‘Ah!’ Mrs Flowerday emits a gurgle of laughter. ‘I thought you could not be her – I have heard so much about her beauty.’
Miss Crawford is still carrying her great bundle, and now she begins to remove clouts from it one by one: fur followed by dense tabby, and calamanco and finally an embroidered shawl. The women gather about.
‘Oh! Little man! Are you awake?’
‘Did you have a long sleep? Oh yes, you did!’
‘Such a good boy to sleep so long!’
For within the bundle is a screw-faced baby, his hair awry with sweat, who blinks irritably at the company and brings his paws up to his eyes. His wrists are mere creases and he has dimples for knuckles. ‘Our handsome fellow! Miss Lippard, you are honoured by Baby’s first visit!’
‘Oh,’ says Sukie. ‘Will you have some tea?’
But even once seated, they fuss about the child, whom the spinster Miss Crawford bounces upon her knee; his little head lolls back upon her bosom.
‘I suppose he is your first,’ says Sukie to Mrs Flowerday.
‘Not only that, but my own first grandchild!’ says Mrs Crawford. ‘A wonder you could guess it! But do you know, when he was born I did not care for him at all. I only sought to satisfy myself that dear Caro was in no danger, for all infants are much of a muchness but there is only one Caroline. Or so I then thought.’ She leans over and seizes Baby’s cheek between thumb and forefinger. ‘Was I wrong, was I not wrong? Are you not the dearest princeling that ever there was?’ She turns back to Sukie. ‘I make a dote of him now, so all is forgiven.’
A smile flickers across Miss Crawford’s face. She is something about forty, and handsome in an austere, big-nosed way: she holds the infant without anxiety, her eyes elsewhere. She barely marks it when he suddenly screws up his face and lets out a squall of effort, but lets him clasp his fists around her fingers with the placidity of habit. He braces his tiny feet upon her legs and arches his back to pull himself upright, his eyes goggling with the strain and a bubble of drool glistening on his slackening lips.
‘A fine strong fellow! A true Hercules! You would not guess he was only three months old,’ his mother and grandmother exclaim, but Miss Crawford herself says nothing. She merely grips his fat wrists as he teeters on her lap, loose-strung as a puppet. ‘And our Jane has such a way with him, eh, Miss Lippard?’
Mrs Flowerday dabs at the child’s wet lips as he collapses back upon her. ‘A shame she never was a mother.’
‘Well now, well, perhaps. But if every woman had a husband and children of her own, who would be spare to help her? There must be some old maids; God makes work enough for them.’
The baby grunts in Miss Crawford’s arms. ‘You did not marry?’ Sukie asks her. It is an idiotic question but she wishes the lady would answer in her own words.
‘She was disappointed by a sailor,’ says Mrs Crawford in a hoarse stage whisper.
‘An officer in the East India Company,’ says Miss Crawford, drawing the child back to her chest.
‘Had her wait all her best years for him …’
‘He was posted abroad …’
‘And never returned for her …!’
‘He drowned.’
‘And so it is a comfort that we are able to supply her with occupation, although of course it cannot compare to holding one’s own child.’
‘She is so good I do not know how I shall get on without her,’ says Mrs Flowerday. ‘I mean to bring her back with me to Essex, and she can care for him all the time.’
‘And that will be a relief to my husband and me,’ says Mrs Crawford, ‘for of course we are devoted to her but the cost of living being as it is, it were better for everybody if she were in a situation in which she truly earned her keep. My husband feels most tenderly for her – but that is his weakness; she was his favourite sister even in childhood – and he swears he would keep her in comfort all her life merely for the satisfaction of doing so, but we must allow dear Jane her dignity, must we not? I should not like her to feel as if she were an object of charity.’
‘And so to Essex I go,’ says Miss Crawford.
‘We shall have such fun,’ says Mrs Flowerday.
The infant begins to twist and whine. His face turns pink and grows pinker. His ears, in fact, are quite scarlet. He screws his face even tighter and snuffs once, twice. Miss Crawford bobs him on her knee and tots his fists about in her hands, but he will have none of it. He opens his mouth and his first cry comes in a great peal. ‘Oh, hush you, hush you, little fellow,’ whispers Miss Crawford, putting a finger into his mouth, but he has been duped this way before, and reels back from her. His fury bursts from him in a roar, his gums bone-hard. Miss Crawford looks up at Mrs Flowerday. ‘Nothing for it,’ she says.
The young mother is tugging at her stays, and fossicks beneath her fichu. ‘Oh, poor Baby,’ she cries over his lamentations, ‘is he hungry? Hand him over, Aunt, pass him here quickly,’ and he is handed across the table as if he were a plate of macaroons. Mrs Flowerday raises an eyebrow at Sukie. ‘You see,’ she says, ‘there are some things that she may never do for him,’ and hoists her left breast into the room. She claps the child upon it and the silence is immediate, except for her continued talking, which keeps time as she jogs him gently up and down. ‘Put him out to nurse, Mama said, the very moment he was born: certainly not, says I, nobody shall feed him but I myself.’
‘I put all my children out, and very happy we all were,’ says Mrs Crawford, looking on fondly as the child sucks and grunts, his fingers splayed upon his mother’s blue-veined bosom. ‘I should have been worn to a thread if I had nursed them myself. Countrywomen are more robust.’ She looks to Sukie as if she might have an opinion on it. ‘You would think, to hear her, that I had told her never to see him again. But a child during its first year is more of a burden than a pleasure: why not put him out of the house until he can walk and talk and make himself amusing?’
‘Nobody does that any more, Mama.’
‘And what of Mr Flowerday? He cannot want his wife always so encumbered.’
‘He is glad to have Baby about.’ Mrs Flowerday looks down upon her child’s drooping eyelids, and pauses for a moment, for her breath is taken by his feathered eyebrow and the perfect curve of his nose. ‘He says he never saw such a natural mother as I.’
And it is at this happiest – or unhappiest – of moments that Angelica, Mrs Hancock, casts open the door and flounces in to meet her neighbours.
Not since she left London has she looked so magnificent. Her hair is powdered to immense height and volume – how she has effected it with only the fumbling hands of Catty, cannot be guessed – and her gown is sheer to the point of vaporous, striped organza through which the blue satin of her undergown shines. Her lacquered shoes clack on the floor, and her cheeks are a-blush and her lips soft as roses. The women cannot but flutter, for she is exactly as their imaginings wish her to be: sweat breaks out on their palms, and they feel hot and cold at the same moment, and they do not know what shapes to make with their mouths. For they apprehend that before them, pulled up to the fullest of her height, stands a true and haughty whore of the first water. And they cannot think what to do.
SEVENTEEN