He frowns. ‘With reason?’
‘She thinks – well, ’tis a small thing really – she thinks that if you were not here I would see more men. And we would be – we would be better off.’
‘Do you see other men?’ His face shows true surprise.
Looking all askance at him, she tries to laugh it away. ‘I hardly have the time! You would know, would you not, if I were entertaining others?’
‘But you would see them.’ He withdraws his hand from hers as if it were a glowing ember.
What else would I do? she thinks. How else does he imagine I pay my way? Aloud she says only, ‘No, no. No!’ With nothing to cling to, she knots the tear-damp bedsheets about her fingers. ‘Not if I did not need the money.’
‘I had not …’ He gazes at her face in stupefaction. ‘I did not think …’
’Tis always the way, she thinks. Treat them as if they are the centre of the world, and they do not hesitate to believe it. A charmed life these men lead, if they have never needed to look beneath the surface of things.
Knowing his next emotion will be anger, she grasps about for something to say. ‘It can’t be helped,’ she tries. ‘You must understand my circumstances. Of course I would not gain a moment’s pleasure from other men’s society; of course it would wound me horribly, and all the while my heart would break at my betrayal of you.’ This is untrue. Angelica has no particular feelings about spending an evening of mutual flattery with a stranger: on the whole she finds it enjoyable. Besides, she knows that to privilege desire in one particular man’s bosom is not to extinguish it from all others – there is no mutual exclusivity in attraction, and therefore it is no crime to encourage it wherever it appears – but she has come upon few men who appreciate this argument.
‘And what would you do with them?’ he demands. ‘Would you – would you lie with them? As you do with me?’
‘No!’ (Perhaps.) She folds her arms across her naked bosom and says coldly, ‘I am no whore, sir, no mercenary. Pray do not think me so base.’
‘What, then? What do you do with them that they pay you for so handsomely?’
She shrugs. ‘They have my company. That is all. I play a little music; I make conversation. They may escort me to plays and parties, if they desire it and if I am amenable to being seen about with them.’
He had thought she smiled upon nobody the way she did him. ‘You might as well open your legs to them.’
She begins to weep again, having over the course of her career developed a great knack for pathos. ‘Oh, how can you say it? Georgie, how can you? I allow them to be near me, that is all, a privilege you enjoy gratis.’ Raising her swimming eyes to him she sees he is gazing steadfast out of the window. ‘And if they bring me presents,’ she continues tremulously, ‘it is because they know with what great difficulty a woman survives in this city, and not with the expectation of any favour. That I only bestow upon the one man I truly love.’ But her words are in vain: he rises from the bed, and she has a glimpse of his glorious buttocks before he pulls his shirt on. ‘Smelly old men,’ she says, ascending again into a lament, ‘who fart in their sleep and talk about their years in the cavalry! Do you think I enjoy a moment of it?’
‘So do not do it.’ He buttons his breeches.
‘I have no other way of keeping myself together.’ She wipes her eyes on her wrist and adds in a scandalised whisper, ‘Some of them have hair that grows from the tips of their noses.’
‘What decent woman finds she must keep herself together at all?’ he demands. ‘The very fact that you must support yourself is a judgement on you. I am going.’
‘But where?’ She rises now, in true fear. ‘Wait for me –’ she gathers up her clothes – ‘wait! I shall come with you.’
‘Do not follow me. I can’t bear to be seen with you.’
FIVE
In the evening, the families returning in tired straggles, the lovers still unaccounted for in the hedgerows, Jem Thorpe arrives at Mr Hancock’s door. He puts his palm flat upon its frame, his other fist propped loosely upon his hip. He looks as he is: a man at the end of a day of leisure, still and smiling, as if the sunshine his skin took up now sits warmly within him.
‘I came,’ he says. ‘Like you asked of me. I’m at liberty to build your houses, and my boys eager to start.’ He reaches up and pats the belly of one of the twin cherubs flanking the lintel, put there by his grandfather and fluttering still.
‘Oh,’ says Mr Hancock, who in the absence of the girls from the house has been compelled to get his dinner from the pie shop, and now guiltily shakes crumbs from his cuffs, ‘there will be no need.’
Mr Thorpe is as a man still awaiting an answer. He stands a moment longer, blinks, and says, ‘Why’s that, then?’
Mr Hancock shrugs. Above him, the cherubs are frozen in their joy, flourishing scrolled paper and compasses, ready to draft edifices as yet unthought-of.
‘If you mean no longer to put up any houses,’ says Mr Thorpe, ‘I would strongly counsel you to change your mind.’ He puffs with enthusiasm. ‘Now is the time, sir. So many are in want of a genteel sort of living, and you are in a fine position to supply it.’
‘Certainly I am,’ says Mr Hancock, ‘but I have bought a very handsome parcel of land in Mary-le-Bone where I mean to do so.’
Mr Thorpe takes his hand from the cherub and places it upon his wigged pate. ‘A great distance from here,’ he says.
‘Quite so,’ says the merchant. ‘In London, or near as makes no difference. The countryside there is wide and pretty, and so close to the fashionable squares. Every gentleman wants a country home, and how right you are, sir: now is the time. Now is the time.’
Jem Thorpe clings to his notion like a drowning man. ‘That is a great distance for my team to travel,’ he says. ‘I suppose you …?’ But the supposing, however groped for, does not come to him. ‘You mean to take your business elsewhere,’ he concludes flatly. ‘You mean not to hire my men.’
‘It would, I fear, hardly be practical.’ Mr Hancock is anxious for his pigeon pie cooling on his desk, a skin puckering upon its gravy. ‘A shame, but what is there to be done? Now you must allow me—’
‘There is plenty to be done,’ says Jem Thorpe. ‘Were you not born here? Yes, you were; I know you, I know your family, and your father would never have treated my father in the manner you now treat me.’
Mention of his father pricks at Mr Hancock. He shuffles, defenceless, as the shipwright goes on, ‘If each man born here were to do as you are doing, there would be no town left at all. Make your fortune in London, sir, nobody grudges you that, but do not spend it there too!’
‘I must look to my own interests.’
‘Your interests are our interests!’ Mr Thorpe’s eyes have a great deal of white to them. ‘Or ought to be! Sir, why build there when you can build here?’
He shakes his head. Why keep an ass when you have the means for racehorses? ‘That is where the opportunity is,’ he says.
‘You have the money –’ Jem jabs his finger – ‘therefore you make the opportunity!’ He looks about himself. ‘I declare, you are as bad as the Admiralty. They grudge us the work we are due, and now so do you.’
The pain these words causes Mr Hancock is startling. ‘I have bought land here,’ he protests, ‘good growing land at Lady-well. I shall cultivate fruit and vegetables; those want jobs—’
‘Fruit-picking!’ spits Thorpe. ‘Children’s work! Old women’s work! Not for my men! Unrivalled, sir, unrivalled in their capabilities. No. If we cannot build ships we ought at least to build houses.’
‘My hiring you would be no more than an act of charity,’ says Mr Hancock.
‘An act of unity.’ Mr Thorpe would almost place his foot at the threshold; instead he doffs hat and wig and all, and clasps them to his chest. His head is shiny back to its crown, and thence fuzzed with greying curls. ‘Come, sir,’ says he, ‘we cannot go on without regular employment.’