‘Ah, you are a sentimental old man,’ she says, taking his arm, her feathers bobbing over their heads. They walk together and she gazes about her, for the passers-by are of great interest to a visitor, comprising of ringletted Portugal Jews, and Mohammedan Turks in strange draperies and turbans, not to mention the gaudy gibbering Italians and the haughty French all there for reasons of trade or genteel asylum. She stares too at the passing ladies; their array of bright chintzes, their hats and their jewels and their blowsy wigs.
‘Do you think they are all here to see our mermaid?’ Sukie whispers, tightening her grip on his arm.
‘Since they are walking in the opposite direction to it, we must assume they are not.’ He is steering her towards the Pineapple coffee-house on the corner when a hawker, an old woman with a wart on her upper lip, thrusts a rush basket of scraggled flowers, plucked from the ditches of Stepney, into his path.
‘A nosegay for the lady?’ she croaks.
‘Thank you, no.’ He bats her aside.
‘Ah, now, don’t she deserve it? Flowers for your sweetheart? Pretty girl like her, she deserves something for her troubles.’
Sukie is peering back over her shoulder at a sumptuous merchant’s wife borne past in a chair painted with roses; she seems not to have heard, but Mr Hancock is disturbed.
‘What can you be thinking!’ he snaps. ‘She is a child!’ and he drags Sukie onward, all his joviality evaporated.
‘A change is coming,’ the woman calls after them, and he feels the muscles clench about his spine where, if he were a dog, his hackles would have risen.
‘What?’
‘I believe something unlooked-for has already come to you, ain’t that so? You have been surprised of late.’
He strides on, not betraying his perturbation, but Sukie tugs him. ‘Your mermaid!’ she whispers. ‘How does she know?’
‘Who in this city has not received some windfall?’ he snaps.
‘A change in your station! A change in your fortune!’ the hag persists, and she totters after them, her flowers lolling on their stems. Her shortgown is much patched; her arms poke from its flapping sleeves, broomstick-thin. ‘I have the sight,’ she calls, ‘and the spirits whisper news of you to me. If you would know more it will only cost you—’
‘Begone!’ He turns to flap his hands at her. A cold perspiration has settled upon the back of his neck. He drags Sukie down the next alley, and she squeals as she steps into some unnameable sludge, slithers, stumbles.
‘A change in your fortune,’ she gabbles even so. ‘Did you hear that, Uncle? An unlooked-for change. I think today will be auspicious indeed.’ They emerge into the light, and she turns her ankle one way and then the other to inspect her ruined shoe. Muck has sprayed also up the back of her stocking. ‘Ugh.’ She curls her lip; then, looking up, ‘Is this it?’
‘Yes.’ For they are indeed arrived at the Pineapple coffee-house. There is a bill advertising his mermaid posted to one window, but otherwise it appears as it ever did, and Sukie’s face grows all the sourer.
‘But it is so quiet,’ she says. ‘There are no crowds. No lines of people.’
‘Is that what you expected?’
She straightens her absurd hat. ‘It may be better inside.’
When he holds the door open for her, a few middle-aged middle-sort men in sober felt jackets look up from their broadsheets, but they do not appear to be a-buzz at the prospect of witnessing a marvel. The most animation they collectively display are those groups who gather along the benches, muttering together: ‘What do you make of this tip?’; ‘Has the Richard passed Kent yet?’; ‘And what of your own stock, hmm, or do you mean to take our news and refuse to share your own?’ But even they are barely moving their lips.
This being territory that Mr Hancock likes and feels easy in, it is little wonder that young Sukie is disappointed. The air is coffee-toasted and fragrant, cosy and quiet, and nobody obliged to spend anything in order to exchange gossip and speculation in comfortable masculine quietude. Mr Murray has sense to dabble in freaks; the money is not in coffee.
‘Nobody is here,’ says Sukie, lowering her very black eyebrows.
‘Come, that’s not true. See all these gentlemen?’
Those at his favourite table – plain and honest and solid like himself – are waving and beckoning. ‘Hancock!’ they call, and he joins their group although he feels the mortification of Sukie behind him. ‘Hancock, what is this we hear about a mermaid?’
‘I own one,’ he says.
‘You’re short a ship, though, ain’t that true?’
‘No ship.’ He buttons his lip. ‘No ship, but a mermaid.’
‘A courageous trade-off.’
He shrugs. ‘That you may decide for yourself, for a shilling. ’Tis upstairs, ready to be viewed.’
‘Oh! Mark this, gentlemen, he is already a true showman, no concessions for his old friends. And are you to run a circus now, Hancock? The business of honest trade too plodding for you?’
He laughs along with them but his palms are clammy and his stomach sour. On the landing outside the mermaid’s chamber, ‘Those men are jealous,’ Sukie says, and he turns to her gratefully.
‘Think you so?’
‘Of course! Think of their disappointment when their next shipments come in and it is only miserable tapioca as usual, when Jonah Hancock was blessed with a mermaid.’ She ruffles her skirts cheerfully. ‘I know I am right.’
The landing is empty of people, save for Mr Murray’s boy Daniel who has a cashbox to take payment and sits with his legs splayed before him, picking at his teeth with a little blade. He barely raises his eyes at their entrance. Equally deserted is the chamber in which the mermaid lies. Sukie puts open the door and walks all about it, her footsteps loud on the floorboards. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘’tis still early for the crowds. What shall we do now?’
They sit on the landing for over an hour. Nobody comes. The boy Daniel rolls up his jacket for a pillow and commences to doze; Mr Hancock bites his nails until he tweaks a hangnail and it begins to bleed. The pain is insistent. Sukie perches and reads her book, rising every now and then with a sigh to wander into the little room and look again upon the mermaid.
‘Why do you keep going in there?’ her uncle asks, blotting his bleeding thumb on his handkerchief. ‘Nothing has changed.’
‘How do you know? You have not been looking.’
At eleven on the clock, they hear scuffling downstairs, and voices. ‘Up, up this way,’ says a female. ‘Careful on the stairs, my poppet.’ And at last comes into view a well-dressed mama and her attendant nurse, each clutching the fist of a small child. These children – and one is really no more than an infant, quite bald beneath its little cap – scramble gingerly upward, stop-start, stop-start, their breathing loud and their tongues protruding as they exert themselves to place both feet on one step before pushing off to the next one.
‘Our first customers,’ whispers Sukie, clasping her hands, and in smiling silence she and Mr Hancock watch the slow and fumbling ascent of the children.
‘Here for the mermaid?’ asks Murray’s boy, rousing himself.
‘Most assuredly!’ The women jiggle the children’s hands to provoke their enthusiasm. ‘A mermaid, Harry! Cassy! What do you think of that?’ They turn their indulgent grins to Mr Hancock. ‘They have spoke of nothing else, you know. We are very excited, are we not, little ones?’ The children goggle in dumb confusion.
‘Delightful,’ Mr Hancock says. ‘This is very pleasing to see.’ He cannot help adding, ‘For I am owner of this mermaid.’
‘You own it!’ The mama is thrilled. ‘And did you catch it yourself? Did you see it alive?’
‘It died very shortly,’ he says. ‘Poor creature.’
‘Well! We are fascinated to see it. Shall we go in, little ones? Shall we go and take a peep at the mermaid? Yes, you would like that!’ They drop their coins in the tray and lead the babes into the dimmed room, closing the door behind them.
At first there is silence. Then a querying upnote from one of the ladies; then a lusty howl. The bellowing of the children reverberates through the stud wall, and the party bursts forth in short course, the children clutched in the ladies’ arms, scarlet-faced and inconsolable.