Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  ‘Don’t nag me, we’re not spliced.’

  ‘No, thank God!’

  He goes into the other room and Betsy-Ann tidies herself. When she emerges from the chamber the two men are huddled together. She puts on her bonnet and cloak and leaves them to it.

  5

  When the clock chimes three, Papa and Scrope are still shut up in the library, scrutinising Mr Zedland’s papers.

  ‘Poor William!’ says Mama without looking up from her netting. ‘He detests such business. Thank Heaven Scrope can be trusted.’

  ‘Is something out of order, Mama?’ Sophia asks with a little clutch of dread.

  ‘Nothing that need concern you, my love. Papa wishes to be quite clear upon certain matters, that is all.’

  ‘You said, thank Heaven.’

  ‘Bless the child, how fretful it is! What I said had no reference to Mr Zedland – I was speaking of lawyers. Most of them are a rascally set, but Papa has every confidence in Scrope.’

  Her daughter is not entirely reassured. Mr Zedland, heir to Wixham, sole offspring of deceased Essex gentry, brought forward all of his legal documents months ago and is now Sophia’s acknowledged intended. Why, then, should Scrope have been summoned at all?

  ‘Will Papa tell us about it afterwards?’

  ‘It’s only a matter of figures, my dear. Let the gentlemen take care of it. You should be engaged in something more amusing. How’s that blackbird of yours? Have you taught him to sing?’

  Seeing herself blocked, Sophia obediently banishes fear from her face, if not from her heart. ‘He’s tolerable,’ she says. ‘Should you like to hear him?’

  Titus stands before the two women, his feet planted far apart as if to repel an assault.

  ‘Now, Titus,’ Sophia announces with a glance towards her mother, ‘repeat after me. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper!’

  ‘Feeter Piper picked a peck of fpickled peffer. Pepper.’

  ‘You see how improved he is, Mama?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Mama smiles, not at the slave but at Sophia who has trained him so well.

  The boy clasps his hands in front of him. Until recently his complexion was a dull grey, as if scoured with ashes. Sophia thought he might be sickly, perhaps pining for his native sun. An apothecary was consulted and suggested that Titus’s skin should be massaged with butter. He was duly given an allowance for the purpose, since which time he has returned to his original deep brown shade.

  ‘I know a bank,’ Sophia prompts.

  Titus begins to recite, ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,’ with the careful, expressionless enunciation of someone who has memorised a rigmarole. Though he still confuses f and p whenever he is flustered, and pronounces ‘weed’ as ‘wade’, there can be no doubt that he has made progress.

  ‘It’s extraordinary, my dear, how much patience you’ve shown with the little beast,’ Mama says when Titus has finished. ‘A few more weeks and he’ll be fit to go out in public. Don’t you think?’

  Though his face gives not a flicker of recognition, Fortunate has understood the word beast. All day long the imperatives and insults of English wash over him; though rarely able to frame a reply, he interprets for himself more than anyone suspects. Nor is he surprised that the old one has called him an animal. He is accustomed to being addressed as Blackbird and Monkey-Boy, names as stale as the sagging face of this woman with her eyes like dirty water, her ruined teeth and her body that hardly moves all day. A memory surfaces: his mother as a young woman, in a brightly patterned wrapper, laughing and gesturing to his aunts, all of them tall and strong and graceful. These Englishwomen walk stiffly, like very old people, their skin as pale as the bellies of fishes. The younger one’s mouth does not sag, but one can see that they are mother and daughter. They have the same deformed nostrils, as if a god decided at their birth to pinch the breath out of them.

  Why has Dog Eye brought him here? He was happier in their rooms in the city, learning to play dice, than he has been at any time since he was taken from his home.

  His home! Home is now this country of savage manners, where the people carry weapons with them and are ever ready to take offence. Their women stare at Dog Eye without shame, as if they had never been taught better, and everybody pretends not to notice. To the English, Dog Eye must seem beautiful – to Fortunate, all these people look much the same – since the inferior women in the kitchen, who behave in front of Fortunate as if he were deaf, speak laughingly of his master’s eyes, and laugh. It is true that they are unusually large, clear and bright. Fortunate once had a hunting dog with just such a luminous gaze.

  ‘Dog Eye,’ he says softly to himself in his own language.

  The younger woman pounces. ‘What was that?’

  At the sound of her scratchy voice Fortunate starts and his English deserts him.

  ‘What did you say?’ the woman demands.

  He cannot answer. His face is hot with humiliation. The older one says something and now he cannot even understand.

  6

  Betsy-Ann is lying tucked up with her brother. The bedding has a warm, earthy smell, like the potatoes her mother brought back from the field. The farmer made the women turn out their pockets, but Mam knew a trick worth two of that and had put three big potatoes down the front of her stays. Betsy-Ann sees them come tumbling out onto the grass, the children snatching at them and then the bucket over the fire, boiling up a mess of potatoes and bread and milk. Her mother’s tanned, stringy hand stirring the broth with a wooden spoon, her fingernails rimmed with clay.

  She wakes hungry, Sam snoring beside her. By the time she came home, supperless, Harry had eaten her share of the bubble and squeak. Sam most likely offered it from spite, but trust Harry to take advantage. Perhaps, she thinks, he still suffers the hunger of childhood, like Betsy-Ann herself. It never goes off, even now.

  Keshlie hung about the edges of her dreams last night, prowling and whingeing outside the tent. Whenever she appears she’s always some way off, never in the warm earth-smelling shelter with the rest of them. Betsy-Ann saw her walking over the field, wearing a little gown of cornflower-blue, her curls dangling down her back. The Corinthian came along and gave her a piece of sugar to suck.

  Betsy-Ann tries to sink back to sleep. Sam’s snoring doesn’t bother her, but hunger continues to nag until she knows she has to get up. Painstakingly, so as not to wake him, she rolls out of bed and feels her way to the door. In the next room she gropes about in the food cupboard and lays hand on the heel of a loaf and a dish of pickled cucumber. That will have to do.

  She draws the tattered curtain for light and sits at the table mopping up cucumber and vinegar with her hunk of bread. The street is quiet tonight, just the occasional shout from neighbouring yards. Moonlight spills into the room, picking out a corner of the table, the back of a chair. Harry and Sam work by darkmans: the sky’s too bright for their line of work, too bright for any of the canting crew, so Sam must wait at home.

  Behind doors is another story. Behind doors you can do what you like. The Corinthian told her how in St James’s, fine ladies dance without a care in the world. Turn the pack that is Romeville upside down, and there’s the other side: high toby men arming and setting out for Hounslow Heath, flats coaxed into flash houses, resurrectionists shrinking like vermin from the light.

  Far off in the city smoke surges up, rolling in crimson-bellied swags towards the east. Somewhere there is pain, people running about, but from here the fire is a rose warming itself in the moonlight and Betsy-Ann sits dreamily admiring it. She has heard of bloods who set houses afire for pleasure. She herself would never be so wicked, but she understands the temptation.

  Strange to dream of Keshlie with the Corinthian. Awake, Betsy-Ann hates to remember her, because of what she turned into. In dreams Keshlie’s true face comes back, a pale flower amid the dark twinings of her hair. Betsy-Ann’s not what you’d call dimber, not precisely: she was behind the door when they handed out sweetness but Kesh
lie got enough for both sisters. She wonders if Keshlie might not have been her sister’s true name. What, then? Catharine? Keziah? She grew up calling her Keshlie, never questioned it. Now there’s nobody to ask but Harry, and he won’t know. He doesn’t care about such things.

  *

  ‘How are the togs?’ Sam asks. ‘Will I pass?’

  Betsy-Ann turns her head away.

  ‘Come on, girl. Cleave to me a bit.’

  Reluctantly she confronts him. Clad in a threadbare blue coat and breeches, he holds his hat before him with one hand and scratches under his arm with the other.

  ‘I see you got plenty of active citizens,’ Betsy-Ann observes. ‘Come free with the shirt, did they?’

  ‘Forget them. This is life and death.’

  ‘Think I don’t know that? Go on, then.’

  Sam arranges himself in a respectful attitude. ‘I’ve come for my aunt, Madam, so I can bury her from my home.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘William Cliffe. My aunt, God rest her soul, was Joanna Jane Barlow.’

  ‘That poor old woman!’ Betsy-Ann frowns. ‘I don’t recall you ever visiting your aunt, William.’

  He hesitates.

  ‘Buck up, Sam, I’m losing faith in you.’

  ‘Ma and her fell out. We was forbidden to visit. Me, I always liked the old lady, never wished her any harm.’ He seems to choke at the last word and buries his face in one of Betsy-Ann’s stolen handkerchiefs.

  ‘Come in quicker next time. And don’t overdo the wiper.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want her shamed by a parish funeral.’

  ‘That’s a good tune. They’ll like that one, the tight-arsed bastards.’

  They run through the lay several times, adding questions until Betsy-Ann can think of no more.

  Sam claps her on the shoulder. ‘Reckon I’m better now.’

  ‘I never felt worse.’ Betsy-Ann goes to the cupboard and takes out the gin. ‘Have a flash?’

  Sam hesitates. ‘They’ll smell it.’

  ‘Nothing wrong there, you’ve been toasting the dear departed. You can’t do the thing without, Sammy.’

  ‘No.’ He reaches for the cup she has poured him and swallows it in one. ‘I don’t mind telling you, girl, I don’t like this bob.’

  ‘Nobody does, Sam. That’s why you napped it.’ She puts her arm around his shoulders. ‘Why don’t you go to bed? I’ll tell Harry you was sick. You’ll get off this once.’

  Sam shakes his head. ‘Promise me, though. If anything goes wrong, I mean anything – you won’t let Harry take me, will you?’

  Betsy-Ann withdraws her arm. ‘After all I’ve said, you’re asking me that? Seems to me I should be asking you.’

  When he’s gone she paces up and down before the window. Over there is where the fire was, the other night: she wonders who lived in that house and if they’re living still. A stink of bad pork, and Harry levering up the coffin lid: no, no. She fights that off, but now come pictures of a woman and child huddled under gaping rafters, open to rain and hail. Their ken’s most likely been stripped by fire priggers – ‘O Madam, I’ll convey your goods to safety’ – and everything not burnt or prigged now sodden and filthy, the mattress, if they had one, burst open and buried in fallen plaster.

  Betsy-Ann knows what it is to sleep under rain. There’s a lot worse off than us, Sammy, and yet . . .

  She stops pacing and sits down next to the jug of gin.

  These days, Shiner smells as foul as Harry Blore. It’s in his duds, in his skin: a mixture of the sweat off the crew themselves (Shiner was a dry man but now he sweats like a sponge, that’s the fear for you) and the corruption they work in. He looked so sick when he started, she let him talk; now she can’t forget what he said. You have to get them fresh, no market for them else, but they’re not always lying alone. Some cribs are packed – to get one, you have to move the others. Then sometimes the one you want turns out to be a drowning, or left too long before it went in the ground.

  She insists on washing the shirts, breeches, anything she can tear off his back; she does more scrubbing than a laundrymaid. She believes she’d know a resurrectionist among the evillest-stinking crowd in Romeville, know him blindfold among a thousand.

  The stink pays, she’s not denying it, but they could do without. During a single day on the Oxford Road she sold seventeen bottles of lightning, a diamond fawney and two shawls: not once has she failed to make the rent. Why don’t men listen to women? You need a long spoon to dine with Harry – her very words, and all she got for them was a shrug. The Flash Kiddey, for all his knowing airs, was just such an unsuspecting daisy. Sam’s begun to know his man, though. It makes him sweat worse than before.

  Such fine talk, when she passed into Sam’s keeping. Honour, obligation. She was helpless against all that, led away like a turkey. And then the pair of them shook down together, more or less. She wasn’t happy, never happy. But settled, you might say. Her wings well clipped.

  Sam’s clipped too, come to think of it. That butchered hand of his, his luck sheared away with his finger.

  For weeks now she’s felt change in the air, like the first pinch of autumn, and a queer sort of restlessness: her wing feathers, you might say, growing back.

  She goes to her concealed cupboard and lifts down the deck of cards. On top lies Pam, the Knave of Clubs. Her lucky man, though it’s not often she has the chance of a hand at Loo. First she shuffles keeping Pam always on top; next she slips him from top to bottom, bottom to top, twenty times without pause; then she picks out sections of the pack and holds them concealed and ready while seeming to shuffle in the ordinary way. All this is done without looking at the cards. Instead, Betsy-Ann sings one of her mother’s songs, smiling and wagging her head about, as a substitute for the chatter of company. Your hands have to seem the last thing on your mind, their movements natural as breathing.

  Her fingers, that were stiff from lack of practice, are now warming up. The flick and slither of the cards bring back memories: O, for the Corinthian! She and Corinthian Ned would sit for hours shuffling and dealing, Betsy sitting judge and jury on him: loosen your thumb, you looked at the books, you stopped your talk as you came to the ace, do it again, again. They drank throughout; he got every move off pat, drunk or sober.

  ‘Show me how to plant them,’ he begged.

  ‘How many hands?’

  ‘Say six, with you and me.’

  She showed him and with painful care he stacked the deck. Betsy-Ann snatched it up, shuffled and dealt the hands. He took up his: all aces and royalty.

  ‘What did the rest get?’

  ‘Have a look.’

  He turned them over. Deuces, trays, fours: a dog’s portion. He looked up in wonder. Betsy-Ann fell in love all over again at the sight of Ned Hartry’s innocence: you saw what he might have been in a better world.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you saw me shuffle?’

  He nodded. Betsy nodded too, and then mockingly changed to shaking her head.

  ‘What you saw was my hands. This time, watch the books. See where they go.’ With slow, exaggerated movements, she went again through the sham.

  ‘You’re not shifting them,’ he said at last. ‘It only looks like it. Could another sharp tell?’

  She laughed. ‘What’s the use of sharps playing sharps?’

  For days he practised shamming the shuffle. Then came righting the books when somebody else has shuffled, so as to restore your preferred order, and digging a fingernail into the side of the pack, and forcing, and palming.

  ‘You’re a prodigy,’ Hartry said to her as they lay in bed one afternoon.

  She had to ask him what a prodigy was.

  ‘A she-gamester. A marvel.’

  ‘That’s nothing, Ned. Only my upbringing.’

  He pulled up her nightgown and softly, very softly, closed his teeth on her titty; he wasn’t shy of the marvel, not he. That was his upbringing. She wondered how many hands had stroked the skin
of his back, as she was doing now, to make him so practised and cunning: a ‘man of spirit’ who had served a long apprenticeship between women’s legs.

  ‘Knave of Hearts,’ she said. The words excited her. A king had a queen, and duties, but a knave only ever had mistresses; he was slippery and dangerous, like the cards themselves.

  Betsy-Ann sighs. One thing she’d stake her life on: Ned’s not standing at a door begging some old woman’s bones. He was elegant down to his fingertips, fingertips perfect for the trade. Not even he, though, learnt her best trick, because she never taught him. Perhaps if she had, things would’ve gone differently between him and Shiner, and Betsy-Ann wouldn’t be bedding down each night between sheets that smell more and more like graveclothes.

  But then, Ned might have got the thing to perfection, put on his hat and bid her farewell. He had it in him to do that.

  7

  Specks of sunlight flash in the weave of the sack as the man beneath him strides along. From time to time a stumble sends his bound knees into the man’s belly. His mouth is packed with the same coarse stuff and the jolting, the jerking, the man’s dirty smell, his own tied hands, all put him in terror of vomiting: if he does so, he will choke, unable to make a sound or move a finger to help himself.

  From time to time he hears a woman’s voice, low but harsh. Though they are not his people, he understands something of their language. Once, she shouts out in rage: the child she carries has wet itself. Without taking Fortunate from his shoulder, the man halts. There are yells, and the gasping of the woman, and muffled cries from the other child, which must also be tied in a sack.

  The man shifts Fortunate on his shoulder and walks on. The child’s whimper goes with them. Where Fortunate’s body is pressed against that of the kidnapper the heat is unbearable: he is baking, his insides congealing like meat in a pot. The man must feel it too, since the bag is so wet. Then the air becomes fresher and Fortunate can hear the movement of branches. The man moves more unevenly, sighing as if in pain. He lays Fortunate down, still in the sack, and sits beside him. The sparks caught in the weave of the sack change from gold to green and there is a sound of someone drinking.