‘You monster!’ cries the mama, her infant’s fat tears splashing on the floorboards, and snot flowing over its top lip.
‘To upset innocent children in such a way!’ berates the nurse, and they descend the stairs at a far greater speed than they got up them, the children weeping all the way and the women broadcasting their own disgust and disappointment: ‘A horrid little imp!’ ‘The day quite ruined!’
Mr Hancock attempts to pursue them, calling out, ‘Ladies, how can I apologise? May we not settle this?’ but they turn up their noses and affect not to hear him. On the street beyond he can hear them resume their shrill narrative of terror to passers-by.
‘Scared the babies out of their wits! A horrid thing, it was, a menace and a disgrace.’
He retreats up the stairs, where Sukie is standing with her palm clapped over her mouth in horror. He sits and, taking off his wig, rubs the palms of his hands over his prickled scalp. ‘Oh, my girl!’ he mumbles, elbows about his face. ‘We are finished before we began.’ She plumps down next to him, lacing her fingers together in her lap, and they sit sombrely.
‘Perhaps ’tis not so bad,’ she ventures. ‘They are only two people.’
‘But they have gone forth from here to tell the entire city. Damn Jones! His taste for frivolities will ruin us yet. And I am no better, for I am so credulous.’
She says no more, although she is a little embarrassed at her uncle’s despair under the dispassionate gaze of Mr Murray’s boy, who rattles his tray – empty but for two shillings – most provokingly.
EIGHT
Presently Mr Hancock gathers himself. Catastrophe as it may be – that he has forfeited a year’s profits, that his reputation has lost a great deal of its gravity – is it not fortuitous that although he has overstepped himself in this folly, there are more terrible ways to lose what he has lost? No ships have been sunk, for one thing; not a single life lost, and if his pride is not quite what it was, he reminds himself that pride is a sin.
But poor Sukie, who looks now upon his shame with calm and childish eyes, has suffered most by this, although she does not yet guess it, and it is her dowry that gnaws at his spirit. He has witnessed more than once the way in which all the ardour in a young man’s eyes is extinguished by a single column of figures, and a host of terrible scenes flock his head: Sukie at her first dance, bashful excitement fading to shame as the beaux glance at her but do not approach, as her own peers whisper behind their fans; Sukie, grown older and thinner, sitting at the parlour window still, watching for the approach of a lover who has forgotten his promises; Sukie, alone in her querulous marriage bed, watching the damp spread across the wall while her infants cry for hunger and her husband drinks his cares away. Oh, dear Sukie, what depths his folly might bring her to!
‘Let this be a lesson to us,’ he says bravely. ‘I will buy us a rabbit pie for our dinner – what do you think to that?’
‘Oh, we are not leaving now,’ says Sukie. ‘You mean to let one single misfortune turn you back from your path?’
‘I—’
‘We have a ship to earn back!’ she snaps. ‘And a creature people will pay to view. Only a fool would not hold fast.’
‘Nobody wishes to view it,’ he says sadly.
They are interrupted by voices below: ‘This way to the mermaid?’
‘Dear Lord.’ He closes his eyes in forbearance. ‘I cannot endure this again.’ He makes to rise, but Sukie pulls him back.
‘Where do you mean to go?’ she asks. ‘Will you hide behind the curtains until they have left? Stay here with me, sir, see how it unfolds. Not long,’ she adds more gently, ‘but we must try.’
A pair of young clerks comes up, scrubbed and keen. Mr Hancock watches with dull terror as they pay their money and pass into the room where the creature awaits. But there are no screams. There is some silence, and then, as he strains his ears to hear, laughter, betraying – could it be? – real pleasure. The men emerge at their leisure, grinning ear to ear.
‘I never saw such a thing! And real, is it?’
‘The genuine article,’ says Mr Hancock.
‘Extraordinary! I do not know what to make of it.’ The pink-faced clerk is shaking his hand now. ‘You are a lucky man! This is the oddest thing in the city, I am sure of it.’
‘Thank you,’ he says quietly. Then, gaining confidence, ‘Do spread the word. Tell your friends.’
‘I shall speak of nothing else! To think I was first to see this.’ And the men retreat incredulous, and all a-bubble with the spectacle.
Shortly thereafter comes the stampede. Old maids and rich gents, pie-men and flower-girls and clerks and foreigners, their boots clatter up and down the stairs and their voices fill the air in increasing excitement. They demand to see the creature that made the children cry; that made their mama faint dead away; that put a Jesuit priest into a fit which (it is said) he is yet to come out of. In the afternoon, chairs draw up to deliver fine gentlemen and their ladies; a corpulent old woman is fairly carried up the stairs by her posse of white-clad daughters so great is her desire to observe the creature, and in the evening lovers come clutching hands, the girls squealing and the men preening their scientific minds. They queue out into the street, until Mr Murray distributes bone tokens amongst them and bids them avail themselves of his victuals in the downstairs room, an exercise that disgruntles the regular customers but intrigues their visiting ladies, who have harboured dark suspicions about the places their men spend their time.
The whole day passes and still the people crush into the little room so that they can only shuffle around the mermaid, peering and shrieking at its goblin glare. Another draughtsman arrives with his pencils and sketchpad and sets about making a series of studies to be printed up post-haste; he is joined in short order by one more, on the business of a scientific society, who send their warmest greetings to Mr Hancock and hope he will be agreeable to a lecture series on his extraordinary creature. Hawkers arrive – first one, then all in a swarm – to pass oranges and hot pies and small beer about the coffee-house and up and down the staircase, and although the cashbox fills up at remarkable speed, Sukie will suffer nobody to touch it but herself, scowling at Master Daniel Murray as she heaves the takings into Mr Hancock’s own strongbox. Mr Murray scrawls tickets dated days in advance. ‘Could you not have ordered more mermaids?’ he asks Mr Hancock. ‘The one is hardly enough to share around.’
The end of the evening finds merchant and niece sore of foot for constant pacing, and sore of cheek from constant smiling. They can hardly credit the reversal in their fortune; the morning might be forty years distant, it has so little to do with their present situation. It is ten of the clock and the queue has not much abated.
‘What will we do?’ asks Sukie. ‘Turn them away until tomorrow?’
‘I durst not,’ says Mr Murray, who betrays a grain of admiration now. ‘They will riot for certain. As long as there are those as wants to see it tonight, I shall let them in.’ The thought of his twenty per cent pushes his own tiredness from his head. ‘You go on home, if it pleases you. The girl is ready to drop.’
Mr Hancock turns to Sukie. ‘Are you?’