The Vizard Mask (2 page)

Ignoring the presence of the Queen, the crowd emitted rutting noises in appreciation of its king's libido. Forearms imitated the sexual act as voices in the cheering advised him to 'Swive 'em, Rowley'. The loudest calls, however, were for war with the Dutch. 'Blow the butterboxes to hell.'

Charles Stuart himself. Shall I spit? Turn my back? Who else in this mass of sinners would reprove the man? It was Christ the Lord should be ruling England, not this Papist-sympathizing wencher. She risked a peek at Satan rampant. No smell of sulphur, no forked tail. Penitence's nose sniffed perfume, and for a second her eyes, instead of the hackneyed evil she'd expected, saw something more complex and more awful.

Sobered, she followed her new friend through the dispersing crowd. 'Now then, young lady, where do you want to go?'

Penitence delved into her satchel-bag and brought out the slate she had prepared with the words: 'I do search for my aunt. Last known address, the Rookery, St Giles-in-the-Fields.' She held it up.

The gentleman was pitying. 'Dumb eh? Poor maid, poor maid.' Then his expression hardened. 'The Rookery? You don't want to go to the Rookery.'

But the girl's expression too had changed, the eyes he'd admired were dull with the obstinacy often observed in the afflicted. Very well, I'll show you your way, but I warn you . ..' He warned her all down Ludgate Hill to the gate and up Fleet Street. Civilization was the City: its extension into the Strand, Covent Garden, Whitehall and Westminster was still the home of gentlemen, but half-way up Drury Lane things became dubious and by Holborn, and especially St Giles, downright barbaric.

That his beloved city had no charitable alternative to offer the poor girl made his warnings increasingly angry, so that by the time they had reached Drury Lane he shouted: 'I have a care for my purse, mistress, if you have not', and stumped away, giving her no chance to thank him. After a few paces, however, he paused and watched the strange small person in its dreadful hat and boots lope out of sight. Her chances of reaching her destination without assault were slim, her chances of staying unraped once there were non-existent. Well, he'd told her, done his best, gone out of his way, couldn't think why he'd bothered. The memory of her eyes put him out of temper the rest of the night.

By a quicker route than Penitence's the Plague's carriage took itself to the Fleet Ditch by the time Penitence and her companion crossed it. It could have settled more than once, but a force stronger than itself twitched the rat on towards even greater congestions of people. It liked the habitation of people, the more crowded the better.

Finding itself in the gardens of Bedford House, it sensed there was nothing for it in these spaces. Its teeth couldn't gnaw marble and stone, it couldn't breed in roof-tiles. Its shadow elongated as it slipped along a gutter at the edge of Covent Garden Piazza. It turned left and north.

Better. Better. Thatch, and rotten wood, open cesspits, the warmth of human bodies living close. There was no point in going on; its flickering whiskers brought the message that not far away habitation thinned into fields which were no use to it.

It was glad to stop. It wasn't feeling at all well.

As her acquaintance had noted, there was a stubbornness under Penitence's apparent vulnerability which had been formed as a protection against a religion, guardians and a community demanding absolute obedience. Penitence approved of the religion, had dutifully loved her mother and grandparents — and just as dutifully grieved for their sudden death; she had done her best to conform to the community, but to preserve an unbroken spirit under such an upbringing had necessitated reserving a place in her mind and soul against the lot of them, and in that place had grown the obstinacy which had brought her three thousand miles against all advice.

All at once Drury Lane's smart roofs lowered, becoming tile or thatch rather than slate. Its traffic was as thick as it had been further back, but here it consisted of single horsemen and pedestrians, and the jollity was cruder. Penitence's mouth gaped as she was turned this way and that by the entertainment on offer. There was singing and dancing everywhere. A seven-foot giant was teetering along on stilts which put his head on a level with upper windows while a dwarf ran alongside collecting pennies in a hat. From the windows ladies showing too much of their anatomy leaned out, screaming and laughing, to try and push him off. 'She painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window. Kings II, chapter 9.'

Everywhere she looked there was evil, and, more appalling, the enjoyment of evil. She broke into a run. At any moment the Lord would destroy this Sodom and Gomorrah with fire.

It was darker further up, what light there was showed meaner houses and fewer people, but it was quieter and she could slow her pace. Back home she could have walked ten times as far and not felt as tired.

I'm in peril. The familiar sense of danger cut through her fatigue and was immediately trusted. She knew it well.

Penitence's twice-weekly journeys to school had involved paddling a canoe five miles down the Pocumscut and a subsequent walk of three miles through forest. She'd carried a satchel of books and a primed flintlock. Attack by men was unheard of, unless you counted the occasional Iroquois raid, but bear, moose and wolverine, especially wolverine, posed a threat that required instant reaction to the inexplicable shadow or the leaf moving when there was no wind. Reading the signs had become an instinct that had twice saved her life. Now, here, in this dark lane, there was a wolverine.

She had no flintlock, but she slipped the knife from its sheath on her wrist in one concealed movement, as Matoonas had taught her to do.

Just as the Drury Lane beadle's nose could detect a possible charge on his parish, so the Reverend Robert Boreman, rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields, had suffered enough from Puritans in the Interregnum to smell them at forty paces. The one at his gate was young and female, but stank of bigotry. 'What do you want?'

Penitence was no more amicable towards the Reverend Boreman than he to her. To be seeking assistance at the gate of an Anglican church was nearly as bad as asking help from the Pope. However, she knew she'd been lucky to get this far. In the walk between Drury Lane and here she had been pestered, pawed and propositioned. Two women, one old, one young, had tried to enrol her for Lord-knew-what. ('Put you in the way of riches, dearie.') A man had tried to steal her purse and she had been forced to jab her knife at him.

From this high point above the river, she had looked around at the jumbled roofscape and known that unless she had a guide she was defeated. She'd made for the spire.

The Reverend Boreman groped for his spectacles and took the proffered slate to the lamp by his lych-gate. '"Penitence Hurd."' He was right, only damned Puritans could have called a child 'Penitence'. Searching for her aunt, last address St Giles Rookery. Despite himself he was touched. 'My child,' he said, 'go home. Go back to where you came from. Where do you come from?'

The girl retrieved the slate and wrote: 'New England.'

New England. What was wrong with the old one? Stiff- necked, hypocritical heretics calling themselves pilgrims sailing off to create their joyless Zion and plague the poor savages. New England indeed. Still, he could hardly send her back there.

Was your aunt born here? Married here?' Another shake of the head that wobbled the ridiculous hat. No, of course not. Her aunt was probably not married at all; indeed, if this was the child of Dissenters, she was a bastard whose parents imagined that some words said over them by a magistrate rendered them married. Nothing the Puritans had done had upset the Reverend Boreman more than denying the sacraments of the wedding service. On the other hand, if the aunt was a Puritan, what was she doing in the Rookery? He found himself curious. 'Are you dumb?' Obviously, she wasn't deaf.

'Shall I try to tell him?' She was tired, it would be too hard, and she wanted no involvement with a church that had persecuted her people. Besides, he was the height and shape of the Reverend Block back home, dressed in black, white tippets to his collar just like the Reverend Block's, only older. The sooner she got away from him the sooner her stomach would stop heaving. Insistently, she pointed to the slate.

The Reverend Boreman shrugged. 'On your own head be it. I must warn you that the Rookery is the lowest sink of sin, and that if your aunt is still in it she is undoubtedly defiled or dead, probably both.' He didn't believe in sugaring the pill, and merely having to admit the existence of such a place in his parish shamed him. God knows he'd done his best. 'Ah, Peter Simkin.'

His clerk joined him at the gate. 'I'm away to alert the Searcher, Rector.'

'Peter, here is a person from the Americas trying to find her aunt. Last known address the Rookery.' The two men exchanged looks.

Peter Simkin turned to Penitence: 'What's her name?' It might be that the Rookery woman was a member of the congregation, though unlikely; precious few were.

As Penitence wrote, the rector said acidly: 'Our young friend from the Americas, though not dumb it seems, does not deign to speak to us.'

'"Margaret Hughes" read Peter Simkin. 'Plain. Also unknown.'

'Oh, take her along to the Searcher,' said the Reverend Boreman. 'If anyone knows this woman, she will.' It had been a long day and he wanted his supper. 'And don't forget to get Sexton to toll the bell and ask John Gere to dig the grave.' Reluctantly, he added to Penitence: 'If you don't find your aunt, you'd better come back.' He'd have to procure her employment, or put her in the workhouse if she was indigent, which he was sure she was.

He lingered to watch Penitence and the slightly shorter figure of his clerk disappear along the High Street into the shadows. Another bit of jetsam washed into this penance of a backwater. How long, O Lord, how long before he procured a decent parish? How had he offended? He did his best, badgering the authorities for drainage, an almshouse, more help to save souls. And what did he get? Jetsam. By the day more poor were coughed out by the overcrowded city to turn this once pleasant suburb into a Gehenna.

Whores, pimps, beggars, buggerers, playwrights, even Jews - and poor Jews at that - washed up in St Giles-in-the-Fields. Fields indeed. He remembered the fields, he'd walked there with his wife, God rest her soul. And now they were a laystall and had gained their first American Puritan. Well, she'd have to take her chance with the rest.

He strode off to the rectory and the supper provided by his housekeeper. First he washed his hands, as he always did, and wished he felt less like Pontius Pilate while doing it.

There's a death in the Buildings, see.' The neat little clerk was brightly informative. 'Lucky for you, else you'd have had to wait for another corpse. Can't call on the Searcher except to view the corpse for the cause of death. Against the rules. Mind you, you wouldn't've waited long. They die here pretty frequent.'

Penitence could believe it. The difficulty would be not to. Her boots were fouled with the excreta, mud and rubbish of the alley they had turned into. The only light, apart from Peter Simkin's lantern, was a moon that came and went between cloud. The few shutters were closed; where they'd rotted or broken off, scraps of sacking hung between the night and the even darker interiors.

'They retire early round here' said Simkin, 'saves candles.'

Here and there the holes emitted the cries of a baby or an altercation, but otherwise there was the quiet imposed by hopelessness. Her home had been in a wilderness miles from other human habitation and it hadn't been as silent as this. Penitence bent over in a sudden cramp that was part hunger and part homesickness for river sounds, a nightjar, her grandmother humming a psalm.

'Careful,' said Simkin, 'falling down here ain't recommended.'

They went deeper into the maze and stopped before an afterthought of a house squeezed in between two others, with a door that was at least intact, if small. The clerk hammered on it.

'Threepence a corpse,' he said to Penitence. 'Penny under the going rate, but she gets more business than most. Stand back if I was you.' He stood back himself as shuffling footsteps approached the other side of the door and it opened.

Penitence had been expecting something horrible, but even worse was the shrouding of the old woman's face so that neither then nor later did she see it, leaving her to imagine leprosy, or even a blank.

'Harrison. The Buildings,' said the clerk. 'And this young lady's looking for a Margaret Hughes, last seen in the Rookery.'

There was a wheeze from within the shawl. 'Tuppence.'

Peter Simkin turned to Penitence. 'She wants paying for finding. You got tuppence?' Penitence nodded. 'Off you go then.' He left.

After much wheezing and muttering within the house, the Searcher emerged, more be-shawled than ever and carrying a white staff. A movement of the bundle that was her head indicated that Penitence should fall in behind her and she went off at a brisk shuffle. It was almost the nastiest of all the nasty walks Penitence had taken that day. She wasn't interfered with - the few pedestrians pressed against walls as the Searcher went by - but every step took her deeper into this unclued labyrinth until they were going along tiny alleys so dark that the Searcher's white wand was the only thing visible and moved as if with a life of its own. Some inhabitant, a woman, was screaming but it was impossible to locate the sound.

This was the Rookery. As they passed each closed door, the Searcher whispered. Reluctantly, Penitence caught her up to listen. The whisper wasn't for her benefit; each building was eliciting a response of memory from this basic brain. Top floor, convulsions.' 'Second floor back, childbed.' 'Basement, frightened.' 'Worms, attic.'

They passed 'Palsy, third floor front', and stopped before a door. A frightened-looking man opened it and retreated before the Searcher. From outside Penitence could see a candle held over a bed in a room that contained little else. The Searcher went to the bed and drew back a cover. Penitence heard children crying and a woman's voice, weeping and pleading.