Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  ‘My love, you have scourged the rest of the company until we stagger and bleed,’ says Edmund at last. ‘In common kindness to the other players I must now whisk you away to our lodgings.’

  ‘Pray do not go,’ Mrs Chase murmurs with ill-concealed relief.

  ‘I fear we must. Forgive me, Madam,’ (he turns to Mrs Chase with a smile that brings Sophia, figuratively, to kneel at his feet once again) ‘if I am such a domestic tyrant as to bring away my wife, but you know how it is with these newly married people. They cannot be long from home.’

  Mrs Chase can only smirk.

  ‘Will you settle now?’ Edmund asks carelessly.

  Mr Chase cannot apologise enough. He has not the wherewithal; he never intended to play so deep this afternoon; will Mr Zedland take a note until Mr Chase can visit his banker tomorrow?

  ‘Whenever you choose to take your revenge,’ says Edmund. ‘No notes between friends,’ and he waves away the offer.

  As they make their way along Borough Walls Edmund hums to himself: some rustic air. Sophia, looking up at his elegant profile, sickens with love. She has long pardoned his ineptitude in shuffling the cards.

  ‘The trees are beginning to turn,’ she says.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘The trees. They’re beginning to turn.’

  Edmund says, ‘I prefer autumn to summer. Smoke and fruit in the air, and blue mist – in the country, that is.’

  ‘You talk like a poet. You look like a poet.’

  He laughs. ‘More than Derrick, at any rate.’

  ‘My love,’ Sophia says, ‘you won’t play again, will you?’

  ‘Of course not. I only consented in order to be civil.’

  She touches his arm. ‘But if they asked? Would you not wish to be civil then?’

  He seems extremely amused. ‘You little goose!’ he says. ‘They won’t ask us again.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ While Sophia no longer likes Mrs Chase as well as she did, the rupture of a friendship is always distressing. She feels as if a layer of love and respect has been torn away from her, as if she stands before the world a little more naked than she did this morning. ‘Have we offended them? Have I?’

  ‘They dislike your beginner’s luck.’

  ‘But I couldn’t help that! Besides,’ she clutches at straws, ‘I’m not a beginner. I’ve played before.’

  ‘Brides are beginners in all they do.’ He pinches her cheek. ‘Forget Mrs Chase. She’s a false friend.’

  ‘Is she really? I liked her.’

  ‘Then you have learnt something,’ says Edmund.

  9

  Betsy-Ann turns up an alleyway and emerges into a court. The houses are taller here and of recent construction, though already smutted by the smoky air of the city. Down another alley, its walls plastered and painted from the time when it led to a respectable house but now greasy from bodies pressed up against the plaster, dancing the old buttock ball. A girl passing in the opposite direction smirks at Betsy-Ann as if to say, ‘I know where you’re bound.’

  Same place as you come from, my dear.

  You never know what you’ll meet up with in this passageway. She can hear the Corinthian now, in his cups:

  Oh, the leafy lane, the sweet retreat, where having stepped from turd to turd, the grateful cull may at last feast his ogles on this palace of pleasure, this mountain of monosyllables . . .

  ‘Monosyllables?’ Betsy-Ann asked. ‘What’s a monosyllable?’

  ‘The monosyllable. A woman’s commodity.’

  ‘Commodity?’

  She’d never heard so many fancy words for the thing.

  She rounds a corner to find a man half fallen, crouching on one knee, and is past him before he has time to grab. He looks as if he wants to come after her but he’s too drunk to heave himself off the ground. No companions: been shook of everything he carried, most likely, and doesn’t know it yet.

  The bells are chiming eleven. A bright morning, but it’s dusk down here. She looks up to the sky and feels dizzy to see the roofs so far above. There’s a smell of frying sausages and from a window, high up in the wall, someone is shaking out a cloth.

  There, at the end of the alley: a brick archway, the underside painted red, and set into it, the smaller deeper entrance to the seraglio, their combined appearance putting Betsy-Ann in mind, as ever, of the monosyllable. She’s not the only one to have had this fancy: though it’s safer to enter Kitty’s establishment through the front door, some culls prefer to approach it from this side, risking dirt and criminal company, perhaps because it’s less visible, perhaps because they relish brushing shoulders with blackguards. Among these the place is known, far and wide, as the Cunt in the Wall, and as if to live up to its name, it stinks. She knows why: the cullies piss before going in, right here on the steps. The familiar stale odour brings back a rush of sensations: fear, disgust and a strange, warped sense of loss, not for this place but for what she once had here.

  More men are approaching along the alley. That decides the thing for her: she raps on the door.

  A blowen peers out from behind a chain. ‘What’s your business, mort?’

  ‘Say it’s one of her old girls.’

  The door closes again. She waits, breathing through her mouth; the men have stopped to chat with some woman encountered in the alleyway.

  The blowen returns to unchain the door and admit Betsy-Ann to a parlour where there are elegant papered walls and paintings. She remembers the paintings: scenes of whoring, mostly, and one of meadows. When she lived here, Betsy-Ann used to wonder at the meadows. The Mother’s grand project was to improve the panney from a common brothel to a seraglio in the continental style, in hopes of drawing in a wealthier clientele. That might account for it.

  She’s led past a couple of bullybacks playing at dice, their cudgels propped between their knees. She’d forgotten the bullybacks. There’ll be more of them, a warning to the wilder sort, stationed near the front door. Skirting round their tables, the blowen leads Betsy-Ann towards a sofa where a woman waits.

  What the devil ― ? The Mother’s twice the woman she used to be, her robes filling the entire sofa without benefit of company. The blue-black hair for which she was famed, and which she still wears unpowdered, lies rough and dusty-looking on her head, as if it doesn’t belong there: could it be a wig? Kitty Hartry, bald of the pox? Serve her right, Betsy-Ann silently exults: serve her right! The eyes, though: the eyes haven’t changed. Or have they? For the Mother says nothing and remains peering at Betsy-Ann as if unsure who stands before her.

  ‘Don’t you know me, Mother?’

  ‘Fetch a light,’ Kitty says. The girl leaps to obey. When the lamp is brought over Betsy-Ann notices the puffiness of the young face and throat: another one by the look of it, not yet fifteen and peppered already.

  ‘You’ve seen me many a time,’ Betsy-Ann says, taking the lamp and holding it up to her own face. The woman has recognised her now. Betsy-Ann watches her pretend to search for a name.

  ‘The tinker,’ she says at last. ‘Keshlie.’

  ‘Betsy-Ann. Keshlie was my sister.’

  ‘So she was,’ says the Mother. ‘You’ll take a flash of lightning with me, Betsy-Ann.’ She gestures and the blowen fetches a tray from a nearby sideboard.

  What’s served to the culls – the ones that stick to lightning, and won’t stand for ratafia – is an evil brew costing four times the going rate. The whores themselves drink better. Betsy-Ann needs that flash to keep her up; she has a hard time of it, sitting opposite the Mother, whose flesh, glistening with sweat in this muggy weather, rises and spreads like proving dough. Harry wouldn’t need to lever up the lid of this one. It would burst off of its own accord, and the corpse within would spill ―

  ‘You’ll know me again,’ the woman remarks.

  So she can see that much. Betsy-Ann says, ‘You’re the picture of prosperity.’

  ‘A tub of guts is what you mean. It keeps a-growing on me. I tried the star
ving, and the purging.’ With a faint grunt, the Mother leans forward as if to confide a secret. ‘There’s culls that like it.’

  ‘That’s only to be expected, a woman of your fame,’ Betsy-Ann says. She would give anything to know if the hair is a wig.

  ‘I’m still in Harris’s List.’

  ‘Naturally you are.’

  ‘For the connoisseur of fat, a stupendous figure with dairyworks to smother a Hercules, is how he puts it.’

  She sounds as if she’s pored over the words so often as to get them by heart. Most likely she wrote them herself, since nothing goes into Harris’s that isn’t paid for.

  ‘I take it trade’s brisk, then.’ Betsy-Ann could just as well answer her own question. From the parlour within she can hear singing, and shouting, and screams of laughter: all the sounds of gay company.

  The Mother’s smile is vicious. ‘Wondering if there’s still a space for you?’

  ‘No, just wanted to know if you was still here.’

  ‘I’m not intending to die yet.’

  ‘And to hear news of old friends.’

  Ah, says the woman’s face, now we come to it. ‘Not much in that line,’ she says. ‘But aren’t you spliced? I heard you was.’

  ‘I’m Mrs Samuel Shiner now.’

  ‘His autem mort?’

  ‘Good as.’

  She clinks her glass against Betsy-Ann’s. ‘To the well wearing of your muff.’

  As a rule, lightning brings on laughter or tears: Betsy-Ann is caught between the two as she surveys the grinning creature before her. It seems only a day or two since she last looked on Kitty Hartry, Mother of the House, who at forty was still in demand with sportsmen of every shade and trade: whipping culls, debauched schoolboys, men of spirit, queer culls, flash kiddeys, cracksmen, toby men and the occasional gent. Even now, her eyes might be half blinded but they haven’t dimmed. The sight of them glittering in the bloated face makes Betsy-Ann’s throat tighten. Ned’s have just that brilliance: black diamonds. She wonders who’ll be first to bring up his name.

  Kitty says, ‘You’re rubbing along all right, eh?’

  As if she cares. Betsy-Ann shrugs. ‘Not so bad.’

  ‘That all you can say for him? Can’t be a patch on Ned, then.’ Knave of Hearts. Betsy-Ann could strangle the old bitch.

  ‘Dimber cove, our Ned,’ the Mother goes on. ‘Girls fighting over him before he was old enough to do the deed. You’d have wed him, eh?’

  Folk have been murdered for less. Betsy-Ann clenches her fists and says, ‘Sure enough.’

  ‘Ah, but he wouldn’t wed you.’

  He’s kinder than you are, thinks Betsy-Ann. Might’ve turned out a marrying man, even, if you’d raised him away from here. Though in that case, Betsy-Ann would never have met him.

  ‘You know where he’s gone?’

  The Mother shakes her swollen head. ‘Comes and goes. He knows this place is always here.’

  More’s the pity.

  ‘If you see him,’ Betsy-Ann says as appealingly as she knows how, ‘will you tell him to come and see us? Me and Sam.’

  ‘Oh, me and Sam! Sam, especially,’ the Mother drawls. She’ll say nothing of the sort to Ned, they both know that; also that Betsy-Ann came here desperate for a glimpse of him.

  ‘Since we’ve always been such good friends,’ the Mother adds. ‘That all you come for? Eh?’

  Until this moment, Betsy-Ann has sensed a change in the Mother, a change in more than appearance, but has been unable to say where it lies. With that eh? she knows: it’s in her talk. Kitty no longer tries to sound like the Quality. Her voice has a natural milk-and-honey sweetness – like her stupendous dairyworks, it was celebrated in Harris’s – and not so long ago she purred away in it like a woman of breeding, or tried to. Now she’s let all that go, and talks like what she is.

  ‘I wanted to see you, Mother. You was always good to Keshlie.’

  Should her sister’s ghost hear that lie, Betsy-Ann can only hope she’ll forgive. Good to Keshlie! The best you can say about the Mother and Keshlie is that she didn’t gnaw the girl’s bones. Still Betsy-Ann holds on, unable, even now, to quit the Corinth, since any minute he might walk through the door.

  ‘Dimber little thing was Keshlie. She keeping well?’

  ‘Still dead.’ It is out of Betsy-Ann’s mouth before she can stop herself.

  The Mother puts a hand to her heart. ‘God have mercy on us, of what?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  The woman looks Betsy-Ann straight in the eye, just as she used to when her sight was perfect, and says, ‘A shame, a crying shame.’

  ‘Shame on them that did it, I say.’

  ‘Isn’t that the truth?’ the Mother sighs. ‘At least she had a shelter here in her time of trouble.’

  Betsy-Ann nearly cracks, at that. But remembering the bullybacks sitting with their cudgels, she chokes out a civil farewell to Kitty Hartry and comes out of the panney into the damp dusk of the alleyway.

  She’s been a fool, on a fool’s errand. She knew that’s what it was, but she came anyway. That’s how bad things have got.

  10

  To Fortunate Bath seems a wretched place, worse even than Buller where he lived with Mrs Sophia and her parents, for there were plenty of servants at Buller and they were not always unkind to him. For him, Bath is a city not of sociability but of loneliness. And then ―

  In Milsom Street, walking behind the master and mistress, he glimpses a brown-skinned man in livery, strolling unaccompanied on the other side of the way.

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

  Dog Eye turns on him. ‘Master, Titus.’

  When they lived together in Romeville (another word he is forbidden to use) the name ‘Dog Eye’ made his master laugh. Everything must change now because of this miserable ghost, this ugly new wife.

  ‘If you would be so kind,’ Fortunate says, gesturing towards the brown-skinned man. The wife is pulling stupid faces but Dog Eye sees the thing at once and nods. By the time the woman can say, ‘My dear ―’ Fortunate is already gone, skipping over the stones towards the liveried man. He studies the stranger from behind as he approaches and a little mouse of disappointment gnaws at his heart: this person has an alien shape, an unfamiliar walk. Most likely he is not the brother Fortunate hoped to find. He may even be an enemy.

  Someone nearby points at the two of them walking together, and calls out a jest or insult. The man he is following turns and looks at him in surprise.

  Fortunate stammers, ‘Greetings. I hope you are well today, and that your family is also well.’

  The man says something in English.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ says Fortunate.

  Something more, and now the man speaks with a kind of scorn. It is no use. He turns back, dragging his feet, to where the master and mistress are waiting.

  *

  Sophia and Edmund are seated in the morning room. The fire is lit, giving a cheerful air, and on the spotlessly appointed table sit chocolate, coffee, eggs and buns. This ritual of breakfast should flood Sophia’s soul with deep wifely joy and would doubtless do so, were she not quarrelling with her husband.

  ‘You really mustn’t ask me to dispose of him in Bath,’ Edmund says. ‘He’ll be better placed in London.’

  ‘There are respectable families here.’

  ‘Indeed there are. But my love, only consider. Servants have their societies, as we do, and in Town there are clubs for such as he. Here is nothing of the sort. You saw how pitifully he ran after that other blackfellow.’

  ‘He should have stayed with us.’

  ‘Into every life a little joy must come,’ says her husband. ‘They have feelings, like Englishmen.’

  ‘You believe me to be unkind, Edmund, is that it?’ Sophia feels tears start to her eyes. The weakness humiliates her, but is beyond her control. At the merest hint that Edmund might consider her less than perfect, she finds herself on the point of dissolving, just
as she would dissolve, as a child, when reproved by Papa.

  He spreads his hands in a gesture of denial. ‘Not at all, my dear, I would simply ―’

  ‘How many boys in his position draw wages? And yet he’s discontented!’

  ‘Has he said so?’

  ‘There’s something about him. A sulkiness. Imagine how he would be if he had nights off, and subscribed to societies! Papa says it’s a cruelty to bring them here. Mixing with freeborn English servants only makes them envious.’

  ‘Papa’s thoughts do him credit, as always, but I can perhaps claim greater experience. House slaves require patience at first.’

  ‘I know that, Edmund! Our people at home will witness that I have always been considerate of their needs, provided those needs were legitimate.’

  ‘Of course. You are the most indulgent of mistresses, to them and to me.’

  Sophia sees that he wants to kiss her into quietness but she is too far gone for that; she must have her way or feel herself unloved. At the same time, she is hot with shame. Tearful, bickering, demanding proofs of affection: this is scarcely how she pictured herself as a spouse. There was a time when she looked forward to the wifely pleasure of submitting her will to Mr Zedland’s, but then she never imagined he would be like this.

  ‘Then you’ll place an advertisement?’

  ‘Once we get to London. Not before.’

  Since they came to Bath Edmund has shown an occasional propensity to strike up acquaintance with persons lacking manners and education, in defiance of the distaste expressed by his spouse. She has ruefully accepted this tendency to dabble in the mud, as she expresses it to herself, but that he should side with a servant, no, slave against her is something new and alarming.

  ‘To hear you talk,’ she mutters, ‘anyone might think you cared more for this boy than for your wife.’

  ‘I don’t propose to set up Titus as a mistress,’ he says, as if to laugh it off.

  ‘But what of my feelings, Edmund? Is it not mortifying to have one’s servant run away in the street? There are perfectly good arrangements here. I’m told there’s a bureau where ―’