‘Let me see you out.’
He ushers them through the office, where all his men sit up goggling. In the yard the stationer’s children and their black dog are playing some sort of chasing game, and pelt across the flagstones shrieking while their pet gambols in pursuit; the visitors are obliged to stride stiffly amongst them, executing little nervous side-steps when one child or other runs too close to them. Eventually one of the smaller boys wallops into the leader of the visitors’ legs, which throws him sprawling to the ground clutching his knee. It is at this point that Mr Hancock closes the door on his benefactors. When it is fast, he leans against it and tries to quiet his breathing so as not to arouse the curiosity of the clerks so nearby. He cannot decide what to think. He holds his hands up before him, and they shake.
THREE
Little boys’ fingers patter against the window of Mr Hancock’s counting-house. He hears the chime of their sticks dragged along the grilles in the pavement, and the high earnest wondering of their talk. If he turned from his desk he would see their figures slithering in the whorl of the glass, swimming and dispersing in its waves: he would see the light of their sunny hair and the stockings wrinkling down their legs as they break into a run, and thus vanish from each pane’s vortex.
It is a Sunday, a day of exodus, and the families of Deptford are setting out upon their rare pleasures with redoubled determination, it being an unseasonably fine day, perhaps the last they see this year. The women don their gay dresses and fresh-trimmed bonnets, and the men hoist their babies onto their shoulders, and they walk out with children and dogs running about their feet, all equipped with bats and balls and nets and fans, their bread bound in clean cloth, their pennies carefully counted. Stout matrons take their husbands’ arms with girlish pleasure, and suitors attend bashfully to their sweethearts, and bands of lads from the yards unbutton their shirts and uncork their first ale of the morning. Out they stride, one and all, bound by river and road for the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall or the tumbled green hill of Greenwich or the breeze of Blackheath, where the sky dances with many-coloured kites. They fill the street with the tramp of their feet, and their shouts and laughter waft across the twinkling river-water, no matter that it stinks. In the little rowing-boats the women shriek and clutch at their bonnets; the boys spring from stern to pitching prow without anxiety.
Mr Hancock remains at his desk. He is rich now, in the manner of a man long-apprenticed in handling other people’s money. His wealth drives him to no feverish excess (besides the ordering in, as the weather grows colder, of spiced currant buns and new woollen underwear): he has laid money aside for Sukie’s dowry and her boy cousins’ apprenticeships, but for the most part his ambitions remain unaltered in their substance, merely greater in their scale. He will still build houses, oh, most certainly, but he will build not one terrace but two, and they will not be here. What man builds in Deptford, after all, who has the means to build in London?
And so there is much to be done, and so he remains at his desk.
Furthermore, who would he walk out with?
In his boyhood he scampered ahead of his sisters amongst those tramping feet, with the admonishments of Hester harsh in his ears, but their father rarely came with them and their mother was dead beyond remembrance. The girls – Grace and Dorrie, Rachel and Susan – sometimes ran too, matching their steps to his. They ran altogether like pups in a pack, so hard that their lungs ached with the joy of it, but Hester was right to call them back to her.
‘Stay with me,’ she hissed, a skinny girl, as tidy then as she is now. ‘Walk nicely. They will say we have no order.’
‘They run,’ he said, spreading his hand at the children vanishing down the lane, the dust clouding behind them.
‘They have mothers.’
And he and Philip (whose skin was tight as a bladder by the time he washed up in the creek all blue and fish-nibbled) and Rachel (who was spirited off to Bristol, no more to see her family), and Grace (who, delivering her first child, bled and bled, and bled away), and Dorrie and Susan and even Hester grew quiet and took one another’s hands. Still they capered, but they doubted themselves, and could not skip and leap as carelessly as the other children.
Sukie has gone for the day: at morning prayers, her favourite spotted kerchief was already knotted about her shoulders, and as he intoned her feet jigged on the floorboards to run and meet her own sisters at the turnpike. She has been skittish of late, like the cat when she is out of temper, eyeing him suspiciously and saying nothing. This, he knows, is since the sale of the mermaid.
‘Oh,’ she had said when he told her.
‘Is that all? I had thought you would be pleased.’
She shrugged, and brought her thumbnail to her mouth.
‘It is a lot of money,’ he explained to her as she made for the door.
Turning, she said in a most accusatory manner, ‘I helped you.’
‘Aye, you did – you are a fine little helper. And now I have done my part too.’ But she is out of the door. ‘It was mine to sell,’ he called after her.
He hopes her day out might restore her cheer.
From somewhere in the house, Mr Hancock hears a strange twittering. He scratches on with his letter, but there is the sound again. A gurgle, fast suppressed. He puts down his pen. Venturing from his counting-house and into the hall, the gurgling becomes a giggling, and is joined by others to make a little chorus. The kitchen is dark and cold, made darker yet by the brightness of the open yard door, where Bridget leans against her broom, her back to the room. Her cot is still tumbled in the corner, its blankets thrown back to reveal the dent in the tick where she slept. There are breadcrumbs on the table, and a splash of milk, and dishes unwashed.
He crosses the room until he is only a few feet away from the yard door, and still Bridget does not notice, so deep is she in mirthful conversation with a knot of young girls who have gathered outside. They have let their good shawls drop from their elbows, guiltily enjoying the sunshine upon their forearms, and they have blacked their brows most startling. While maids they certainly are, they are also a diminutive masquerade of the town’s ladies, each being dressed faithfully but imperfectly in her mistress’s cast-off clothes. He recognises the blue tabby gown favoured by the doctor’s late wife; the black-and-red trim of the mantua Mrs Lawlor had been so proud of until she caught its cuff on a candle; the sprigged skirt worn and discarded by all four of the Master Shipwright’s daughters. Poor Bridget, he thinks, to find herself so poorly clothed. It is a wonder she has not run away.
‘What’s afoot?’ he asks, and the giggling stops. Bridget hardly turns at his approach, but the little mummers outside crane over her shoulder at him.
‘Good morning, sir,’ bob the girls one, two, three. ‘And a fine morning it is,’ says the bravest of them.
‘Aye,’ he says, ‘and what brings you here?’
‘Come to say good day, aren’t we?’ says Mrs Lawlor’s girl, flirting her patched mantua. ‘We’re off to Greenwich.’
Bridget sighs heavily.
‘Back by six, sir,’ says the girl in the blue tabby, which scrinches along her flanks with its imperfect adjustments.
‘All of them going,’ says Bridget. ‘Their masters are out, and they at their liberty.’ The girls nod eagerly, and she turns her eyes balefully upon him.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘but I am still here. And Bridget was off all Thursday afternoon and evening, were you not?’
‘My mother had need of me,’ she protests. ‘I was not at my leisure.’
‘You have had your freedom for the week, ’tis not my lookout what you used it for.’
The girls fall quiet.