Ace, King, Knave (3 page)

Sophia assured Mama that she had no secret sorrows and that nothing distressed her save the condition itself. They therefore pinned their hopes on Dr Brunt’s regimen. At table Sophia takes as little salt, or salted food, as may be; she shuns dishes swimming in any kind of sauce or gravy, takes no liquid after eight o’clock, and is careful to visit the necessary house frequently before retiring to bed. She has made considerable progress this way, and hopes she may make more.

In her chamber she unfolds the letter and reads:

The little mare I told you of has had a fall and now limps intolerably. Paterson tells me she will hardly recover within a month. It is a pity, as I am persuaded you would have taken to her, but since I had not closed the bargain when she fell I have instead purchased a hunter, a real beauty. I am now seeking another mount for you; Paterson knows of a quiet grey

Sophia sighs. She understands that female happiness depends upon attracting a protector who takes just such pains as these to secure her comfort. And yet . . . an ardent
billet-doux
, a forbidden familiarity, would comfort her more than any amount of such household stuff. What is more, she finds it difficult to reconcile Zedland’s glamorous person and intimate, teasing manner with his prosaic outpourings on paper. Her parents, however, seem quite satisfied. Possibly she is the only person to perceive him thus – and this because of what older people call ‘youth and innocence’. Perhaps, after all, these different aspects of Mr Zedland are perfectly reconcilable, and the mixture a proven recipe for married bliss?

In the meantime she has domestic concerns of her own. She rings the bell and asks the servant to send Titus to her, to see if he has made any progress in curbing his defective speech.

4

Betsy-Ann, says Sam Shiner, ‘talks like a sheep’.

She knows what he means. She burrs instead of chopping her words short, the way folk do here. And why should she? She once learned to read – learned some of the letters, at any rate – and she reckons that when the letter R was made, it was made to be used. When she first took up with Sam he sometimes mocked her way of speaking. When she protested, he said it was nothing more than merriment, no harm done, but the Corinthian never used to mock her for it and that was another difference between the two men.

These days she’s given up most of her country words, though she can’t take the taste of them out of her mouth. She’s up to every lay in Romeville – the Deuce himself couldn’t fool Betsy-Ann Shiner – but she still talks like a sheep.

Let Sam laugh, he doesn’t know everything. Look at the way he talks about the Corinthian, with his, ‘Hartry taught her everything she knows,’ when all the time it was the other way round. As far as that goes, she
made
Ned Hartry. She can’t play the public tables, but she was brought up to the cards and it was to Hartry, the Corinthian, that she gave up her secrets.

All but one or two: she always keeps something back for herself. Once a man’s drained you dry he starts looking round for a full hogshead, and that’s when
you
start missing that little bit you should’ve kept back. Is Sam looking round, then? He’s been going out a lot, lately, and not giving her straight answers.

Fine thing that’d be, when she’s only just got used to him. She didn’t take to Sam at all, at first, on account of how he came by her. Not that she could stand off from him, O no! Those first few weeks she was constantly put in mind of the old song:

Sometime I am a butcher bold

And then I feel fat ware, Sir.

And if the flank be fleshed well
I take no farther care, Sir,

But in I thrust my slaughtering-knife
Up to the haft with speed, Sir

― and didn’t he just! Another woman might’ve been put to the squeal but Betsy-Ann wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

That apart, he’s not so bad. She goes by his name, as if they were legally spliced. The Corinthian never laughed at her speech but he never called her Mrs Hartry, either. For all that, she sees him in her dream. It’s always the same dream. He sits down to the card table with Sam and winks at her, and this time he sweeps the board.

*

‘Ever seen books like these?’ She fans the strange playing-cards under Sam’s nose.

He grunts. ‘Shams?’

‘No.’ She upends them, turning the soldiers to ladies. ‘That’s all the trick there is.’

Sam laughs. ‘Well, if there’s another, you’re the mort to find it out.’

‘Am I?’ she says. ‘Seems to me there’s a lot I don’t find out.’

He’s been back a day now and still not told her where he went. Something bad is coming: Betsy-Ann can feel it.

‘I’ve made bubble and squeak,’ she says.

Sam clicks his tongue. ‘Curse me, I forgot.’ He goes to the door and bellows, ‘Liz!’

Elizabeth Jane Williams, a creeping crone who occupies a cupboard on the ground floor, is heard wheezing her way upstairs. She haunts the staircase in the hope of errands and obliges everybody in the building, though being such a tortoise, she can never earn much by it. The nearest gin shop is two doors away, which makes her just tolerable for deliveries.

‘Get us some lightning. A quart of the Royal Cream,’ Sam tells her, handing over an empty jug.

When Liz is gone, Betsy-Ann says, ‘Royal Cream? Flush, aren’t we?’

‘You needn’t have any.’ He avoids her eyes; he’s working up to something. ‘Harry said he might step over.’

And there it is, the bad thing. She knows now where he’s been, and what he’s been doing, this last fortnight. She thought as much: there’s a dirty smell on him.

‘You saw Harry today?’

‘Any reason I shouldn’t?’

‘Course not. Only I never thought you was fond.’

Betsy-Ann herself isn’t fond, though she was born Betsy-Ann Blore and Harry Blore is her own blood brother.

‘I ran into him up by the Haymarket. He was ―’

Betsy-Ann turns on him, jabbing her finger towards her face. ‘Them’s my
eyes,
Samuel Shiner! You’ve been out with him, haven’t you? After we agreed ―’

‘Blunt’s blunt.’ Sam’s talking seriously now, no longer fencing with her. ‘Somebody has to bring it in.’

Since he doesn’t like to be reminded, she forces herself not to look at his maimed hand as she says, ‘Don’t I make enough for us? We got two chambers here, a snug little ken ―’

‘I’m not being kept by a mort.’

‘That shows your manly spirit, Sammy. But what about me? I won’t know where – what you’ve been touching.’

‘It’s trade!’

‘Coming from
them
into our bed.’ For the life of her she can’t stop her voice quivering; it’s a relief when she hears Liz toiling up the stairs. Betsy-Ann watches Sam take the jug and pay her off, then listens to the old woman creeping down again before repeating, ‘Coming from them into our bed, Sam! Turns me funny just to think of it.’

She sets out cups but he does not pour the drink. Instead he says, ‘Think what? That I’m kissing them – squeezing their bubbies? Eh? You got a mind like a midden!’

It does look that way, Betsy-Ann has to admit. She tries another tack. ‘Tell us one thing, though, Sam. How was it? Was you boozed up?’

‘What d’you think, we’d do it cold?’

‘They talk about Tom Ball – eh?’

‘One thing, you said.’

‘Tom Ball. The Flash Kiddey.’

He clicks his tongue. ‘Who’s Tom Ball, in the name of Christ?’

‘You’ve got his situation, you might say.’

She takes the gin from him and pours, humming one of her tunes. There’s no end to them, and she knows words to every one. She hands Sam a cupful and watches him swallow.

‘Well,’ he says at last. ‘What manner of cove was he?’

‘Dimber – a regular heart-breaker. And knew it. Anyway, they was lying up, two days’ drinking time on account of the moon, then suddenly there’s cloud, so it’s off we go, drunk as kings. They’ve just got a large on the cart and they’re going for another, right next door it is, so they chuck the soil from the second grave into the first. Then they get the signal, Davey’s spied the patrol, so they toddle quick. They’re away and sitting on the cart and Pete Hindmarsh – you met Pete?’

Sam nods.

‘Pete says, “Where’s the kiddey?”’

She pauses.

‘Get on with it, girl. Where was he?’

‘Where d’you think!’ she spits. ‘They’d buried him.’

‘Never!’ He flaps his hand at her. ‘Who told you ―’

‘Harry. Harry told me.’ She watches that sink in. ‘He was lying drunk in there and they covered him over.’

‘So – what then?’

‘Well.’ Betsy-Ann shrugs. ‘They couldn’t hang about.’

‘Didn’t they go back?’

‘Couldn’t, could they? Not once the patrol was there. You should hear Harry tell it, he laughs fit to choke.’

Sam downs the last of his cup without looking at her.

She says, ‘And you’ll trust Harry after that?’

‘I never trusted Harry.’

She pours him another flash, and one for herself. After a while he’s looking more cheerful so they go into the next room, leaving the bubble and squeak for later, and lie down together on the bed. When Blore arrives to discuss business, he has to hammer to make himself heard and Betsy-Ann goes to the door with her stays unlaced and her hair hanging down.

Ask anyone who knows him to describe Harry Blore and one of the first words out of his mouth will be ‘heavy’. Betsy-Ann is a tall, strong woman; Blore is a tall, strong, thickset man, sallow and with a pungent stale smell about him. Some say it comes of his trade, some that it’s his by nature. There’s also a whiff of the bare-knuckle fighter he once was: the solidity of a man not easily put down, the ferocious gaze, the broken nose that gives him his blunted profile.

Acting the quality again, thinks Betsy-Ann, eyeing his shabby laced coat. She smiles, gestures to him to come in and pushes the gin towards him. Blore ignores the cup set ready and helps himself from the lip of the jug.

He looks her up and down. ‘You’ll wear the cove flat at this rate. Tell him I’m here.’

‘Thought you’d come to see your beloved sis.’ Pulling a face once she has turned her back, Betsy-Ann goes out of the room. In the bedchamber, Sam is wriggling into his breeches.

‘No need to break your neck,’ she whispers. ‘And not a word of what I said.’

‘Don’t nag me, we’re not spliced.’

‘No, thank God!’

He goes into the other room and Betsy-Ann tidies herself. When she emerges from the chamber the two men are huddled together. She puts on her bonnet and cloak and leaves them to it.

5

When the clock chimes three, Papa and Scrope are still shut up in the library, scrutinising Mr Zedland’s papers.

‘Poor William!’ says Mama without looking up from her netting. ‘He detests such business. Thank Heaven Scrope can be trusted.’

‘Is something out of order, Mama?’ Sophia asks with a little clutch of dread.

‘Nothing that need concern you, my love. Papa wishes to be quite clear upon certain matters, that is all.’

‘You said,
thank Heaven
.’

‘Bless the child, how fretful it is! What I said had no reference to Mr Zedland – I was speaking of lawyers. Most of them are a rascally set, but Papa has every confidence in Scrope.’

Her daughter is not entirely reassured. Mr Zedland, heir to Wixham, sole offspring of deceased Essex gentry, brought forward all of his legal documents months ago and is now Sophia’s acknowledged intended. Why, then, should Scrope have been summoned at all?

‘Will Papa tell us about it afterwards?’

‘It’s only a matter of figures, my dear. Let the gentlemen take care of it.
You
should be engaged in something more amusing. How’s that blackbird of yours? Have you taught him to sing?’

Seeing herself blocked, Sophia obediently banishes fear from her face, if not from her heart. ‘He’s tolerable,’ she says. ‘Should you like to hear him?’

Titus stands before the two women, his feet planted far apart as if to repel an assault.

‘Now, Titus,’ Sophia announces with a glance towards her mother, ‘repeat after me. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper!’

‘Feeter Piper picked a peck of fpickled peffer. Pepper.’

‘You see how improved he is, Mama?’

‘Indeed.’ Mama smiles, not at the slave but at Sophia who has trained him so well.

The boy clasps his hands in front of him. Until recently his complexion was a dull grey, as if scoured with ashes. Sophia thought he might be sickly, perhaps pining for his native sun. An apothecary was consulted and suggested that Titus’s skin should be massaged with butter. He was duly given an allowance for the purpose, since which time he has returned to his original deep brown shade.

‘I know a bank,’ Sophia prompts.

Titus begins to recite, ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,’ with the careful, expressionless enunciation of someone who has memorised a rigmarole. Though he still confuses
f
and
p
whenever he is flustered, and pronounces ‘weed’ as ‘wade’, there can be no doubt that he has made progress.

‘It’s extraordinary, my dear, how much patience you’ve shown with the little beast,’ Mama says when Titus has finished. ‘A few more weeks and he’ll be fit to go out in public. Don’t you think?’

Though his face gives not a flicker of recognition, Fortunate has understood the word
beast.
All day long the imperatives and insults of English wash over him; though rarely able to frame a reply, he interprets for himself more than anyone suspects. Nor is he surprised that the old one has called him an animal. He is accustomed to being addressed as Blackbird and Monkey-Boy, names as stale as the sagging face of this woman with her eyes like dirty water, her ruined teeth and her body that hardly moves all day. A memory surfaces: his mother as a young woman, in a brightly patterned wrapper, laughing and gesturing to his aunts, all of them tall and strong and graceful. These Englishwomen walk stiffly, like very old people, their skin as pale as the bellies of fishes. The younger one’s mouth does not sag, but one can see that they are mother and daughter. They have the same deformed nostrils, as if a god decided at their birth to pinch the breath out of them.