Authors: Maria McCann
‘It’ll be hard for you after Town,’ says Betsy-Ann, who seems to have forgotten her earlier fury. ‘Unless you leave your papa’s house, you know.’
‘Marry, you mean?’ She can barely restrain a laugh: Edmund not yet in the ground, and his mistress matchmaking on his wife’s behalf! She toys with the idea of informing Betsy-Ann that – Edmund having squandered her modest portion, partly on Betsy-Ann herself – she has nothing with which to attract a suitor.
‘All men aren’t alike,’ says Betsy-Ann.
‘Thank God.’
‘Once you’re over this, you’ll be right enough. Comfortable.’
If Sophia were not so beaten down she would order the woman to stop prattling. Comfortable! Possibly this is for Betsy-Ann a mode of begging, of hinting that her own prospects are unappealing, but the truth of the matter is that at present, Sophia cannot care about Betsy-Ann Blore. Her sentiments are desiccated, hard, parched: in a nutshell, used up. Even the thought of her parents produces only a sullen dread. They will want to preach and moralise when the sole thing she craves is privacy, the better to grieve. For the grief has barely started: she has seen enough mourners to know that.
‘I could perhaps work for a chaunter cull,’ says Betsy-Ann. ‘I make up songs in my head but I can’t write ’em. I reckon he could put me to use.’
‘Indeed,’ says Sophia.
She insists that the driver go first to Betsy-Ann’s lodging. By the time they arrive, the moon has come out from behind the clouds and Sophia has sufficient curiosity about this place, which she has so long imagined, to exert herself and raise the window blind. There stands Miss Blore, ghostly on the house steps, her face turned back towards the carriage while she fumbles for her key and the driver, instructed by Cosgrove, waits to see her safely inside. Sophia also waits, with a sense that some part of her life is ending, unwitnessed, in this obscure street. At last the key is produced. As Betsy-Ann puts it to the lock and enters, a glimmering candle appears at a top-floor window: the landlady, Sophia supposes, curious to see what company her lodger keeps.
She feigns not to see Betsy-Ann’s wave of farewell. Instead, she sits back in the shadowed interior as the vehicle pulls away. Afterwards she remembers: the lodging was not the one she wanted to see, the one where Betsy-Ann was installed by Edmund. She was mistaken in that, as in so many things.
At her own house she happens to glance upwards in alighting. There are chinks of light between the first-floor shutters. The candles should all be snuffed, and the servants in bed: evidently they are profiting by her absence. She hands the driver the shilling she had saved for a chair on the way home.
The bell brings a sound of footsteps within but to her surprise, no extinguishing of the lights upstairs, which have evidently been forgotten. What does it matter? She will soon be rid of the entire household.
A faint rustle announces the arrival of a maid at the door.
‘Who is it?’ Fan’s voice is anxious.
‘Mrs Zedland.’
‘Mrs Zedland, Madam ― !’ The bolt shoots and there at last is Fan, candle in hand.
Sophia wonders what the driver makes of Mrs Zedland who is also Mrs Hartry, but he is already moving off. She steps inside, fatigue sucking at her. Fan helps her off with the pelisse: if she recognises it, she gives no sign.
‘Forgive my asking, Madam, but is anything amiss? We thought you’d had an accident, or you were lost ―’
‘You see I’m not.’
‘― and you have company, you see ―’
Company
, at this hour? She starts as a man’s step is heard descending the stair.
‘Mr Letcher?’
‘Sophy? Is that you?’
‘Papa!’ For Papa it is, holding out a lamp, and behind him, beyond its dim circle of light, an indistinct figure in a night wrapper: Mama.
Instead of coming directly to embrace her, Papa holds the lamp aloft and studies his daughter. Once more, Sophia is aware that her shoes are damp and disagreeable, her entire appearance bedraggled in the extreme. Papa exclaims in disgust. ‘What’s that smell?’
‘Vomit,’ Sophia murmurs. ‘Blood.’
‘
Blood?
What the Deuce ―?’
Mama hurries forward. ‘O, my darling, are you hurt? Shall we send for help? Who did this to you – Edmund?’
50
O I am one loves company
Drink up
With drink and dancing night and day Drink up drink up
Give me a man with an open purse A merry heart, a mighty tarse Who’ll love and never count it loss Drink up drink up drink up
Damn parsons they’re but buzzing flies Drink up
That fill men’s heads with canting lies Drink up drink up
Gay company’s the thing my boys With kisses and with pretty toys To find the way to sweetest joys Drink up drink up drink up
I gave my love my heart to hold Drink up
Put in his pocket with his gold Drink up drink up
I kissed him and his ring I wore He turned me then from out his door And took up with a richer whore Drink up drink up drink up
I beat him when his back was turned Drink up
I said Take that ’tis fairly earned Drink up drink up
He said My love pray do not scold I must have her for truth be told She has a hundred pounds in gold Drink up drink up drink up
I took from him my diamond ring Drink up
I took from him most everything Drink up drink up
There’s nothing so becomes a whore As does the keeping of a score And chalking it upon the door Drink up drink up drink up
His quittance I have fairly signed Drink up
It’s out of sight and out of mind Drink up drink up
And I must find another one
To kiss my lips and plump my bum Now my old cully’s dead and gone, Drink up drink up drink up
51
The drove lies between flooded fields and he is walking before her, talking with Keshlie, Keshlie skipping, holding his hand. The back of Keshlie’s gown comes undone and begins to drop away from her, Betsy-Ann fussing along behind, gathering up the stuff, tying it anyhow, hoping nobody will notice, until her sister is naked but still skipping, seemingly unaware, such a daisy she is, and Ned turns and winks at Betsy-Ann, and turns Keshlie to face her and the child is smeared with something, some dust from the roadside where she has fallen. Ned says, ‘What a dirty little thing,’ and takes off his hat – his finest, with the gold brocade – and makes to put it over Keshlie’s head, but instead it goes over Betsy-Ann’s, and she struggles in darkness, and by the time she gets the hat off they are far away in the field, the child still skipping, water splashing up round her feet and her white body twinkling.
*
Rolled in her old quilt, she lies stretched before the hearth. A sullen light oozes, rather than shines, into the room; a faint wisp of yellow-grey smoke shows that the fire is not quite out. On her hands and knees Betsy-Ann drags herself to the coal scuttle, and pours some slack over the embers. She kneels there with the bellows, breathing life into it, Romeville’s familiar waking noises all around her. Somewhere kegs are being loaded onto a dray. A woman down the street is crying hot rolls. She thinks of her Eye, in Shiner’s place, lying open now and ransacked.
Blind Eye.
She hugs her knees, hoping to still a queasy curdling that she knows comes from drink. Last night when she came home, O, didn’t she go it! A week’s worth down her throat: laughing and crying together, and screaming, and rolling on the floor.
The fire begins to pick up. She stays a long time unmoving, watching the smoke. No sneaking about with Ned now, of any description: he’s secured, the property of his autem mort.
When she saw the black boy, she thought nothing of it. Not such a fashion, now, as they used to be, but still you see them. He was out of livery and might have been anybody’s. Shockingly turned out, in fact, his shoes hanging off his heels: what could Ned be playing at, not to find him in better togs? The boy was already backing off, heading towards the tree. She supposed he was too shabby to enter, and was there to see the Quality go in and out while he waited for his master.
Later, as the shrieks started and the charging about, she saw a flash hang in the tree like a star. That’d be the second shot, the one that dropped Harry. If the boy was up there, he’d have leaped from the branches and been away almost before the star faded.
Ned said the boy was entirely his. Why, then? Unless it was Harry he wanted dead. Harry was known at the house. It comes to her that the boy meant to defend Ned, and his first shot was a bungle. If anyone has him strung up for that, it won’t be Betsy-Ann Blore.
His master’s just as dead, though. O Ned, clever Ned! To die of a bungle!
Can’t you forgive him, Mrs Zedland said.
No, she can’t. She loved him to the bone. Can’t hang over him like you do, repent, repent. She peached on him, couldn’t sit forgiving him for very shame, though you’re no better, sitting there blubbering with your Mr Gingumbob primed and ready to go off, shame indeed, do you know the meaning of the word?
What sort of funeral will they give for Dimber Ned?
She
won’t be invited. Suppose Kitty Hartry turns up? Rum doings, if she does! Good as a hanging! She manages half a smile before the pains start up inside her throat, and the tears.
*
‘I told her you’d be trouble,’ says Clem.
Fortunate stands grey and forlorn, bent and aching from the hours passed in the porch of the Spyglass.
‘Where you been, then?’
‘In Town.’
‘Don’t give me your lip. In Town!’
‘I can’t say the place.’
‘Don’t suppose you saw much of it,’ says Clem. ‘I hear you got a gentleman friend. Well, whatever else your
friend
pays for, he don’t pay your wages here.’
‘I will stay now. Stay inside.’
‘If you’re allowed to, which I sincerely hope you ain’t. I got my eye on you.’ At last Clem moves aside to allow Fortunate to enter, though his voice pursues him along the passageway: ‘Beats anything for impudence.
One day
in the house ―’
Dog Eye falls.
Fortunate runs up the stairs to his chamber, stumbling, crying out as he bangs his knees on the steps.
Alone, he wets the comb and applies it to his head, persisting this time though it pulls out his hair by the roots. He rubs water over his face. His eyes are swollen: he bathes them, begins to weep again, rubs them on his sleeve, weeps. Dog Eye falls.
Dog Eye falls.
*
Papa and Mama have travelled with Rixam, who is despatched the following morning to Cosgrove’s to reassure the proprietor that he will not be left with a dead man on his hands, while Papa accompanies Sophia to the nearest church. Should the funeral be that of Mr Zedland or Mr Hartry? Mama thinks Zedland less mortifying for Sophia, though Papa, with his strong legal brain, points out that if the marriage is to be proved void, it would be as well to bury a Hartry. Sophia, for her part, is nervous that an interment under that name may attract the
K. Hartry
whose letter remains engraved on her memory as the quintessence of filth. She wonders how many other names Edmund has gone by, and for what ends.
The minister is not eager to have Edmund, whether Hartry or Zedland, interred in his churchyard. He begins to explain about parish settlements but Papa, though not a native of London, carries a panacea in his pocket. Soon the man is in possession of a generous donation and of his Christian charity prepared to preside over the burial of a murdered stranger.
‘After which,’ says Mama when they are all together again, ‘you shall come home to Buller and endeavour to be cheerful. Hetty is to visit, and we plan an excursion when the weather improves.’
Sophia cannot exert herself sufficiently to feign gratitude. Her feelings, raw, ragged and muddied, absorb her entirely. At times she experiences a dreadful, corrosive pleasure of which she had not thought herself capable:
he is dead, I am free.
At others she is choked with grief for her early love, for the time on the lake that can never come again. Self-torturing, she recalls every seductive smile, every affectionate gesture: there is no coldness, no cruelty in the Edmund whose charmed ghost stalks her memories, only misunderstanding. She wrings her hands to think that he has gone before his Maker with so stained a soul, and prays the Lord to have mercy on him. Though what use is that? God does not revise his judgments to please the living.
Lastly comes the most terrifying suspicion of all: a sense that with all its misery and wickedness, this episode may yet prove the most vital and engrossing chapter of her life, to which the rest will prove mere epilogue.
*
With care, Betsy-Ann unwinds the silk wiper from the Tarocco.
She had a pain this morning, a visit from her red-headed friend. First time she’s ever been sorry. Mrs Ned has at least that much of him: there, she holds all the aces. What if it’s a boy, though, and the boy grows up a Hartry, with his papa’s pleasures and pastimes!
How will Mrs Ned like that?
Strange to sit here, doing nothing. Having been bounced, all her life, from one beating to another – bounced by hunger, by lust, by hopes that were nothing but chaff, in the end – she finds herself with no one to fear or depend on. Outside the window the very air is blank, white with frozen mist.
In fact, she’s not precisely doing nothing. She’s thinking. Not about Sam, or Harry, or Mrs Ned or even Ned himself – though he breaks in all the time, can’t be helped – but about Betsy-Ann Blore, with no support but her own two legs. What’s to become of her? Fancy – from the wagon to Denman’s Buildings, all that long, long road just to find this shabby stopping-place! Though it’s quiet enough, and the window frames snug. She can dig in here awhile, alongside of Mrs Sutton, or she can go elsewhere.
She’ll be the one to decide. There’s no part for her to play, now: her life is as unshaped as all that whiteness hanging in the air. This must be how it feels to be rich. Though even the rich play parts, and fall into traps. Some of them fairly fling themselves in.