‘Look, fellows! Watch me!’ A boy of about thirteen lifts his tricorn from his head and sprints towards her. The crowd parts about him; two yards away from where she staggers, he leaps gracefully into the air, hat held aloft, toes pointed. He comes down with all his weight upon her; his foot connects with her head and she is down again, he leaping and tripping clear of her all a-burst with hilarity, and his friends running to join him with their mouths wide. She is moving yet, though all the intelligence be gone from her eyes, her small hands with their tapered fingers fretting in the dirt, reaching and flexing as the hands of a newborn.
This is when Mr Trevithick’s officers catch up with him. He has turned his back on the scene and is packing his pipe. ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s away. There’s nothing to be done.’
‘Should we not intervene?’
‘Are you mad, man? With only three of us? No, no. If we take her from them now they will never forget it. Let them have her, let them have her. They will be quieter after this.’
As they turn away, a second boy makes his run-up, and flies both feet first, arms whirling behind him, to crunch into her ribs. How can it be that after each fresh blow she manages once again to rise? It must be by the energy of her will alone, for she has taken such a pummelling, and is so very old and weak, it cannot be her body that propels her. She utters not a sound; her face shows no expression; she is a machine, it seems, set only on survival, so that each time she falls she turns her face mutely again and again to the edge of the crowd, and compels herself towards it, although her mouth hangs, and there is a fluid dripping from her nose.
The boys and men about her are equally determined that she will not get away; they jostle one another jokeously, and laugh, but their eyes are very firm upon her, and whenever she looks to be making too rapid a progress, another of them launches from the group as arrow from bow, to knock her down again. Each time she rises more slowly than the last, each time takes fewer steps before subsiding to the ground once more. The last time she hauls herself to her knees, something on the outskirts of the crowd seems to catch her eye, crusted as it is with blood and dirt, and she lifts one arm – through which exertion she trembles, as if it were made of stone – to stretch her fingers towards a flash of white. If anybody in the crowd had turned, they might have observed a dusky-skinned girl in a broad straw hat, holding her starched white gown clear of the ground. Mrs Chappell is alert to the last to a remarkable face or a fine form, but it is this girl’s singular poise that now arrests her attention. She moves like a dancer or a duchess, her back quite straight, as if movement were for her a long-studied art, or an expression of intellectual delicacy. At the edge of the square she pauses, and, seeing Mrs Chappell collapse once more, presses her hand to her mouth. Then she bows her head and hurries onward, and does not look back.
Mr Trevithick and his men, now hastening down an alley, hear a roar from the crowd. ‘Poor Bet,’ he says. ‘We’ll not see her like again.’
TWENTY-SIX
The night before the party, Angelica wakes at some small hour. Something feels awry. She reaches across the bed, but Mr Hancock is there at her side, snoring gently. She lies for some time, frowning up into the dark as she listens to the noises of the night-time. An owl’s hollow call; the rattle of tree branches; a clank, perhaps, of a carriage passing somewhere on the heath. Nothing that might cause alarm. She rolls onto her side, but cannot settle; she rises at last from her bed, and not knowing why, crosses to the window and puts her head through the curtains, where the glass is cool.
At first she sees nothing beyond. Even at this witching hour, the sky is not yet dark: it is almost midsummer after all, and the place where the hill descends into the trees glows yet, whether with the vestiges of dusk or the first rays of dawn it is hard to say. The clipped lawn is black and still; the white statues seem to waver upon it, their limbs not quite discernible, not positioned quite as she remembered. But this is a deceit on the part of her eyes; she blinks hard and peers again, although she shivers there on the wrong side of the curtain from bed and hearth. And now she sees it; one of those white figures, vague about its borders, striding across the grass. She swallows her own breath, trembling as she watches its fixed and purposeful progress through the wilderness and across the lawn to the folly. There it stops.
‘Mr Hancock,’ she whispers. ‘Mr Hancock, wake up.’
The white figure attempts the door, but it is locked. It rattles once again, and utters a phantasmic moan. Then it paces the building’s circumference, as if it sought entry another way.
‘Mr Hancock!’ Angelica is loath to leave the window, but presently she feels him at her side.
‘What is wrong?’ he asks, still blinking with sleep.
‘Out there!’ she hisses. ‘Look!’
He leans beside her, and together, their cheeks brushing one another, they stare out.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘That is Sukie.’
And so it is. She wears her thin chemise, and moves about the folly slowly and carefully, her hands trailing against the wall. She goes again to the door at the back, and they hear a great thud as she kicks the panels. She kicks again and again, and puts her shoulder to it.
‘She will break it!’
A thin cry of real grief rises to them on the wind as Sukie pounds upon the door. The Hancocks do not hesitate. They hasten from the room and down the great stairs; Angelica slips on an unexpected step, and almost wrenches her arm from its socket as she stumbles, clinging to the banister, but she barely feels it; she is up and running across the hall in her bare feet without a thought. The pair rattle at the French windows that lead from the dining room onto the stone steps to the lawn, and spill into the dark, calling out, ‘Sukie! Sukie!’
At first they do not see her, and run down the lawn beside one another, an exertion neither is well prepared for, their lungs protesting mightily. Angelica’s gown flies about her as she cries out, ‘Where are you? Sukie, go no closer!’ while her husband stumbles ahead, wheezing, to get a sight of her. He vanishes into the shadows at the back of the folly and cries out. There is crouched Sukie Lippard, her chemise soaked in dew, keening with the truest grief. Her knuckles are skinned from pounding at the door; her bare feet bruised, their nails torn and bleeding where she has kicked and kicked for entry. Mr Hancock lumbers to his knees beside her and draws her into his chest; she quivers with cold, and with the sobs gathering still in her throat. Her skin is terribly cold, but when he seeks to lift her up, she shrieks, ‘No! Do not take me away! No, no, I need to go in! I must go inside!’
He is not accustomed to lifting heavy burdens, and particularly not those that writhe and flail, and claw at his face, and kick his gut with bony feet when he attempts to hoist them over his shoulder, but he struggles back up the hill nevertheless, grunting with the effort of it, until a vein throbs in his temple and his face is quite scarlet. Angelica runs alongside as Sukie strains her arms towards the folly, howling as if she were being snatched from her own parent.
‘Hush,’ she comforts her. ‘All will be well.’
‘No! Let me go back!’
‘You will be better when we are away from it.’
But Sukie sets about weeping anew. ‘I will never be better! The only peace I can find is there. Please, oh, please, let me go.’
‘Get her inside,’ says Angelica, and Mr Hancock bears her up the steps and into the house. In her bedroom, with the candles lit, she is a dreadful sight, with her lips blue and her skin mottled grey; her fingernails are quite purple with cold, more as if she had been half drowned by a North Sea squall than merely wandering abroad one dewy summer night. She is bruised all over, and streaked with her own blood, and even once Angelica has stripped her of her drenched gown and wrapped her in blankets, she slumps shivering like a mouse released from a cat’s jaws, her eyes quite glazed, her mouth slack. She is more than subdued; she is dejected. All the vivacity is drained from her. When Mr Hancock tries to speak to her, or coax a little caudle between her lips, she turns her face away in perfect exhaustion, and closes her eyes.
‘Oh God –’ Angelica hunches at her bedside, chafing her cold fingers in her hand – ‘oh God, did I do this?’
Mr Hancock squeezes her shoulder. ‘I did,’ he croaks.