Ace, King, Knave (6 page)

‘There! We can have a very satisfactory game with three,’ says Mrs Chase. ‘Mr Zedland may look on, or read the paper, as he pleases.’

But Edmund now stands pulling on his fingers. ‘I have no desire to be unsociable. I may play a hand or two.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ says Chase. Sophia thinks he may regret his enthusiasm when Edmund, asked to shuffle, bungles it so badly as to drop several cards to the carpet. He has to sweep them up, laughing with embarrassment, before the game can begin.

Mr Chase wins the first trick, Mrs Chase the second. The third goes back to Mr Chase, the fourth and fifth to Sophia.

‘Bravo!’ exclaims Mrs Chase. ‘Sophia will win at this rate.’

The next trick goes to Edmund, the one after that to Sophia.

‘
You
could’ve had that, Edmund!’ she cries before she can stop herself.

‘I think not, my love; I’d only a tray.’

‘So you did,’ says Sophia, whose love will not let her expose him, but Mr Chase is less delicate.

‘She means that you laid a queen on a deuce last time. That queen, Sir, was thrown away.’

‘I know, in principle, how the thing should be done,’ Edmund admits, looking down at the table. ‘But I find such limited pleasure in the game that my concentration leaves much to be desired.’

‘Possibly the case is vice versa: there must be an intelligent interest before pleasure can follow,’ Mr Chase suggests, and Edmund’s eyes take on the hard, shiny look of polished jet.

The game continues.

‘Mr Chase, you wicked man!’ his wife teases. Indeed, it seems Mr Chase is a player of some skill, for the other three cannot match him. Sophia deals, then Mr Chase, then Mrs Chase. Edmund, who has won only two tricks, seems half asleep.

Mrs Chase yawns. ‘What do you think, Sophia, is low play not tedious? What do you say to doubling the stake? It may possibly wake up Mr Zedland.’

Sophia is taken aback. Of the last four tricks, Mr Chase won three and Mrs Chase one: in these circumstances her hostess’s proposal strikes her as downright uncivil.

‘Treble it,’ Edmund replies before she can gather her wits. Sophia turns to him in dismay but he refuses to meet her eye.

‘Treble it is, then,’ says Mrs Chase.

Edmund takes up the cards and again drops some of them. Sophia sees the King of Spades flip over in the air; Edmund snatches up the card and jams it into the middle of the deck.

The cards are dealt, not without a great deal of fumbling. Unreservedly as Sophia adores her husband, she feels a twinge of humiliation, not unmixed with dread: perhaps his father should have taught him cards rather than rowing. She picks up her hand to find the King of Spades in the middle of it, flanked by the King of Hearts, the Ace of Clubs and the Ace of Diamonds.

‘Thank you, Lord,’ she prays and at once blushes since God surely disapproves. She was able to convince herself that low play was nothing, a mere friendly amusement, but
this
is indubitably Gaming. She is disappointed in Edmund, who must have taken more madeira than is good for him since he looks ready to drop forward onto the table. The Chases, too, appear to regard him with some unease.

Sophia wins the next three tricks and Edmund the two after that.

In the next round, with Sophia dealing, each player wins a trick apart from Edmund, who wins two. The Chases shuffle and deal: honours are equal. Edmund again shuffles awkwardly, apologising for his ineptitude and reshuffling several times to make up for it.

Sophia gapes at her hand. She has again received the King of Spades, this time flanked by the King, Queen and Ace of Clubs and the Ace of Hearts. Blinking with disbelief and a sense of unmerited good fortune, she goes on to win four tricks in a row. The remaining tricks are won by Edmund. The Chases appear to have had no cards worth holding.

From now on, the wind of good fortune sets in one quarter of the compass: Sophia’s. Kings and Queens flock to feed from her hand, Aces rarely desert her courts and the tricks mount at her side of the table.

‘My love, you have scourged the rest of the company until we stagger and bleed,’ says Edmund at last. ‘In common kindness to the other players I must now whisk you away to our lodgings.’

‘Pray do not go,’ Mrs Chase murmurs with ill-concealed relief.

‘I fear we must. Forgive me, Madam,’ (he turns to Mrs Chase with a smile that brings Sophia, figuratively, to kneel at his feet once again) ‘if I am such a domestic tyrant as to bring away my wife, but you know how it is with these newly married people. They cannot be long from home.’

Mrs Chase can only smirk.

‘Will you settle now?’ Edmund asks carelessly.

Mr Chase cannot apologise enough. He has not the wherewithal; he never intended to play so deep this afternoon; will Mr Zedland take a note until Mr Chase can visit his banker tomorrow?

‘Whenever you choose to take your revenge,’ says Edmund. ‘No notes between friends,’ and he waves away the offer.

As they make their way along Borough Walls Edmund hums to himself: some rustic air. Sophia, looking up at his elegant profile, sickens with love. She has long pardoned his ineptitude in shuffling the cards.

‘The trees are beginning to turn,’ she says.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The trees. They’re beginning to turn.’

Edmund says, ‘I prefer autumn to summer. Smoke and fruit in the air, and blue mist – in the country, that is.’

‘You talk like a poet. You look like a poet.’

He laughs. ‘More than Derrick, at any rate.’

‘My love,’ Sophia says, ‘you won’t play again, will you?’

‘Of course not. I only consented in order to be civil.’

She touches his arm. ‘But if they asked? Would you not wish to be civil then?’

He seems extremely amused. ‘You little goose!’ he says. ‘They won’t ask us again.’

‘Why ever not?’ While Sophia no longer likes Mrs Chase as well as she did, the rupture of a friendship is always distressing. She feels as if a layer of love and respect has been torn away from her, as if she stands before the world a little more naked than she did this morning. ‘Have we offended them? Have
I
?’

‘They dislike your beginner’s luck.’

‘But I couldn’t help that! Besides,’ she clutches at straws, ‘I’m not a beginner. I’ve played before.’

‘Brides are beginners in all they do.’ He pinches her cheek. ‘Forget Mrs Chase. She’s a false friend.’

‘Is she really? I liked her.’

‘Then you have learnt something,’ says Edmund.

9

Betsy-Ann turns up an alleyway and emerges into a court. The houses are taller here and of recent construction, though already smutted by the smoky air of the city. Down another alley, its walls plastered and painted from the time when it led to a respectable house but now greasy from bodies pressed up against the plaster, dancing the old buttock ball. A girl passing in the opposite direction smirks at Betsy-Ann as if to say, ‘I know where you’re bound.’

Same place as you come from, my dear.

You never know what you’ll meet up with in this passageway. She can hear the Corinthian now, in his cups:

Oh, the leafy lane, the sweet retreat, where having stepped from turd to turd, the grateful cull may at last feast his ogles on this palace of pleasure, this mountain of monosyllables . . .

‘Monosyllables?’ Betsy-Ann asked. ‘What’s a monosyllable?’

‘
The
monosyllable. A woman’s commodity.’

‘Commodity?’

She’d never heard so many fancy words for the thing.

She rounds a corner to find a man half fallen, crouching on one knee, and is past him before he has time to grab. He looks as if he wants to come after her but he’s too drunk to heave himself off the ground. No companions: been shook of everything he carried, most likely, and doesn’t know it yet.

The bells are chiming eleven. A bright morning, but it’s dusk down here. She looks up to the sky and feels dizzy to see the roofs so far above. There’s a smell of frying sausages and from a window, high up in the wall, someone is shaking out a cloth.

There, at the end of the alley: a brick archway, the underside painted red, and set into it, the smaller deeper entrance to the seraglio, their combined appearance putting Betsy-Ann in mind, as ever, of the monosyllable. She’s not the only one to have had this fancy: though it’s safer to enter Kitty’s establishment through the front door, some culls prefer to approach it from this side, risking dirt and criminal company, perhaps because it’s less visible, perhaps because they relish brushing shoulders with blackguards. Among these the place is known, far and wide, as the Cunt in the Wall, and as if to live up to its name, it stinks. She knows why: the cullies piss before going in, right here on the steps. The familiar stale odour brings back a rush of sensations: fear, disgust and a strange, warped sense of loss, not for this place but for what she once had here.

More men are approaching along the alley. That decides the thing for her: she raps on the door.

A blowen peers out from behind a chain. ‘What’s your business, mort?’

‘Say it’s one of her old girls.’

The door closes again. She waits, breathing through her mouth; the men have stopped to chat with some woman encountered in the alleyway.

The blowen returns to unchain the door and admit Betsy-Ann to a parlour where there are elegant papered walls and paintings. She remembers the paintings: scenes of whoring, mostly, and one of meadows. When she lived here, Betsy-Ann used to wonder at the meadows. The Mother’s grand project was to improve the panney from a common brothel to a seraglio in the continental style, in hopes of drawing in a wealthier clientele. That might account for it.

She’s led past a couple of bullybacks playing at dice, their cudgels propped between their knees. She’d forgotten the bullybacks. There’ll be more of them, a warning to the wilder sort, stationed near the front door. Skirting round their tables, the blowen leads Betsy-Ann towards a sofa where a woman waits.

What the devil ― ? The Mother’s twice the woman she used to be, her robes filling the entire sofa without benefit of company. The blue-black hair for which she was famed, and which she still wears unpowdered, lies rough and dusty-looking on her head, as if it doesn’t belong there: could it be a wig?
Kitty Hartry
, bald of the pox? Serve her right, Betsy-Ann silently exults: serve her right! The eyes, though: the eyes haven’t changed. Or have they? For the Mother says nothing and remains peering at Betsy-Ann as if unsure who stands before her.

‘Don’t you know me, Mother?’

‘Fetch a light,’ Kitty says. The girl leaps to obey. When the lamp is brought over Betsy-Ann notices the puffiness of the young face and throat: another one by the look of it, not yet fifteen and peppered already.

‘You’ve seen me many a time,’ Betsy-Ann says, taking the lamp and holding it up to her own face. The woman has recognised her now. Betsy-Ann watches her pretend to search for a name.

‘The tinker,’ she says at last. ‘Keshlie.’

‘Betsy-Ann. Keshlie was my sister.’

‘So she was,’ says the Mother. ‘You’ll take a flash of lightning with me, Betsy-Ann.’ She gestures and the blowen fetches a tray from a nearby sideboard.

What’s served to the culls – the ones that stick to lightning, and won’t stand for ratafia – is an evil brew costing four times the going rate. The whores themselves drink better. Betsy-Ann needs that flash to keep her up; she has a hard time of it, sitting opposite the Mother, whose flesh, glistening with sweat in this muggy weather, rises and spreads like proving dough. Harry wouldn’t need to lever up the lid of this one. It would burst off of its own accord, and the corpse within would spill ―

‘You’ll know me again,’ the woman remarks.

So she can see that much. Betsy-Ann says, ‘You’re the picture of prosperity.’

‘A tub of guts is what you mean. It keeps a-growing on me. I tried the starving, and the purging.’ With a faint grunt, the Mother leans forward as if to confide a secret. ‘There’s culls that like it.’

‘That’s only to be expected, a woman of your fame,’ Betsy-Ann says. She would give anything to know if the hair is a wig.

‘I’m still in
Harris’s List
.’

‘Naturally you are.’

‘
For the connoisseur of fat, a stupendous figure with dairyworks to smother a Hercules
, is how he puts it.’

She sounds as if she’s pored over the words so often as to get them by heart. Most likely she wrote them herself, since nothing goes into
Harris’s
that isn’t paid for.

‘I take it trade’s brisk, then.’ Betsy-Ann could just as well answer her own question. From the parlour within she can hear singing, and shouting, and screams of laughter: all the sounds of gay company.

The Mother’s smile is vicious. ‘Wondering if there’s still a space for you?’

‘No, just wanted to know if you was still here.’

‘I’m not intending to die yet.’

‘And to hear news of old friends.’

Ah,
says the woman’s face,
now we come to it
. ‘Not much in that line,’ she says. ‘But aren’t you spliced? I heard you was.’

‘I’m Mrs Samuel Shiner now.’

‘His autem mort?’

‘Good as.’

She clinks her glass against Betsy-Ann’s. ‘To the well wearing of your muff.’

As a rule, lightning brings on laughter or tears: Betsy-Ann is caught between the two as she surveys the grinning creature before her. It seems only a day or two since she last looked on Kitty Hartry, Mother of the House, who at forty was still in demand with sportsmen of every shade and trade: whipping culls, debauched schoolboys, men of spirit, queer culls, flash kiddeys, cracksmen, toby men and the occasional gent. Even now, her eyes might be half blinded but they haven’t dimmed. The sight of them glittering in the bloated face makes Betsy-Ann’s throat tighten. Ned’s have just that brilliance: black diamonds. She wonders who’ll be first to bring up his name.

Kitty says, ‘You’re rubbing along all right, eh?’

As if she cares. Betsy-Ann shrugs. ‘Not so bad.’