The Vizard Mask (32 page)

Nothing in Aphra's style of dress complemented anything else; her grubby, low-necked, light-blue gown was of rich taffeta draped with scarves, some silk, some wool woven in barbaric colours, and to Penitence's untutored eye, owed more to the time of Charles I than Charles II. On top of her hair was a red taffeta cap of unknown origin with black feathers, one of them broken and dangling. She wore it with composure, apparently sure that if it wasn't the fashion now it soon would be. Without her youth she would have been merely eccentric, as it was she looked extraordinary, but not extraordinary in the right way; the limp attitudes she affected gave no hint of the recklessness which had sent her traipsing off to the Netherlands to become a spy. Penitence, having never met a woman spy, nor having imagined there could be any such animal, might have expected one to be bold-faced, sharp, something of a hussy. Yet, while the letters denoted their author to be an adventuress, a female with no margin of safety, somebody Penitence's grandmother would have described as 'having no hem to her garments', sitting on Penitence's bed was a woman whose appearance merely revealed amiable oddity.

Penitence returned to her reading. Even on her return to England, Aphra's pay had been withheld. The acquaintance demanded the return of his loan, she didn't have it, he took out a writ.

'Sir,' read Aphra's last letter to Killigrew:

if you could guess at the affliction of my soul, you would, I am sure, pity me. 'Tis tomorrow that I must submit myself to prison. I have cried myself dead, and could find it in my heart to break through all and get to the King and never rise till he were pleased to pay this; but I am sick and weak and unfit for it, or a prison.

'Killigrew?' asked Penitence, allowing herself to remember the name.

'He recruited me in the first place,' complained Aphra. 'He is head of the King's Company of Players and a powerful friend of the dear King's.'

An actor. Faithless, like all actors.

'He's a powerful welcher,' said Master Johnson, 'nor the dear King ain't much better.'

'He is our king.' For the first time Aphra was sharp. 'Parliament keeps him short, poor man. Sir Thomas, too, has troubles, the Plague having interrupted the theatre.'

'He ain't in the Whitt,' pointed out Master Johnson, gloom- ily.

Neither are you. Despite her own misery, Penitence was being drawn to the suspicion that this woman, little older than her brother, carried him and their mother as if they were baby apes clinging to her back.

'My guts is gnawing,' grumbled Master Johnson.

'Of course,' said Aphra, rising. 'We must dine. Mistress Hurd, you will accompany us?'

Mistress Hurd was not hungry; she was also reluctant to face anybody else. She felt as if P for Prostitute burned on the skin of her forehead. Aphra insisted — 'One begs you, be our guest' — and in minutes Penitence was being towed along a passageway arm in arm with Master Johnson and an unsteady Mrs Johnson while Aphra brought up the rear as if ushering them to her own dining-hall.

By day Newgate became what it in fact was, a town locked within a town. It shed some nightmares, gained others, while its corridors assumed the bustle of streets of which cells were the shops and meeting-places.

Twice Aphra called a halt while she stopped off, first at one cell to collect a pair of shoes from the cobbler who inhabited it, and then at another to hand in a tattered pair of gloves for mending to the tailor who sat cross-legged on his bed, his cell crowded with suits of clothes on hangers. Further along, a wig-maker was fitting a customer with a periwig while three others passed the time in a game of cards.

Every cell door stood open, whatever the activity going on inside. A man enveloped in steam and a slipper bath, whose only item of clothing was his hat, cheerfully raised it to Penitence and Mrs Johnson as they passed.

'Is no one shut up?' asked Penitence over her shoulder.

'Not on this wing,' Aphra told her. 'The limbos are elsewhere. That's where they keep those to be transported or executed. And Quakers, of course.'

What struck Penitence about the prisoners in this part of Newgate was the normality of their demeanour. In one cell, which had curtains at its window, a husband read The Intelligencer while his visiting wife laid a table with provisions from a hamper — Penitence saw her add a sprig of parsley to his plate of chops — as their children played marbles in the corridor outside. Two gentlemen discussing the international situation swept off their hats to Mrs Johnson, Aphra and herself as if they were passing in a street.

There was no trace on the faces here of the desperation that existed in Flap Alley, no joy either, but few showed outward distress, merely the assurance of people going about their everyday concerns. The debtors and minor felons here had enough resources, or friends, to maintain life at a just-bearable level. They've got used to it, thought Penitence, incredulous.

The noise as they neared the dining-hall had the echoing resonance of any large gathering in any large, enclosed space. The smell of cabbage struggled for supremacy with the stink of bad health and poverty. The hall itself was beautiful, with the dimensions of a small cathedral nave, hammer-beam roof and high, arched windows, but religiosity ended with them and the huge refectory table down most of the room's length around which some three hundred men, women, children and dogs were eating — the animals making disconcerting pounces into the floor rushes as Newgate's more desperate rats tried to intrude on the feast.

Flap Alley was well represented. Penitence saw the tall figure of Bet crouching so far over her trencher to protect it from the fingers of the women around her that she was almost kneeling on the table. A mixed crowd of men and women by a wide hatch in the wall shoved and quarrelled for positions in the queue as they lined up for their ration, carrying a variety of dishes or. which to receive it; some only a slice of bread, in one case a chamber pot. The sparse, grey substance splattered on to them by the servers' ladles was, presumably, Whitt stew.

As Aphra ushered them up the hall, they passed a frail, elderly man urinating against the side wall. Nobody was taking much notice of him, though one diner stopped eating long enough to shout: 'Not in here, Piddler, for Gawd's sake.'

A long trestle set crossways at the top of the room, like a baronial high table, kept off those prisoners in the body of the hall who subsisted on staple Newgate diet from those who could afford to pay for something better. Not much better — Newgate cooks were skilled at rendering meat, vegetables and gravy into a uniform shade of grey - but brought to its customers on platters by a serving man, though his manner and the keys at his belt showed he was a turnkey only doubling as waiter, while the condition of the napkin tucked under his armpit suggested he should have stayed with the day job.

Manners were better here. Three or four of the men actually rose as the Johnsons and Penitence took their seats, though one of them clanked noisily in doing so, having a ball and chain attached to one foot and manacles joining his wrists.

The courtesy was directed mainly at Aphra, obviously a favourite. She introduced Penitence: 'My dear friend, Mistress Hurd, recently arrived from the Americas.'

There was a general welcome, except from the waiter who grunted: 'Transported, was she? What you want eat, I ain't got all day.'

'I advise against the pork,' said a small man.

'And the beef,' said the man in fetters, 'and tell 'em to pour the ale back into the horse that pissed it. 'Morning, Aphra.'

Apart from Aphra, her brother and Penitence, he was the youngest of the diners, with sharp good looks and over-bright clothes.

'My poor Swaveley,' said Aphra. 'A very good day to you.'

Her brother showed his first animation: 'The Swaveley?'

A woman at the far end of the table said clearly: 'And that such rogues should dine at our table is beyond belief. I shall complain to the Keeper.'

The waiter turned on her. 'Keeper's orders, so blurt to you, missus. Ordinary wants to talk to him.'

'The Ordinary can talk to him in his cell,' complained the woman.

'Can't then,' said Swaveley. 'I'm partickler who I talk to.'

Even Penitence had heard of Swaveley, a highwayman whose exploits, while committed mainly south of the river, had been widely publicized and gained the Rookery's hard-won admiration. To judge from the nudges and looks accorded him from the body of the hall, in Newgate he had achieved hero status. Even the waiter treated him with respect.

To Penitence he was merely part of the horrific kaleidoscope that flickered around the edges of her misery. I must get out.

Aphra was choosing her meat for her, she was aware that Mrs Johnson was agitating for something stronger than ale to go with it and that Swaveley, against Aphra's wishes, was ordering it, that Aphra and her brother were arguing as to which of them should keep the larger share of Killigrew's ten crowns, but these sounds and movements were removed from her. Get out. I must get out. When the food came she forced some down, uncaring as to what it was or how bad, so long as it sustained her strength to plot deliverance. It wasn't until Aphra began pestering Swaveley that she became conscious of another's reality.

'One begs you to plead,' Aphra was saying, earnestly. 'I beg you. It's a terrible death.'

'Ain't none of 'em congenial,' said Swaveley. 'Least with this one, me old gaffer gets me horse.'

Master Johnson nudged Penitence enthusiastically: 'He won't plead. Chosen to be pressed. Ain't been a pressing in years.'

'What's pressing?'

Swaveley put his manacled hands behind his head and leaned back, regarding her with amusement: 'Ain't they got pressing in the colonies?'

'I d-don't think so.'

'Backward, ain't they?'

The diners enlightened her. By 'standing mute', refusing to plead either innocent or guilty, a malefactor earned the right to be pressed to death rather than hanged. 'Peine forte et dure,' moaned Aphra. The procedure's advantage, from the malefactor's point of view, was that it allowed his estate, goods and chattels to be passed on to his heirs instead of forfeited to the crown, as they would be if he went to the gallows.

'Old Rowley ain't getting my Bess,' said Swaveley, firmly. 'Too good for him, she is. Sweet little Doncaster-cut like that, he'd have her pulling a coach, or give her to one of his wenches.'

'I'm wagering you won't bear three hundred pounds' weight,' blurted out Master Johnson.

Swaveley grinned. 'Put a dozen more decus on for me, and send the winnings to Bess.'

He reminded Penitence of the Tippin boys. He was little more than a boy himself, made old, like the Tippins, by enforced cunning. His exaltation from attention and terror made him more alive than anyone in the whole room. His pale nostrils twitched at every movement, his own or anybody else's, like an animal aware of scent imperceptible to humans.

Benedick could grow up like him. Here was the child of another Rookery who'd opted for the criminal life with its built-in early death. Now it was nearly on him. She wondered whether, if the choice could be offered again, he'd make a different one. Perhaps not. By his lights, he was going out with glory.

I'll save Benedick. I can't save this lad but I'll save Benedick.

A large shape exuding the smell of alcohol and sweetish sweat took a seat opposite. 'Tut, tut,' said Newgate's Ordinary, 'eating without benefit of grace? Doubtless you would still wish me to say it?'

'No,' said everybody, but the Ordinary insisted on intoning some Latin to which nobody paid attention.

Being among the last things men and women on the scaffold saw before the noose tightened, it was regrettable that the prison chaplain's nose showed signs of having been directed into more ale cups than prayer books. His knobbled and alarmingly puce face shone with perspiration and seemed about to burst. From the stains on his velvet coat and from his aggressive bonhomie, he had dined already, better, and elsewhere.

'Now, my son,' he said, focusing on Swaveley, 'About your confession . . .'

'I ain't making one,' said Swaveley, wiping his platter with a piece of bread held in both hands. 'And I ain't having you sing the dismal ditty while I'm being ironed, so stick that in your ribs, old giblets.'

The Ordinary's forefinger was as brown as his teeth, shading to black at the tip from tamping tobacco. He wagged it at Swaveley, to indicate that he took the insult as jovial raillery. 'If you won't consider your soul, my son, think of your fame. See how I have reconciled our next unfortunates to the public ...' He fetched a sheaf of bills from his pocket and distributed them round the table.

Swaveley crumpled his between his cuffed hands and flicked it at the Ordinary's stomach. 'I got fame already.'

Swaveley's generosity in the matter of gin had gained him an ally in Mrs Johnson who toppled affectionately on to his shoulder. 'Knock his hat off,' she said.

'Mother.'

Master Johnson was scanning a bill. 'Our Affie could write a better'n 'n this.'

Aphra, restraining her mother with one hand, scanned hers. 'As a matter of fact, one could.'

Mrs Johnson toppled again, belligerently: 'My Aphra writes, so there,' she told the Ordinary. 'Wrote to the King.'

Her professional interest aroused, Penitence glanced at the bill. It was the last, and lurid, confession of a James Spiggot and a Mary Moders before being executed, he for blackmail and theft, she for fraud and prostitution, and as vile a piece of printing as she'd seen.

'They ain't being turned off 'til Monday,' said the small man. 'Supposing they get reprieved?'

'Reprieved?' bellowed the Ordinary. 'With a confession as sweet as this? They'd better not.'

The small man was still considering the bill. 'It could do with a nice woodcut,' he said. 'I could do you a nice woodcut.'

A turnkey approached the highwayman. 'Couple of wagtails asking for you, Swaveley. Shall I show 'em to your cell?'

'Pretty?' asked Swaveley.

'Young anyways,' said the turnkey.

The highwayman turned to the table and rose. 'My public,' he said. 'Time for me greens, ladies and gents. So farewell.'