The Vizard Mask (25 page)

During rises to consciousness she found she was being nagged: 'Do you hear me? I've worked hard on you, you miserable item of humanity. Until I came along you crawled in mud like the base clay you are. I took you up. I transmuted you into gold. For one moment I heard the authentic voice of Beatrice come out of the mouth of a stammering, tuppenny-halfpenny whore. One moment. My achievement out of my Gethsemane. Are you listening to me?'

She wasn't sure. The aggrieved argument held flaws she was too tired to put her finger on; she allowed it to become a lullaby, the only one she'd ever known, and slept to it.

The dream recurred. 'Never knew you had a beau, Prinks.' The voice was rallying but flat, as if its owner talked for the sake of talking and expected no answer. It came into the caverns in the form of light.

Reluctantly she lifted the weight of her eyelids and saw Dorinda's face. 'Who's this Benedick then, you dark horse you?'

'Cat,' said Penitence. She'd left it behind, so valuable, so hurt. Tears oozed out of her eyes and Dorinda dabbed them away. 'Cat, was it? Thought you'd got a secret beau.'

Apothecary Boghurst diagnosed pleurisy and recommended honeyed electuary, seethed red meat, eggs and rest.

It was from Dorinda she received these things, Dorinda who nursed her, washed her, potted her, spooned food into her mouth. Sometimes Job, very gaunt, sat by her bed through the hot nights, but most often it was Dorinda, encouraging her with good news. 'Ma Hicks's beat it, like Job. Henry and MacGregor and the rope-walker's got her through. Henry's going to win the war by sending her against the Dutch. Mistress Palmer still ain't got it. There's two dolly-mops left alive over Hubbard's. The parish Bill's down this week. And Sam and Molly Bryskett's third youngest's still going strong. An' we got a plan.'

'What plan?' She asked out of gratitude; she wasn't very interested.

During her illness, it appeared, matters had got both worse and better. In St Giles the mortality rate was slowing, though London as a whole was suffering a thousand Plague deaths a day. Services were breaking down; parish relief deliveries were intermittent; most serious of all, the water cart only came every four or five days.

Faced with thirst and starvation, the survivors of Dog Yard had organized. There had been rooftop meetings.

'See that?'

'That' was a ladder leading up to an unsuspected skylight in the attic-tiles above the beams. 'You get on to Mistress Crawford's, over a plank on to the Ship, then more planks round to the flat roof of the Stables. That ballocking Dogberry said it was agin promulgation to have gatherings, but 'Pothe- cary said as we was all shut up it didn't make no difference.'

The Yard was pooling rations. Mistress Palmer cooked stews in one of her iron wash-tubs. The pawnbroker's widow baked communal, though kosher, bread. The two remaining Tippin boys risked prison, this time in a noble cause, by making rooftop forays out of the Rookery to the countryside where they acquired chickens and any other edibles left unguarded for the Dog Yard pot.

Obediently, without enthusiasm, Penitence swallowed the proffered spoonful of stew. 'B-beef too?'

Dorinda looked shamefaced: 'Dogberry got that. He's kin to butchers.'

Wearily she remembered that a charitable Dogberry was a contradiction in terms. 'What with?' Her Ladyship's two guineas had long gone.

Dorinda worked herself up into aggression: 'Out your bag, acourse. You been hiding a fortune in there could've bought us Whitehall with some left over.' Seeing Penitence's incomprehension, she said: 'Funk. Fume. You know what it fetches? He's a fumer our Dogberry, do anything for a pipeful, and you got a mass on it.'

The tobacco the Indians had given her. She'd forgotten it. If she'd realized its value before she could have afforded better food for Her Ladyship and the others. Tears dripped down her face. Dorinda wiped them away. 'Wouldn't've made no difference,' she said. 'Get to sleep.'

By day her attic became a gathering place and thoroughfare. Unable to bear the salon, Job and Dorinda used it as a sitting- room and, since the Cock and Pie's well was supplying water to most of the Yard, the actor and his surviving male neighbours from Mistress Hicks's regularly crossed the plank that now served as a bridge over the alley to help wind up buckets and carry them via the ladder to those in need.

Then there was the Plan. Dorinda was full of it. Its aim was to save the Brysketts' last living child from further threat of the Plague. 'Sam Bryskett — Gawd, you ought to see him. Prinks, it's pitiful — he asked for help and it was our Henry came up with it.' The Cock and Pie was to produce a version of Much Ado About Nothing, on its balcony.

Originally, the idea had been to perform extracts, just the Beatrice and Benedick scenes, with the actor narrating the rest of the plot. Dorinda, however, had seen her chance. 'I'm going to act and all.' She had persuaded the actor to include both her and Job in the cast; it meant considerable complication, not least of which was that, due to their illiteracy, the two of them had to be taught their lines by word of mouth. On the other hand, as Dorinda pointed out, it would lengthen the duration of the play and thereby give the Plan a better chance.

Across the alley, the actor was now writing, rewriting and swearing as he turned a comedy intended for a Dramatis personae of eighteen, to say nothing of messengers, watch, attendants, etc., into a play for four, while in Penitence's attic MacGregor, the erstwhile Scottish piper, who could read, spent much of the day repeating Shakespeare's lines so that Dorinda and Job could learn them by heart.

The only one who had no response to the general animation was Penitence. She lay incuriously watching the comings and goings, finding the constant company tiring, too feeble even to experience embarrassment at this most public of convalescences, unsure that it was convalescence. The emotions from the dream, emotions she'd never felt in her waking life, oppressed her. She couldn't free herself of them. The thought of what waited for her in Her Ladyship's room flattened her on to her bed like a stone slab.

So, on an afternoon when nobody was around, she went and faced it.

There was a lining of dust in the frills of the satin valance of Her Ladyship's large bed. As Penitence's hand ran tentatively over the rough floorboards, it encountered furred rolls of more dust, then a knot-hole. With an effort, she pulled up a square section of board, groped in the cavity underneath and retrieved a box. She squatted back on her heels with it on her lap.

It was not the box she had fetched from Lawyer Patterson. It was small, with an arched lid striped by two brass bands. It was the twin of one her grandfather had made for her when she was ten years old, and which was now ashes blowing in the breeze from a Massachusetts river; perhaps it was from the same piece of cherrywood. Perhaps he had made it for his daughter, Margaret, when she, too, was ten years old. She had pokerworked her initials into the lid - M.H. - just as Penitence had.

She was shaken by sudden agony for that unknowing child Margaret Hughes and what had become of her. Still kneeling, she lifted the box on to the bed and opened it. Inside were scrolled papers tied with ribbon.

The first was a deed naming Margaret Hughes of St Giles as purchaser of 'the property called the Cock and Pie, heretofore known as Appleyard House'. It was dated 14 April 1651 and the vendor was a John Appleyard. The price was £186 16s.

The wages of sin must have been high, thought Penitence, for Her Ladyship to have been able to afford a sum like that.

The next roll showed that they hadn't been. It was a deed of mortgage, making the Cock and Pie security for the sum of £185 0s 0d. The interest to be paid on said sum was 45 per cent per annum.

Penitence felt her first reaction in days. She yelped. 'Forty- five per cent?' Her grandfather had only been charged 20 per cent when he'd borrowed for one of his trading ventures, and he'd grumbled enough about that.

Margaret Hughes had signed with a cross, and so had a gentleman called William Calf, described as 'Agent', though agent for whom was not set down. The witnesses were a doctor of divinity and a canon, presumably two of Her Ladyship's clients.

The parchment of the second scroll was less yellowed and its ink fresher than the first. It was the last will and testament of Margaret Hughes. Apart from some small personal items to Job, Kinyans and the girls, it bequeathed all her property and possessions 'to my daughter, Penitence Hoy, yclept Penitence Hurd, recently come from New England'.

She had not needed the proof; at the moment when Her Ladyship's body had been dragged to the burial cart and Dorinda had shouted, a hundred flakes of memory, whispers, looks, hurts, had drawn together into a core of certainty.

Nevertheless, to see the words written was shocking, an official command to remake herself. She rested her head on her mother's coverlet while the person she had thought herself to be disassembled.

Hoy?

Is that all you will tell me? She scrabbled in the nearly empty box and brought out a thin, flat package wrapped in silk. It was a letter. The superscription on its stained outside read: 'Mistress Margaret Hughes, to be found at the George Inn, Taunton'.

Penitence unfolded it carefully. It was coming apart along the heavier creases. It was dated Oxford, April 1646.

Mistress, I must report to you the doleful news that Capt. James Hoy is dead of wounds gained in a skirmish. It is a grief to me to lose an officer as valiant in the field as he was merry in company. At the last he begged me write to you of his affection and send these enclosed pieces and recommend you to the kindness of his people. Would I could do more for the memory of a faithful friend but I and my brother are bid by Parliament to quit England and take ship for Calais.

God keep you, mistress. Your servant, Rupert.

She had to read it twice to decipher the hasty scrawl and three times to absorb its significance.

Rupert? Only royalty signed with a Christian name. Prince Rupert of the Rhine and his brother, Maurice, had been banished by Cromwell at the end of the Civil War.Remorselessly, her mind pursued the logic while the person she had always assumed herself to be unravelled further.

Capt. James Hoy. My father.

The exemplary Ralph Hurd, that martyred saint of the Puritan revolution, faded into smoke and in his place stood a stuttering blue-eyed man who turned her into as much of a stranger as himself.

He had fought on the wrong side. She was not Penitence Hurd, sprig of solid Puritan stock, she was a royalist's bastard. If she was now eighteen years old — if that was not a lie, like everything else she had been told about herself - he had impregnated her mother just in time to go and get himself killed in a last 'skirmish' against Cromwell's forces.

At that moment it was indignation she felt. You stupid, Papist . . . Bartholomew. Wrong side, wrong loyalty, wrong death, wrong time. A most perfect disordering of everyone's life, her mother's, hers, that of the woman who had passed herself off as a mother, his own most of all, a microcosm of upheaval in the upheaval going on around them.

Had Margaret Hughes been a harlot then? But even royalist captains did not make death-bed professions of love for prostitutes, nor recommend them to their families. Perhaps he felt guilt. Perhaps it had been rape. The expression on Her Ladyship's face as she'd died remembering Captain Hoy did not support that premise and Penitence was forced to abandon it.

Still she held on to her indignation for fear that she would be formless without it. Seduction, then; the blandishments of a be-plumed Cavalier from the squirearchy overcoming the scruples of an innocent country Puritan.

However it had happened, if poor, pregnant Margaret Hughes had thrown herself on the charity of the Hoys, she had been rebuffed. Penitence's lips thinned as jeering landed gentry in her mind directed the pleading young woman from their magnificent door.

She was on stronger ground of interpretation when it came to the reaction of her own family. How her grandmother would have shrunk back from the sullied flesh of her flesh, how that hard little mind would have rejected the path of compassion for the road of outraged righteousness. Margaret Hughes had been ostracized.

It must have been around this time, not earlier, that her grandparents had joined the ranks of other Puritan saints in the New Jerusalem of the Americas, leaving the shamed daughter behind, taking her bastard and the virtuous daughter with them. Did they wrench the baby from Margaret Hughes's sinful arms? Or had she, knowing she was to be abandoned and could not support it, begged her sister to bring it up as her own?

And what of the sister? Warily, Penitence's mind explored the loveless parenting she had received from the woman she now knew to have been her aunt, and found it less painful in understanding it better.

Unless Ralph Hurd had been a respectable fiction, his poor widow had had foisted on her, to bring up as her own, a child who had not only been conceived in sin, but fathered by one of her husband's enemies — for all she knew, the man who fired the shot that killed him. It was not a recipe for happy motherhood.

As for the real mother, left in England by her nearest and dearest to suffer the wages of sin ... there would have been no wages but sin's.

Penitence studied the dates on the documents. James Hoy had died in April '46, her birthday was four months later. Five years after that Margaret Hughes had bought the Cock and Pie and begun her career as Her Ladyship.

Knowing what she knew now, Penitence could imagine the poverty of those five years, the struggle to stay respectable, the inexorable sinking below the waves of corruption, the bleaching out of all virtues except that of survival. You had no Her Ladyship to offer you a refuge.

Penitence raised her head and her eyes encountered the black shapes of the manacles, chains and whips that hung on Her Ladyship's pink bedroom wall. Couldn't you have stayed a victim? Did you have to survive so well?

She rewrapped the letter in its silk, retied the ribbons round the scrolls. The reconstructions and rehabilitations she must make to her own and others' past would take time. Oddly, her overriding emotion was still indignation, a child's anger at adult secrecy. How devious they had all been. She had been deterred from loving her mother'aunt and grandparents as she would have liked, but she had respected them for their ideals of plain-dealing and truth. It was they who had taught her to despise deception. She'd trusted them to be who they said they were.