The Vizard Mask (18 page)

'From the stomach, like I told you.' The actor in the window across the alley put his hand across his lower ribs. 'Like this.' 'I'll g-get the P-Pla-Pl-umm-Plague.' 'Well, it's too late now. Breathe.'

She took in a lungful of alley air and nearly burst before he let her release it.

'Now.' He took up his quill as a sign of his schoolmasterly status. It formed another in the vertical lines of which he consisted; lank hair to his shoulders, long cheeks and nose, the points of his stuff shirt-collar over the slashed leather jerkin, the excellent hands protruding into the sunlight which reached his table in the mornings leaving the rest of him in shadow. 'Talk.' 'Uh?'

'Talk. I've got to hear what you do when you talk. Tell me your name, tell me anything. It doesn't matter. Just say it.'

It doesn't matter. There was the trouble, or part of it; his disinterest in who she really was. To him she was the prostitute across the alley he was trying to improve because improvement was possible and because it passed the hours of shut-up. She had been right to expect humiliation from these lessons and already it was being doubled by his indifference.

Dorinda tripled it. From her window immediately below them came her voice: 'Her name's Pen Hurd. She's our American whore.' With the precision of the jealous, Dorinda had located the crack of misunderstanding and was whittling it wider.

'Madam, I don't care if she's the Witch of Endor. Don't interrupt.' He frowned across at Penitence. 'Talk.'

Shall I suffer this? Better to retreat into the dignity of loneliness, stay on the outside of life where she belonged. But it wasn't life behind her in the shadows of the attic, it was the slow death of listening to the daily round of the Plague and waiting for it to suck her into its anonymity. She got ready, balled her hands, lifted her shoulders, sucked in her breath . . .

'Don't do that. Relax your hands, let your body go. And for the love of God, will you breathe. Tell me your name.'

'P-Pe-Pp-e-Ppe—' The plosive reared up against the hedge between them, tried to leap and tangled itself in invisible foliage. 'I c-c-can't.'

'Look,' he said, patiently, 'I heard you singing the song of barbarians. Where did you learn it?'

'N-nn-no-ot ba-ba-bar-bumm-bar-barians.' Such ignorance. 'Alg-gonquin.'

The French priests told me the Algonquin were barbarians. They said the only good Indians were Iroquois.'

She knew what he was doing, riling her into speech, but she couldn't stop her rise to the bait. French priests sent to convert the Iroquois were trouble-makers and liars, the Iroquois themselves vicious savages, unfit to lick an Algonquian moccasin.

Writhing, she tumbled into a panegyric of Awashonks, Matoonas and their people, scrambling through thickets of stutter, watching words she had to abandon fall into the alley, crawled up syllables, persisting in the truth about her Indians because it had to be told and because telling it brought a whiff of Pocumscut air into her Plague-ridden nostrils.

He was pleased. There you are, you see, Boots. Your main trouble is at the front of your mouth. You stutter on everything, but mostly at the closure of the lips, the p-urrs and the b-urrs.'

He doesn't hear a word I say. Only the way I say it.

She heard the rumble of the burial cart. She got up. 'I m-m- must go.' As the only one with an outlook into Dog Yard, she had been deputed to act as the Cock and Pie's Plague-watcher and report the night's toll.

He gave a disgusted 'For God's sake' at her defection and slammed the shutters shut.

Penitence crossed the attic and went out on to her balcony.

The chalk of the first Plague crosses had been replaced by official red paint and gleamed against nearly every one of Dog Yard's doors with alien smartness. The burial cart had drawn up against the pawnbroker's on the far left corner, in the mouth of Pinchers Lane.

One of the bearers was putting nosebags over his horses' bridles; they would be here some time. Beside him, his fellow was ringing a bell and shouting 'Bring out your dead' as casually as if he were calling for rags and bones. She thought drearily: I suppose he is.

She tensed herself for the answers. 'Here.' 'Here.' 'Here.' 'Here.' 'Here.' 'Here.' Lord, let it stop. It didn't. 'Here.' 'Here.' 'Here. 'Here.' How long before there was a response from behind the door of the Cock and Pie? Or Mistress Hicks's? The upper rooms in the Buildings were still free of it, but the Stables was answering; Pa Tippin must have gone.

Oh God help us. She sank down on her knees as one of the bearers raised a finger in acknowledgement of a call from the Ship's window. Not again. She stayed as she was, not to pray, but to escape the sight of another coffin being carried out of the inn's door. Why are You doing this?

Crouching, she listened to the silence from the Ship, to the Jewish ritual wail of grief from the pawnbroker's wife as her family was carried away, to the scuffle at the Stables as the Tippin boys tried to rush the door and follow their father to his ill-deserved rest, listened to panic, grief, anger and bewilderment form an elaborate motet out of the responsory of pestilence.

When it was over, she dragged herself up again and let Soper, one of the watchmen, tell her the toll. Then she went down to the clerestory. Her Ladyship stood in the doorway to her room: 'Well?'

She gave the list. '... and t-two more from M-umm-M- Mother Hubb-Hubbard's. The paw-pawnbroker's gone, and his s-son.' Her stammer worsened in ratio to how well the dead had stood in Her Ladyship's regard. 'And M-M-Mistress C- Cr-Craw—'

'Jenny Crawford?' Her Ladyship's face never altered.

And the b-b-babies. I'm s-s-ssorry.'

'Ma Palmer? Ma Hicks?'

'N-no. Th-they waved.' It had become a ritual; the living signalled to each other. Men who'd punched one another's noses, matrons who'd shrieked at next door's children, now waved and exchanged news in the weary comradeship of survival. The sight of Mistress Palmer flapping a piece of morning washing towards her once mortal enemy, Mistress Hicks, and the rag in the brawny fist of Mistress Hicks - the view of her neighbour's contiguous frontage was hidden from Penitence's balcony - flapping back, reassured her that there were some things the Plague could not kill. Yet.

'Is that all of them?'

Reluctantly she said: 'An-n-nother B-Br-Bry-Bry-umm-Brys- kett. S-S-second oldest.' 'She tensed herself for the moan from the open doors along the clerestory, and for the sobbing from Dorinda's room. It came.

'You bitch. You ballocking cow, you. You corpse-sniffing crow. Ain't you got better things to do?' Dorinda's grief invariably confused the message with the messenger.

Penitence went slowly back to her attic and sat herself down on the stool facing her side window. What does it matter? Stammer, cure, pride, sin, were nothing. The minutes tolled away by the passing bell had become so fragile that they made even humiliation a precious awareness of living.

'Boots.' The command always sounded as if he were calling a servant, it was always at his convenience, not hers. She always answered it.

'Right, now. Polly pours the porridge. And breathe.'

She took in breath, let it out, tried to let her hands go limp. Polly pours the porridge. Easy. 'P-P-P-P-um-Polly p-p-po ....' It was worse; her lips compressed so hard that only muffled grunting crossed the alley.

'Not more poxy porridge.' From below came Dorinda's monotonous but effective sabotage.

'Silence down there. Boots, I've told you. The ambush lies between the words. We don't leave gaps. We are a good general in enemy territory, we keep our file close. We-keep-the-troops-together. Like that. All one utterance, no gap.'

In the privacy of her room, progress was excellent; Polly poured porridge as bravely as brindled bullocks bellowed. Her tongue clicked smartly against the roof of her mouth in the t-urrs and d-urrs — 'Terrible Duke of Tonbridge died in Dorset.' jh's and ch's made exits as easily from the sides of her tongue and teeth as the k-urrs and g-urrs from clicks at the back of tongue and throat. S's slid through the attic like snakes in wet grass.

That speech could be subject to analysis was exciting in itself. So was his insistence that the stutter was an invading force; not a weakness, not an inherent fault, but something outside. 'It's the enemy, Boots. It attacks us, so we counterattack.' She thought that, for an actor, he was surprisingly heavy on military metaphor. But they were both learning that the enemy was stronger than she was.

She was losing hope. He was losing patience.

One thing: she had become crafty in diverting him into illustration which, with luck, developed into a performance.

Unknown to herself, Penitence Hurd had become an obsessive and escapist playgoer. Today she managed to nod him into giving her examples of speech patterns. Diverted, he got carried away and acted through the gamut of his fellow- lodgers at Mistress Hicks's. From the fat and Cockney orange-seller with her variously fathered brood in the basement, to the juggler-cum-rope-dancer and the pipe-makers on the first floor, they made their appearance in the proscenium arch of his window in their differing shapes and accents.

'And MacGregor, he's in the room next to mine, he speaks up and down, like his truly dreadful bagpipes which, thanks be to God, he has now sold. Like this: "Now Master King. Will ye be leehnding me. A grooat. For a wee. Sup of ale?"'

The figure of a thick-set man with the amiable, bulbous eyes of a drunk wavered and realigned itself into a tall, thin, regretful actor. 'Poor bastard, I know how he feels. I'd kill for a drink myself.'

But it had been a tour de force. From the windows of Alania and Dorinda, the theatre aficionados, who had been able to listen though not see, came applause. 'Better'n Charlie Hart, you are.'

Not knowing who Charlie Hart was, and caring less, Penitence was unable to make a comparison. Amazed by the performance, almost fearing it as witchcraft, she knew nevertheless that she had witnessed a display of skill, but only skill.

She was beginning to think that the play-actor was not a real actor. Acting was something he did because it gave employment at the present time; it was a proficiency like swordsmanship, dancing, or playing the lute, prerequisites of a culture which she only knew about from hearing it condemned. It was a stop-gap, not his life.

There were his occasional unguarded references to military matters, to the political situation, to the mysterious and unexplained sojourn in France, a familiarity with court circles, that reference to the King he'd made on the day he rescued her in the Cut.

Knowing nothing of the theatrical world herself, it might be that all actors were polymathic as he was, but she doubted it. After all, she knew nothing of him, not his parentage or background, nothing.

Had Alania and Dorinda learned from theatre gossip that the man was an exile from the moon Penitence would not have been surprised. What did, and constantly, surprise her was how well she knew the important things about him: his longing for whatever it was that had been denied him, scorn for his present position - and the gallantry with which he endured it. He was making a better fist of it than she was.

It was beneath him to reveal such emotions to her, but they came across the alley like a bow-wave.

He louted to the unseen, applauding girls, then settled back in his chair. 'You've got good teeth, Boots,' he said. 'Smile more often.' He wagged the quill. 'Now then. Hands. Breathe. Begin .. . No, no, no. We do not suck in on the p-urr, we breathe out. In the name of God, will you breathe.'

Her head ached. So, apparently, did his: he was clutching it and calling on someone named Pygmalion. 'His part was easy; he just had to make a woman from a block of stone. I've got this, this—'

She slammed the shutters before he could say it, and heard the answering slam of his own.

The City was losing definition. Peter Simkin kept being disorientated by the lack of human buoyage that had always marked his passage in it. The lavender-seller on the Fleet Bridge was missing. So few people were gathered at St Paul's that he heard his own footsteps echoing back from its high, plain vaulting.

The cobbled sweep of the Poultry was empty, its one occupant - a woman with a lone hen in a crate - making it emptier. He had expected it; large markets were banned for the duration, as were all fairs inside fifty miles of London. Nevertheless, not usually an over-imaginative man, Peter had a fleeting but overwhelming sense of basilisk responsibility, as though he were vanishing these people and that, if it had been somebody else who passed them by instead of himself, they would still be there.

The new porter at Parish Clerks' Hall wouldn't let him in. He was made to put the Bill of Mortality in a warming pan held through the bars of the gate and told to wait.

Last week's Bill on the gate-board declared the Plague total to be 1,089. Next to it the sixteen quarto sheets of the Newes had been tacked into a large square.

Peter no longer wasted his penny on it, reckoning that no Newes was good 'Newes', but he was prepared to read it for free. It still rejoiced at the victory off Lowestoft three weeks before, the twenty line of battle that English ships had sent to the bottom, the Dutch admiral, Opdam, blown to the skies in his own flagship, ten thousand Dutch seamen drowned and slain.

Considerably more space was given to advertisements for sovereign remedies against the Plague than to news of the Plague itself. However, the editor had utilized a few paragraphs to be still pleased that the dead were mainly in the out-parishes. Although forced to recognize fifty-six in the City, he pointed out that they were 'but in the close and blind alleys'. Also, 'I am warranted by good authority to advertise that partly by taking cold and small drinks in the heat of the fever those who have perished in this dreadful mortality have hastened their own destruction.'

The porter returned to find Peter Simkin still reading. 'You don't want 'a bother with that,' he told him. 'Old L'Estrange prints what the King tells him. And where's our good King Charlie now?'

'Where?'