Her hair wafts about her. The water spatters her face and arms, and across her bosom so her nipples tighten as if a stitch had been tugged in them. ‘’Tis fearful cold.’
She swings her legs over the edge, and her feet are in the water, and her ankles and her calves. ‘Ay, me!’ she gasps. The marble ledge numbs her buttocks. Then she slides all the way in.
It is cold, cold, cold. Cold so her ribcage contracts and she gasps a quavering indrawn breath. Leaden cold on her commodity, the warmest part of any woman, and under the cusp of her breasts, and up the insides of her thighs, and gripping cold into her armpits and the crooks of her knees. She raises her hands up. ‘I am in! Am I not in! I am your very mermaid!’
‘Swim!’ shout the party, bottles aloft. ‘Three times round,’ and this reminds them of a song, deliciously forbidden to any mariner, which they begin to sing lustily and in all tempos at once:
‘And three times round went our gallant ship
And three times round went she
And three times round went our gallant ship
And she sank to the bottom of the sea, the sea, the sea.’
She feels her very organs are quaking. She cannot swim the shallow pool but walks it with her hands, grit under her nails and her palms slithering, her stomach grazing the gravel and her chemise floating like the skirts of a jellyfish. The fish are alarmed from their doze and dart about her, their cold bellies bumping her forearms. The falling water thunders about her and strikes her shoulders hard as pebbles, dragging her hair from its powder and pins. Her teeth begin to chatter, but she circles again, and rolls over onto her back, singing to the best of her quaking lungs’ abilities:
‘We there did espy a fair pretty maid
With a comb and a glass in her hand, her hand, her hand.’
Then, ‘Where is my comb?’ she demands, leaning over the rim of her great scallop shell. ‘Where is my looking glass?’ but by now she is fairly keening with the cold. ‘Oh, I can take no more. Was it not bravely done?’
She reaches out for her handmaidens but they recoil.
‘My silk,’ cries Polly, pulling her splendid wrap about her. ‘’Twill stain, ’twill quite ruin.’
‘There will be the devil to pay,’ says Elinor. ‘You know how it is.’
‘I know, I know, you turn over three hundred a year and you do not own the gowns on your backs,’ groans Angelica. ‘A sorry state, when a woman of means may not spoil a dress or two.’ Turning to the gentlemen she cries, ‘Which of you is man enough to volunteer his arms to a siren?’
Which of them, of course, but Mr Rockingham, who is at her elbow before she has finished speaking, with a great linen towel and a twitch to his handsome eyebrow. He grips her forearm and lets her lean her wet hands against him as she scrambles onto dry land. ‘Oof,’ she gasps, as the gooseflesh erupts across her arms, but although he holds up the towel like a barricade to the company, he does not cover her up straight away. Her chemise is transparent and plastered to her body, with bubbles of air where it stretches between her breasts and the hollow between ribcage and belly. His eyes flutter across her without a word, and she feels no shame nor disappointment, only that this is the greatest caper she ever took a part in. A smile bursts across her face without her bidding it there, and she feels the tips of her ears grow hot. His smile mirrors hers, although he puts his chin down to hide it, and for a moment they stand together while webs of mirth and desire and joy stretch between them. Then he wraps her up and tussles the coarse linen over her shoulders and back.
‘Come,’ he says, ‘I shall find you a cup of negus to warm you up. But then you have nothing to wear.’
‘Not a stitch,’ agrees Angelica. There are currently ten young ladies resident in Mrs Chappell’s home, and a great wardrobe room laid on for them to choose from upwards of three times a day. This is, therefore, a barefaced lie.
‘There is nothing for it. We shall have to take you to bed.’
‘What a shame,’ she whispers, the water pooling about her feet. ‘I had been so enjoying myself.’
SEVENTEEN
The wool curtains are pulled flush around his bed, and if the dawn is approaching – and the great conversation of the birds suggests so – not one ray of it reaches him. He lies in his shirt, his breeches discarded and his cuffs flung into a corner, and keeps his eyes fast closed. Perhaps he is inclined to throw back his covers and pace the room, or take up a candle and a book. He might remove himself to his counting-house if he chose, or walk the dawning streets. He might but he does not dare: this is the hour for sleep, and so he dutifully adopts its attitudes.
And still he cannot help thinking.
I have made a terrible mistake. To put my greatest asset into such a den of iniquity; to associate my name with that level of barbarism.
He groans aloud. His eyes are closed, and at the corners of his vision clouds of colour roll. But what am I to do? If I wish my mermaid to succeed, I must learn to conduct myself in these circles. ‘I have such losses to recoup,’ he announces to his woollen chamber, and he lies thinking on that dreadful thought until the bells of St Nicholas’s sound on one side of him and those of St Paul’s sound to the other, and he knows it is time at last to rise. And yet why must my mermaid succeed at all? Can I not put it away like so much old lumber, and forget this sorry episode?
He raps on Sukie’s door as he passes it: ‘Up! Get up!’ he calls, but he cares little whether she does or no. Because of the money, of course. Because my sister is disgusted with me and my niece depends on me. I have nothing else of note in my life, and now that I am saddled with this freak I must profit by it. And indeed he has profited, for one of England’s most skilled priestesses of love, one of the very finest models of womanhood, was last night willing to take him to her bed. As if a man of his sort – a merchant, a son of Deptford – might have the opportunity to touch her! And like a fool he was appalled. I rejected her and humiliated her. Is not that a judgement upon my own self rather than upon her? Is it merely that I lack the sophistication that comes naturally to another quality of man?
Bridget is up, he knows by the cold air that nips past him as he comes down the stairs, for as usual she has left the yard door open while she goes to the pump. He has had words with her about this before but she will not change. ‘Takes too long,’ she replies, looking at her toes, and he thinks, a woman of the house would know how to make her obedient. She has not yet opened the shutters, and only a little daybreak slips through them: Mr Hancock has to lift his bunch of keys to within an inch of his nose to make it out at all, and as he peers and paws at it, a piece of the darkness unfurls from the skirting and wraps itself, velvet-soft and purposeful, around his calves.
‘God’s teeth!’ he exclaims, picking up his feet like a stout old maid jumping rope. He wrenches open the front door: light floods in and the cat scampers out.