There is a jovial holiday air to the afternoon: when their food has arrived – on polished trays with thick linen napkins, which they are ashamed to receive, knowing themselves so naughty – they kick off their shoes and perch carefully on Elinor’s bed, spreading out their skirts and patting nervously at their hair, cracking nuts and reading aloud to one another. Seldom are they left so entirely to their own devices, and they drowse most happily for an hour.
‘We are treated so nice here, Nell,’ Polly sighs. ‘Perhaps we should never go back,’ a remark which – if she had known then what she was later to discover – Elinor might have marked as of particular significance. But having no talent for prophecy, she merely murmurs and cracks another nut.
THIRTEEN
The day of Twelfth Night. Rockingham has been gone two weeks, and Angelica is bored. She and Mrs Frost have indeed embarked upon the work of cutting out the parts of a new gown, and they have pushed the furniture to the sides of the room. The floor is spread with ivory damask, and Mrs Frost kneels there: shrik goes the steel of the scissors through its gleaming fibres; shrik shrik shrik. Outside, there is laughter on the pavement, and the smell of hot brandy and plum cakes. At night they hear merrymaking, but Angelica and her companion go obediently nowhere. Now Angelica stands up, pushing her hair out of her eyes. ‘How much longer must we continue?’ she asks.
‘Until ’tis finished,’ Mrs Frost murmurs.
‘I cannot remember a time before I was making this dress! And it is no more done than it was when we began!’
‘Wait until we get to the stitching.’
‘You can do that. I am finished.’
‘You desired a decent pastime. Well, here it is. Won’t your George be delighted when he sees your industry?’
‘Women of consequence do not make their own dresses.’ She flings down her scissors. ‘Oh, what can I do?’
‘Read a book.’
‘I have read them all.’
‘Take up a magazine.’
‘Their nonsense bores me. I want some society, Eliza!’
‘Wait awhile and I will play you at knucklebones again.’
‘Ah!’ She shrieks with mirth that slips into horror. ‘No, no, I can bear it no more! What is there to do?’
‘He did not forbid riding in the park, did he?’
‘Ugh, too cold. And I do not suppose I could go to the theatre without prevailing upon a gentleman for a box. Why has he not rented me a box for my own?’
‘He’ll not have you looked at. We could visit somewhere new. A menagerie, perhaps. The Academy.’
Angelica groans. ‘What point would there be? All the effort and discomfort of getting there, and then we should only have to come back. It all palls without Georgie.’ She crosses sadly to the window and twitches the curtains back to observe the quiet street. ‘In the whole of this city the best you offer me is knucklebones.’
From below, a faint call of ‘Ahoy’.
‘Who’s that?’ Angelica looks up and down the street, and sees trotting along it Mr Jonah Hancock, cloaked in dark green, puffing frozen clouds of breath. ‘The mermaid man! Well, it has been some time!’ She pushes up the sash and leans out. ‘Halloo! What are you doing abroad this cold day?’
Inside the room, Mrs Frost says, ‘Angelica, no. What are you thinking?’
‘I had business,’ says Mr Hancock. ‘And in passing by I thought to see how you did.’
‘What business? Nobody has done a stroke of work in weeks.’ She leans out further, most merry to see a friendly face. ‘Where’s my mermaid?’
‘Angelica!’ snaps Mrs Frost.
Angelica shoots a glance behind her. All within is dismal. She is conscious of the need to keep him wanting, but very likely his devotion will compensate for any lapse in her. ‘What are you doing now?’ she asks.
He almost hugs himself. ‘Nothing – nothing at all. I am at my liberty.’
‘I cannot credit you,’ tuts Mrs Frost. ‘You do not know what is good for you.’
‘I know that I shall die of boredom if I continue thus,’ Angelica hisses. Leaning again from the window, she calls, ‘I am not quite prepared for company. If you return in twenty minutes I shall be better disposed. And just to talk, you understand? Come up to amuse me, and leave when I give the word.’
As she draws the window down, he bounds off proud as a crow in a gutter. A few times he has passed hopefully by here since their last encounter, but always the window was dark, or filled with the stern face of Mrs Frost, whose favour he does not dare attempt to solicit again. His contact with Mrs Neal herself is so little, in fact, that he does not know she has a keeper; it is gossiped all over town, but he, ignorant of how close their streams of commerce run, passes through taverns and coffee-houses alert to mention of this ship or that insurance, but never for the name of Angelica Neal. It does not occur to him that if he had wanted news of her he could have asked for it and had an answer from half a dozen different quarters – but no. He thinks Angelica Neal his own secret.
Any astute gentleman would have questions, but he is more now than he was when he first met her; his fortune is equal to any body’s, and so, therefore, is his right to be received by her. Besides, the vision of the crescent of her naked breast rising above the windowsill intrudes yet upon his mind, and the press of her fingers upon his, and how nearly, in the mermaid’s closet, they had …
Still, when he returns after pacing briskly around Soho Square for fifteen minutes, and is led wordlessly to Mrs Neal’s door by her companion, he wavers on the threshold.
‘Are you ready to receive me?’ he asks.
‘I am,’ Angelica Neal calls from her parlour. She is in her white gown, and her hair all shining under the starchiest cap he ever saw, with the most evenly crimped frill. ‘Come, sit with me,’ she says.
His approach is not without hesitation. And indeed he finds this room, which he has never been in before, quite peculiar. It is very warm, and elegantly proportioned, with large windows, but it is cluttered in every corner with luxury of all sorts.
‘You are well appointed here,’ he says. He has noticed the ivory threads strewn here and there on the Turkey carpet, but he does not imagine that only ten minutes earlier the beginnings of a dress had been laid out here, and that down the passage in Angelica’s bedroom, its components have been hastily heaped.
‘I like it.’ She looks at him expectantly. He seats himself in the chair opposite her, and folds one hand upon the other. ‘Good day,’ she says, and in the quiet room her voice is soft and pretty. There is a small round table at her elbow, set up with tea equipage, and she leans to pour hot water into the pot; her eyelashes brush her cheek most beguilingly.
‘Why do you bring me up here?’ he asks.
‘I had nobody to talk to,’ she says, and looks up to smile at him. ‘Besides, I desired to know you better. We met so briefly; I have been much caught up with life since I returned to London.’ She pours a cup and holds it out to him; he must rise to receive it, she being so distant. ‘I suppose your Christmas has been very busy.’
‘No,’ he says. Christmas is the time he feels most like a stray dog, and each year it stretches on a little longer, an endless procession of babies to hold and exclaim over, sweethearts clutching one another under the mistletoe, spouses grown content and old together. ‘I took my niece to her mother’s house, which pleased her but did not much please me.’
Angelica has not spent a Christmas with any of her blood since she was a girl of thirteen; in her maturity she has gone wherever she is summoned and admired, to be herself as much a part of the festivities as the gilded gingerbread or the riotous song. Thus she continues to perceive the celebrations in many ways as a child would: a hazy whirl of frumenty, hunt the thimble, plum pie, blind man’s buff and scorch-cased chestnuts: endless laughter and no anxiety; she expects to light every candle and dance beyond sunset, but not a moment of expense or resentment. And so she does not say anything.