‘Oh! I regret I watched a great deal too much of it, knowing I was only invited there for one night. I should have looked more about myself; I believe I missed some gossip. I must find a gentleman who has a good box, Eliza, and who will let me sit in it every night; that way I need pay no mind to the play unless there is really nothing else to see.’ She sighs mightily. ‘I am at least satisfied that I myself received attention of the most felicitous sort. You may be sure that everybody knows I am in town, and I would not be surprised if I now receive a great flood of invitations. Hmm, then what?’
She wears only her white lawn chemise now, her body a shadow beneath it as she fills the basin from the ewer. Mrs Frost is shaking out the mantua and petticoats, checking them over for rips and stains before putting them aside to be sponged in the morning. ‘Oh, then dancing, and then the men were playing at cards – I did not put any money down, you need not worry about that, I merely acted as Mr Jennings’s luck, and he did very well by me. Mark you, I did well by him too.’ She puts her foot up on a stool, and the candlelight glows in the filaments of fine hair on her thighs as she rinses her commodity. ‘My pocket is on the chaise; I think you will be pleased by the sum you find in it.’
They slip under the sheets. Angelica curls up like a little creature, but Mrs Frost is wide awake. She rolls onto her side and says, as if there has been no break in conversation, ‘You will not consider it?’
‘What? Oh, not now, Eliza. Let me sleep.’
But Mrs Frost is set on it. ‘You are fortunate that Mrs Chappell would still have you.’
‘I’ll not go back to a bawdy-house.’
‘Not any bawdy-house,’ Mrs Frost says pleadingly.
‘All cats are grey with the candles out. It comes down to the same thing.’ The relief of being in her own bed and wrapped in the arms of sleep makes her soft and affectionate; she wriggles close to her friend. ‘I know you think it is the prudent thing to do,’ she mumbles, ‘but if I go back there, I may never get out again. At least not before I am old and raddled and poxed, and she discards me as so much trash.’
‘You will command higher fees,’ Mrs Frost perseveres as her friend throws an arm across her. ‘You can earn your way out in a moment.’
‘She will never allow that to happen.’
‘Why not consider it?’
Angelica, cross, must surface again from her pillows. ‘You make me sorry that I brought you in here. This is a delicate moment for me, which Mother Chappell apprehends quite as well as I do. I can return to a brothel, or I can seize my liberty. The doings of tonight make me surer than ever that I shall do well.’
‘’Tis the rent I worry about.’
Angelica’s irritation gets the better of her. ‘So go down onto the street and start earning it yourself. Go on. A clean-looking woman like you, well spoken, you might make two shillings before breakfast.’
Mrs Frost blanches. Angelica’s eyes are wide again, enamel-blue. ‘No?’ she asks. ‘You don’t like that idea?’
‘That is not the arrangement,’ mutters Mrs Frost.
‘No. This is the arrangement, isn’t it? And if you don’t like it …’
Mrs Frost hangs her head.
‘Yes, dear. You can go back to your husband.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘Oh, forgive me. You would have to find him first.’
‘I’ll not stand for this.’ Mrs Frost is out of the bed and making for the door.
‘But you do,’ Angelica mocks her. ‘You always do. You purport to disdain this life and yet you always return to it. What am I to make of that?’
And then she is satisfied, and she falls asleep without another thought.
SEVEN
Mr Hancock takes out adverts in newspapers and pastes up bills about town. On Mr Murray’s advice, he procures a tall glass dome, under which they balance the mermaid upright. ‘So as to look its visitors in the eye,’ Murray explains with relish. They set it up on a small table in a room just large enough for visitors to pass all the way about the creature, and satisfy themselves of its authenticity before leaving the way they came in. ‘There need be no more adornment than this,’ says Murray, but even so Mr Hancock commissions a nearby draughtsman to imagine the dramatic moment in which the Japanese fishermen caught the creature in their nets. The waves rear up and the fishermen wear triangular straw hats; in the background there are many pagodas. The mermaid, in this image, claws its fists to its mouth and seems to be chattering in the most menacing manner, while its brothers squirm to safety. Mr Hancock, well pleased with this rendering, pins a copy up on the wall, and sends for coloured prints to sell as souvenirs.
Thus, they are ready to open.
‘No need for you to be here,’ says Murray. ‘’Tis all taken care of.’ But Mr Hancock wishes to observe for himself the effect his strange protégé will have on the city, and besides, Sukie is wildly excited.
‘You might let me accompany you,’ she murmurs as she stands at his elbow for morning prayers; ‘Your mermaid’s first social engagement,’ she persists as she brings in the day’s loaf; ‘We might make a day of it,’ following him up to the turnpike as he departs to his business in the city. Even without her persistence he would have unbent to her: he likes the sherbet stand in Seven Dials as much as she does, and he is glad to have her find his business interesting, even glamorous.
He gives her leave to walk to her eldest sister’s house in Wapping, and there spend three nights pillaging Rebbie’s wardrobes for a suitable mermaid-launching costume and catching up on what mysteries whispering sisters miss when they are kept apart from one another. He therefore may blame nobody but himself when he rises on the morning of the mermaid’s debut to the smell of burning cloves, and finds an unfamiliar woman leaning over the parlour mirror blacking her eyebrows with some alacrity.
‘Christ’s teeth, Sukie, what are you about?’
She turns with a grin on her painted mouth, and although she looks mightily pleased with herself he cannot tell why. He had expected her to seize upon a gaudy yellow taffeta, or a painted silk, something showy and indulgent, with all manner of ruching and scalloping such as might appeal to a bright-eyed young girl. In fact she has chosen an ensemble that unsettles him in its refinement and simplicity: a little jacket of white quilted cotton, printed with small black sprigs. Its tight sleeves have not so much as a ruffle upon them, and the body of it ends at her waist with a single flounce and nothing more, as if it were a practical riding jacket. He cannot even complain about how much of her bosom it exposes as she has tucked a fichu of sheer muslin about her shoulders.
‘Well?’ she asks, holding out the edges of her good blue skirt, which to him looks dreadful flat without hoops beneath it.
‘You need not have restrained yourself so,’ he says. ‘I would have paid for something finer.’
Her lacquered eyebrows lower and he knows he has said the wrong thing. ‘This is the finest,’ she says. ‘We cut up Rebbie’s bedspread for’t. I know how to dress for an occasion.’ She is frowning at his somewhat threadbare stuff jacket.
‘Very well. I would not have the first idea, of course.’
But sitting in the carriage, she still huffing, he keeps catching a glimpse out of the corner of his eye of some slim, neat, fashionable lady. And it is a shock, time and again, to turn his head and be sure it is only his little niece, wearing a smart jacket and with a vast plumed hat on her head, her eyelashes lowered and her nose tucked into a novel. He likes it less when they arrive on the corner of the Exchange, for once in London there is no arguing: she is certainly à la mode. He fears he might lose her amongst the grown ladies who are admired as they stroll the pavements, each in their figured white gowns or their glove-tight redingotes and white stocks at their throats. On an impulse, he seizes her hand and holds it tightly.
‘You are a good girl to accompany me,’ he says. ‘And you look very fine.’