The Vizard Mask (31 page)

Bet wavered up to the fireplace holding out a blackjack by its neck. 'Put some of that where the flies won't get it. No hard feelings, eh?'

Penitence took it. 'No.' She hadn't. As well to have hard feelings for rain or cold. These women were elemental, too random in their cruelty to be resented.

'Got to have a bit of fun now and then, eh?'

'Yes.'

'Everyone for themself in this life, ain't it?'

Penitence drank to the woman who had just voiced the only principle to life which had any validity. 'Yes.' Bet, if you only knew it, you're my midwife. A new Penitence was being born.

Bet stretched out a skinny hand. 'My turn.'

Penitence held the bottle out of her reach. 'Oh no you don't. I paid for this. And I need to be d-drunk to do what I'm going to do.'

Bet squinted at her. 'What you going to do?'

'I'm going to get out of here, Bet. By Christ, I'm going to rise above this rat-hole, all rat-holes and the stupid bitches in them. And I'm going to take my son with me.'

When the keeper George came on duty that night, Penitence was waiting by the door for him.

Chapter 2

For her first venture into harlotry, Penitence Hurd could have chosen worse clients than Keeper George. The turnkey aspired both above his station and his performance — the Cock and Pie would have put him in the fumbler category. Also, as far as honesty went in Newgate — which wasn't far — he kept his word. Dorinda would have told her she was lucky (and later did).

That first night, however, as Penitence followed him and his shaking lantern into the bowels of the prison, such blessings were not apparent. He dithered with excitement, touching her, insisting that she didn't like him.

She could not, could not have survived the Plague for this; any moment there would be a miraculous intervention. She'd made a mistake; there were other ways out of Newgate, must be. Oh God, she could get pregnant. She'd tell him, sorry, but she must return to Flap Alley. At that she kept walking. Flap Alley was death. Criminals had a defined sentence: debtors were imprisoned until they paid. She wished she'd drunk more gin.

'P-PP-PPress Yard?' she asked him. 'You p-promise?'

He looked at her suspiciously: 'You got a stutter?'

Mustn't stutter, mustn't stutter. Must stay alive. Why didn't I bring the mask? He had no use for vulnerability; she had to play up to this grotesque fantasy of his. 'No,' she told him clearly. 'Ladies like myself do not stutter.'

Gratified, he opened a small, iron-studded door and ushered her into a cell and put his lantern down on a table. 'This is where we keeps them as is going to be turned off.' The place was tiny and windowless. From its smell and the wet walls, it seemed to be drying out from inundation by a river carrying corpses. The bed had been made up with blankets.

She felt the area round her mouth go cold and press against her teeth as her blood retracted.

'You going to faint?' asked George, admiringly. 'Ain't used to this, lady-in like you.' He sat down on the bed, indicating that she should undress and holding up the lantern to watch her better. 'Tell us what you are used to.'

It can't be happening. It won't happen. She knelt down and forced her hand to touch his knee. 'P-please, Master George,' she said, reasonably. 'P-perhaps you have children. I have a s-son.' She had difficulty emitting the lovely word, but she was sure he could not withstand it. 'For their sake let us live in decency. Allow me a room of my own, and I promise you in time you shall be paid very well. I have a p- printing—'

She had timed it wrong; his expectation had grown too high for his better nature, such as it was, to respond to appeal. His mouth stretched like a baby's about to cry and he yelled: 'You're spoiling it.'

He picked up his lantern and began pushing her to the door. 'You've spoiled it. You ain't a lady-in at all. I'm taking you back to the Alley.'

'no.' Somewhere, at some time, someone had taught her to act. Act. She stepped away from him. 'You horrid rogue. I shan't go back.'

He looked sullen. 'I'm not having you spoil it with childer and such.'

'It was a lie,' she told him.

He sat down, mollified but still suspicious. 'What then?'

She took the vizard mask out of a mental drawer and put it on. It wouldn't be her it happened to; it would be someone else. The voice of a high-born lady said: 'How should I submit to this life? Heretofore I have lived in mansions.'

'Lovely,' he said. 'Go on.'

She heard her mother's ... aunt's . .. voice: 'All actresses are harlots.' Wrong again. All harlots are actresses. She began unbuttoning her basque with fingers she couldn't feel. 'Were I to tell you the name of my father, you would recognize it as among the highest in the land, but it shall remain unspoken, to save his shame and mine.' This is ridiculous.

'Lovely.' The lantern was vibrating so hard its flame was in danger of going out. 'More.'

Did survival rest on a hideous farce like this? She couldn't remember why she was here, didn't want to, only that it was necessary. Eventually, chattering nonsense, she was naked except for the mask he couldn't see. It wasn't her face, in any case, he was interested in.

'Ooh, them little lily bubbies.' He stood up and fingered them for a while, muttering to himself: 'You lady-ins. You ladies.'

She closed her eyes. I'm not here. I'm somewhere else.

'You lady, get on that bed.'

She got on it, staring at the wall. Her fists were clenched tight. She heard the keys rattle as he unbuckled his belt and threw it on the floor. He was struggling out of his breeches. God save me. Oh God. She panicked as she felt the heat of his body press down on hers.

Tou look at me, lady. You look at old George.' His breath was awful. 'You don't like me, do you?'

With perfect honesty, she said: 'I hate you.'

'Oooooooh.' He was shrieking. 'Lovely.' It was over. His weight went slack on top of her. There was liquid on the top of her thighs. He lay, panting into her neck. 'Too quick.'

She felt a moment of gratitude that he hadn't penetrated her, and then she was sick.

He was good about it, bustling cheerfully to help her dress; the vomit was an indication of her disgust and, therefore, her nobility. He'd clear it up later.

She was never able to remember the walk to the room she'd just bought in Press Yard. It had a window. 'Water,' she said. 'Get me lots of water.'

'You lady-ins.' He was roguish, but he brought her some in a bucket, a sliver of soap, and a stub of lit candle stuck in a square of clay.

When he'd gone she stripped and washed herself all over, put her clothes back on, took them off and washed herself again. She was very cold as she dressed herself once more. She lay down on the bed, shivering, afraid to think. If she thought, disgust would destroy her.

It's so cold. Like winter. Winter. The Pocumscut winter. In winter she always went out to watch the tree swallows ... and she didn't want to miss them. She made herself float down to the stream where they congregated on the last of the bayberries. They were the only birds she knew that played, dropping a feather to float in the air, twittering cheerfully as they skimmed down to pick it up again, the sun catching their metallic blue wings. Matoonas was fishing along the river bank; she didn't want to face him, so, cold as it was, she stepped into the stream and lay down, letting it carry her into the river which swirled her along to where her stains could be pounded clean by the rocks of the rapids.

Somebody was dragging her back, which made her irritable. She wanted to be pounded clean.

'There,' said a voice. 'We're warmer now.'

They might be. She wasn't. She was turned to stone. Galatea in reverse. She opened her eyes. A heated brick warmed her feet, a spoon was hovering near her mouth and, above it, a face.

'I heard your arrival and thought, God's dines, a neighbour of one's own gender and station at last. Then, nothing. So I ventured in, and just as well. How did you get so cold, you poor creature?'

The woman's affected drawl suggested falseness, an attempt at the languid assonance of the upper classes, so did the elaborately untidy hair, the clothes that were not so much worn as draped, but Penitence noticed none of these things at that moment. She saw only the interested yet vague large blue eyes and great kindness.

'We must eat some of this calves-foot jelly, mustn't we?' The woman sniffed at the spoon. 'One asked for calves-foot jelly, but... My name is Aphra Behn, by the way.'

'Penitence Hurd,' whispered Penitence.

'How very ... biblical. Now then, whatever this mess is it's nourishing. We must eat it up or nasty Noll will come and get you. That's what they used to tell us, didn't they? Nasty Noll Cromwell will come and get you.'

They'd told Penitence no such thing. This woman was a royalist, then. But she was right about the soup; it was nourishing and Penitence felt better after some spoonfuls. Even more nourishing, after Flap Alley, was the friendship on offer from a woman of about her own age.

Aphra Behn dabbed her patient's mouth. 'There, dear. Oh, the vicissitudes of life, that women like us should be so reduced ... and for such small matters as a hundred and fifty pounds.'

So Aphra was a fellow-debtor. 'Mine's a hundred and eight.'

'We shall not despair,' said Aphra, patting her shoulder. 'We shall arise from this darkness and our banners shall yet stream in a new dawn. "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage; minds innocent and quiet take that for an hermitage." Dear Lovelace, also in prison when he wrote that to lift our hearts.'

There was only one person to lift Penitence's heart and it wasn't Lovelace, whoever he was, nor this prattling woman. Kind as she was, Aphra Behn was a reproach; her mild clear eyes showed no experience of a world where to inhabit a room in Press Yard at all was a step up from somewhere more terrible. For her, it was a step down.

At that moment Penitence would have cowered from the gaze of her son; it was for him she had prostituted herself, but by that same prostitution she had made herself unworthy of him. It was Dorinda she wanted, the only person to understand and not condemn. Until this moment she hadn't valued enough a relationship that went deeper than friendship and liking - there were times when she actively disliked Dorinda — but existed in the bone, uncosseted and unremarked.

'Perhaps I should mention at this stage,' said Aphra, 'that one is a playwright and a widow. In that order.'

'A playwright?' She'd never heard of such a thing as a woman playwright. Penitence asked the one defining question: 'Have you children?'

'Alas, my lord and I were not blessed with offspring.'

Penitence lay back on her wooden pillow. This woman was a calves-foot jelly supplier, of no use to desperate states of mind.

She was wrong, but it took time to know it. As it was, she found the instant, intimate friendship being thrust upon her both warming and surprising. Without being asked, she gave a few details about herself. Recently arrived from the Americas. Trapped by the Plague. In debt.

There was a squeal from the next room: 'Where's my Aphra? Them bastards taken my Aphra. Aphra-a-a.'

'Visitors. Excuse me, dear.' Aphra Behn stuck the spoon in Penitence's mouth and left it there while she hurried next door.

She came back accompanied. 'This is my mother, Penitence. Mistress Johnson. And this my brother. Brother dear, fetch stools from my room. Mistress Hurd should not be alone.'

Penitence was surprised by the sensitivity, and grateful. The Johnsons looked a mixed blessing; young Master Johnson being languid to the point of vapidity, and old Mistress Johnson undeniably drunk. But Penitence was so frightened of being left alone with the memory of George — even worse, with George himself — that she would have welcomed the company of the undead.

Slouching, Master Johnson brought the stools, nudged his mother on to one and slumped on to the other. Aphra, begging Penitence's indulgence at discussing personal matters, asked him: 'Did my letters reach the King? What did Sir Thomas say?'

'The King ain't a goer.' Master Johnson dispensed words as if they might fall into enemy hands. He handed over some letters. 'His foot-licker gave 'em back. Killigrew's another'n. Only stumped up ten decus, which won't keep Ma and me, let alone you.'

'But he promised,' wailed Aphra.

Mrs Johnson lurched forward, took the letters and shoved them at Penitence with a blast of alcoholic triumph. 'My Aphra spied for the King.'

Penitence gave her an indulgent nod.

'Spied for the King. My Aphra.'

'Mother!' said Aphra.

Mistress Johnson winked. Her mouth made shapes that eventually produced more words: 'Spied on the Dutch. And Dissenters. My Aphra.'

'Mother!'

'Now she's written to him for to ask why he ain't paid her.'

'Mother!' Distraught, Aphra held her mother back and explained in a whisper, 'Poor Mother never fitted into England after Papa's tragic death. She has never recovered from that. And now we have fallen on bad times. So insalubrious. So shaming. You must forgive her.'

Mistress Johnson nudged Penitence in the ribs, shoving the letters under her nose. 'Letter to the King,' she said. 'My Aphra.'

A dispirited nod from Aphra gave Penitence permission to read them, which she did while the family talked.

Bartholomew. She really did spy for the King. Either this was an extraordinary charade for which Penitence could divine no purpose, or Aphra Behn had indeed gone to the Netherlands as a spy. Without hiding her light under a bushel, Aphra's letters dwelled on her services as the King's agent in Holland in the previous months. She had extracted secrets from this one, passed on intelligence from that one. But it had been an expensive business and her appeals for money had been ignored by her English spymasters, despite her petition after petition to the King, so that she had sold her jewellery in his royal cause, at last being forced to borrow £150 from an acquaintance in order to purchase her and her family's passage back home.

Penitence kept glancing up from the letters to study Aphra, finding the story they told and the fluent raciness with which they told it irreconcilable with the woman who'd written them.