‘Not on the linen,’ cries Sukie. ‘We shall never get the mark out. I would rather you even blotted it on your apron.’
‘I believe they come to stare.’ Angelica sucks the blood away and inspects as it bubbles up again. ‘I am a freak to them.’
‘You are the wife of a good man, and mistress of this house the same as any.’
‘They come only for curiosity. I will not have them.’
‘I have already invited them here,’ says Sukie. ‘For tea. Tomorrow. The ladies only, of course. That is the thing to do, you know, the right thing.’
‘Ugh! The ladies are worst of all! The only thing worse than the ladies would be their gentlemen.’
‘Hush, hush.’ Sukie suppresses her impatience. ‘Remember, you are Mrs Hancock now. Once the ladies have taken a look at us, there will be other invitations. You will like that, to be back in society.’
‘Not their society.’
To distract her from her petulance, and remind her of her position, Sukie bullies her through the messuages of which she is mistress – the dairy, the brewhouse, the laundry – and out into the orchard, where the grasshoppers buzz in the grass, and leap like popped buttons at the women’s passing. The two maids hired from the village of Blackheath follow behind, hung about with baskets and coarse bags, and sharing the weight of the ladder between them as they teeter unwillingly on their pattens, picking their feet up high. The gnarled and reaching arms of the apple trees are all a-rustle, their leaves crisp and vivid and cool. Sukie stops to draw a bough down towards her and inspect the pale fruit growing there, the largest no bigger than a hen’s egg.
‘Look,’ she says, brushing a ladybird from the curled leaves.
‘T’was not for this I became a great lady,’ Angelica grumbles.
‘And when did you do that?’ Sukie lets the bough go, and it hurtles upward, setting all its neighbours a-swaying.
‘Nobody elevated as we have been must see to her own gardens.’
‘This is exactly our duty. What, you thought you would be at your leisure because you are kept? Your work is hardly begun.’
‘I had better remained where I was,’ says Angelica, pulling her straw hat down over her face. Sunlight speckles through its weave; she shades her eyes.
Onward they walk to the first of the plum trees, whose perfumed boughs droop with the weight of their fruit.
‘We have plums enough,’ says Angelica. ‘I am sick of the sight of them.’
‘Well, be sick. They are hardly into their season, and we must preserve a good many more before winter.’ The girls set the ladder up against a tree. ‘Help us?’ asks Sukie. ‘You need not climb, dear, just pick the ones closest to hand.’
Angelica says nothing. She turns her face towards where Greenwich might be, but the basin of land beneath them is filled up still with the dawn’s mist, and she does not see the spire of Alfege’s, or the domes of the naval hospital, or even a single ship’s mast, except through a veil of haze. The river, with its gilded barques and swift clippers, has been vanished all away, and she is alone on her hillside.
‘Come.’ Sukie takes her arm. She does not like the maids to see her aunt so devilled: they have a cruel way of watching. ‘Collect those that have already fallen if you prefer. That’s an easy task.’
‘Don’t it feel worse out here?’ Angelica asks. For a tide of particular sorrow has taken her. She sighs as if she could empty her whole heart. Another breeze rushes up the hill, and she must sigh again; she feels the sorrow filling her lungs.
Sukie shakes her head. The maids lack a certain sprightliness of manner, she thinks, but then her aunt is a most subduing influence. It is hard to guard one’s own happinesses against one who is so very much in denial of them. Sukie thinks, it takes all I have even to affect happiness in her presence. She will suck it all from me; I cannot fight her much longer. Is this how it is always to be? Aloud, she says not a word.
The plums at the trees’ feet are some of them reduced to sludge, and their brandied smell is thick upon the air. ‘Ugh,’ says Angelica, ‘they are rotted away.’
‘Not all of them.’ If Sukie is impatient, her voice hardly betrays it. ‘See? These are good.’ She nudges one with the side of her patten, and it rolls, flesh tender and true on all its faces. Flies green as opals rise peevishly. ‘We must gather them up before any more go bad.’
But Angelica cannot be entreated. ‘A fatuous endeavour,’ she says. ‘Everything is rotting.’
‘Then will you go to the raspberry patch? See if the heat has ripened any,’ persists Sukie, who would find true pleasure in the flourishing of her land, were she permitted. To walk out into birdsong and the damp-soil air, and discover what secret doings the plants have been about overnight … She feels as if she were a child who has discovered an elf-land. And yet she knows that Angelica is best appealed to through her appetite, and adds rashly, ‘There may be enough to make a little tart. Or to garnish a fine duck, if Cook is disposed to roast it.’
‘The more you try to please me,’ says Angelica, ‘the less you succeed.’ She starts back towards the house, the trills of a blackbird knitting about her. Behind her, the girls snort with laughter and are up the tree with a swish of branches. They pass the plums from hand to hand and lay them in their baskets as gently as eggs, watching the scene through the leaves.
‘She has such queer moments,’ Sukie explains, but the girls extend no friendliness to her, only roll their eyes at one another. Wishing for a friend, she seizes up her skirts and pursues Angelica up the hill through the long dry grass.
‘Mrs Hancock!’ she admonishes.
‘Oh, leave me be.’
‘You are mistress of this house; why do you give it none of your time?’
Angelica is walking fast, up the steps to the French windows, her arms clasped about herself. ‘And what will you do now,’ persists Sukie, pushing her hat away from her face so it dangles on its ribbon between her shoulder blades, ‘but go back to your chamber and lie on your silly bed and read your silly books, or some other nonsense thing that benefits nobody? Do you ever look beyond yourself?’ She follows her into the atrium, where the marble floor gleams. ‘You got what you wanted,’ she says, and her voice echoes up the stairs. ‘He gave you all this. And still you keep secrets from him. Still you are not happy.’
‘What business is it of yours?’ Angelica shakes her jacket from her shoulders and lets it fall to the floor as she storms on. She does not look back; she makes for her rooms.
‘You have burdened me with it enough that it might as well be my business. This is not my own house and yet I can account for every last bolster in it, while you—’
Angelica’s impatience erupts. ‘Nebbiting, yepping thingsnitch! On and on you go, Sukie Lippard, you’ve tongue enough for two sets of teeth! If you wish to make such footling your life, then so be it! I am glad to say it is not mine, nor ever will be; trouble me with it no more.’
Sukie stands at the foot of the stairs, her hat tossed back and her hands on her hips, her mother’s attitude. ‘But it is your life,’ she says. ‘It must be. Or what are you?’
Upstairs, Angelica’s door slams.
FIFTEEN
Mr Hancock has watched it all from the back window: the women in their straw hats and drab everyday gowns, going about their work with some animation. Could this be the same Angelica Neal he married? At this distance she is a woman as ordinary-looking as any other, not the shining and laughing ornament he had imagined keeping in his house. And that whisper again: it can never be, the feeling of great loss, as if the soft and lavish wife he chose has already died and it is only her shell carrying on. That distant shore he once envisaged is a mirage: what he thought were lush mountains are only churning clouds.