Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  ‘No.’ Ned hesitated. ‘Indeed, I shan’t stay here. I’ve – taken rooms.’

  ‘Rooms? Where?’

  ‘In the New Buildings.’

  She thought: Never! Kitty’s, more like. But what did it matter, now? ‘Your Mister Shiner,’ she said, ‘he’ll clear everything that’s owed?’

  He bowed. She didn’t care whether the tradesmen were paid – she needed all her pity for herself – but she itched to give her new keeper any little trouble she could.

  ‘What if I pike off?’ she demanded, glancing back towards the piazza. ‘Suppose your coming man gets here and finds I’m a going woman?’

  ‘I hope you’re not such a fool.’

  She stiffened. ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Ned returned. ‘But you know how it is with a woman on the town. One false step and ―’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘Sam’s trusty. You’d do well to bear that in mind.’

  *

  That night she again lay sleepless. Wakefulness was no stranger to her; she knew every lump in the mattress. Now some other mort would lie here. A few words, a wager, and her time had ended. She lay on her back gazing up into blackness. Was death like this? An emptiness, a light, numb sensation. She closed her eyes, trying to escape into sleep, but the shrieks of a night reveller down in the square returned her to herself.

  Keshlie had died in bed, a year or so after her breaking-in. When the symptoms first showed themselves Kitty called in a physician – the girl was in demand, so it was as well to be sure – but his diagnosis was the inevitable one.

  ‘He said I was a very bad case,’ Keshlie whispered to her sister. ‘And he asked if any of them had no hair, you know, down there.’

  ‘And did they?’

  ‘Yes, some.’

  ‘Christ, Keshlie, you never told me!’

  ‘I didn’t know it was anything,’ Keshlie said. She seemed afraid she might be blamed.

  A ‘rose never blown upon’ was a commodity for which a bawd could charge the highest rates. Betsy-Ann was, of course, aware of this: both she and Keshlie, after their initiations, had been douched with ‘pucker water’ to disguise the damage and sold several more times as innocents. Even so, Betsy-Ann experienced extreme good fortune: it so happened that her early clients were men excited by seduction and rape. What she underwent at their hands was unforgettable, but by the standards of the brothel, far from being the worst.

  That worst was reserved for Keshlie, who was sold as a cure for the pox. Her fragility was an additional attraction – such a childish creature must surely be clean – and Kitty made the most of it. Then, when the infection began to show, she swept Keshlie from the premises before she could publicly sink from being a ‘sweet feast of love’ to a spectacle more likely to bring on a vomit. The seraglio could not be expected to support such cases, which were a drag upon trade. For them, there was the Lock Hospital.

  So to the Lock Keshlie went, but the disease had been working unseen within her for too long, and the cure did not take. She came out of the hospital poisoned with quicksilver, barely able to walk.

  By means of tears and pleading Betsy-Ann managed to extract a loan from Kitty. With it she rented a room, cramped and filthy but not too far from the seraglio, and there she installed her sister along with a nurse, a broken-down old woman who was paid to tend the fire and give Keshlie tea and slops whenever she could take them.

  On the day of Keshlie’s death, Betsy-Ann obtained permission to visit her as soon as she had finished with her last cull of the afternoon. She bade the man goodbye with languishing smiles and sighs, all the time wishing him in hell, before throwing on her pelisse and hurrying to the house where Keshlie lay. Panting, Betsy-Ann pounded up the stairs and struggled with the lock. Even before she had the door properly open, her heart misgave her: a waft of stale, cold air from within told her that no fire had been lit that day. Keshlie lay on the bed without so much as a sheet, her cheeks fallen in and the inside of her mouth showing black. The nurse was nowhere to be seen, but the landlady was already peering round her door, wanting to know what Betsy-Ann proposed to do.

  ‘I’ve no money to bury her with,’ Betsy-Ann said.

  The woman looked sour and said that was strange, in a wench so well turned-out.

  ‘None of it’s mine.’ Those were the last words she spoke for some time, being almost strangled with sobs. The landlady’s face softened. She said that in return for Betsy-Ann’s pelisse, she would arrange for Keshlie to go to the poor’s pit.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, if I can. I’ve no call to keep her here.’

  Betsy-Ann unfastened the pelisse.

  ‘Dear God, the poor’s hole!’ Kitty had exclaimed, pouting in disgust. ‘Surely you can’t wish to see her coffin shoved in there with the rest of them, all . . .’ She shook her head.

  ‘I’ve no wish to see it, but ―’

  ‘Then don’t speak of such things.’

  ‘― it’s her grave. My sister’s grave.’

  Kitty stared. ‘You did all you could. Your duty now is to work off some of what you owe.’ Perhaps Betsy-Ann’s expression was rebellious, for Kitty caught hold of the young woman’s hand and marched her to the room near the front door where the bullybacks sat at their card games.

  Kitty clapped her hands for attention. ‘This one,’ she announced, pointing to Betsy-Ann. ‘Never mind what she tells you, she’s not to go out.’

  The Mother charged interest and kept tally of every farthing, so that Keshlie’s sickness and the loss of the pelisse sank Betsy-Ann further into debt. She spent the morning of her sister’s burial chafing the withered parts of an elderly gentleman, a service known in the trade as ‘raising the dead’.

  And now she was through with the Hartrys. Bad luck to the pair of them, mother and son: it was an evil hour when she flew under their net.

  Indeed, she was better off without Ned Hartry. Much better. Much . . . Betsy-Ann gave up the struggle. She cried in the darkness until her face turned to raw meat.

  *

  At half past one the following day, her features pale and swollen, she was standing at the window of the apartment, surveying the piazza. The strollers below, knowing themselves observed by their fellows if not by Betsy-Ann, carried themselves with the usual swagger and sparkle of a Romeville crowd, even the beggars plying passers-by with an insolence that was their version of wit.

  To Betsy-Ann’s experienced eyes nearly all those in the piazza fell into two groups, the one’s pleasure being the other’s profit, and her sympathy lay entirely with the profit-seekers. From time to time she would recognise a face: a street girl noticed on another day or a wench who once worked at Kitty’s. These she would watch with interest to see what fortune had in store for them: a pretty young fellow, kind-hearted and open-handed, or one of those miserly debauchees whose ruined constitutions demanded refinements for which they were loath to pay. Some of the shabbier women continued wretchedly pacing the piazza for hours on end. She watched them come round and round, dragging their feet for weariness: no supper and perhaps no lodging either.

  Since taking possession of these rooms, Betsy-Ann had watched the heaving shoals outside with the blessed sense of having been lifted out and placed in a calmer sea. Now she felt herself tossed back again, one fish among hundreds.

  Her feelings towards Ned had softened with daylight. Though she could never, never hold with what he’d done, it might be considered an act of kindness, a damn fool way of doing her good. Suppose she piked off now, leaving Shiner empty-handed? He’d think she and Ned were in it together: it was how he and Ned pulled in the flats, a lay he thoroughly understood. Who knew what Shiner might find it in himself to do, what revenge he might take on Ned, after that?

  This morning she had risen and moved about the place with an intense awareness of doors slamming shut behind her: her last cup of chocolate, her last putting-on of her stockings in this bedchamber, her last spying out of the win
dow. She was going to play her part. What else did a whore ever do?

  She wondered what Shiner had in store for her. She hoped there would at least be a window.

  He was punctual to his time. She saw him approach just before two and at once turned away: he should not think she was looking out for him.

  His footstep was light on the stairway. Cock-a-hoop. Before Betsy-Ann could answer to his knock, he’d opened the door for himself. Ned must have handed over the key. She was caught unprepared, betrayed as Shiner stood masterful in the doorway, his blue eyes gleaming.

  ‘I trust you are ready,’ he said.

  Perhaps this was how it felt to be mad: like two women in a single body, one holding up her head as she went down the front steps, the other thinking, This is Sam Shiner, Sam Shiner, yet continuing to walk beside him, right into the carriage. Shiner patted her hand, a satisfied smile on his lips, as the driver loaded up her boxes.

  Though Shiner still occupied the plain old lodging once described by Ned, his landlady had agreed to let him an extra chamber at the house back. The few rooms were spare and precise: everywhere the mark of the meticulous man. Betsy-Ann walked about stupidly touching the walls, except in the new room where Shiner explained that she would be able to enter in a day or two; he had engaged a man to paint and paper but the job was not yet complete.

  ‘For you,’ he said, holding open the door to show her. The room was almost empty, the window big and light. A tree outside cast green shadows onto the floorboards and she realised that the window gave onto someone’s garden: a city man’s notion of a rustic retreat, in which she was to provide the birdsong.

  So many knick-knacks as she’d had in her Covent Garden rooms! She wondered what Shiner had made of the place: was he impressed by the comfort in which Ned had set her up, or disgusted by her extravagance?

  ‘I hope you find it satisfactory,’ Shiner said. As if she had a choice in the matter. She looked round at it all, plain as a nunnery, and nodded.

  ‘You’ll be known as Mrs Shiner.’

  ‘What of the other Mrs Shiner?’

  ‘I’m not spliced.’

  ‘You’ve a friend, though, haven’t you? Ned told me.’

  Shiner turned to her in surprise – ‘He did?’ – then fell silent a moment, picking with a thumbnail at something between his front teeth.

  ‘Shall you give her up?’ Betsy-Ann persisted.

  ‘Yes. Poor Nancy.’

  So that was settled, if he intended to keep his word. You never knew with men. Shiner himself carried her box into the room she was to share with him – he kept no servants, she was to discover later – and stayed with her as she unpacked her things. She dearly wished he would go, but could scarcely order him from his own chamber. Worst of all was when she took out her blue silk. The light shook off it, as if some exotic bird were flying about the room: O, the times she’d had, the memories! She resolved there and then to sell it and never look on it again. But Shiner said, ‘I always thought you perfection in that gown, Mrs Shiner,’ and she knew it for her livery.

  The following week a man arrived with a box, pulling back some straw at the bottom to reveal a pup the colour of cinnamon. She recalled her words to Shiner – I’m not wapping you for the price of a greyhound – and bit her lip. But she’d wapped him anyway, and it wasn’t so bad: the simple act satisfied him, no filthy letches. And here was the dog. She might still have stood on her pride and sent it back, had the little thing not chosen that moment to raise its head from the box and look around, some straw behind one ear. Seeing its delicate whiskers, the honey of its eyes, she was lost. She reached into the box for it, taking it in her arms, and it at once pissed over her. Betsy-Ann burst out laughing. The man said it was nothing but fear: the dog would soon know its home. She kissed the top of its head, inhaling its biscuit smell.

  Some men can tolerate any amount of dirt provided it arises from horses or hounds. Not so Sam Shiner. On coming home he cast an anxious eye around the rooms, noting wet patches and torn paper. Betsy-Ann waited, enjoying his discomfiture. In the end he said nothing except, ‘Did I choose right?’

  She couldn’t deny it warmed her to him.

  From that time they began, though slowly, to shake down together. Even after the little dog vanished, stolen by someone who scaled the wall of the yard, the gift bred a certain kindness in Betsy-Ann. She could never love Shiner as she had the Corinthian, but she thought of him now as Sam: there was a steadiness between them, a trust you might say, that went on growing until Roderick Morson struck at it with his knife.

  She remembers the morning he came home, his fam bound up in a wiper. At first he wouldn’t unwrap it or talk about it. He sat awhile staring at the wall, then started up and hurried downstairs. Betsy-Ann hung over the banister.

  ‘Sam? Are you going out?’

  When he returned, he told her he’d talked with the landlady. They could no longer afford to rent the room with the green shadows in it. From now on, she’d be in with him entirely.

  30

  ‘Titus?’ Eliza says. ‘What’s it like, being a slave?’

  Surprised, he looks up from polishing the spoons. When he first came to England, people talked to him more kindly than in Annapolis. Since they seemed sympathetic, he thought they might ask about his family: whether they were people of importance, what language they spoke together, if he felt loneliness at being taken from them. He soon realised that they had little interest in that. What they most liked hearing was how he had been enslaved by his fellow blacks: they wanted tales of savagery, full of cannibalism and sacrifice, and to know how England seemed to him – didn’t London fairly knock him sideways, at first? Wasn’t it the finest place in the world? Then they would look pleased with themselves, and say, ‘Well, we won’t eat you here.’ As his speech improved, matters only became worse: if he spoke of what he had witnessed in Annapolis, they would fidget and say things like, ‘My brother was there on business, and found them extremely civil,’ and one man even told Dog Eye that no Maryland gentleman would behave so, and that the boy was a liar and deserved a whipping. They asked, but they did not want to know. So now he has stopped talking about Annapolis.

  ‘Launey said you get wages, like a servant,’ Eliza goes on. ‘Why’s that?’

  He shrugs. Dog Eye always paid him something, even before the marriage. The Wife thinks that he eats too much and does too little, but he did not ask to come here.

  ‘Were you a slave in Africa?’

  Now it starts. ‘No. My father was an important man.’

  Her face lights up. ‘From Ethiopia?’

  This, too, he has been asked before. Dog Eye explained to him that a famous Englishman wrote a story of an Ethiopian prince; even some ignorant people – like Eliza, who cannot read – have heard of it, and take it for truth.

  ‘That’s another country.’

  ‘Not Africa?’

  ‘Another part of Africa.’

  Her face falls. He is secretly glad to displease her; it is an effort to remain patient with a woman who pretends to be interested in you, but is really only puffed up at the idea of mixing with princes. He says, ‘Some men took me and sold me for a slave.’

  ‘Which is a better master – an Englishman or an African?’

  For an instant he considers taking the question seriously, before replying, ‘Englishman, of course.’

  She smiles. ‘I thought so. But the Abolitionists say it’s all the same! You’ve heard of the Abolitionists?’

  He has heard of the Abolitionists. Every time he meets with the word, so long and slithering and alien, it catches him out for a second, but he knows what it means. He waits for Eliza to tell him that they are a race of meddling busybodies, as he has heard elsewhere, but it seems he has exhausted her meagre stock of interest: she is content to smile and go on grinding sugar.

  What does it mean, master? Not the kidnappers. He would not dignify them with such a name: they were devourers of human flesh. He remembers being found, s
truggling in their sack: someone slit the top of it, pulling the fibres away from him where they had stuck to his skin. The rescuer was a man he had never seen before, who at once pushed him to the ground. Fortunate held his arms up over his head for protection, looking down at the sunburnt grass and the man’s scarred and dusty feet.

  He heard another person shaking out the girl child from her sack. Between splayed fingers Fortunate saw her fall to the earth, folding upon herself like cloth. The man who had taken the sack from her turned up her face, then with a disgusted noise let her drop back. It was the first time that Fortunate had seen the girl. He did not think she was from his village.

  Both men now stood staring at him. One of them bent to untie his feet, leaving his hands tied, then dragged him upright. Fortunate made a little coughing sound and the man understood: he felt in Fortunate’s mouth for the cloth and threw it away but did not speak to him.

  Leaving the dead child, they began walking towards the sun. Very soon they passed one of the kidnappers. It was the man, lying with his face to the ground and an arrow sticking up from his back. Where the blood was, the body glittered with flies. The man who had taken the girl from her sack went to pull out the arrow and the flies rose in a cloud. He listened for a while, then called out something. The other man went to him, Fortunate following behind.

  The woman kidnapper was lying on her back. The arrow had pierced between her breasts. Her breathing bubbled and rasped: she looked at the men with half-closed eyes. The men talked to one another, seemingly unsure. In the end they left the woman where she was and set off at a slow pace that told Fortunate they would be home before sunset.

  It was not so very far, but by the time they arrived he was staggering from hunger, thirst and fear. The men indicated that he should sit down while a woman sent a small boy up a tree for mangos. Fortunate’s hands were still tied, so the boy came to feed him. The sweet pulp of the fruit cleaned the dust from his lips and ran from the corners of his mouth. He looked around and saw a green country, greener than his father’s and seemingly close to a river.