‘Good day, good day to you,’ they chirrup, nice children in clean mended clothes, and he thinks without meaning to, had I children of my own, I would bring them here. He feels an airy rush about his coat-tails as if some little beings, buoyant with their play, were running to keep up with him. It is not merely a Henry who walks beside him today, but a whole gaggle of putative children, those who through his own inaction were never born. He mounts the steps of his building alone, and lets himself in.
The counting-house is habitually quiet and dry, never more so than with the departure of Mr Greaves and the removal of his wife to the country. The footsteps of the Greaves children are no longer audible from the lodgings above; the workday is not punctuated with domesticity – deliveries of cheese and milk and music teachers – the hall empty of visitors and of kitchen aromas. The counting-house now smells only of whitewash, parchment and sand, its only sounds the rustle of papers, the scratch of nibs, and the persistent sniffing of Oliver, the youngest clerk.
On the left of the entrance hall is a dining room, installed for the purpose of entertaining clients; its polished tabletop and empty candlesticks are peaceful in their abandonment. On the right is the counting-house where Scrimshaw the Beak hunches at his pedestal swathed in the black gown he had made up during the reign of a previous George, and the clerks balance on stools before him. Two are middle-aged, in the company through its permutations (for the Hancocks and the Greaveses, like all effective merchants, must be pliable in their ventures and their choice of business partners) since boyhood; the others are newer additions, steady young men with good prospects, among them always a Hancock nephew or two. He prefers not to take on any man with too evident an ambition, they being wont to make extra work, but he enjoys the satisfaction of watching faltering boys become confident men, training up a promising young clerk into a fine businessman on his own account.
The men all rise when he enters.
‘Good morning, sir.’
‘Good morning.’
They look at him expectantly. Although the arrival of the mermaid has little practical connection to the office – beyond the paperwork pertaining to the loss of the Calliope and its promised cargo – they have taken a keen interest in its fate. Now, they regard him in the polite but intense manner of well-trained dogs watching their master eat a plate of mutton chops.
‘What news?’ croaks Scrimshaw, fossicking drops of candle wax from his wig.
‘Regarding?’
‘Last night,’ says Oliver.
‘You went to King’s Place, did you not?’ says Jonathan, the nephew.
‘I did.’
‘And?’ No other man in this room has ever seen within a King’s Place nunnery, nor are likely to unless they are to ascend quite phenomenally in their lives. This is, however, the age of unlikely ascents. ‘What was it like? How was it done? What of the women?’
He considers. ‘’Twas well done. The mermaid was greatly admired; they had displayed it in a manner theatrical and yet tasteful.’
The men nod in satisfaction. ‘But what of the women?’ The coals on the brazier shift and rattle.
‘I …’ He thinks of Angelica, her back against the closed door, looking up at him. Nausea surges through him; he feels feverish, prickly. ‘I found it a most immoral place.’
‘Foul-mouthed, were they? Drunkards?’
‘I cannot tolerate a woman who drinks,’ nods the clerk his own age. ‘That’s the real evil. The lack of delicacy.’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ he says. ‘They are good girls.’
‘They always are, or start off that way,’ says his clerk Brown, who took his wife the same year Mr Hancock married Mary, and who has twelve lusty children with her. ‘I never met a doxy as started out wicked, but I have come upon a fair few who have become so. Stealing and such.’ The other men murmur in agreement.
‘What it is,’ says Scrimshaw, ‘is the bawds. They are the truly corrupt; spent their whole lives in the trade and now they will not save their sisters but draw them into greater sin.’
‘Aye, ’tis the bawds who begin it all,’ agrees Brown. ‘Who makes the whores but they? A jade I’ll forgive, she has her own reasons – but a madam?’ He sucks his teeth. ‘Never. She’s out for her own profit. Profits by us, profits by them. Where’s her punishment?’
‘It was the luxury,’ Mr Hancock says. ‘I did not like it.’ He feels the eyes of his employees upon him and adds grandly, ‘There was something of the Fall of Rome about it. Such an excess of wine and naked women.’
‘The rich!’ grunts Mr Scrimshaw. ‘The well-connected! Politicians! Idleness and excess curdles their brains. They live in a world of fantasy.’
‘Yes,’ he nods. ‘Yes, that is it entirely.’
‘No place for a man of sense,’ says young Oliver wistfully.
‘We are all best kept ignorant of it.’
‘Yes,’ Mr Hancock says, ‘that is what I thought. I shall not call there again. Is my fire made up?’
‘And burning merrily,’ says Oliver, who sees to all the office comforts.
‘Then I shall get to work. Good day, gentlemen,’ he says.
As he passes into the adjoining partners’ office and closes the door behind him, he hears the clerks burst into excited whispering, to dissect all he has said and cast their own opinions upon it.
Mr Hancock regrets that Greaves himself is in Boston, for the silence sits heavy with him today. He sits down at the desk, beneath the portrait of his father, and the portrait of his wife Mary’s father, and under the gaze of a feathery miniature of his brother Philip who drowned in Deptford Creek while rollicking home one night. And he touches to his nose a handkerchief worked by dear Sukie and thinks, this is a good honest place to be. And however wealthy I do become, I shall be no other sort than this.
The morning’s letters are on his desk, but he hesitates to read them. First he sharpens a new quill with unusual care; little coils of white shear away from it until he is satisfied that its mark will be both bold and firm. Then he lays out a sheet of fine white paper, and inks the following:
Dear Mrs Chappell,
It is with regret that I find I must withdraw my Exhibit from your Home. You and I navigate very different Worlds, Madam, and after last night’s Proceedings I can no longer suffer my name to be associated with yours. I waive my right to the full balance of my fee and I will be pleased to have my Creature returned to me by to-morrow Morning and no later.
He looks over it a moment, then draws out another sheet to make a fair copy, minus the sentiment of ‘regret’ and with addition of the word ‘demand’.
For class is a type of bubble, a membrane around one, and although one might grow within this membrane, and strain against it, it is impossible to break free from it. And a man of nobility is always such in his soul, however he may fall; and a man of humble sort is always such in his soul, however he may climb.
He signs his name with a hand so exuberant it sends a spray of ink across the page; sprinkles it with pounce to hasten the drying; blows upon it, shakes it clear, folds it and seals it. Then he rises.
‘Oliver,’ he says, stepping into the office, ‘convey this to Mother Chappell.’
He retreats into his office before he can be prevailed upon to elaborate. He has set things right; that is all. He will be what he was before. He will not entertain baubles one moment longer. And he still cannot decide, as he sets about his books and slits the first of the day’s letters, whether he is content with this, or tormented by it.
EIGHTEEN
And what a joy it is to bask a-bed with a man of one’s own choosing! To have one’s face cupped in his warm hands, to have him marvel at the dilation of one’s pupils and linger over the rosy tenderness of one’s lips, to have him chafe the warmth back into one’s fingers and feet.