‘She had no other,’ wheedles Elinor. ‘Pray, what was she to—’
‘She was to remain in the house!’ thunders Mrs Chappell. ‘She was not to abandon my service as if she were no better than some wilful housemaid!’ Her voice vanishes to a croak, and she subsides in her chair, her hand to her breast, panting painfully. Her face is ashen, her lips blued, and Elinor takes alarm.
‘Madam!’ She crouches beside her. The abbess’s skin is cold and dewy, but her eyelids flutter over the rheumy orbs beneath. ‘Do you need your salts?’
‘Water,’ she croaks, and Elinor pours it with terrible trembling, so that its dropples fall to the carpet and stain her slippers. Once Mrs Chappell has sipped, coughed, sipped and gulped, she looks a little better. ‘I’ll have no more of your worrying, miss,’ she says. ‘You are to go out of this room and make those gentlemen forget they were ever disappointed.’
‘But Polly!’
‘Leave that in my hands,’ says Mrs Chappell.
‘Will she be got back?’
‘You assume we shall be so fortunate as to find her. If she has gone into the rookeries we’ll not see her face again – and if we did she would be welcome in my house no longer. You would do well to forget she was your friend.’
He dreams, one night, of grey seawater, its surface leaping, its depth incomparable. Beneath its surface, very far below, he sees a black shadow, vaster than any thing he can even conceive of. Its scale is not of this world, it is bigger than factories or mountains, bigger than the growing ships that tower over his little Deptford home. The shifting tugging water obscures its shape, but its largeness is such that his breath aches in his throat and his fingertips tingle. And all the time it is coming towards him.
In his dream this dark creature rises and rises up to the surface, its pace stately but gathering speed, until its shadow is all that can be seen beneath the water. It must shortly crash through the waves, scattering white wings of foam in its triumphant upsurge into his own realm, to loom into the sky and block out the sun.
But before it does so, he wakes up.
It is morning and the room is full of pale light, the dream hanging upon Mr Hancock still, a heavy sadness across his chest and shoulders. He has seen his own smallness, the futility of all of his doings. He rubs his eyes, massages his sternum to ease the knot of grief that has formed inside him. When he sits up, he sees that there by his bed stands a grave pale boy of eight years old, his dark curls lying on his shoulders.
Mr Hancock cries out. He kicks the bedclothes aside. He reaches, grasps, his heart thundering. But nobody is there.
NINETEEN
‘Mr Hancock?’ Mrs Neal turns restlessly, and lays her face upon her arm. ‘Were you ever in love?’
He tugs at his cravat. He feels that Henry has walked beside him all the day, and many hours after waking, his mind is still so distracted that the word love on the lips of a beautiful woman puts him in mind of nothing that it ought, but instead lays in his arms once more the weight of his little boy, Henry, as he had cradled him that one and only morning. The child was already dead at that time, his poor blood crisping at the jag in his head that the instruments had made. ‘That is scarcely a thing to complain of,’ the surgeon had said (not his fault – nobody to be blamed – they had paid for the best). ‘If the infant had been any faster stuck I would have been obliged to bring it forth in pieces; be glad you’ve something to honestly bury.’ And that was something to be grateful for, was it not, for despite his wound and his lips going greyer, and his tiny shoulder strangely crushed, this long-awaited Henry looked as perfect as any living child. Mr Hancock remembers Henry’s shawled body in the crook of his arm as if he carried it there still: he thinks, it will be the last thing I feel before I die.
But he can say nothing of this to Angelica, who knows, after all, no atom of such suffering. So he knuckles his brow and, ‘Aye, yes,’ he says, ‘I had a wife. Mary was her name. That is a long time ago.’
‘And what happened to Mary?’
He says not a word.
‘Forgive me,’ she says. ‘It ain’t my business.’
He is about to nod and turn his talk to other things, but then he thinks of how she had so unwillingly wept before him, the memory of which he has been holding at arm’s length since last he saw her. He never speaks of Mary, certainly never of his son, but he has seen a tender part of Angelica Neal’s soul, one she would not have volunteered to him, and it is in this spirit of transaction that he offers her his own story. ‘We were married four years,’ he says, ‘and were very content, but we had no child, although we sorely desired it. And when she at last took one, there were no two more joyful people than we.’
Mrs Neal puts her fist under her chin, listening. It is too late for him to stop: he feels as the boys who line up on the jetty on hot days, to fling themselves into the still and tepid water. He remembers well how it was to jump; the moment his feet left the boards and the time stopped to nothing, and he knew that there was no altering his trajectory. His heart quickens. He has not spoken these words often enough for them to have lost their sting, and to recount his loss even at the distance of fifteen years is to relive it.
‘This story does not end happily,’ he warns her. ‘Mrs Hancock was brought to bed and she laboured for days, but finally she was tired and could do no more. Perhaps she was too old.’ He tries to smile. ‘But women a good deal older than she labour safely every day of the week. Perhaps it was her physiology.’
‘Some women are ill suited,’ says Mrs Neal sympathetically.
‘If I had known it! I would have put all thoughts of children away from me, and been grateful for our lot.’ Poor Henry, whose face was swollen and cruelly bruised, his eyes closed in a perpetual frown, keeping to himself the secret of whether they were to be blue or brown or grey – were it better that he had never been conceived at all?
‘Oh no, but you cannot have foreseen. Well, what happened?’
‘There is no more to say. I buried my wife and my son – I am glad they lie together.’
‘I had hoped the child had perhaps lived,’ says Mrs Neal.
And where would you be now, Henry Hancock? A young man, slender like his mother, Mr Hancock thinks, and most assuredly with her dark hair, for he already had it on the day he was born. Yes, he thinks, he would have gone to the navy, and this is a happy thought, and proud. If he had lived and grown, he would not now remain at his father’s side; the pain of parting would have been delayed, but never avoided. It may be that at this moment Henry Hancock is not dead but only very far away, with the breeze of a foreign ocean stirring those brown curls. ‘Some say that in such circumstances it were better the child died,’ he says, ‘leaving me free to start my life anew.’
‘Not I,’ says Angelica. ‘A living child is always good fortune.’ She furrows her brow and casts the full light of her blue eyes upon him. ‘These are very sad things that have befallen you.’
‘No worse than anybody else’s lot.’
‘Maybe so; that is not to say it does not cause you pain.’
‘I am advised to forget,’ he says, ‘but if I did not have the pain, I would have no memory of them at all.’
Her face is still cupped in her hand; she sits up straighter and says, ‘Shall I tell you my opinion on it?’
He is never to hear it, for at this very moment the door flies open and all the room is taken up by the gentleman in the blue coat. He is very handsome. He looks at Mr Hancock and says only:
‘Get out.’
‘Georgie!’ cries Angelica. ‘What are you about?’
Rockingham seizes Mr Hancock by the arm and pulls him to his feet. ‘Leave,’ he says. His face is so close Mr Hancock can see the white cap of a pimple glowing on his chin. Turning back to Mrs Neal he says, ‘What am I about? When you have brought a man in here?’