Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  ‘Well – not precisely.’ That is the extraordinary thing: the meat does not appear dried or singed. When the maid comes to remove the plates, Sophia questions her: ‘Did you see the cooking vessels at the inn? Were they quite clean?’

  ‘If you please, Madam, I did and they were,’ says Eliza.

  ‘The beef had a disagreeable taint.’

  ‘Ladies new to London often find the food disagreeable, at first.’

  ‘Why should that be? Beef is beef.’

  ‘It’s the garden things, Madam. The smoke gets in them, you see, and tastes everything. At least, so they say. I don’t notice, myself.’

  Of course, Sophia thinks. Soot-encrusted vegetables in the pot, transferring their delightful fragrance to the meat.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ says Edmund, dabbing at his mouth. ‘I hope you find the house more to your liking?’

  ‘It all seems quite . . .’

  ‘Quite what?’

  She who hesitates is lost. ‘Proper.’

  Comfortable she is sure it is not: so gloomy and grimy (rather like the meat) and about half as big as she imagined. Why, any thriving tradesman who aspired to rent such a dwelling might readily gratify his wishes. But then, as she reminds herself, such people are very much on the rise these days, some of them achieving an income comparable to a gentleman’s, and Edmund does not rent but owns the place outright.

  ‘It takes time to get used to a house,’ she continues, gaining conviction, ‘and to decorate,’ but here she falters again, since she had understood, as had her parents, that her new home was already prepared to receive a bride. As Mama put it: Mr Bachelor Bird, when he goes a-courting, decks his nest.

  ‘If you’ll allow me a free hand,’ Sophia says at last, ‘I’m told I have some excellent notions. Mama is forever consulting me.’

  New paint, new gilding! Competent craftsmen, intelligently directed, could freshen this house to the point where Sophia might walk through it with pleasure, taking an honest pride in how her woman’s eye had made the very best of everything and rendered it, if not distinguished, still a temple of domestic happiness, good sense and good taste.

  ‘You could wave a magic wand over it, I’m sure,’ says Edmund. ‘Unfortunately we have no time to engage workmen, but next year you shall paint and paper to your heart’s delight.’

  Sophia blinks.

  ‘Reassure yourself, however, that there’s no such problem at home. There you may employ yourself throughout the winter, and transform the place to a fairy palace, if you please.’

  ‘At home? Do you refer to Wixham?’

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘Are we leaving for the country so soon?’

  ‘But my love, surely you understood that? I’ve business in London, after which ―’ He shrugs.

  ‘Business!’ exclaims Sophia. Really, she might have married one of those craftsmen of whom she was just now thinking. If, that is, Edmund is speaking the truth.

  ‘Yes, business.’ There is an edge to his voice. ‘Need I explain again?’

  ‘Not to me, Edmund. I’ve heard quite enough about dunning, thank you.’

  ‘And yet you don’t understand me. To repeat: my father left certain affairs in disarray ―’

  ‘Dunning.’

  ‘Have the goodness to hear me out. He invested money in the City. Consequently, I must visit bankers and lawyers here. Do you call that dunning?’

  ‘Not precisely,’ she admits. ‘Only I hoped we might ―’

  ‘Lord, Sophia, don’t you see how greatly to your advantage this is? How could I be better employed, at the very beginning of our life together, than in trying to make all clear, plain and regular?’

  Sophia is silenced. The only answer she could honestly make, she does not dare: I do not believe you. Though you talk glibly of plain and regular, you yourself are neither.

  ‘We shall have to practise economy nevertheless,’ Edmund adds. ‘By retiring to the country we may retrench on a great many expenses.’

  ‘And are we to return before the end of the Season?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ says Edmund in a tone she has come to dread.

  ‘It was agreed upon. You promised ―’

  A maid enters to put coal upon the fire. Sophia waits, palpitating, for her to leave. At last, after a puffing on the bellows which raises clouds of sooty dust and causes both husband and wife to shrink away from the hearth, the fire revives and the wretched girl takes herself off to the nether regions.

  ‘Edmund,’ says Sophia as the door closes behind her.

  ‘You’re on me like a pack of hounds,’ exclaims Edmund. ‘Barely an hour since we arrived and already you’re discontented. I take you from a poxy lake with one statue, first to Bath and now to London, but nothing pleases.’

  Sophia flushes. ‘I didn’t mean to appear ungracious.’

  ‘You have a most happy knack, then, and achieve it without effort.’

  ‘I admire the house, I do indeed.’

  ‘Then what need of decoration?’

  He is inviting her to bicker about that, rather than his mysterious business. In cowardly, wifely fashion, she accepts the invitation.

  ‘No absolute need, perhaps. I always understood it was usual upon marriage.’

  ‘I don’t dispute it. At Wixham you shall exercise your bride’s prerogative to the full and next year, when we have guests here, you shall do the same, and can choose from the newest patterns. Until then, it’s just a waste of my money.’

  ‘Our money.’

  ‘I’m too tired for this, Sophia. I shall take a bath and I suggest you do likewise.’ He rings for a servant. ‘It may calm your nerves.’

  Having made do all her life with a china bowl and jug, Sophia does not find the prospect of a hip-bath particularly calming and is nervous of the one she glimpsed in the bedroom. Now she listens to the tramp, tramp of the maid carrying hot water upstairs. Hot water! Cold, bracing baths are agreed to be beneficial but Edmund risks enervation of the system, to say nothing of scalds: servants are such careless creatures.

  At the same time, it must be said that she is tempted. Bathing is said to cure fleas and she is sure there was an infestation of the vile creatures in the coach. Nor is she free of them, even now: at least one of the nipping, itching horrors is trapped beneath her stays. She struggles to scratch at it, pushing her hand down as far as it will go. The stays pinch her uncommonly tight this evening; Sophia could shake herself with discomfort and frustration. Perhaps it would be wise, after all, to follow her husband’s example.

  She so longed to be mistress of her own household. When first she saw the bedchamber, her disappointment at the shabby furnishings was intense, but then she thought: perhaps it’s just as well, I can choose for myself. She pictured blue wallpaper with scrolling flowers, perhaps new wine-coloured curtains, a hundred charming refinements, the neglected house blooming beneath her womanly touch, and now they are not to stay here over the winter! Whatever Edmund may choose to signify by it, Sophia has come to hate the very sound of the word business.

  *

  When Edmund is in bed and the hip-bath refilled, Sophia undresses, catching the maid in a discreet surveillance of her abdomen. Her entire body is a little swollen and her bosom so tender as to be painful, but not for any reason the maid may imagine. These signs, along with her tight stays, are familiar ones: her flowers are due.

  The tub is not so bad. Rendered tolerably comfortable by towels draped over its metal edges, it forms a prospect at once more private and more wholesome than the disease-ridden pools of Bath. How gratifying to picture the fleas, that meant to make a meal of her, being drowned instead in the perfumed water – to feel her muscles unknotting themselves in the warmth. The indulgence of a warm bath is surely permissible after such a long cold journey as hers.

  She dozes.

  When she opens her eyes there is something like smoke twining through the water, a wisp of crimson that breaks up as she moves her thighs in the tub. She
asks the maid to bring clean rags and bandages and, once dried, binds herself carefully before going in to Edmund, who is already asleep.

  Thank you, thank you, she prays to the Almighty as she pulls back the sheets. That it is now and not in the coach.

  While the coach would doubtless have been torture, the bed is quite trying enough. A dull, dragging pain in her back compels her to roll this way and that until Edmund half-wakes to demand, in a sullen murmur, what the devil she would be at. At last, having heard a church bell strike two, she gets off, only to dream that she is roaming an elegant but unfamiliar square, holding a small child by the hand and with the most pressing need for the necessary house. The child is a perverse little brat; it holds back, whining, as Sophia toils up and down, knocking on house doors that never open, searching even sheds and outhouses in her desperate need for a privy. The square shifts and alters under her gaze: now it contains a garden with ornamental yews and box hedges. She drags the heavy, pouting child into a green walk and there, right in the middle of the way, stands a necessary house, but when she enters, it is unspeakably filthy and the wall at the back has missing bricks through which men’s faces peer and jeer: she cannot use it. At last, barely able to walk, she spies a bush behind which she can stand. Nobody is near; even the tormenting child has wandered off and disappeared. Sophia plants her feet wide apart beneath her gown and lets go. At once the most delicious ache pierces between her legs and spreads up into her belly, growing to an intensity in which she cannot hold back but feels compelled to pull up the front of her clothing and display herself, throwing back her head in glorious, overpowering release. Looking down again, she finds Edmund standing before her, his finger a key in the lock of her body. He squirms the finger into her, tickling, unbearably tickling. ‘I flatter myself you don’t despise me,’ he whispers. An obscure fear flickers in Sophia, an ominous sense of impending disaster. She tries to push him away but finds herself unable to move. As he continues to toy with her the tickling sensation mounts, grows exquisite, voluptuous, irresistible as the clawing of an itch.

  She wakes, still in its poignant grip, and holds herself very still. A faint, whistling snore tells her that Edmund sleeps on, for the moment undisturbed and unaware. Sick with dread, Sophia slides her hand down to the mattress.

  It has happened, the shameful thing.

  She is still not emptied out. She drags herself over the wet bedding, her damp nightgown clinging to her thighs, and squats over the jerry in a state of horror and confusion so appalling that even Mrs Chase might pity her. The bandage between her legs drips into the jerry. Until this minute she had forgotten all that. Is she bloody? Is the bed ― ?

  Edmund has stopped snoring. She clenches herself so tightly that her teeth ache, but to no avail; he surfaces from his sleep and begins to take notice.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he murmurs. ‘Are you ill?’

  So carefully has she managed, up to now, that he has never even known her rise in the night. She whispers, ‘The jerry. Go to sleep.’

  But he rolls over, turning towards her. ‘I’m awake now,’ he says. ‘Come on, give us a sight of Miss Laycock.’ Curtain-rings jangle: he’s feeling outside the bedcurtains for the candle.

  ‘Not now,’ she hisses. ‘Go to sleep.’

  It is too late. She hears him fidgeting in the bed, and then a sudden intake of breath.

  ‘What the ― ? In Christ’s name, Sophy, what’s this?’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Edmund.’

  Sophia crouches, fumbling. At last the sodden wadding between her legs drops away into the jerry. She gropes in the bedside table for fresh rags.

  Her husband’s voice assails her from the bed: ‘Why didn’t you get the pot?’

  ‘I didn’t wake. It’s my time, you see, that makes it worse.’ She shivers as she knots the ends of the rags together.

  There is a silence. Then Edmund says, ‘It’ll stink infernally tomorrow.’

  19

  At Mr Watson’s house in Maryland, Fortunate was beaten whenever he made a mistake.

  Mrs Dog Eye sometimes looks as if she wishes to do the same. The woman is impossible to please, forever calling her husband into the room and then asking Fortunate to repeat certain words, after which she wails, wrings her hands and rushes out in tears. Dog Eye stands by as if in sorrow, but then after the wife has gone he claps Fortunate on the shoulder, asks him to say ‘part, prig and puck’ and laughs heartily when he does so, which makes no more sense than crying. Between these two it is difficult to know how to live.

  Still, the house is more spacious than the rooms he and Dog Eye lived in before the marriage. Fortunate has a bedchamber to himself, where before he had always to share. The privacy he now enjoys is useful, because one of his tasks is to take up any letters newly arrived or waiting to be taken. Such letters should be put into his pocket and, if possible, taken directly to Dog Eye in the room where he reads over his business papers. Should Dog Eye be in company with someone else, Fortunate goes away and waits in his own chamber, for nobody is to see him carrying the letters, nor must Fortunate speak to the wife about it.

  Now that they have been in the house a fortnight, he has letters to carry almost every day. Dog Eye takes them and looks at the writing on the outside. Fortunate once asked the meaning of a small thing which often appears on these letters. Dog Eye laughed and said that for men, it was a sure sign of trouble. Fortunate understood that this was some kind of joke, so one day he showed a letter to the cook, who can read a little, and who told him that the word was Mrs.

  He is not too unhappy. He is used by now to loneliness, to looking on at others’ lives. He finds comfort in the brass tap in the scullery, shaped like the head of a bird. There are such things in his own country, but here it is a kind of secret beauty, for only servants see it, and it seems to Fortunate that of all of them, he alone appreciates the kindness of a tap with a bird’s head where a bare spout would suffice. Apart from his love of Dog Eye, his life is all bound up in things. He treasures the pink carpet in the drawing room, with its pattern of flowers, and the view of a neighbour’s herb-garden visible from the window at the top of the stairs.

  One of his most beloved objects lives in Dog Eye’s private room: a small round table, its top made up of different coloured marbles so cool and smooth that Fortunate can rarely resist the temptation to spread out his hands upon them. His palms, polished by contact with the marble, come away chilled and smooth, leaving ghost-hands of mist that linger briefly on the stone. While Fortunate does this, Dog Eye reads letters to, or from, his wife and seals them up again, stamping the seals with gold rings he keeps in his desk. He then returns the letters to Fortunate, who replaces them when he can do so unseen. He is proud to be trusted with this duty and admires Dog Eye’s deft, swift movements as he heats the wax and handles his little rings, repairing the torn seals.

  One morning, he has just pocketed a letter to take to his master when he turns to find Mrs herself standing watching him. The woman steps forward, her fingers an eagle’s talons. Fortunate puts his own hand over his pocket to protect the letter nestling within.

  ‘What have you there?’

  He manages to say, ‘Nothing.’ If only Dog Eye were present, to explain to her! Doesn’t she understand that the man must first look at these things?

  ‘Give it here,’ the woman orders. He still keeps his hand over his pocket, so she slaps him hard across the face: one, two. She will have to explain this to Dog Eye. She has disgraced herself. Handing over the letter, Fortunate lowers his eyes, watering from the force of the blows, so as not to witness her shame.

  ‘This is private, private!’ she hisses, one talon resting on the Mrs. She shakes the letter under his nose. ‘How dare you!’

  Fortunate cannot find the words with which to reply. He cannot say he made a mistake, for he did not. The woman throws down the letters which are not Mrs on the table and, clutching the one she has stolen, runs with it along the hallway and up the stairs.


  *

  My dearest daughter,

  Your last found us happy and well and we are glad to know that you and Edmund are likewise. I was a little concerned to hear that you had left the Baths. Papa, of course, told me not to fret – you know how foolish your old mama can be where her darling is concerned – and insisted there was nothing to worry about, merely a change of plan. He went so far as to scold me, but I could not be at ease until I heard more from you.

  I hope you now see, as I do, how wise I was in raising you to understand a woman’s duty. You grew up in the knowledge that Papa must constantly occupy himself with the business of the estate, and were thus prepared for your present situation. I always say that nobody can understand the obligations of a gentleman who has not tried to live up to them. Persons who pass their days in idleness can have no notion of this but you and I have married men of quite another stamp: they have always some scheme, some object of charity or some project of improvement in hand, and are forever occupied. Few women are blessed with husbands of such an industrious character, and when we consider what a hazard every woman runs in the marriage-lottery, I am sure we should cheerfully resign ourselves to any little inconveniences. And to show that I can practise what I preach, I do not complain that I was unable to visit my chick before her husband whisked her off to London. We shall not be long parted, my love. I will be sure to come to you when a certain happy event approaches, if not before.

  I hope, my darling girl, that you will not take it amiss if I own to some disappointment that your address is not a more fashionable one. I understood, as did Papa, that Mr Zedland’s town house lay a little nearer to St James. This is what we expected for you, but I find, from your Aunt Phoebe’s map of London, that you are rather on the way to Marylebone. (Phoebe insisted on bringing the map to show me: plus ça change!)

  Still, a London house of three storeys is well enough. I was only in London once in my life, when I went to stay with Constantia, God rest her soul, but that was out of the Season, and besides, Town was not nearly so brilliant or elegant as they say it is nowadays. Who has called upon you, my love? Have you returned any visits? You must send me a regular bulletin of all your outings and entertainments.