Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  ‘O, it’s been done before,’ says Betsy-Ann. ‘Mostly by tumbling her first.’

  ‘That is, indeed, the beaten track. I pride myself on a little more finesse.’

  ‘Christ, Ned!’

  ‘Patience, you shall hear.’ He’s smiling; he’s gained the upper hand. ‘Now Betsy, in your gypsy days, when you went rolling about the country, did you ever fetch up at Bath?’

  She shrugs. ‘Don’t recall.’

  ‘Then my life on it, you never did. Bath’s not a place you’d forget. Half of England’s in lodgings there – the gaming half.’

  ‘I know that much, Ned.’

  ‘Well. It was in Bath that I set myself up.’

  ‘Living off the loobies, I suppose.’

  ‘Aye, such fat foolish trout as you see there! Ned tickled ’em into the pan.’

  ‘But why?’ Betsy-Ann is finally overcome by curiosity. ‘Why Zedland?’

  ‘The thing is, child, I didn’t go there so much as leave here. Uninvited company, you know.’

  ‘Uninvited ― ?’ For a moment she thinks he’s complaining of fleas. ‘Duns, you mean?’

  ‘Aye. I was never so plagued in my life.’

  ‘But Kitty – wouldn’t she ―’

  ‘Put her hand in her pocket? It was she cut off the funds. I daresay you remember how that came about,’ he adds with a touch of bitterness.

  Betsy-Ann sits up straight. ‘Don’t you put it on me, Ned. I won’t have it.’

  ‘If we’d been spliced, nothing to be done, then perhaps she’d have come round in time. As it was, I saw she’d never leave off.’

  She sniffs. ‘I’m with Sam, for Christ’s sake. What more does she want?’

  ‘Curse me if she doesn’t think Sam’s a decoy. My dear mother is of a suspicious nature.’

  Suspicious? Pitiless, more like. When Keshlie wouldn’t go with a cull, but cried and clung to her, Kitty bent and whispered in her ear that if the man was not obliged directly, she’d have Keshlie’s throat cut in the night and her body thrown into the Thames. She’d never have done it – easier just to shove a girl out on the street – but Keshlie was too green to know that. As for her elder sister, who did know, Kitty made sure she was occupied and out of the way. When Betsy-Ann was finished with her cully she went to the kitchen to look for Keshlie, who did such tasks as chopping and peeling, and was told her sister had gone for oranges.

  ‘What’s a fellow to do?’ Ned shrugs. ‘She wants me to give you up. I give you up, and she ruins me!’

  Keshlie trailed downstairs and halted at the bottom step, grimacing, a slash of crimson across the front of her gown. Betsy-Ann hurried to her, took her by the arms and turned her round: another patch, and a faint hogo of salt and rust. Why, the child had started with her flowers! Bleeding like murder, right through her clothes. Behind Keshlie one or two whores were frowning and signalling across the parlour, indicating Betsy-Ann should take her sister away to their private quarters.

  ‘Come with me and we’ll get you some rags,’ she said, putting an arm round Keshlie’s shoulders. ‘You’re a forward wench, to be sure!’

  Keshlie blubbed. Betsy-Ann could have done the same, seeing her start so young, but she squeezed Keshlie to her, murmuring, ‘There, there, you won’t die ―’

  She broke off, held her sister at arm’s length, and stared. Earlier that morning, Keshlie had worn her green robe, with a little apron over it. Since then, someone had undressed her and put her into a long white garment like a nightgown, trimmed with lace and satin ribbon. At first Betsy-Ann had failed to notice the gown, so distracted was she by the patches of red. She ran her hands along her sister’s body: neither stockings nor stays. Now she understood how the gown had become so bloody: there was nothing between it and Keshlie.

  She understood everything.

  When she first told this story to Ned, he insisted it must have been a bungle: a cully who’d paid to fondle and pet the girl, nothing more, but then things went too far. Betsy-Ann demanded what kind of fool he thought she was. They’d waited until she was busy, she shouted. They’d tricked out her sister like a bride. Yet still Ned resisted. His mother was no pious prude, but a child of Keshlie’s age? Her house didn’t deal in children. Kitty was a woman of principle, in her way, and much maligned.

  It was a natural enough blindness in a son. Even so, there is a certain satisfaction in Betsy-Ann’s remarking now, with an air of innocence, ‘She ruined you! And she so soft-hearted!’

  ‘It wasn’t for lack of pleading, I assure you. I got down on my marrowbones – you’d have laughed to see me.’

  ‘I reckon anyone would.’

  ‘I said, Sam Shiner’s her protector now, and she said, That’ll change if you once get sixpence in your pocket.’

  Betsy-Ann sighs. ‘Didn’t know you, did she?’

  ‘I said, Be reasonable, Ma, you might as well cut off my baubles, and she said, At your choice. I never knew her so hard – to me,’ he adds, noticing Betsy-Ann’s expression. ‘She said, I shall try if I can starve some sense into you. Nothing for it but to toddle. Fellows told me Bath was the place, so there I went.’

  Betsy-Ann tries to picture Dimber Ned let loose in Zedland. All the time she lived there, she only once saw a man with good lace to his coat. In fact, Zedland was one of the first words Catharine taught her when she came to Town: the place was so called, she explained, because the inhabitants are too stupid to say ‘s’ but must say ‘z’ instead, with their zyder and Zummerzetzhire. Zed was the last letter of the alphabet, said Catharine (Betsy-Ann not having learned her letters then, this was news to her) and it followed that Zedland was the last place on earth: Zed Land.

  Yet here is Ned claiming to have married into it.

  ‘So there you went,’ she echoes. ‘Is it so very grand?’

  ‘The buildings please, and there’s a deal of elegance in all their customs and contrivances, but lord, how it cramps a man! I lacked room to turn around in.’

  ‘You mean they began to know you,’ says Betsy-Ann, smiling despite herself.

  ‘Aye, they made that pretty plain, so I took myself off to an inn outside Bath until there should be fresh trout to tickle, and there fell in with her father. A man of property, travelling on business and with a daughter at home still unwed, would I do them the honour of visiting? In short, Papa was quite charmed.’

  ‘He took you for a gentry cove.’

  ‘One would say so. He is, himself, a gentry cove. I arrived to find the premises snug, his wife as hopeful as himself and the wench ―’

  ‘I’ve seen her, remember ―’

  ‘I was about to say, a cursed mope.’

  ‘So you worked a cure?’

  ‘Had her blushing like port wine,’ he agrees. ‘A charming sight! How she did struggle against it! Were I not the most modest fellow living, such adoration might have swelled my head.’

  ‘I daresay it did, a little, though you are so very modest. Had the lady no other suitors?’

  ‘She’s . . .’ – his eyes go inward for a second or two – ‘. . . not calculated to please a man. I found her standing empty and put in for the lease, as it were.’

  ‘But you ―’

  ‘I was a gentry cove, remember. Property in Essex. By which you perceive that I fought under false colours.’

  ‘And was the lady in the deceit?’

  ‘Not then and not now. What would you have me do? She would scarcely appreciate my mother’s establishment.’

  Betsy-Ann whistles. ‘But if they find out?’

  He shrugs. ‘I’ve the dowry safe. Well, Betsy? Was it not a rum bite?’

  She never fancied him capable of such things, certainly.

  ‘They will find out, Ned.’

  He shrugs. ‘I’d put money on it.’

  ‘But they’ll come after you!’

  ‘After who, Betsy? Edmund Zedland?’

  Betsy-Ann blinks.

  ‘There’s a Mr Cant at Bath,’ he says, laughing, ‘and a Mr
Blunt, and a promising pair by the name of Chase, with whom I had some excellent sport – the flats must think what very curious names some gentlemen have – but, Betsy! I must tell you, I ran into a friend of Ma’s in the Assembly Rooms. I might almost say, a friend of yours.’

  She shakes her head. ‘I’ve no friends there.’

  ‘Man of business, then.’

  ‘A cully of mine, at Bath?’

  ‘A hundred of ’em, for all I know, but the man I mean is Derrick.’

  ‘Sam Derrick?’

  ‘The same, and living most respectably. He’s Little King of Bath now and a great favourite with the ladies.’

  ‘And they don’t object to his writing Harris’s?’

  ‘Your respectable lady’s never heard of Harris’s. As for the gents, some are just such innocents, but the rest! If you could see their faces!’

  ‘I’m surprised they don’t peach on him.’

  ‘They’d peach on themselves into the bargain. And the thing amuses, no question, so providing he doesn’t rub anyone the wrong way, Sam’s safe enough. You should see him fawning on respectable females, petting their lapdogs and directing them to reading rooms and chapels!’ Ned bursts into incredulous laughter. ‘One expects him at any minute to lapse and introduce someone as Lady Lushington, fine black pelt around the Grove of Venus. He’s been there two years now, and still not found out.’

  ‘Who writes Harris’s then, while he’s in Bath?’

  ‘Himself, I fancy. The style of the thing is his. King of Bath and King Pimp, what a blessed existence – eh, Betsy?’

  Still laughing, he rises to go outside and piss. Betsy-Ann is left to ponder what she has been told, not about Sam Derrick but about Ned’s wife. The lady has been cruelly taken in, almost as cruelly as the Blore sisters when they fell into the hands of Kitty Hartry.

  He’s made a sweet business of it.

  She’s always known he had a wicked streak (how could he not, with Kitty as his ma?) but she never thought him so bad as this. And he isn’t, she tells herself, he isn’t! It’s all down to Kitty – Kitty drove him to desperation – and things are never so hard for the rich, they’ve always something. Mrs Zedland (Mrs Hartry?) has family, and heaps of gold.

  Or had gold, before she married Ned.

  It was the common cry, among Kitty’s girls, that Ned had twice the heart of his ma. They all said so, Betsy-Ann louder than any. Now it comes to her – with a sensation like something scraping at her breastbone – that twice nothing is nothing.

  He’s coming in from the yard. Betsy-Ann arranges her face in a smile.

  ‘That’s it,’ he says, pinching her cheek. ‘Good cheer and good company, the best things in life.’

  ‘Not love?’

  He grins. ‘What, in the name of all that’s ridiculous, has a married man to do with love?’

  ‘If you don’t know, you must ask your wife.’

  ‘Pooh! Any whore knows ten times as much about it.’

  ‘About lechery, you mean.’

  ‘It’s all one. That’s why whores make the best wives.’

  Betsy-Ann looks down, recalling the culls at Kitty’s. Love!

  ‘Yes indeed,’ Ned insists. ‘By love, you know, I don’t mean your sentimental spew, your milk-and-water for young misses. There’s but one kind, and if a man doesn’t want that from a woman, what will he want?’

  ‘Money,’ Betsy-Ann retorts.

  ‘Touché. You think I haven’t lived by my own lights, eh?’

  ‘Well, have you?’

  ‘I have, indeed, married money – just a little. And what’s the use of money? To buy pleasure.’

  ‘I suppose,’ says Betsy-Ann.

  ‘We know too much to be prudish, you and I.’

  His voice is softening, growing huskier. She looks up to see his eyes full on her, and recalls a fancy she had once, that those eyes of his give off black light. As a lantern shining in your face at night shuts out everything else, so to be caught in the beams of Ned’s eyes is to find yourself alone with him; as a lantern turns flying things to crackling, so Ned sears his wife’s skin, burns her cheeks to embers. The wife is a poor scorched fool, and Betsy-Ann is another: she sees him practising on her, plain as anything, but she’ll dance up the stairs with him anyway. It’s going to end the way it always did. She can no longer meet his gaze, and as she looks down at the table, Ned shifts in his chair. She knows that movement: it signals excitement. Yet he seems determined to take things coolly. He orders more capuchin and sits back as if to study her. She wonders if he’s about to ask her about Sam but when he speaks it is to continue his own story.

  ‘I can go about now. Most of the duns are paid.’

  ‘With her dowry.’

  ‘And my genius. We began our married life with a visit to Bath – I wanted a last crack at it, so I persuaded ma femme to take a wedding trip there. And by God I was lucky!’

  ‘You won a great deal?’

  ‘A more pitiable flat you never saw. The merest pup.’

  ‘Had he no friends?’

  ‘Aye – damnably wide-awake ones. They’d have queered my pitch, only he was too drunk to heed them. They were not to be shaken off, however, so I thought it best to leave Bath and negotiate from a distance. Madam’s been sulking ever since.’

  ‘I thought ladies liked to come to Town.’

  He grimaces. ‘My wife, poor bitch, wishes to mingle with the Quality.’

  ‘And will you?’

  ‘How can we?’ He runs his fingers through his hair. ‘Where can I take her?’

  ‘How about the bagnio? She’d see fine gents there,’ says Betsy-Ann, only half joking since a bagnio is to her a place of luxury and splendour. To be invited to the bagnio, there to dine off plate and crystal and perhaps even bathe in the mineral waters! But Ned says sharply, ‘She knows nothing of bagnios. Nor shall she, if I have my way.’

  The capuchin is brought. Betsy-Ann, who rarely takes it, drinks half a cupful at once: the nearest she’s likely to come to the joys of the bagnio.

  ‘So,’ she says, ‘what will you do?’

  Ned shrugs. ‘She must wait, is all.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Until my turn is served. After that, she may go where she pleases. Christ, but I’m sick of her jaw!’ He whines in mockery of a gentry-mort: ‘I meet nobody! I meet nobody!’

  ‘Can’t you introduce ―’

  ‘Who’d want to meet her, by God? If all a wife had to do was write letters and prink herself in a glass, she’d be the best wife in England.’

  There is silence between them.

  ‘You perceive how happily married I am,’ says Ned at last. ‘I fancy you and Shiner are better suited.’

  Behind him, at a nearby table, a pinched, hungry-looking woman, her eyes closed in exhaustion, seems about to slide from her seat. Her gown is pulled aside to expose one breast and on her lap lies a swaddled infant. Betsy-Ann supposes the mother unfastened herself but fell asleep before she could put the babe to suck. Unable to reach for the teat, it grizzles, a thin hopeless sound.

  Ned takes Betsy-Ann’s hand. ‘There’s money in resurrection – I take it he supports you?’

  ‘His dowry’s not up to much.’ She pulls away. ‘But you needn’t put your finger in your eye for me, Ned, I’m not about to starve.’

  ‘No, by God! I see that.’ He’s studying her bubbies. ‘But you can still eat, I hope?’ Though nobody nearby is listening, he leans forward and whispers into her ear. ‘Suppose I ordered a private supper? I’ve a chamber upstairs and a fancy for resurrection. You can show me how to raise the flesh.’

  Despite the capuchin she’s drunk, Betsy-Ann’s mouth goes dry. Not that she’s surprised: what else are they here for? What astonishes her is the way her body, his loyal creature, sets to work. Like dried flowers dropped into water, it moistens and swells and blooms for him. Until this moment she fancied, fool that she was, that she had a choice.

  ‘Wait, I’ve something to do,’ s
he says, rising to go outside. In the street, she shades her eyes to shut out the coffee-house lights, and squints over the rooftops opposite. It’s your true Romeville sky, a tight lid of cloud and smoke. Over to the east there’s a flickering rose colour that means trouble for somebody; the rest is dark as the devil’s arsehole – as dark as the inside of her own head, it seems to Betsy-Ann. She can’t think straight: she’s game, but is she flash or flat, here? If only she knew whether the cards would fall right for her: Ned kind and true and open-handed, and an end to Sam Shiner.

  ‘You could’ve used the jerry upstairs,’ Ned observes on her return.

  ‘I was looking for the moon.’

  He laughs. ‘And what, pray, does that signify? Are you afraid of lunatics? Or is it the fashion now to relieve nature by moonlight?’

  She shakes her head. ‘If the sky clears, Sammy can’t work.’

  ‘Does he come home?’

  ‘He might.’

  ‘So you won’t share my supper,’ he says plaintively. Smiling, Betsy-Ann lays a finger to her nose.

  ‘It’s pitch,’ she says. ‘No moon to be seen.’

  On their way to the stairs she stops and puts the swaddled child to its mother’s nipple, folding the mother’s arm over it for protection. The breast, when she touches it, is cold. She has a queer, bad feeling as if she’s done this before, but perhaps that’s just because so many things tonight are strange and yet familiar. She bends over and listens. The woman’s still breathing and as Betsy-Ann moves away she groans in her sleep. Betsy-Ann silently wishes her luck before straightening and taking Ned’s arm.

  25

  Clad only in her nightgown, Sophia is making her way across the rooftops. It is an effortless business: without any volition on her part, her steps soften, loosen, become long, low leaps, until she is merely skimming the slates, needing only to touch her foot to one before springing off again. There is considerable satisfaction to be derived from this floating motion, which is all quite natural. Somehow she has always known how it would feel to fly; she is ready to take off when the last, the longest, the endless step comes, after which she will have no further contact with anything resting upon the earth. In the meantime she churns the air with her hands, pulling herself along.