, seizing at nothing. ‘I believe we can take her apart in buckets, as if it were only water we were moving.’
Outside, the dawn chorus stirs and crescendos.
Angelica climbs up to fill her buckets, and each one seems to her to let out a little ‘oh’, an echo of water on metal. ‘Take these,’ she says.
He stands immobile. ‘No, no. I cannot.’ My mermaid. All I worked for … ‘Our party,’ he protests.
‘Never mind that. This thing must go.’ She hauls the buckets aloft, and drips hit the brick floor with soft little cracks. He steps forward, takes them from her. ‘Take them over there –’ she points to the pool – ‘we are going to give this beast its freedom.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘I want it gone away from my family.’ She has a sibyl-ish look about her, her hair awry and her white shawl draped over her shoulder. ‘We have detained it too long. If it is angry, it is because of our ill-treatment of it. What trapped creature does not strike out? Now, here. Help me.’
‘Oh,’ the buckets drip as Mr Hancock carries them, dizzy with fear, to the rock-lined edge of the pool. And, ‘Oh,’ they sigh as he empties them, two by two, whole buckets of sorrow pouring into the dark water.
He thinks he sees her there, in the well’s queer phosphorescence; she dances like stars and then plunges downward. Far beneath the surface, she swings in netty lengths, rediscovering her atomised self. Then he goes back to switch his empty buckets for full ones. Standing by her chair, he reaches only Angelica’s bosom. She stoops to kiss him. ‘You see? This is the right thing to do.’
He goes back and forth more times than he cares to count, and his arms ache and his feet become chilled. His wife’s lips are the only warm thing in the cavern, and he returns to them with each visit to the vat.
Presently, Angelica finds she has emptied so much that she can no longer reach the surface of the water still contained within it. She is not afraid. ‘Nothing for it,’ she says, and hitching her wrap up above her knees, she climbs in. The water comes up to her shins, and is not as cold as she had expected; it is at least not the gripping cold she felt the night she swam around Mrs Chappell’s fountain. She crouches down to fill a bucket. The water swirls about her, almost loving, and she feels its soft sorrow tickle her skin as if a great many little fish nibbled her.
‘Take care,’ says her husband.
‘Oh, we are all right.’ She crouches to stir the water again, the way children squat on the foreshore and study the drifting grains of sand. ‘We are all right, are we not?’ she croons to the water where the mermaid was. Then she passes up a bucket. ‘These are the last two,’ she says. ‘One for you and one for me.’
He helps her scramble from the empty vat; her wrap is wet and clings to her calves and thighs: even her hair is wet, and clings to her shoulders. She seizes it and twists it like a rope; dropples fall to the floor and she laughs.
‘Are you ready?’ he asks, and she follows him to the pool, each leaning a little to accommodate the weight of their bucket. He realises that he is tired; his bones drag as if they have been turned to stone, but this priestish moving of the water is nearly at an end. Even the vaulted cells of the grotto seem a little brighter than when the transportation began. Angelica draws close to his side as he empties his bucket into the pool, with a swirl and a gulp. Then she steps forward herself, her pail raised above her head. With her hair loose and her white wrap clinging, she might be fourteen years old and dancing as an acolyte of Venus once again. She balances the bucket on her shoulder, tips it gently, and pours it out in a long unbroken stream, so that at the end the water closes in a perfect ‘O’, and one single drop leaps up into the air.
‘And so it is done,’ she says.
First I sink,
Then I trickle,
Then I rush.
I am here; and here; and here. I touch this surface and also that.
I mingle, I quiver with a thousand new voices, and all these voices my own. I am a great tumble of motion which torrents all in unison.
And learning and knowing are the same, and I am a mite, and we are all the space allowed to us.
And if I am made of grief, well! Here is joy, and if I am made of fury, here is peace.
Rush, rush, we rush, a sparkling stream through rock and moss, deep in the cold stone of the earth. No daylight here, no dying breaths to catch up. We rush young and bright, and ever widening, and these bitter atoms are lost in new-minted freshness.
We hasten, hasten, onward to the boundless sea.
EPILOGUE
The midsummer party – the first held by Mr and Mrs Jonah Hancock of Blackheath – is an immense success. Mrs Hancock is a hostess both affable and beautiful, resplendent in a mermaid-blue satin gown which trails gauzy sea-foam lace; her marriage has been the subject of much gossip, but as she hangs on the arm of her bluff husband, her face bright with laughter, certain minds are changed. Their niece Miss Lippard is additionally much admired. Very properly considering her age, she is permitted to appear on the garden steps for only a few minutes, a pale and elegant girl with a most arresting expression in her eye, who speaks not a word. She returns shortly to her own apartments, but on the strength of this brief sighting several local mamas add her to their personal lists of Girls With Suitable Qualities, and determine to monopolise her before she comes out. The house and gardens are declared faultless, and guests strolling the lawn praise its superlative aspect over Greenwich and the river.
Then there is the delightful surprise of the grotto, its shells gleaming in the candlelight, and illuminations of ghastly sea creatures beyond imagining flickering over it to cries of delight and wonder. The guests are enraptured. They dance beneath the chandeliers; they trample crystal wine glasses into the brick floor of the vaults. They marvel at the scientific system of periscopes that lights up the peculiar green pool in the very furthest chamber. Most of all, they are impressed by its very particular atmosphere. For this underground wonder, as chilly as it may be, is all suffused with a character of its own: a quiet ebullience that must be thanks to the genius of their hostess, or how could a small space have so much feeling to it? Friends embrace; strangers delight in new acquaintances; husbands draw their wives into dark corners.
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock Page 42