Those on the shore see our faces break the waves far away, or see our dark shapes shift and disperse somewhere deep below, and they insist: Yes, it was more than animate, it was human!
No mistaking it – not some dumb beast – nor ice nor rope nor flotsam. It called to me, they say, it waved an arm, it knew me, before it vanished into that cold void beyond, dived into such endless space as you cannot imagine.
Our breath is the heave and pull of the sea on a black night, which rocks the sparks of moonlight in its ripples. We are foment, white foam spreading and leaping; we dash against the crag and are dispersed. We are the long briny hiss of tide retreating from the land. The pebbles skip when we pass by; the stones roll over. We are the waft and spread and bloom of purple weed. We lie smooth and polished. We tug, tug, haul at strong bodies. At our gentle, endless touch, wood is softened, sharp edges licked smooth, the strongest locks corrode.
EIGHT
November 1785
The winter comes in bitterer every day, but does not trouble Angelica in the least. She is happy and lavish in the arms of her dear George: when Mrs Chappell visits, with her girls all bundled up in swansdown pelisses, she finds them sprawled together on the sopha, a snaggle of limbs, feeding one another tipsy-cake. Polly, Elinor and Kitty cannot tear their eyes away from the spectacle: Mrs Neal in her robe embroidered with palm trees, and Mr – who? – with his banyan embroidered with monkeys, sucking custard from one another’s fingers and chortling. It is obscene: they stare and yet they cannot bear to see. Nobody notices the blood that heats their faces, for the fire is banked up so high that even Mrs Chappell, who certainly has no delicacy left to offend, appears flushed. Groping for Mrs Frost’s arm as she is deposited in the apartment’s largest and ugliest chair, Mrs Chappell exchanges a look with her – or in fact does not, for Mrs Frost mournfully lowers her eyes to mutely avow, ‘’Tis nothing to do with me.’
The girls dither. ‘Be seated,’ says the abbess, and they crush in where they may, the sopha being occupied. Rockingham takes up his newspaper, and absent-minded takes up Angelica’s hand as he reads, caressing its fingers one by one.
Kitty leans so far forward her elbows balance on her knees. She clasps her hands and stares. Stop it, mouths Polly, but it goes unmarked.
‘I’ve not seen you in a good long time,’ observes Angelica, stroking Mr Rockingham’s palm with her own even while looking deeply and frankly into Mrs Chappell’s face. Of course she has come to make amends, she has already assured herself. ‘Are you staying long?’ she asks.
‘Why?’ asks the abbess. ‘Have you another engagement?’
George looks up from his paper to meet Angelica’s eye, and they both smirk. ‘No.’
‘We shall not keep you,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘We merely came to remember ourselves to you.’
‘Good of you, good of you.’ Rockingham’s fingers visibly tighten upon Angelica’s waist but his eyes return to his paper. She is dressed exotically à la turque, with a scarf wrapped most becomingly about her head. The colours are ones she has never been in the habit of wearing – oxblood, mustard, jade – and Mrs Chappell thinks she cannot quite like it, what with such hectic colour in the girl’s cheeks and lips, such spark in her eyes: everything about her seems brighter, sharper, fuller. Presumptuous, she thinks, to make such a show of herself. Too much. She likes her own girls in charming white gowns. Sartorial daring is for women who may choose how they are looked at.
Even now, under the abbess’s scrutiny, Angelica bristles. ‘Hmm?’ she asks sharply.
‘I merely look upon you.’
‘Merely.’ Angelica stretches out her arm to show off the drop of her sleeve, so busy with embroidered tendrils and fronds, and cupping within it a foam of white lace. Her knuckles are dazzling with jewels. ‘You are always thinking something,’ she says, ‘I know. What do you think now?’
‘Very fine, I daresay.’
‘Georgie bought it me.’
Mrs Chappell looks at him. He is transfixed on his reading, but runs his fingertip along the edge of Angelica’s ear: she shivers and squeaks.
‘Oh, you did?’ says Mrs C. ‘And all of this –’ the Turkey rugs, the coloured prints, the piles of books and ribbons and shawls and flowers – ‘you pay for it?’
‘She’ll want for nothing,’ he says without looking up.
‘But I want to keep house, Georgie.’ She thrusts out her bottom lip. ‘You and I, in our own home.’
‘Patience.’ He folds the newspaper over and shakes it at Polly, although he has hitherto given no hint that he has noticed her presence in the room. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘what do you make of this?’
‘Of what?’
‘The problem of the blacks. There are too many of them in this city; they will not work.’
‘I know nothing of it.’ She lowers her face.
‘You’ve no family? They cannot be rich, or else you would not very likely be in the position you are—’
‘No family,’ says Polly. Elinor is trying to catch her eye, but Polly will not look at her; she feels her face burn with what exact emotion she cannot tell. She tries to feel nothing.
‘Then it were well you are where you are,’ he says, ‘for your brothers the Lascars and the Africans can find no work here, and are begging on our streets. Look –’ he flaps the newspaper towards her again – ‘there is a public subscription to help them. Public subscription! Food and beds and whatever they demand this cold winter! A suit of clothes, if they asked for’t. Some say they have earned such charity, I say—’
‘Certainly they have,’ says Elinor bravely. ‘They have fought for us in the war with America, and they have sailed our ships and been all manner of use to us – we who enslaved them, and who brought them here. We grant them their liberty, but what does liberty count for when its condition is destitution?’
‘A very pretty speech,’ says Rockingham, ‘but you cannot understand the half of it.’
‘We owe them a fair living,’ says Elinor.
‘A great many of them are nothing more than runaways,’ he says. ‘We owe them nothing; in fact, they have positively stole from us. My uncle keeps a plantation in Jamaica and he cannot bring even his most favourite slave with him when he visits here, because what will the fellow do? He will escape at the first opportunity. And furthermore, the people here will protect him! They’ve no loyalty, not a grain of respect: they might be kept by a good family their whole lifetime, and educated, and clothed, and given a place in the world, and yet none of this means a thing to them when they see their chance to escape.’
‘No man is a slave on English soil,’ says Elinor.
Rockingham turns to Mrs Chappell. ‘Is this something you encourage?’ he asks. ‘Her tongue is too ready; no man wants that in a wife.’
‘Men keep their wives at home,’ says Mrs Chappell most pleasantly. ‘They do not come to us for more of the same.’ To Elinor, she says, ‘Do not contradict the man; he don’t like it.’
‘I was not addressing her anyway,’ says Rockingham. He gestures again at Polly. ‘I was asking her opinion of her people’s plight.’
‘I know nothing of it,’ says Polly.
‘Put them all on a boat and send them away where they came from, that is my solution to the matter. If they cannot earn their keep, we’ve no room for them here.’
‘In that case we would do best to put all the beggars on a boat,’ says Elinor triumphantly. ‘The white ones too, and all the destitute mothers that we cannot keep, and the blind and the idiots and the cripples who are passed from one parish to the next until they fall down dead, and set off a new argument as to who should pay for their burial. It is not only the black poor who cause nuisance and expense.’
‘Who are you,’ asks Rockingham, ‘to think you know anything of this? Ah! You are the favourite of an abolitionist, is that it? Does he talk fine words of emancipation as he beds you?’