Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  She brushes his finger aside. ‘Is he better off tied to a wife?’

  ‘Of all ties that’s the most damnably . . . damnable. It’s a species of . . . of . . .’

  He trails off. Betsy-Ann waits and waits but he seems to have fallen asleep. At last he mumbles, ‘It can be done.’

  At least, that’s what she thinks he said, since her ears at once start up a stupid buzzing that means she can’t trust them. Or was it, can’t be done?

  Perhaps she’s dreaming.

  *

  Daylight. She’s revelling in the luxuries of the toilet table – cold cream, toothpowder, rose cologne, comfits to freshen the breath, an ivory brush and comb – when he slaps down a sealed pack on its marble surface.

  ‘What’s this?’ she says, turning. ‘You’re going out?’

  ‘It’s eleven, my sweet. At the private tables your industrious sharp is already up and tearing at the prey while Ned, like an idle ’prentice, puts pleasure before duty.’ He laughs. ‘As would any rational man. No, I’m not going out.’

  ‘Are we playing, then?’

  He bends to kiss the nape of her neck. ‘For love, for love.’

  Just as well: her stash, even had she brought it, would hardly suffice.

  ‘Very well, but first help me lace my stays.’

  ‘We’d only have to unlace them again. You can play in déshabille, surely? All the better to distract me with – you know the rig.’

  Betsy-Ann brushes her hair and sprinkles it with cologne while Ned fetches the little card table from the far side of the room, setting it at a comfortable distance from the fire.

  ‘Now,’ he says, unsealing the cards. ‘What shall it be?’

  ‘A queer thing,’ she observes, ‘a sharp playing a sharp.’

  ‘Novelty pleases. Come, your game.’

  ‘If we was in company, I’d say Loo.’

  ‘Loo? Where have you been, my dove?’

  She blushes to think how near she was to wearing the little fawney with its inscription. ‘Don’t you remember we used to play sometimes? Catharine was fond of it, and Lina.’

  ‘And I rode a hobby-horse – during the last Age. I beg to inform you that no person of fashion sits down to Loo, these days. It is most extremely decayed.’

  ‘What, nobody at all?’

  ‘Perhaps an old squaretoes, here and there – your booby squire, dining off a boiled ox, bones and all, with a dried pippin.’ He begins to shuffle. ‘And as you observed, we are not enough for Loo. Here, ask any card.’

  ‘Pam.’

  ‘Always your darling.’

  So he hasn’t quite forgotten. He is, indeed, always her darling.

  No doubt about it, Ned does her credit. She watches him drop the cards like any cack-handed fool, then sweep them up, seemingly flustered.

  ‘Bravo,’ says Betsy-Ann, knowing not a picture will be out of place.

  When she examines her hand, she laughs out loud: there is Pam’s melancholy face gazing off into the distance, surrounded by a gallery of kings and queens. When Ned sets himself to please, he excels. It is like their best times together: the joys gathered beneath Kitty’s nose, the more defiant days of Covent Garden.

  He winks. ‘I wager a pretty fellow has come to see you.’

  ‘Pretty, aye, but he looks sulky.’

  ‘That’s because I’ve trained him to my hand,’ he says, with a lewd grin. ‘He’s accustomed to find his pleasure there and nowhere else.’

  He holds up his own cards. For each of her queens he holds in reserve a king, and for each king, an ace. It is, she sees, calculated to a hair’s breadth. They abandon the game while Ned demonstrates the rig.

  ‘Naturally a man can’t beat Pam,’ he observes with a wink, ‘but once he’s gone ―’

  ‘Here, give them to me.’

  She lays aside the important cards, inserts them and tries the shuffle, Ned instructing her: take a grip with your thumb, it’s this way not that way, hold the cards so and count off, one, two. She deals, asking Ned to hold up his cards. There he is: Pam, flanked by nobility and royalty. She checks her own, laying them on the table beside his. How could a flat, dealt these, understand that he held a losing hand? Not only would he be done to a turn, but he would surely blame himself.

  ‘My own work, you know,’ Ned says. ‘An entirely new thing.’

  ‘I never made up a rig in my life,’ says Betsy-Ann, delighted.

  ‘Am I good to you, my doe?’

  She replies with a kiss.

  ‘You know, I suppose, that a man can bring anyone he wishes to this place?’

  She shrugs.

  ‘But I don’t wish,’ Ned says. ‘I don’t frequent it. I came only for you.’

  Betsy-Ann holds back the words, ‘That’s my eye,’ but it seems he reads them in her expression, for he adds, ‘Not a word of a lie, Mrs Betsy. I miss our old times.’

  ‘Then it’s a pity you ―’

  Ned holds up a hand. ‘No need to remind me, I assure you.’ He looks melancholy, and all the handsomer for it: a little goose would kneel before him, embrace his thighs and plead, take me back, take me back. He would recognise his cue, would raise her, take her in an embrace and promise never to part – what bliss! And what a blunder, since he’s already warned her off, and since Ned pays court just as long as some part of the woman remains unconquered.

  ‘I’m kept on short measure, these days,’ he says. ‘She thinks to raise her value by rationing.’

  So she knows him that well already. Betsy-Ann supposes he wants to go back to bed and wonders if she has time to chew one of the sweet comfits when she realises that’s not his game. ‘Do you know, Betsy, I’m still in hock to Ma?’

  Is he asking her to settle the score with Haddock’s? She feels a twist of panic: she hasn’t the readies for that sort of kindness and besides, it’d make her a fool.

  ‘I thought your autem mort was a fortune?’

  ‘Up to a point.’

  ‘So you’re not ―’

  ‘The truth, Betsy, is that from being saddled with one female, I’ve gone to being saddled with two. At least Ma is a beauty, or was before she sported so much blubber. That’s more than you can say for Mrs Zed.’ He’s working up to something. Moving closer, he takes her hand between his. ‘I can get free of the pair of them, if you . . .’ He gives her the benefit of his most imploring expression. She guesses now what’s coming and pulls her hand free, clenches her fists to keep him off ―

  ‘I can get away, my darling, if only you’ll teach me the Spanish trick.’

  Betsy-Ann looks down. He’s too fly to snatch at her again, but his hands are clenched.

  ‘With that rig, I can make a clean sweep. Tell Ma to kiss my arse.’ His voice loses its edge, softens, grows more intimate. ‘I can set you up again, my dove. Picture it. The two of us, just as we were.’

  Paying the bagnio is nothing to this. The Spanish trick came from Mam; it’s the one thing she’s never shared. Giving him that would be like tearing the heart out of her breast. She stares at him, tears rising in her eyes, the elegant glitter all around dissolving into sodden misery like rain in clay country.

  She says, ‘I’ll show you the bridge of cards ―’

  ‘A very pretty trick, indeed, but what I need is the Spanish.’

  ‘I can’t, Ned, you know I can’t. My mother told me to ―’

  ‘Your feelings do you credit, love, but what difference can it make? Pardon my bluntness but your people are dead ―’

  ‘Harry’s not.’

  ‘Dear child, I’m not such a fool as to trumpet where it came from! What do you take me for?’

  She isn’t sure what she takes him for. It occurs to her that perhaps his ‘treat’ has been only for this, and Betsy-Ann Blore merely another Mrs Zedland. Not for the first time with Ned, she feels as if someone has stuck a shiv between her ribs; yet there sits her lover, those black diamonds of his shining with hope. No man ever looked less cunning than Ned at this moment. He
could pass for a bridegroom, thinks Betsy-Ann, taking breakfast, with his new wife blushing with mingled shyness and delight at last night’s discoveries. Even in debauchery there’s always been something boyish about him.

  She says, ‘Harry would know, if he ever saw it used,’ though Harry knows nothing of the trick, which passed from mother to daughter. Women have their secrets, as well as men.

  ‘But how could he see it?’ asks Ned, practised in the art of pushing others round the chessboard. ‘He’s not admitted to the establishments where I spread my net. Just think, my honey. Think how snug we’d be.’

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting Sam?’

  ‘O, Sam!’ He waves dismissively. ‘The merest sot!’

  ‘So you said before.’ She fixes him with an accusing eye. ‘Who was it begged me to stay with him? Your great understanding! Christ knows, I heard enough of it! In honour, you said, in honour.’

  ‘How many times, child? I never thought he could win. It damn near broke my heart.’

  Damn near, thinks Betsy-Ann. No more than that?

  29

  Before Sam Shiner was himself shorn by Morson, he and Ned often joined forces to shear those lambs who came wandering among the tables. Sam was celebrated among sharps for the extreme delicacy of his fingers, which impressed even Ned: ‘Put a picture a hair’s breadth out, he’ll feel it.’

  ‘Takes more than good fams,’ said Betsy-Ann.

  ‘True, and nothing is neglected. Shall I paint you the picture? There’s Sam, in his wool, and me in lace. Not a glance between us, we haven’t the pleasure of each other’s acquaintance. The flats don’t take to me.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Betsy-Ann, surprised. ‘Surely you want ―’

  ‘I’m the bonnet, my dear. And I flatter myself I cover Sam tolerably well.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Prattle, mainly. A pound of prattle to an ounce of wit. They distrust me from the start, and never stop watching my hands.’

  ‘While all the time Sam does the business.’

  ‘He’s his part to play, too – he’s the Plain Man, pursing up his face at my sallies, as if to say, Who’s this fopling? They consider him no end of an honest fellow.’

  ‘And so between them both, you see, they licked the platter clean?’

  ‘Dear Prodigy. How well you understand the world.’

  Betsy-Ann liked the sound of this Shiner, but when Ned brought him to the rooms off Covent Garden, she drew back. Though Shiner would take nothing but small beer, his blue eyes clung so moistly that she felt them sticking on her skin.

  ‘Your friend has a letch for me,’ she informed Ned afterwards.

  ‘He shows admirable discrimination.’

  ‘Admirable discrimination! I’d call it slobbering, myself.’

  He said lightly, ‘How refined you’ve grown, my dear,’ and Betsy-Ann’s cheeks burned.

  ‘You needn’t fling it in my face, Ned.’

  ‘Damme, my tongue’s so sharp I cut myself sometimes.’ He kissed her hand, bowing his head in a gesture of contrition. ‘Shiner’s susceptible to the Sex, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t like him.’

  Ned shrugged. ‘You needn’t see him, except when he’s with me.’

  About the same time, letters started to arrive from Kitty. Ned would read them aloud. He had a sly knack of imitating his mother’s voice, particularly its sudden shifts from dove-like cooing to the screech of an angry crow. Betsy-Ann laughed. She kept the laugh in her mouth even when Kitty offered Ned two beautiful sisters, though she saw it now: how clearly she saw it! Every whore in the parlour, a weapon in Kitty’s hand.

  Ned snorted – ‘She forgets I’ve already seen the livestock’ – and continued to read.

  ‘Are they so dimber?’ For the life of her Betsy-Ann couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Fishwives. Ma should keep her trash for Harris’s.’

  As the weeks passed and Kitty drew her purse-strings tighter, it became hard to obtain credit. Though the butcher and the vintner were the most insistent, all the tradesmen seemed to raise their snouts to the wind at once, sniffing out weakness and ‘howling like a pack of wolves’, as Ned put it. Betsy-Ann’s bracelets were returned to the jeweller but the howls continued. People of means were beginning to decamp for the country, so that Sam and Ned, for all their talent and industry, sometimes found themselves without an opening. There came a month when, the meat bill being at last settled, Ned’s winnings barely stretched to the rent on the rooms.

  ‘I could entertain here, if you wished,’ said Betsy-Ann. She needed all her courage to propose it, having forgotten neither Ned’s jibe at her ‘refinement’ nor his mother’s suggestion, in one letter, that she should earn their expenses on her back.

  ‘If I wished!’ Ned exclaimed. ‘Pray, why did I take you out of Ma’s place?’

  ‘To have me to yourself.’

  She would never say, ‘To spare me.’ Ned preferred not to reckon with the sufferings of the ‘sweet criminals’. Nevertheless, his refusal did much to comfort her.

  *

  Sam Shiner, unlike the Corinthian, was a saving man, notable even among sharps for his watchfulness. He drank mostly beer and stayed away from disorderly houses, preferring to visit a lady in Long Acre on Sunday evenings. He paid two guineas for the entire night and (Ned told Betsy-Ann) never occupied her without first donning a sheep’s-gut cundum. Shiner claimed that this arrangement, a decorous and long-standing one, suited them both.

  He maintained two good plain suits of clothes, which apart from the Long Acre lady constituted his principal expense and were essential for the role he played opposite Ned at the tables. All this Ned reported to Betsy-Ann with a certain amusement at what he called Sam’s ‘puritanism in debauchery’. Sometimes she thought she detected something like envy, for it seemed that Sam planted his money where it would grow, while Ned’s dribbled away in momentary pleasures and lasting debts.

  He called a few times at the rooms, always with Ned, and she was forced to recognise his quiet usefulness. To this man, in part, she owed her silk and linen, her soft mattress and pretty china. She was fly enough to be civil: never let it be said that Betsy-Ann Blore quarrelled with her bread and butter. Her distaste to his person, however, did not diminish, any more than his evident appreciation of hers. He would hang over her bosom as though about to snout and truffle there, while Ned affected not to notice. Later, when Shiner had gone and Betsy-Ann complained of him, Ned would say no more than, ‘If a man chooses to make an ass of himself, that’s his affair.’ Like Betsy-Ann, he would not quarrel with his bread and butter and besides, he disdained to be jealous.

  *

  ‘I should like a greyhound,’ said Betsy-Ann one afternoon.

  Ned stared at her. ‘A greyhound? Can’t you amuse yourself without?’

  ‘Surely you don’t grudge me, Ned? Only a little Italian one. All your ladies have them.’

  ‘O, ladies! Ladies want everything they see. I’ve no desire to be forever tripping over a cur.’

  ‘It’s something to love.’

  ‘You’ve got me to love.’

  ‘I mean company. When you’re at the tables.’ Recalling the previous week – during which he’d stayed out every night except one, and that only because he’d overdrunk himself the previous day – she started to pout.

  He said, ‘Sam and I are hard put to it, don’t you understand that? I can’t have another useless mouth.’

  Betsy-Ann abandoned the pout, a habit picked up at Kitty’s which had never come naturally to her, and drew herself up. ‘Another useless mouth? Pray, who taught you to handle the books?’

  He dismissed that with a noise of impatience. ‘Your cur will piss everywhere, the place’ll stink. Besides, I’m not paying for lapdogs or dog’s meat or cushions or any of it.’

  ‘I offered to entertain,’ said Betsy-Ann.

  ‘You are too good, Madam. But I don’t propose to make myself a keeping cully, maintaining a mistress for the benefit of
every strolling beggar.’

  ‘Beggar!’

  ‘Bishop, then, if you prefer. I still won’t have it.’

  ‘Very well, I shall just sit here and love you.’ She gave a frigid curtsey. ‘Lovable as you are.’

  After that Ned slept awhile, so as to be fresh later on, and went out without any supper, telling Betsy-Ann, ‘They’ll feed me where I’m going.’

  She took the hint and didn’t wait up, but could find no rest in bed, where she lay sleepless, anger heating her like wine. Hadn’t she already given up her jewels, the best pieces she possessed? He’d no call to beg and plead: she’d parcelled them up directly and presented them with a kiss, keeping back only his first gifts: the earrings and the little fawney with the red heart.

  What a daisy! She thought of his mother’s pearls, great ropes of them. Kitty’s sort never stopped angling: for rings, for gowns, for carriages, houses and land.

  Could any lover worthy of the name begrudge such a trifle as a dog? She’d known many a man who’d abandoned wife and children to smile indulgently on a whore who petted pups and kittens. It was natural that the Sex should find these little creatures appealing, and some culls found irresistible the toying and whispering that they inspired in ladies of pleasure: for such men as these, a kitten nestling in a white bosom was as good as a dose of Spanish fly.

  As for Ned, what would it cost him, after all? Scrimping was what men did with their wives. A keeper had to be open-handed, or his doe would wander into someone else’s field.

  With that thought came fear: did Ned wish her to wander? She’d never seen him so ill-humoured, or so beset by debt. In the seraglio he’d gamed with the best of them, throwing gold about like a nabob: Betsy-Ann now understood what she had failed to grasp at the time, how little he controlled the supply. Kitty had wasted no time in cutting it off. Ever the strategist, she’d known just how to have him.

  Some said you should husband your resources. That, too, was easier said than done. How many fellows of the middling sort had she heard in Kitty’s parlour, boring the company with their debts? So common were they that Kitty complained that they lowered the tone. The wretches would sit spouting resolutions – to repent, give up their evil ways, no more gaming, whoring, lushing – then call for a fresh jug and continue to drink till they fell from the chair. She didn’t think they were shamming, just overcome with hopelessness. Betsy-Ann knew nobody who’d got out of debt. She herself had never tried it; never, until now, even considered it.