The Vizard Mask (7 page)

'He can't burn me,' Penitence said again. 'Can he?'

'He's frightened of you,' said Awashonks. 'He might.'

He might. The Puritans could not allow the impropriety of one of their number living among Indians. They were forcing the Reverend Block to get her back, but Awashonks was right - he was afraid she would denounce him as a lecher. He had to get in his own denunciation first.

The council relapsed into silence. She smelled wood-smoke, dung, river, the grease on her companions' hair. She was being isolated here by her own people. They'd trained her to feel revulsion for these Indians and sometimes she did. She felt it now. Sosomon looked ridiculous with black paint on his face to disguise his amiability; Matoonas was ridiculous in his pride in an initiation which involved beating his shins with a stick until he could hardly stand, running through snow from sun to sun and drinking his own drugged vomit. And how could she trust in the wisdom of Awashonks, an old woman who wore a sachet of asafoetida round her neck to ward off evil spirits?

Sosomon said: 'Hear me. Taupowau is my adopted grandchild. She has helped us in the past and now she appeals for help. If the soldiers come to take her away, we shall fight for her. I have spoken.' But like everybody else, he looked at Awashonks out of the corner of his eye and waited to see what she said.

'She can stay and we will fight,' said Awashonks. She had the high voice that belonged to very old women and very small children. 'If that is what she wants.'

Down on the river bank the calls of waders were breaking into the nothingness of dawn. The sky hadn't yet gained colour and the moon was an eerie disc waiting to disappear. Penitence dragged her eyes away from it to look at the face of Awashonks the sachem. She looks like a pickled onion.

It will be war, said Awashonks's button eyes. Neither side wants it: each side knows it will come. Sooner or later white and red will become tired of wondering how much better it would be if the other disappeared. Something will snap the tension in which we exist. Will it be you?

The Puritans would win. Awashonks had always known it- Penitence knew it in that moment. They might be fewer in number, but their intensity was greater. So was their god. Perhaps not now, certainly not over her, but soon the untidy duality of culture in which she had grown up would disintegrate and out of it would come a neat, unvaried world.

If she went away now and left them all behind she wouldn't see it happen. If she didn't see it, it wouldn't happen.

Politely, she'd got up and declined their offer. She'd thanked them. 'But I shall go back to the Old Country and search for my aunt.'

They had equipped her with the bead bag and packed it with pipes and their best tobacco, with the small hunting bow Matoonas had taught her to use, with Sosomon's best knife and all the wampum they had.

The Farewell had taken an entire day. She'd sat impatiently by the fire in the ceremonial ring while they danced the Quatchet, the going-away dance. At the feast they'd fed her with sustaining food, sutsguttahhash with green squash, Jerusalem artichokes with walnuts, fish chowder with wild leeks, and juicy, black thimbleberries.

Hurry, hurry. Let me go before you disappear.

That night she'd lain down on the wide shelf that ran along three sides of Awashonks's lodge, watching the light from the embers of the fire outside on the crazy patterning of baskets, gourds, turtleshell scoops and baked clay pots hanging from the rafters, the fetishes of children's gods. The silence from the mound of blankets on the far-side shelf suggested that Awashonks couldn't sleep either.

In the morning she and Matoonas had loaded his canoe with beaver pelts and gone north to the river's confluence with the Quintatucquet where they'd turned south and slipped past the tiny Puritan settlements on the banks until they reached the estuary.

Master Endicott, an old trading partner of her grandfather, had given her passage in return for the beaver pelts. The Lord re-established Himself among the pretty, white spires of the meeting-houses standing against the enamel blue of the sky.

His commands were audible in the Customs bells ringing out to announce ships' arrivals and departures and in the guns from the blockhouse warning incoming vessels to anchor for inspection.

Returned to the society of black-clad, high-hatted men and women, she'd become ashamed of the heathenish bead pectoral on Matoonas's bare chest and the eagle's feather drooping from his hair, and had refused to let him see her off. She'd given him one wave as he'd started the long journey back up the Quintatucquet and then turned away.

The Penitence now lying on an attic bed moaned in spiritual pain at that Penitence's ingratitude.

Somebody else moaned, as if in sympathy. She sat up. There was squeaking too; steady rhythmic squeaking like a bed-frame protesting when you jumped up and down on it. She got out of bed and picked up her candle. The noise was coming from beneath her floorboards, from the next floor down where ... oh, where the harlots' bedrooms were.

The moans became a wail, then an excited crescendo of profanity.

Penitence covered her ears to shut out the sound. Obliterate them, Lord. Send down Thy bolt and pierce these sinners in their uncleanness. Punish these deans and bishops who call the Indians savages.

She fell on her knees. And, Lord, in Thy infinite mercy, guard the people of the Squakheag from all harm.

Though she'd been late going to bed, Penitence, commanded by the habit of a lifetime, woke up as the night sky began to respond to a sun still below the horizon. During her dreams the previous day's experiences had enmeshed into an almost frantic need to be clean.

I must wash. This attic, her clothes, her very soul were mired.

She got up, used her chamber pot, then, having wrapped herself in a blanket, carried it downstairs, feeling her way with her other hand.

The greyness coming through the high, east windows of the salon lighted her way along a ghostly clerestory. The place smelled of tobacco, scent and food. The doors of the harlots' rooms were shut. Were the male fornicators still in them? Did they stay all night or did they return in the early hours to their palaces and cathedrals?

She went through the door at the far end, locating by the snores the room where Kinyans and Job slept, and negotiated the dark cupboard stairs to the kitchen where the embers of a fire in the grate threw out warmth and glow. Something soft touched her leg and she saw that the cats had been allowed into the kitchen and were waiting for her to let them out. Putting the pot on the floor, she drew back the bolts and smelled the air that might have been fresh before it passed the laystall. There was utter silence from the buildings around her, re-emphasizing the Rookery's godlessness; by this time back home the trading post would have been awake and working.

Cautiously, she crept out into the alley, emptied her pot and left it in the yard while she went into the cold larder to draw water from its well. She returned to the yard and scoured out her pot.

She drew two more buckets from the well, stoked the fire, poured the water into a cauldron and hung it from a jack to warm. Wondering again where the Cock and Pie did its laundry, she sniffed out a clove-scented tub in a cupboard and took a ball of its storax soap.

When the water was ready she lugged it upstairs, bolted her door, stripped, plunged her head into one of the buckets and washed herself from top to toe. After she'd finished she set her undergarments, cap and dress to soak and put on the fresh ones she'd brought in her satchel from America. She felt better; cold, damp - she'd had to rub herself down with the blanket — but better.

The horrors that had manifested themselves the previous night had changed her mind yet again. I must go.

But Penitence Hurd had a careful soul. Undoubtedly she was in the frying pan of Hell; however, before she jumped out of it, she had to be sure what temperature of fire awaited her.

She went to her unglazed west window and opened its shutters. Less than six feet away the upper storey of a house loomed towards her. It contained a shuttered window exactly facing hers. She leaned out, looking north along the alley between the houses, and saw it passed the Cock and Pie's back gate and the laystall before losing itself among more houses. In the other direction were the steps leading down into Dog Yard.

She padded over to the south window. For a moment, as she opened its shutters, she thought she was again facing a brick wall, this time only three feet away. She stepped up and out on to the platform to find that in fact she was on a balcony. The wall, now waist-high, was a parapet formed by the upper part of the Cock and Pie's peculiar frontage; immediately below her were the medallions, she could see the curve of their blue, pottery tops. Further below and to her left was Dog Yard, but a great deal more compelling than that was the view.

The Cock and Pie was the tallest building in the Rookery, and its parish of St Giles the highest point of the West End. The prospect before her, beyond a rickety roofscape, was a panorama of London.

On her few visits to Boston with her grandfather, its multiplicity of white-spired churches had been impressive enough; she saw now that it had been a puppy. What lay before her here was the splendid, muscled adult, a coiled, silver-scaled dragon of a city.

The sun rising like a giant orange was giving the morning air such veil-like texture that she could almost rub it between her fingers. Here and there were open spaces where the tops of autumnal trees provided palettes of colour. In between, stacked geometrical confusions of roofs became denser as her eye was led east to where, loomed over by the cathedral and the prissy uprightness of the Tower, they became a squeezed mosaic held by the mould of the City walls. Only the Thames had clear definition; along its bank directly to her south, the streets and gardens were indistinct in a haze from which emerged the chimneys and cupolas of the Strand's palaces.

She was transfixed by the sense of being waited for. In one of these magical towers there lay an expectation, some marvel, something that accorded to an unknown capability within herself if she could only find out what it was.

But not yet. Contempt had gone, to be replaced by unwilling respect. Sinful it might be, but it was the sin of the very old, a city negligent with wisdom and riches, a city with too much history to care what anybody thought of it, and still worth ferreting in for the wonders it contained.

She felt negligible, provincial, yet excited. To discover whatever it was that beckoned her would need sophistication; London was excluding her and, by excluding her, stimulating the desire to join ...

Could she start from here?

Unwillingly, she looked down to see if Dog Yard had been improved by daylight. It hadn't.

It was too early in Penitence's experience for her to know that what the area around St Paul's was to the City of London, Dog Yard was to the Rookery. Anyone with the physique, will-power and sheer luck to survive a Rookery childhood regarded Dog Yard as the next move up. It was its hub, its bourse, the place where you strolled to pick up news and gossip. Just as most of the world's trade was conducted in the colonnaded loggias of the Royal Exchange, the Rookery's commerce was concentrated on the cobbles of Dog Yard. The fact that nearly all of it came from theft was neither here nor there; as Will Tippin, Dog Yard's late pickpocket, had remarked in his speech from the gallows, so did the Royal Exchange's.

Its eminence arose mainly from the Rookery's only two solid pieces of architecture: the Ship Inn and the Cock and Pie. The Ship was Elizabethan, a building with the raked, be- windowed frontage of a galleon. That it was occasionally patronized by gentry who wanted to see low life while tasting good ale and without having one's throat cut, was due to the muscle and intelligence of its landlord, Sam Bryskett.

The emergence of the Cock and Pie as a brothel - it had led a varied career since its days as a Tudor farmhouse - had at first been an affront to Dog Yard where prostitution was on a freelance basis. More affronting yet had been Her Ladyship's barring of would-be customers living in the Rookery itself, and her prices, which would have barred them anyway. Behind her back the 'barge-arsed bitch' was resented, along with her girls, for her pursuit of the genteel both in clientele and manners.

However, Dog Yard had benefited from Her Ladyship's aspirations. It watched her purchases with interest, noting that she patronized only country sellers of the freshest food, sent her linen to the laundry in Holborn, bought wine at St James's, and sprinkled fresh sawdust on her kitchen floors every week.

In the entrepreneurial spirit for which it was famed, Dog Yard adapted to the situation, Sam Bryskett improved his own cellar and sold direct to Her Ladyship, thereby saving her transport charges.

The country vegetable- and meat-suppliers were persuaded, mostly at the point of a knife, to hand over the retail of their produce to certain Dog Yarders. The Tippin family, who lived in the Stables on the Yard's south side, considered the feasibility of either blackmailing or robbing the Cock and Pie's clientele, but in the end decided against killing the ganders who were laying the golden eggs, and instead instituted a practice of demanding protection money, known locally as 'angel's oil', from the sedan-chair carriers for the privilege of waiting for their masters unharmed. By raiding the nearest woodyard at night, the youngest Tippin gained the sawdust concession.

Her Ladyship fought off - literally - Pont Tippin's attempt to fill the post of the Cock and Pie's apple-squire in exchange for a proportion of the profits, at the same time rejecting his offer to sell her two of his daughters, but she was astute enough to allow all other changes in the interest of goodwill, a commodity always in short supply in Dog Yard.

She also entrusted her washing to the undoubtedly capable hands of Mistress Palmer after two occasions on which it came back muddied from the Holborn laundry, Jethro Palmer having twice tripped up the Holborn laundrymaid who carried it.

Owing to the Dog Yarders' preference for drinking and gambling their profit rather than investing it in brick and mortar, none of their enterprise was evident to Penitence Hurd as she looked down from her balcony that late autumn day. She saw only squalor; irregular patches of lath-and-plaster where rendering had fallen off the walls, broken tiles, thatch on which grass grew in profusion, though none grew on the ground.