‘Oh, my!’ she gasps, ‘Oh, my, what a caper. What a reel.’
‘That is enough,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘The devil is in you girls today.’ She turns to Madame Parmentier. ‘Is this the week they all bleed?’ Of the girls she asks, ‘What is going on here?’
‘She would disdain a man of trade,’ says Elinor.
‘She would deny my dignity,’ snaps Polly.
‘Upon the soul of the Magdalene, you are the silliest girls I ever took charge of. Forget your dignity. You can discover it again when you have made your fortune. As for disdain, there’s no place for it here. This world elevates the industrious man, and if you are canny it will elevate you. Disdain! Dignity! I never heard of such squabbles. Now, are you able to put this aside?’
The girls are silent as a pair of mules.
‘Yes? For I had come to bring you good news. Our mermaid is arrived.’
Kitty, at this, pushes back her chair and bounds over, a pantomime of mute excitement.
‘Simeon!’ barks Mrs Chappell, and in clips the taller of her two footmen, bearing on a cushion the grim little corpse. The girls twitter and crowd, but in their clean safe home it looks more an oddity than a thing of fear. Polly flicks its nose with an impertinent finger, and they all reel back chortling. She does not look Simeon in the eye, for he inspires in her an irritation she can barely express in words.
‘I mean to put it in the little room off my great salon,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘And to drape the place as if it were an underwater grotto, with sunken treasure and garlands of pearls. And all you girls will be decked out as sirens, and I shall have you seduce the assembly with your song.’
They are silent for a little moment. They look at the creature. ‘Do you not think,’ says Elinor, ‘that it is – well, quite a different sort of mermaid? From the sort you would dress it up as?’
‘Not the seductress sort,’ adds Polly.
‘I have eyes,’ says Mrs Chappell.
‘And so do our visitors. I think they will apprehend that it is a grotesque. A little imp.’
‘Not like us.’
Mrs Chappell eyes them severely. ‘None of you has yet offered me a seat,’ she says. ‘My suffering is never at the forefront of your mind. Attend to me, if you please.’ They take her elbows and support her to the sopha. ‘It don’t signify what it looks like. What do people want of a mermaid?’ she demands, spreading her shawl about her shoulders. ‘A beautiful siren? Or a malevolent little beast?’
The girls say nothing.
‘You know which. So which should we give them? The mermaid as it is or the mermaid as they would wish it to be?’
‘But look at it,’ says Polly.
Mrs Chappell takes from her waist a little tin of lavender comfits. She pops one in her mouth. ‘Fan me,’ she says. Young Kitty sets up an assiduous fluttering. ‘They’ve their whole lives to stare ugliness in the face,’ she says. ‘I will not have them do so in my establishment. I mean this to be the most lavish and extraordinary event I have ever put on. Now, Polly, my little orator, will you recite me the last sonnet you got by heart?’
‘In Latin or in English, madam? Or French?’
‘English, English. I am bilious today, my stomach will tolerate nothing but the purest Shakespeare. And, Elinor, you might play awhile for me, at least until the tea is brought in. Kitty! Enough of your wafting. Rub my feet.’
Samuel, the second footman, appears in the door. ‘Miss Polly,’ he says. ‘One waits for you below.’
‘Ugh.’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Early again.’ To the women: ‘Am I presentable?’
‘Here – come here,’ beckons Mrs Chappell, spitting on her handkerchief; seizing Polly’s chin she scrubs at a smut on her cheek. The girl bends to her as springy as a willow wand. ‘Captain Tremaine, is it? Your usual Thursday afternoon? I would have him come sit with us for a while but I cannot trust you girls to maintain any conversational niceness today. Now, that plain cap won’t do. Where is your turban?’
Polly’s brow lowers. ‘It is troublesome.’
‘Well, you cannot be the Queen of Carthage without it. Now, make haste, upstairs. The robe laid out in the dressing room is the one I wish you to wear. And will you try – try – to have him gone by six; you will want time to dress again.’
‘The sooner I go, the sooner ’tis done,’ protests Polly, pulling away. As she rustles past the piano, Elinor cannot help whispering, ‘Which are you, then? A beautiful siren or a malevolent little beast?’ and Polly cannot help delivering a sharp nip to her persecutor’s forearm.
‘That is what I thought,’ says Elinor.
THIRTEEN
‘Where are you going?’ asks Sukie, which surprises Mr Hancock. It is mid-afternoon, and he is busy in his counting-house, drawing on a pipe as he tots up the cost of his proposed new building works.
‘Why, nowhere. I am busy.’
‘But later. Bridget has your good cuffs all starched and pressed. You are going somewhere.’
He shifts his pipe stem from one side of his mouth to the other, and bends over his books. Tonight the mermaid will be revealed at Mrs Chappell’s house, a place Sukie cannot even know of, much less visit. Indeed, he has told her nothing of its removal from Murray’s keeping, but this makes it all the worse, for she is confused, and alert to clues. He regrets that it will not be displayed in a place whose grandeur equals its probity, where he could bring her to see the fine people, and be admired by them as the niece of the mermaid man. How breathlessly she would have reported on it to her mother and her sisters; how proud she would have been that she, and she alone, had been so favoured by fortune. Instead she scurries down the dark stairs of his house; eyes his dress and demeanour enquiringly; lingers outside his office door. ‘I wish you would tell me,’ she says, this girl of fourteen, with her hands on her hips. ‘I was a help to you before, was I not? I could come with you again.’
‘Who is master of this house?’ he snaps.
She takes a little step back. ‘Oh. I merely—’
He has never raised his voice to her before: her face is as stupefied as if he had raised his hand.
‘You are prying,’ he says. ‘’Tis not seemly. And what use would the knowledge be to you? My place is out there –’ he waves his arms across to the window, the dockyard beyond – ‘and yours is in here. I go out, you stay in. I do my duty, you do yours; then ’tis all harmonious. Do you understand?’