Ace, King, Knave

  ‘Aren’t there enough hand-me-down gowns to be bought, Mrs Zedland?’

  Sophia stares.

  ‘New sells dearer than used,’ says Betsy-Ann. ‘Stands to reason.’

  ‘Men require – variety.’

  ‘More than that. Breaking in a wench is said to cure the pox. That’s what happened to my sister, Madam. So little she was flat-chested, but she nabbed the worst dose ever seen in that place.’

  Intolerable images crowd Sophia’s brain. The words flat-chested are particularly distressing, suggesting as they do the puny ribcage of a child.

  ‘Kitty’s safe enough,’ Betsy-Ann adds, looking as if she would like to flay the woman. ‘She’s friends very able to help her.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘You see it now. You’ve learnt something,’ says Betsy-Ann with an air of triumph that grates upon Sophia: it is almost as if the woman would have every other female deprived of innocence. She says, ‘Perhaps I was ignorant, but my parents did right to protect me. They could hardly reveal the truth.’

  ‘Not to a respectable young girl,’ Betsy-Ann puts in with what might or might not be satire.

  ‘But men – if this were known to men of standing and reputation, who could prevent ―’

  ‘Known?’ Betsy-Ann flares up. ‘It’s known, all right! Who do you think goes to these places? It’s not your chimney-sweeper that can afford Hartry’s!’

  Sophia is silenced. The nightmare of that many-headed monster snarling and snapping just beneath the surface of polite society is hideous enough. How much more hideous to realise that Edmund is not unique in his descents to it, that faces dear to her – Papa? Mr Letcher? – may also, at times, be known there, may number themselves among its inmates and familiars. She recalls her dream of running along the London rooftops, abysses opening up at every stride. Inwardly trembling, she says, ‘I should like to ask you a question, if I may.’

  ‘About Kitty?’

  ‘About you. Did you, were you able to keep yourself . . .’ She is at a loss for the word.

  ‘Clean?’ Betsy-Ann sits back and looks her straight in the eye.

  ‘You didn’t ―’

  ‘I had a little trouble that way.’ Her mouth twitches as she adds, with unmistakable emphasis, ‘You look well, Madam.’

  Sophia has brought this upon herself. She put the question and the woman answered it, but she cannot, must not, continue with a topic which threatens to hurl her from the rooftop once and for all. And yet she is seized by the most tormenting curiosity. What of Edmund? She closes her eyes: later! She can consider matters later, when she is alone. Steeling herself, she remarks, ‘I imagine you often lacked occupation. Was it there that you learned your card tricks?’

  Betsy-Ann Blore can take a hint. ‘Ma showed me first,’ she says, reaching into her bag and bringing out her deck. ‘When I remember how Ned used to beg!’ She begins to shuffle. ‘He thought to worm it out of me. He’s sly, is Ned, but so am I. A regular slyboots.’ And she winks, actually winks: after her excruciating history she is capable of winking. Sophia feels shame. She has always thought of herself as compassionate towards the poor, yet she was unable even to hear to the end what Miss Blore had suffered. Who has ever heard the woman out – surely not Edmund?

  ‘Your life has been a most unfortunate one. I hardly know what to say.’

  ‘Most respectable folk say a deal too much.’

  ‘There are foundations to help women – the Magdalene House. Would you consider the Magdalene House? I’m told it’s managed upon the most enlightened lines.’

  ‘With a brown uniform.’

  ‘Yes. Very modest and simple, I thought.’

  ‘Would you wear that uniform?’

  Sophia feels the refusal like a slap. ‘Do you speak in earnest? You would reject such a chance, purely because ―’

  ‘I’m too old for the Magdalene House, Mrs Zedland. They like to catch ’em young. And what’d be the use of it, after all?’

  ‘I should’ve thought that was obvious.’

  ‘Magdalene girls go into service. I shan’t scour jerries for a living, not while I’ve something put by.’

  ‘You have something now, perhaps. But what if you’re tempted back into keeping?’

  ‘Not likely. Seen too much of it. A little shop is what I want.’ She holds Sophia’s gaze an instant before turning back to the cards.

  ‘I understand you. I think Papa might find it in him to help, if things go as he hopes.’

  ‘You’ve all been rascally abused.’

  Sophia can’t help smiling at this: it comes so pat. ‘I quite see the charm of independence. Would that I could attain it.’

  ‘You would, if Ned died,’ says Betsy-Ann without the slightest restraining delicacy. ‘Provided you’re snug, widowhood’s a blessed condition – men bowing and scraping, you sitting there, taking your pick.’

  ‘And if you don’t marry again?’

  ‘Then you’re mistress of what’s yours. Now, look.’ She has divided the cards into four piles. ‘See what’s in here.’

  Sophia examines them. Each pile is a suit, unmixed, from deuce to ace. ‘Now put them together, one on top of another.’ She takes the reassembled pack from Sophia. ‘You put down every one in order, right?’

  Sophia nods.

  ‘I’ll shuffle and deal, same as before.’ The cards chop back and forth between her hands, Sophia on the watch for juggling. Betsy-Ann again divides them into four piles and Sophia turns over each in turn: one of court cards, one all eights, nines and tens, one of lower cards from seven down to five, ones of threes, fours and deuces.

  ‘Where are the aces?’

  ‘Here.’ Betsy-Ann fans out the heap of court cards to display them. ‘Can’t range ’em quite like that, of course, it’d be noticed directly.’

  ‘Can’t any sharp meddle with the deck?’

  ‘This is faster. Ned would give his teeth to know how it’s done.’

  Sophia sees Edmund toothless, his jaws fallen in.

  I shall return to Buller, she thinks, as Betsy-Ann, with a satisfied expression, lays down the cards. While I sit over my embroidery you’ll be serving up tobacco, or perhaps lace. In a year or two I’ll look back on this London misadventure as I might a delirium.

  I shall be the terror of the card table.

  ‘There’s something else I want to ask. About Mrs Hartry’s establishment. What did Edmund, Ned, know of it?’

  Betsy-Ann looks puzzled. ‘There was nothing kept from him.’

  You were better prenticed to my trade – is that how it went? ‘Was he familiar with how you came to be there?’

  ‘He knows how the world wags, Mrs Zedland. He stands to inherit the business. Here, take the books. Let me see you deal for Faro.’

  *

  ‘What’s your game, friend?’

  A sharp pain in his side: Fortunate starts awake to find two youths standing over him. It is an instant before he realises that one of them has just kicked him in the ribs.

  ‘Perhaps he don’t talk English.’

  ‘I do, I do,’ he mumbles, drawing up his arms and knees for protection.

  ‘Who put you over the wall?’

  ‘A man chases me.’

  ‘That door, Snowball, was shut and bolted.’

  ‘I came here, I wouldn’t sleep if ―’ the English words refuse to come to him. ‘If doing bad things.’

  ‘Nothing’s gone from the house,’ says the other youth, who seems to be of a more kindly disposition.

  ‘Runaway, then,’ says the one he suspects of kicking him. ‘Up, up, Blacky,’ and before Fortunate can protest he has been hauled upright and his arms dragged behind him.

  ‘Easy, Matt. He’s not fighting you.’

  ‘I am Titus.’

  ‘Sure he’s not fighting, I’ve got a hold. Search his pockets.’

  ‘No,’ Fortunate cries, but the lad is already drawing out a pistol.

  ‘Not a thief?’ Matt jeers. ‘With
a barking-iron!’

  ‘Broken.’

  ‘Take a look, Jim. Is it loaded?’

  Jim examines the pistol and nods his head.

  Matt steps forward and seizes it. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘tell us who was with you.’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Very well.’ He raises the pistol level with Fortunate’s head. ‘You heard him say it was broken, Jim?’

  ‘Put it down,’ Jim pleads.

  ‘The man says it’s broken.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Matt ―’ Jim reaches for the pistol, but Matt at once aims it straight into his face. Jim backs off, though continuing to protest: ‘There’s money in runaways! You want to think of that!’

  Fortunate hopes the dampness of his pockets will save him. It seems hardly to matter any more: life is so wretched, so relentless and terrifying, it would be a relief to end it. In his exhausted, shocked condition nothing seems real. At the same time, some instinct not yet befuddled warns him not to seem afraid of the pistol, and he stands as if calm.

  ‘Dying game, are we? Your last chance now. Who put you over?’

  Fortunate spits at him.

  The pistol clicks. Jim screams and lunges at his fellow servant. The pistol skitters across the cobbles of the yard: Fortunate stoops for it, unbolts the door and is gone while the two of them are struggling. Life and energy re-entered his body the moment the youth tried to kill him: his feet pound the pavement as if to make holes in it. There is a strange noise and after a while he realises that it is himself, wailing aloud as he goes.

  *

  Some time later, exhaustion having returned and closed on him like a fist, he enters a tavern. Here people find food and drink, and perhaps a bed: things of which he is in desperate need. He can barely see the faces of the people inside, the room is so dark and his eyes so unwilling to stay open, but he knows without looking that some of those within are staring at him with cold dislike, some leering, some with a milder curiosity. He is aware of fingers on his back, even on his neck: people walking up quite coolly and touching him for luck. They used to do it when he lived with Dog Eye. For reassurance he puts his hand to the pistol. After leaving Matt and Jim, his first action was to search for the other one. His fingers encountered a tear in the bottom of his pocket, through which the weapon had slipped into the lining of his coat. It is still there, resting against his leg.

  The woman serving drink takes his money and pours him a tankard of beer. She also asks him if he is a slave. He says no, and wonders how she would feel, if he should ask the same question of her. Fortunate’s father was wealthy and kept slaves of his own: what would he say, seeing his son so insulted? But here it is not the dignity of the man or his position in life that matters but the colour of the skin.

  ‘You were freed, then.’

  ‘Freed. Yes.’

  ‘Down on your luck, are you?’ She seems friendly enough but his eyes are closing in his head and his tongue feels shackled. With an immense effort he manages to ask if there is a room he can have.

  ‘It’s a shilling,’ the woman says.

  ‘I pay. Please some food.’ The press of bodies, the starers, some mimicking his manner of saying pay and please: it is all loathsome to him just now, even more than at other times. They allow nothing for his condition. They make no allowances ever. If his weapons were not damp, he would be tempted to shoot one of them and see the rest scatter.

  ‘There’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .’ the woman says. He cannot catch the words but says, ‘Please. Take me room now.’ He is conscious of sounding stupid. It is the tiredness of many nights, rolled into one: his tongue is too thick to speak.

  She comes out from behind the bar, calling, ‘Clem!’ as she does so. A tall fair-haired man separates himself from the customers and comes to take her place as the woman leads Fortunate, clutching his beer, upstairs to a small shabby room with a servant’s bed, not unlike the one he had in the New Buildings, but dirtier. He waits for her to leave, then slumps on the bed to finish his drink.

  When the woman returns Fortunate is in a doze, still holding the tankard on his lap. He starts, spilling a little, as she sets down his food on the counterpane: a plate of boiled bacon, of the coarsest, toughest kind, and slimy cabbage greens. He sees now that the chamber has a fireplace, and a door that can be bolted.

  ‘Fire, please.’

  She pulls a face as if to say: You don’t want much, do you?

  ‘Pay.’

  She gives him a shrewd look, but fetches a coal scuttle. When she has lit the fire and gone away, Fortunate bolts the door. Fighting the urge to sleep, he lays his pistols in front of the fire, not too close. The box of powder he retrieves from his coat lining. He opens it and pushes the contents about with his finger: they feel dry, but he warms the box anyway, a little further from the fire, with its top covered in case of spitting coals.

  Then he gorges on the cabbage and bacon, the stringy flesh catching in his throat more than once and almost choking him. With the help of the beer he gets it down. He lies on the bed fully dressed and the world disappears.

  48

  ‘Best front pair in the house,’ Mrs Ledley says, holding back the door. Betsy-Ann looks round. Not bad: wallpaper stained but not peeling, a hearth, a bed and a few other sticks of furniture, not up to her rooms in Covent Garden but then nothing is. The usual chamber fug of sweat, spunk, fannies, pisspots, drains. The bed must have been especially stinky: someone, Ledley probably, has been dousing it in Cologne water.

  ‘Who had it before?’

  ‘A Miss Roberts, very genteel.’ The woman’s moist, bulging eyes put Betsy-Ann in mind of a pug dog.

  ‘Where’s she gone then, this genteel Miss Roberts?’

  ‘She found herself a friend.’ Mrs Ledley looks coy. ‘The district is noted for good company and good cheer.’

  Betsy-Ann knows what it’s noted for. ‘Are there many churchyards round about?’

  ‘Churchyards, my dear?’

  ‘I’ve a horror of skulls and bones and graves. Been like it since I was a girl.’

  ‘There’s churchyards everywhere.’ Mrs Ledley looks doubtful, then brightens. ‘But you won’t be troubled here. The church in this street is end-to-end with the houses, brick to brick. You couldn’t bury a mouse.’

  There is a commode in the room but the woman shows her the necessary house, which is as foul as any she has seen.

  ‘I’ve a cart and a few knick-knacks to sell before I can move in,’ says Betsy-Ann.

  Mrs Ledley doesn’t miss a trick. ‘I was hoping to let it directly. There’s a lady coming to see ―’

  ‘O, that needn’t stand in our way. Suppose I paid you a quarter’s rent, straight off, and took the key? Would you be so kind as fill the scuttle for me?’

  ‘Of course,’ the woman simpers. You needn’t think you’ll be let to bilk me every time I want a few coals, Betsy-Ann silently retorts. To secure the chamber, though, it’s worth it this once. She hands over a quarter’s rent, retrieved from under Sam’s floorboards.

  ‘O, Mrs Ledley,’ she says when they have shaken hands. ‘Are you able to write the direction for me, nice and plain, so I can give it my friend? My lady friend,’ she adds, as if Ledley cares.

  Mrs Ledley can read but not write. However, Mrs Sutton from the back pair is quite a scholar and always obliging provided there’s no ribbon tied to her door handle – that is, no intimate ‘conversation’ taking place within. Mrs Sutton comes to the door frowzy and bored, seemingly glad of distraction, and invites Betsy-Ann (though not Mrs Ledley, who goes sniffily downstairs) to step into her rooms.

  The air within is every bit as stale as in Betsy-Ann’s own place. There’s the usual greasy bed, one leg missing and its absence supplied by a rough length of timber, plus a jerry and a bowl for bathing, should visitors be particular. Over the mantelpiece Mrs Sutton has pinned a piece of paper covered in print. The last time Betsy-Ann saw something of this kind, she was told it was a prayer.

 
‘What’s that?’ she enquires, nervous lest she should have misjudged her company.

  ‘O, nothing of importance.’ Mrs Sutton reaches down the gin from a shelf. ‘A gentleman gave me the Bath Chronicle – he’d just come back from taking the waters – and that part entertained me, so I cut it out and kept it.’ She hands Betsy-Ann a full glass. ‘To health and happiness.’

  ‘To health and happiness,’ Betsy-Ann echoes as they clink and smile. ‘Would you be so kind as to read your – chronicle – to me?’

  ‘Of course.’ She goes over to the mantelpiece and peers. ‘Mail from Flanders and Stockholm. A few days ago a small hound was brought here from Angermansland, and shown by one Garney, a book-keeper, which has been taught to speak.’

  ‘To speak!’

  ‘The hound, not the book-keeper. He not only utters whole words, but whole sentences one after the other, in the French and Swedish languages, and among other expressions, he speaks plain, Vive le Roi.’

  ‘Veevla?’

  ‘God Save the King, in English.’

  Though Mrs Sutton’s mouth and cheeks are dimpling up, Betsy-Ann is unsure whether to be astonished or amused. ‘Can a dog really do that?’

  ‘No, no!’ cries Mrs Sutton, openly laughing now as if delighted at the question. ‘Some sham or other.’

  ‘I wonder how it was worked.’

  ‘How should I know? I fancy he pinched it, made it cry out.’

  ‘Poor little cur.’

  ‘Aye – out of luck, like others I could mention!’ Herself for a start, Betsy-Ann thinks. The way Mrs Sutton holds up her head, her speech, her broad, creamy features, her pleasure in a scrap saved from the newspaper – all these suggest a life begun in comfort and respectability.

  ‘I see I’ve made you curious,’ Mrs Sutton observes. ‘I’m quite the usual thing, I assure you. A promise of marriage – he’s in India, now, and the child in the Foundling.’

  ‘And your family?’

  ‘Cut me off.’ She shrugs dismissively. ‘When I first came on the Town, I wasn’t well known. But Mr Derrick puffed me in Harris’s – a fine witty wench, eminently well adapted to a man of solid parts, it said – and after that I was more in request.’