‘Aye, yes.’ Bel’s head in the puff of her wet chemise drifts to the steps. She strips naked and the two women chafe her down with coarse linen sheets. ‘What post for me?’ she asks, leading the way into her resting room, which smells of roses and Castile soap and where a fire is burning and a white-draped bed made up. She always reads her messages after her bath.
‘Three letters this morning,’ and they each seize an arm and rub her well with lovely unguents: they are brisk and vigorous in their work and she relaxes into the squeeze-and-slacken of their hands over her elbow, ribs, the backs of her thighs, and the smart dome of her belly. Then the one woman helps her don a fresh whitework shift, still warm from its pressing, while the other measures out drams of strengthening tincture into glasses as fine as sharded ice on winter puddles. And she perches on the bed to take her doses, and at last pivots her legs up, and reclines.
There are hemispherical windows high up in the wall, and all about their frames on the other side of the glass blow filigree leaves of herb-Robert and forget-me-not. Yonder is the bluest of skies, and from time to time the feet of gardeners tramping past. She rests a hand on her stomach and reaches for her letters; shuffling the envelopes she recognises the hand of Angelica Neal, who is now Angelica Hancock and in her own great house.
Lady D—, Bel Fortescue as was, gives a great smile.
TWENTY-TWO
Sukie is at a loss as to what can be happening, except that all of a sudden Mr and Mrs Hancock are never about the house; they abandon her to her walking lessons while they do she-daren’t-think-what at the far end of the garden, or vanish to London for the day, returning with mysterious crates and proceeded by endless waggoners delivering more of the same. She is dully acquiescent to being shut out of such intrigue: her loneliness and melancholy increases day upon day, until she can suppose it no less natural than the other curses of womanhood she has been rudely surprised with these last few years.
One morning, however, she awakes at her accustomed hour, and hears a sound to which she is perfectly unaccustomed: the rhythmic swish of four strong men swinging their scythes in time on the damp lawn. Peeping between the window frame and the fold of the curtain, she further observes a master gardener in wire spectacles move stoopingly behind the team with his golden shears, to snip with infinite studiousness any blade left tall.
And, furthermore, upon descending she finds the house below is suddenly fearsome busy, with footmen everywhere, and lines of hired women called up from Deptford and Greenwich to roll up their sleeves and do unguessable things to the folly on the lawn, which to her knowledge has remained firm locked since the house was bought. They file down the hill laden with buckets and brooms and brushes, and emerge some hours later weeping into their aprons.
‘What’s afoot?’ she asks Mr Hancock, who is reading a newspaper in the library. He is hunched deep into his chair but even so there is something more expansive about him than she has detected in some time; he seems almost to smile when she comes into the room, or at least he troubles to turn up the corners of his mouth. ‘Something very strange is happening,’ she says.
‘My wife,’ he says with hesitant hope. ‘She is solving all our problems – at least, she says she is.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Go, go!’ He wafts his paper to her. ‘To the folly – you will find her busy in there. Quite extraordinary things, dear niece; she means to reverse our fortune entirely.’
Sukie squints at him. He is certainly altered. He wears an air of fragile optimism, as if he were at last recovering from an illness that has diminished him for many months, and the blood once more returning to his cheeks. ‘Uncle?’ she asks. ‘Are you – are you happy?’
He reaches for his pipe and sets about packing it. ‘I believe I mean to be.’
She hesitates. ‘I’ve not seen you so in a good long time.’
At first she thinks that her observation has angered him, for he pauses in his activity for a moment, and gazes without seeing upon his pouch of tobacco. Then he reaches out his hand to her. ‘Here – come.’
She lingers yet some yards away from him. To speak would be to betray her emotion.
‘Do you think I have forgot you?’ he asks softly, and in response she only tips her face down. ‘I forgot everybody,’ he says. ‘But I will remember; I am remembering. And when I am restored to myself—’
‘Then you will be happy with her.’ And Sukie finds herself racked with great distress, for what is she but a spare daughter, a fortuitous pair of hands to be sent wherever life cannot be managed? She strives always for harmony, for order, for contentment – that is her usefulness – but where it is restored, her usefulness ends. Must I live all my life in this manner? she wonders. For how long can this be borne? Aloud, she says, ‘I know you will send me away.’
Still he reaches to her, and observes, she knows not why, ‘Perhaps it has got to you, too. Sukie, Sukie, have I not had sorrows in my life before? And were you not always my first joy?’
A secondary joy, she thinks, a compensation for those he lost. She shakes her head – ‘I do not know, sir, I cannot say’ – but crosses the room to him and cautiously takes his hand.
He squeezes it hard. ‘You have a place here always,’ he says. ‘You are my family, and Mrs Hancock’s too.’
She can do nothing but squeeze back, and look in the other direction, and mumble, ‘Perhaps.’
‘Not perhaps! Most certainly! Even when I had little else, I had you; you think I shall abandon you now?’ He pats her hand and releases it. ‘You are mistaken. Now, go on with you. See what my wife is about.’
She ventures into the garden with great trepidation, and steps apologetically past the gardeners, who are now wheeling in a number of white-painted classical statues to place in the wilderness behind the folly. Sukie has never spent much time at this ornamental and neglected end of the grounds; she has certainly never before noticed the little wooden door at the back of the building, which now stands wide open, the voice of Mrs Hancock clearly emanating from within.
‘Higher up,’ she is saying as Sukie descends the stairs. ‘Just so – just so,’ and she enters the darkness of the first great chamber in time to see a bright apparition whisk across one of its walls. Sukie is astounded past speech: she never saw such a place, and situated under her very home! And yet, and yet, the strangest thing of all, is the vast green mermaid, fanged and terrible, that hovers upon one wall, its edges all radiant with strange light, its body knobbled and quivering. It looks so very much like the mermaid brought to Union Street that Sukie staggers, and gasps, but Angelica is laughing and clapping.
‘Oh, bravo! That is how I wanted it! Lights up, now! Sukie is here.’
Some hired woman lights the sconces, and here is Angelica as finely made up as ever she was in her life; a blue sash in her heaped hair, and dolphins embroidered on the cuffs of her dress. She looks at her niece’s face and clasps her hands with joy: ‘Now that is the effect I wanted.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Enjoying my grotto. Look. I have had transparencies made up.’ The gentleman who works the magic lantern holds out his work with pride. Sukie cannot but admire the glass sheets painted each with underwater creatures: here a whale, its tail flipping joyous; here a school of bubbling fish; here a terrible mermaid and here a voluptuous one with long tumbling hair. ‘So lifelike, when projected. You were afraid. But see, see what else I have done!’
Angelica leads her forth, and indeed the changes to the grotto have been most extraordinary. A chandelier is rigged to the vaulted ceiling, and one alcove has been fitted with cool marble shelves, upon which are arrayed goblets of Bristol green, and a vast punchbowl painted with goldfish, and decanters of every sort of spirit.