The Vizard Mask (14 page)

There was squealing from the back of the Ship and a constable came marching round to the front, his hand clamped on the thin shoulder of a girl. 'Nelly Ogle, sir, spinster of this parish. Skivvy to the Ship. Caught trying to escape.'

Magistrate Flesher considered Nelly Ogle and his options. If he opened the door the drayman, a very big man like all draymen, would get out. 'Get a ladder and tip her in.'

In silence Dog Yard watched twelve-year-old Nelly Ogle, spinster of its parish, hauled up a ladder, watched her helped in by Mistress Bryskett, watched Mistress Bryskett's face, watched Magistrate Flesher draw a red cross on the Ship's door and chalk words above it. He turned round, planted his short legs apart and addressed the crowd: 'Anyone violating this order will be subjected to the severest penalties. Consider yourselves lucky I have not imposed them already. Constable.'

Ill-will was something Magistrate Flesher was used to, but he preferred facing it from the height of his Bench. He waited at the top of the steps until the pikemen had formed two protective lines around his horse before giving the signal for the company to move off.

As he marched out of Dog Yard, Corporal Forbush reached up, plucked Footloose off his bracket and popped him tenderly into his tub. 'God Save the King,' he said.

It was a salutation usually eliciting a cheer from the Dog Yarders among whom a sovereign of legendary naughtiness had been an icon. 'To Charlie, may he bust a thousand bellies' was a toast that had raised many a loyal tankard in the Ship. Today they remained silent.

Between them, Dorinda and Penitence helped a weeping Mistress Parker to her feet. 'What's them words say?' she asked, pointing at the Ship door.

Penitence read them: 'Lord Have Mercy Upon Us.'

Mistress Parker wept again. 'He always wanted to die with a tankard in his bloody hand,' she said, 'I reckon he's got his wish.'

They took her to the door of the Buildings and returned to the Cock and Pie, threading through a yard full of people who were being joined by others from the alleys of the Rookery, all staring in the direction of the Ship.

'There'll be trouble,' said Dorinda.

How much more trouble can there be?

Plague was as yet merely one of the immeasurable diseases the Rookery lived with; on the other hand, intrusion by royal authority was here and now. As far as popularity went, the King couldn't hold a candle to Sam Bryskett, who provided employment and entertainment in an area where both were scarce. Penitence heard one man say: 'Whosis Fornicating Majesty with his jools and fancy women to shut up our fucking inn?'

Gaining the attic, Dorinda sank on to the bed, Penitence on to a stool. The last vestiges of daylight were coming through the front window.

'My bread's baked,' said Dorinda. With her eyes closed, the girl looked vulnerable and exhausted. 'I ain't never been taken medicinally before.'

Penitence remembered the men who'd been tramping up and down to the clerestory all day. The Plague sign on a nearby door would keep them away from now on. 'Th-that's over, at 1-least.'

The sympathy in her voice stirred Dorinda into sitting up and reclaiming ground lost by her show of weakness. She looked round the attic and sniffed. 'Smells like a new-baked turd in here.' She got up and swatted a stem of St John's wort hanging from a beam - Penitence had gone out into the country near Tottenham Court to pick herbs after spring- cleaning the attic. 'Think a bunch of weeds'll keep off the Plague?'

Penitence shook her head. 'F-f-umm-fleas.'

'Fum-fleas,' said Dorinda, with contempt. 'Fleas won't kill you. Plague will. But I forgot, didn't I? Miss Prinkum-Prankum won't get it. Her Ladyship's sending Miss Prinkum-Prankum away.'

'N-n-no m-more w-w-work.'

'That's what she said.' The old viciousness was back. 'She's favouring you, you ballocker. She's always favoured you.' She glanced towards the actor's window, found his room empty, and went.

Upstairs after dinner, Penitence emptied her bead satchel on to the bed, ready to repack it. Her Ladyship, with surprising generosity for the imprisoned drayman, had told Job to take the man's team back to his wife in Potters Bar in the morning. Penitence was to go with them.

She considered the small pile of belongings; useless strings of wampum which she would take with her because they were reminders of the Squakheag, as were the little hunting bow and quiver of arrows Matoonas had made for her. The tobacco and pipes she would give to Kinyans, who was a fumer when he could afford it. Clean underwear and dress, her old coat, clean but threadbare — thankfully, she would have little need for it with summer coming on — a pair of Phoebe's cast-off slippers and a new cap she had made from a linen cut-off.

Even with Her Ladyship's two guineas, it was little enough for the months she had spent in this attic. On the other hand, she was taking other things away with her: a compassion for the life of whores, a reluctant admiration, even fellow-feeling, for the spirit of an indigent people who, half a year before, she would have condemned as worthless. Whether these changes of attitude were advances, or merely destructive Anythingarian- ism, she could not have said. The God she'd believed in when she arrived here would certainly have disapproved, but He had undergone a bit of a sea-change Himself.

She heard movement from the play-actor's room and saw light from his window flicker on her sill. Lately, he'd taken to sitting at his table, writing into the early hours. The scratch of his quill had been audible through her shutters and kept her awake. Alania said he was writing a play.

It occurred to her that he might not know there was Plague at the Ship and ought to be told. Personally, she didn't think there was danger; but he ought to be told.

Immediately the thought of exposing her stutter sent her into a panic. There was no avoiding the word 'Plague', it being the raison d'etre of the warning, but it would block her. Was there no other noun for it? Only Pestilence, another insuperable 'p'.

Bartholomew the man. What did she care what he thought of her? And who was he to cavil at the messenger? He should be grateful she was telling him at all.

Whipping herself into a fury, she went to her half-open shutters and pulled them wide. He'd taken off his cloak and hat and was studying the papers on his table. 'Hey,' she shouted.

He looked up. 'Ah, Mistress Boots.'

At once, her anger left her and she went into the worst stutter of her life. 'There's P-p-p-pl-p . . .' It wouldn't come out. It stayed reverberating behind the compression of her lips. Give up. Run and hide. Her clenched knuckles dug into the sides of her thighs as she fought with it. 'There's P-p-pl...'

Instead of turning away, or helping her out, he looked at her with interest. 'Why do you do that?'

She was so surprised, she said: 'I s-st-stutter.'

'So it seems. You know it can be cured?'

So casual. As if she'd caught it, like a cold. How dare he. She was angry enough to get out: 'There's P-plague at the Ship.' Let him cure that. The last glimpse she had before she slammed the shutters and went to bed was of his grimace as he reached for a bottle on his table. He'd get drunk. It was all actors were good for.

Chapter 5

The Reverend Block knelt by her bedside, muttering profanity and prayer. This time he'd brought reinforcements. A dozen lecherous clergymen were outside the door, shouting obscenities. The noise pinioned her arms to the bed like clamps. She wouldn't be able to fight him, them, unless the noise let her arms go. Stop it, stop it.

She sat up in bed, drenched in sweat. There was noise, like that produced by the riot earlier, but magnified ten times over. Pulling the bedspread over her night-shift, she hurried to the front window.

The scene below was like the evening riot magnified ten times. Yet not like. One hundred or more figures milled in and out of the flickering light thrown by Dog Yard's only cresset. Where before there had been anger, now there was hate, unfocused, generalized hate. It scalded through the Yard like boiling steam.

It took a while for her to realize that the resentment which had erupted in Dog Yard that evening had spread to the rest of the Rookery as its men — and the swarming crowd below consisted mainly of men — emerged into the night to find their favourite inn closed against them.

Imprisonment of the Brysketts, fear of the Plague, bitterness against authority, drunkenness, had sparked the fuse of terrible deprivation and burst into a huge, illogical explosion.

One man standing upon Footloose's vat, weaving perilously, was urging a march on Whitehall. 'Let's go wake up the King. Let's go 'n shut up Old Rowley's inn.'

Nobody was listening to him, having better things to do, like trying to kick in the doors of the Stables, or claw up cobbles to throw at windows. The Dog Yarders, having shot their bolt that afternoon, had retired indoors to protect their homes.

The Ship's doors were open, and so were the flaps to its chute; barrels were being passed up and broken open. There was no sign of the Brysketts - Sam was probably trying to defend his cellar. No sign, either, of the two watchmen who had been left on guard; perhaps gone for reinforcements. They could be dead. The mob was capable of killing.

The only faces she recognized were the drayman's, who was drunk and dancing, and Mistress Parker's husband, who was just drunk and ignoring the pleas of his wife from her balcony to come home.

There was thudding immediately below. She leaned over the parapet and saw a phalanx of men rhythmically ramming a plank against the Cock and Pie's door. One of them spotted her. 'Come down here, you cat, or we'll come and get you.' More amiably, somebody else shouted: 'Come on down, chucky, and give us the pox.'

Over at Mother Hubbard's another group had broken in. There were screams coming from inside. Whores screamed in pretended admiration, but not like that. The Mother Hubbard girls were being raped.

A torn-up cobblestone cracked against her parapet. As she ducked back, she heard the noise of triumph and splintering wood. The outer door had given in. If the inner door gave, what was happening at Mother Hubbard's was about to happen to the Cock and Pie.

She ran to tip out the satchel's newly packed contents, feeling for her knife. Her fingers came across Matoonas's hunting bow and quiver, and grabbed them. At the door it occurred to her that a swordsman would be useful, and she rushed to her side window.

'Actor, actor.' What was his damned name?

She heard a groan: 'Leave me alone.' A guttering candle on his table allowed her to see that he was lolling over it, still clutching his bottle.

She picked up her ewer and threw its water in his direction, hoping to sober him. He'd help or he wouldn't. There was no time to see. Outside, in the corridor, she bumped into a shivering Mary and pushed her out of the way.

On the clerestory she looked over the balustrade into the salon. It was dark, but lights from the flares outside came through the high windows. Job, with his back to the door, was spreadeagled like Atlas holding the world up, but he was being jerked forward every time something heavy crashed into it. The mob would be in any second.

Everybody else was facing the door; Kinyans and Francesca had raided the kitchen for cleavers, Dorinda, Alania and Phoebe were holding chairs at shoulder level, Sabina and Fanny both had pokers.

Her Ladyship, representing her profession, was wielding a whip, though at the moment she was cracking it above her girls' heads. 'Upstairs, get upstairs. Job can't hold. Jump over to Ma Hicks's.' She drove them towards the stairs.

As the girls came up, Penitence took a position from which she could shoot downwards. She wasn't adept with a bow and its arrows were only lethal against small animals, but she might administer a sharp enough sting in arms and legs to give the invaders pause for thought.

If she'd had time she'd have given way to the terror inspired by the screams from Mother Hubbard's; instead she found herself obeying an instinct to protect not only herself but the Cock and Pie. Sinful it might be, but the brothel was her home; its girls were fellow-women. And no bastard's going to abuse them.

Even so, her hands were shaking and she had difficulty notching the first arrow.

Job went sprawling as the door fell inwards and men trampled over it. Penitence loosed off an arrow, but she only did it because she'd planned to do it; nothing, no whip, no cleaver, no arrow, could keep this mob at bay. Its individual faces were giggling, shouting, lusting, drunk, but it wasn't twenty or so individuals, it was a forty-legged, forty-armed, twenty-headed monster that compounded a violence greater than itself, reducing even Her Ladyship to an ineffective pigmy. Penitence saw her crack her whip across the first of the monster's faces, saw Kinyans throw his cleaver, before both of them turned and ran. The thing ran after them. It had never been allowed into the high-and-mighty Cock and Pie before, another deprivation in its dreadful life for which it was about to take revenge.

That Her Ladyship and Kinyans gained the stairs was due to Penitence's arrows and missiles from the girls on the clerestory, but the confusion of light and dark aided the enemy; those who weren't hit were unaware that others had been and came on regardless of counter-attack.

'The attic,' Penitence yelled. Kinyans had reached the top of the stairs, Her Ladyship was lumbering, dragging with her a man who was clutching the back of her skirt. It was difficult to see. Penitence leaned over and shot. The man's hands released Her Ladyship and flew to his backside. He caused enough of an obstruction to give the Cock and Pie contingent time to get behind the door to the attic stairs. In the narrow, dark space at the foot of the stairs they stood on each other, fumbling to hold the door against a battering of kicks that thudded it inwards.

There was a tiny gleam of light above them and a voice used to carrying said: 'Allow me, ladies. This way if you please.'

The actor was coming down the stairs towards them, gesturing with his sword for the girls to squeeze past him. The door kept being thrust in and Penitence, Her Ladyship and Kinyans exerted their whole weight to thrust it back while one by one the girls escaped to the attic.