Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  Most of our affairs, alas, are very small beer. However, every dog has his day and every woman some news of real import, once in a while, so here is mine: your cousin Hetty is to be married by private licence to Mr Josiah Letcher of Cheltenham Spa – you will remember that Hetty has known this gentleman for several months now and both parties wish to dispense with the usual long engagement. Between boasting of Hetty’s brilliant match and complaining that the ceremony is to be a simple one, your Aunt Phoebe is grown quite intolerable. As for Hetty herself, she laughs and says she wonders how she will bear being called Mrs Letcher. Her Josiah has a fortune of £5,000 per annum and though not in his first youth is polite, mannerly and not an ill-looking man, so entre nous, I think she will bear it very well.

  Though it is tedious to be obliged constantly to exclaim at her good fortune, I am of course delighted for Hetty. She is, and always was, far more agreeable than her mother. You may imagine, however, how Phoebe crows over me. Even when we were girls, the most beautiful doll, the most charming robes, must always be hers, and now it is the same with daughters! All day prattling of Hetty’s intended and scarcely a word to spare for your marriage – it is extremely provoking. But there. Hardly a girl in the county will marry as well as Hetty, to be sure, but if you, my love, are content with your bargain I have nothing more to wish for. And I am as sure as I can be of anything, Sophy, that you are content and will continue to be so. You were raised to surmount any little difficulty (you understand me) and a wife can come with no better recommendation.

  Now for the small beer! Mary-Ann cannot work from a pain in her back, which has gained on her to the point where she is fit for nothing but lying down. Had it been Sarah we might have suspected idleness, but Mary-Ann is such a good creature that we consulted Dr Chesse directly. He says she will not be well these four weeks. It is extremely trying but the poor girl cries out at the least movement, so there is nothing to be done but wait. Chesse thinks of cupping her. As if this were not enough, Rixam has been called home to his grandmother’s deathbed. I hinted at the great inconvenience to us but he said the old lady had raised him and he must not refuse. Your papa says that is quite right, but your papa does not concern himself with the management of servants. We make shift to rub along without Rixam, and have a daily girl standing in for Mary-Ann.

  As you can imagine, we are all at sixes and sevens, but when we are back on our feet I intend to paper the breakfast room in silver and blue, or silver and salmon. Which do you think would go better? You have such elegant taste in these things.

  Papa asks me to send his love. He says I am like all women, a great tattler, and insists I convey his compliments to Edmund as follows: ‘Hearty greetings to Yedmund,’ if you please! He means to tease me by sending such a rustic salutation, but we women are not to be had so easily, and I am sure my daughter will not fail me but will know how best to trim and turn it according to the London fashion.

  Your loving

  Mama

  Sophia lays the letter on the bedside table and sits unmoving beside the bed. She seems to hear her mother’s sprightly, rallying tones but today not even a letter from Mama can raise her spirits.

  Never, even in the face of such provocation, could she have imagined herself lashing out at a servant. The second blow was the more shameful of the two; the first resulted from a spontaneous eruption of feeling, but in striking the second, though she was still carried along by her indignation, there was an instant during which she knew what she would do before she did it. To find the boy in possession of what was hers, to witness that peculiar manner of his, and that wretched feint as he tried to cover up the letters, was intolerable, yet none of this can excuse her.

  She does not imagine she has done him lasting injury. A gentlewoman is delicate and who knows what these blackfellows do in Africa? They are tough and stubborn: it is said that they eat one another. No, she has not inflicted any serious hurt on Titus. More shameful, infinitely more shameful, is the hurt she has done herself.

  Sophia has always held the lowest opinion of those mistresses who, presuming upon their social superiority, conduct themselves in such a way as to nullify it. Whether it takes the form of assaulting the staff or engaging them in amorous intrigue, it invariably degrades all those concerned. While in the Pump Room at Bath, she happened to overhear some talk of a woman of quality infatuated with her footman. The talk was of a decidedly masculine nature: a great many coarse and suggestive terms were employed and Sophia hurried away, sickened that a lady could so forget herself as to furnish gossip to the likes of these.

  To compound the matter, it is now clear to Sophia that Titus was acting on Edmund’s instructions, which means she has assaulted him for carrying out his duties. As a child she accidentally kicked a little pug bitch that followed her everywhere, and broke its foreleg. The dog had to be destroyed; Sophia mourned it for weeks. As Mama pointed out, it was a lesson in the folly of not governing one’s body. This is another.

  Worst of all, it would appear that Edmund has been intercepting Mama’s letters, though she cannot conceive why he should. Their correspondence is as innocent as water; indeed, she has never hesitated to leave her letters, once opened, lying about where Edmund might pick them up. True, in this one there is Mama’s hint of ‘any little difficulty’, but that is quite inoffensive, surely? Particularly if its true significance is understood, for Sophia knows that Mama alluded principally to her ‘weakness’.

  It would be of no use, thinks Sophia, for her mother to visit now. Now is too late.

  A week ago, she would have come up here with her letter and read it stretched out on top of the bedcovers. Today the coverings have been pulled back and folded over the bottom of the bed, exposing the mattress in its black-and-white ticking.

  The ticking is stained and gives off a peculiar mixed odour, one familiar to Sophia since childhood. Cologne has been rubbed into it, and orris, and cinnamon, despite which fragrant ingredients there rises from the mattress stuffing a fishy staleness, faintly but unmistakably suggestive of the pavement around a tavern in high summer.

  The first time it happened Edmund behaved with consideration. True, he swore upon discovering the wet sheets and talked vulgarly of stinks, but on perceiving the acuteness of her distress he softened and put his arms around her. He said such things might happen to anyone once in a while; her initiation into wifehood, and then the arrival of her flowers, had most likely done the damage, and if she took care next month it need never worry her again. He stroked her hair, like a kind husband, while Sophia trembled.

  But her body’s sluices, forced open by the weight and press of water, cannot now be closed. Since then it has happened twice more, and last night Edmund was not kind; quite the contrary. He called her a ‘bog-house’ and other names too painful to be recollected. Under this provocation, Sophia too became contrary and her eyes remained as dry as her nightgown was wet. Edmund pulled away to the far side of the mattress, dragging most of the bedding with him, while for the rest of the night Sophia lay rigid, uncaressed and uncomforted.

  At breakfast this morning Edmund appeared haggard, decidedly not plump currant. Though similarly jaded, Sophia had spent the sleepless hours in thinking matters over, and now drew up her forces.

  ‘Edmund,’ she began, seeing him withdraw behind his morning newspaper, ‘may we not discuss this?’

  His voice was disdainful. ‘To what purpose? The thing is evidently beyond your control.’

  ‘Indeed it is, yet I’d do anything to cure it. Surely you understand that.’

  Edmund snapped the paper out, spreading it wide, his knuckles presenting themselves to her like those of a pugilist. Tentatively, Sophia reached out to touch them. ‘Edmund, please don’t sulk. It’s unworthy of a gentleman.’

  ‘Do you consider yourself a gentlewoman?’ murmured Edmund, flipping over a page. ‘Your habits would shame a tuppenny bunter.’

  Sophia withdrew her hand. ‘I’m at least sufficiently refined not to be acquaint
ed with blunters, whoever they may be.’

  ‘Permit me to enlighten you. Bunters are depraved creatures so low most men won’t touch them, but even they keep a dry bed.’

  Sophia fired up. ‘How dare you mention me in the same breath as those women! I’m not depraved, I’ve a weakness, an affliction. You knew all this before we married.’

  Edmund lowered the paper, his eyes so hard and dark that they resembled knobs of polished jet pushed into the flesh of his head. He surveyed her at length before saying,

  ‘Knew?’

  Sophia’s cheeks, neck and bosom grew hot, her hands icy. Her entire body seemed about to disintegrate but she managed, by clinging to the chair-arms, to hold herself upright. ‘Yes, indeed,’ she insisted. ‘You were informed by Papa.’

  He stared at her in frank, if hostile, astonishment. ‘Is that what he told you?’

  Sophia put a cold hand to her throat to soothe the flaming skin there. She was quite unable to speak.

  20

  God Rot Samuel Shiner

  She’ll have it stitched on a sampler, one of these days, and pinned over the mantelpiece. It’s now over a week since Betsy-Ann last clapped eyes on her keeper, if she can still call Sam that. Devil a penny has she had from him since then; she’s keeping herself. Even though his absence means she no longer has to share his bed, she feels the insult.

  The night he brought her back from Laxey’s, he was at it directly they got under the quilt, poking and poking, veins on his temples standing out so much she could see them even by candlelight. Betsy-Ann pictured herself taking a pin and pricking one of them – he was so far gone in rut, she wondered if he’d even feel it. The drink made him a slow finisher, though, and she was sore by the time he got there.

  Now, remembering that sudden urge to prick the veins, she shudders. Where did it come from? It seems to Betsy-Ann that Sam’s nastiness is seeping into her: the nightmares she has! Never in her life has she dreamt such things, not even during those first days at Kitty’s. She wasn’t capable, but she is now. Last night she dreamt she saw the crew lever up a coffin lid. Underneath was a crumbling heap of soil that crept and rippled as if full of worms. ‘Far gone in corruption,’ said Sam, and she realised that the soil was a woman’s body, and the ripple in it an unborn babe, still living. A tiny, wizened face, like a monkey’s, poked out of the heap. Someone cried, ‘A turnip-baby!’ and the crew sliced it out of her with their spades. Betsy-Ann woke sweating fit to beat Sam himself, fit to beat Old Scratch. No, she doesn’t miss sharing a bed. She’d just like to know he’s still alive. Ten to one he is – sitting in a flash house, calling for nantz, most likely – but sometimes it’s the long odds that come up, and Sam’s in very bad company. She’s warned him about Harry, how if you anger him he sometimes smiles but keeps score, all the same.

  Well. She did what she could. A new day awaits, there’s profit to be made. She goes to the Eye and unhooks a rope, lowering a closed basket. There they are, the little darlings: her measures for dispensing cheer to the needy. On the floor beneath them stands a covered bucket, brimful of England’s cheapest.

  They say the poor have only two joys, fucking and drink, and in Betsy-Ann’s opinion drink is kinder comfort. Kitty Hartry might dispute that, but her dealings are with people who can pay for pleasure and want it stronger and stronger. What the poor want, mostly, is to be knocked senseless.

  Betsy-Ann fills some bottles, takes another basket and lays the precious store within. She spreads a white cloth over them and arranges on the cloth some biscuits she purchased this morning from the pastrycook’s, cut in halves, then lays another cloth over the biscuits and closes the basket lid. Lastly she takes a plain gold ring from a nearby pot and slips it onto her wedding finger.

  She gropes her way down the unlit stairwell, expecting to find Liz lying in wait – the old woman haunts these blasted stairs, she’ll get kicked down them one day – but Liz must have other business, for Betsy-Ann reaches the ground floor unmolested and steps out into the autumn day.

  There’s a small, high, dirty sun that would do some good if it could only get through the smoke. Down here the air is thick, a clinging web of familiar scents: stale, yeasty gusts from the doors of public houses, hot bread, piss and worse drying beneath chamber windows, mould from dank basements, horse dung, folk lighting their fires, and on the pavement a sour, bright star of vomit.

  Betsy-Ann is on her way to the New Buildings.

  Even when you’re as partial to your own ken as she is to hers, and have plenty set by, it does no harm to stick your head out once in a while. You get a sense of how the world wags, how everything keeps bustling on. Today, however, she has business in hand. Lina told her of a pawnbroker near the New Buildings, a man of discretion. She intends, if she gets that far, to pay him a visit.

  Coming through Covent Garden, she sells two half-biscuits and three bottles of lightning. In Long Acre a blowen approaches, strikes up talk and then pulls from the front of her stays a length of cream-coloured silk, for which she wants three shillings.

  ‘Say one,’ suggests Betsy-Ann.

  The blowen shakes her head. ‘This sells at four shillings the yard. There’s two yards at least.’

  ‘Two then,’ Betsy-Ann wheedles. ‘As a favour to you.’

  ‘Look here, Mrs Betsy.’ The girl spreads out the stuff on the basket top, smoothing out the creases. ‘Not a hole or a mark.’

  Betsy-Ann fingers its glossy surface. ‘Two.’

  ‘Three.’

  Betsy-Ann shrugs. In a pet, the girl snatches up the silk and marches away.

  ‘Like your impudence,’ Betsy-Ann says under her breath. She waits to see if the girl will think better of it, but no, the striding figure turns into another street and is lost to view.

  She forgets the silk directly she enters the piazza, a place which never fails to arouse in Betsy-Ann a bittersweet ache, joy and sadness mixed. From here she can see the windows – her windows, where she was first put into keeping by the Corinthian. Behind them lie three elegant rooms, so fondly remembered that whenever she passes the building she feels she might walk up there and take possession again.

  Those rooms, like their mistress, were fitted out in style. Betsy-Ann, who not so long ago had been living in a wagon, eating potatoes and cowering whenever the farmer appeared, now had a maid of her own and a different gown for each day of the week. When it was too wet and dirty to go out, or when the Corinthian stayed night after night at the tables, she’d ask herself: should the farmer appear, wouldn’t he be struck dumb? What could his wife, that bullying bitch, find to say to her now? There were darker days still, when the weather might be fine but she was plagued with the memory of Kitty’s place, and of Keshlie, when the answer to those questions would come to her in Mam’s voice: They’d know what to say, all right, and it’d be WHORE. The only way to stifle that voice was to stand before one of Ned’s presents: a fine looking-glass from Venice, the edges bevelled so as to glitter like gems. There she would go and turn about, admiring herself in her new gowns.

  *

  He was an unexpected gift, so it was fitting that she first clapped eyes on him at Christmas.

  The season of goodwill was always something of a lean time in Kitty’s establishment. Wives and mistresses alike demanded tributes, resulting in a general scarcity of the readies. Debauched students went home to be dull with Papa and Mama. Families had visits to make, hypocrisies to keep up, and there was also the occasional fit of repentance: a good few married men fell away each December, only to return, hammering on the door, by February.

  Until they did, the inhabitants of the Cunt in the Wall might find themselves free for hours at a time. The least popular girls were put out to grass, the prettiest and the specialists kept on hand, for if a Person of Quality should arrive unexpectedly, quel dommage (as Kitty said) if he should find the house lacking in refinement. The girls would sit talking, curling their hair and trying out the new fashions in face-paint, wondering what the comin
g year would bring.

  It was during this flat period that Harris’s List came into its own, providing the man of pleasure with reading matter to tickle his appetite until he could escape back into the sporting life. As soon as a girl was ‘finished’ in the tricks of her trade, Kitty had her entered in Harris’s, paying over the odds for a good account of her livestock. Betsy-Ann was listed along with the rest; when her report first came out, she asked another girl, Catharine, what was written of her.

  ‘A fine tall girl whose dark eyes languish sensual fire,’ read Catharine. ‘Miss Bl―re well knows how to render youth free and happy.’

  ‘Miss who?’

  ‘Miss – you, you ninny, they miss some of the letters out – O, never mind. She is of the gypsy nation ―’

  At this Betsy-Ann laughed aloud. ‘No gypsy would think so.’

  ‘Now, Miss! You told me you had a cart and you were gypsies.’

  Betsy-Ann shook her head. ‘We knew some gypsies. We worked the fairs ―’

  ‘Listen! Trained up from girlhood in the amorous arts freely practised among that passionate and uninhibited race.’

  Here Betsy-Ann exclaimed, ‘He knows nothing of gypsies either,’ to which her companion replied, ‘That may be, my dear, but Mr Derrick thoroughly understands his trade.’

  ‘Derrick? I thought it was a Mr Harris?’

  ‘It’s named for Jack Harris, but it’s Derrick who writes it. You must’ve seen him, little carroty Irishman, comes and shuts himself away with Kitty. Now listen . . .

  Newly finished and polished by Mrs H—try, so as to excel in the most exacting disciplines of pleasure. She has considerable natural advantages in that field, for in her case the path to bliss is indeed strait and narrow. The gate of life is firm and exquisitely deep and shaded by the most profuse vegetation. Fortunate indeed the eager lover who knocks and is admitted here.