Suki, p.12
Suki, page 12
‘That will depend, my lady,’ Old Sheena said, and her tone was a rebuke, ‘on how I’m used and how I’m paid. Vision is a curious thing. Speak fair to see true.’ She stared her latest client full in the face and, to Suki’s delight, Ariadne dropped her gaze and fished about inside her pocket for the necessary coins.
Old Sheena secreted the silver in her sleeve and gave her attention to a hand now rather less imperious, tilting the palm carelessly towards the nearest torch. Her oiled skin was mahogany brown in the moonlight, the line of forehead, cheek and jaw edged with silvery blue. She looked outlandish and sounded shiveringly mysterious, her silk shawls rustling like leaves and the bells at the wrists jangling softly as she moved. The crowd edged forward to hear the lady’s fortune, and Suki noticed that for all her air of superior unconcern, Ariadne’s neck was rigid with alarm.
‘Look into your soul,’ the gypsy said. ‘’Tis a rash black soul an’ full of passion. Strife I can see most clearly in this hand. See how the lines of life and love entangle. A Gordian knot as clear as ever I see, an’ all entangled at the time of youth. Woe to your rash black soul! Fie on your passionate heart! You bring a sorrow to your father’s house, and bitter grief to them as loves you true. Remember the fifth commandment, my lady!’
‘A priest could tell as much,’ Ariadne said scornfully, trying to withdraw her hand, ‘if he had a mind to give as much offence.’ But Sheena was in her stride and wouldn’t let go or be deterred. Her litany had mesmerised the crowd, the flow of fortune wasn’t to be stopped. ‘Your heart is given to a fair young man,’ she said. ‘Anguish will be your portion if you yield. Bitter regret and sorrow mar this love. Discord and rancour where you seek for passion, torment and trial where you hope for peace.’ The crowd was swaying to the rhythm of the words, and Ariadne was burning with embarrassment.
‘I’m sure the chairs are come,’ she said to Melissa. But there was no sign of Jessup and all the chairs scrambling outside the theatre seemed to be for other people. She gave a shudder and turned to the attack.
‘Can you find nothing good to say at all?’ she demanded. ‘’Tis a poor fortune with nothing good in’t.’
‘Well, as to that,’ Sheena said, reverting to her business-like voice, ‘’twould depend, so ’twould. Takes a powerful amount of spirit to see far.’
Her beleaguered client paid at once for better fortune, and the crowd nudged even closer, hungry for her humiliation. Both were confused. Sheena looked away from the hand she still held firmly locked, and turned her concentration upon Ariadne’s face.
‘Get you to the fair on the feast of St Lawrence,’ she advised. ‘There your happiness will make or mar. Enough! I have done!’
Ariadne was very cross. ‘We will walk home,’ she said to Melissa, tucking her discarded hand into her sister’s plump elbow, and setting off at once. ‘Chairs are a folly.’ She had no intention of standing in the street to be mocked. Suki, who had been wondering whether she could spare a coin to have her own fortune told, was caught unprepared and had to run after them, pushing against the crowds and tripping on the uneven cobbles.
‘We must go to the fair, Addy,’ Melissa said as they bustled home. ‘I have the strangest feeling about it. Do promise we shall go!’
‘Mere superstition!’ Ariadne said. ‘I hope you don’t allow yourself to be moved by such nonsense, Melissa. If we go ’twill be for the entertainment, not the fortune.’
‘Then we’ll go?’
Her sister’s answer was drawlingly casual. ‘’Twould do us some benefit to amuse ourselves in the fresh air, I daresay. Good sport is so hard to find in a city devoted to the sick.’
‘Here are the chairs, Miss Melissa,’ Suki said. Miss Ariadne was wearing her arrogant expression, so the sooner she got them both home, the better. ‘Your mamma will be waiting to hear your opinion of the play.’
She also required a detailed account of Ariadne’s behaviour in the theatre and, when it had been given, allowed herself to ask a direct question, in the most casual manner she could contrive. ‘Was there any communication between them, would you say?’
‘No, ma’am,’ Suki assured her. Nothing of that nature at all, he bein’ on stage and she in the audience. ’Twas admiration on her part, no more. All from a distance.’
‘The chairs arrived in good time, I trust.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Suki assured again. ‘They came straight home.’ But not before you’d allowed ’em to consult a fortune teller, Hermione thought, which I notice you don’t see fit to mention. ’Twas as well I required Hepzibah to keep watch in the street when the play was done, or I’d not have known that.
However, given her own good sense and forethought, her foolish daughter might yet escape without ill effect. The wet nurse’s presence had served to remind her of her position, and even if the wretched girl was too artful to give a full report, Hepzibah could keep watch on them both. I shall instruct her to be extra vigilant in the next few days, reward her with that gown perchance, and see what she has to report. Like most servants she was short of wit and venial. She would work well given a bribe or two. Meanwhile something had to be said to Suki.
‘You have done well,’ she said, pulling out her purse and considering how small a coin would serve as reward. ‘Continue your watch for a day or two. William is well, I trust. Good. Be so kind as to tell Mrs Sparepenny that we will attend morning service tomorrow. Then you may retire.’
And about time too, Suki thought as she took the proffered groat. It had been a long day.
Chapter 9
The next morning the household woke to find that the weather had completely changed. A fog had curled up from the surface of the river, yellowing as it gradually absorbed the smoke from the city’s chimneys. Now it hid the surrounding hills and lay in the hollow of the town like a deflated cloud, cold and sulphurous and dank. The two Miss Bradburys took one look at it and decided it would be politic to stay in bed for another hour or two. Unfortunately their mother swept into their room to rouse them, and she would not permit any such idleness.
‘I agree with you my dears,’ she said. ‘The climate in this town is a positive disgrace but that is no reason why we should not attend morning service. We have a position to maintain.’
Hepzie couldn’t see why she had to maintain the position too. ‘Cook ain’t been asked to go, I notice,’ she said tartly.
Cook was in a bad humour because Barnaby had forgotten to bring in the kindling overnight and now it was damp and the fire wouldn’t take. ‘I ain’t a family servant,’ she said. ‘That’s for why. Hired by the day I am, an’ only to cook, not to sit about in that draughty old abbey an’ be spat on by that old Bishop.’
Mrs Sparepenny was giving orders, right and left: Barnaby was to wash his hands and comb his hair; Suki and Bessie were to be sure to wear their best bonnets; the baby was to attend the service.
‘They’ve never took un to the abbey before,’ Suki complained as she wrapped him in her shawl, tight and snug like a little rosy sausage. ‘All in this nasty weather. He’ll catch his death of cold, poor lamb.’ She didn’t want to go to church either, not in her present sinful state. She was telling lies every single day — she couldn’t avoid it — and the more she told the more complicated they became, and church was where they preached about the wages of sin and the hellfire that was sure to follow, which was something she didn’t want to hear or think about. ‘I don’t see why we can’t stay here in the warm.’
‘’Tis all a poppy-show,’ Cook told her. ‘They’m a-taking him to impress their precious friends, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Which was how it turned out. For as soon as they were inside the abbey, the baby had to be handled and dandled by everybody within reach, by that awful Lady Fosdyke and Mrs Smithers and her sister and her two aunts and sundry other simperingly interested persons, and was passed back and forth across the pews until he was so perplexed and tearful he could only be comforted by being fed.
The Bradbury family sat in the seventh pew that morning, which was just far enough from the pulpit to be beyond the range of the Bishop’s infamous spittle, which was a mercy, but right in the middle of all the noise and babble of the occasion. If only they wouldn’t shout so, Suki thought. They’m like a flock of starlings. People never used to shout in church at Twerton. ’Twas quiet there and reverent, the way it should be. Anyway they wouldn’t have dared, not with Farmer Lambton’s eye on ’em to keep ’em in order. The clergy here got no authority at all. ’Tis like being at the play, with everybody so loud and busy. Even the pew ends were busy, with all that carving swirling around, and so was the glass in the great window above the altar, and so was the altar itself. Busy, busy, busy, shout, shout, shout. An’ he’ll be on about sin any minute now, bound to be.
Loud hymns and prayers booming, then much feet-scraping and blethered comment as the congregation resumed their seats and the Bishop rose with a fart to deliver his sermon, which he began by clearing his throat like a thunder clap.
But he didn’t lecture about sin. Instead he announced that he wished to draw their attention to what he called ‘the serious matter of Christian obedience’. ‘I take as my text this morning,’ he said, showering spittle before him, ‘St Paul’s epistle to the Colossians: “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands; children, obey your parents in all things; servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh.”’
Well that’s a mercy, Suki thought. At least we aren’t having the eighth commandment for I couldn’t have borne that. She composed her expression to listen to him, the way she usually did in church, with half an ear and less than half her mind. You didn’t have to listen hard in church because they always said the same thing and everybody agreed with it. But that morning half-listening was more difficult than she expected, and after a while she realised that she was actually paying attention and that almost everything he was saying was provoking her. Questions rose to the surface of her mind to explode like bubbles in a stew pot. Why? What if…? Why should wives be expected to obey their husbands? Why shouldn’t they be equals the way lovers were? When she and the Captain had been together, they’d neither the one of them given the slightest thought to obeying or being obeyed. What they’d done was simply for delight, sweet and simple and full of pleasure. Obeying didn’t come into it. As to children obeying their parents, what if a parent told his child to do something they knew wasn’t right, something unlawful? Should the child be obedient then? Surely not. ’Twouldn’t be right.
But it was when he began to talk about the duty servants owed to their masters that the bubbles reached boiling point, exploding into her mind in a red-hot certainty, and she knew that, bishop or not, he was wrong. For if his teaching was to be followed, a servant had to lie down for her master simply because he was lustful and commanded her to do it, ‘according to the flesh’, and there was no way she would agree to that. Not now. ’Twas plainly a bad thing, and, as a man of morals, he ought to see it. But then, as she looked around at all the masculine heads that were solemnly nodding agreement, another idea came pushing into her mind. The Bishop is a man for all he’s a bishop, and husbands are men, and fathers and masters are men, and lawyers and politicians — and it occurred to her that the people who were expected to obey were mostly women and children and usually poor. And she knew there was no justice in this man’s teaching and felt quite lightheaded with the boldness of what she was thinking.
At that point, the choirboys began the psalm, bouncing its cadences straight up into the high fan vaulting, where the stone erupted into vast ribbed trumpets, and the sound echoed and re-echoed, and made such battering patterns inside her head that they shattered her thoughts to confusion. How much longer is this service going on? she wondered. ’Tis giving me a headache. And she looked round to grimace at Bessie and noticed that the butler wasn’t with them.
‘Where’s Mr Jessup?’ she mouthed.
‘Gone on some errand for the missus,’ Bessie whispered, leaning towards her to be heard. ‘Bristol way, I think.’
‘In this weather!’ Suki whispered back. ‘Rather him than me.’ And she shuddered to think of travelling any distance in all that fog. There’d only be one thing that’d take me out in such weather, she thought, an’ that would be to see the Captain. And how she yearned to see him again, with that bold handsome face and that easy way of walking and talking, and those beautiful brown eyes and that gentle mouth. Oh, I wonder where he is and what he’m a-doing.
He was standing in the sunshine in the garden of the Pelican Inn with Lady Bradbury’s opened letter in his hand and Jessup waiting stem-faced the required six paces away — the man was always nauseatingly correct — and he was struggling to keep his expression calm and his emotions under control. Whatever else, he wasn’t going to allow a servant to see how he was feeling, and especially a superior servant with a sneering mouth and cynical eyes.
He and his friends had had another disappointment on Friday morning, when their much-desired traveller had failed to appear for the second time. They’d had to make do with a merchant and his wife who’d had so little of value about them that they were barely worth the effort. Quin had ridden off to Bristol in a temper immediately afterwards, taking Charlie with him, swearing they’d been peached and vowing to find out who was to blame. But Jack had stayed on at the inn, where he’d run up huge bills for food and drink while he waited for his allowance to release him. And now this cruel letter had arrived and he was cast adrift, suddenly and without warning, with one last payment between himself and penury. He was profoundly upset, aching with anguish at her unexpected rejection, torn with fury at his own drunken bravado in provoking it, stunned by his impending poverty, in a black rage at the unfairness of it and, worst of all, with the old familiar rush of panic at being abandoned and lost.
A slight breeze rustled the corn in the field beside him, and Jessup shifted his feet and gave his nervous cough. Krrm, krrm. Was there any message?
‘No, no; Jack said, pleased that he was managing to keep his voice steady. ‘You may tell Mrs Roper I shan’t be requiring her rooms for a month or two.’ That was well said, and in exactly the right tone, as if it were of no consequence. A man has his pride. ‘As a matter of fact, I’ve accepted a position which will take me abroad. Thought I’d see the world, don’tcher know.’
Jessup smiled his faint half-smile. ‘Yes, sir.’
What a knowing rogue he is, Jack thought, itching to hit him, what an unprincipled, arrogant, upstart, time-serving, penny-pinching, dung-crawling, arse-licking villain. Oh, if I could give you a trouncing, I’d wipe that smile off your face, Mr Sneering Jessup. You’d not condescend on me again in a hurry, I can tell you. But the butler was smiling again, looking straight at him in his superior way, as if to say, there ain’t a thing I don’t know about you, and there ain’t a thing you can do about it.
Rage rose in the Captain as black as bile. ’Twas not to be endured. If I meet with you on a dark road one night, he promised, I’ll not rate your chances at a groat. Or a farthing. He turned on his heel to walk into the inn. ‘That will be all,’ he said, giving a lordly wave of dismissal. And more than enough.
He had to get away and quickly. This place stifled him. Pay the bill, gather his few belongings, stride to the stable to check that his horse was properly groomed and ready to ride, then up and off, out on the open road where speed and distance could restore him to himself and calm this awful sense of panic.
But it was several miles before he could accommodate his thoughts to the monstrous unkindness of that letter. ‘You are old enough to make shift for yourself.’ How dare she treat him so! After all he’d had to endure at her hands. ’Twas more than human flesh and blood could stand.
The horse cantered steadily, the rhythm of its stride soothing to his senses and his pride. He had a good seat and rode well and he knew it, and the knowledge was a comfort to him. A good horseman on a good horse, for Beau was a very good horse indeed, mettlesome and as high-spirited as he was himself, with a sensitive mouth and a handsome mane and inordinate strength.
‘We make a fine pair,’ he said to the animal, patting his neck. ‘We won’t be beat.’ And Beau pricked his ears and snorted by way of answer.
But how would he fare once his allowance was spent? He’d not have a farthing to his name come that day. He would have to find some way to fudge. Panic stirred again. I shall do it, he told himself, deliberately summoning good sense to his aid. But what would he do? He rehearsed the possibilities. Join Quin Cutpurse perhaps. The man was an unconscionable rogue but he was a good judge of a situation and one of the bravest villains in England. Except that in his trade the risks were uncommon high and the more risks you ran the nearer you came to the gallows, which was not a consummation to be wished. Go on the stage? He’d spent a season with a travelling company, playing the hero and the fool and the villain, and he could do it again should the worst come to the worst. Except that the pay was poor and the work uncertain. Join a travelling fair, then? Except that they were mostly gypsies and uncommon clanny. Didn’t welcome strangers. Or go to sea, the way milady counselled? He had an uncomfortable feeling that she’d suggested it as a challenge and didn’t expect him to rise to it. Well, if ’twas the case, she was mistaken in her unkindness. He could rise to any challenge, no matter how hard. She needn’t think him craven. He’d as much bottom as any man in England. ’Twould be a hard life but ’twould put him beyond reach of his creditors and wenches who thought to foist paternity upon him, which would be no bad thing. He was on his way to Bristol in any case, so ’twould make sense to look into it. He knew very little about the slave trade, except that it was full of dangers and employed some very tough seamen. But one thing was certain — if you survived the voyage and came home to port, you came home a rich man. He’d heard that much, sitting in the Llandoger Trow with Quin and Charlie.
