Ace, King, Knave (20 page)

Never could Sophia have imagined such wickedness. It is beyond anything: a father enticing his own son into debauchery! There are other letters in the same hand and these she pushes aside unread, not without a sense of contamination from their very paper and ink. So this is the company her husband keeps, unknown to her – this monstrous Hartry and his son. Supposing
Mrs
Hartry alive, and possessed of any womanly feeling, how the poor creature must have suffered to see her husband’s profligacy begin to show, like spots of decay, in her child. Even the love affair of which the father wrote was evidently of a coarse and carnal nature. Only suppose if she, Sophia, had a son, and Edmund should ―

Edmund. He said he would be out tonight, but he has been known to change his mind, particularly if the weather turned cold. Suppose he were to return? She has now worked her way through about half the mass of papers. Should she take some of them away with her? Caution urges staying where she is: from this room she can hear the front door, which allows her time to press them back into their hiding place. Once remove a document, and who knows when she will have the opportunity to make the return?

How, though, will she explain the unlocked drawer? Directly Edmund finds it, she stands detected. She feels at the back of the drawer, finds the snapped-off tip of the letter-opener and slips it into her pocket. The lock itself appears uninjured. If so, and if she can find a key, all may yet be well. The maid (Sophia blushes) can be blamed for the damaged paper knife. Some tale about dusting – clumsiness – she will make it up to the girl.

Though the middle drawer is also locked, its contents can be exposed by lifting the top drawer clean out of the desk, thus revealing two rings and a stub of wax. There is, alas, no spare key. Sophia picks up the first ring, expecting to see the turtle-dove device that always appeared on Edmund’s letters during their courtship. Instead she beholds a carved sunflower precisely like that on her own seal ring, the one she inherited from Grandmother Cotterstone. Sophia’s ring is of bluejohn. This one has a dull reddish stone, perhaps carnelian, but as far as her eye can judge, it is the very same design.

There is a piece of paper shoved to the back of the drawer. She pulls it out and is faced with the words

Sophia Zedland

Sophia Zedland

Sophia Zedland

– followed by a few sentences of no great import but painstakingly inscribed in a character identical to her own. The proof is damning: here lies the explanation, dreadful though it is, for Papa’s confusion. Sophia’s breath seems to come through layers of muslin, as if she were straining the air, and she can hear her own gasps as if made by another person. Is this hysteria? Not at all.
Sophy is rational.

Papa has been reading not Sophia’s letters but Edmund’s.

It is some minutes before she can command herself sufficiently to continue. The third and last drawer is unlocked and empty. Sophia turns back to Papa’s letter and reads through to the end. He does not continue to scold her but offers the ‘small beer’, as Mama called it, of a country household: Mary-Ann’s back is improved, Rixam’s grandmother has left him 20L. Sophia is not greatly cheered by Rixam’s good fortune. She returns the letter to its place in the pile and closes the drawer, then hurries to her boudoir where she snatches up a handful of hairpins.

Eleven o’clock finds Sophia kneeling by the desk, hairpin in hand.

Midnight finds her, a prey to violent headache, in bed and endeavouring to sleep. The drawer is locked. Outside in the yard, bent pins and a broken paper-knife sink down in the privy-pit.

Edmund is still not home.

24

Punt’s Coffee House makes itself known a hundred yards away, sudden heaves of heat and laughter pushing aside the cooling air each time the door opens. Betsy-Ann knows it of old: a nest for night birds, both cocks and hens.

Ned’s there already, sitting some way off and watching the company. As he sees her approach, he turns the familiar smile full on her and despite herself, Betsy-Ann feels her heart kick.

He takes her hand and kisses it. ‘Here have I been in a cursed funk.’

‘What, you?’ says Betsy-Ann, sitting down.

‘I thought you might be afraid to come.’

Who does he think he is, Old Harry? She has sufficient courage to share a pot of capuchin, at any rate, and drinks from his used cup, the sweet milky coffee coating her tongue. This is a time to listen, not talk – what’s his lay? – but now he has her here, Ned seems ill at ease.

At last he ventures, ‘Queer times, eh?’

‘I’ve seen worse.’

‘And better. Speaking for myself, that is. Who’d have thought it, you with Sam, and me ―’

‘Spliced?’

‘Damnably spliced.’

So she was right. She wonders if his autem mort is One of Us, as
Harris’s
calls it. She didn’t look the type, but on consideration Betsy-Ann’s not so sure. It’s possible to drown the whore in the wife. It’s been done.

He says, ‘I see you’re curious, Mrs Betsy.’

‘How?’

‘Your eyes are all slitty.’

Too sure of himself by half! Betsy-Ann at once yawns in his face. He sees his mistake and says coaxingly: ‘I flatter myself the tale isn’t without interest. She’s from Zedland, where the fine big wenches grow.’

‘Is that why you went, then? To get married?’

‘Nothing further from my mind, I assure you. When I binged avast, I hadn’t the price of a hat.’

‘You, Ned? You’ve never gone short in your life.’

‘Ah, Betsy!’ He makes sheep’s eyes at her. ‘You know I have.’

‘You’ll be telling me she’s a fortune, next.’

‘You are at liberty to laugh, Madam,’ he says, but good-humouredly.

‘That’s a mercy. Might burst myself otherwise. So, let me see: you went there penniless and married an heiress.’

He grins. ‘I grant you not every man could’ve done it.’

‘O, it’s been done before,’ says Betsy-Ann. ‘Mostly by tumbling her first.’

‘That is, indeed, the beaten track. I pride myself on a little more
finesse.
’

‘Christ, Ned!’

‘Patience, you shall hear.’ He’s smiling; he’s gained the upper hand. ‘Now Betsy, in your gypsy days, when you went rolling about the country, did you ever fetch up at Bath?’

She shrugs. ‘Don’t recall.’

‘Then my life on it, you never did. Bath’s not a place you’d forget. Half of England’s in lodgings there – the gaming half.’

‘I know that much, Ned.’

‘Well. It was in Bath that I set myself up.’

‘Living off the loobies, I suppose.’

‘Aye, such fat foolish trout as you see there! Ned tickled ’em into the pan.’

‘But why?’ Betsy-Ann is finally overcome by curiosity. ‘Why
Zedland
?’

‘The thing is, child, I didn’t go there so much as leave here. Uninvited company, you know.’

‘Uninvited ― ?’ For a moment she thinks he’s complaining of fleas. ‘Duns, you mean?’

‘Aye. I was never so plagued in my life.’

‘But Kitty – wouldn’t she ―’

‘Put her hand in her pocket? It was she cut off the funds. I daresay you remember how
that
came about,’ he adds with a touch of bitterness.

Betsy-Ann sits up straight. ‘Don’t you put it on
me,
Ned. I won’t have it.’

‘If we’d been spliced, nothing to be done, then perhaps she’d have come round in time. As it was, I saw she’d never leave off.’

She sniffs. ‘I’m with Sam, for Christ’s sake. What more does she want?’

‘Curse me if she doesn’t think Sam’s a decoy. My dear mother is of a suspicious nature.’

Suspicious? Pitiless, more like. When Keshlie wouldn’t go with a cull, but cried and clung to her, Kitty bent and whispered in her ear that if the man was not obliged directly, she’d have Keshlie’s throat cut in the night and her body thrown into the Thames. She’d never have done it – easier just to shove a girl out on the street – but Keshlie was too green to know that. As for her elder sister, who did know, Kitty made sure she was occupied and out of the way. When Betsy-Ann was finished with her cully she went to the kitchen to look for Keshlie, who did such tasks as chopping and peeling, and was told her sister had gone for oranges.

‘What’s a fellow to do?’ Ned shrugs. ‘She wants me to give you up. I give you up, and she ruins me!’

Keshlie trailed downstairs and halted at the bottom step, grimacing, a slash of crimson across the front of her gown. Betsy-Ann hurried to her, took her by the arms and turned her round: another patch, and a faint hogo of salt and rust. Why, the child had started with her flowers! Bleeding like murder, right through her clothes. Behind Keshlie one or two whores were frowning and signalling across the parlour, indicating Betsy-Ann should take her sister away to their private quarters.

‘Come with me and we’ll get you some rags,’ she said, putting an arm round Keshlie’s shoulders. ‘You’re a forward wench, to be sure!’

Keshlie blubbed. Betsy-Ann could have done the same, seeing her start so young, but she squeezed Keshlie to her, murmuring, ‘There, there, you won’t die ―’

She broke off, held her sister at arm’s length, and stared. Earlier that morning, Keshlie had worn her green robe, with a little apron over it. Since then, someone had undressed her and put her into a long white garment like a nightgown, trimmed with lace and satin ribbon. At first Betsy-Ann had failed to notice the gown, so distracted was she by the patches of red. She ran her hands along her sister’s body: neither stockings nor stays. Now she understood how the gown had become so bloody: there was nothing between it and Keshlie.

She understood everything.

When she first told this story to Ned, he insisted it must have been a bungle: a cully who’d paid to fondle and pet the girl, nothing more, but then things went too far. Betsy-Ann demanded what kind of fool he thought she was. They’d waited until she was busy, she shouted. They’d tricked out her sister like a bride. Yet still Ned resisted. His mother was no pious prude, but a child of Keshlie’s age? Her house didn’t deal in children. Kitty was a woman of principle, in her way, and much maligned.

It was a natural enough blindness in a son. Even so, there is a certain satisfaction in Betsy-Ann’s remarking now, with an air of innocence, ‘She ruined you! And she so soft-hearted!’

‘It wasn’t for lack of pleading, I assure you. I got down on my marrowbones – you’d have laughed to see me.’

‘I reckon anyone would.’

‘I said, Sam Shiner’s her protector now, and she said, That’ll change if you once get sixpence in your pocket.’

Betsy-Ann sighs. ‘Didn’t know you, did she?’

‘I said, Be reasonable, Ma, you might as well cut off my baubles, and she said, At your choice. I never knew her so hard – to me,’ he adds, noticing Betsy-Ann’s expression. ‘She said, I shall try if I can starve some sense into you. Nothing for it but to toddle. Fellows told me Bath was the place, so there I went.’

Betsy-Ann tries to picture Dimber Ned let loose in Zedland. All the time she lived there, she only once saw a man with good lace to his coat. In fact,
Zedland
was one of the first words Catharine taught her when she came to Town: the place was so called, she explained, because the inhabitants are too stupid to say ‘s’ but must say ‘z’ instead, with their
zyder
and
Zummerzetzhire.
Zed was the last letter of the alphabet, said Catharine (Betsy-Ann not having learned her letters then, this was news to her) and it followed that Zedland was the last place on earth: Zed Land.

Yet here is Ned claiming to have married into it.

‘So there you went,’ she echoes. ‘Is it so very grand?’

‘The buildings please, and there’s a deal of elegance in all their customs and contrivances, but lord, how it cramps a man! I lacked room to turn around in.’

‘You mean they began to know you,’ says Betsy-Ann, smiling despite herself.

‘Aye, they made that pretty plain, so I took myself off to an inn outside Bath until there should be fresh trout to tickle, and there fell in with her father. A man of property, travelling on business and with a daughter at home still unwed, would I do them the honour of visiting? In short, Papa was quite charmed.’

‘He took you for a gentry cove.’

‘One would say so. He is, himself, a gentry cove. I arrived to find the premises snug, his wife as hopeful as himself and the wench ―’

‘I’ve seen her, remember ―’

‘I was
about
to say, a cursed mope.’

‘So you worked a cure?’

‘Had her blushing like port wine,’ he agrees. ‘A charming sight! How she did struggle against it! Were I not the most modest fellow living, such adoration might have swelled my head.’

‘I daresay it did, a little, though you are so very modest. Had the lady no other suitors?’

‘She’s . . .’ – his eyes go inward for a second or two – ‘. . . not calculated to please a man. I found her standing empty and put in for the lease, as it were.’

‘But you ―’

‘I was a gentry cove, remember. Property in Essex. By which you perceive that I fought under false colours.’

‘And was the lady in the deceit?’

‘Not then and not now. What would you have me do? She would scarcely appreciate my mother’s establishment.’

Betsy-Ann whistles. ‘But if they find out?’

He shrugs. ‘I’ve the dowry safe. Well, Betsy? Was it not a rum bite?’

She never fancied him capable of such things, certainly.

‘They
will
find out, Ned.’

He shrugs. ‘I’d put money on it.’

‘But they’ll come after you!’

‘After who, Betsy? Edmund Zedland?’

Betsy-Ann blinks.

‘There’s a Mr Cant at Bath,’ he says, laughing, ‘and a Mr Blunt, and a promising pair by the name of Chase, with whom I had some excellent sport – the flats must think what very curious names some gentlemen have – but, Betsy! I must tell you, I ran into a friend of Ma’s in the Assembly Rooms. I might almost say, a friend of
yours
.’

She shakes her head. ‘I’ve no friends there.’