Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  ‘Could what – turn Methodist?’

  ‘In sure and certain hope of resurrection, at any rate.’ He catches her smiling at that. ‘I trust you’re pleased?’

  So pleased is Betsy-Ann that she’s tried sending Liz for nantz and leaving the open bottle on the table. She’s on the lookout for the blessed just this once that will end his career as tea-and-beer man, but it’s a long time coming – a cursed unlucky time, too, with the moon waxing and a clear sky full of frost. Nothing doing for resurrectionists: a full moon and a quiet churchyard. She wheedles, ‘Don’t it make you poorly, though, Sammy, giving up so sudden?’

  Sam considers. ‘I see better these days.’ He raises his eyebrows as he did when he said Haddock’s. After that, she doesn’t want to know what he can see.

  Next day she’s restless, cudgelling her brains. How can she get word to Ned? She could slip Liz sixpence to write a note and deliver it. Then she realises: even if she directs the old woman to the right street, and Liz has the strength to creep there, she still can’t describe the house. And suppose his autem mort got hold of it, what then?

  Taking the cards from the shelf, she sets herself to practise. She can’t ask Shiner to watch her while she’s drilling: that would be to teach him the trick, and if she won’t give it to Ned, she won’t give it to Sam. Much good it’d do him, with his ruined hand, but still.

  She lines up the books and plants them, idly flicking backwards and forwards through the pack as if to amuse herself. Sam sits by the window, drumming his fingers on the ledge.

  ‘Look here, Betsy.’

  She ignores him. He has a habit of pointing out little oddities – a pigeon with a broken wing, a beggarwoman wearing a man’s wig to keep her head warm – and calling her to the window to witness them. His drunken time put a stop to that, but now he’s started up again.

  ‘Look here,’ he repeats. ‘Look.’

  Suppressing a sigh, she goes to the window. Below in the street is a dwarf, a man in a full-sized coat turned up at the cuffs and cut short across his knees. The dwarf is dragging a kind of sled behind him, laden with tarpaulin tied up with rope.

  ‘Now where’s he going with that?’ Sam murmurs as if to himself. ‘It’s near as big as he is.’

  ‘How should I know?’ There’s something pitiful in the sight of so small a man tugging so awkward a load and she turns away from the window.

  ‘Makes you think,’ Sam says. ‘Looks like he’s pulling a dead kinchin.’

  ‘That’s your trade, preying on your mind.’ Betsy-Ann sits again and takes up the cards. ‘He’s carrying goods.’

  ‘A kinchin’s goods, ain’t it?’

  He seems low in his spirits. Now might be the moment to propose a cheering glass.

  ‘Betsy-Ann.’

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘I don’t care for the resurrection lay.’

  ‘Nobody cares for it,’ says Betsy-Ann. ‘Here, how about a warming drop of ―’

  Shiner bursts out, ‘I hate it, Betsy. I can’t hardly stand myself.’ He stares at her, mouth compressed, eyes swimming. Caught off guard, Betsy-Ann stares back. She’d forgotten how he was once, a man capable of turning things over in his mind, of drawing a line, saying, That’s as far as I go. Now he’s capable again, and miserable as only a sober resurrectionist can be.

  He says, ‘Suppose I was to pike.’

  Betsy-Ann’s stomach turns over. ‘He’d hunt you down,’ she says, snapping shut her fan of cards for emphasis.

  ‘ I won’t peach, Betsy. I’ll swear any oath he likes.’

  ‘An oath!’ Betsy-Ann looks pityingly at him. Who’d swear a cockerel not to crow, when you can just wring its neck?

  ‘You’re his sister. He won’t make you a widow-woman.’

  She could agree. It’s a way out for her – urge him on, get him to pike and leave the rest to Harry – but at the thought of it her insides go cold. Whoring’s one thing, setting up a murder another. She snaps her fingers. ‘He’d do it like that. Christ, Sam! I’m sick of telling you!’ Go back on the nantz, she silently urges him. It’s suited you this long.

  But of course it doesn’t suit him any more. He wants to be sober now and keep an eye on her. Betsy-Ann could weep.

  ‘I need blunt,’ he says, scratching his head.

  ‘You’ve got blunt.’

  ‘I need more.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Change of air. He can’t look for me forever.’

  I wouldn’t bet on it, thinks Betsy-Ann, but she holds her tongue because it’s hopeless, he might as well be deaf. Besides, fancy’s painting her a pretty picture in which Sam doesn’t figure: herself at the window of a new lodging, watching Ned come down the street. She’s tearing herself in two as she says, ‘Don’t cross him, Sam.’

  ‘Damn your advice.’

  Betsy-Ann’s come to the end of her strength: she can’t go on. ‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Be a fool, if you’ve set your heart on it.’

  ‘But will you help me?’ Sam says. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘There’s stock put by.’

  He snatches up her hand and kisses it. She stands ill at ease, arm extended, making no move to embrace him. How he’s lowering himself, she thinks. When he raises his face to hers, his voice is husky.

  ‘You’re a diamond. Take that nantz, will you? I don’t want it round the place.’

  She nods. He widens his eyes again in the way she has come to distrust. ‘You’re a good mort, though,’ says Sam Shiner.

  35

  ‘Sophia, have you been in my study?’

  Edmund’s voice, though polite, has the effect of trapping Sophia’s breath in her throat. She forces herself to look up slowly from her newspaper, as if reluctant to leave off reading.

  ‘No, Edmund. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Something’s been moved.’

  ‘Oh?’ She hopes she looks sufficiently puzzled. ‘If I went there, I’d be sure to leave everything in place. May I ask what you’ve lost?’

  ‘I didn’t say I’d lost anything.’

  ‘I thought ―’

  ‘Someone’s moved my pistols.’

  Sophia starts. ‘You have pistols?’

  ‘Like most gentlemen,’ he says, evidently enjoying her dismay. ‘And have even been known to fire them. You may now worry to your heart’s content.’

  ‘Edmund, don’t.’

  ‘Don’t what?’

  Joke about something so terrible, she was about to say, but his amusement acts as an astringent upon her so that she says instead, ‘Surely you would never be so stupid as to demand satisfaction?’

  ‘Perhaps another man may call me out, and I be obliged to meet him. But if I did, I’d be sure not to tell you.’ She can’t tell if he’s mimicking her. ‘One doesn’t frighten the ladies for nothing.’

  No indeed, thinks Sophia: you have always some purpose. ‘Quite right,’ she says. ‘Die first and tell me afterwards.’

  Her husband almost smiles. ‘I’ve no intention of duelling, you goose.’

  ‘Then why did you want the pistols?’

  ‘You persist in misunderstanding me. I didn’t want them, I noticed they’d been moved. Not at all the same thing.’

  ‘O! Not at all.’

  ‘So you know nothing about it?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she repeats, nettled at the repeated question. ‘The people to ask are the servants.’

  ‘I am quite of your opinion. Suppose you ask them.’

  He is gone. Sophia remains sitting with the paper open before her, her eyes focused on a grease-mark on the opposite wall. She finds herself simultaneously noting that she must have the mark rubbed with bread, even while she considers what Edmund has just told her.

  It astounds her he can talk in this half-teasing, half-bullying fashion when by night she has to endure his repeated assaults. The first occasion was only the most violent one; he still comes to her chamber upon occasion and woe betide her if he finds the door bolted against him. She has
tried that and it does not answer.

  How weak are the Sex at all times, how ill-equipped for defence! How much more difficult to resist one who attacks in the marital bed, his ring upon her finger! Resigned to the futility of resistance, Sophia does her best to shorten the ordeal by yielding directly. He takes what he has come for, then retires to his own chamber with its unsoiled mattress. His wife lies in darkness, staring upwards, her mind as frenzied as her body is motionless. When she is at last able to sleep, she dreams of foulness proliferating within her, of worms thick as ropes coiling about her womb, lying packed beneath the skin of her breast.

  Yet morning after morning she awakes to find her body apparently sound; if disease mines within, it mines unseen. Nor has Edmund struck her again. To her astonishment – considering what has passed between them – it appears he can still be pacified by animal satisfaction. At times it even appears to produce a mechanical affection: his you goose, as he dismissed her fears of the pistols, was not unkindly spoken. She was aware of something similar after that first hateful time: a few hours afterwards Edmund was already talking as if nothing untoward had occurred, as if the memory of it had fallen away from him even as he rose and dressed. Sometimes he smiles at her, rallies her, as if with a little give-and-take they might yet be happy together.

  It is as if there were two Edmunds: the gentleman whose very person emanates refinement and the nocturnal brute who can mate without esteem. Even this she can comprehend: there is said to be a certain admixture of the animal in the make-up of every male, which a Christian, manly fellow makes it his business to subdue. What she cannot fathom is how the daylight Edmund, knowing what he knows, can talk to her as he does. But then she, taking her cue from him, responds in like fashion. She wonders what marital horrors are concealed beneath Mama’s words: I positively hated your papa, at first! But one shakes down, child. One shakes down.

  These days she weighs Edmund’s every speech, trying to judge how much truth it contains, how many lies. Does he have pistols? She has never noticed them, but supposes they are kept in a case.

  She sees him lying in a field, his waistcoat dark and sticky, herself kneeling beside him. Forgive me, he says.

  *

  Is he home? Betsy-Ann’s been backwards and forwards, forwards and back to the street-end. Twice she thought she saw him approach: each time, her heart came so far up her throat that she could have coughed it out, and then as the man drew nearer, she saw that he wasn’t Ned.

  Business is middling. The nantz went first, raising her hopes, but after that only trinkets and wipers. Hard luck, Sammy.

  What now? Shift her pitch and try elsewhere? After all the time she’s put in, surely it can’t be much longer. Ned will walk out of that door or better still, come towards her, so she can collar him before he gets home.

  She wasn’t thinking straight when she brought the cart. She fancied they might go off somewhere together, but it can’t be left unguarded; she’s tied to it like a tinker’s dog, trotting behind. She’s pushed the cursed thing so long now that she’s constantly re-crossing the tracks left by its wheels; perhaps it’ll wear a groove in the road, big as a ditch, and by the time Ned arrives she’ll be sunk down in it, never to be seen again.

  His house has a discouraging, shut-up air. The downstairs shutters are pulled to, either to keep in the warmth or keep out the spying eyes of such riff-raff as herself. There’s also the odd cheering detail such as the house number, forty-three – remember that, girl – and a scrap of string on the area railing, fifth rail from the end, just beneath the spiked arrow-head. To Betsy-Ann it shines out because she put it there: the merest twiddle while she leaned against the railing as if for weariness. Jack Ketch himself couldn’t tie a sweeter knot.

  The sky is dark even by Romeville standards. Ned, where are you? Once more she scans the street, her eye caught by a tall cove on the other side of the way, talking to a young woman. His back is turned to her. He’s sporting a fine coat, something about him . . . ? No, not Ned. At first Betsy-Ann assumes he’s a flesh-hound closing on the prey, but then the woman points as if to give directions. A lot of folk get lost round here, on account of the New Buildings.

  Here comes the rain! Stinging her face, beading the sleeves of her pelisse, it acts on those around her like a whipping: respectable men hasten towards their business, idlers strike out for the taverns, servants hoist baskets over their heads to keep off the wet. A few of the prowling women flock together and move off towards some nearby panney, while others dart into an alleyway just to her left.

  No point in staying now. All she’ll get is mud up to her arse, a bonnet like a squashed bun and her death of cold into the bargain. With a sigh of disappointment she turns the cart around, causing a passing coachman to curse her for a witless bitch.

  But wait. It’s the walk she recognises, even before the phiz: hurrying like the rest but slipping between them, no shoving. A flick of the brows: he’s seen her. At once her heart’s up in her throat again, worse than before: too bad about the limp bonnet, but perhaps he won’t notice.

  He’s only a few yards away now, and smiling.

  She can’t help calling, ‘Ned!’

  He takes another step and halts. She sees the joy drop from his face. His mouth works; he’s like a man paralysed, twitching back and forth before recovering the use of his legs, turning and diving into the alleyway.

  ‘Ned!’

  Betsy-Ann stands confounded, rain dripping from her front hair. Impossible to follow with the cursed cart. Damn the man, what’s got into him? She’d lay a hundred pounds he saw her: there was the black-and-white flash of the eyes full on, the smile, and then ―

  Someone taps her on the shoulder. Betsy-Ann gives a little cry as she flings around to find herself face to face with the man she noticed earlier.

  ‘You’re like a drowned whelp, Sis,’ says Harry Blore. ‘Reckon you’d be best in your own ken, don’t you?’

  It is a dreary traipse back to the rooms, Harry lumbering alongside but not offering to help with the cart, Betsy-Ann tormented by Ned’s flight. Why should he be afraid? In any particular way, that is. Most people fear Harry on sight – the damp and dispirited stragglers coming in the opposite direction take care not to meet his eye – but that’s only the common prudence of the streets.

  Walking with her hulking companion is like being taken up by the traps: others move aside at their approach, some of them glancing at Betsy-Ann with curiosity and even pity. There are no manacles, to be sure, but there’s that feeling of being for it, afraid to stay yet unable to move off.

  Betsy-Ann has the advantage of the onlookers, having studied Harry’s moods over the years as a cat studies a mousehole. One thing she can rely on: he loves to be praised, and even more to praise himself.

  ‘That’s a grand new coat you have on, Brother. New hat too, unless I’m mistaken.’

  As good as a disguise, she could have said. In them he can pass – on a dark day, with his back turned, from the other side of the street – for an almost-respectable man.

  Harry struts. ‘The tailor was for pinching and scrimping but I told him, Be damned with that, Harry Blore wants something worth wearing.’

  What gammon! Close up, she can see how the fabric strains across his shoulders. Harry was never at a tailor’s in his life: the coat is some cast-off purchased from a footman.

  ‘I’m told it sits well,’ Blore adds, by way of a nudge.

  ‘Vastly well. But then, you’re a fine figure of a man.’

  ‘So she says.’

  ‘An affair of the heart, Brother?’

  Harry remains modestly silent, but his answering leer makes as sinister a phiz as Betsy-Ann ever hopes to see. She gushes, ‘A beauty, I’ll be bound. Eh?’

  Harry grins. ‘Tall. Fair. Lush around the dairyworks.’

  ‘Gay company?’

  He doesn’t answer. Betsy-Ann supposes her dairyworks are company enough. She’s about to ask if he has these pouting bubbies – and the
lady attached to them – safely in his keeping, when Harry says, ‘How’s Shiner?’

  ‘A touch sickly, but tolerable.’

  He walks on a few steps, frowning. ‘Tolerable. You surprise me. He surprises me.’

  ‘He’s as hale as most, Brother.’

  Harry shakes his head. ‘My meaning is, he gets a good whack, yet here’s my sister behind a cart.’

  ‘O, don’t fret yourself about that.’

  ‘You like tramping about in the wet?’

  ‘I’ve goods on my hands. No point keeping them for the priggers.’

  ‘Shiner never said you had priggers.’

  Fat lot he cares. ‘Through the skylight.’

  Harry nods, as if to say that he understands now. She breathes more freely, despite the effort of pushing the load.

  ‘Why’d you go there, Betsy?’

  ‘Sam was already settled when I took up with him.’

  ‘Not the ken. Back there. Good run, is it?’

  ‘Never tried it before.’

  He purses up his lips as if in disbelief. Rain trickles off Betsy-Ann’s forehead into her eyes.

  ‘And what brings you here, Brother?’

  ‘Something and nothing.’

  When Sam opens the door she takes a good look at him, since that’s what Harry will do. Sam is pale, greasy, eager to please: a kinchin could smell the fear coming off him. He’s doomed, she thinks, as Harry strides towards the fire and Sam, having found a smile from somewhere, steps back out of his way.

  Her brother announces that he’s come to see his old trusty, his friend Sam Shiner, for mutual merriment: perhaps a bowl of something hot?

  ‘We’ve beer and lightning,’ says Betsy-Ann. ‘Shall I send Liz?’

  ‘She’ll be an eternity,’ says Sam. ‘You go. Get nantz, lemons – will they have lemons?’

  She shrugs.

  ‘If not, try at ―’

  ‘I know the drill.’ Betsy-Ann takes up the empty jugs. Looking sick at the prospect of being left with Harry, Sam produces a coin from his pocket and then, after some fumbling, two more.