‘You,’ he croaks, and a little crease appears at the top of her nose.
‘Forgive me, I do not … Have we met before?’
‘No, no.’ Heat rushes up his neck and suffuses into his ears and cheeks. He believes he recognises her – her face is somehow very familiar to him – but he cannot say from where.
‘I know. You saw my picture in the Academy. It was very popular the year it was displayed.’
He does not go to the Academy. He does not like the jostle of it; he has no desire to crane to look upon a painted duchess he will never have call to recognise, or a landscape so unlike the vista of London that it must be fanciful; the history paintings are too huge for him, overpowering in their crammed, twisting bodies and urgent movement. But he knows where he has seen her: a yellowed print, curled at the corner and smeared by many fingers, tacked up in a coffee-house. The Comic Muse, it is titled, and a girl with Angelica’s pointed chin smiles out, her robe falling from one plump shoulder, rippled chiffon only skimming her bosom. He had not thought it showed a real woman, only some tumbled mirthful fantasy, but yes. That woman is this woman.
‘I have seen your portrait,’ he says.
Her smile is like stars on water. ‘So I am still recognised! And on the strength of one single picture. I have been out of the world for some little while, and yet I am not forgotten. Do you know my name?’
He looks at his shoes. She chortles, but he feels that she watches him more sharply than she might; he feels he is being weighed up, his worth gauged.
‘Mrs Neal,’ she says. ‘And I know all about you: you are Mr Hancock, the mermaid man.’
With Mr Hancock’s rusticity in mind, Angelica has dressed herself as a sort of courtly shepherdess: her creamy silk mantua is bordered with chenille flowers, which crowd around her wrists and neck like blooms along a country path. She has a healthy out-of-doors glow to her cheeks and her eyes. As the party resumes its seats, and he is encouraged into a wing-back armchair, she appears at his elbow with a glass of ratafia. It swirls viscous up the sides of the glass and burns his throat when he takes a sip. Angelica Neal pulls up a cane chair beside him.
‘These are all my girls, or were once,’ gusts Mrs Chappell, unwilling to leave off her introductory speech. ‘I summoned them back to me for this important night – for your night – and without hesitation they came. They never cease to be my girls, you see, though they go all ways in the world.’
‘Some ways more salubrious than others,’ says the actress, and although a ripple of amusement passes through all the women, none seek to quip further.
‘It takes a special sort to stay the course,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘Although, as we were just raising a glass, our little Bel is leaving it ere long.’
‘Don’t say so,’ says Bel Fortescue, resuming her seat. ‘I am only getting married.’
The women are sleek as ever but the air prickles: Mr Hancock cannot guess what it is they communicate to one another but he knows when women are speaking through means other than words. Mrs Fortescue knows too; the corners of her lips twitch upward.
‘Mr Hancock,’ says the regal Whig mistress, louder and with more emphasis than is necessary in that small room, ‘I have been desperate all night to congratulate you on your mermaid.’
‘A wondrous creature,’ the ladies chime in, turning to him like a clan of kind aunts.
‘Oh, fabulous.’
‘Of great value to science, I don’t doubt.’
‘How lucky we are!’
‘Mr Hancock,’ persists Mrs Fortescue, turning the intensity of her eyes and the sweetness of her smile upon him, ‘do you agree that women are doomed to servility?’
The dazed smile remains on his face for some moments after his mind has begun to panic. He did not expect to be asked questions, and his head is very empty. In his general life, Mr Hancock sees no need or benefit in questioning how things are, and avoids the society of what he calls ‘clever men’ – that is, men who reflect on the why of things and who wish to discuss it. To now be confronted with a clever woman is beyond his preparation. He must grapple with what her meaning might be before he can even think to give her a reply.
‘… servility?’ he mouths.
‘It is a philosophical question,’ Mrs Fortescue says cheerfully, but if she means to soothe him her words have the opposite effect.
‘You do not have to answer her,’ snaps Angelica Neal, a waft of rose-otto at his side. ‘She is too serious. Nobody wants her sort of debate here.’ She places a hand on his sleeve.
‘But we all are servile,’ he blurts out. ‘Men also.’
‘Servile to what?’ Bel Fortescue fixes him with her keen dark eyes as her questions press him into a smaller and smaller space. ‘What are you servant to, sir? Do you, Mr Hancock, believe in the notion of free will?’
‘Hold your tongue, Bel!’ snaps Angelica. ‘We are having a pleasant evening; why you cannot simply—’
‘The woman is touched,’ whispers the Whig, which sets all the women off a-muttering.
‘… I have been saying it for years …’
‘… altogether too absorbed in her own intellect …’
‘… why is she still invited …?’
‘Money,’ he says.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘Money. If you are asking, am I in command of all my doings, I say no. I am guided by money.’ He does not know if this is his honest answer, only that, once he made sense of the question, it was the one that leapt from the top of his head. He thinks too late that the correct answer is ‘God’, and makes a note to pray more often.
‘And does this trouble you?’ asks Mrs Fortescue.
‘No. This is how things are.’
‘Yes,’ nod the women vigorously. ‘Yes, this is how things are.’
Bel Fortescue is still frowning, but Mrs Chappell stirs in her chair. ‘And so we are all free,’ she says with finality, ‘free in this small little world of our own design.’ She swings her head to Angelica Neal, who all of a sudden snatches up Mr Hancock’s hand.
‘I cannot wait one moment longer,’ she cries. ‘I want to see your mermaid! For can you believe it, I still have not had the opportunity. Will you accompany me?’ She is dragging him away without waiting for an answer, her hair bouncing around her shoulders. Her hand is warm and slightly damp, but the sensation of being clasped by her delicate fingers is enough to set a slight kindling feeling in his breeches.
She leads him up to the first-floor landing, another vast space hung with red damask and the sweatier sort of history paintings – torn drapery, upraised cutlasses, and rearing, white-eyed horses: he cares for them as little as any others he has seen, but judges nonetheless that these are quality copies, done from the source and no doubt specially commissioned.
‘That little vixen!’ Angelica is saying. ‘I never know what she is at.’
He does not know how to respond. ‘You have known her a long time?’
‘Aye. We were raised together in this house for some number of years. Of course, she was not called Bel then: her name is Harriet and she is quite flat-chested.’
There is a pair of closed double doors on the landing from where the sounds of a party emanate: there is a string quartet, laughter, the clinking of glasses. Another negro as cool and statuesque as the first swings these doors open, and ushers them within with a pair of spotless kid gloves. This is a new kind of intimidation, Mr Hancock thinks. No lantern-jawed bullies to keep the clients in their place, only handsome blackamoors to strike them into apologetic silence.