He wishes he were a scientific man.
And yet surely this phenomenon cannot be explained by science. His mind creeps to the feeling he had as he leant over the vat. He thought it contained something far larger than it appeared; as if a huge void were opening up where before all was solid and dull. A strange prickling rushes over his whole body, and he thinks suddenly of Henry, of Mary, who in the midst of life were in death. Futility creeps on us everywhere, he thinks. Flourishing one day, cut down the next. And if a man may be taken from his work at any moment, the only thing that can be hoped for is that he will leave some mark of himself behind, in the footprint of a building or the pounding heart of his own child. If he leaves nothing, who can say he lived at all?
His mouth is dry. He has not felt it at all since his marriage, but all of a sudden he is fearful, and most certain that these fragile things he has will soon be snatched again from his grasp. There are words in his head that he did not put there, but he cannot quite make them out. He sighs, and reaches across the table for his wife’s hand.
TWELVE
May 1786
He is absent every day. She does not know where he goes, but he is not in the bed when she wakes up, and she walks his house all day knowing she will not find him in any of its rooms. It grasps at her heart as if he has abandoned her. She tries to make ready for their removal with Bridget and Sukie, but her pace is so dull and directionless that they soon lose patience.
‘Stir yourself!’ Sukie says, the day Angelica stands for twenty minutes in the middle of the parlour, holding a single tea bowl in her cupped palm. ‘’Tis not right that I must do everything. The lists I write that you do not care even to read! The arrangements I have made that are surely more your business than mine. And he is no better.’
‘I am sorry,’ whispers Angelica. There are dark shadows under her eyes.
The loss of the child feels to her an omen, and the closer the day comes for them to depart, the greater her dread grows. Her husband would have her installed in a great house, the shining jewel at the centre of a finely worked setting, and she thinks, it cannot be. I am no match for any of it; I shall fail greatly there as I failed humbly here. The fear quite chokes her; she sits down and cannot find the life in her heavy legs, or the activity in her mind, to rise again.
The room is pale and strange, white sheets hung over every piece of furniture. Angelica, clutching a sheet to her bosom, turns to Sukie with agony in her eyes. ‘Please, please, do not tell him about – about what has happened.’
‘He must know soon enough.’
But her aunt hangs her head. ‘Only give me a little longer. I cannot let him down so, I cannot do it.’
And Sukie, now carrying the sick anxiety of Angelica’s secret, must continue with the great business of their home all alone, pattering up and down the stairs on errands without cease, with such scratching in her pocketbook as to make her mother proud. When Mr Hancock returns home in a trance, Sukie rages at him. ‘Where have you been? Look to your wife! She is not well.’
‘Oh?’ He has spent all day standing over the mermaid’s tank. His feet are pearled with chilblains from the dirt floor, and his eyes ache for searching the black surface of the water. He has not powdered his wig or visited the barber or changed his clothes for many days, but he feels that the longer he gazes upon the mermaid, the better he can hear the words she whispers. At night, lying sleepless by his sleepless wife, he fancies he hears the mermaid’s voice – it must be her voice – no louder than the mutter of somebody deep in dreams. Soon he will understand what she is saying.
‘Are you listening to me?’ Sukie stands before him, but even as she speaks he fades away from her, as if he were slipping down into deep water. ‘Your wife needs you. And yet I think that has no meaning for you.’
And no, no, it does not; for he does not go to her and he does not ask her how she goes.
It is on this day that a messenger arrives at Mr Hancock’s London counting-house.
‘A note for the gentleman,’ he says.
‘Regarding?’ asks Scrimshaw.
‘His use of the outbuildings at Greenland Dock.’
‘He is not here.’ He is there so rarely now; he has made no arrangements for another voyage and no attempt to go in on any other. The clerks fret, and pursue business as best they can. Perhaps this is what happens to a man when he attains gentility.
The messenger heaves his shoulders a little. ‘My master wants this message delivered to his own hands. We have pasted up bills on the building itself but he persists in using it. What does he have in there?’
‘As if that concerns you,’ snaps Scrimshaw, who has positively no idea. ‘’Tis not for you to wonder what a gentleman does with his own property.’
‘If it were his own. In fact, Captain Tysoe Jones has relinquished the lease on it, and left it cluttered with rotten rope and rendering drums and Lord knows what else. We are not a common tip, you know.’ He thrusts the note out more vigorously. ‘We are businessmen, same as you. Won’t you see he acts on this information in short order?’
‘You couldn’t give it to him yourself? How is this practical?’
‘He don’t listen to a word we say,’ says the messenger. ‘He goes his own sweet way. He can’t very well disregard what is written on vellum and sealed –’ he puffs up his chest – ‘with wax.’
‘Leave it with me,’ says Mr Scrimshaw. ‘He’ll be here by and by.’
‘No. I want it took to him now.’
‘So you take it to him.’
The clerks are stirring themselves, watching the conversation with some interest. ‘Yes,’ they murmur, ‘you take it.’
‘I am paid by the letter,’ says the messenger. ‘They will not pay me more for a long walk. Besides,’ he adds, putting the letter on Scrimshaw’s lectern, ‘’tis your business.’
Scrimshaw sighs. ‘Oliver?’ He rolls his eyes to his youngest clerk.
Oliver looks mournfully out of the window, at the heavy sky and the first spits of rain on the glass. ‘I shall take it when I go to deliver the other papers to Mr Peyton,’ he says. ‘I’ve not the time for two errands.’
Scrimshaw squints challengingly at the messenger. ‘Well? That must satisfy you. We are busy men.’ In the corner, Mr Jarrold puzzles over the bawdy riddle Mr Percy has doodled for him on the back on an invoice.
And so this note is crushed into the pocket of Oliver the clerk as he departs on an errand to the docks at St Catherine’s. He strides swiftly with it as far as the top of London Bridge, but the sky is darkening and spits of rain are misting upon his face: on such a rough night he wishes to go no further in his errand, but take himself into a tavern and see out the weather with ale and laughter. He presses the note and a few wafered coins into the fist of a small boy sheltering in the porch of St Magnus the Martyr, and this boy scuttles onward over the bridge, wrapped about in his older brother’s greatcoat, whose tattered hem drags on the ground and soaks up the puddles. His nose runs prodigiously, and he blots it once or twice upon the ink: about him the wind gets up and the river churns and leaps in its crenellated bounds, like a horse nervous before a storm.