Simeon looks her up and down. ‘Much good it does you,’ he says, and bestows upon her the most delightful of smiles.
Mr Hancock is a man of particular impressionability, this is true, but it takes him less than four hours to set his mind on visiting Angelica Neal that very evening. He knows not what he will say or do, but she awaits me there, he thinks, I cannot do her the double dishonour of snubbing her invitation. Certainly I will not give way on the question of the mermaid, but is it not a fine pretext to see her again? He has come to the conclusion that however disgraceful her circle, he must display courtesy beyond it. For I, although not so socially elevated, am the better man. I would treat no girl that way; I would never disport myself so amongst my peers; I am cognisant, as those gentlemen are not, that all pleasures have their cost.
He makes his way there as swiftly as he may, but all along the Strand the girls are coming out for their evening’s work: they perch on doorsteps and window ledges, or stand in small groups, passing a bottle between them and flirting their brightly coloured skirts up to show their frilled petticoats beneath. There are some as stand on the edge of the pavement (if there be pavement at all), nervous and watchful, their eyes flicking from one man to the next as an animal’s eyes will dart in search of safety. Every man who passes they try to meet his gaze; every gaze they meet their faces twitch into a smile. Mr Hancock strides with his head down but they approach him still, laying their hands on his sleeve as he passes.
‘Walk me home?’ one asks.
‘I’ve something you want, sir,’ confides another. The ones out in daylight have little besides the obvious to be ashamed of, their faces youthful and only lightly painted, the state of their dresses respectable at first glance if not at second. The ghastly ones – the toothless, the rotten, the old and the filthy – are not to be seen: they conceal themselves in their crooked alleys or wait until the small hours when they might conjure their lost charms with drink and darkness.
He is turning up Half Moon Street when a young one steps into his path. She is neither exceptional pretty nor exceptional plain; just a little brown-haired country girl of perhaps sixteen years, with a faded kerchief knotted about her neck and her stays all shiny with wear. She starts to trot alongside him, and although he picks up his pace she picks up hers too, her borrowed hoops rocking this way and that.
‘Sir,’ she says. ‘You’ll not stop a while?’
‘Thank you, no,’ he pants, for the exertion to escape her is more than he is accustomed to. Still she does not fall back.
‘I know an alehouse near here,’ she says. ‘A decent place to pass an hour.’ She twists her fingers wretchedly: she wears no gloves, and her hands are white and bony, with crescents of black under the nails. ‘It has an upstairs room.’
‘Be off with you,’ he says. ‘This won’t do,’ but the little jade pursues him still.
‘Sixpence and a jug of wine, that’s all I ask,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you right.’
He stops, and she fairly trips over her feet: no wonder, for her shoes are too large and slither up and down her heel as she walks. He looks into her face. She is all unpainted, a spray of freckles over her nose.
‘Who runs you?’ he asks.
‘Nobody,’ she says.
‘Is that the truth? No bully, no bawd?’
‘No, sir, I do trade alone.’
He sighs, and rummages a shilling from his pocket. He holds it up for her to see. ‘Enough to find somewhere warm and a bite to eat. Perhaps a candle. This is for nobody’s spending but your own, d’ye mark me?’
She does not move. He has never seen anybody stare at a coin so intently.
‘Go,’ he says, holding it out to her. She looks at him stupidly. ‘I want nothing of you, only that I shall not see you on the street again tonight.’
She holds out her palm, and when he drops the coin into it her fingers snap closed like a trap. She brings her fist close to her chest. ‘Thank you, sir.’
She drops a curtsey, and hastens away, he hopes to a pie shop but perhaps back to the spot on the pavement where she began. As if she will spend it on anything but gin, he thinks to himself as she vanishes into the crowd. As if a mere twelvepence could help the child. Where is her family and why does she not return to them? Confound it, a respectable man ought to be able to walk down the street without being accosted.
And onward into Soho he goes, irritated by his own softening. All the way to Dean Street he finds women’s hands on his cuff, their entreaties in his ears. It seems there is not one woman abroad who might not open her legs given the opportunity: the milliners’ girls with their goods parcelled up whisper, ‘I have time to tarry,’ and the dressers who have been turned away superfluous from the theatres call, ‘An unusual evening, that I am at my liberty! This chance will not come to you again.’
And yet all about them is industry. He sees printers’ apprentices with their inky fingers, blacksmiths and pie-men and builders and lawyers. Doctors bustle the streets in their cauliflower wigs; apothecaries scoop from great majolica jars; furniture salesmen sit happy behind mullioned windows. But amongst all this brave order there are those who have fallen loose from it, as screws from a fine machine. In this city of a thousand trades, there is only one that the women return to as if they were called to it.
He comes to Dean Street; at Angelica’s address the first-floor window is open and a narrow, tidy-looking woman sits within, leaning an elbow on its sill.
‘Good day to you,’ he calls up, raising his hat.
She does not look up immediately, preferring to finish whatever she is scribbling in her pocketbook, and then her irritable blink is something like Hester’s when she has lost her spectacles, although she is much younger.
‘May I help you?’ she asks.
‘I am after Mrs Neal,’ he bellows. He is painful conscious of the other people in the street, the good washerwomen and tradesmen, the mantua-maker’s seamstresses who are quick to gather at their window below Mrs Neal’s as if it were a theatre box. It is unfortunate that he is unconscious of Angelica’s giggling return to her rooms, not two hours earlier, wrapped in a wool blanket and with her soaked underclothes and Mr Rockingham in tow.
‘This is the gentleman you met at Mrs Chappell’s, I suppose,’ had said Mrs Frost once they were alone in the dressing room.
‘I don’t see what it is to you,’ Angelica retorted. ‘Here, my gown must be left at Mrs Chappell’s. What larks! You might send and see if it has been found.’
‘But the gentleman—’
‘Yes! For pity’s sake, Eliza, yes, he is from Mrs Chappell’s; I met him there yesterday and I shall keep him with me tonight. Does that satisfy you? Well, leave us be.’
Mrs Frost now raises the sash and leans further out, eyeing Mr Hancock carefully. ‘And what are you wanting with her?’ She is always judicious in her assessment of visitors. This man, his thumbs notched into his pockets, looks like neither a gentleman nor a bailiff, but if she had to choose she would lean to the latter.
‘Why, I … I wished to see her. To talk, if I may. I met her last night.’
‘That hardly sets you apart. Your name?’
‘Hancock.’ He removes his hat and turns it around in his hands. The mermaid man, he wants to add, but he bites it back as folly.
‘Never heard of you.’ She turns her head from the window. Within, although he cannot know, Angelica Neal is locked in her bedroom, cocooned in love. ‘Well, she is not at liberty.’
‘I met her last night,’ he repeats. ‘I did not treat her as I ought, and I—’
‘Not today,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘She will see nobody.’
The girls in the mantua-maker’s below seem to Mr Hancock remarkable short of occupation; they now push their own window as far open as it will go, and prop their elbows on the frame to watch the back-and-forth on the street. Mr Hancock, standing not two yards distant from their beady interest, shuffles his feet and endeavours to hasten his enquiries.