The Vizard Mask (72 page)

Flies were attracted by the stench and heat. There was no shade. Time and again, Penitence appealed to Lieutenant Jones to let his soldiers take the men into the cool of the hall but he refused.

She was trying to bandage a stomach wound when some militia soldiers began dragging her patient away towards their cart. 'He's a Monmouth, Ladyship,' explained their sergeant, pointing to the white cockade pinned to the man's jacket.

'He's hurt.' she screamed. The sergeant - a local man, she knew his face from somewhere - was not unsympathetic. 'Better let me have un, Ladyship.' He cocked his head towards the mild woolly shape sewn on the standard over the archway. 'He's a rebel dog, but tid'n pretty to see dogs torn by Lambs. That old boy Nevis, he don't take prisoners.'

His subordinates didn't leave stones unturned either. As Penitence passed through her house she couldn't see a chair standing upright. Cupboard doors were off their hinges, every tapestry cut from its pole. All the portraits, even the two of Rupert, lay face-down in the hall.

But the greatest destruction was in her bedroom. Nevis had returned to it to inflict more. Her down quilt had been stabbed so that the place was snowed with feathers. Her needlework which had been stretched on a frame by the window was slashed across and across.

The devastation had a message. Nevis's instinct was telling him the room concealed something. It was also a display of sexual hatred; her shifts and under-petticoats had been hung from the tester rail of the bed and a hole gouged out from the front of each skirt at pelvic level. Most serious from her point of view was the door's smashed lock which stopped her from securing it.

Lieutenant Jones's dark eyes were on her face to see how she reacted. She almost forgot to - she could only think of the boy in his hiding-place. He could have bled to death or choked on vomit. He'd been in darkness without food or drink for over four hours.

It was an effort to keep her eyes away from the bedhead. It was an effort not to pick up a torn piece of wood from her tapestry stand and stab the leering pig to death. They'd hear if he screamed. It was her only reason for not doing it.

The bandages from her medicine chest were spilled on the floor. As she gathered them up she caught a glimpse of her face in a shard of her looking-glass. It was dirty. Now she came to think of it, she hadn't done anything to her appearance since she left the inn at Yeovil ... incredulously she counted back . .. only yesterday morning.

God damn them all. I'll he clean if the skies fall. 'Will you leave while I wash?' she asked.

She glimpsed his brown teeth as he spat. Deliberately, she went to her toilet cupboard and washed. She balanced the sliver of glass on her scored dressing-table, searched among the wreckage for her hairbrush, righted a stool and sat down to brush her hair.

'You want change your robe I don't mind.' Lieutenant Jones's voice insinuated down from somewhere above her head. He was behind her. She could feel the heat of his groin against the back of her neck.

Will it help Benedick if I do this? It's how I saved him once before. She calculated. Was there the remotest possibility that this man would allow her to tend to Benedick for services rendered? No. Her body wasn't sufficient incentive now for a man like this to betray his superiors for long. She studied the dark eyes reflected in the mirror and knew they had looked on excesses she couldn't even think of. Benedick was better off dying unconscious in his hole than in the hands of this man.

'Get away from me,' she said.

For a moment she rested her head in her hands, her fingers threading her hair. How had all this happened in a day? This was war, then, this thing arbitrated by other people, those poor men out there, her son dying in his hole, this sudden collapse of all structure, this lady of the manor transformed back to actress and then to calculating whore.

Hooves clattered in the courtyard and Jones moved over to the window to see, then jerked a thumb at her. 'Down. Now.' He was suddenly in a hurry.

She began gathering up ointment jars from the floor in the hope that he'd lose patience and go without her. He lost patience but drew his sword instead. 'Down.' Hastily, she swept jars and bandages into her apron and preceded the man down the stairs.

'Evacuate this place. Get these men down to the ambulance carts.' It was Major Nevis's voice. Some of his soldiers were already joining the militia doctors in carrying stretchers across the bridge.

Not until she saw him again did Penitence realize what fear Nevis had left in her. His figure on his horse was outlined against a glorious sunset - and turned it grey. She might cope with everyone else to bring herself and her son out of this situation intact — Sir Ostyn, bless him, the lustful Jones, even Monmouth if he found his way here — but Captain Nevis was beyond anything that she could manage. He had no bounds.

The men with him were of similar, though paler, stamp. Uniformed, they still gave the impression of irregulars: thinner, quicker, more wolfish than standing army soldiers.

Jones crossed the courtyard, stepping over the stretchers, and his commander bent down so that the man could whisper in his ear. Is it about me? The men surrounding Nevis's horse were fixing bayonets. The click of the knives fitting into the muzzle of muskets brought up the head of each man in the courtyard capable of lifting it.

With Jones leading the way Major Nevis, still mounted, followed to one of the wounded lying in the shade of one of Penitence's flower urns. Their men came behind, lifting their feet like cats to avoid the bodies stretched on the cobbles. She heard Jones say: 'He's one.'

It was the wounded man who'd been delirious and babbling while she cooled his forehead and Jones listened. She'd known even then that he was a rebel who'd been mistaken and brought in for a royalist soldier — he'd kept raving of 'King Monmouth' as she tried to hush him and hope that Jones didn't understand his thick Somersetshire.

She watched Nevis nod, saw the right elbows of two of his men crook as they brought up their muskets, then straighten. She saw the bayonets go into the body of the man at their feet, and still didn't believe what had happened. The steel went in so easily. There'd been just a twitch then, again so easily, the man was dead.

Penitence found herself running forward. What are you doing? He was alive.' Sir Ostyn was behind her, backing her up. You varlet, you villain. I protest, sir.'

'Do you?' asked Nevis. 'The man was a rebel. Perhaps a spy.'

'You dog, sir,' shouted a militia surgeon from the other side of the courtyard. 'He was entitled to trial.'

'Trial?' said Nevis. 'You want a trial?' He was looking towards the gatehouse. The setting sun was shining through its tunnel in an arch of orange light that made the eye blink. Black figures stood against it, one dumpy and still with a distorted collar round its neck and what looked like a lead snaking upwards from it.

Penitence couldn't make it out. But from the other side of the courtyard she heard Prue gasp: 'Barnzo. Barnzo, what they doing to ee?' She watched the girl run into the light and be pushed to the ground by one of the guarding figures.

Penitence turned to the man on the horse. 'It's Barnzo,' she said, as if he'd know.

Nevis's voice was negligent but it carried into the silence. 'Stands accused of obstructing His Majesty's soldiers when they were searching the village for rebels and of shouting epithets against the King. Ask the prisoner if he has anything to say, Harris.'

There were villagers on the other side of the moat. From his height Penitence recognized Jack Fuller, who was the tallest man in Athelzoy and Barnzo's father.

'He says Bur, bur, bur, sir,' called back Harris, and somebody laughed.

It was a trick of Major Nevis that as he talked he looked elsewhere than at the person he was addressing until his last sentence. He did it now, turning his head as if considering the upper windows that looked down at him from three sides. 'Anything to say in this man's defence, Mistress Hughes? Like who was being carried up this rise this morning and by whom?' Now he looked at her. 'And where he is now?'

He's trying to make me an accomplice. The sun through the tunnel turned the gatehouse entrance into a proscenium arch against which actors stood in perfect, black silhouette. It's a play. It isn't real. She said: 'He's a simpleton. You can't hang him. Please don't.' It wasn't the right line. Too feeble. It is a play. But it's real. Even if she could trade Benedick's life for Barnzo's, she had no right to trade Mudge's.

Nevis nodded to the silhouettes around Barnzo and Penitence shut her eyes. She heard the screams from Prue and the villagers.

When she opened her eyes again the silly round face of the Paschal Lamb looked down on a bundle that swung beneath its embroidered hooves. Beneath them both carts with wounded were trundling across the bridge and down the drive. On the other side of the moat the relief of villagers was kneeling, all except Jack Fuller who stood upright and still.

A shocked Ostyn Edwards lectured Nevis. 'No harm in that poor soul, 'twas sheer cruelty to hang un. I'm going to report you to the King.'

Nevis stretched. 'You're going to take the wounded to Taunton.'

Penitence said quickly: 'Don't leave me, Sir Ostyn.' The thought of being alone with Nevis terrified her.

'I won't, maid,' he said stoutly. 'I take my orders from the Duke of Somerset and from the Duke of Somerset only.'

'Captain Sir Ostyn Edwards?' said Nevis.

'I am, sir.'

'In charge of the Cary Valley troop of the Somerset Militia?'

'And proud of it, sir.' Sir Ostyn put his arm around Penitence.

'Ordered by Commander Feversham four days ago to destroy the bridge over the rhine at Chedzoy so as to deny it to the enemy and still deliberating on how to do it when the enemy crossed it yesterday?' Nevis's eyes regarded the sky.

'T'wasn't. . .' Penitence felt Sir Ostyn's stout arm slacken.

'Mistook a hollow tree trunk in a hedge for artillery and called on his men to retreat, as it turned out, into real enemy fire?'

Sir Ostyn's arm dropped away from Penitence's shoulders.

'Poured rapid fire into advancing enemy all night to discover when dawn broke that he'd peppered the sails of Somerton windmill?'

Sir Ostyn said nothing.

At last Nevis looked at him. 'Now fuck off to Taunton.'

Lieutenant Jones and some of the Lambs lined up to cheer a destroyed Sir Ostyn as he and his troop disappeared into the last of the sun underneath Barnzo's still-hanging body.

Penitence tried to remember where she'd put the Bridgwater merchant's pistol. She was going to be raped or killed, probably both. Her death would mean Benedick's. She had never felt so frightened but if she could remember where she'd put her pistol she'd go down fighting. She was as terrified for Prue as for herself and her son; the girl didn't deserve what was going to happen to her now. Nobody deserved what was going to happen ... In the kitchen chimney. That was it. She'd become irritated as it clanked against her knees while she'd helped Prue prepare soup during the long hours of waiting for Dorinda to come back.

Stay away. At the thought of Dorinda, Penitence felt tears come to her eyes. Keep safe. But I wish you were here. You and me together.

Leaning over the pot she'd felt the pistol hit her knees again and had put it on the sooty shelf inside the chimney. If Nevis's men hadn't thought to look in the chimney, it was still there.

She heard a whimper. Prue had been pushed into the middle of the courtyard in a circle of soldiers.

Penitence staggered as the shoulder of Nevis's horse nudged her forward. She looked up. Nevis's hands were on the pommel of his saddle. He was apparently riveted by the condition of his horse's right ear. 'There's two ways of doing this, Mistress Hughes.'

'I'm not hiding anybody,' she said, and knelt down. 'Please, sir, please, I'm not hiding anybody.' She had turned liquid with fear. There wasn't anything she wouldn't do if he would only not let happen what he was going to let happen.

'One way,' he said, 'is to give your abigail to my men until you tell me where and who you're hiding.' He smiled and turned his head so that he looked at her. 'Or I can set fire to the house.'

'Please,' she said, 'please.'

From somewhere came anger. An odd, almost unrelated anger, for the reduction decent people suffered at the hands of monsters like this man on the horse above her.

How dare he unman poor, amiable Sir Ostyn and his militia because they couldn't kill? They were crop-growers, children- raisers, they made things - they didn't have time to leam how to destroy efficiently. How dare he take away a harmless life like Bamzo's, how dare he threaten atrocity on Prue, on her. How dare he hate women.

'You bastard,' she said and ran for the kitchen.

She got to the chimney in time to see that the pisol wasn't there before they caught her and dragged her back to the courtyard. Her bolt had released the men to action and Prue, lost somewhere under a crowd of them, was screaming. Penitence screamed with her as she kicked and spat at the two men who held her back.

And stopped.

'That's not nice, lads. Don't do it,' said a voice that managed to carry and remain conversational at the same time. Somebody new had ridden, unheard, into the courtyard.

'I heard women screaming,' said the voice, chattily, 'and I said to the Brigadier: That must be old Nevis up there, let's call in. And he said: It looks a decentish place, why not spend the night there? He'll be here in a minute, by the way. Help the lady up, Muskett.'

Prue, clutching the torn basque of her dress to her breasts, was helped to her feet by a sturdy soldier in buff uniform. Nevis's men edged reluctantly back, wild animals driven back from a carcase by flame. They looked from the speaker on his horse to their major on his. The newcomer had the red and yellow flashes of the Somerset Militia on his collar and sleeves but he was no Sir Ostyn; there was a whip behind the sociability of his tone; besides, he held a pistol - carelessly and as if he didn't know he had it, but steadily - pointed in their direction.