The Vizard Mask (69 page)

She had to work fast. 'I am flattered, sir, that you have delayed to see the play out. If I have pleased you, grant me a boon.' She leaned forward so that he could look down her cleavage. There wasn't time for subtleties.

'My withers are not stone, Mistress Hughes,' he breathed wine fumes in her ear, 'they are flesh, and you have wrung them. Ask of me what you will.'

She explained, watching calculation enter his light blue pop eyes.

He said: 'Shall I lose you now I have found you? We may not dine tonight, but there is still tomorrow.' He patted her bare shoulder, and appeared to forget to lift his hot hand. 'No, no, dear lady, it is too dangerous for you to go home.'

'I can think of nothing else but my children until I can see them,' she said warningly. You can wring your own damn withers. She appeared to melt: 'Did you not say you will soon be entering ...' She fluttered her eyelashes. '... my, er, neck of the woods? Give me a docket to travel, my lord, that I can prepare my house against your .. . coming.'

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Betterton, who'd just come in, run a finger round his collar as if he found it too tight. Anne Marshall was grinning, Becky had raised her eyebrows and Elizabeth Barry was interestedly picking up points.

Sir George's mouth was wet. 'If the King commissions me to bring these rebels to book when they are caught, I shall travel the south-west circuit like the scythe of doom. Shall you fall before me too, madam?'

'My fields will be standing ready,' she whispered back. She could be ashamed of herself later. Just give me the docket.

She got it. He called one of his men to bring his travelling writing desk and wrote it out there and then, instructing whomsoever it concerned that Mrs Peg Hughes was to be assisted to the utmost, signed George Jeffreys, Lord Chief Justice. As he sealed it he shouted: 'Monmouth, thou standest condemned that thou didst come between this woman and myself. For that alone shall you be disembowelled when at last you face your judgement.'

Becky paused in taking off her make-up. 'And when will that be, my lord?' It was July now. Monmouth had been marching the South-West virtually unchecked for nearly a month.

But the Lord Chief Justice had gone, leaving his wine- flavoured saliva all over Penitence's arm.

'Well,' said Anne, 'talk about highway robbery.'

'So that's what they mean by "Stand and deliver",' said Elizabeth Barry.

'I needed the docket,' Penitence said defensively. She regretted her performance now that it had gained its end, not least its hamminess. She was aware she had promised the man more than she intended to pay, but consequences had overridden immediate need; he might die, she might die, the world could end before they met again.

'You certainly went bail for it.'

'Let's hope Sir George isn't too severe on her when she surrenders her person,' said Anne. They say he's got a very big Assize.'

'Oh, shut up,' said Penitence.

Even with accreditation from the Lord Chief Justice, the journey down to Somerset was a nightmare that lasted a week. The flying coaches flew only as far as Salisbury and after that she had to ride post, clinging on to the stout waist of a Bridgwater merchant who was hurrying back from Scotland to take charge of his troop of militia.

At Yeovil there was no change of post horses. The Post Office rule was that, if it had no mounts available, passengers were free to hire their own after half an hour. Penitence and the Bridgwater merchant waited half a day at the inn while its ostler made fruitless enquiries among the local farmers who were reluctant to hire out such horses as they'd managed to hide from the requisitioning agents of both King and Duke. The streets, too, were empty of horseflesh. Eventually Penitence rushed out and captured a mule and a donkey from two countrywomen on their way to market, and offered them a price they couldn't afford to turn down.

It meant parting with much of her luggage as well as the Bridgwater merchant, who was taking the mule and a different way to his home than Penitence's route. He was worried about her; they had developed the comradeship that comes to benighted travellers. As she packed her saddle-bag with a change of clothing, he knocked at her door to give her - in return for the mule - a cartridge belt, a flintlock cavalry pistol and a lesson on how to use it. 'She's old but she's trusty is Bess. See, she's rifled and can fire more than one shot. The pan-cover and steel are in one piece, here, and this is the safety catch.'

He refused to listen to Penitence's protests that she hadn't far to go, she had friends along the way, she wouldn't want to shoot anybody, that the last heard of Monmouth's army was that it was miles away, camped outside Bristol. War be dangerous to women, no matter which,' he said. 'If you spots Monmouth, you shoot un.'

She paid the ostler three shillings to accompany her on the remaining twelve or so miles home and set off the next morning into a July dawn. The bells of Yeovil's churches told her it was Sunday.

The ostler deserted her when they caught up with heavy royalist artillery lumbering along the Somerton road, telling her he must answer a call of nature. What made her cross was that she waited half an hour before realizing he wasn't coming back from behind his tree.

The guns were dragged by oxen and blocked the road; her difficulties in getting the little donkey past were compounded by men constantly catching its bridle so that they could eye Penitence up. They weren't so much lustful as unhappy. She gathered that the royalist commander, Feversham, didn't understand artillery or the needs of artillerymen, would benefit from having a round of shot stuffed up his person and what was a pretty woman like her doing on a road like this.

They were heading for Bridgwater. Latest intelligence put the enemy just outside it. Penitence was relieved. Bridgwater was too near for comfort, but it was at least further away than Taunton. With luck, the battle - if there was a battle - wouldn't touch Athelzoy.

As soon as she could, she left the main road with its traffic and roadblocks for the hill tracks. She was becoming tired and desperate. She kept mishearing birdcalls as a child crying — it was Ruperta, it was Tongs. She kicked the donkey and rode on, blinded by the lowering sunlight as she came into it out of trees, knowing that if she faced it she must sooner or later come down into the Cary valley from which she could find her way home.

All the cottages and huts she passed were shuttered. No smoke came from their stacks, no hens scratched in the empty runs. When she saw horsemen in the distance she took the donkey into some trees and hid until they'd passed.

The ground began to slope consistently downwards and the donkey stumbled. Penitence got off and walked with it, realizing that her eyes were becoming stretched with staring to keep the track in view. By the time she'd got down to the Levels they had gone into sepia with the banks of the rhines reflected as smudges in water still touched by gold and old rose. At long last, and far away, she glimpsed Athelzoy's church tower, its weathervane caught gold by the last ray of sun, and sobbed with relief.

She found a path that would take her home, though slowly - its apparent aimless meandering avoiding the quagmires that lay in wait under the thin crust superimposed by a dry summer. It was just possible to make out the dip it made through the grasses, but she went ahead carefully. If the donkey got mired she'd never get him out.

There was a crackle as of somebody lighting dry twigs, no, letting off fireworks a long way away. It died down, started again, became brisk; a busy, innocent sound — until she realized it was musket fire. It came from directly north but if there were twinkling lights in that direction they were difficult to distinguish from stars.

What was eerie was that the noisier it became to the north, the quieter went the marsh around her. Usually a night walk was full of the carping of frogs, the booming of bitterns and the rustle of reptilian traffic through the rushes. Now everything had stopped.

The path shimmied gently under her feet and she heard a whine, then a crump. Somewhere north a cannon had fired. There were more explosions, until the tremor coming up through the soles of her feet became a continual palsy. She'd heard artillery before — she'd been present when the Fleet gave Rupert a twenty-one-gun salute, and had thought then that the scream of the shell represented the terror of those it was about to fall on, just as the keek of the hunting owl imitated the squeak of the mouse before the talons ripped it open.

Flashes lit up part of the northern sky now - flame roaring out of cannons' mouths.

The long-promised battle between Monmouth and his uncle's army had begun.

Stop it. Stop it. You're too near my children. Damn you, go and fight somewhere else.

What puzzled her was a thin pencil of light that made a path over some willows ahead of her. It came from the direction she was aiming for. Not musket nor cannon fire, a steady beam. The Priory should be over there. It was the Priory.

What are they doing?

The three windows of the hall that should have been in decent obscurity shone out to make a triptych, a Christmas welcome, a beacon, an invitation cast over the moor: come and fight here, rape me.

Dorinda. I'll kill her.

Something was very wrong. To be on the safe side she led the donkey along the old track to the house, the one that led to the Ridges' farm. The farmhouse was shut up, hurdles that had once penned pigs lay on their side in the yard - in the gloom she tripped over one and grazed her ankle. From what she could see there was no other damage but the silence of a place that had always been busy with fowls and a rootling pig unnerved her and she began to run, dragging the donkey with her.

The bridge over the moat was floodlit by the hall windows and it wasn't nice to be exposed as she crossed it, the donkey's hooves making a loud, hollow reverberation. She kept her eyes away from the shapes of the yew chessmen on the north lawn in case one of them moved.

The light gave the courtyard normality. Mounting block, tubs of flowers, the lichened stone lions crouching against the steps, all reassuring. But no dogs came to greet her. No maids appeared at the windows to bob the mistress hello, no groom walked bandy-legged through the stableyard arch to take her horse ... donkey. She let go its bridle and left it by the trough, taking the pistol from its saddle-bag.

The front door swung open when she touched it and then creaked to behind her so that she had to feel her way along the screen passage until her eyes were accustomed to the dark. Heat came out of the kitchen and there was a glow from its fire reflecting on copper pots.

The girls are dead. The household was keeping vigil upstairs in the hall. The lights from the windows were candles round their catafalques. Sobbing with dread and fatigue she threw herself at the stairs and pounded up them.

All the light in the hall came from three candelabra standing on the sills of its windows, the rest was in shadow. The noise of her ascent still hung in the air and covered some other quick and furtive movement. Penitence set her back against the nearest wall and brought up the pistol while she listened. It wouldn't hold still but wavered up and down.

There was no sound now except the distant battle's. Straining, her eyes travelled from piece to piece, the black mouth of the fireplace and the portraits of Rupert against the lighter walls. Bless him, he wouldn't cower in his own house. 'Come out,' she called, making herself angry. 'I know you're there.' Her voice echoed; she wished she'd kept quiet.

Something emerged out of the fireplace and walked towards her, brushing itself down and speaking in the creamy, comforting diphthongs of the Somerset accent. 'You never did then,' said Prue Ridge.

For all her assumed nonchalance, the girl was shaking and so was Penitence. They clutched at each other's hands. 'What's happened? Where are the girls and Mistress Dorinda?'

Mistress Dorinda, it appeared, had instructed Johannes and Boiler to take the two children, Annie, the Reverend Boreman and Mistress Palmer out of the danger zone a week before to stay with the Cartwrights at Crewkerne. Boiler had brought back a note to say they'd arrived safely, had gone off the next day to fetch supplies from Taunton — and hadn't come back. Staff from the village had run to their homes to secrete their stock in the marshes, out of the way of army scavengers.

It took time to learn these things, mainly because Penitence relaxed when she knew the little girls were safe and didn't catch all that Prue said. Then again, Prue thought Penitence knew more than she did. 'Miss Dorinda and Mudge gone looking for un.'

Who? Who had they gone looking for? Where? When? Why?

'This minute gone.' Prue didn't know the name of the person seached for: 'She couldn't rest still. 'Twas her man seemingly.'

What man? Who had been so important as to lure her friend and this girl's brother out into the marsh when they heard the noise of gunfire?

The bombardment had increased and the crackle of musket fire sounded as if the marshes were burning. She went to the windows; the flickering in the northern sky was like lightning that didn't go away. She began to blow out candles, but Prue stopped her: 'I was to keep they alight so's if they missed un he'd find the place.'

'"Her man" . . . MacGregor? You can't mean MacGregor?' Oh God, MacGregor had been in the Netherlands; he couldn't have been so silly as to join Monmouth's invasion.

Prue shrugged. But, yes, the man referred to was in the battle. She slapped the side of her head, her face clearing, then started to undo her shoe. It's been too much for her. But Prue was producing a letter that had been tucked under her foot. 'She said show ut you when you came.'

It wasn't from Dorinda to her, it was a letter from MacGregor to Dorinda, the one they'd quarrelled over when Barnzo brought it across the marshes from Taunton. At the top it said: 'On the island of Texel'.

It was very short, dated 14 May, nearly a month and a half ago. 'Dear Wife', it began:

The lad is determined on it: I would have told all to his unknowing father trusting him to be as inclined as ourselves to wish his son's retreat from this business of Monmouth but my lord Henry King has left the Netherlands. All the caution the boy will use is to call himself by the name of Hurd. Stay by his mother at the Priory as I shall stay by the lad when we get to England to direct him in need. We are committed to the venture now. Pray the Lord He smiles on the Duke's endeavour so that you and I be reunited in life before we are in Heaven. But as He wills. Yr loving husband, Donal MacGregor.