T. Boyle - Water Music

Then one evening, as he skulked about the shadows arrayed in the torn and soot-blackened weeds of a chimney sweep, the front door swung open and a female form — jerked by a pug on a silver leash — descended the steps. Ned moved in, heart pounding, simultaneously formulating a greeting — should he whistle a few bars of “The Derby Ram”?—and an inspired excuse for the way he was dressed. “Fanny,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with passion.

“ ‘Ey? Wot’s ‘at?” came the reply in a voice that could scour the streets. He was staring into a face crusted over with eczema, and a milky, leering eye. The pug growled.

“Begging your pardon, Mistress,” he said, bowing. “I thought you would be Fanny Brunch.”

“ ‘Oo? Fanny ‘oo? Nivir ‘eard of ‘er.”

He was speaking with Barbara Dewfly, the scullery maid. Half a crown later she recalled that Fanny was “ ‘at young trollop wot warshes ‘is Lordship’s socks,” and added that “there’d be ‘ell to pay if ennybody was seen bringin’ ‘er a message or the like.” Ned pressed another coin into her palm along with a hastily scrawled note: Meet me out back at Midnight, Yr. Hmble. &. Obdt. Servt. Who Wishes To Know You Better, Ned Rise. The dog dropped a turd in the walkway, Dewfly gathered her stained skirts, mounted the stairs and was gone.

It should be remarked at this juncture that the life of a servant in Georgian England was not one that allowed for a wide range of social intercourse. Servants, if they were fortunate enough to pass muster, were taken on for life. They were expected to give up their families, interests and former ties, their sex lives and the expectation of marriage. From the moment they were hired they lived entirely for the comfort and benefit of their employers, worker bees fussing round idle drones and swollen, helpless queens. The reward? Six or seven pounds per annum, a warm grate, a dry bed, and — most importantly — three square meals a day. At a time when the streets were lined with thieves and beggars, prices were soaring as a result of the war with France, housing was inadequate or nonexistent, and truckloads of spindly hollow-chested men and women were dropping dead of hunger each day, a position as chambermaid or footman was nothing to sneeze at. And a loss of self-determination seemed a small price to pay.

So it was with Fanny. She’d gone from a hand-to-mouth existence in the country (milking cows, shoveling shit, gruel three times a day) to a life of relative ease and plenty, from her parents’ dominion to Lady B.’s. On her first day in the Banks household she was taken aside by Lady Banks, warned of the horror and degradation of the sex act and the slavery of motherhood, given a prayerbook and told that she must now devote herself to higher things. She had a position to maintain. From now on she was upper house parlormaid to Sir Joseph Banks, one of the truly great men of his time, and she must do nothing to embarrass him or his household. When she was finished. Lady B. had smiled a grandmotherly smile and asked Fanny if she understood. Fanny had nodded solemnly.

Still, when the crier cried twelve, she was out in the garden all the same.

♦ ♦ ♦

After that first furtive assignation (during which hands were pressed and vows exchanged), Ned Rise prowled Sir Joseph’s garden nightly. Sometimes he and Fanny would sit there whispering and necking for hours, other times they’d sneak off to an inn for a meal and more comfortable lovemaking. They ate caviar on toast. They drank wine. Fanny told Ned of her days on the farm, of Squire Trelawney and the hoe duel. Ned told her of his own miserable beginnings and his struggle to rise above it and establish himself in the world of commerce. Which he had done, finally and brilliantly. He was a businessman of independent means, he told her, privileged to move among the aristocracy and their hangers-on, a familiar to the likes of Lord Twit and Beau Brummell. Her eyes widened at the mention of these exalted names. She pressed him for details. He invented them. Then, one night, as they lay in the long plush grass beneath Sir Joseph’s lime, he asked her to run off with him. The moon hung in the branches like an ornament. Soft and low, a bird began to sing. She agreed.

Ned was moved. Here was a beginning, a center, a new key to which he could tune his life. He thought of his clarinet. Of buds opening in dark places. Of a little inn in Holland or Switzerland maybe, a stone hearth, a dog, Fanny at his side. The following morning he retrieved his clarinet from the pawnbroker and booked passage for two to The Hague, via Gravesend. Later he took Fanny out to Lamb’s Conduit Fields and played her a clarion version of “Greensleeves” while Venus rode across the sky. In two weeks they would be gone.

Still, he was troubled. All this heartbreak and ecstasy, delicious though it was, had deflected him from his work. Sixty-three jars of Chichikov’s Choice were backed up on him in the cellars at Bear Lane. The sturgeon had quit on him long ago, all bred out for the season, he’d laid off his street urchins and given Shem and Liam five-pound bonuses — but he hadn’t sold a jar of caviar in nearly a month. Yes, the iron chest under his bed was brimming — nearly three hundred and fifty pounds — but he’d gone through quite an outlay wooing Fanny and it would be a shame, a criminal shame to let those last sixty-three jars go to waste. Besides, they’d need every farthing to set themselves up in the Netherlands what with all those sharp-nosed Hollanders running around.

He went back to the streets, peddling his caviar with an evangelical fervor, wheeling and dealing. Two for the price of one, one for the price of two. Catherine herself eats it, he told the head chef at White’s. Washes it down with frozen vodka and steins of kvass. He held up a jar for the little man’s inspection. The label featured an amorphous building identified in block letters as “The Kremlin,” and a wolfhound that looked like an epileptic seal. The chef took six jars. Lord Stavordale, profoundly drunk outside Boodle’s Club after dropping eleven hundred pounds at whist, bought a jar and consumed it on the spot. Lady Courtenay sent two jars to her maiden aunt in Bath; Messieurs Grebe and Parsley of Bond Street had a jar with crackers for luncheon; Rose Elderberry, companion to the P.M.’s wife, used it as a facial restorative. Apparently the chic of Chichikov’s Choice had grown in proportion to its scarcity. Ned sold out his stock inside of a week.

He tallied up his earnings, minus expenses (disguises, jars, labels, salt, sedan chairs and the like), and found that he’d added over a hundred pounds to his nest egg. He was elated. But why stop here? Herring were running. Shem and Liam were hauling them out of the river by the cartload. He’d salt up the eggs, darken them a bit with shoe blacking, bottle and label them and who’d know the difference? And what if they did? — he’d be in Holland in a week. He concocted twenty-six jars of the stuff, falling back on frog’s eggs when the herring supply ran short, got himself up as a Russian balalaika master and sold them in an afternoon. Fifty-two pounds more went into the iron chest, and every penny of it for Fanny.

But then one night, with less than a week to go, Fanny failed to show up at the hour appointed for their liaison. Ned was stunned, distraught, buried under a weight of suspicion and gloom. He paced beneath the darkened windows for three hours, stomach churning, oaths and resolutions and speeches running through his head, until finally he vented his frustration on a bed of peonies and clambered up over the back wall, defeated. As he reached the top, however, he became aware of a sound emanating from the direction of the house. A sort of hiss or rasp, the sound of a fly trapped against a windowpane. He held his breath. There it was again: pssssssssst.