Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  He nods. He wonders if she is going blind, to hold the thing so close. The first time he saw a man wearing spectacles, he thought some enemy had put them on him. Then the man took them off and polished them and Fortunate understood they were like the instruments used on the ship, intended to help the eyes.

  The man with the spectacles was Mr Watson.

  His hand continues smoothing the cloth around the bowl but his mind is far away in Romeville, where he stands behind Mr Watson at a table covered in green cloth. The room is hot from many candles and Mr Watson ill at ease: Fortunate, who has come to know the signs, observes the flush spreading up his neck and a few strands of hair beginning to curl beneath the edges of his perruque. When the master looks so heated, it is best to keep back. Fortunate knows that from experience.

  All the men around the table, including Mr Watson, are holding cards, and several have small heaps of coin before them.

  Though Fortunate can tell from the master’s flushed skin that this is an unlucky night, he has little sense of the games played. He has stood for many hours at Mr Watson’s house in Maryland, holding trays of drinks and watching money pass across the tables, but nobody thought to explain the uses of the cards to him, any more than they would explain them to any other article of furniture. During the voyage from Maryland to here he again observed play, this time that of the sailors, but still without understanding. Still, to watch was pleasure enough. To walk about, too: to go wherever Mr Watson sent him, instead of suffocating below. Seeing him clad in livery, the white people behaved themselves differently towards him, some even seeming friendly. They showed him various contrivances of the ship and would have made a player of him had Mr Watson not spoken to them, saying that Fortunate had no money of his own, was forbidden to game, and that he, Watson, would not cover his debts. Though Fortunate made sure to look sorry before the men, he was secretly glad. The sailors were noisy and unpredictable in play and on one occasion a man punched another to the deck.

  In Romeville, in the room full of golden statues and mirrors and lights, there is no shouting and no anger, except in that sweating neck.

  The table has gone very quiet. Not long ago they were laughing and passing round a wine-flagon. That has all stopped in an instant. Then the man opposite flips down a card as if he does not care for it and a roar goes up from the others. The man who laid the card smiles towards Mr Watson.

  ‘Damn you, Sir,’ Mr Watson says, shifting in his chair. Fortunate shrinks back but when Mr Watson snaps his fingers he is forced to move forward to his master’s side. Mr Watson places his hand in the small of Fortunate’s back and shoves so that the edge of the table catches Fortunate in the belly.

  The men grin to see him squeezed up against the table edge. One of them says the word blackbird.

  ‘He speaks no English,’ Mr Watson says. Fortunate is surprised, since his master knows he can speak a little.

  The man opposite Mr Watson says something: his voice is soft. One of the other players, still grinning, addresses this other man and seems to put a question. The man shakes his head.

  Then Mr Watson rises without warning, pushing back the chair. He throws his cards and some money onto the green cloth and hurries away. Fortunate makes to follow him. Mr Watson turns and catches him a blow across the face that sends him staggering back against the table.

  The men cry out. One of them takes hold of Fortunate by the arm and makes signs that he should sit down; when Fortunate tries to struggle free and follow his master, the man pushes him into Mr Watson’s chair and holds him there. Fortunate twists himself to look over his shoulder, afraid that Mr Watson will punish him for not following and for the insolence of sitting where Mr Watson should be. He manages to bring out the word master.

  Someone says, English.

  The man holding him turns a little so that Fortunate can see Mr Watson is gone. He goes limp in the chair, unsure what to do. Perhaps his master is coming back and has told the men to keep him there.

  A glass of wine is put in front of him. The man on his right indicates that he is to take it and drink. It occurs to Fortunate that perhaps they mean to poison him on the orders of Mr Watson who is angry with him for some reason. He shakes his head. The man on his right takes the glass himself and drinks from it, then holds out the rest to Fortunate.

  Fortunate sucks up a little sour-tasting wine on his tongue.

  The man opposite also has a glass of wine, which he raises towards Fortunate before drinking. Fortunate knows the meaning of this: friendship. They are mocking him. But then the man drinks to him again, and looks kindly. He points to Fortunate’s glass and gestures that he should also drink some more.

  He does so but it is so unpleasant that he can scarcely swallow. Seeing this, the men burst out laughing.

  ‘Master,’ says the man opposite. He is pointing not in the direction of Mr Watson, but to himself. Fortunate looks at him more closely now. He is a young man with a full mouth, very red, and eyes glittering with wine. He seems a good-natured person, but Fortunate knows better than to trust in the kindliness of a white face.

  ‘Master,’ the man says again. He takes one of the gold pieces from the table and puts it in Fortunate’s other hand, then makes a joke which causes the others to smile. Putting down the wine, Fortunate turns again to see if Mr Watson is coming back, but there is no sign of him. It is true, then. He has been passed from one man to the other. He slips the gold coin into his pocket and the men laugh, seeing it.

  ‘At that time ―’ he says to himself.

  ‘Jabbering again?’ The maid’s hand is on his shoulder. ‘Is that as far as you’ve got? It’s to be packed up within the hour!’ He moves the cloth faster. ‘This one’s clean enough,’ the maid says, taking the bowl from him in order to dry it. ‘Do that one.’

  *

  Betsy-Ann is practising two things together: her shuffle and one of Mam’s songs:

  He came by the mountain

  He came by the valley

  O he came full twenty mile

  For to be with his dearie

  So he spurred his prad, thinks Betsy-Ann, breaking off as she drops a card and blends it back into the deck. Or else he was a great walker and snoring the minute he climbed into bed, and his dearie rogered by the cove next door.

  Some of the songs are stupid when you stop to think of the words, but she loves the music and the stupid words she keeps for Mam’s sake. Most of them she’s got off by heart; there’s the odd one where she knows she’s lost a verse, lost two, lost the start. If she could write – properly, not just a few letters of her ABC – she could keep everything better.

  She nearly learned once, came close as spitting. Queer how it happened. A fingerpost came to this street to preach, all the usual gammon: faggots bound for the fires of hell, sinners on the broad way that leads to destruction. He should’ve known they’d pelt him for his trouble. His kind were never liked and the weather was so bitter that when he went on about Hell and its flames you could see folk were fairly longing to get there; failing that, they’d settle for a blazing hearth and some drink. They held back, though, since he had a boxful of Bibles. The fool gave them out and looked pleased that everyone was grabbing at them, for lighting the fire (supposing they had coal) or wiping their arses on. Betsy-Ann, standing near the front, managed to lay hand on one of the things just before his stock ran out and the filth began to fly. As the man was scurrying off without his hat, she ran alongside and said, ‘Will you teach me to read it, Sir?’

  That knocked him back, she thinks, smiling. He wasn’t in such a trusting mood after what’d just happened to him, so he looked her up and down, trying to see if she was honest, then said his wife taught persons wishing to improve themselves, every evening bar Sunday, and gave her the place and time. ‘Will you remember it?’ he asked.

  Betsy-Ann’s head could hold more than that. ‘Is it free, Sir?’

  ‘Free,’ said the fingerpost, pulling away from her in his hurry to escape being sc
ragged.

  She went the next night. St Something’s: it was an autem. She’d never been partial to autems. This one was so vast she could hardly see the ceiling, and crammed with statues, the biggest of a wench suckling a kinchin-cove, her hair tied up in a clout. There were other wenches with their eyes rolled up, hands on their hearts, and bearded men, all of them wrapped in bedsheets.

  The whole place was deadly cold, much colder than the rooms Betsy-Ann shared with Shiner. She wondered what would bring folk in there, except possibly the candelabra dangling above her like a huge brass spider. A neat bit of work; she’d once fenced one just like it.

  The fingerpost’s mort peeked out from a room at the back and as soon as she saw Betsy-Ann, came to her and steered her inside. Fair enough: it wasn’t friendly to wander about pricing the furniture and besides there was a tiny fire in there, struggling in the icy air. The mort wasn’t as game as her man, you could see that straight off from her sour way of twitching her nostrils, but she held up a piece of paper with letters on it, A, B, C, and they chanted it out together. The other scholars were all men, with Betsy-Ann the only female. At the back sat a huge cove like the Champion of All England, hands like a bear’s paws, covering his slate with an army of pot hooks and walking sticks.

  ‘Have you ever been to school?’ the mort said.

  What a green question! It annoyed Betsy-Ann, so she said, ‘Only the pushing academy.’

  A couple of them hooted at this but the mort didn’t seem to know what a pushing academy was. She pointed at a paper pinned on the wall, with lines of these same walking sticks, and said Betsy-Ann was to copy them, it would prepare her for proper writing. So Betsy-Ann sat down with her slate. She was only five sticks in when she nearly choked on a foul hogo. She was looking round for a killed rat, when the man on her left happened to turn in her direction. He had no nose at all; he’d got the Covent Garden Ague so bad he should’ve been in pickle, not sitting here spoiling a slate. She turned her face away. This autem mort must have bottom, after all, if she could sit with that every night. No wonder she pinched up her phiz.

  When the mort came to look at Betsy-Ann’s slate, she seemed surprised. ‘Surely you have done this before?’

  ‘No indeed, Ma’am.’

  ‘You have remarkable dexterity,’ the woman said. ‘Your hands, I mean. You are – precise.’ Betsy-Ann wanted to giggle. It was the books, of course, all the shuffling and forcing, but that wasn’t a thing to brag of here.

  ‘Here, since you’re a quick study. Try ABC.’ The mort pointed to another paper pinned on the wall.

  Betsy-Ann set to work, breathing through her mouth and only occasionally taking a little whiff through her nostrils to see if the hogo was as bad as she remembered. Now here was a thing, she thought: people who found a stink often couldn’t leave it alone but must keep coming back and exclaiming again, and she was as bad as any. But when she set herself in earnest to copy the letters, they were so strange and interesting that she forgot Poxy Pete. A was a fine looking thing, standing like a monument with one leg on each side. That made it the first letter, the Upright Man of the crew. B sounded like bubbies and looked like them too: pouting bubbies. C was a curl of hair in a barber’s bowl, and D a slice off an apple. E was like nothing, nor F, nor G. H was dimber, straight-limbed, sworn brother to A.

  The mort even came to sit beside her, right in the thick of the hogo, and told her the name of each letter and the sound it made. Some of them she still remembers: R, for example. That’s how she knows there’s a rrr sound at the end of soldier and sailor, just the way she says it. Not sheep talk, Sam Shiner. Writing talk.

  The mort wrote out ABC on a paper for her to take home and practise. ‘Next time,’ she said smiling, ‘I’ll teach you to write your name.’

  Sam wouldn’t let her go. He said he didn’t like her hanging round autem bawlers. Any minute now they’d have her repenting, and turning him in.

  ‘You’ll get not a penny out of them,’ he said, ‘unless you pay ’em a pound first.’

  Betsy-Ann thought that was true of most people; the only difference was that autem bawlers talked about love and charity while they were shaking you down. Look at the men she’d known in the seraglio, demanding buckets of drink and the prettiest mort in the house. They’d order her to do any number of disgusting things, enough to turn your stomach, and after she’d gone through with all that, they’d decline to settle. Kitty was fly to their sort, though: she once told Betsy-Ann that when gaming, these same cullies staked hundreds on the turn of a card and paid up, game as you like, because they were dealing with other gentlemen. Later, when Betsy-Ann took up with the Corinthian, he confirmed every word of it.

  His mother didn’t stand for such gammon. Any cull who tried it got a sound milling from the bullybacks and was never admitted again – never, even after he’d cleared himself, in case he should take it into his head to return with rough friends. A little note on perfumed paper, offering to enlighten his family as to his habits, sometimes greased the way, especially if his father was a pious old moneybags who might cut him out of the will. Every girl of Kitty’s made it her business to coax such intelligence out of her culls and have it written in Kitty’s book. That might be worth ten guineas to her, should the information ever be used.

  Even if the rogues paid up and never came back, there were always new cheats. Romeville was full of them as a dog of fleas. Still, this fingerpost and his mort seemed harmless. They’d asked nothing that could set her up for a touch.

  She said, ‘But Sammy, you can read.’

  ‘And write too. What of it?’

  ‘And the Corinthian can read and write, can’t he? Don’t make him a flat.’

  ‘God rot your Corinthian,’ said Sam.

  ‘My Corinthian? What’s up, Sammy? I thought you and him was trusty.’

  ‘Never mind him. He’s gone. It’s you and me, now.’

  For weeks afterwards she thought about going back to the autem, sitting down to her slate, until so much time had passed that Betsy-Ann would’ve been ashamed to explain herself and anyway, the autem mort probably thought she’d toddled or died. In those days Sam still had all his fingers. Had Betsy-Ann known he was about to lose one, she’d have gone back no matter what. She’d be far on in reading and writing by now.

  The Curse of Scotland flies out from the deck and skids across the table. Betsy-Ann’s growing tired and cack-handed. She shuffles again and sings:

  She kissed him and lay with him

  Down in the valley

  And then said the young maid

  O when shall we marry?

  To hell with Johnny and his true love. Let’s have something more like it. She digs a fingernail into the deck to mark the position of the ace and begins slowly, carefully to plant the books.

  Moll of the Wood went to the fair

  To see what pleasure and pastime was there.

  She met with the drummer, he being just come,

  She learned to beat on his rum-a-dum-dum.

  Pleasure and pastime! Give her a sporting cull that’ll lay down a bit of cash, not a Darling Johnny who tastes the goods and runs for the mountains at the first whiff of trouble. She moves the books faster: three shuffles and she has them lined up. Ace, king, knave.

  Knave of Hearts.

  It’s no use, she can’t settle. Betsy-Ann lays down the cards and goes to the window where the sky shows iron-grey. The starved sapling rooted in the gutter of the house opposite is bent over to one side, like a schoolboy about to take a whopping.

  This is what she dreamed of, all the time she was with Kitty: a ken of her own, nothing too fancy, just an upstairs pair with a stout lock on the door. Upstairs is more private, and not so hard on the windows: it’s months since these were last starred by a stone. The sash frames are stuffed tight with rag and the place is snug. What a joy, then, to have a hearth of her own with an unblocked chimney! There’s a bucketful of coal standing ready and a pan of lightning, with sugar and clove
s, warming before the fire. Mrs Samuel Shiner should be like a cat in catnip, shouldn’t she?

  Instead of which she’s like a bitch with the itch. She goes to the cupboard and opens up the inner door. No. Close it. No, have a look, there’s nobody to know.

  She finds and opens the white leather box. O, the sweet satin shoes, embroidered fit for a duchess! She looks down at her feet: Betsy-Ann has a big foot for a woman. The shoes were made to her size, but if she once puts them on, they’ll stretch and lose their freshness. Better keep them as they are.

  The ring, though; she might wear that. If Sam asks, one of the kinchin-coves brought it in. Her finger slides snug inside the gold band and the coral heart sits so pretty, so innocent. A child’s ring. A pretty fam deserves a pretty fawney. One time, the hand was sweet as the ring, on the large side but soft-skinned, a graceful shape. Her fingers are coarsening with all those shirts she scrubs for Sam. She should’ve worn this before, just put it on as if it was nothing. He wouldn’t have known.

  She takes an earring, black pearls and gold, and tries its wire in one of her lobes. It’s some time since she last wore any and the hole is shrunken. She licks a finger, moistens the skin and pushes hard. Like something else: lick, push, in you go. Somebody should write a song about it: The Goldsmith’s Prentice and His Lass.

  O no, my dear prentice, this never will do

  Your wire is too thick, it cannot go through.

  My sweet, said the prentice, Pray leave it to me . . .

  She’d like to make a rhyme with key but can’t be bothered. The inside of her ear-lobe feels enormous as she tries to guide the earring through it from front to back; she imagines corridors inside there, dead-ends of flesh glowing with pain, red like your hands when you cup them round a lantern. She won’t give up. She closes her eyes and twiddles until the earring is in place. Seen in the mirror, the throbbing labyrinths she has been probing are nothing, just a slice of skin. The other earring passes through without trouble.