‘You never would.’
He acknowledges that it does him good to have a young person in his household. It gladdens him to hear her and Bridget’s shrieks as they chase one another down the stairs, and to see them stroll out together on errands, arm in arm. He will even tolerate an apple-pie bed every now and then, for what else is to be expected of a girl of fourteen? In all other particulars Sukie is, after all, an excellent housekeeper, and infinitely preferable to the surly hirelings who came before her. If she were his own daughter he would have had her cast her sharp little mind over his ledgers, but he must assume that what she knows her mother must shortly know too. He has taken the precaution of buying her a fine silk day dress and allowing her to wear it about the house so that, by its constant rustling, he will know her presence.
Sukie, meanwhile, is secretly pleased to have been sent to her uncle: of all the situations that might have called for a spare daughter, this is the best by far. She dreads the day her brother will get another child on his fat wife and she, Sukie, will be called to Erith to scrub the nursery and mop drool. Here she has her own room, and she and Bridget find themselves often at their leisure, for a modest old man makes little work.
‘Will I read to you, then?’ she sighs. ‘The evening will not pass itself.’
‘Very well. Pope’s essays, if you please.’
‘Oh, yawn! Uncle, it don’t please me even one bit. No. Choose something else.’
He sighs. ‘I think you have something in mind.’
Indeed, she wastes no time in whipping from behind her chair a handsome little volume of the sort sold all down Fleet Street.
‘This is a good one,’ she says, bending close to the firelight to riffle through its pages. ‘I am halfway through so you will have to guess at what adventures came before.’
‘So many novels,’ he wonders. ‘Such a mob of Emilias and Matildas and Selinas: I had not thought the exploits of young ladies could take up so much print.
‘I am addicted to them,’ she says happily.
‘I am not.’ (But this is untruthful: he is a sentimentalist, and furthermore he enjoys Sukie’s reading aloud. She has a high bright voice, and bobs her head with narrative energy.)
‘You will like this one, Uncle! ’Tis full of excitement. And highly instructional.’
‘Your mother is right, I allow you too much pin money. Your library is larger than my own.’ Mr Hancock’s books number eighteen in total, excluding his bible which may be classified as an artefact. Then, because he enjoys her company more than he does Alexander Pope’s, he says, ‘Well? Will you read it or no?’
She wriggles in her seat to get comfortable, and clears her throat: ‘Heh-eh-eh-hem.’
This is the moment there comes a great thundering at the door. Mr Hancock scrambles with his pipe, spilling tobacco over his shoes in his haste to rise.
‘Sit down, Uncle!’ says Sukie, who is on her feet too.
‘It sounds important.’
‘Even so, ’tis not proper for a gentleman to answer his own front door. You want to hire a man,’ she says, and while he is stammering and grappling with the question of whether he is or is not a gentleman, and furthermore the cost of a liveried footman, and furthermore the absurdity of it, the hammering starts again.
‘Don’t go,’ Sukie warns him, adding in her mother’s voice, ‘Bridget must see to it, that is what she is for,’ but she cannot help kicking off her slippers and creeping across the room in her stockings. She nudges the door ajar with her toe and presses her face into the gap: she will have a clear view across the landing to the front door at the foot of the stairs.
‘What do you see?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Bridget!’ she hisses into the darkness.
When the door sounds again it is with a true pounding: the panels tremble and the iron bars across the fanlight set up a high resonant hum.
‘Open up, sir!’ calls a voice from outside. ‘’Tis Tysoe Jones!’
‘He himself! He has not sent a boy. Confound it. Something is amiss,’ says Mr Hancock, and he barges past Sukie and down the stairs. It is dark as doomsday but he has run up and down these stairs since he first learned use of his feet, and there is a flutter of light behind him as his niece comes forth with a taper to light the sconces.
‘He must not find our house unlit and we sitting only with the fire,’ she is muttering.
Mr Hancock is down the stairs with a scuffle and a clatter, his lungs juddering in his chest as he repeats, ‘Something is amiss. This is not the usual way of things,’ and thinks, what will we do now? If the ship is lost, and the cargo with it, ah! that will be a blow. Is it one he can absorb? And what of his investors? Many men stand to be disappointed on his initiative. He is ticking over the figures in his head even as he reaches the hall and comes to the front door. God be praised, he thinks, for bricks and mortar: if it comes to it I may sell my tenanted houses – this one too, but God forbid, God forbid, that I be the one to sell my father’s house.
He unlocks the door with palsied hands, the big key from his bunch first, followed by bolts top and bottom. The metal is heavy and uncooperative in his fingers: he wrenches once, twice, at the top bolt that always sticks – ‘Oil, Sukie, fetch me oil for the door –’ until it shoots home too fast, nipping the side of his palm so he curses. Outside, he can hear Captain Tysoe Jones stamping and swearing on the step.
‘I am here!’ Mr Hancock calls, clasping his injured hand.
As he opens the door, there is a little crescendo of light as Sukie puts the taper to the last of the candles, and here is Captain Tysoe Jones, ruggedly lit. He is in his sea clothes still, a jacket so faded by salt and sun that it appears dove-grey except for wedges of its old blue preserved under the lapels and the cuffs. His person is equally stained and faded: his face brick-coloured and tough as the soles of feet, with white creases about his eyes and mouth. The stubble on his cheeks twinkles as if a light frost has settled there. He clutches a canvas sack and looks mightily irritated.
‘No time like the present,’ he says.
‘Forgive me. I could not – I was unable to –’ Mr Hancock gestures at the door helplessly.
‘Let me come in. I have walked from Limehouse.’ His arms are crooked up to his chest, and he holds the sack as one holds a sleeping infant. ‘I wish to stand no longer.’
‘Did you come home on the Calliope?’
‘No.’ Captain Jones steps past him into the house. ‘My letter explained everything.’
‘I received no letter. I have had no word from you since you left London in January last. Nothing!’
Captain Jones removes his hat. He holds his bundle easily: it is neither heavy nor cumbersome. ‘Good evening, young lady,’ he says to Sukie.
Her curtsey is perfunctory, not her most elegant although she practises it often enough in the bubbled mirror that hangs above the fire. She has lost her composure and is dumb as a child, mouth firm shut and eyes wide. ‘You must have tea,’ she says at last.
‘Ale,’ says Mr Hancock, feeling cruel for correcting her. ‘And have Bridget bring out the blade of beef.’
Sukie scuttles into the kitchen, her head ducked. He thinks, if the ship is lost, her father has lost the five hundred pounds he invested. What will Hester say?
He waves Captain Jones into the counting-house, remembering too late that the candles within are extinguished. He wishes to be a good host but in the thick-wadded darkness the words burst from his mouth: ‘Where is my ship?’
‘Hanged if I know. Might we have a little light?’
His hands tremble as he lights the candles on the great desk. ‘And what of its cargo?’
‘I took no cargo,’ says Captain Jones, seating himself with a long groan of relief. ‘I sent you a letter.’