She has a thunderous scowl on her. I have indulged her to a dangerous degree, he realises. She thinks too much of herself. Aloud he says, ‘Susanna, if you mean to keep a place in any household, do not overreach it. I’ll have no more of your presuming.’ Her bottom lip quivers. Please God do not let her weep in front of me. ‘I am on my own business,’ he says more gently. ‘It’s not for you.’ Will she answer him back? His authority will not take much more challenging. ‘Get you gone,’ he says softly. ‘Lay out my fine linens and brush my best jacket. I am wanted in London at nine tonight.’
For his own whoring, Mr Hancock naturally inclines towards the upstairs room of a genial tavern, where the passing girls are almost incidental to the gaming table, buxom and giddy, confident in their cups and at their cards. Even if he were to regularly frequent whorehouses – and he never has, not in the first dark years of his bereavement, and not now that they stretch before and behind him – Mrs Chappell’s nunnery is like nothing he has known. It is in a narrow courtyard off King Street, and both outside and in is as grand as any ducal residence – indeed, it might be one, being in such proximity to Court – and the roads not only paved, but additionally so clean as to have been fairly scrubbed. The people he sees strolling or riding between park and palace are very grand – ladies in shimmering court dresses, and their men tall and modish in blue and buff – and walk without fear of abuse or soil. The women do not pick their skirts up to keep them from the filthy gutters; the men do not look nervously about them for bareheaded urchins who would pelt them with mud and worse. Mr Hancock, borne from the barber’s in a chair to keep the marks of the city from his good clothes, feels a glorious relief.
He is not the first visitor to Mrs Chappell’s nunnery this evening: the alley into King’s Place is narrow in the extreme, so that a peevish crush of carriages must await entry in the street, horses wickering and coachmen squabbling, emblazoned all with crests identifiable to any observer as those of noble families. As Mr Hancock watches from his chair, a gentleman whose face he knows well from its regular appearance in print-shop windows leans out of a carriage and hails a passer-by by name.
‘And in full view of the street,’ he tuts. ‘For anybody to see, as if they were proud of’t.’ To the chair men he raps on the ceiling and says, ‘We shall never get through the crush. Set me down here.’
He walks into the courtyard and up to a fine stuccoed house with torches blazing on either side of its steps and lights hung up all around in blown-glass bubbles. He feels as anxious as if he were sixteen years old and this his first visit upon Venus. But this is merely the gentry’s version of the same, he reassures himself. Underneath the show, ’tis an amusing evening with sympathetic women, and the end result will be no different.
He is ushered in by a negro footman, of uncommon height and elegance. His powder-blue livery is almost angelic to gaze upon and when he says, ‘This way, sir,’ his voice is musical but modulated, soft yet penetrating. He is better spoken than Mr Hancock, and he smells of lilac-flowers. All at once Mr Hancock is acutely aware of the fraying cuff of his own good jacket, the gold threads on its pockets that have tarnished black. ‘For who will be paying attention to me?’ he had reasoned as he dressed at home, not bothering to light the candles for such a perfunctory undertaking. He sees now that this was a mistake. There is a splash of walnut ketchup on the calf of his stocking.
The marble floor of the atrium is polished as a frozen pond, its inlaid tables almost concealed beneath cornucopiae of flowers gaudy as jungle-birds: he could not name even one single specimen. There are a great many candles set about the place, and mirrors and chandeliers that double their light and double it again. Up above him, where the staircase spirals into darkness, he hears the whispers of girls, and the officious cloppeting of their cork-soled shoes on the parquet.
Mrs Chappell is there to greet him, a vast toad in white muslin, her stubby arms outstretched and her legs churning up her skirts as she paddles across the gleaming floor.
‘Dear sir!’ she says. ‘Delighted, delighted.’ He does not like procuresses – women debauched in their own youth who usher the next generation to the same fate – but he is relieved that his mermaid’s entrée into high society has been overseen by an expert. She has launched numberless girls onto their glittering careers: she can be assumed to manage the same for his wizened freak.
‘I believe you will approve of what we have done with the little thing,’ she is saying now, patting his hand. ‘’Tis upstairs, in the salon. But first, a drink? We are having a little merrymaking in my private rooms. Just a cosy gathering, you know, but ’tis rarely now that all these luminaries are seen together in one place.’
‘Does my mermaid please them?’
‘Ah, they are addicted to novelty. This is the most uncommon sight since Mr Lunardi’s balloon journey. And before that I daresay we’ve had nothing like it since Cook’s return.’
‘And so you would judge that I might make a true success of this creature?’ he asks.
‘Sir, if the Ton is enchanted by it, and London enchanted by it, the world will be enchanted too. ’Tis already settled: the mermaid is a sensation.’
He blinks. ‘Much obliged,’ is all he can think to say.
She claps him on the back with a phlegmy roar of mirth, revealing once again those yellow teeth arranged like a string of knucklebones. ‘The gentleman is obliged! It is I who am obliged to you. But come with me, sir, do come this way. Take a glass –’ for a tray has appeared from nowhere – ‘take two.’
It is a relief to find Mrs Chappell’s parlour so neat and proper, with a parquet floor and the walls papered with a green trellis design such as might meet the approval of any of his matron sisters. Tonight it fairly glows with richness, thanks in some part to its population. In the corner are a little brood of her younger girls, the red-haired one assiduously nodding over the harpsichord, the Creole (or mulatto, or whatever she might be, for this categorising age must have a name for every permutation) who first approached him, sullenly turning the pages. Mr Hancock has heard tales that the junior girls earn their keep by scrubbing the grates and making the beds themselves, in which case the faint clank and splash of buckets behind the jib door speaks for the narrow distinction between housemaid and whore.
His attention barely brushes across these girls, however, for here sits a group of women, splendidly dressed and languorous in the way of Olympian females, and lit warmly by shaded candles. They have been talking quietly together, but when they see him they fall quiet. They do not drop their eyes but look straight at him without abashment.
‘Ladies,’ says Mrs Chappell, and they rise without a moment’s hesitation, elegantly and silently the way the sea gathers itself into a fresh wave, and in unison drop a curtsey with the same slow and elemental grace, and a long hissing of satin and lace. They smell of port and bitter almonds.
They watch him gravely, their fans fluttering, and he thinks they are not like any women he has seen in his life before. There are five of them, and each truly handsome, not with the clean prettiness of the younger girls he has seen thus far, but each with her own singularity. One is tall and slender, boyish and wistful; one bold and sleek as a kingfisher; one soft and fondly smiling like the perfect memory of an adored mother. Each of their faces is familiar to him, and yet each is entirely new, delightful and uncommon to look upon. He apprehends, perhaps for the first time, what taste and intellect the appreciation of true beauty entails, for these women are complex in their loveliness. Mrs Chappell speaks their names as he kisses their outstretched hands, but he knows them already: the first is a lady of the court who stooped to become a lady of the world; the second a comic actress; the third a one-time mistress of the Prince himself. The fourth is a keen little creature, with soft dark eyes and a russety glint in her coiffure. ‘Mrs Fortescue,’ says Mrs Chappell, and the ostrich feathers in her hair nod. And finally the fifth, whom he first observes is small and then observes is radiant: a buxom bright-cheeked froth of a woman, with hair falling over her shoulders and drifting around her face gold as sunset clouds.