‘What are you at?’ Mr Hancock fumes, but he follows her onto the street and grinds the lock fast behind him. Overnight, Deptford’s heady miasma had begun to settle, like silt in a puddle, but sunrise stirs it back up again and Mr Hancock stumps through that great rich stink of baking bread and rotten mud and old blood and fresh-sawn wood with the cat trotting on her tiptoes beside him. What sort of a world can this be, he is fuming to himself, in which a whore stoops to an honest man? The end of the mortal world is heralded by signs of such disorder, a man yoked to the plough, a fox pursued by a hare. He has seen it etched on gravestones, too: a heart turned upside down.
He will not suffer a ferryman today, nor crush himself into the public coach that will bear him joltingly into the heart of the city. Nor does he desire to take the path along the stinking river, where every shipbuilder in every yard, and every waterman at every step, knows his name and his business. He chooses instead to walk the long way, spurning Southwark’s crush and reek for a stride across open fields, and thus turns up Butt Lane, where the boys from the bakery run giddy on the flagstones, their shirts untucked and flapping. There is a heap of oranges outside one of the little shingle-clad shacks, all puckered and foxed, the saddest oranges in Christendom, their innards no doubt fibrous dry. They are by no means fit for sale but this makes no odds since they will never be sold. They are moral decoys, merely, for above them swings the sign of the jolly mariners, and within, the last raddled drab may yet be rinsing her shift before falling into her bed alone at last. Mr Hancock’s lips twitch at the thought: he would like to spit on the threshold.
On the parcel of land next door, the shipwrights are at work, singing together as they haul up beams. The world turned upside down indeed, he thinks, beginning with my own town. For here the shipwrights take their work upon dry land, and amongst them there is not the usual hierarchy of kings and lords, but only that of skill, no class but what is ordained by one’s work group. Here labourers prize their fine china and shelves of books; here wives are husbandless two seagoing years in three; here ship-masts tower over church steeples; here he is, sorry Jonah Hancock: a husband without a wife; a father without a son; paterfamilias of a she-house ruled by little maids, and whose years of faithful work have accrued no fortune to compare to what a freak goblin can bring him.
It is half a mile up to the New Cross turnpike, the road already moderate busy. A small boy bobs out of the whitewashed tollbooth to heave open the gate at the swift approach of the Dover stagecoach: behind it creeps a wagon laden with sacks and rope-lashed boxes, on top of which ride pale-faced newcomers to the city: an old man, with only a flour sack tied about his pitiful body, mumbling his toothless gums; a mother who draws her infant close beneath her shawl; two pretty country girls turning out their bundles in search of coins to pay their final stage. They look about themselves in bewilderment – ‘Be we in London now?’ – and pinch the blood into their cheeks and straighten their kerchiefs, ‘For the fine ladies don’t want maids as don’t look healthy, don’t look decent,’ one says to the other as the wagon lurches onward.
To the west, towards the city, the fields are picked brown and bare, and the trees stand open-armed and stripped of fruit. Even the blackberries in the hedgerows are gone now, the coils of brambles that bore them sagging into wayside ditches full of grey water. Far away to the south the masts of ships are fewer on the river, and stand in tall huddles with their sails drawn close about them.
As he strides onward, another thought strikes him. Confound the rest of the situation. It is a fact that last night a pretty young woman – remarkable pretty, alive with her very prettiness – put her hand on his and gazed into his eyes. She kissed him on the lips, this buxom lovely girl. He might at this moment be basking in her embrace: her bedclothes tangled around them and her soft arm flung across his chest. She might lean above him so her golden hair streamed down around them, and the sunlight took fire in its strands. He had, in fact, the opportunity to lie skin upon skin and limb upon limb with another living body, to be the focus of another’s touch and thought. This is what he turned down, last night. Not a whore, and not a prize, but a moment of contact between man and woman. ‘Damn you!’ he spits, kicking the dirt of the road, and alarming the old spinster sisters who have just toddled up from their cottage in the beetfield. ‘Excuse me, ladies,’ he says. ‘I have a great fear of ants. A great and unreasonable fear.’
It is in this very fug of confusion and rage that he strides the leafy Kent road, where other men of his sort descend the steps of handsome brick houses to their waiting carriages. This new breed of man keeps his home in the countryside in preference to squashing his family into the apartments above his office: his children learn to paint and are sent away to school, and yet even after plucking up the courage to append an audacious ‘Esq.’ to his name, none of these men would stand for such behaviour as Mr Hancock witnessed last night. For shame, he thinks, we live on a different scale of morality. And which is the correct one? He regrets his solid provincial decency; he is sorry that the memory of the priapic sailors brings such a wave of horror to his soul; for those people are so much happier than he is.
Furthermore (he reflects as he comes upon Borough and the fields melt away to tight alleys and sunless yards, and the city begins to loom and to crowd, and thence with aching calves across London Bridge and into the mercantile crush of Lombard Street), furthermore, by whatever moral compass one chooses, his treatment of Angelica Neal – rebuffing her generosity at a function organised in his own honour – is reproachable. I shall seek an audience with her, he tells himself. Apologise for my behaviour; she may be understanding of my confusion. Yes, this seems to him a good plan. He tries not to think too hard about the other possibilities of being permitted into her lodgings: if in such privacy she will once again guide his hand across her body; if with the curtains drawn and her servants dismissed she will remember what business was left undone the night before.
It is, however, this thought that continues in his mind as he completes his morning circuit of the coffee-houses, an action he has methodically repeated for twenty years, checking off one by one the news-sheets he has read and the men he has whispered with until his routine is complete. A tiny alley behind Gray’s Inn Fields leads him to the counting-house wherein the mercantile business of Mr Hancock and his partner Mr Greaves is gravely attended to by six clerks and their crook-backed overseer Scrimshaw.
The counting-house is a long red-brick building about a hundred years old, which might once have been imposing, but the city has crept up on it from all sides, and now it sits three storeys tall in its cramped court like a rhinoceros in a rabbit hutch. While the dwellings around it are better-built than those ramshackle edifices that grow up nearly overnight in the rookeries of St Martin’s – and which are liable to topple over in a shower of brick-dust if any inhabitant turns over too heavy in their bed – they are hardly to be admired, being unornamented thin-walled places with mean lightless windows. They are home, however, to decent unassuming people: two sisters in crocheted mittens, erstwhile mistresses of a failed dame school; and a law stationer who has somehow contrived to fit his shop, wife, dog and seven children behind his narrow front door. Three of these children are in the yard as Mr Hancock approaches the offices: two boys and a little girl, who stand around a set of arcane chalk marks on the flagstones, and take turns to throw down small twigs and pebbles with some energy.
‘Good day,’ he says, and they tumble to bow to him.