The Vizard Mask (77 page)

Yes, thank you, Miss Ruperta and Miss Tongs were well. No, there was still no news of poor Mudge Ridge, but thank you for asking.

'Do ee miss him, Ladyship?'

She looked up because this was not a polite enquiry, but had the tone of a message. The man who gave it was heavy- set and middle-aged. She could not remember seeing him before.

'Very much,' she said. The other seventeen men had retreated into the shade of the gatehouse preparatory to marching off to the teasel fields. She handed the man before her the last knife on the table, but he didn't take it.

'Did ee hear about the escape at Ilchester gaol, Ladyship?' He was looking about casually, acting insouciance so hammily that Nevis would put him down a suspect right away if he saw him. Don't let Nevis see him. She felt a spasm of fear put her heart into an a-rhythmic beat. She suspected Nevis of being everywhere.

No, she hadn't heard of it.

'Sixty men, Ladyship. Sixty got away. We reckoned you'd be interested and you'd want to tell Prue Ridge.'

'For God's sake,' she snapped, 'if Mudge was among them, tell me.' She couldn't bear this furtiveness, these cryptic 'carpets'. Even if Nevis was watching, he couldn't overhear. 'Do you know anything of a man called MacGregor? Or Mistress Dorinda?'

The man shrugged, then he was gone. She saw him join the others to cross the moat, but then break away across the moorland.

When she looked down at the table, she saw that he'd left the teasel knife behind. She picked it up and put it in her pocket before she went to tell Prue what had happened. She found the girl sweeping out the hall.

'Is that what he meant, Prue? That Mudge was in Ilchester gaol and has got away? But how could Mudge have got to Ilchester?' The village was six miles to the south-east and well away from the battle.

'They put un in prison all over the place.' Prue's once- plump face had brightened. 'And they damn Lambs wouldn't keep Mudge Ridge locked up for long, iss fay. 1 reckon that's what 'tis. Mudge's got free.' She began to cry on Penitence's shoulder. 'God preserve un for a good brother and keep un safe to get home.'

'Amen.' But not yet. Fond as she was of her bailiff, Penitence profoundly hoped he would make for somewhere else other than the Priory or the farm. The secret room was definitely getting overcrowded, and she was already at risk. Nevis suspected her of hiding one of Monmouth's commanders and whoever it was that had delivered 'the carpet' knew she was hiding the rebel preacher, Martin Hughes.

If whoever-it-was got captured he might very well betray her to save his own skin. Somebody had betrayed Lady Alice Lisle for the same reason.

I shall be ill. Nobody could live on such a knife-edge of anxiety for so long without amassing bad humours in her body. I haven't got time to be ill. She must investigate the possibilities of escape for her son and for his damned great- great-uncle, if the man survived.

And now, added to her woes, was the thought that she had locked herself out of the secret garden by telling Henry of her whoredoms. He'd believed those, all right. Happy enough to believe truth that damned her; unable to hear truth that didn't.

She was defiant nevertheless. I'm glad I told him. How had he thought she'd survived any other way? What did he expect? What did all men expect? That women keep themselves pristine, like new flower pots, for men to plant their own, exclusive seed into? I bet he didn't spend all these last years in self-denial.

It was the late Lady Torrington's fault in cuckolding him with the King that he so mistrusted women. If he was as suspicious of the late Lady Torrington as he is of me, then I'm sorry for the poor dead slut.

But if his jealousy meant that he wasn't coming back to smuggle Benedick to the coast and freedom, she didn't know what she would do.

I shall be ill.

She pulled herself together. There's no time to be ill. The problem with problems on this scale was that they absorbed your time in a stomach-clenching rotation that led nowhere except to madness. 'Go and get some breakfast ready for the men,' she said to Prue.

'There in't much.' Prue wiped her eyes. Food was becoming scarcer than ever now that what had been left after army requisitions was being commandeered for the invasion of judges, clerks, barristers and servants necessary to the Assizes. The Levels' marshes were empty of cattle and the Levels' islands of sheep.

'Do what you can.' The Assizes. There was another horror waiting to be faced and faced this very afternoon. In her escritoire in her bedroom was an embossed, be-sealed, be- ribboned letter which read:

Dearest Madam, I saw your performance. Will you not come to see mine? We shall dine after. Your humble servant, Jeffreys.

She crossed the hall to put the teasel knife back in its case, and stood still.

Somebody was breathing.

She looked round; Prue had left for the kitchens, the hall was empty, the morning sun coming through its windows in three patchworked stripes. Muskett was upstairs in the bedroom, guarding the two fugitives. There was no one else in the house. Yet somebody was breathing. A wheezing intake of air. A long, shaky expulsion. She was taken back twenty years to the condemned cell at Newgate and George's heavy panting as she undressed before him, chattering her nonsense.

Nevis. She fought down panic as she whirled around. There was an explanation. Must be. Drains. A cat. Something up the chimney. It was loudest when she was close to the interior wall, and louder yet at the fireplace end. Of course. The gargoyle.

She expelled her own breath in relief as she looked up. It was gasps from the still-delirious Martin Hughes she could hear coming through the vents from the secret room. Yet, even as she took in the rational explanation, she was shaken by superstitious horror of the life given to the gargoyle's malevolent face by the air that whistled through its mouth and nostrils.

She ran through the hall door, along the passage to the main bedroom. 'For God's sake, Muskett, can't you keep him quiet? Where is Muskett?'

Sitting by the window, her son directed a thumb over his shoulder towards the bedhead where the panel was open. Penitence clambered through, struck again - as she always was - by how drearily the shape of the room acted on the spirit, her spirit at any rate.

Muskett was kneeling beside the palliasse on which lay the heaving body of Preacher Hughes, bathing his face and neck. A rushlight burned in the pincers of its holder, casting its unflickering light on the old man's slack, stubbled chin. Magnified by the high, sloping walls of the room the noise of his breathing was louder than ever.

'Hear him, can you?' Muskett had already recognized the problem.

'They can hear him in Taunton.'

'Sorry, mistress. I'll stop up the vents. I got me some clay.' Not for the first time Penitence wondered how much Henry paid Muskett and decided, as always, that it wasn't enough. He handed her the cold cloth to continue cooling Martin Hughes while he began stuffing clay into the holes that led to the hall. 'But if the panel's closed, mistress, these'll have to come out. They'd suffocate else.'

She examined Martin Hughes. He was still in crisis. 'He's no better, Muskett, is he?'

'Him?' Muskett appeared not to approve of Dissenting preachers. 'His sort'd survive the Last Trump.'

'Prue will bring breakfast soon. Muskett, I'm grateful to you. Muskett, will he come back?'

'His Lordship?'

'He said he'd be back tomorrow night to fetch Benedick.'

'If he said he will, he will.' Was rain wet? Did birds fly?

Penitence looked at Muskett with envy that any human being could rest such absolute trust in another. 'Have you known him long, Muskett?'

'As long as me teeth, mistress. My father served the old Viscount.'

'So you knew the first Lady Torrington?'

'I did.' The tone was non-committal.

'I knew him during the Plague.' She heard her voice softening and couldn't help it.

'Yes, mistress. 1 gather. We was all worried where he'd gone to.'

'Major Hurd is his son.' She didn't know why she said it.

'Is he, mistress?' She'd caught Muskett looking from Benedick to Henry and back to Benedick and she knew the resemblance had not escaped him, but, as far as Muskett was concerned, if the Viscount didn't acknowledge Major Hurd as his son, then no son of his was Major Hurd.

With the twinkling lights in the wall blanked out, the secret room became more unpleasant than ever. Penitence left Muskett with his patient and eased herself out of it to sit on the bed. The room had been tidied, though it still showed signs of its wrecking. 'Benedick, there are things I should tell you.'

They'd had little time to talk since he'd been fit. She hadn't yet found out what sort of person he was now, what change the battle of Sedgemoor must have wrought in him. He'd become a cipher for the baby he'd once been. She felt the same protective agony, had the same cat nightmare she'd known when she'd been in Newgate, as if he was the mewling, helpless little thing he'd been then instead of a grown man.

She said abruptly: 'Why did you join Monmouth?'

He didn't turn round from the window. 'Prince Rupert would have done the same.'

'Prince Rupert would never have tried to unthrone a legitimate king,' she said.

He didn't want to discuss it. Instead he pointed to the slanted view beyond the courtyard over the western Levels where the rising sun was turning the early morning mist into a golden rose. 'Where is that?'

'King's Sedgemoor.'

He hadn't connected it to the night flashed with gunfire. He fell quiet. She could have wept for him. Well, he was going to have plenty to distract him. 'Benedick,' she said again, 'I must tell you things.'

So she told him. First about MacGregor and his Aunt Dorinda. To her amazement, instead of being distressed for them, he was angry: Aunt Dorry? God damn it, can't a fellow go off to war without all his female relatives running after him?' He was ashamed, of course, but Penitence could have hit him again. They've no idea. They thought of the world as a ringed-off space with women circling it, like an audience, with no other involvement than a spectator's. 'Where is she? With MacGregor?'

'We don't know.'

'Then we'll just have to go and find them. Where's my sword?'

From far away, somewhere among the infinitely changing green of reed and meadow came the boom of a bittern.

'Benedick,' said Penitence. Her voice failed and she had to try again. 'Benedick. Out there is a river called the Parrett. On its estuary tomorrow night a boat will be waiting to take you back to the Netherlands. Tomorrow night you will be aboard the sodding thing. I want that clearly understood. To the Netherlands. You and your father.'

He'd been almost smiling until then. 'What father? Why do you keep on about my father? He's dead.'

She didn't make it elaborate, just told him that during the Great Plague she and his father had been thrown together, that he had been called away on service to his country, most of it spent in a French prison, without knowing he'd left a son behind him.

He was quiet for a long time, digesting it. She began to worry that she wouldn't be ready for when Sir Ostyn Edwards came to fetch her to take her to the Assizes, but she dared not interrupt the boy's thoughts.

'Do you know,' he said, 'I always knew my father wasn't dead. Your voice would change as you said it. I thought he might be Prince Rupert.'

'No.' How sad. You never knew what was harboured in the mind of your child. 'Oh.'

She said brightly and ridiculously, 'The Viscount is very nice. His family name is Torrington. Anthony Torrington. 1 call him Henry.' He's got good teeth. She began to get irritated. I'm not selling a horse.

'Why?'

'Does it matter?' Do you want a father or don't you?

'Will he make an honest woman of you?'

'I beg your pardon?' She was furious now.

'Is he going to marry you? Will he acknowledge me?'

That's all she was to her own son, a chattel to be passed around for his benefit. 'No,' she shouted, 'because I won't marry him. I'm going to stay a dishonest woman like I've always been, and if you don't like it you can go hang yourself and save King James the trouble.' She stalked over to her dressing-table, adjusted the sliver of silvered glass that was the only decently sized piece left of the mirror, and began to brush her hair.

After a while she felt her son's hands on her shoulders and looked up at him. He was as tall as his father. 'I suppose,' he said, 'you haven't done badly. For a dishonest woman.'

'Thank you.' She patted his hands. 'And no more nonsense about trying to find Aunt Dorinda. I can do that better alone. You're a risk to me as long as you're in the country. I'll fare better when you're out of it.'

'Yes, I see that. But it was typical of her, wasn't it? To risk her life for mine? She and MacGregor were always so kind to me.'

Was it? Were they?' How unheeding of other people's virtues and relationships she had been as she'd plotted and clawed her way through her life.

'A viscount,' mused Benedick. 'Not so bad a choice for a father after all. What does that make me?'

She couldn't resist it. 'A bastard.'

Chapter 5

'Proper little maypole,' said Sir Ostyn admiringly as he helped Penitence into his carriage. 'A sight for sore eyes, you are, my 'andsome. Us'll have a tumble together on the way.'

Penitence stood on the step and looked down at him. 'I'm prepared to go in my donkey cart,' she warned him. He'd recovered some of his confidence since the trouncing it had taken at the hands of Nevis. She was glad for him, but not enough to have to put up with being fumbled all the way to Taunton. 'Besides, Prue's coming with us.'

He was not put out. 'Tumble the maid too, if ee like.'

She had dressed carefully in her best and known as she did it that she was inviting trouble. She had so overplayed the coquette for Jeffreys the last time she and the Lord Chief Justice met that he would more than likely wish to bed her after their dinner together tonight.