The Vizard Mask (21 page)

She picked up the silver oval and slid aside its front. The interior of one side held a miniature of the play-actor when he was younger and richer. She looked into the glass set in the other side.

The eyes of a strange woman looked back at her. They were long, stretching almost to the temples. A strong blue. The lashes were dark - a contrast to the appalling colour of the hair above them — and also long. Above the black anonymity of the mask, they were compelling. It was no vanity to consider them; they were disembodied, unrelated to anything outside the mirror. For the first time that she could remember, Penitence looked somebody straight in the eye. The eyes looked straight back, intelligent and, Lord, amused. Beatrice's eyes.

Power was a new sensation for her; she felt it so strongly that she shut the mirror and took the mask off to examine it for witchcraft. No runes had been stitched along its seam which, if anything, was carelessly sewn. She put it back on again, opened the mirror, looked, and took it off again, being careful not to glimpse her bare-faced reflection; she had no interest in Penitence Hurd. She did this several times.

When it hung from her hand the vizard mask was a shaped piece of satin. When she put it on, it was a cap of darkness that vanished Penitence and replaced her with a new and potent being. Nothing, nobody would ambush the woman behind the mask; it was she who lay in ambush. It was a cloak of invisibility allowing the wearer to be whoever she wanted.

She tied it on and ducked out on to the balcony into hot air polluted by the slow chime of bells and smoke from disinfectant bonfires. A fine time to come into possession of a city, but it was hers. She stretched, raising both arms above her head in acknowledgement of fealty.

From below her came a gasped 'Oh my Gawd.'

She looked down. The only two people in the Yard were Dogberry, who had resumed his patrol, and Footloose, sitting in the mouth of his vat and baring his stumps to the sun. Both were staring at her; Footloose had crossed his two forefingers in front of his face to ward off evil.

Beatrice spoke through the mask-shaped hole in the barricade of Penitence's stutter. 'Cousins, God give you joy.'

Footloose patted his heart: 'Gawd, Pen, you didn't half give me a turn. I thought you was a demon.'

I am.

She turned back into the attic.

She was agin promulgation, a thing of darkness, a shape- shifter, a changeling to spin her mother and grandparents in their grave; the Pure Church would wash its hands of her and call in the witch-finders. She'd sold her soul. But the price was right.

1 am a voice.

She raised it: 'But then there was a star danced, and under that was I born.'

The voice whipped round the room. It found everything funny. It was a voice surprised to find itself where it was. Its echo slid over the planks of the floor as if expecting to find them marble. It ran a vocal forefinger over the beams and raised its eyebrows at the dust. Clear, used to command, it was the voice of the governors' daughters who had viewed New England settlers as backwoodsmen.

The masked woman cocked her head to listen to it. Not quite right.

As a child her mind had escaped into the animal spirits of the Indians, becoming an owl, an eagle, a fish. The woman's mind swooped into Beatrice.

These men went off to their enjoyable wars, they came back, ignorant of the boredom that existed without them. Were she of a resentful humour, which she was not, she would be piqued, just as she was piqued by the changes in her breathing when she looked at him — some devilish aberration for which he must pay. Since he was here, she'd have his attention.

She swept to her side window, wiggling Beatrice's be-ringed fingers.

Benedick still sat in the angle of his window. His hat was over his eyes, so that his face was in shadow, but the light caught his throat where it rose from his shirt. A linen cap dangled from his fingers.

She said crisply: 'Is it possible Disdain should die, while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signor Benedick?'

For a moment he still seemed asleep until, very slowly, he raised a finger and tipped back his hat. ..

Somebody was knocking on the front door of the Cock and Pie, from the inside. Alania's voice was shouting for the Watch to fetch the apothecary.

There were running footsteps on the stairs to her attic and Phoebe fell into the room. 'It's here, Prinks. Oh, what we going to do?' She ran to the window and repeated the shout for the apothecary, then turned back. 'It's here, Prinks. It's in here. Kinyans has got it.'

Penitence's eyes met the play-actor's for one long minute. Then she held out her hand for her cap.

She was to remember his hand clenching on the piece of linen as if he could not bear to let it go, and that he said: 'No.'

She knew his concern was not for her as such but for the promising pupil he was about to lose but she was always grateful.

She'd known. For one moment she had experienced such appalling joy that it was only to be expected that the Puritan God would make her pay for it.

She smiled at the play-actor and held out her hand again. Bad-temperedly he threw the cap across.

She caught it, took off the vizard mask and put her cap on her head to go downstairs, tucking in her hair as she went.

Chapter 8

The girls were gathered on the clerestory, trying to catch what the apothecary was saying over Kinyans's screams. Below them, Her Ladyship and Job struggled to hold the old man down on one of the salon's couches.

They managed to hear Master Boghurst say: 'This is the fear stage.'

Kinyans was attempting to crawl away from something only he could see, though his horror made it vivid enough for Job, his great hands clasped like manacles round the old man's wrists, to keep glancing in the same direction in case it had taken shape.

Her Ladyship snapped: 'How long does it last?' She wasn't paying out half a crown to be told the obvious.

'Four, five hours. Sometimes longer.' He raised his voice without changing its tone. 'After this will come vomiting and the flux. 1 advise you to have pails ready. Has he the buboes yet?'

The Cock and Pie's front door was open for the first time in three weeks and late afternoon sun was making a path sideways across the salon to the east wall, letting in fresh air. As Job and Her Ladyship fought to strip the patient, Kinyans's hands batted at their faces as if they'd become monstrous. He kept crying out with pain. The apothecary stepped closer and peered. Job kneed the couch into the path of the sun coming through the Cock and Pie's front door. Kinyans's sparse, yellow body was covered with pinhead spots, some of which had run together into rings the size of a fingernail. Dark lumps were forming in each armpit and the groin, giving the impression that giant black beetles had lodged themselves under his skin.

The apothecary pointed at the buboes. 'Hot mustard plasters to gather the poison. They must burst, or be burst. How old is he?'

'Sixty, sixty-five,' puffed Her Ladyship.

The apothecary said without inflection: Then he may survive. This is a young person's plague. So far I have been unable to save a single child.'

Oh God. Oh God. This is normal to him. This is what Plague is. She had counted up names with the abbreviation 'Pla.' beside them and transferred the totals to the Bills of Mortality and thought she knew the extent of the disaster upon them all.

It was brought home to her now; every name on Peter Simkin's list had been prefaced by this scene from Hell. Behind every padlocked, red-crossed door this had been enacted, often in multiplication, with noise, with convulsions, with victims evacuating their bowels on the bed-sheets as Kinyans was doing now. One by one the Bryskett children had screamed on this rack while their parents watched, unable to stop the turn of the screw.

She had listened to bells ringing out orderly, sanitary messages of deaths that should have been recorded in jangles of pandemonium.

'I do not recommend a nurse,' the apothecary was saying, 'unless you would take in a sot and a thief. If you wish to choke the patient you may purchase some of the more preposterous physics on offer, or you may prefer my electuary at eightpence a bottle. Keep him clean, warm and, as you love him, no cold drinks until the sweats are gone.'

He spoke through the screams to some inner measure that could not be hurried, as if exercising his profession was an end in itself.

He's lost hope. For us, for him, for everybody. The apothecary's emotions had stopped being kindled by fear, by love of man, love of God, by disapproval for harlots. She saw through him the presence of wholesale annihilation. How to await it was a matter of choice — in gibbering terror or, as this little man was, in a dignified continuity.

There was another shriek under which Her Ladyship asked a question. The girls couldn't see her face; she had her back to them.

The apothecary didn't bother to lower his answer: 'Mistress, I cannot tell. Since this man has had the run of the house I see small purpose in continuing isolation. Let them check their bodies each morning, take my electuary with a little wine each day and permit them to be of help.'

I can't. Lord forgive me, but I can't. Let the others. Not me. Only minutes before she had found the key to life itself. I can't die now.

Puritan duty was one thing; she'd been prepared to soothe brows, to comfort, to spoon gruel. But to approach the stinking, raving thing that Kinyans had become, for herself to die like that ... her arm touched against Sabina's and she found she had been sidling back along the clerestory towards the door to the attics.

The apothecary nodded to Her Ladyship and went out, walking through the sunlight to the open air. They heard the clatter of Dogberry's keys and the sun was shut out with a slam. Immediately the salon reverted to twilight where three shafts of fading light came through the high east windows on to the pillars, showing up dust on the peeling gilt, the yellow tone of the old man's naked body, resting on Her Ladyship's lustreless dyed gold hair and the thick bend of the dowager's hump where her neck disappeared into the collar of her robe.

The tawdriness, the smell, the heat, combined into a nausea of suffocation. I can't. She could hear the other girls' quick breathing.

Everybody stayed as they were, waiting for Her Ladyship to move. Kinyans's screams were weakening; each jerk of his body increased the smell. Job held him, crouching on the other side with his eyes on Her Ladyship's face. After a while she lifted her right arm and wiped her face along its upper sleeve.

'Well' she said. Kinyans kicked, and she leaned her weight on his ankles. 'Phoebe.'

'Yes, Ladyship.'

'You and Sabina heat some water so we can get this old rasher of wind cleaned up; you'll be in charge of laundry. Fanny.'

'Yes, Ladyship.'

'You and Job get Kinyans' bed down here. Francesca and Alania, start tearing up rags. Clean, mind.'

'Yes, Ladyship.' The woman had brought order back into the universe. Gratefully, the girls scurried off.

'Dorinda, you'll be in charge of the kitchen, Gawd help us. Dorinda.'

There was no reply. Her Ladyship turned round and saw Penitence standing, solitary, on the clerestory. 'What you think you're doing? Get back to the attic.'

She'd been about to slink there; now she was irked to be excluded from the structured industry. 'I c-c-can h-help too.'

'jesus.' The near-hysteria of the woman's shout jerked Kinyans's body into another fit. 'Why don't you do as you're bloody told? I don't want you here. I never wanted you here. You and your bloody eyes and your stammering gob. Don't you understand?' Her arms flailed at Penitence. Her hands were shaking and she stared at them. Slowly she curled them into fists and brought herself under control. Quietly she said: 'Get Dorinda. Send her down to the kitchens. If you want to help, get and wheedle fresh straw and rushlights out of that bottle-headed watchman. But I don't want to see you down here again. Is that clear?' She turned back to Kinyans.

Penitence rested her hand on the latch of Dorinda's door, dismal with the return of an old pain. Her mother had stood in the kitchen of the New England house as Her Ladyship had stood now. At her feet were the shards of a favourite Delft bowl that Penitence had just dropped. 'I never wanted thee. Thee was spawned of the Devil. I'll not have thee in my house.'

Dorinda was in her room, lying on her bed with her thumb in her mouth. Her eyes were open but when Penitence spoke to her they didn't move.

Francesca and Alania looked in. They were carrying one of the chests from the attic. 'Has she got it?'

'I d-don't know.'

'Oh Gawd. Look, then.'

And because they were expecting her to, she put out her hands to force Dorinda's huddled arms apart and pull down her robe.

The girl's skin was clear. There were no swellings under her armpits.

'I th-think she's j-just afraid.' Dorinda had chosen to meet the end of the world gibbering. Penitence couldn't find it in her heart to blame her.

'Ain't we all. Well, she's no loss in the kitchen, that's for sure.'

'I'll m-manage the k-k-kitchen.' She knew enough of the Cock and Pie girls' slatternly backgrounds to doubt if housewifery was numbered among their skills, whereas it was the one challenge she was equipped to meet. Her mother and grandmother had organized the provisioning of their remote household - during harvest-time when neighbours gathered to help it had numbered more than sixty - with an efficiency that would have put an army sutler to shame. Good housewifery was the only lesson Penitence had learned from them with any pleasure.

Other lessons had been harder: how to cling on to a knowledge of self-worth in the face of women who'd given her none, how to use stubbornness as a resistance against discipline verging on dictatorship. They availed her now. She pulled the bedspread over Dorinda's hunched shoulders and went out on to the clerestory, her mouth set in a line her mother and grandparents would have recognized.

In the salon Her Ladyship was washing Kinyans who had relapsed into unconsciousness. As if he was a baby, she'd got his thin ankles in one hand, lifting them high while she laved the ordure off his buttocks and thighs with a cloth in the other.