The Vizard Mask (71 page)

'Who won, Mudge?' On reflection it was a stupid question. If Monmouth had won MacGregor and Benedick could have stayed on the battlefield and waited for the ambulance carts instead of dragging themselves to a dip in the Polden hills.

The Devil,' Mudge told her. He kissed his sister. 'Can 'ee drag the boy from here? I'd better get back before the patrols get un other two. Miss Dorinda can't manage alone.'

'Be careful, Mudge. Thank you, Mudge.'

Penitence didn't even watch him go, and didn't allow Prue to, but called her to put Benedick's arm round her shoulders and help her get him to the house. He was completely unconscious and his weight was fearful; he'd grown. The toes of his boots dragged wavy lines in the dust of the track. Once across the other side of the moat, the women had to prop him on the bench inside the gatehouse tunnel while they rested.

They'd reached half-way across the courtyard when they heard hooves trotting up the drive. Prue began to pull towards the hall door, but Penitence pulled to the left. 'In here, in here.' The north wing door was nearest and stood open. Doubled up under their burden, they almost fell over the threshold and Penitence kicked the door shut behind her.

'Upstairs. Quickly. Quickly.' Whoever it was would try the hall first — the more impressive door and the first to be seen on entering the courtyard. She had her son's hands in hers now and was hauling him from above while Prue pushed from below.

Benedick's boots caught on every rise with a loud click but the sounds of hooves and voices in the courtyard covered it — whoever it was, there were a lot of them. The door to her bedroom was only a yard away now. The staircase was narrow but, thank God, well polished.

The men were in the house now. Even from here she could hear boots and spurs in the screen passage and somebody shouting in the name of the King.

'Go round,' she panted to Prue. 'Go round the hall way so they don't think you've come from here. Keep them there. Offer them ale.'

'Wreckers took that last week.' Prue let go Benedick's legs and squeezed past him up the stairs to the tortuous passage that eventually bent round to run between the hall and solar to the stairs.

'Offer them anything. I need a few minutes.'

They'll look under the bed,' Prue warned her.

Not behind it. 'Go, for God's sake. Before they come up.'

How she did it, she never knew. Later that day she was hobbling from lifting a weight half as much again as her own on to her bed, clambering through the panel, then pulling the body through after her. At the time she didn't notice pain. She had to do it anyhow, no time to consider the boy's wound. The elegant frieze of figures standing on the bank of a rhine taking aim at men floundering below kept moving through her mind. They'll shoot him. She tugged fiercely at her son, furious at him, ready to kill for him, until his legs scraped over the sill and they both fell backwards on to the floor of the secret room.

No time to see him comfortable. Even above the sound of her own panting she could hear boots coming along the corridor towards her bedroom and Penitence's voluble protests: 'Her Ladyship's sleeping.'

Penitence dived for the square of light that was the opening in the bedhead, got herself through, squirmed round and dragged the panel back. It clicked into place, she got off the bed, the bedroom door opened — all simultaneously.

She patted bits of her dress and herself into place, and the man who came through the door saw her do it. But that's all right. If I'd just woken up I'd do the same. It was an actress's response: yes, my character would do that. She knew she was going to have to act to the top of her bent for this man.

He was bleach-haired, thirty-odd, not bad-looking and he didn't believe anything; not that the earth went round the sun, not that the sun went round the earth, not in God, not in non- belief. From the moment Penitence set eyes on Nevis she knew he lived in a vacuum.

'Major Peter Nevis, mistress.' His eyes roamed the room before resting on her: 'Search it.'

So exactly did the last words match the tone of his greeting that she thought he was addressing them to her but, as he said them, two soldiers leaped forward and pushed her out of the way to kick open her clothes press, tear down paintings, overturn her mirror and shake out the contents of her scent bottles and powder boxes. While one ripped through the bed- hangings with his sword the other dived under the bed and came up with the chamber pot, shaking it over the floor and then, as if disappointed it was empty, throwing it against the wall, where it broke.

She remained calm. Would my character remain calm? It would have to; she was shaking too hard with relief at having got Benedick hidden to simulate anger. Anyway, the destruction was being perpetrated less as a search — who would hide in a scent bottle? — than to get her frightened. And this much she already knew: if she showed fear to Major Peter Nevis he'd want more.

She showed dignity instead. 'And why is this being done?'

'Guess.' He was tossing robes out of her clothes press with the end of his sword, idly, not looking at them. His eyes were directed at the bed.

'1 guess it is because you are a lout, sir.'

'Not a bad guess.' He sidled over to the bed and sat on it with his sword point-down to the floor between his knees and his hands crossed on its hilt. 'But my guess is you're hiding somebody, Mistress . ..?' He raised an interrogative eyebrow.

'Hughes.'

'Mistress Hughes. In fact I know you are. A man carrying another was seen coming up this rise from the marsh.'

Is that all? There was some abatement to her terror. 'Oh well,' she said with sarcasm, 'that proves it. He wouldn't have been going to the village, or the church, or the farm, he'd have been coming here. What an idiotic fellow you are.' Play the grand lady, the royalist, make him ashamed of suspecting her, her, of hiding a rebel.

'Yes,' said Major Nevis, 'he would. You see, Mistress Hughes, I have a wonderful instinct. The Arabs used to say I had a third ear. That may be because I cut off so many of theirs, of course, but I like to think it was because I hear the things people aren't saying.'

His left hand was feeling in the rumpled bedclothes. 'For instance, the first thing your abigail didn't say to me when she met us in the hall was that she had something to hide. Now you aren't telling me you are concealing someone.'

He had wonderful instinct right enough, but he wasn't sure. And I'm an actress. She could feel his mind probing her stance, looking for weakness and disconcerted at not finding any. Time to bring in the big guns. 'Fellow,' she said, 'you will regret this nonsense when I tell Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys of it.'

'Tell the King while you're about it, mistress.'

'I could,' she said, 'I know him too.'

He brought his hand out from the bedcovers and sniffed it. 'And explain to the King why there's fresh blood in your bed?'

Her toes curled with the effort not to show shock. She'd dragged Benedick to the bed, then climbed on it and hauled him so that his head and trunk rested across it while she got the panel open. That's when the blood went on the covers; after that she'd put a pillow over the two sills and sledged him through on it. He'd bled on the pillow as well, but by the mercy of God she'd just had time to put it between his head and the floor of the secret room.

'You humiliate me, Major, if you force me to explain what happens to women at certain times of the month.' She ought to blush but her face was bloodless. It might shame him.

It didn't. He nodded — more at an opponent scoring a hit than if he believed her. She braced herself. He was capable of having her stripped to make sure she was menstruating.

Slowly, like a-puppet's, his head began to turn to the left as if it was being drawn to consider the bedhead. He brought up his sword and casually began digging its point into bits of the carving and flicking it out again. Penitence stood frozen, unable to think, just watching as the swordpoint went into the eye of a hare, then flicked off the nose of a dachshund, stabbed Adam's navel, waiting for the inevitable when it pierced Eve's nipple.

There was an altercation at the door; somebody shouting, Nevis's lieutenant was shouting back. She heard the word 'wounded'. Pay attention to them, not Eve. The man had powers but perhaps she could will them towards something else. Not Eve. Not my son.

He was looking at her. 'I'm going to find him, Mistress Hughes. Wherever he is, I'm going to find him.'

And she believed him.

'Bring her down.' He stood up and went out of the door, and the soldiers took Penitence's arms and marched her after him.

In the courtyard a standard hung above the archway of the gatehouse tunnel painted with the Paschal Lamb. Beneath it, two horses were coming in, the wheels of the cart they pulled still sounding on the bridge. Sir Ostyn Edwards in the red and yellow uniform of the Devon and Somerset Militia was striding ahead of it, shaking his fist at Major Nevis: 'I ain't leaving the wounded waiting in that dang marsh no more. Fly-blown, poor 'andsomes. They needs good water and good women to nurse un.' He turned to Penitence: 'Ain't that so, Mistress Hughes? Good water and good women.'

She could have kissed him. 'Bring them in, Sir Ostyn.'

Mollified, the magistrate gestured to red-and-yellow-clad soldiers to start lifting down the men who lay in the cart and the one behind it, grumbling to Penitence and the world in general as he did so. '"Wait" he says. "There's rebels in that house," he says. "May be Monmouth," he says. "Wait 'til I go and ferret un out," he says.' He turned on Major Nevis, looking like a gaudy bantam cockerel. 'And I told you Mistress Hughes was a good friend to Prince Rupert hisself and as like to shelter Monmouth or his rebels as my arse.'

Major Nevis addressed his lieutenant: 'Nobody to go in the house until you've finished searching, Captain. After that nobody to go in the house without they're accompanied by you or Canto.'

'Yes, sir.' Nevis's lieutenant had long black hair, olive skin and an earring but he looked capable. Of anything, thought Penitence.

'I'll be back.' Major Nevis swung himself up into his saddle and rode out with his mounted troop behind him. He hadn't so much ignored Sir Ostyn as seemed unaware of his existence.

The magistrate shook his fist after him. 'I'll write to the King, iss fay. Just because we'm militia, don't mean you can treat us any old way.' He nudged Penitence and repeated, 'Just because we'm militia.'

But Penitence was watching the major doff his hat in a salute to the standard hanging from the gatehouse as he rode under it, or rather, she watched the hat. It was black and had a high feather. It had been predominant among the hats that had hunted down the men in the mist that morning.

'Good riddance to un.' Sir Ostyn wiped his top lip with a hand that shook, and Penitence knew it had taken courage even for a magistrate to stand up to Major Nevis.

'Who is he?'

'Colonel Kirk's second-in-command. One o' the Lambs.' At her incomprehension he jerked his head towards the standard embroidered with the Paschal Lamb. 'See them colours? Never thought I'd see men scared of a danged sheep but that un'd frighten its own side, never mind the enemy. Kirk and Nevis, just back from the garrison in Tangier. Ask me, they've learned nasty ways from they danged Tangerines. Very nasty. Still, the King do love un.' He turned to his wounded who were being helped off the carts. 'Well, Jem, there's a cut to be proud of. Missus would have complained if ut was an inch higher, I reckon.'

Nevis's second-in-command, a lieutenant with the unlikely name of Jones, interpreted his superior's orders meticulously; Prue was only allowed to enter the house under guard, Penitence wasn't allowed in at all, and the wounded lay on the cobbles of the courtyard in full sun all the afternoon. More and more injured were brought to the Priory gates as word spread that it had been designated the casualty post for the southern end of the Levels.

'You thank God it's royal troops mostly down yere,' Sir Ostyn told her. 'Up by Weston Zoyland they got all the injured rebels in the churchyard. Thousands, they do say.'

'How do they know which is which?' she asked furiously. Not all the militia were in uniform, having run straight from their fields and jobs to answer the call to arms. Blood mixed with mud rendered it impossible to tell the original colour of the cloth Penitence cut away from wounds that day. Army, militia, rebel, they were all suffering. She got up from her knees to face Lieutenant Jones: 'Will you let me go to my room for more bandages?'

He surprised her: 'Yes.' He chewed tobacco — a habit she hadn't come across before. When he smiled, as he did now, his teeth were tan-coloured. He spoke very little, probably so as not to betray a foreign accent, but he listened a lot. As she'd bent over a dying man to catch his last words, Lieutenant Jones was there, catching them too. Soothing a patient's head with a cold cloth, her arm was obstructed by Lieutenant Jones as he listened to the delirious babblings.

'Good.' She pushed past him to the north door, found he was going with her and changed direction to go in by the hall instead. The Tudor wing stairs might have blood on them.

She strode ahead, desperate. She begrudged nothing to the men she was nursing, except that her own son lay without help a few yards away. This was the first time she'd been permitted to enter her house since .. . she looked back over her shoulder and saw that it was evening sun lighting up the screen passage . .. since midday. Prue had been allowed in, but always under guard. Even had Prue known how to enter the secret room she was too closely watched to help Benedick. The girl looked as desperate as Penitence felt; on top of the worry for Benedick was the anxiety for Mudge, Dorinda and MacGregor out on the marshes. The activity around the Priory would warn them not to come close, but on the other hand where could they hide? Royal troops were scouring the Levels for fleeing rebels. Every so often some half-dead scarecrow was flung into the courtyard to be patched up by the doctors before being marched off to the prison carts.

If she had not lived through the Plague and seen what it did to the human body, Penitence would have been no use to the men who lay in rows across her courtyard. Prue had kept retching each time the surgeons uncovered an anemone- coloured bit of bowel or liver or revealed a piece of bone glistening white among the blood. Penitence, fighting sickness herself, had kept her busy fetching water from the pump.