Ace, King, Knave (21 page)

‘Man of business, then.’

‘A cully of mine, at Bath?’

‘A hundred of ’em, for all I know, but the man I mean is Derrick.’

‘
Sam
Derrick?’

‘The same, and living most respectably. He’s Little King of Bath now and a great favourite with the ladies.’

‘And they don’t object to his writing
Harris’s
?’

‘Your respectable lady’s never heard of
Harris’s.
As for the gents, some are just such innocents, but the rest! If you could see their faces!’

‘I’m surprised they don’t peach on him.’

‘They’d peach on themselves into the bargain. And the thing amuses, no question, so providing he doesn’t rub anyone the wrong way, Sam’s safe enough. You should see him fawning on respectable females, petting their lapdogs and directing them to reading rooms and
chapels
!’ Ned bursts into incredulous laughter. ‘One expects him at any minute to lapse and introduce someone as
Lady Lushington, fine black pelt around the Grove of Venus.
He’s been there two years now, and still not found out.’

‘Who writes
Harris’s
then, while he’s in Bath?’

‘Himself, I fancy. The style of the thing is his. King of Bath
and
King Pimp, what a blessed existence – eh, Betsy?’

Still laughing, he rises to go outside and piss. Betsy-Ann is left to ponder what she has been told, not about Sam Derrick but about Ned’s wife. The lady has been cruelly taken in, almost as cruelly as the Blore sisters when they fell into the hands of Kitty Hartry.

He’s made a sweet business of it.

She’s always known he had a wicked streak (how could he not, with Kitty as his ma?) but she never thought him so bad as this. And he isn’t, she tells herself, he isn’t! It’s all down to Kitty – Kitty drove him to desperation – and things are never so hard for the rich, they’ve always something. Mrs Zedland (Mrs Hartry?) has family, and heaps of gold.

Or
had
gold, before she married Ned.

It was the common cry, among Kitty’s girls, that Ned had twice the heart of his ma. They all said so, Betsy-Ann louder than any. Now it comes to her – with a sensation like something scraping at her breastbone – that twice nothing is nothing.

He’s coming in from the yard. Betsy-Ann arranges her face in a smile.

‘That’s it,’ he says, pinching her cheek. ‘Good cheer and good company, the best things in life.’

‘Not love?’

He grins. ‘What, in the name of all that’s ridiculous, has a married man to do with love?’

‘If you don’t know, you must ask your wife.’

‘Pooh! Any whore knows ten times as much about it.’

‘About lechery, you mean.’

‘It’s all one. That’s why whores make the best wives.’

Betsy-Ann looks down, recalling the culls at Kitty’s. Love!

‘Yes indeed,’ Ned insists. ‘By love, you know, I don’t mean your sentimental spew, your milk-and-water for young misses. There’s but one kind, and if a man doesn’t want that from a woman, what
will
he want?’

‘Money,’ Betsy-Ann retorts.

‘
Touché
. You think I haven’t lived by my own lights, eh?’

‘Well, have you?’

‘I have, indeed, married money – just a little. And what’s the use of money? To buy pleasure.’

‘I suppose,’ says Betsy-Ann.

‘We know too much to be prudish, you and I.’

His voice is softening, growing huskier. She looks up to see his eyes full on her, and recalls a fancy she had once, that those eyes of his give off black light. As a lantern shining in your face at night shuts out everything else, so to be caught in the beams of Ned’s eyes is to find yourself alone with him; as a lantern turns flying things to crackling, so Ned sears his wife’s skin, burns her cheeks to embers. The wife is a poor scorched fool, and Betsy-Ann is another: she sees him practising on her, plain as anything, but she’ll dance up the stairs with him anyway. It’s going to end the way it always did. She can no longer meet his gaze, and as she looks down at the table, Ned shifts in his chair. She knows that movement: it signals excitement. Yet he seems determined to take things coolly. He orders more capuchin and sits back as if to study her. She wonders if he’s about to ask her about Sam but when he speaks it is to continue his own story.

‘I can go about now. Most of the duns are paid.’

‘With her dowry.’

‘And my genius. We began our married life with a visit to Bath – I wanted a last crack at it, so I persuaded
ma femme
to take a wedding trip there. And by God I was lucky!’

‘You won a great deal?’

‘A more pitiable flat you never saw. The merest pup.’

‘Had he no friends?’

‘Aye – damnably wide-awake ones. They’d have queered my pitch, only he was too drunk to heed them. They were not to be shaken off, however, so I thought it best to leave Bath and negotiate from a distance. Madam’s been sulking ever since.’

‘I thought ladies liked to come to Town.’

He grimaces. ‘My wife, poor bitch, wishes to mingle with the Quality.’

‘And will you?’

‘How can we?’ He runs his fingers through his hair. ‘Where can I take her?’

‘How about the bagnio? She’d see fine gents there,’ says Betsy-Ann, only half joking since a bagnio is to her a place of luxury and splendour. To be invited to the bagnio, there to dine off plate and crystal and perhaps even bathe in the mineral waters! But Ned says sharply, ‘She knows nothing of bagnios. Nor shall she, if I have my way.’

The capuchin is brought. Betsy-Ann, who rarely takes it, drinks half a cupful at once: the nearest she’s likely to come to the joys of the bagnio.

‘So,’ she says, ‘what will you do?’

Ned shrugs. ‘She must wait, is all.’

‘For what?’

‘Until my turn is served. After that, she may go where she pleases. Christ, but I’m sick of her jaw!’ He whines in mockery of a gentry-mort: ‘
I meet nobody! I meet nobody!
’

‘Can’t you introduce ―’

‘Who’d want to meet
her
, by God? If all a wife had to do was write letters and prink herself in a glass, she’d be the best wife in England.’

There is silence between them.

‘You perceive how happily married I am,’ says Ned at last. ‘I fancy you and Shiner are better suited.’

Behind him, at a nearby table, a pinched, hungry-looking woman, her eyes closed in exhaustion, seems about to slide from her seat. Her gown is pulled aside to expose one breast and on her lap lies a swaddled infant. Betsy-Ann supposes the mother unfastened herself but fell asleep before she could put the babe to suck. Unable to reach for the teat, it grizzles, a thin hopeless sound.

Ned takes Betsy-Ann’s hand. ‘There’s money in resurrection – I take it he supports you?’

‘
His
dowry’s not up to much.’ She pulls away. ‘But you needn’t put your finger in your eye for me, Ned, I’m not about to starve.’

‘No, by God! I see that.’ He’s studying her bubbies. ‘But you can still eat, I hope?’ Though nobody nearby is listening, he leans forward and whispers into her ear. ‘Suppose I ordered a private supper? I’ve a chamber upstairs and a fancy for resurrection. You can show me how to raise the flesh.’

Despite the capuchin she’s drunk, Betsy-Ann’s mouth goes dry. Not that she’s surprised: what else are they here for? What astonishes her is the way her body, his loyal creature, sets to work. Like dried flowers dropped into water, it moistens and swells and blooms for him. Until this moment she fancied, fool that she was, that she had a choice.

‘Wait, I’ve something to do,’ she says, rising to go outside. In the street, she shades her eyes to shut out the coffee-house lights, and squints over the rooftops opposite. It’s your true Romeville sky, a tight lid of cloud and smoke. Over to the east there’s a flickering rose colour that means trouble for somebody; the rest is dark as the devil’s arsehole – as dark as the inside of her own head, it seems to Betsy-Ann. She can’t think straight: she’s game, but is she flash or flat, here? If only she knew whether the cards would fall right for her: Ned kind and true and open-handed, and an end to Sam Shiner.

‘You could’ve used the jerry upstairs,’ Ned observes on her return.

‘I was looking for the moon.’

He laughs. ‘And what, pray, does that signify? Are you afraid of lunatics? Or is it the fashion now to relieve nature by moonlight?’

She shakes her head. ‘If the sky clears, Sammy can’t work.’

‘Does he come home?’

‘He might.’

‘So you won’t share my supper,’ he says plaintively. Smiling, Betsy-Ann lays a finger to her nose.

‘It’s pitch,’ she says. ‘No moon to be seen.’

On their way to the stairs she stops and puts the swaddled child to its mother’s nipple, folding the mother’s arm over it for protection. The breast, when she touches it, is cold. She has a queer, bad feeling as if she’s done this before, but perhaps that’s just because so many things tonight are strange and yet familiar. She bends over and listens. The woman’s still breathing and as Betsy-Ann moves away she groans in her sleep. Betsy-Ann silently wishes her luck before straightening and taking Ned’s arm.

25

Clad only in her nightgown, Sophia is making her way across the rooftops. It is an effortless business: without any volition on her part, her steps soften, loosen, become long, low leaps, until she is merely skimming the slates, needing only to touch her foot to one before springing off again. There is considerable satisfaction to be derived from this floating motion, which is all quite natural. Somehow she has always known how it would feel to fly; she is ready to take off when the last, the longest, the endless step comes, after which she will have no further contact with anything resting upon the earth. In the meantime she churns the air with her hands, pulling herself along.

Thus she swims through the night sky, her destination a distant belfry where the bell shines out bright as a guinea. Sophia keeps her eyes fixed on the belltower, assuring herself of its solidity, for she has begun to notice, passing from one roof to the next, the great height of the buildings beneath her. Between them lie chasms, dropping sheer to the depths where London, all mouths and teeth, lies buckling and heaving. How easy, to fall into it and be devoured. And now she realises with horror that the belfry is swaying, undermined from below. She cannot reach it in time and as she passes over a great black gulf she feels herself sucked down, down, the walls hurtling up on all sides as she falls. The bell calls tenderly to her, its faint metallic lowing snatched away by the wind.

She is startled awake, the bell still pleading in her ears even as the threaded roughness of the winter coverlet tells her she is in bed and her husband, having kicked open the chamber door, is cursing his boots.

Perhaps she really did hear chimes. There is a clock over the hearth; were she alone, she would rise and ascertain the hour but Edmund is moving restlessly about, muttering something Sophia is glad she cannot understand. She is lying with her face towards his side of the bed. With infinite care, so as to make no sound, she rolls over until she is facing the other way.

At last he finds the edge of the coverlet and pushes his way between the sheets, bringing with him an eloquent if unspoken account of his night’s adventures: the mingled stinks of punch, tobacco and burnt meat; the sourness of unwashed flesh and, most hateful of all, a sickly, clinging pomade.

His wife lies shamming sleep though she has never been more awake, almost afraid to breathe for fear of what she might suck into her lungs. Her thoughts come in a terrifying rush. Tobacco is nothing, though foul: even a man who does not indulge can pick it up on his clothing, merely from standing near. But the pomade, the pomade . . . if Edmund has been close enough for
that
, there can be little doubt of the rest. And now she remembers that vile, corrupting letter, the enticement to debauchery signed
K. Hartry
, testimony to the company Edmund has kept.

That the footsteps of vice are dogged by disease, and a wife’s health at the mercy of a foolish or selfish husband, Sophia first learnt as a child, from hearing talk amongst the servants. At that time, with a child’s innocence, she understood it to mean that a wife might become debilitated from constant quarrelling. Since then she has learnt more. Vice’s punishment is visited upon the innocent as well as the guilty: not even children are spared. Very possibly, her husband carries such castigation within him; or, if not infected today, he may be so tomorrow.

Edmund makes an incoherent sound, followed by a full-bodied snore. The self-discipline required for perfect stillness means that Sophia dare not sleep likewise; coming to after a momentary lapse, she is cold with fear but Edmund snores on.

Her hips ache. The night would seem interminable but for the church bells: half past five, quarter to six. It is Sophia’s habit to rise and be dressed by seven. She ought to get up, get away from him, but suppose he should catch hold of her? She cannot think how to proceed. Shortly after six, exhausted but still wakeful, she perceives a difference in Edmund’s breathing. Immediately afterwards, her husband stretches his legs. Sophia’s posture has never altered since he got into the bed, and now she feels his hand creep under her nightgown, pause on the curve of her hip, then walk crabwise, finger by finger, round the front of her body. Edmund pushes himself against her, nuzzling the nape of her neck. A sly, insinuating finger parts the flesh between her legs.

‘Not now, my dear.’ She attempts to pull his hand away, but his arm is stronger than hers. The finger stays where it is, and at the same time he slides his other hand around and beneath her in order to pinch at her breast.

She says more loudly, ‘Not now,’ but Edmund only murmurs into her hair, ‘Ah, don’t be coy, my dimbadell.’

At least, that is what it sounds like. Whatever it is, she has never heard the expression before and she thinks: Why, he has mistaken his bedfellow! Now he is putting a leg across hers, as if to turn her over. Sophia lies rigid with fear and disgust. In all the mortifications and cruelties of her married life, nothing has come close to this. Here in their bed, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, her criminally careless husband is proposing to ruin her health.