Ace, King, Knave

by Maria McCann

  Clothes are flung about the bedchamber; the master’s razor and other personal items have vanished from the closet. There is a sharp stink on the air. Eliza looks round, lifts the lid of the commode and lowers it with a grimace of disgust.

  ‘He’s heaved up in there. Nice job for somebody, and don’t I know who!’

  ‘Dun,’ Fortunate suggests. ‘Afraid of Devil Dun.’

  ‘Could be.’ She flops onto the bed and sits there, gnawing at her thumb. A disrespectful action. She would not dare if the master were present.

  ‘He’d a soft spot for you,’ she says with a sly look at him. ‘Did he never drop a hint?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘You know what this means, don’t you? He’s gone.’

  ‘To Romeville?’

  Despite everything, she laughs. ‘Who taught you that word?’

  ‘Him.’

  ‘And he didn’t teach you what it was? We’re in Romeville now, you simpkin. But you can’t call it that in respectable company. You must say, London.’

  She’s teasing him. This dreary house, with its sour mistress, is London. He hasn’t forgotten Romeville: a savage, marvellous place, where the people live by night.

  ‘I wouldn’t be in your shoes,’ Eliza says, her face softening. He knows this saying about shoes: in the kitchen, it means a cake is sunken or a sauce curdled. ‘She’ll get rid of you now, you may depend upon it.’

  She begins a story about a housekeeper she once knew, dismissed by the mistress of the house while the master was away in Italy but Fortunate, plunged in misery, barely hears her.

  Dog Eye has abandoned him.

  43

  The Pinched Wife stands a long time staring at the ashes. Before fetching her Eliza hurried to Fan, who now stands at the door, fingers twisted in her apron. All three women are the colour of watered milk.

  The Wife murmurs something. Fortunate is unable to understand what she is saying, and perhaps the maids also, since they exchange furtive glances.

  ‘If I may speak, Madam.’ For once, Eliza is solemn enough.

  ‘Yes?’ The Wife does not look at her.

  ‘The drawer’s been sticking lately. Something wrong in the lock. I heard the master pulling at it yesterday.’

  ‘I see,’ the Wife says, looking not at the desk but at the ashes.

  Fortunate says, ‘He’s taken his pistols, Madam.’

  The Wife says, ‘They’re on the shelf.’

  ‘The case is, Madam, but it’s empty.’

  ‘Why would he leave the case?’ The Wife goes to it and opens it up. Folding back the lid, she stands a moment with her hands on the leather, staring out from the study window. To Fortunate she looks as if she is trying to foresee what will come of this. Only now does it come to him that the missing pistols change everything. They mean a duel. He should have held his tongue.

  ‘Tell Mr and Mrs Letcher I’m indisposed and must beg to be excused. Offer them more refreshment before their journey. Fan, I shall want you. Come to me in half an hour.’

  Within her closet Sophia takes out her favourite writing paper, a gift from Mama. Extraordinary, the comfort afforded by such an inert and flimsy substance, and at such a time – in those very moments when one might fancy it beneath notice. The inkstand she brought with her from Buller Hall, her rose-scented sealing wax: each speaks to her as a friend, reassuring her that present troubles represent an eruption of anarchy soon to be repressed, after which life will continue to conduct itself comme il faut. The very curves of the inkstand insist upon it.

  And yet, comme il faut is precisely what her life has never been. Always there have been spots of rottenness, maggots deep in the core: Papa’s vanity, her ‘little weakness’, the dishonesty of her parents in concealing it before the marriage, her craven, reprehensible feelings for Edmund. Perhaps misery and uncertainty are, after all, the way of the world and everything else mere surface.

  What would a poor woman say? Surely if anyone understands trials and tribulations it is a widow without means. Could she but find some decent but penniless creature, spotless in her person (since otherwise Sophia could not endure to sit with her), she would have someone to consult with. ‘Speak frankly,’ she would say. ‘Do you consider our existence to be made up entirely of suffering?’

  The conversation can never take place; her acquaintance does not extend to paupers. Nor could she bear to uncover her own wounds, to respond to questions probing, lancet-like, into the inflamed and infected body of her marriage. Thank God she sent Hetty away! – and yet, she realises, her husband’s departure is a development of which her cousin must be told. She may require the assistance and protection of Hetty’s husband: who knows what debts, what secrets, what crimes Edmund has left behind him? Suppose that degraded hulk of a man should return in search of him, force the door and find Sophia unprotected?

  If only it were possible to quit this house. Mama always maintained that a wife who ‘bolts’ puts herself entirely and irrevocably in the wrong, but may not a woman flee when her husband has already done so? In what sense does this leaking ship of souls – four females and a black boy – constitute a marital home?

  The closet surprises her by its warmth. She pulls the curtain aside – no risk of Edmund spying on her now – and wipes her brow, the skin of which is unpleasantly greasy. Dearest Hetty, she imagines writing. What follows? You are doubtless wondering ―

  Supposing she writes her letter now. Will there be another, a worse one, to write tomorrow? On the face of it, a duel seems inconceivable: what honour can Edmund possibly imagine himself obliged to defend? Yet every day men take up arms, knowing themselves in the wrong. Even so, it is difficult to imagine Edmund so engaged. He takes far too good a care of himself.

  Best write now. She pictures the words on her fine paper, sealed with the pink wax. This letter will require some delicacy of phrasing. Really, how warm the closet is for this time of year! More than warm, it is stuffy, quite intolerably so ―

  Something strikes her nose, filling her eyes with water. There is a voice, flat and toneless: ‘Madam.’

  Then a scratching sensation in her fingers. Another voice, toneless likewise: ‘Told you.’

  Sophia is unable to distinguish the words that follow. Her closed eyelids appear to her as blood-coloured curtains. The sensation in her hand softens, is now a patting, while the jumble of speech swells, gathers depth and nuance and becomes recognisable at last as the familiar voice of Fan, saying, ‘There, you see?’

  Sophia raises the red curtains of her eyes on a puzzling scene: the two maids standing over her, one on either side.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘You asked me to come for a letter, Madam.’ Fan’s manner, calm and respectful, suggests there is nothing in the world the matter. Sophia, recalling the blow to her nose and the shock of pain that resulted, is about to ask what happened when she observes her vial of hartshorn lying upon the toilet table.

  Fan says, ‘Mr and Mrs Letcher left word they’d be back tomorrow.’

  The dead weight Sophia escaped in unconsciousness promptly rolls over her again, crushing her: Edmund, gone. She sits motionless. Everything that suggests itself to her, even rising from the chair, strikes her as futile.

  ‘You fainted, Madam. Shall I help you to bed?’ Fan suggests at last.

  ‘I meant to write to Mrs Letcher.’

  ‘Your delicate health . . .’ Eliza allows her voice to trail off insinuatingly.

  Indignation lends Sophia strength enough to snap, ‘I wasn’t aware I’d discussed my health with you.’

  For all that she bows her head, the girl’s face is sly rather than humbled. She is a coarse creature, and has the insolence one might expect in a household where servants are told more than the wife.

  Fan tries to soften the thing down. ‘Pray excuse the impertinence, Madam. Eliza meant well.’ Yet she, too, has a curious way of looking at Sophia, as if she has glimpsed new lights in her. Without a master, the househ
old has begun to dissolve: Sophia senses its dissolution as she might a physical, palpable process.

  ‘Eliza,’ she says, ‘go to the kitchen.’

  To mark the punishment, Fan, the favoured, may remain. She regards her employer with such an expression of preparedness, of faith in her own abilities, that it is a comfort in itself.

  ‘Does Mrs Launey know Mr Zedland is out?’

  ‘I can’t say, Madam.’

  ‘Then tell her to keep something hot for him.’

  ‘What I mean, Madam, is that she went out after dinner and hasn’t come back.’

  ‘After dinner?’

  ‘About three o’clock. I pray God she hasn’t met with thieves. She has a gold brooch, and other things.’

  Sophia considers this. ‘Could we send Titus to ask?’

  ‘Ask who, Madam?’

  ‘The watchmen, of course.’

  ‘The Charleys won’t have seen anything.’ Fan is emphatic. ‘They never do.’

  ‘Well. Let us hope she soon returns. In her absence, do you think you and that silly wench could put together a cold supper?’

  ‘Of course.’ The maid goes to the door, hesitates, and turns back. ‘If I may ask, Madam. When you are finished, might we also serve ourselves?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Sophia answers. ‘Take whatever you wish.’

  Left alone, she stares into the mirror, a sibyl intent on divination. Does she detect a sickliness – a pallor? Could a woman of her complexion conceivably look any paler?

  Eliza’s mention of delicate health has struck terror into her. Mama has told her, more than once, of the faintness that comes from being enceinte, how Mama herself was prone to it, and how Aunt Phoebe’s swoonings were notorious. Once, when four months gone with Hetty, Phoebe was admiring a bed of roses when she toppled headlong into it. The gentlemen ran to lift her out; finding her face barely scratched, everyone cried out upon her good fortune and said it was a mercy she hadn’t lost an eye.

  Sophia’s flowers are overdue, and now she has fainted.

  Anything more precise than ‘overdue’ is beyond her unless she first consults her diary. Since the first faint stainings at the age of fifteen, her visitations have been irregular. She lives resigned to this inconvenience, believing it connected in some way with her weakness, a deficiency of one kind balanced by a superfluity of another: in her bodily make-up, anything to do with vessels and liquids can be relied upon to go wrong. As Dr Brunt told Mama so long ago, such difficulties are exacerbated by anxiety and of late Sophia has been nothing if not anxious.

  She runs her hands down the swell of flesh at the base of her stays. She will leave off tight lacing, if it is so. Surely it is not so? Yet as she sits, folded in upon herself, it seems that minute by minute an indefinable change comes upon her, a change so subtle that no figure of speech could convey its nature. There are no words for this consciousness, which cannot even be located; all she knows is that, until very recently, her bodily sensations were otherwise.

  Perhaps, then, it is so.

  At once her mind swarms. Edmund, a father: how she would once have welcomed this! How she might have blushed, informing him ―!

  There they are, all three of them, afloat upon the flaming surface of the Statue Lake. The little boy, clapping and crowing, is tenderly supported upon his mama’s knee. Mama holds up her head and looks about her with zest, blithe as a milkmaid in this fresh access of married happiness. Papa, bound to wife and child by the silken ropes of affection, rows with practised control towards the jetty and every so often fixes his black eyes, full of longing, gratitude, desire, upon the woman who has given him this precious jewel: a son.

  Perhaps he has other sons.

  The child’s busy hands, the seething glitter of sun upon waves and Edmund’s languishing, subjugated gaze vanish like a soap-bubble that, wavering prettily here and there, is drawn into a candle flame and so comes to grief.

  *

  It is dusk. Sophia stands at her chamber window, watching the inhabitants of that other world which is so strange to her, so familiar to him. This street is not reliably lit: flickers of torchlight show where an occasional passer-by has hired a link-boy, but most of those below either have no need of light or prefer not to be seen too clearly.

  Across the way another woman stands in a window much like hers, but where Sophia is concealed by darkness, the window opposite is illuminated by a well-trimmed lamp. Its occupant continually lets down her curls, brushes them and fastens them up again. She is a slovenly coiffeuse, but Sophia understands the artifice: as a means of displaying her hair, and suggesting the intimacies of the bedchamber, it could scarcely be bettered. When bored with this occupation, the woman heaves up the sash, leans out and scouts the pavement, occasionally greeting some person she recognises below. Withdrawing, she seems to lose interest in her hair and grows almost as motionless as Sophia herself, a still life whose frame is the window. Sophia has never before seen this woman, who appears to exist only by night.

  How different from her imaginings of married life in the capital, and how strange to think that Hetty was in Town only a few months earlier, staying with wealthy friends. What a delightful picture she painted! Even in May the city was abuzz, she wrote, with everything that could amuse and edify. Mr Garrick, returned from his travels, was once more in command at Drury Lane and Londoners looked forward eagerly to new productions. Hetty danced at balls, splendid in French silk; wearing her warmest pelisse, she attended a musical service at the Foundling Hospital. When not visiting or engaged in some party of pleasure (which pastimes seemed, to the dazzled Sophia, to fill up Hetty’s every hour) she found entertainment in reading those same memoirs of Mr Psalmanazar which her husband condemns as meretricious. Imagine, Sophia remembers her writing, the intellectual labour required to invent an entire language, alphabet and all! Had he been honest, what might he not have achieved? Sophia agreed: it was astounding that one so capable should have thrown away his brilliance upon the construction of a sham, which, directly it was known, must bring him into contempt.

  Her opinion has altered since then. She believes there are men whose souls compel them to deceit, whose genius finds its fullest flowering in the elaborate workings of betrayal.

  Instead of watching a slut comb her hair, Sophia should be exploring the waxworks and the Tower, dancing at Mrs Cornelys’s house and perhaps hearing the Mozart boy and his sister. She should be patronising public lectures, attending plays and operas, reading fashionable memoirs, visiting respectable families. In short, moving in good society.

  Is that the front door? Mrs Launey, returned home to explain herself at last? But no, the noise must have come from a neighbouring house, for a silhouette now detaches itself from the pavement on Sophia’s side and crosses towards the building opposite. The woman at once bends to throw up the sash, but Sophia, straining her eyes, can distinguish nothing more than a patch of shade. It flits a few more yards and dissolves, swallowed up into the gloom.

  *

  ‘Am I to understand that Mrs Launey and Titus have run off together?’

  Her own lamps are now lit, so that Fan and Eliza throw goblin shadows on the chamber walls. Predictably, Eliza fails to conceal a smirk at the notion of Mrs Launey’s absconding with the boy. The maids, thinks Sophia, are a study in contrasts. When she first came here, she thought them much the same, a misapprehension which it pains her to remember. She adds, ‘I was not aware that I had implied any indecency,’ but Eliza’s expression does not change. The girl is an imbecile.

  ‘What do you think, Fan?’ she demands, despairing of rational discourse with Eliza. ‘Could they be in league?’

  The maid looks doubtful. ‘They were never thick with one another.’

  ‘Then why should both of them leave? Is anything missing downstairs?’

  ‘Not as we can see, Madam.’

  ‘Can see? You mean you haven’t searched?’

  ‘For what, Madam? And it’s poor work searching at night.’

/>   She has a point. Sophia rubs her eyes, wishing she had gone to bed when Fan first suggested it: she would dearly like to sink down onto the closet table, pillow her head on her arms and sleep. ‘Did Titus ever talk of running away?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘What about the man who came here? Could Titus be in league with him?’

  ‘Oh, no, Madam.’ Fan is more emphatic on this head than any other. ‘He was frightened of him. I noticed it particularly.’

  Yet fear means nothing, Sophia realises: one scarcely imagines criminal association to be motivated purely by affection. Still, Titus seldom leaves the house. There seems no reason to think him connected with that brute: her mind clutched at an idea, that was all.

  ‘He’s cut up with the master leaving,’ Eliza says.

  ‘We do not know that the master has left.’

  To this both maids return a perfect silence. It is a disagreeable moment, broken by Fan’s saying, ‘Perhaps, Madam, I might bring you Mrs Launey’s book.’

  ‘Help her find it, Eliza.’ Not that there should be much finding involved, but it is imperative to get Eliza out of the way, Sophia realises, before she succumbs to overwhelming temptation and administers to that face, glistening with prurient excitement, a good sharp slap.

  Alone, Sophia gives herself over to wild imaginings. Perhaps Fan and Eliza are even now packing their boxes and at a signal from the street, a soft whistle, a pebble on the attic window, they will slip out of the house and rejoin their master, leaving only the deserted wife to drift about the place, a living ghost.

  Some time later Fan returns alone to announce that the book is gone from its usual place.

  ‘Did you look in her chamber?’

  ‘Yes, Madam. She’s taken her things.’

  So they have seen the last of Mrs Launey. Evidently Edmund was not the only one with something to hide, Sophia muses with growing bitterness: since the creature has taken pains to cover her tracks, doubtless she levied duties on their every joint of mutton, on their candles, flour, butter, coals. Now she has sniffed the air and found a taint. The household is going off and the stink will be unmerciful, so away scuttles Mrs Launey, intent on finding another pantry to pillage.