The Vizard Mask (87 page)

They were pitiful. Unused to London, its ways and its prices, they had already run through most of the money with which they'd hoped to free their children. At Whitehall they were being passed from secretary to secretary, made to wait outside doors — sometimes for days — for agents who never attended to them, or might tomorrow. And all the while the thought of what was happening to their little girls in prison was sending them mad.

Landlord Yeo had lost so much weight Penitence almost hadn't recognized him, while Mrs Yeo's colour was bad and her feet and ankles had swelled alarmingly. 'Iss fay, there's ache in that danged old Whitehall,' she said tiredly to Penitence, not meaning her own pain only, but that of the hundreds of rebels' relatives battering their heads against Whitehall obfuscation in an effort to purchase their loved ones from death or, what was often the same thing, transportation.

Penitence offered the Yeos and some of the other Maids of Taunton parents free accommodation at the Cock and Pie, procured the assistance of the Earl of Craven and John Churchill in the prosecution of their pleas, and advanced them £100 each. Damn Monmouth. 'Damn Monmouth,' she shouted. A pheasant dithering on the bank decided not to cross the track after all and rustled back into the scented, rusty-coloured bracken.

The teasels rebuked Penitence as a foul-mouthed harpy and for that she let them remain undisturbed while another five miles went by before allowing her great-uncle out of them.

At Lower Langford they spent the night with a fellow- preacher of Uncle Martin's. There couldn't have been more double-knocking, passwords and general secrecy than if the man been putting up Monmouth himself. Penitence, tired, demanded her bed which turned out to be in the hay loft of the barn but was at least quiet. The next morning she also demanded hot water and repaired with it back to the barn to make up her face and dress herself in her best blue velvet and sapphire earrings. There were still ten miles to go, this time on horseback, but there would be no opportunity to change before Bristol where she must make a good impression.

She looked carefully into her travelling mirror in the bad November light which was reluctantly seeping into the barn. Stress had caught her up and was showing itself in hollowing cheeks and temples. Old. I'm old. No wonder he doesn't want me. He's making jealousy his excuse to marry somebody young enough to give him children.

'Jezebel,' said Uncle Martin Hughes without heat, coming into the barn, his invariable response to seeing her regard herself in the looking-glass, to her powders and perfumes on the dressing-table, or when she wore earrings or her hair uncapped.

'Fop,' answered Penitence for once. She had provided him with some of Rupert's clothes altered to fit his shorter frame. The black embroidered coat hanging down to his skinny knees with the lace gorget at his throat, the feathered hat and silver-buckled shoes, wore him rather than he them. She grinned.

He said: 'Shamed in the sight of the Lord I be.' But his great-niece detected an interrogative note as if he wanted to know how he looked.

She put Nevis's pistol into a saddle-bag: 'Just in case some highwayman fancies my earrings or your buckles.'

'By the Lord, let un try.' He surprised her. For a moment she was warmed by a sense of comradeship which went as she placed the fur-edged, satin-lined hood of her travelling cape over her hair and he called her 'Jezebel' again. She supposed it was a compliment of sorts; it meant she had committed the sin of looking pretty.

They were leaving the cart until Penitence returned — the teasels were payment for their night's accommodation and the risk the preacher had taken in giving it to them. Martin mounted the horse and Penitence got up behind him and they took the road for Bristol.

Penitence was surprised by the beauty of the houses. Though smaller than London, Bristol ran the capital close in its foreign trade. The shop windows displayed fine hats, silvers and pewters, gilt leather trunks, beaten gold jewellery. Best of all were the cloths: the silks, the various cottons, niccanees, cuttanees, buckshaws, nillias and salempores thrown over chairs and counters glowing like flower gardens behind the dark glass of the shopfronts. 'Jezebel,' intoned Uncle Martin, as he peered in with her.

The inn was called the Blackamoor and Elephant, and, so that illiterates wouldn't miss it, its balcony was decorated by two enormous plaques, one bearing the head of a negro, the other an elephant's. Inside it consisted of corridors, tiny rooms and doors, a puzzle of black wood, redolent with beeswax and old wine. At the mention of her name, a bowing landlord showed them upstairs to the parlour, where a softly spoken, carefully smiling gentleman and his pretty wife were waiting for them. 'Mrs Hughes, a pleasure. I am John Spragge, secretary to the Royal African Company. My wife, Henrietta.'

As Penitence was about to introduce Martin, Mr Spragge held up a hand and smiled her back into line. His whisper was one used by reassuring doctors at a death-bed: 'And this must be Master Smith for whom we are pleased to be arranging a passage.'

'It's kind of you,' she said humbly. The cost of the passage alone was £500 - the Royal African Company wasn't being all that kind — but that it was smuggling out at all a man it must suspect to be a rebel against its king was a cause for gratitude due to the intervention of the Earl of Craven and the fact that Rupert had been a prominent shareholder.

'Not at all, Mrs Hughes.' Mr Spragge beckoned with his discreetly be-ringed fingers at a lurker in the shadows and ordered it to show Mr Smith to his cabin on the Bonaventura. 'You shall have time to say your goodbyes later, Mr Smith,' he confided, 'but perhaps you would like to settle in for now. You will be sailing on the afternoon tide.' His soft voice hoped that would be suitable, but Penitence saw that it didn't matter if it was or wasn't. He wants Uncle Martin away as quickly as possible. She was impressed.

She accepted a dish of excellent coffee from Henrietta who asked vaguely if she'd come far and told her that she and Mr Spragge had four children and lived in a sugar house in Prince Street.

'Sugar house?'

Henrietta looked around for help. 'Mr Spragge says it is a pleasantry to call it so. I think because this is a sugar town built on the sugar trade.' Henrietta seemed spun from sugar herself with her fair, frizzy hair and light, frosted-blue, absent- minded eyes. The pastel flowers appliqued on to her dress looked like marzipan roses.

'On that matter,' said Mr Spragge, soothingly, returning from the door, 'I have the Earl of Craven's permission to try and interest you in investing in our enterprise, Mrs Hughes.' He sat down and paused. Penitence wondered which smile he was going to use now. He seemed to have a selection. It was admiring. 'We in the Company know how much trust our late patron, Prince Rupert, put in you, Mrs Hughes.'

She translated 'put his trust in you' as left you a lot of money'. Elizabeth of Bohemia's necklace. Lord Craven hadn't seen fit to mention to the Royal Africans that it was sold. She inclined her head.

'Have you ever thought, Mrs Hughes, of how even princes in these troubled times can no longer rest assured of traditional income but, like that dear, modern-thinking man, Prince Rupert, must invest in the life-blood of this great country of ours, trade?'

She hadn't, but she knew that for the next hour or so she was going to. Well, it was not unrestful to be plied with coffee, cakes and compliments and listen to ways of earning money with what remained of her inheritance. It had been an expensive year.

The Royal Africans not only made money, it appeared, they practically minted it. They couldn't fail. If one ship in three came in a man . .. begging her pardon, a woman ... sustained no loss. If two came in she was a good gainer. If all three, she was rich for life. And on an average only one ship in five miscarried.

Mr Spragge's smile bared his soul. 'Even I, Mrs Hughes, invested my widower's mite ... beg pardon, Henrietta, a little pleasantry ... and though the cargo was indifferent and reached the We'st Indies in poor condition, the profit on the venture was 38 per cent. Thirty. Eight. Per cent. What think you of that?'

He stifled her answer with a benediction from his hand. 'Wait, Mrs Hughes. There is no need to make a decision at once. Come, bid goodbye to your uncle, look over the Bonaventura — she is the latest addition to our fleet, just commissioned — and then you may wish to meet some other partners of your ... of Prince Rupert.'

Like most people, Penitence had always been excited by dock quaysides. On these Bristolian wharves it was like passing through an olfactory rainbow to walk past the barrels of spices, tobaccos, sugars and wines. In a strange way the unimpressed dockers unloading ivories, apes, tea, coffee and peacocks as if they were everyday goods highlighted the exotic, like the grey, English water lapping against the ornamented, foreign hulls.

But it was from these docks that the transports had left for the Atlantic crossing, packed with rebel Englishmen being carried to their ten years' bondage or, more likely, their death. MacGregor had been among them and his difficult-to-remember face haunted Penitence's mind's eye more, not less, as the days went by, as if Dorinda's ghost were etching it there to remind her of her debt to him.

The Bonaventura, a big ketch, was gleaming new and smelled of wood and lanolin. Uncle Martin Hughes's stern cabin was well fitted; she would have thought it a sight too good for him if she hadn't found, to her consternation, that she was having pangs at the thought of his going.

He, however, was surly: 'These tarpaulins baint going to the West Indies,' he said, accusingly. 'You told me West Indies.'

She turned on Spragge. 'I paid for the West Indies.'

The smile was understanding but held reproof. 'Anxious as we are to oblige a protege of our dear departed prince, Mrs Hughes, you must realize that the Bonauentura has been built to ply between the Guinea Coast and the West Indies. First she must pick up her cargo in Africa before taking it on to Jamaica. It will make but a week or two's difference to Mr Smith's arrival.'

She turned back to Martin Hughes where he had sat himself down on his bunk and got out his Bible. This, then, was the moment of their goodbyes. With thunderous proper feeling, Mr Spragge whispered that he and Henrietta would wait outside while she said them.

Penitence and her great-uncle were left alone. The boat rocked in the wake of some passing ship and she heard the slap of water against the hull. It reminded her of the sound she wished she could forget, of entrails being thrown into the executioner's bucket. I saved you from that at least. 'You'll write and tell me,' she begged him. 'MacGregor first and then the Indians. You'll let me know if you haven't enough money.' Irritating to the last, he put his finger on the line he had appeared to reach, looked up and nodded before returning to scripture.

Impulsively she found herself saying, wishing she wasn't: 'Won't you bless me before you go?' Of all people she had reason to know that water was thicker than blood but, with Martin Hughes's departure, the last of her mother's family would be gone from her for ever and she no nearer to understanding them than the day she left Massachusetts.

'Thee were a colicky babby,' he said, and because she'd been expecting a rebuff she didn't hear what he said for a moment.

'Was I?'

'On this very quayside I bade thee goodbye before thy grandmother took thee to the Americas and thee did sick bile on my best broadcloth.' 'Did I?'

'Admit thy transgression, come to repentance and thee shalt have my blessing.'

All love must be for the Lord; the more affection one saint of the Pure Church felt for another human being, the greater his responsibility to save that soul for the Lord. She supposed he must be admitting some sort of fondness. He'd probably felt the same for her mother. She hadn't come to repentance either. 'Goodbye, Uncle Martin,' she said.

To her chagrin she was blinking back tears as she rejoined the Spragges on deck where sailors were stowing and lashing casks. Above their heads men with bare feet curling like a monkey's ran up and down the ratlines. Spragge busied himself to expound the ship's seaworthiness. It was probably still short of investors. Penitence nodded dumbly as he suggested she might like to see the cargo hold - 'We pride ourselves it is the most up-to-date in the trade' — and followed him down a ladder into a hole that smelled of a carpenter's shop where curls of wood brushed her feet as she stepped down on to planking.

She found herself in a narrow passageway formed by the bulkhead on one side and slatted shelving that took up all the space on the other. If the shelves hadn't extended back so far she would have thought them built for a library — the height between each would have taken a large book although the uprights occurred, apparently unnecessarily, every sixteen inches and had a ring screwed into them which corresponded to a ring in the slats some six foot further in.

The effect of the cubbyholes and new wood would have been pleasant if it hadn't reminded her of Flap Alley. My God, in Newgate human beings used to have to sleep in cubicles only a little bigger than that. She nearly said it aloud, but thought that Mr Spragge would be shocked at a potential investor who'd been in Newgate. Or perhaps he wouldn't. Rebels, criminals — if they had money, the Royal African Company seemed prepared to do business with them.

'Do note, Mrs Hughes, that on a ship of this size we can carry as many as 516. Note too the ventilation overhead ...'

Five hundred and sixteen? She felt goosebumps go down her arms. 'What is it you transport?'

Mr Spragge expelled a what-have-we-been-talking-about breath and fixed on a patient smile. 'Our cargo is slaves, Mrs Hughes. That's the trade. Slaves to Jamaica. This is where we stack them.'

'Excuse me,' she said, 'I meant the cargo you said you'd be plying from Africa to . .. oh, my God.'

Mr Spragge's smile was playfully tolerant of women's ignorance of what wagged the world. 'Mrs Hughes, how do you think the sugar grows, is cut, refined?' He bobbed his raised finger forward, like a schoolmaster. 'Ships, slaves, sugar. Sugar, ships, slaves, the great triangle of navigation. Since 1680 the Royal African Company has shipped 5,000 a year and hopes to ...'