The Vizard Mask (3 page)

The Searcher came shuffling back to the door, followed by the man who was begging: 'It ain't the you-know. You'll say it ain't. It's rickets, she had rickets.'

'Shilling,' said the Searcher, and the man counted some coins into her hand.

As they continued up the alley, Penitence heard more wheezing. The Searcher was laughing. Ain't Plague, but Tom Fool thought it were.' The shawls caught sight of Penitence, the voice stopped talking to itself and addressed her: 'Rickets. Ain't Plague.' Penitence, hypnotized, shook her head. 'Rickets and hectick fever. They're frit of Plague round here. Had it bad in the twenties.' She pointed ahead: Dog Yard.'

Penitence pressed ahead into a courtyard of light and noise so welcome that it took time to absorb how sinful it was. Here, in a broken-cobbled area about sixty feet long and thirty wide, was the Rookery's largest and only professional alehouse and, therefore, its social centre. Here, every human degradation which London had forced on Penitence's attention was represented in the women drinking on the doorsteps, their knees wide apart, their mouths loose and shrieking, in the men who staggered and lolled, in the children who dabbled in the guttered sewers. A young woman sitting at an open window fed a toddler from one breast and clutched a bottle against the other. A cock-fight was exciting wagers and shouts in one corner, a dice game in another where, high above it, an altercation was in progress between two women over the washing-line strung between their windows.

Penitence saw no good in the place; she had gone beyond seeing good at all in this terrible capital city. Quick to recognize and resent disdain, the Dog Yarders didn't see much in her either. Catcalls commenting on her appearance and making suggestions as to her hat broke out - until the Searcher emerged beside her, at which they stopped.

Everything stopped. Like a small, muffled Gorgon, the Searcher hobbled through a crowd frozen in mid-movement into a tableau in which the only sound was the flutter of cocks' wings and the tap of the Searcher's wand.

Nobody followed them as they climbed steep street steps to the high north side of the Yard and stopped outside a door on the edge of it. The shawls whispered to Penitence: 'Margaret Hughes.'

Three thousand miles of anticipation, and she was here. She had expected a feeling of the momentous, but it escaped her in fatigue and confusion. She was not sure she was here at all; any reality she recognized had been left behind on Master Endicott's ship. The Searcher grabbed her arm. 'Tuppence.'

Penitence had no idea of the rate of exchange, but in the circumstances she was prepared to overpay. She felt in her satchel and brought out her smallest string of wampum. The shawls directed their attention on it, and said again: 'Tuppence.' Penitence pressed the wampum, the shawls rejected it. 'Tuppence.'

Penitence panicked. Back home this many shells, a fifth of a fathom, would be worth five shillings. True, she hadn't seen any wampum changing hands since she'd been in London, but her grandfather and other merchants had traded in little else. If its value hadn't survived the Atlantic crossing, she was in extreme trouble, unless her aunt had money, which, considering the surroundings, was unlikely.

The Searcher had turned nasty and was spitting words with which Penitence was unacquainted. Penitence held open her satchel and shrugged. 'Wampum or nothing.
¹
The Searcher sniffed at the satchel, sniffed again and was suddenly scrabbling like a burrowing animal at earth.

Relieved that she had means to pay the old woman after all, Penitence held her off with one hand while managing to open the box inside her satchel and extract one of its carefully packed contents.

The Searcher took the pipe into her disfigured hands, sniffed the tobacco in its bowl with the reverence of a communicant receiving the host and hobbled off with it, leaving Penitence to knock on the door.

Down below, Dog Yard relaxed at the departure of the Searcher, but much of its interest remained on Penitence. She sensed a change of mood; the catcalls redoubled but with a difference. Where before the Yarders had merely resented her as an uppity stranger, now they appeared to have placed her. The mewing to which she was subjected was as derisory as the hoots had been, but more amicable. The words, as far as she could understand them, were definitely filthier, with a tinge of contempt. The Yarders seemed to have gained advantage over her.

One of the washing-line quarrelers remarked: 'I thought I seen all the quiffs there was, but that's a new one on me.' She called down to Penitence: 'Here you. Under the tile. Her Ladyship running a new line?'

Even had she been able to answer it, Penitence did not understand the question. She knocked more smartly and made a show of studying the house before her.

It was a peculiar house, the biggest in Dog Yard, and the only one in good repair from what she could see of it. In height and breadth it was reassuringly like the large farmhouses back home that the settlers of Massachusetts had built for themselves, copying the medieval halls of England. It was the wrong way round. Impatiently pacing, Penitence peered down the alleys on either side and saw that it continued irregularly backwards for at least fifty feet. Its age suggested that it had once stood in solitary grandeur, looking over the fields of St Giles, until tenements accommodating the City's overflow had sidled up on its back and front so that its southerly side was now the frontage that faced her and the Yard.

What was bizarre was the addition to this frontage, a rectangular extension of brick which stood out from the main wall of the house by what seemed only four or five unnecessary feet. It was like a shield, windowless and with a door that could have withstood a battering ram. Its only ornamentation was a red lantern hanging above the door and, along its top, which rose over half-way to the house's gable, six china medallions containing life-sized portraits of ladies. The inevitable sign protruding from above the door showed a cockerel rampant on the crust of an enormous pie, though the words beneath it read, confusingly: 'Her Ladyship'.

Presumably her aunt had gone into the catering trade, since the place didn't seem to be an inn. What will she say when she reads my name? Penitence got out her slate and rehearsed several enjoyable possibilities in all of which her aunt ended by weeping tears over the niece who had come to save her.

'Thy aunt fell from grace, child. We have cast her out. Let thee be silent.' Thin-lipped, her mother and her grandparents had refused to tell her anything more, always the same answer in the same words since she'd been old enough to ask.

In Puritan terms a fall from grace could involve anything: adultery, murder, dancing round the maypole, celebrating Christmas, or using starch. It must have been for one of the deeper sins, probably you-know-what. How deplorable, how shameful, how different.

The young Penitence had obediently condemned this fallen aunt, but her censure had been tinged with curiosity and the older she got, the more curious she became. Her own adolescent falls from grace, though petty, had made even more intriguing an aunt who had fallen on a grand scale. She had begun to dream that naughty Aunt Margaret would one day arrive at the Hurd trading post; sometimes she imagined her as being rowed up the Pocumscut in a scarlet barge, dripping jewels and wickedness, sometimes as emerging from the forest, a thin, dying figure begging forgiveness with its last breath.

Whatever she needed forgiveness for, Penitence, as one of the saints of the Pure Church, had come three thousand miles to save her from it. And she needed to do it quickly. There were footsteps prancing up and down behind her in what she guessed was mimicry and might, at any moment, become attack. Pray thee hurry, Aunt. She knocked again. There was an impression that life was going on in the house's deeper recesses, but it wasn't coming to the door.

At last, footsteps approached from inside. The door opened, not to let Penitence in, but to allow half a dozen black-clad gentlemen out. In the glow from the shop's interior their clothes had the unmistakable sheen of richness, a phenomenon almost as sinister as the holes where their faces should have been. All of them were masked. They passed the shrinking Penitence so that she saw their glossy, contained shapes against the rags of the crowd and the untidy clutter of the Yard buildings. It flashed into her mind that these, predatory and beautiful, were the Rookery's rooks.

Migratory rooks. From the shadows around the Yard emerged a succession of attendants carrying sedan chairs; a fat one turned back. There was a glimpse of flesh and teeth as the mask said 'Most interesting, Your Ladyship.'

'Come again, my lord.' The chairs were trotted across the court, be-ringed hands through the windows scattering coins on the cobbles. In an instant Dog Yard became patched with heaps of struggling bodies.

Penitence turned to the lady in the doorway, who was a large-scale burst of colour from her black-rooted golden hair to her surprisingly tiny jewelled slippers. In between was an acreage of scarlet satin topped by black and white lace lying so low round her shoulders that Penitence's Puritan fingers twitched to hitch it up.

The twitch lasted until she met the lady's eyes, which were of such a light blue as to be nearly colourless, and cold enough to freeze fingers in their sockets. 'What?'

Penitence held up her slate. Her Ladyship's eyes didn't bother with it. They penetrated Penitence's bag, assessed its contents, stripped her and made an educated guess at the price of her body and soul. Her Ladyship was tired, it had been a long night, but she was a professional, and here were professional possibilities. 'Down on your luck, pippin? Come in. Who sent you?' The voice contrasted with the eyes, being reminiscent of warmed molasses. She put her arm round the mopsy's shoulders and guided her gently through the red-lit ante-chamber, fingering the bones beneath the dreadful dress. With a bit of feeding-up, there were definite possibilities, and all of them unexplored. Her Ladyship advertised virgins, but it was a long time since she'd been able to offer her customers a real one.

As they went through the double doors of the salon, she paused for the effect. The salon always impressed her novices.

It impressed Penitence, though not favourably. Here was the large hall promised by the exterior of the house, here great oak pillars that held up the roof strode its length in two rows, but they had been striped like a barber's pole in scarlet and yellow and bore gilded plaster capitals of fruit-and-vine design. Hiding the inevitable saddle beams was a much lower false ceiling of pinewood panes painted with poor execution and an overheated imagination.

A gallery ran along the four walls with its open side pillared, like a clerestory, but it obtruded so far on the left side in order to provide space for the row of rooms behind it that it gave the hall a lop-sided air. Where a ladder had once led up to the solar, there was an imposing staircase with a much- curlicued banister.

The furniture consisted of low tables, a few gilded chairs and many couches, these last a novelty to Penitence who had been taught that you lay down only when you slept. Gaudy cushions and hangings made the unexpecting eye blink.

Despite all that had been done to its dimensions and dignity, the country house such as Penitence had grown up in was there under its tawdry paint, like a whiff of Massachusetts air detectable in cheap scent. It was occupied by young ladies relaxing in various stages of undress, but again — and this was the eerie thing — she was reminded by their poses of her grandparents and mother after a hard day in the fields. One had taken off her high-heeled shoes and was rubbing the joints of her feet, just as Grandmother used to, another was loosening her corsets and scratching, another had flopped down on the couch with her feet up and eyes closed.

Her Ladyship guided her to a couch and sat her down. A couple of the young ladies turned tired, incurious eyes in her direction.

What's your name, pippin?'

She held up her slate, showing it round the room. It had no effect. They couldn't read. What sort of city was this that it allowed itself to turn out illiterates? She was going to have to speak, Help me, Lord, she would have to speak. The familiar mountain reared up in front of her. She clenched her fists, hunched her shoulders and ran at it: 'Umm P-p-p-ppp. Umm P-p-pp—' Why didn't they call me Hannah?

Outwardly the effort was as unsightly as it was inwardly difficult. In order to produce her first words on English soil Penitence's mouth compressed so hard that her neck cords protruded. One shoulder came up like a hunchback's, her hands clawed into her skirt as her body heaved, like a dog vomiting, to relieve itself of words.

'Ummm P-p-p-p. Umm P-p-p-p-P-Penitence Hurd.'

One of the young ladies said: 'Gawd help us. Ought to be Patience the time it takes', and there was giggling from some of the others. They began to gather round.

She never got over it. She saw compassion extended to unfortunates, she heard preachers urge charity towards the blind and the lame, but for her there were only jeers.

Nobody she'd ever met had made the mental leap to join her behind this oral barrier and realize how high it rose between her and the rest of the world. At first there might be sympathy, nearly always embarrassment, but both inevitably declined into irritation, as if her stammer were an option she had chosen in order to be annoying. Her mother, seeing the Devil everywhere, had suspected his presence in her daughter's tongue and designed a splint for it so that it stuck out of her mouth, like a gargoyle's, kept in place with strings that looped round her ears.

On and off, she'd spent months in that instrument, her tears shrinking the strings so that they cut into her cheeks.

Her Ladyship was frowning at the young ladies. 'I'll take your coat, will I, Penitence, while you tell us about it? This is Alania, this Phoebe, and this is Francesca and this is Dorinda, here's Fanny and this is Sabina ...' She desisted in the attempt to take off Penitence's coat when the mopsy drew away. Her Ladyship had recognized her mistake; the dummy had wandered here by accident, looking for somebody. She'd need careful angling before she was landed, but it would still be worth it; the eyes alone . .. the stammer wouldn't matter. The clients wouldn't be demanding conversation.