He is not to be moved; she sees it from the shape of his mouth. ‘I am paying for the carriage; ’tis mine really,’ he says. ‘So I choose where you go.’
She sighs. ‘Very well. No dancing, no merrymaking. And am I allowed to be sociable at all? May I visit my female friends, go on errands?’
‘As much as you like. I would have you happy.’ He takes her hands in his and traces her fingers as he always has. ‘Only, I remember in what circumstances I first came upon you.’
She draws down her brow, but her lips smile on. ‘I remember too,’ she says, and tightens the twine of her fingers about his. ‘And so may I impose any conditions on your behaviour?’
He chuckles. ‘You jokeous creature.’ Then serious again, pulls her to him and whispers, ‘Do not forget me.’
‘Never!’
There is embracing, and a few tears shed by both parties, and then he must away, leaving Angelica alone in her crammed living room, clasping and unclasping her hands. She has not been left to her own devices for a great long time; the hours fairly loom before her. How can they be filled? She hardly knows what time is if it were not spent with him, or preparing to meet him, or subsiding after he has gone: now she paces a little, her old nervous habit, and puts more coal on the fire, lump by lump, and crouches to watch it begin to gleam red seams of heat. Outside, the sky is thick and greenish black, and moment by moment it seems to sink down upon the street, like a lid shut. It will not be long before the weather engulfs them entirely, and so she is relieved when Mrs Frost returns from the mysterious errands that running a house necessitate, her cheeks and nose shining pink and her hair all of a tousle under her windswept cape.
‘He is gone,’ Angelica says tragically, and totters as if into a swoon.
‘And not a moment too soon,’ says Mrs Frost, righting her briskly. ‘When will we know?’
‘I cannot bear it! To be without him so long! What am I to do? I think my heart will break.’
‘Will he send us word of his arrangements as to money?’ persists Mrs Frost, drawing close to the fire and stretching her fingers to it. ‘Oh my,’ she sighs, flexing them in its heat, ‘there ain’t a drop of blood in my hands; how they do ache.’
‘You and your mercenary heart! He undertakes a great long journey to plead our case, and settle all so that we may be happy for a good long time, and all you must yap is, “When shall we know, when shall we know?” I cannot say, Eliza! For he left my house not fifteen minutes ago! Where is your gratitude that he is gone at all?’
‘Gratitude don’t pay our way.’
‘I never said it did. He has left us twenty pounds under the fruit bowl.’
‘Well, and what good is that to us?’ Nevertheless, she snatches it up and presses it into her bosom. ‘When he is gone who knows how long?’
‘A month, merely,’ says Angelica, but she quails within. ‘If we are very good, and quiet, and keep to ourselves, twenty pounds will see us for twice that time. We do not pay Maria even ten pounds in a year.’
‘I should like to see you live as Maria does.’
‘I need nothing, if I have him. Let us show him how faithfully we wait for him, Eliza; buy me some magazines, and some books; we shall cut out a new dress if you will help me, and pay nothing to a seamstress.’
The sky is rent; the snow tumbles from it and patters now against the window. Even if they had desired it there would be no leaving the house today. ‘A frightful winter,’ says Mrs Frost, and she draws the curtains against it.
ELEVEN
Polly is in the little top room she shares with Elinor, which in a different house might be the maids’ room. The beds are neat and narrow, and she has drawn from beneath hers the box in which she keeps her scant possessions. It holds not a coin, not so much as a single gemstone – Mrs Chappell would know at once if it did – but many items of inscrutable value. Two little novels and three broad ribbons, rolled tight and pinned, well suited for barter or bribery in her female universe. Her own box of pins, and her own scissors in their shagreen case; her spectacles and her pencil. There is also a dirty pair of kid gloves, crushed into a ball; each time she opens the box she turns them over with a cluck of irritation, but she will not throw them out. She had thought them very fine the day she arrived in the house; they are the most raw totem of her folly, and too powerful to allow out of her possession. Then there is a little prayer book wrapped in a spotted handkerchief. Although she has not opened it in some long time, it has her mother’s name writ carefully inside. Her hand aspired to the easy flow and loop of a gentlewoman, but the effect is ruined by the blots where the pen has hesitated at the top of the ‘L’, the crooked turns of ‘C’ and ‘Y’.
A tap on the door.
‘I am busy,’ she says, for it is only six, and she had hoped for some time longer before being required again.
Simeon puts his head around the door. ‘A moment of your time,’ he says.
‘You are not allowed here.’
‘Just one moment.’
He steps into the room, and she watches him crossly. He looks nervously to the landing; then pushes the door to, and she cannot help but shrink into herself when it clicks shut behind him.
‘What do you want?’ she asks, and every fibre of her being is fierce at their being alone in the room; she feels the closing of the latch as if it were a hand clamped about her wrist.
‘Yesterday,’ he says, all unaware of her dis-ease. ‘At the carriage. When you …’
‘The piss,’ she says, and at mention of it he brushes at his livery as if filth still clung upon it. She sits up straighter. ‘What of it?’
‘I saw how you looked.’ He drops his voice to a whisper. ‘If you ever wanted to leave this place …’
‘Why would you say that?’ Her box is still on her lap; she folds her fingers around the knobbled case of her scissors. ‘You are not allowed to be in here,’ she persists.
‘I know people,’ he says, drawing from his waistcoat pocket a little piece of paper. ‘Here. Addresses. If you wish to leave, they will help you.’
He holds it forth for her but she does not rise to take it. ‘How dare you?’ she says. ‘To come in here where you have no right! To talk to me in such a way?’
He holds up his hands, the paper pinched between his fingers.
‘Ever since you came here you have presumed a kinship between us that frankly, sir, insults me. And these people, who give aid to slaves, to runaways. Why do you think they would help me?
‘They help the black poor, our brothers—’
That word again! ‘I’ve no brothers. I am not poor.’
He looks at her, clutching her box to her chest. ‘I suppose that is where you keep all your money? Come, now, ain’t this enslavement of a sort? You, here, unwaged, with no prospect of leaving …?’
‘And Nell and Kitty and the other girls, you’d call them slaves also? Could they make use of this address?’
He shakes his head. ‘I have tried my best with you.’ She does not guess what effort it has been for him to come to her thus; he perceives that elsewhere in the world he is categorically her inferior, for he guessed from the first day he saw her what she is: the child of some chosen woman, picked from the fields to share her master’s bed and wear the clothes that please him, and to bear infants who will be cherished despite their skin, and whose father will put gold rings in their ears and lace at their wrists and books in their hands, while lamenting that he cannot do better by them. In Carolina, Simeon himself had been a mere house slave, valued but uncherished. He tries again: ‘Here in London, this is a fine place for us.’
‘Us,’ she mocks, and rolls her dark eyes, not seeing how it strains Simeon to speak on so coolly.
‘The living is good; the conversation is good. I have friends who, if you were to meet them—’
‘I do not wish to,’ she says. ‘By all means seek your own satisfaction in this life; who am I to stop you if you wish to join up with others of your race in one great mass? I do not see the advantage. I want to mix with all people …’