They slap their palms on the table and slop liquor into one another’s glasses with no regard for whether it matches what was there before. All social gatherings have a riptide moving through them – some revellers joining the party as others melt away, some retiring to a quiet room, others emerging refreshed – and it is this unseen, unsought tide that nudges Angelica and the lieutenant closer and closer together without their even trying. Little Kitty is swept away protesting; Lucy Chadwick judges herself to have graced the party with her presence long enough, and besides has two little children snuggled in the Hampstead countryside who will in a very few hours want her at breakfast, and so she makes for her carriage. She is replaced in short order by the erstwhile mermaids Elinor Bewlay and Polly Campbell, their hair freshly dressed and their modesty restored by matching silk wraps, giggling to embark on a night of outrage and intemperance now that Mrs Chappell is safely a-bed in clean sheets. Angelica is first five chairs away from Rockingham, then three, until when the clock chimes for a quarter after four, they find themselves side by side in the midst of the depleted group.
‘Is it too late,’ she says, ‘to revise your first impression of me?’
His face splits into the most amiable of grins. ‘But why? I liked it. A woman never fell at my feet before.’
‘Be assured I never shall again,’ she says.
‘Rockingham,’ he says, and he puts her hand briefly to his lips.
‘Lieutenant Rockingham,’ she nods, surveying his uniform.
‘What, this?’ he laughs, glances down at himself. ‘No! I only wore it to come in here – a mermaid party, you know. I was in the navy once, only they would not tolerate my high spirits.’ He rubs his hair roguishly and turns upon her the smile of a cherub. ‘I am a student of law, for now.’
‘Oh! So you shall be a lawyer, by and by,’ but he looks at her so quizzically she fears for a moment that she has slipped unknowing into some low provincial dialect, as she was wont to as a girl, to her own mortification and her patrons’ amusement.
‘I should hope I’ll never earn my living so. A gentleman wants a profession to keep the mind sharp, that’s all, and perhaps to see him into Parliament.’
Ah, she thinks, Bel was incorrect: of course he has means. God be praised, for he is so handsome. She smiles as he goes on, ‘One travels, of course, but it wears after a while; such an endless round of scenery and curios. I was glad to leave Naples by the end, I can tell you. Full only of sightseers, dilettantes, pleasure-seekers, not a one of them with a real appreciation for the place.’
‘Oh, of course – of course.’
Their heads nod closer together until their fascination envelops them; they forget their friends and their old lovers, pains and anxieties as their worlds telescope into this one space where he is her best friend and she his.
‘Mrs Neal,’ their friends say, ‘Angelica, ’tis your turn.’ She is not listening; they have to prise her fingers open and press the die into her palm before she will drag her attention from her dark-haired friend.
‘Must I?’
‘Throw! Throw the die!’
‘Very well, very well.’ She turns away from the man with reluctance – for I am yours really, her manner tells him – but she is pleased for him to see her sportive side. She presses her lips together and closes her eyes as she warms the die between her hands, and flings it down on the table.
It leaps once, twice.
It stops just short of diving onto the floor, and balances on the table’s inlaid edge, one single dot smiling up at the room. The company howls. The men’s wigs are all askew, those that remain on their heads at all. It is strange to see these bloods reduced to tousled boys; their cropped heads are fascinating, touchable, this one a fuzz as close as a puppy’s belly; this one a nest of coppery curls.
‘Drink!’ they call. ‘Take a drink!’
‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘I want no more of it.’ She is comfortably drunk; she wishes to tinge her judgement no further, but her companions have no mercy.
‘Rules are rules. Drink!’
‘What was the game?’ She turns appealingly to Rockingham.
‘Hi-jinks!’ roar her friends. ‘And you could roll no lower. Drink! Drink!’
She utters an unwilling bleat. ‘I cannot! Do not make me!’
‘Drink!’
Rockingham, though not a lieutenant at all, remains gallantry personified. He puts a hand boldly upon her elbow and says, ‘If the lady does not want a drink she should not be obliged to take one.’
His comrades boo, and she wafts her fan, for her face has become suddenly hot. The lieutenant lets go of her elbow. ‘Rules are rules,’ he continues. ‘And we all agree that she who will not drink, must pay a forfeit.’
‘A forfeit!’ she gasps, and swats at him, which act of daring makes her giddy. ‘What have you got me into?’
‘What’s it to be, boys? Ladies?’
Elinor Bewlay and Polly Campbell are whispering together, and squawk with joy. ‘I know,’ says Elinor. ‘She’s to play mermaid.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘If we can do it, so can you,’ says Polly. Her fingertips are still stained green. ‘You must go outside …’
‘… into the garden,’ chimes in Elinor,
‘… down to the fountain.’
‘… and swim three times all the way around it.’
‘Naked,’ says Polly with satisfaction.
‘Quite naked.’
‘I shan’t,’ says Angelica. ‘I can’t. The fountain is barely two feet deep.’
‘Mermaid!’ the girls set up chanting. ‘Mermaid! Mermaid!’
‘’Tis October,’ protests Angelica, but they are up from the table and she is running with them, laughing now. ‘You are absurd. I shall keep my chemise on.’
‘Mermaids do not wear chemises,’ says Polly as they burst out into the dark garden. The men are behind them, calling for lanterns; only Rockingham accompanies them, for he can be nowhere but at Angelica’s side.
‘Well, I am not a mermaid,’ says Angelica. ‘I’ll go in the water but I’ll not strip down to nothing.’ In other circumstances she would have no such qualms. She loves to go naked before an admiring party: in her career she has danced on tables and rolled on petal-strewn couches wearing not even so much as a pair of garters, but now she hesitates. She does and does not wish to be naked before this man. Letting him glimpse her body in a moment during which he may not touch it or betray himself is tempting to her, but she had hoped to savour this unknowing a little longer. Tonight she would have flirted for hours more, and coaxed him into a dark corner to kiss her until they both trembled. She would have let him touch her first over her chemise, in the warm dark of her bedchamber, and then undress her or not as his passions dictated. It would take them a long time to discover one another. If he looks upon her now, half the fun is gone before they have begun. ‘I think I shall not do it,’ she announces.
He hands her a bottle of brandy. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘I’ll close my eyes.’
The men are coming out with torches and lanterns, which dredge the little garden with yellow light. Their voices have a crispness that comes with cloudless nights, and bounce off the high walls. It is cool and fresh but not so cold the feat cannot be done.
Angelica takes off her slippers, and then her stockings. The flagstones ice the soles of her feet, but she detects, perhaps, the last of the sun’s warmth aching through. ‘’Tis not so bad,’ she says. ‘Help me, girls,’ and they swarm over her to unpin her bodice and shuck her of skirts and petticoats which they trample carelessly underfoot as they tug at the knots of the bum-roll that girdles her hips. Elinor holds it aloft, a long satin pudding, and all are convulsed with laughter.
‘Do not lose that,’ Angelica says sternly, as the men toss it between one another, horrified and intrigued, ‘nor abuse it; I had it made to my own measurements and there is not another like it. I said, there is not another like it; do not take such liberties; it does not go on your head.’
She has on only her stays over her chemise, and the girls’ busy fingers are all over them, loosing their strings, easing them open to shake out the creases from the chemise beneath, the only thing now separating her skin from the air. It falls to just below her knees, its sleeves tight and plain, which makes her look as spotless as any of Mrs Chappell’s newest acquisitions. The girls fumble to denude her of this too, but she shrieks and slaps their hands away.
‘Into the water with you,’ says Captain Carter. ‘They have you outnumbered!’
The fountain is fifteen feet across, a great shallow basin scalloped like a shell. The water cascades down from an acrobatic dolphin in its centre, churning the black pool up silver in the dark. At the bottom of the pool drift golden fish, dim ghosts in their sleep. Angelica scrambles onto the lip of the basin. Inside it is dead cold, and slippery with algae to the point of greasiness. ‘Ugh! So I am going in, am I?’
‘Yes!’