‘Are you certain?’ Mrs Frost puts her fingertips to her throat. What would Angelica say if she knew she had spoken of her finances to the abbess? And what else, if she secretly accepted money from her? ‘… I …’ She shakes her head. ‘I cannot. To put her in your debt … it does not seem …’
‘Nonsense. She will never know. Let this be a gift, from me to you – to ease your mind.’
‘I am ashamed,’ says Mrs Frost.
‘No need! I know how it is. In this world, we have nobody but one another; I seek to protect Angelica, for our collective reputation.’
Within Eliza Frost’s soul the pecuniary takes mastery over the honourable. ‘It would reflect worse on her,’ she says slowly, ‘if there were no money. If bills were not paid.’
‘There you have it. There is nothing so shameful as a woman who cannot keep her own house. Here, you do the right thing. She will not have to know.’
‘Still I feel …’ Mrs Frost glances aloft, as if Angelica might be peeping through the ceiling joists. She tucks her bottom lip inside the top.
‘Trouble yourself no longer,’ says Mrs Chappell. She takes Mrs Frost’s hand and closes it around a clinking purse. ‘Only pray that in time the gentleman will come to a better arrangement with his finances.’
Holding the purse, Mrs Frost is enlivened with a new spirit. Indeed, she almost giggles. ‘Or melt away entirely,’ she says.
‘Humph. I fear that is inevitable.’
‘Thank you.’ Mrs Frost inspects the purse and presses it tightly to her bosom. She feels a prick of conscience, but relief from want is a great balm. ‘Thank you, madam, I will not forget your kindness. If we can repay you—’
‘Hush you! Do not consider that at this moment. Simply go on as best you can – the wheel will turn. It always does.’
NINE
She is jovial until they are out of the door, but as she is hoisted into the carriage Mrs Chappell allows herself to express some provocation. ‘Wilful,’ she says to the girls who wedge themselves into the seat opposite her, their eyes blinking in the depths of their swansdown. ‘They are wilful in their infatuation.’
‘They are in love,’ says Elinor, who despite her altercation with Rockingham is still a mite impressed: compared to certain of her regulars he is a veritable homme comme-il-faut, so handsome and so young.
‘Only because they have both chose to be,’ sniffs her mistress, shifting uncomfortably in her seat. ‘Ay, me! I should not have drank so much tea! I shall never last until home. Stop, girls, stop – Pol, pass me the thing.’
Mrs Chappell’s bourdaloue is made from fine white porcelain with dragons rampant about its rim. She has a great abundance of skirts and petticoats so that it is almost impossible to discover her legs beneath them; above her garters, Mrs Chappell’s thighs are vast and dimpled as dough, and faintly mauve. ‘They each went out in search of an affaire du coeur, and it is no accident that they found one another,’ she huffs, heaving herself up so as to accommodate the vessel against her coarse and greying cauliflower. Her legs brace upon the boards and she trembles with the effort; she plucks with small fat hands at her skirts as they subside over her knees, and the sound of her pissing fills the carriage.
Elinor looks kindly out of the window, but Polly wrinkles her nose; she pulls her hood further over her face and scowls to herself. Kitty, so very lately plucked from Billingsgate, does not mind it, and sees her chance to contribute to the conversation. ‘They are marvellous well suited,’ she observes foolishly.
‘Pish posh,’ says Mrs Chappell. Her water has a mineral, creaturous smell that creeps into the nostrils; it tinkles to a cease and then spurts again. ‘They are both young and handsome. What is marvellous in that? They spur one another on, that’s all; they give one another licence to abandon good sense. Take this.’ She passes the piss-pot to Polly, who stares at it for a long and haughty moment. ‘Well?’ She brandishes it with vigour, so that its amber contents leap within.
Polly drops her eyes and takes it. Its porcelain belly is hot against her palms, which on a cold day such as this is not unwelcome, but there is a great anger in her throat. ‘And what am I to do with it?’ she asks coldly.
‘Put it out of the window,’ says Elinor. ‘Here, pass it me, I shall do it.’
‘’Pon my word!’ Mrs Chappell mops between her legs with an edge of her petticoat, and rearranges her skirts to sedateness. ‘You certainly shall not! On a public road, in my own carriage, for any body to observe and chatter on later? No, Pol, it is not far, keep hold of it until we are set down.’
‘If only you had done so,’ growls Polly, but very quietly.
Elinor apprehends her friend’s rage. ‘Only round the corner,’ she comforts her, and puts a lid on the offending thing, ‘then you may leave it under the seat for the servants.’ Polly says nothing. Her lips are pressed tight, and although she holds the lid fast, she feels with each jolt of the carriage the abbess’s piss slop and jump in its shallow vessel. A trickle escapes and tickles her finger, but she closes her eyes and will not look. Elinor returns to the conversation. ‘At least the gentleman will see Mrs Neal well provided for,’ she says, ‘and that is all we can any of us hope for.’
‘No! Did you listen at all? He cannot afford her. Prick up your ears, girl, people speak for other reasons than to simply exercise their jaws. What you have the privilege to overhear, you ought to have the sense to make use of.’ She knits her fingers across her belly and sighs. ‘And no, Nell, simply being kept is not enough. How long will it last? Until he tires of her, or she him? Perpetuity, that is what you want. Dignity. A certain what-shall-I-call-it – a cachet.’
‘Love, though!’ says Elinor.
‘Oh, fools fall in love. Children, dogs, dotards. What you want, girls, if your time ever comes, is a gentleman who sees your rare value. An admirer, certainly – for what are you intended for, except to be admired? But ask yourself, can this gentleman appreciate me? He ought to prize you as he prizes his Sèvres, his antiquities, his best-bred hounds. You seek a gentleman who knows exactly what he has got in you; who understands the responsibility he has to you. You are ladies quite apart from the common water.’
‘And does Rockingham not …?’ asks Kitty.
‘Oh, he appreciates nothing. He is a mere boy! Any country slut has soft tits and a warm cunt; that is all he wants, whether or not he knows it. Mrs Neal is of no worth to him whatever, and if this affair transpires to the benefit of either party I shall be vastly surprised. You watch, girls; they will be the ruin of one another.’
They are returned, and all descend from the carriage with varying degrees of ease. Polly is last to alight; Simeon the footman comes to her assistance, and the sight of him with the dogs scampering at his heels puts her into a worse temper than before.
‘Here is a jar of piss,’ she says, holding it out to him as the others vanish within. ‘Pray dispose of it.’
He looks at it, and then at her. ‘I shall send a maid,’ he says.
She sniffs. ‘What? Too good for it?’
‘’Tis not in my duties.’
‘’Tis not in mine, and yet Gunderguts Chappell compelled me to carry it all the way back, and here I am holding it in my hands still.’ Being around him always makes her feel spiteful; it is something about the livery, how tidy he keeps it and how puffed up he is within it. And then Rockingham’s words have ruffled her – ‘your brothers’, as if she had a single thing in common with the Africans and the slaves and the indigent poor who clutter the streets.
He apprehends her fierce expression as boding no good at all. He does not like the way she clings with such loathing to the bourdaloue. ‘Pray put it down,’ he says. ‘I shall not report to her what you just called her. Here, let me assist you.’
But she remains crossly seated, holding the pot as if it were a weapon. ‘She should not treat me thus,’ she says. ‘She would not give it to Elinor or Kitty to hold. As if I were lowlier than them when I know it to be true that men will pay twice for me what they will for them.’