The Vizard Mask (26 page)

They lined before her now in masks. Why didn't they tell me?

Dorinda was standing at the door, watching. Penitence turned on her: 'How d-did you know?'

Dorinda shrugged. 'Plain as Paddy's pig, it was.'

'Not to me. Why d-didn't she tell me?'

'Oh, Prinks.' Dorinda spoke with tired exasperation. 'What you expect? Your goggles stared at all of us like we was stale herring and you was still swimming. Was she going to look into goggles like that and say "Welcome home and I'm your ma"? Acourse she ballocking wasn't.'

It was a simplistic explanation and probably true, but Penitence had also seen in Her Ladyship a woman who had been leached of the ability to feel anything very much, not sorrow, nor happiness, not good, not evil, and certainly not mother-love. Whatever agony she had gone through when her baby had been taken away, it had been lived with and layered over too long. There had been discomfort when Penitence turned up on her doorstep, a memory that there had been pain, not the pain itself. I was a nuisance.

Her Ladyship had done her duty, given her child her protection, found it proper to pass on the Cock and Pie to her but, if there had been any sensation in the numbness in which she existed, it had brought with it resentment that she should feel anything at all. The affection between them, such as it was, was makeshift, not the love of mother and daughter. Penitence doubted if, on Her Ladyship's side, it was greater than for Dorinda and her other girls.

The only love that had warmed her daughter's life had come from a wizened Indian called Awashonks, the truest mother of them all.

She was so tired. She put the papers back in the box and shut its lid. 'She's left me the Cock and Pie,' she said.

Dorinda's face sharpened with the old jealousy. 'I was a better daughter to her than you ever was.'

Through mental and physical exhaustion, Penitence wrong- footed her. 'I know you were.'

She suffered a relapse, really a form of lethargy in which she reluctantly transferred her identity from respectable child of respectable parents to the bastard of a royalist and a whore- mistress - moreover one who found herself the owner of a brothel.

It was a painful transition for one with a Puritan upbringing, though it was that same upbringing which brought her through it eventually with belief in her individual worth intact. The Church which had formed her might lean heavily towards group responsibility, but its glory lay in the value it put on personal salvation, and it was that which helped her now.

Irritatingly, so did the exchange of fathers. Devout Ralph Hurd, so long presiding over her from his position among the Lord's host, had been credited with many virtues, but merriment wasn't one of them. Now suddenly, perched up on his branch of her family tree, was a man who had been 'merry' in company. Probably drunk, she scolded him. What right had thee to be merry, seducer? But as she frowned at him, he gave her a wink, one stammerer to another, and she very nearly winked back.

The apothecary pronounced her better.

'P-please inform P-Peter Simkin I can help him again with the Mortality B-Bill,' she requested, and found she was weaker than she'd thought when he told her the clerk had died many days before.

'B-but it's over now, isn't it?' she asked through tears. The vibrations of hope rising from Dog Yard had matched her own.

The apothecary looked at her out of his expressionless eyes. 'Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie,' he said. She didn't know what it meant, but it frightened her.

Whatever it was, he was right. The next evening Mistress Palmer called from her balcony to the Watch that there'd been no movement all day from within Mistress Fairley's room. 'And the door's locked.'

It was William Burrows on duty. He called his fellow- watchmen from the Cut, they wound mufflers over their mouths and entered the Buildings. The Yard heard them break down the door, listened to silence, and waited.

Mistress Fairley and both her babies had taken the Plague, but it was only Mistress Fairley had died of it; before doing so, she had smothered each of the children so that they should not be left to die without her.

That night, in pursuance of the plan to save Kitty Bryskett, the only child still alive in Dog Yard, the Cock and Pie went into rehearsal.

Chapter 10

Beatrice and Benedick danced together in Leonato's pillared hall in Messina, ignoring the fact that their raised fingertips were separated by a five-foot width above the stinking alley in the Rookery and that the light was going. Most of the rehearsals took place at night; it was cooler, though not much.

'Will you not tell me who told you so?' asked Beatrice.

'No, you shall pardon me.'

'Nor will you not tell me who you are?'

'Not now.'

'That I was disdainful, and that I had my good wit out of the "Hundred Merry Tales"? Well, this was Signior Benedick that said so.'

'For God's sake, Beatrice.' The play-actor dropped his hand and hammered with it on his table. 'We've been through this. The first line's a question so put a bloody rise on it. Say it again.' She said it again .. .

'Hand up, woman. You're supposed to be dancing with

Benedick, not goosing him. Extend your fingers. Gracefully. That's good. Again.'

His attitude towards her had changed; such patience as he'd shown in enabling her to speak in the first place had gone now that she could.

The irony was that it was only as Beatrice that she could speak to him at all. When, as everyday Penitence, she talked to Dorinda or Job or exchanged news with the rest of the Yard she stammered very little now. If, as Penitence, she tried addressing herself to her mentor, the stammer became so appalling that she didn't say anything.

Nor did he notice. The play was the thing and only the play. It was Beatrice he was rehearsing, Beatrice's voice he listened for and corrected: the woman who played her needed no other purpose. He was a Pygmalion chipping away at his sculpture to produce his ideal woman and the ideal woman was not Galatea, but Beatrice.

Beatrice didn't mind. Shakespeare had given her a hundred revenges in his lines; the actor's strictures enabled her to deliver them better.

It was Penitence, still rocked by the revelation of an unsuspected identity, who minded. She minded that she was being treated like two people, one important, one insignificant. She minded that she was becoming two people: Penitence, the retiring identical twin of an outgoing and popular sister, Beatrice. Every time his nod of dismissal betokened the end of a rehearsal, she took off the vizard mask and, watching him, had the uncanny experience of seeing her unmasked self disappear.

Unmasked, she resented that she had not even been consulted on whether she would co-operate on the play. She went on with it because it was only as Beatrice that she regained visibility and - she accused herself of being fanciful, but it was true - because Beatrice willed it.

Beatrice lived for and in the hours at the window, falling in love with Benedick more deeply with each one.

A shuffle from the alley below told her that Dogberry had come on night duty. They paused while he settled himself on the stool which was now his regular stall. Thought you were going to start the love bit.'

'We are' said the actor, shortly.

'Good.'

The dance scene was brief. As usual, Beatrice wiped the floor with Benedick.

'Very well, then,' said the play-actor, 'Beatrice has been gulled into believing Benedick loves her, we know he does, etc., etc., he's been gulled into believing she loves him, we know she does, di-da-di-da, poor Hero's been wrongly accused of unchastity but Claudio believes it, tum-ti-tum, and now we get to it.' He peered across the alley which was lit fitfully from below by Dogberry's lantern and above by a harvest moon. We've finished the masked scene. Take it off.'

She shook her head.

'Take it off. It's served its turn. You can't go out on that balcony next week in a mask, for Lord's sake.'

Beatrice was the mask, the mask was Beatrice. Besides, Beatrice's love for Benedick was such that Penitence needed to stay free of it; there must be no confusion of roles.

'Don't you realize, we haven't got time for this.' His fury was partly from exhaustion. Dorinda thought he was a marvel to work so hard for the Plan, but from the unidentified source by which she understood him Penitence knew that the approaching end of shut-up was unnerving him. The forty-day period since Mistress Hicks had contracted the Plague would be over two days after the play's performance. The Cock and Pie's shut-up extended a week longer. They were all strung up on tenterhooks from the ever-present threat of another death shutting them up for a further forty days, or, if il was their own, for eternity. The gallantry with which he had borne his imprisonment, like his temper, was getting threadbare as his release came nearer.

He was rubbing the back of his neck. 'How can it stay so bloody hot, so bloody long?' He looked down at Dogberry to ask, as he always did: 'Why don't you go and get me a drink?' Dogberry gave his usual answer.

The actor took in a breath and let it out again. 'Look,

Boots ...' It was over a week since he'd called her that. '.. . you don't need a piece of silk to be masked. Everybody wears a mask. If I were to take you to court and tear the visages off the lords and ladies who parade around it, you would be astonished by the rogues, double-dealers and strumpets who would then stand revealed. Who am I? You don't know. Who are you? I don't know. For all I know Dogberry in the alley down there is an Oxford scholar. What I do know is that I am making you into the finest actress of your generation. You have the ability to be anybody you wish, I swear it, anybody. Now, please, take that damned bit of material off and show me the face of Beatrice.'

You dear man, she thought. As it happens I am of a line of mask-wearers. If they could do it, I can.

'Thank you. Now then. Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?'

Through real tears, she said: 'Yea, and I will weep a while longer.'

At last Benedick told Beatrice: 'I do love nothing in the world so well as you - is not that strange?'

And Beatrice said truthfully: 'I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.'

'Come, bid me do anything for thee,' begged Benedick.

'Kill Claudio.'

'Not like that,' shouted the play-actor. 'You don't say it quiet, like that. This is the great demand, the shock. It changes the play. It takes the audience by the throat.'

'Took me,' said Dogberry from the alley. 'Fair took aback, I was.'

'Shut up,' said the actor. 'Beatrice, even in this moment of declaration you do not give all your heart to this man. He gives all his to you, but you retain compassion for your cousin's unhappiness and the need to avenge her honour. The audience is thinking: hurray, now Benedick'll take her off to bed, then comes "Kill Claudio" and it thinks: shit, it's all gone wrong. You have them in your hand. Whisper it if you must, but also shriek. Shriek for poor maligned Hero. Feel it.'

She was quiet for a moment. Beatrice was an amateur in the insult stakes; it was Penitence who knew about insult to women. She gathered up the Reverend Block, encompassed the men who came to the Cock and Pie, took in the actor who thought Penitence was a whore.

She said: 'Kill Claudio.'

There was silence.

'Gawd 'elp,' said Dogberry.

'Not bad,' said the actor. 'Not bad at all.' He yawned. 'I'm tired. We'll finish the scene tomorrow.'

'What's the cat look like?' asked Dogberry in her dream.

'Not handsome,' she said, 'but its features are relevant.' The too-large nose, the long planes of cheek, chin and throat ... she knew them as well as the bole of the tree she climbed down by the river. Uproot it, plant it in a forest and she could still pick it out from all other trees.

'Oh, him,' said Dogberry. 'That's Henry. Lives up there. Hey, Henry.'

She woke up at the shout. There was a rattle on the shutters opposite hers as someone threw stones at them. She got up and went to her own shutters to peer through the crack.

She heard the actor yawning and asking who the hell was there.

'Some nob wanting you, Henry,' called Dogberry.

'It's me, my lord,' said a different voice.

She saw the actor come to his window in his shirt. His eyes were on her shutters, but she doubted if he saw her, or the shutters. He looked down very slowly to the person who stood down in the alley out of her sight. 'And when did I become "my lord"?'

'Four days ago, my lord. Our deepest sympathy, my lord. He was a fine man. We've been looking for you ever since. The King has realized his obligation to you, my lord, and commands me—'

'Better say it in French, George.'

Blast you, Dogberry. The watchman would be sitting immovable on his stool, watching this as he did every other performance.

Whoever George was, he spoke French rapidly.

'I see,' said the actor. 'Well, one's heavily engaged just now, but another week, God willing.'

More French.

'No,' said the actor. 'Not too bad. Quite instructive, really. Amusing people. But one won't be sorry to leave. Where will the coach be?

'Then I'll see you there. Bring a change of clothes.'

And that was that.

'By popular demand,' roared Job from the balcony, 'brought all the way from France by our own His Majesty King Charles to personal perform at the Court of Whitehall, we give you tonight the famous, the inmit—the only Lord Henry king.'

Dogberry's account of the actor's night visitor had obviously lost nothing in the telling.

The play-actor stepped on to the balcony and bowed to the applause. Job pushed forward again. He was getting carried away. 'And pre-senting that well-known beauty, that moon of the Americas, all the way from her recent success among the Red Men, Princess penitence.'

I'm not going to be able to do this. She felt sick. She had the Plague, worse than the Plague. She was dead, unable to feel her feet, her hands. Slouching, she nodded in the direction of the Buildings, and slunk back into the attic.