‘And I am investing in land, and in property,’ he continues smoothly, ‘to better protect my earnings. The sea is a treacherous place for a fortune.’
‘And yet our father managed it, and his father before him,’ she says, with remarkable confidence for a woman who chose a brewer for her husband.
‘I do not mean to be what our father was,’ he says, and as he speaks he realises that he means it. ‘I mean to be better. It is time to elevate ourselves; this is the moment for a man to climb.’
‘Poppycock! Where do you mean to climb?’
‘I hardly care.’ The scales are falling from his eyes day by day, and he sees now that he has spent the greater part of his life at the periphery of things; an obscure planet through whose weak and inconstant orbit pass sisters and nieces and maids and housekeepers, before each is drawn away to her proper calling. This is no way for a man to be, whose natural place is as the axle to a wheel. ‘I have lived an unexamined life,’ he says. ‘And I have now been shown a great thing. I would be a fool to want no more for myself.’
She is affronted, more than anything, that these words were said aloud. For Hester Lippard has toiled her whole life to be the sun at the centre of her life’s orrery, the power that compels all others to move in their tight circuits about her. She has never detected this desire in her brother, and now she feels a shiver as if he has trod on the turf of her grave.
‘A fool to seek beyond your place,’ she says. ‘Ambition is a dangerous thing.’
‘We all must die one day. I ought not to leave the world just as I found it.’
‘All the more reason to lead a prudent life, and protect those left behind.’
‘I leave nobody behind,’ he says. ‘They are all before me still. I must advance.’
TWELVE
In their airy parlour in King’s Place, Polly Campbell and Elinor Bewlay bend over their needlework. Mrs Chappell has retired to her apartment for an apnoeic doze, and her young charges are attended by her powder-blue footmen, who move without sound about the room and out again, seeing to their serene duties. At the window, little pale-eyed Kitty pores over her chapbook prompted by Madame Parmentier: ‘Our f-ar-ther,’ she intones, ‘w-ho-o … who art in …’
‘Do you think Mrs Neal is stooping?’ Polly Campbell muses.
‘Hmm?’ Elinor licks a fresh thread for her needle.
‘For she has not so much as seen the gentleman – if gentleman he may be called – and now she must escort him all evening? I had expected her not to capitulate so easy.’
Elinor shrugs. ‘She is not so different from us.’
‘Oh, she is. Utterly so. She can disoblige any body she chooses.’
‘She’s not so well set in the world as you think. She still needs Mrs Chappell’s favour. And Mrs Chappell needs Mr Hancock’s favour, so you see Mrs Neal is quite trapped.’
‘Oh, Nell, but he is only a tradesman! Did you mark the patch of his wig that the moths had chewed through? And his horrid baggy jacket, with its patched elbows?’
‘Money’s money.’
‘A woman in her position ought to be above that. I would not lower myself.’ Polly is working on a little sampler, intricate with birds and creeping vines. In some other country, in the cool of the big house, her mother had her sewing fancy-work as soon as she could hold a needle. In the fields beyond the louvred shutters, women chanted as they worked, and Poll’s mother hummed along without thinking. Her gold ring glinted and her needle plunged in and out of the canvas. This is what Polly remembers. ‘I’ve an eye for the peerage,’ she says now.
‘Oh! They are all in debt! Gambling it away, the lot of them, drinking and stinking, and their wives are as bad. Devonshire borrows to clear his lady’s debts and she borrows from Prinny to pay him back, although of course the money seldom reaches his pocket; they are all so mired in this horrid business they will never be free of it.’
‘No!’
Elinor tucks her hair behind her ear and looks up from her work with the light of marvellous secrets in her eyes. ‘I have the confidence of men who know,’ she whispers, ‘and I believe that silly couple owe about the region of sixty thou’, all told.’
Polly lets out a low whistle, and Madame Parmentier’s head swivels to her.
‘I am surprised at such a coarse mannerism in you,’ she snaps, and Polly presses her lips together before she smirks. ‘Do not let me hear it again.’
The girls’ eyes meet in mutual amusement. They are smug to have outgrown the jurisdiction of their old nursemaid, but even so they bend their heads over their work until they are sure she has returned her attention to Kitty’s halting catechism.
‘If they cannot even keep their wives, what hope is there for a mistress? I got into this line of work to avoid a spell in the Fleet. Now guess how much debt – hum, let me see – Mr Moses Garrard has.’
‘The Jew?’
‘Well, that don’t signify. For the sake of this question you might equally consider any modest tradesman who has done well. For they have no title, and were born to inherit no more land than we ourselves –’ and at this Polly bites her tongue, for what does Elinor know how much land might be her birthright? – ‘but what they do have is spotless credit, and you may trust they always will. The wealth of the peerage is a fairy glamour sustained by our banks, but a self-made man will have satisfied himself that every penny in his account is truly there.’
‘It’s a wonder you do not pursue this mermaid man yourself.’
‘What! Me? Certainly not. He is a grotesque.’
‘A grotesque of fortune and influence.’
‘I am speaking generally. Once, you know, the whore and the Israelite passed their lives furtive and obscure; now the one may lie with a prince and the other ascend to a peerage.’
‘In which case what might I attain?’ This ought to be a private thought, but Polly says it aloud.
‘You, the mulatto harlot? Your fate is unmapped.’ Elinor Bewlay once thought herself monstrous for her red hair; beside the freakish Polly, with her brown skin and the hints of gold in her tight negro curls, she discovers herself a veritable mild-as-milk Madonna.
‘Perhaps,’ says Polly. She thinks for a little longer. ‘I would gladly take up with a Portugal Jew. I find them admirable courteous.’
‘I suppose you put them in mind of Moorish ladies,’ says Elinor, ‘who they must miss.’
‘Whom,’ interjects Kitty from across the room, and sits back well pleased with herself.
‘As if they ever met a Moorish lady on Threadneedle Street,’ scoffs Polly. ‘As if you know what a Moorish lady looks like. You are horrid ignorant sometimes, Elinor Bewlay.’
‘And you are merely horrid.’ Elinor may appear as placid as a little red cow, but she has lived a year with Polly and knows how to provoke her. ‘As if it matters whether you are really a Moorish lady; you are an object of indulgence, you will be whatever they think you to be.’ She is not malicious, merely bored, and she conceals her delight as Polly’s dusky cheek grows red, and her eyes begin to shine.
The argument is spinning faster in Pol’s head than it is in the room, where all are mighty unconcerned. ‘My father was a Scotsman,’ she spits, as Mrs Chappell returns from her rest, ‘and yet nobody once prevailed upon me to dance a reel. But you –’ flinging down her sewing and wheeling round on the startled abbess – ‘would have me play a houri one night and a hottentot the next.’
‘I endeavour to appeal to all tastes,’ soothes Mrs Chappell, unruffled, ‘but in all my years no man has yet asked for a reel. When the time comes, I shall be sure to recommend you, dear Pol.’
Elinor gurgles with laughter and young Kitty smirks along with her, her mouth prudently closed. ‘Scotch or African, what does it signify?’ asks Elinor. ‘So you’ve hill savages on both sides, what’s there to be proud of in that?’
Polly seizes her furled fan and lunges to strike her across the cheek with it – ‘I will have satisfaction!’ – and Elinor is convulsed, quite weeping with mirth, her eyes scrunched tight and her fists clutching sheaves of her skirt.