‘Will you not …?’ She places a hand on his arm. ‘Why not stay?’ She is all honey and cherries. ‘If this is not to your taste, we can take ourselves off. There are private rooms upstairs,’ she adds in a sugared murmur.
‘No. No, no.’ He has no appetite for her now. Everything about her is sullied – her beauty too effusive, all there for any body to look upon. Nothing about her is secret or private: he sees that she is a bauble for old men’s pleasure, nothing more. Her mouth is crestfallen, and the little crease has taken up its place between her brows, but he cannot trouble himself with her expressions. ‘I have made a mistake,’ he says briefly.
‘Come,’ she coaxes in a high soft voice. ‘Come sit down with me.’
‘This is not a place for a man of my sort.’
‘Come have a glass of something nice.’
‘I must away.’
Before she can entreat him any further, he pulls his arm from her grasp and takes to the stairs. She watches him from the banister, as the footmen fetch him his hat and greatcoat. She leans over.
‘My dear heart,’ she calls, but he does not so much as look up; the only answer she receives is the hurried clatter of his footsteps on the marble as the top of his head passes beneath her and out of the door.
FIFTEEN
It may very well be that Angelica believes what she has said: that she finds no greater pleasure than in the arms of men. However, her believing it does not make it true. Angelica has endured many encounters that were not to her liking: some too brief, some too extended; some brutal, some tentative; some bizarre, some tedious. She has given pleasure to men made noisome by foul and boozy breath or foetid underarms or gallons of rancid eau de cologne, and she has indulged them to spend themselves all over – variously – her bosom, her belly, her feet, her bedsheets, her hair, and the small of her back, as well as inside nearly any orifice that pleases them. She has donned an admiral’s tricorn, affected schoolgirl innocence, and she has nipped down the back stairs in her dishabille in search of a likely switch or whisk or carpet-beater when an evening demanded particular aggression of her. She has suffered deviants whose skill did not match their pride to work at her privates with their lips and tongues (and – God save her! – their teeth) for hours at a time, and she has applied her own mouth to things she would not independently have chose to.
Her career in coitus has not, in short, been a perfect round of pleasure on her part. But mark you, whatever small disappointment or boredom or terror she might experience during the act is more than eclipsed by all the attendant enjoyments of her profession. Whoredom appeals to Angelica’s character in a great host of ways: she likes to live closely with other women and share her secrets with them; she likes to sing and drink and dance; she likes to be cosseted; she likes to be looked at.
What she likes best of all is to be desired.
It tickles her to see men grown stupid when they gaze upon her, all soft-eyed and slow in the head. In fact it inflames her. To find that her eyes and body and manner drive them out of their wits; to feel the humidity of their palms when they remove their gloves, or watch the involuntary twitch of their members when she moves close towards them; to discover that secret otherworld of commerce in which she is at least as powerful as they: all of this provokes in her the most exquisite excitement, and she goads them into ever greater passions of fever and fury. She likes to be pursued, but she does not feel she is ever captured, for it is only by her own decision that they lay hands on her.
And so she is perturbed. This eventuality had not occurred to her; she had no other plan for the evening, for how could this one go awry?
And he a wretched merchant, she thinks as she flounces back into the great and now orgiastic chamber. I should have had him in an instant; he has no idea what he has given up, for in no other circumstances in the world will he ever be near me again.
What should she do now? The shine has been taken off the proceedings, although there are a great many men here who might be ripe for cultivation, she having been dangled before them for three years, docile in the corner of the duke’s country parlour with lace veiling her bosom and her hair unadorned. What red-blooded man does not desire his friend’s mistress, after all, and what enterprising man does not step into the breach once this friend is no longer able to defend her? Now would be her moment to step back into the firmament; to flirt and charm and negotiate, for amongst these men who watched her for so long there must be a likely protector.
But she finds the will is no longer in her. What so repelled Hancock that he could walk away so easily? Was it merely the scene, or was the fault in me? Is there something wanting in my manner or my countenance?
Am I too old?
And she keeps to the shadows, and only smiles when hallooed by priapic admirers. She happens idly to think of the dark-haired naval officer: young, handsome; perhaps impressionable. Certainly the look that passed between them when he helped her up was not an ordinary one. There was no mistaking it; a communication passed between them at that moment, part greeting and part question. He must have felt it too.
But no, no. She will not look for him. If a paunchy cit has no time for her allures, a young rake must certainly laugh in her face.
She traipses instead to the private chambers upstairs, where the housemaids burst from the jib door with armfuls of linen, and Mrs Chappell hustles them about with breathless discretion: ‘And the blue room occupied too? Well then, there is nothing for it, nothing for it. You will have to throw my own chamber open to use.’
Polly, her fish-scales rattling, her green dye smeared, is dancing on the spot with anxiety. ‘And where am I to take the Admiral,’ she demands, ‘if she –’ a glare at the equally smeared Elinor – ‘removes to your chamber?’
‘Christ! We are full to the gunwales.’ Mrs Chappell presses her fists against her eyes for a moment, and then smooths down her gauzy apron with calm decision. ‘Very well. Lucy and Clarinda, you will have to make up the servants’ rooms for entertaining. The bedsprings are wanting and the stairs are steep, so do not take old men there, for once up there will be no getting them down again.’
‘If only it were so!’ snorts one of the girls, but Mrs Chappell waves her quip away as she rattles on:
‘Then bring the couch from my room onto the landing, and that will serve for another meeting-place. As for you –’ she turns to Angelica – ‘if you come in search of a bed, Mr Hancock must be disappointed for the time being. There is not a corner of this house that is not given over to vice.’
‘You need fear nothing from me.’
‘Then what are you doing up here under my feet? Is anything amiss? Are you keeping the gentleman amused?’
‘Oh yes – yes. Of course.’
‘Because he must want for nothing. I shan’t have you abandoning him, miss, this is his party and I wish him pleased. We need our mermaid.’
‘He is mightily satisfied.’
Mrs Chappell narrows her eyes. ‘Where is he?’
Angelica hesitates. But at this very moment the girls stagger out with the couch, and in their blind exertion topple a Japanese screen; the air is rent with a terrible crack and one lacquered panel shears in two. ‘God’s wounds!’ exclaims Mrs Chappell. ‘What have you done now, you fools?’ The girls are white-faced; one begins immediately to weep. ‘Get away,’ Mrs Chappell snaps to Angelica. ‘Whatever you wandered here for, I do not have the time for it. Make yourself useful; call them all to dinner. The old men have exerted themselves enough, I daresay; they are only cluttering the place up now in the hope of being fed. We may yet send them home by midnight.’