Sukie appears behind her, clutching her pencil and swollen pocketbook, her hair tucked under her cap and her shoulders slumped. He tries to catch her eye but she’ll none of it, only turning the corners of her mouth down a little further.
‘And this one,’ snaps Hester, ‘told me nothing of it, although she knows her own fortune depends entirely on this family’s reputation.’
‘She was ignorant of it,’ says Mr Hancock. Sukie’s eyes widen. ‘I kept it from her entirely.’
‘Lies! You had her selling tickets. There for anybody to see, as if she were no better than a carnival girl. Mrs Williams saw her with her own eyes; counting out money easy as anything, she told me, talking and laughing with any man that lined up.’ Sukie’s cheeks are scarlet. She drops her head. ‘What will people think of her? Hmm? Do you think of her reputation?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I did not think.’ Regretfully, he climbs the stairs towards them. Even now that they are both old his spirit flinches from Hester as his body flinched when he was a little child and she a great girl of sixteen: then, her grip was too tight on his wrist, her step too brisk to keep alongside, and she wiped his face but never kissed him, and taught him his prayers and letters with no satisfaction in his progress but only relief at her duty being done. She is now fifty-five, as straight and cool as a steel pin, with ten fine children to exert her will upon the world.
‘You never think,’ Hester goes on. ‘You take no care at all. Those things that are said about a young lady are not easily forgot, but you do not care—’
‘Come, take your ease,’ he sighs.
‘And I, who have devoted my life to this family, these children, for it to come to this?’
‘Where is Bridget?’ He squeezes past her and leads the way to the parlour. ‘Have her bring us water for tea. You must be ready for some refreshment.’
Mrs Lippard objects to the practice of afternoon tea – perhaps rightly since its cornerstones are idleness, sugar and gossip – but nothing else is so conducive to a tête-à-tête, and she has a great deal to get off her mind. As all the rooms in the house, the parlour is small and narrow, its panelling stained a prudent tobacco colour to conceal the soot that the fireplace fails to draw. The tea-table is rackety and unfashionable, the service older than any Hancock now living, its thick off-white glaze daubed with blue intended to recall Chinese scenery. If it were ever a convincing counterfeit for the shell-thin luminous porcelain Mr Hancock now-a-days imports in quantity, its time has passed. A chip in the rim of the sugar bowl reveals coarse earthenware beneath.
Mr Hancock watches his sister’s eyes sweep all before them. She has seen – he knows – the floss of cobweb on the wings of the seraph at the top of the stairs, which Bridget cannot reach without standing on the three-legged stool. She has seen the door to the kitchen left ajar and beyond it the door to the yard wide open for any stray dog or child to chance their luck. She has seen that the skirting was not scrubbed before its last painting, and so its surface is now for ever granular with trapped dust. She has seen things that he himself has not yet seen, and which he will discover with regret and agony after she has gone: she has seen, and he knows he has been found wanting.
Bridget trundles in with hot water in its pewter vessel, and Mr Hancock is proud of how well she remembers her place, for although she flicks a few appealing glances to her friend Sukie, she says nothing, and leaves dutifully.
‘I want you to set up an order with the butcher,’ Hester says. ‘Meat to be delivered every week. Make a note, Sukie. Tuesdays: meat.’
‘Oh no,’ he says, ‘I’ve no need for that. It makes needless trouble; ’tis only the three of us here, counting the girl, and I am out often enough. We buy it as we need it.’
‘Spoken like a man!’ snorts Hester. ‘This is the sort of woeful disarray I cannot stand for. Not a thought for household economy; never knowing today what one will eat tomorrow. For shame, I never heard the like.’
‘But who will eat it all?’
‘I hardly care if it gets ate, or by whom,’ says Hester firmly. ‘Sukie needs to learn. And it will bring an orderliness of time that your lives are sadly wanting of at present.’ She sighs. ‘Sometimes I cannot judge which of you is the less grateful. You encourage one another in your lack of care. I know that the fault with Sukie is not in my rearing, for all her sisters are a credit to me, but this one … When I saw the state of her cuffs today …’
‘Sorry,’ says Mr Hancock immediately, although he can hardly be found accountable for such female concerns.
‘Consider,’ Hester says, ‘that linens lie immediately upon the skin, and so what are people to think when they observe a cuff as filthy as hers were this morning?’
‘That I had no time to change them after scrubbing the stairs,’ growls Sukie, staring studiedly out of the window. ‘That is what they are to think.’
‘What were you about? Scrubbing the stairs with your good cuffs on, which cost three shillings at the last May Fair, and which you will certainly not see the like of again unless you can pay for them yourself?’
‘Trying them out,’ whispers Sukie.
‘This is very regrettable,’ says Mr Hancock helplessly.
‘Regrettable is the least of it. I am ashamed to be associated with this household sometimes, I truly am, and sorely grieved to connect my husband Lippard’s name with such slatternliness.’
Sukie twitches most briefly, as if nipped by a flea.
‘And see what you have done now!’ Hester remembers the original reason for her exercised temper. ‘You have gave up your finest ship for a folly, and you exhibit it around the city like a gypsy showman!’
‘What would you have me do? I shall never own another mermaid,’ he says weakly.
‘Fie, for shame! I am glad that our poor father did not live to see this.’
He ought to raise his voice to her now, for she has no right. And yet he cannot treat her as what she is, a woman past her usefulness, yoked to another man’s fortune and with many sons and daughters to attend to her interests before he should be prevailed upon. He cradles his tea bowl on his lap and watches her as she talks, transfixed as a hen by a serpent. Gold wire glints behind her teeth, and she talks on and on – ‘uncommon misfortune’; ‘an insult, when one thinks of it’; ‘outraged’ – only pausing each second sentence when her plate slips sideways across her palate and she adjusts it with a discreet smack of her chops. Then she concludes, ‘And I’ll wager you will not make even a penny by it.’
‘I already have.’
‘Pardon?’
‘It has been extremely lucrative.’
She snorts and pours herself more tea with vigour disproportionate to the task. A few drops spatter the cloth, and he watches them soak slowly into it. ‘It will never pay off your losses,’ Hester says.
‘’Tis halfway to doing so already.’
Sukie nods. ‘I have seen the books, Mama. ’Tis true.’ Or near enough, her eyes admit to his across the table; Mrs Chappell’s contribution is still the larger part of their takings.
‘You have not had it three weeks!’
He taps his temple. ‘I made the best of what I was delivered. You forget I am a canny businessman.’
‘I merely hope you do not forget your duty to your kin,’ sniffs Hester, taking another and sharper look at the quality of the floorcloth, the clock, the marble-painted mantelpiece. ‘Or perhaps in your good fortune you have decided the Hancock family numbers only one.’
‘I know the size of my family,’ he says wearily. A man without the immediate demands of wife and children finds himself called upon for a multitude of little wants elsewhere. He has three sisters living, each with more children than she can be expected to raise up on only her husband’s fortune.
‘A dowry for our Sukie,’ he says, ‘so she may better choose her husband. And did I not find Rachel’s boy a place in our office, and settle a sum upon your Jonathan, to invest as he pleased, to be thus freer in choosing a wife?’
‘Humph,’ she says, and no more.