‘Surely there is somebody you can appeal to,’ says Mrs Frost.
‘Who, Eliza? I have no admirers left. I have given my attention to no one else, and now I –’ her voice trembles and she gasps but does not sob – ‘and now I am back where I began,’ she finishes. ‘Only a good deal stouter. And the line on my forehead is there all the time, and not only when I frown. I know how it goes when a woman my age is abandoned. The bailiffs come, and she must needs return to the nunnery to open her legs; and the men she gets are of less and less consequence each year that she ages, until she is quite abandoned, and ruined, ruined, ruined. Oh, Eliza! That cannot be my fate! Not so soon! I feel no older than fifteen – how have I come to this?’
‘It may not be as bad as you think,’ says Mrs Frost with distaste. ‘If I take these things away, it will be in the faithful hope that we shall have it all back a month from now.’ She is glad to see Angelica brought to her knees; it makes her feel far softer towards her. She is moved again to touch her; she smooths her friend’s shoulders. ‘All will be well,’ she says. ‘You are young yet; you are beautiful.’
Angelica knuckles her forehead. ‘I fear I have mis-stepped. I am twenty-seven. If I were to have peaked, should I not have done so by now? Indeed, I was on a good trajectory. To have followed the duke with Rockingham, to have so misplayed my hand when I was most desirable – oh, I am a fool!’
Mrs Frost, however vindicated she may feel, betrays nothing of it. ‘That young whelp is no one at all; an aberration you will recover from. The whole affair will be forgotten in six months. You will climb yet, I am certain.’
Angelica tries to smile. ‘Thank you. My dear friend. My truest friend.’
‘I hope I shall always be so.’ A thought strikes her. ‘I shall send for Mrs Chappell.’
‘Oh!’ Angelica feels in sore need of a mother – any sort will do – but she knits her brow. ‘No,’ she says. ‘What a stupid idea; as if I would want her to see what has befallen me.’
‘Perhaps she may help?’
‘Perhaps she may dance a gavotte. Certainly not. The thing to do is make as little of this episode as possible. So he has tired of me – what do I care? Let the world see it makes no great difference to me.’ She begins to survey the room more coolly, and rifles its contents for value with her eyes alone. ‘After all, there is no need to strip the place bare,’ she says. ‘I shall be in need of a certain level of splendour, for my entertaining.’ Her voice again falters with a new burst of shame. ‘Only take these jewels I have set aside, Eliza. They are of greatest value. Go back to the jeweller and tell them – tell them I am displeased! The quality is not what I had been promised. Demand that they return what I paid.’
‘But there is nothing amiss with them.’
‘Better something amiss with the jewels than with me. I need the money. That might settle whichever bills come in first. Then we shall see what steps must be taken. And oh …’ She reaches up to her throat and unpins the twinkling dart from her fichu. Her hands tremble, and she cannot look Mrs Frost in the eye as she turns Rockingham’s first love token over to her. ‘See what you can get for this.’
Her voice cracks and gives out. Mrs Frost has the decency to take the pin without a word, and quits the room as Angelica lowers herself onto her sopha and perches trembling there as if it were already no longer hers. She traces the place on its arm where an entire glass of ratafia was upturned. I am not ruined – never ruined, she assures herself. There is always a way through.
TWENTY-ONE
The alley is not three feet wide, and within it that air peculiar to the rookeries; cold, certainly, but palpably damp, and with a vegetable-ish smell to it, as if the hand of a drowned man had been placed across one’s nose and mouth. There are other smells too; first the smoky runnels of old piss; then a dark foul scent, of things rotting unknown and unseen. Polly cannot think whether she is grateful for the concealing darkness or not; were it better to not see what dreadfulness lies so close to one?
Behind her the breath of this man who has claimed her next ten minutes; she is glad not to look upon him, some journeyman carpenter who stared at her coldly when she asked him the questions Mrs Chappell taught her. ‘Flatter a man with conversation. Engage first his intellect; it will make you all the greater a prize. Any girl can fuck; that is not what he comes to you for.’
‘Here,’ he says in the darkness, and no more.
‘Oh, but sir, I’ve a room just this way – would you not prefer a bed and a glass of something? I shall sing for you …’ she trails off.
‘What, and have you rob me? I know your sort.’ He presses her up against the wall, and she shrieks before she can help herself. He claps his hand over her mouth as she begins to tremble, whispers, ‘No, please, do not hurt me,’ and bridles away with a cowering curl of the lip which is her best attempt at a smile. ‘Forgive me,’ she whispers, ‘forgive me.’
His breath reeks so strongly of decay it were as if his mouth were a meat-safe that some sluttish housewife had abandoned a flitch of bacon within.
‘Command first of all his admiration, and second of all his appreciation. Never let him forget what a rare and valuable item you are. Display yourself to your best; you are an envoy of Venus herself, and he cannot enter the temple without your first beckoning him in.’ She need not conceal her own disgust, which on the one hand is a mercy; on the other, at Mrs Chappell’s she never had so much disgust to mask. For not only does this man’s mouth smell but his clothes do as well, of stagnant water and sour milk, gravy splattered from the crust of a pie, and his own dreadful odour, of an animal lived too long in one small space, turning around and around in its own sweat and filth.
The wall is lichenous and wet against the back of her head. She has lost count of how many men she has taken in this way, with a sort of numbed horror, thinking each time, this will be the last one, but the coins are like elf money, which vanishes from her hand not hours after she has earned it, for the sake of her daily needs. Bread crusts, candle stubs, gin, and it is all gone again, and she forced back onto the street for another round. How quickly it has become routine for her! Hitching up her skirt, she thinks, this must change. Simeon’s note remains in her pocket, although she had determined not to look at it again. After tonight I shall go out of the city at once. I am too easy to find here.