Rush, rush, we rush, a sparkling stream through rock and moss, deep in the cold stone of the earth. No daylight here, no dying breaths to catch up. We rush young and bright, and ever widening, and these bitter atoms are lost in new-minted freshness.
We hasten, hasten, onward to the boundless sea.
EPILOGUE
The midsummer party – the first held by Mr and Mrs Jonah Hancock of Blackheath – is an immense success. Mrs Hancock is a hostess both affable and beautiful, resplendent in a mermaid-blue satin gown which trails gauzy sea-foam lace; her marriage has been the subject of much gossip, but as she hangs on the arm of her bluff husband, her face bright with laughter, certain minds are changed. Their niece Miss Lippard is additionally much admired. Very properly considering her age, she is permitted to appear on the garden steps for only a few minutes, a pale and elegant girl with a most arresting expression in her eye, who speaks not a word. She returns shortly to her own apartments, but on the strength of this brief sighting several local mamas add her to their personal lists of Girls With Suitable Qualities, and determine to monopolise her before she comes out. The house and gardens are declared faultless, and guests strolling the lawn praise its superlative aspect over Greenwich and the river.
Then there is the delightful surprise of the grotto, its shells gleaming in the candlelight, and illuminations of ghastly sea creatures beyond imagining flickering over it to cries of delight and wonder. The guests are enraptured. They dance beneath the chandeliers; they trample crystal wine glasses into the brick floor of the vaults. They marvel at the scientific system of periscopes that lights up the peculiar green pool in the very furthest chamber. Most of all, they are impressed by its very particular atmosphere. For this underground wonder, as chilly as it may be, is all suffused with a character of its own: a quiet ebullience that must be thanks to the genius of their hostess, or how could a small space have so much feeling to it? Friends embrace; strangers delight in new acquaintances; husbands draw their wives into dark corners.
The food is light and delicate, the sort girls eat so that they might have the strength to dance all night: syllabubs on cold slates; liqueur-flavoured jellies, and strawberries and melons and millefruits; and a great heaped centrepiece of butter-yellow pineapples, whose flesh both fresh and roasted perfumes the room and draws a crowd eccentric in its composition. Even its members are surprised by one another, having reasonably expected that a careful hostess takes pains to segregate her guests for the sake of delicacy, but they concede without a word spoken that this is really no different from any night at the pleasure gardens, where those of all walks of life are thrown together and yet succeed in speaking to nobody outside their own sort. Besides! This is a mermaid party – a most amphibious thing – who amongst them does not have the right to witness such a marvel? In fact it might be observed that the grotto becomes a very menagerie, a Wunderkammer of all the classifications of human, who pace warily together, and watch with interest as each curiosity reveals its own habits as to feeding, and dancing, and drinking, and conversation. Shipwrights hold forth beneath the gleaming white statues and fill their pockets with thin-sliced beef sandwiches; Greenwich’s most rakish young couples are there, men and women equally adorned in flounced stocks and wafting ostrich feathers. Newly landed gentlemen whose money comes from ships or coal or cloth fall speechless in the presence of ladies whose faces once graced print-shop windows, and a needle-slim governess of a woman leads six white-clad beauties soberly amongst the trees, their little plumed dogs trotting behind. Mrs Hancock, low-born, the plaything of aristocracy and wife of a gentleman merchant, has run wantonly riot with her own address book and drawn all to her in the name of Curiosity.
There is even a rumour that the Countess of D—herself has been there – aye, truly! – in a gown much more voluminous than is her usual taste. So few attested to having seen her, and so briefly, that it can hardly be credited as fact – and yet what other small dark lady can it have been who walked slowly with Mrs Hancock down the lawn to the most secluded part of the garden, their arms around one another’s waists, their heads nodding together in sincere and private conversation?
Another visitor, nobody sees at all. There is a young man in a deep blue lieutenant’s jacket, a perfect homme-comme-il-faut, who comes on foot across the heath with his hat in his hand the better for the breeze to cool his black curls. Perhaps he hears the music, or sees the lights bobbing in the trees, but he stops at the top of the Hancocks’ drive, and looks to where it curves towards the trees. He stands there for a long time, but ventures no further, and presently he replaces his hat on his head and turns away.
But what of the promised mermaid? Well!! There is the great joke. For nobody could forget that celebrated, hideous Hancock mermaid that so dominated the early part of the season; who amongst them had not gathered about the crooked-limbed sharp-toothed little form, or gazed upon its likeness in pamphlets and papers and posters? And who amongst them had not shuddered at it? Clever Mrs Hancock knows that the beauty of truth has only a limited appeal, and that repulsion’s special frisson is best left to the freak show. Instead she has given her guests the mermaid that they most desire: it is there in the lustrous glim of her mussel-shell grotto and the illuminations that writhe and flicker across its walls, in its dancing fish-tanks and fizzing wine and the strange phosphorescent sparks that swirl in the green-lit pool. The vulgar quotidian is given no quarter here: all is beautiful and hazed as a dream.
The shortest night of the year never passed more quickly. And that summer’s morning, as the last carriage straggles away across the heath, Mr and Mrs Hancock lock the door of their grotto with a sigh.
‘It could not have gone better,’ says Mr Hancock.
‘No, indeed.’ Angelica’s hair is awry and her face smudged. ‘I can scarce believe that I managed such a thing.’
‘I can believe it,’ says her husband stoutly, closing his eyes to the milky morning breeze. ‘You and I, together – we succeed at what we please. And yet,’ he frowns, ‘after I have spent a fortune getting mermaids, the people were most pleased by no mermaid at all.’
‘Huh,’ she nudges him and takes his hand, ‘they’d not have liked the real one much, would they? A grotto – a light show – strings of pearls – if that don’t amount to a true marvel I do not know what does. We live in a modern age, sir: the things that are wrought may be quite as extraordinary as those that are found.’
Mr Hancock turns his face to the house, its stucco lit pink by the dawn. ‘Are you ready for breakfast?’ he asks, and they walk hand in hand up the hill, the ghosts running happy about them.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This novel was coaxed into the world by Rebecca Stott and Henry Sutton, who in the face of all my qualms insisted it must exist. Richard Beard and Katy Darby, educators after the Jean Brodie school, led me out.