‘Perhaps,’ she says, and knows she has said something near enough to the right thing, for he clasps her hand tightly.
Inside Angelica, something is multiplying.
‘What of the expense?’ she demands. She likes it when he talks and she listens; she sprawls further over the table, sinking her cheek into the cradle of her own arms. His gruff voice is not musical but his words are beyond soothing to her. ‘All settled,’ he is saying, ‘all taken care of … paid in full … nothing else to trouble ourselves with … all straightforward now, I should venture.’ While he talks, she reaches up to rub her knuckles fondly and firmly over his bristly jowls, and yawns, and smiles, and thinks, is it really so unlikely that she might find herself in love with him?
FIVE
He takes Angelica up to the heath. High up in the sky a kite is swooping, its beribboned tail flying out behind it, and on the tender grass beneath it, children caper and whoop. The wind catches Angelica’s skirts so she is nearly a kite herself, tottering along the drive as the breeze tries to snatch her up. Her hair flies over her eyes and she puts up both arms to keep her hat on her head, but standing in front of her new home she laughs and laughs.
He sends an order with the Eagle for monogrammed porcelain. He sends an order with the Angel for good chintz. He sends Angelica and Sukie out to choose new silverware.
The spring, which began as one warm bright day – followed after a week of rain by another – has extended into a whole unbroken string of them, and there are now moments that Mr Hancock becomes agitated for the fate of Captain Tysoe Jones’s venture upon the Unicorn. Why does it take so long to return? Sometimes he puts his hands on his desk and leans forward, out of the open window, scanning the bobbing masts of the ships beyond the Deptford rooftops and praying that all is well. At night he dreams of Javanese mermaids, teeming in the black water of his own grotto as if they spawned there. Or else he dreams of a buxom fish-tailed beauty, with sticks of coral in her swirling yellow hair and her bosom languidly rising with the movement of a warm tide. In his dreams she lies in a bathtub of mother-of-pearl, and when he lifts her out she is slippery and heavy, a cold dead weight slithering through his arms. In his dream he picks her up and staggers across a shell-shaped room with her in a kind of ungainly caper, she always dragging him to the floor while her dampness seeps through his shirt and the smell of oysters envelops them both. When she turns her cool wet face to his, it is always Angelica’s that he sees.
SIX
A week before their removal to the new house, Angelica and the girls Sukie and Bridget climb up to the lumber room under the eaves at Union Street to sort through the Hancock family effects.
‘There is nothing here worth keeping,’ says Angelica. ‘Nothing of taste or value.’ She nudges a dusty wooden cradle with the toe of her slipper and sets it rocking. ‘We must throw it all out.’
‘My mother will not like to hear of that,’ says Sukie.
‘Your mother may deal with her own lumber room. This one is mine now, and I say it all must go.’
‘Some good woman will make use of these things,’ says Bridget thoughtfully.
‘Do you think so? ’Tis all quite ugly.’
‘But sturdy,’ says Bridget. ‘And nobody would disdain a good wool blanket like this one, or bedlinen when their own is worn through.’
‘Worn through? What, right through?’
‘So you can see daylight through the middle, in just the shape of the bodies that lay in ’em. In my mother’s house we cut’m down the worn part and stitched’m back together along the opposite sides. Get twice the wear that way. But these sheets are good, madam – these will do somebody for many years yet.’
‘Well! I never was so destitute as to cut my bedsheets in half. I never was.’ Angelica is impressed. ‘I kept body and soul together very adequate, all told.’
‘Aye, and how was that?’ asks Sukie. She and Bridget are both fearsomely interested in Mrs Hancock’s previous occupation.
‘That don’t signify,’ she sniffs. ‘I did what I must.’
‘Until Uncle rescued you.’
‘Rescued me?’ Angelica laughs. ‘Is that what you believe?’
‘Aye,’ says Sukie, ‘aye, rescued you, and now you may reform and be good.’
Angelica feels not entirely easy. Certainly she was desperate – certainly she was glad to have him perceive himself as her rescuer – but never in her darkest hour did she imagine that she might not make her own way through tribulation. ‘A dubious hero he is—’ she says lightly.
‘Which is better, ma’am?’ Bridget interrupts. ‘Living here with us, or back in London with all the sweetmeats and the beaux?’
‘Each has their privations, I daresay. It’s best wherever the living is easiest. Say, Bridget, these poor people who have no bedsheets. What have they done to find themselves in such a position of want?’
‘Why, nothing.’
‘Quite blameless?’
‘As blameless as any body can be, the world being what it is.’
‘Ah. That was their mistake. Do you know where they might be found?’
‘I do.’
‘Very near to here?’
‘Not ten minutes’ walk away.’
‘Well, Bridget, I trust you to identify some individuals of great want and take these things to them immediately. Sukie, you had better help her.’ Angelica is loading bales of linen and wool into her step-niece’s arms. ‘And when you are there, find a wagon, and have it call by here, and we shall put everything else on it.’
Bridget staggers from the room, with her chin ratcheted as high as it will go above the pile of cloth in her arms, and Sukie follows her down.
‘Be careful on the stairs, girls.’
Alone in the attic, Angelica smooths down her skirts. She feels pleased with herself, warmed by her own surprising beneficence. She has never given to the poor before; it is her first truly grand act. For when I am in the big house, she thinks, this will be usual for me. She imagines standing kindly on her doorstep, pressing shiny coins into the hands of a beggar boy and his blind mother. At Christmas she will send a ham to the almshouse. When she dies they will distribute mourning rings, and the orphan children will weep.
Downstairs there is a knock on the door. Perhaps it is not the first knock, for it has a frustrated, impatient sound to it.
‘Confound them,’ she mutters. ‘I will not answer it.’
But it may be the woman who sells the buns she likes.
She thinks for a moment. Then she takes off down the stairs, tucking her hair into her cap as best she can. For a minute the knocking leaves off, but when she is on the final turn of the stairs it goes again.
‘Patience!’ she shouts, and throws the door open.
Mrs Frost is there, all in lilac, with the tassels of a vast parasol quivering around her head like a carousel.
‘Good day,’ she says, smiling. She has had a gold tooth put in.
‘’Tis you.’
‘So it is. I was passing, and I thought – how nice it would be. My old friend.’
‘You were passing? What were you passing to? The victualling yard? The tannery? Did you think to buy yourself a barge? I cannot imagine, Mrs Frost, what can have made my house convenient to you.’
Mrs Frost gives a laugh she has spent some time working up to sound bell-like. ‘You are a sharp one. All right, I have come to visit you. I wish to speak with you. May I come in?’ She is already stepping past her. ‘Upstairs, is it? To your dear little – ah – parlour?’
‘I cannot offer you tea,’ Angelica says, following her up. ‘I have sent my maid out. She is taking contributions to the poor. Mr Hancock and I have been blessed with far more than we need.’
‘I see, I see.’
They sit down together. Mrs Frost gives Angelica a long, shrewd look, as if she were a favourite schoolmistress dealing with an unruly pupil.
‘You think I have abandoned you.’
Angelica frowns.
‘You believe I have profited from you and then cast you aside. Ah-ah-ah, do not speak yet, hear me out, my dear. For this is not so. My dove, this is not so. I have not forgotten you, not for one moment. I owe everything I have to you.’