‘Musicians will go in here,’ says Angelica, leading her through to the next chamber, whose walls are lined with elegant little chairs all painted with dolphins and putti, ‘although the sound wants something. And I shall have real tanks of fish, and there will be dancing while the illuminations shine over the walls. Can you imagine what fun it will be?’
‘What is this for?’ asks Sukie. ‘What has come over you?’
‘Darling! Dear heart! You do not know! I have finally been brought my own mermaid.’ Angelica shoots a vicious little glance at the furthest chamber, which flickers a strange green light. ‘I own it. And I am going to show it to everybody.’ She begins to gabble. ‘Our meeting with those Crawford women set my mind right: I am a grand lady now, and I must behave so. A lavish party is the sort of thing I can do very well indeed. I have until Midsummer Day to have this perfect, so you will forgive me if I pick no fruit with you today.’
‘Is it in there?’ asks Sukie. She has grown bolder, but there is something about the space that troubles her – she feels here a great and peculiar lostness, one she remembers from the day she was taken from school; and again when Bridget would not accompany them from Deptford; and again when Angelica Hancock touched her toe to the fallen plums and pronounced them all rotten.
‘Aye,’ but Angelica’s pride is evaporating a little.
‘I want to see,’ says Sukie, and would march straight in if, from the darkness within, a great and awful sob had not just rung out. Sukie backs into the arms of her aunt, and a hired girl rushes blindly from the chamber, racked with tears and beating her breast as if she were bereaved of somebody precious. She careers from the grotto before they can stop her, slipping and scrambling upon its steps, and groping at its walls for the blindness of her tears. ‘What is she about?’ Sukie cries. ‘Is she so afraid of a magic lantern?’ She steps forth to call after her, ‘It is only a painting, you know! Only a bit of trickery!’
All in a moment, the jubilance has leeched from Angelica. She tugs at her finger joints, her old vulgar habit.
‘Silly girl,’ says Sukie, and heedless of her aunt’s altered mood advances again on the chamber.
Angelica swoops towards her and seizes her arm. ‘No, no,’ she says.
‘Allow me in,’ Sukie argues. The room breathes something mesmeric; she cannot help but peer within, and pull towards it. ‘I want to see.’
‘Come, dear,’ says Angelica, all of a-flutter. ‘I think – perhaps you should not see it until the place is quite done. It is not as I would like. You know how particular I feel about these things.’ She has, for the first time, a misgiving; she thinks, no, I cannot wish this thing upon an innocent girl. ‘Let us go above.’
‘But what sort of creature is it really?’
‘It is a mermaid.’ She is pleasant and even as she walks her niece to the steps, but her heart is uneasy; she feels as if she shepherds her away from a great danger. Do not turn back, she wills her. Do not go in there. She finds that she is shivering, and recognises the strength of will she has exerted in order to remain composed in that chamber. She thinks of the hollowness in her husband’s eyes, and what vast grief rolled over her when first she contemplated the mermaid in its tub. And she feels again the urge to cast herself between the creature and the one she loves; her fists in fact are clenched, her teeth gritted, as she locks the door behind them. She will not have this creature touch her niece, no, not for one second.
As she moves up the lawn, Sukie appears to regain some sunshine, and her questions become more prattle than impulse. ‘No, but what?’ she asks. ‘Is it alive?’
‘You must wait and see.’
‘And you are to have a party?’
‘’Tis my intention.’ Angelica puts her arms about the girl’s narrow shoulders and squeezes her briefly as they stroll together up the hill. ‘But don’t you look until I say you may. I am mistress of this house. Do you remember? Now come, come, back to the house.’
And once they are within she is gripped with a terrible relief.
TWENTY-THREE
The invitation delivered to Mrs Eliza Frost’s nunnery finds quite a different scene. A gentleman has lately complained of a certain heat and tingling in his organ such as very often betokens the growing displeasure of Venus. ‘He has visited no place but this,’ she says, striding before her girls who have been all gathered together in the parlour for an interrogation, ‘and so one of you must be the source of his affliction.’
The girls are at their most innocent at eleven o’clock in the morning, which is their time for sewing and French conversation. They stare at her but none dares open her mouth, for they are all mightily afraid of the whip they have seen propped in the corner of her chamber. ‘Speak up,’ she says, and her shoes click as she paces from one to the next, inspecting their faces for signs of guilt or lesion. ‘Which of you is it? Stomach ache, pains, foul secretions? One of you knows what I am speaking of. At least one of you.’
They shake their heads, most honestly, since none of them suffers a thing.
‘If you do not volunteer yourself, it will be the worse for you. If you have gave it to one gentleman you will give it to another, and word will spread, and then who suffers?’
None of them can say.
‘I suffer!’ she bellows. ‘My name is besmirched. Not yours; you who were never any better than you ought to be. Nobody will be surprised that a whore is dirty, but I am a businesswoman, and it is my reputation you destroy.’ She stalks back to her spot in front of them all. Spittle glistens at the corner of her mouth. ‘Would you have us closed down? Hmm? And you all thrown out on the street?’
They shake their heads.
‘No, it is not pleasant out there. Not for a girl all alone. And yet that is the danger one of you has chose to put all your sisters in.’ She looks from girl to girl. ‘It pains me that one of our number would be so disloyal as to bring us all so close to penury.’ She pauses to study the effect of her words. The girls are agitated; they do not move about but they fret where they stand, for everywhere is the tremble of embroidery and the flutter of books, and the girls who have nothing in their hands suddenly feel a great desire to touch their faces or to put their hands to their own throats. Mrs Frost narrows her eyes. ‘Can you guess what else I have deduced from this?’ she asks. ‘No? One of you –’ she points from face to face – ‘at least one – has broken a rule. What is our first rule?’
At last a question they can confidently answer. All, to a woman, intone, ‘Sheath up!’
‘Sheath up!’ She claps her hands. ‘Sheath up, indeed. If you all made use of the armour provided at a very reasonable rate, we would not have mishaps like this.’ She brings her voice to a sing-song nursery-rhyme bounce, as if she were talking to infants or idiots: ‘A gen-tle-man has caught the clap. And it is to my great embarrassment that this occurs immediately after he – having a great deal of influence in the running of this city – has undertaken a great favour to me. He protects us and you have infected him.’
A footman appears with a silver tray, on which are piled a number of wax-sealed letters. ‘Put it on the table for the present,’ says Mrs Frost, gesturing to the heart-wood bureau at the far end of the room. ‘I shall read them when I have dealt with this trouble.’
It is a large room, with a hard polished floor, and the footman sets out upon it, his feet tap-tap-tapping while the girls watch him in dumb desperation. Tap-tap-tap he goes, and at last lays his tray down with a muted clunk. Then tap-tap-tap on his expedition back to the safety of the landing, and a row of female faces follows his progress like a field of sunflowers. Once he has retreated, one of the longest-serving girls clears her throat. She has been a streetwalker since she was thirteen, and is loath to stir up trouble, but her senior experience outstrips (although she does not think of it) even Mrs Frost, who has had a single lover in her whole life, and he of little enthusiasm. This girl clears her throat again, and speaks up: ‘Not all men can be easily persuaded to wear a sheath, madam.’