This is closer to the truth than Elinor is pleased to concede, for she has taken the eye of a man who writes many letters to newspapers on the subject. ‘I read,’ she says. ‘I observe the world about me,’ and to her credit this is also true.
Angelica has not been paying much attention to the conversation, but when it strays to the bedding of another woman besides herself, she bridles. ‘We mean to keep house,’ she repeats, ‘and we are kept from it by absurd circumstances, for do you know Georgie will not get all the inheritance that is due to him until he is twenty-five? It is a scandal, when you think of it, that he has been deprived of what is rightly his in such a manner, and kept on an allowance as if he were a child. You are not a child –’ she turns scoldingly to Georgie – ‘you ought not to be held back from your own fortune.’
‘Perhaps those who hold the purse strings know what he would do with it,’ says Mrs Chappell.
‘And what do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, come. When young men are so inclined to women and dissipation? They make a very wise choice.’
‘I am hardly dissipated. If they only met me …’
At this Mrs Chappell can only laugh, a great choking bark that leaves her breathless for some moments.
‘I am much in favour of it,’ insists Angelica. ‘George has spoke to his uncle – to all of his people, in fact – of the true domestic happiness we have found, haven’t you, Georgie, but they positively refuse to see me.’
‘They positively refuse,’ he says, acquiescing to her fingers twining through his hair while the girls make cutty eyes at him.
‘And the only reason for it is the unhappy accident of my birth! Why must I suffer all my life for my father’s lack of standing?’
‘You should not,’ says Rockingham, foolishly besotted. ‘You are as refined in your intellect and your sensibility and your beauty as any heiress.’
‘Thank you for your compliment,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘She was a stubborn student.’
‘Oh no, madam, you misunderstand. She is a true daughter of nature, where others must resort to art. Her perfection comes from within.’
Angelica preens. ‘You see? He understands me. We are serious in our desire to marry, you know. Truly his uncle treats him as if he did not know his own mind, as if he were a mere boy. Well, madam, I have no hesitation in declaring that we will do it with or without that man’s approval.’
A ripple passes through the girls, of appreciation or it may be horror; they hardly know.
‘Well …’ says Mr Rockingham. ‘Perhaps if it were—’
Angelica claps her hand over his mouth and squeezes his cheek. ‘Fussing!’ she says, touching her nose to his, with only the flat of her palm to keep their lips from meeting. He looks up at her as the magi look up at the virgin. ‘Fussing, fussing,’ she croons to him. ‘How you fret.’ She turns back to her audience and continues, ‘At any rate, he will be of age in only two years, and then quite beyond their control. So we shall have the last laugh. I say, Eliza! Eliza, dear, would you bring me some of those pretty biscuits we had?’
‘There are no more,’ says Mrs Frost wearily.
Angelica whines like a dog. ‘But I want some!’ She rolls over on the couch, stretching from its arm to see where her companion is at. Her gown, twisted about her legs, rides up to reveal her bare calves. ‘What else have we? Any cake?’
‘No. We have apples,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘There is a cheese on the slate. Or I can—’
‘No, no, no. I must have a cake! The little chestnut ones … you like those, Georgie, do you not? Eliza, Georgie is hungry, will you not go out and bring us back—’
‘Where is the maid?’ asks Mrs Chappell sharply.
‘Maria? Oh, ’tis hardly worth having her, the little she does.’
‘I bade her come only mornings and evenings,’ says Mrs Frost. Angelica is in whispered communication with her lover; behind her unseeing back, Mrs Frost rubs thumb and forefinger together meaningfully. ‘So I run the errands.’
‘And what if a visitor—’
‘There are no visitors,’ interjects Angelica. ‘I do not take visitors any longer, do I, Georgie?’ She cranes over the back of the sopha. ‘Eliza? You are still here.’
Mrs Frost eyes the chilly street outside the window and reaches for her cloak.
‘We shall take our leave,’ says Mrs Chappell. ‘Girls.’ She lifts up her elbows and they haul away, their fingers digging into her armpits as her face bloats and her breathing accelerates to a shallow pant. When she lets out a moan of exertion Rockingham barely stifles a snigger: Angelica eyes him for a moment and then conceals a smirk prettily behind her hand.
The girls in their great pelisses fill the whole of the staircase, a rustling sighing host about Mrs Chappell, leaving behind them a fragrance of roses and lavender. Mrs Frost follows their laborious progress; at the bottom Mrs Chappell seizes the newel with both hands and clings to it, winded, as a shipwrecked mariner to a providential shore. Her breath is painful to listen to, so light and rapid, and when she speaks it is with a rattle of phlegm in the back of her throat.
‘Frost,’ she says, ‘tell me how is that dandyprat keeping her?’
‘That I cannot say,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘I do not trust him, madam; he says we may depend on him but he has not the first idea …’
‘Anything set down in writing?’
Mrs Frost hesitates to report her friend’s foolishness where it will be so quickly condemned. ‘Some agreement shall be,’ she says. ‘She is not so stupid as that.’
‘I suppose you receive a regular stipend from him. Punctual, an agreed sum on an agreed date? Monthly? Quarterly?’
Mrs Frost’s muteness speaks all that is required, and Mrs Chappell groans.
‘’Tis all right for fancies,’ Mrs Frost excuses him, ‘sweetmeats, ribbons, gowns – whatever she has a whim for. He would buy her anything she asked, but you see she will not ask for pins, or stay-tapes.’
‘An absurd arrangement,’ commiserates Mrs Chappell. ‘Indeed, ’tis no sort of arrangement at all – domestic disarray of the worst sort.’
‘He cannot fathom how quickly stockings wear through,’ says Mrs Frost, warming to her topic, for she has had many resentments piling up in her mind, and nobody to air them with, ‘and yet she will not allow me to mend them – we must have new, Angelica says, always new and nothing darned.’ Her voice rises in pitch, and her face breaks out in white-and-pink blotches as she proceeds. ‘And when I ask him for more he becomes certain I am swindling him: “You have the maid sell them on,” he says. “No two women could run through so many.”’ She raises her skirt to show the scars of neat darning in her stocking; a new hole opening up on her calf. ‘And so she wears the new stockings, and I take them once she has worn them out.’
‘Fie, for shame!’ Mrs Chappell comforts her.
‘I cannot continue to apply my requests for his approval – as if he knew better than I what this household needs!’
‘He has not the first idea, of course he don’t.’
‘No bread but cakes,’ laments Mrs Frost, and indeed now she is most thoroughly distressed, almost hiccoughing with emotion, ‘no beer but sack, no pins but what have diamonds on their heads. And the bill with the collier yet to be settled although they would burn the fire day and night without cease. If they would only wear more clothes!’
‘You are an excellent woman. ’Tis an affront to your work that you should be under such duress.’
‘I manage as best I can,’ says Mrs Frost. ‘But I am so ill at ease as to the bills, and the laundry, and the maid – how shall I continue to run this household when they believe I may do so on a farthing, and mock my asking for any more?’
‘What do you need?’ says Mrs Chappell, swinging about the drapes of her pelisse until her pocket comes into view and she is able to seize it in her little pointed fingers.
‘Pardon me?’
‘You ought not to have to ask him. What sum will cover your needs for the moment? Ten pounds? Twenty?’