‘Ugh!’ Angelica stamps her foot like a girl of thirteen. Mrs Chappell’s company arrests her in a certain daughterish petulance, and even in the face of such advice she adopts the mantle of wounded party, and the generations-old cry, ‘You always favoured her!’ She flounces from her seat, and succeeds in screwing out a few tears as she continues, ‘How I strive to please you! And it is never enough, Mother Chappell. Never!’
‘None of that,’ says the abbess, who over her career has raised hundreds of girls. ‘She may rail against it, but Bel Fortescue owes her current fortune in no small part to having always acquiesced to me.’
‘No, that is not so. You built her up so far, but then she went her own way. It don’t signify now whether she is with you or against you.’ Angelica does not have the words, but she both covets and resents what Bel has got, which is to take her own space in the world, to have come by some alignment of charms to be celebrated for her own self.
‘But you are not Bel,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘You are Angelica Neal. I have served you right so far, have I not?’
Angelica draws herself to her full height. ‘I think I do very well on my own. As I told you I would.’
‘Oh, aye?’
‘Aye. And I have met a wonderful kind man, who will take care of me.’ She crosses her fingers in the folds of her skirt. ‘You forget, Mrs Chappell, that I will never be a mercenary, and I will do no business of yours that don’t suit me.’
Mrs Chappell has heard speeches of this sort before, and is robust enough to pay it no particular heed. ‘Go, then,’ she says, ‘and make your own way. My door is always open to you. But dear girl, we are all mercenaries; there is no escaping it.’
‘Not I!’
‘Indeed you; you have need to be the most mercenary of us all. Every kindness has its price, Mrs Neal, and one so precariously set up as you would do well to know your own means.’
‘There is nothing precarious about me,’ returns Angelica. ‘You mean only to unsettle me.’
‘So hold fast, dear girl. Hold fast.’
TWO
And thus it is that Mr Hancock comes to sell his mermaid.
It has been returned to his office by Simeon’s own hand, and sits on the sideboard beneath its glass dome, waiting for him to bear it home once more to Deptford. He is damping down the coals when he hears a rapping on the front door that carries all the way through the building to his private office as if somebody has taken a brass-headed cane to it. He has picked up his coat to leave, but hesitates at the sound of strange voices ushered into the outer office.
‘Mr Hancock,’ a man says, ‘the mermaid man. Where can he be found?’
He is expecting no visitor. He puts down his overcoat and opens his door. ‘Why, I am here,’ he says.
In the plain outer office there is a party of four of the most splendid men. They are not dressed extravagantly, but the quality is evident: their greatcoats are of a deep rich indigo, their cravats the snowiest and gauziest white; their wigs pristine, uncrushed, unstained. And each wears a badge of a jewelled coronet on his arm, flanked with rampant gold-thread creatures.
‘Gentlemen,’ he says, although his mind is all a-fumble. ‘What can I do for you?’ He is thinking, foolishly, are they sent by Mrs Neal? Does she summon me to her?
‘We are here on a matter of business,’ they say. His clerks’ quills are twitching industriously but they are alert to every word: they are not unused to visitors of some grandeur, but the organs of aristocracy – let alone equerries of the Crown – are something new in this quiet office. He notes with some disconcertion that Oliver Hay is scribbling without removing his eyes from the company.
‘We can speak in my own office,’ he says, and they troop past him one by one. Within, he has not an idea of what to do. The mermaid watches from the sideboard. ‘Be seated,’ he hazards.
‘Oh, we shall not trouble you long,’ says their leader, the most clean-shaven man Mr Hancock ever saw. There is hardly a shadow upon his face; he is smooth as a youth although he must be forty. ‘We wish to speak to you about your mermaid, which was recently removed from the house of one Mrs Chappell.’
Mr Hancock nods towards it; the men turn too, and he notes a flicker of discomposure in their demeanour, swiftly suppressed. ‘Well, please,’ he says. ‘Speak.’
‘Do you intend to sell it?’
In matters of commerce he is rarely unprepared for such questions, and although the business with the mermaid first undid his senses entirely, he has passed into a new and absurd sharpness; an understanding that the point at which he judges his demands to be unreasonable is the point he must push beyond.
‘That depends,’ he says. The men are impassive. ‘You must appreciate that it brings me revenue: I had expected it to turn a profit for some time longer.’
‘We have money.’
‘Who has sent you?’ he asks, although he may judge it well enough from their jewelled badges. In the past he has arranged for such a coronet to be etched onto one hundred mother-of-pearl gaming chips.
‘An interested party.’
‘And it will go into a private collection? Some Wunderkammer? It’s my belief this creature will be of scientific use.’
‘It will not go anywhere that scientific men cannot find it.’
He might laugh aloud. Its little grasping hands have brought uneasiness into his small bubble; he realises he never wants it back in his sight again. ‘Well, you have heard my reservations,’ he says. ‘Make me an offer.’
The leader takes a sheet of paper from the desk. ‘May I?’ He dips Mr Hancock’s own pen in the inkwell, and writes with lovely fluid movements under the eyes of the dead men hanging on the walls. Mr Hancock glances up at their painted faces as if they were co-conspirators: the strangest sale I ever did make, he confides, as if any of you would have believed it.
The visitor hands him the piece of paper and Mr Hancock regards the figure in a second that feels as if all the air has been sucked from the room, so still it becomes, and so sluggishly his heart squeezes. The sum is two thousand pounds. This is above what his mermaid cost him. He looks at the number again.
‘Please,’ says the equerry. ‘We are open to your counter-offer. Go on.’
Dare he double their proposed sum? Quadruple it, even? Eight thousand would purchase a ship the Calliope’s equal; would finance a new voyage entirely, if he chose. Sukie’s dowry would be safely set by; his modest empire expanded by another house or two. He will sit in his office and Tysoe Jones will sail his ships, and it will be as if the mermaid never crossed his threshold at all.
Ah, what to do? Six thousand, eight thousand, ten thousand?
He thinks of himself in his counting-house, the evening before the mermaid arrived, alone and silent, surrounded by such unbearable lack.
He walks to his desk and sits down.
He takes up his pen, warm from the visitor’s hand, and he adds another zero.
Thus amended, he pushes the sheet of paper back across the desk, so trepidatious it renders him almost blind.
The visitor glances at the new sum, and then says, ‘Very well.’
Mr Hancock must steel his jaw to prevent it from flapping open. He had not thought it would be done so easily. He has sold Captain Jones’s whim for twenty thousand pounds: enough to pay off a nobleman’s debt; enough to hire a cook to run his kitchen for a century; enough to be another sort of Jonah Hancock than he has been hitherto.
‘Your master,’ he says to the leader of the strangers, ‘whoever he may be …’
‘Yes?’
‘Has he – has he seen this specimen?’
The company, to a man, turns once again to contemplate the beast. ‘He has heard excellent things about it,’ says the equerry, ‘and so what does it matter?’
‘Its appearance is unbeautiful. It is not what people expect of a mermaid.’
The visitor is impatient. ‘But it is a mermaid. He desired one and now he has one.’
‘It is, if I may say, monstrous.’
‘But it is real.’ The visitor straightens the collar of his coat and looks to his men. ‘It don’t matter what it looks like. It is desired by everyone and yet it belongs only to him. May we now be away, Mr Hancock? Or did you have other questions?’
‘Please. I am more than satisfied.’ He notes that the men’s eyes linger on the mermaid, and steps before it. ‘You’ll not take it away today. I shall wait for your payment.’
‘Of course, of course.’