Angelica closes her eyes. ‘This is beyond me. I cannot think where to start.’
‘I can! Come with me to the kitchen, and we shall make up some great lists. A list of what we have, a list of what we do not, and a list of what we must do with it all once it is got.’ Sukie hops from foot to foot, her face flushed. ‘So much to do, Mrs Hancock! It will keep us eternally occupied, and we may do it just as we choose, and the men can say nothing but “thank ye”. I had better talk to my uncle, for you and I shall need to hire a full complement of staff to effect all the plans I have in mind.’
‘Excuse me,’ says Angelica abruptly. ‘I am tired. You will permit me rest awhile.’
Upstairs she pauses on the landing, but Sukie follows behind, her face all knitted with anxiety. ‘Can you not let me be?’ demands Angelica.
Sukie hesitates, and steels herself. ‘You need to tell him,’ she says. ‘If there is not to be a child, he must know.’
Angelica says nothing. She closes her eyes; she cannot think what to do. I do not belong here, she thinks. If I were mistress of this house then this baby would not have been aborted. She was afraid of her narrowing world, but now without its safe enclosure she finds she is nobody. Angelica Neal is quite gone; Angelica Hancock is already hollow as a bleached shell. She places a hand to her brow. ‘He has not even noticed,’ she says. ‘He does not care; he asks nothing about it.’ I have lost everything.
‘Come, we are not two minutes inside the door,’ says Sukie, although she is fierce afraid to see such faltering in her aunt. ‘It will all change now we are here.’ She takes a little step forward. ‘Please.’
But Angelica knits her brow, and shakes her head. A new wave of dejection seems to have settled upon her since arriving on the heath; now she feels most especially as if she were grasping at something quite impossible to seize upon. ‘Leave me be,’ she says.
Alone on the landing, she remembers that she does not know where her bedroom might be. Many doors stand before her, all closed; she tries the first, and it is a library. The second a little music room, all pearl-coloured and glowing with the window shades drawn up: her eye passes over her own clavichord to the harp and viol and flute beyond, and her stomach tightens. He must mean me to learn to play them, she thinks, when I am not even equal to the task of ordering the kitchen.
She opens doors until she discovers a bedroom – a small one, hung with yellow damask, good for a spinster visitor – and once within sits down on the bed quite numbed. She longs for the bare little kitchen at Union Street, where she could chop apples and peel carrots with innocent assiduity under the supervision of girls half her age. What a fool, she thinks, to imagine I had the measure of any domestic life. And what am I to do now? She finds herself at a peculiar impasse, the first perhaps in her life, and it is not caused by obstacles but by the lack of them.
What now? she thinks. What now, what now? and knots her fingers and furrows her brow.
Outside her window the heath lies flat to the horizon, its sky churning. The wind roils the clouds and the gorse bushes alike; each new day grows longer and hotter than its predecessor.
FOURTEEN
June 1786
The summer grows hot and ripe, bleaching the grass of the heath to a perfect rustling sweep of gold, where grasshoppers creak incessantly to one another, but where few walk in the heat of the day. Now ought to be the time for ventures into London, or Greenwich, or out by boat to the country homes of friends, the long bright days being so unwelcoming to footpads. The Hancocks, however, go nowhere. Sukie busies herself with hiring a coterie of servants, from cook to lady’s maid to footman, who look her up and down with amused pity, and who smirk when she gives them their orders in her little thin voice. The promised dancing master comes too, and laments her slumped shoulders, her weak ankles. The French master decries her accent, the Latin master her ignorance, and in this great house she feels a coarse hick of a girl, good for nothing. Of all this she says nothing, but bites her lip, and smiles anon.
Angelica, meanwhile, robbed of the tasks of an increasing wife – no cradle to send for, no tiny caps to trim – finds that her days roll on with terrifying futility. No longer are her moments diminishing; each dawn sees her no closer to any great event. She can anticipate neither the beginning of any new life nor the end of her own: she remains in genteel suspension, her time stretching inexorably before her. As for her husband, where is he? Off about his inscrutable business in the city, or at the faraway Mary-le-Bone site of his new houses. He is never to be found about the house, unless he is lingering at one of the back windows, staring without sight at some far-distant point. More often she sees him trudging up the hill from the place where the garden gives way to wilderness.
Some assignation? she wonders, keeping her eyes closed on the blue-mooned night as he stumbles about the bedroom. Does he go to meet a lover? Has he found a secret way to Greenwich? but she hears no carriage on the drive, and no lantern light has crossed her window, and as he bends over the bed she detects no liquor on his breath, and no perfume on his stock. Where, then, does he take himself all night? She thinks of her other failures: the twist of Georgie’s face when he said – what was it he said? – ‘I am sick of you,’ and the dread shame of clutching Mrs Chappell’s ankles in her parlour all stripped bare. She hugs her arms about herself, and feels her body slacker and less seizable than it once was, which inspires desire in nobody who looks upon it, and cannot sustain the flickerings of any life but her own. Her closed eyelids burn with tears but she resolves to give her husband no hint that his presence has penetrated her sleep: not to flinch at the cold breeze that follows him into the room, or roll over to open her arms to him. She deepens her breathing and nestles closer into her bedclothes, but at her turned back she feels him lie still and wakeful for a good long time. She thinks, our bad luck began when we acquired this place. We have overreached ourselves, that is certain, but is there not some horrid miasma here? It taints her very lungs: some mornings it seems that all she breathes is grief.
‘Another note,’ says Sukie, ‘from our neighbours.’
‘We have no neighbours,’ says Angelica. She licks the end of her thread and squints to press it into her needle, for they are as ever about the business of housekeeping, and in the spirit of furious industry Sukie has devised a code. Each room of the house is assigned its own symbol, spined and hooked as a skeleton key, and with scarlet thread they stitch it upon every bit of cloth that might be carried off from its designated place. The laundry house has levelling tendencies, and without proper oversight might send the fine wool blanket from the library to lie upon the cook’s bed.
‘Certainly we do have neighbours,’ says Sukie. ‘Not three hundred yards away.’
‘We do not pass them in the street and they do not nuisance us through the walls,’ says Angelica, ‘therefore how can they be anything to us?’
‘Well, we are something to them,’ Sukie cajoles, ‘and grateful we should be for it.’
‘Perhaps you should. I daresay they have sons it will be worth your while to know, one day. But I …’ Her stitching is large and ugly, her fingers fumbling. I shall have to unpick those tonight, thinks Sukie. She lets no criticism pass her lips, but she feels as if she were stretched tight; scampering always just before her aunt to cheer her, protect her, encourage her. ‘I am not their sort,’ Angelica continues, frowning over her sorry work. ‘They would not have desired to look upon me before: they would have shielded their daughters’ eyes from me. And their sons’.’ She runs her finger with the needle and jerks back, spitting like a cat: a bead of blood swells there.