The Vizard Mask (88 page)

As he went on talking his voice faded against the sickness rising in Penitence. This is where we stack them. Unwillingly, she was lifted up and squeezed into her allotted space on the shelves. Her right hand and leg were shackled to someone else's left hand and leg. She lay in a space smaller than a corpse's in a coffin. The wood of the shelf above hers almost touched her nose. Her body bucked with the rise and fall of the ship, water poured in through the holes in the cargo cover and ordure from the slave above dripped down on to her stomach and legs ...

She was clawing at the ladder, fighting to get into the air, holding on to the canvas on a boom, retching.

When she could next take notice of anything, Henrietta was wafting a handkerchief back and forth in front of her face as if lack of air had been her trouble while Mr Spragge, more astute, was explaining that such over-sensitivity was unnecessary; that discomfort wasn't the same for blacks as for whites. 'They don't feel the same privation. And when they get to the plantations they are so happy. Henrietta, dear one, tell Mrs Hughes of our voyage to the Barbados and how happy the negroes were in their new home.'

Henrietta looked around as if trying to recall the voyage. 'Yes, indeed,' she said. 'They were very happy. Except that I thought it very odd to see the black cooks chained to the fireplaces.'

'You see, Mrs Hughes, they're not the same as us ...'

'They are' she whispered. 'They are.' She could see Peter's black suffering face as he watched with her over the dying Rupert. She turned on Spragge so that he recoiled and bumped his head on the boom. 'You would not do this if Prince Rupert were alive.'

He blinked, genuinely puzzled. 'Why would we not? I don't think you understand, Mrs Hughes. Slaves, sugar, ships — they are the raison d'etre of the Company. Your ... His Highness was one of its founders.'

'No,' she said, 'Rupert didn't know of it.'

As he protested, she pulled herself together, pushed him and Henrietta away, wiped her mouth, tied the ribbons of her hat more firmly under her chin and set off for the gangplank. At the taffrail gate she swayed for a moment. 'He didn't know of it. Not Rupert.'

Penitence never remembered finding the livery stable and her horse, though the houses she passed stayed in her memory.

Sugar houses, pretending their roofs were gingerbread and their mullions sticks of barley-sugar when in fact their foundations stood in human blood, like the skeletons of baby-sacrifices found under ancient hearthstones.

Not Rupert.

She stayed a wordless night in the barn at Lower Langford and didn't remember that either. She hitched the cart to the horse and drove it south, only vaguely aware of what she was doing or the countryside she passed through.

What has happened? Why do I feel like this? It wasn't as if she had not known of slavery, but it had always been out there, as drawing and quartering had been out there until she had been present at its execution. Now, whatever damned thing it was that had assisted her to become part Indian, or part eagle, the same thing that had enabled her to become Beatrice and

Desdemona, had entombed her. For one moment she had been slid into a living coffin and seen the lid slam.

Matoonas. Awashonks. Forgive me. She should have given up everything to go and find them, left behind child, protector, comfort, house ... Nothing she sacrificed would have been too much payment to save them from those human stacks. Blocked into a space of inches when they had run free through a thousand square miles, they would shrivel into dust.

In that moment she knew her Indians were dead.

Rupert always knew. She faced it.

Fifty times he must have told her the story of Peter, when he and his brother Maurice had moored in the bay of a village on the Guinea coast and gone ashore to find the villagers fled and a small, bewildered, black boy scrabbling at his knees. 'They thought we were slavers, you see, my dear,' Rupert would always say.

And you were. You took Peter home, Christianized him, you knew he could feel pain, happiness, jealousy, love — above all, love — and you could still join other men in an enterprise to market his brothers and sisters in the same way you would sell cattle or coal.

The cargo was indifferent. Arrived in poor condition.

Rupert rose up before her, stiffly dignified, loving, the most decent man of his generation.

She longed to forgive him but it wasn't her wrong to forgive. If you can't see how great a wrong it is, who else will?

Nobody was equipped to see what she saw. She was the freak. It was her peculiarity to have spent a childhood learning that people of one colour could suffer the same pain as those of another. Her adolescence in the Rookery had seen women bought and sold. Forced from one country to another, from one man to another, the struggle she and other women had waged and lost against their rightlessness opened a window on to universal injustice.

Consignments. Profit. Trade. Applied to human beings, the words were ultimate blasphemy. She knew it. Dorinda had known it. Now, if MacGregor was alive still, he would know it. But who else?

The devastating loneliness of her knowledge dwindled her into an ant crawling across the table-top of the Somerset Levels.

'Aphra.'

The November air took the word from her mouth and froze it into vapour. She watched it drift to join the steam rising from the horse's back. But Aphra would know, had known. The strange woman had divined the indivisibility of freedom; that unless it applied to both sexes and all races it was not freedom at all. Aphra would speak out for it. Nobody would listen, of course, but the great truth would have been said and perhaps one day somebody would hear it.

Still she was as lonely as when she'd first stepped off the ship from Massachusetts into the slums of London. The pale, lowering sun gleamed on bare branches and, along the route, tarred, iron-bound pieces of flesh swung in the light, cold airs with a not unmusical reverberation. She wanted Aphra, the only person in England who would understand her misery. And she wanted MacGregor. Stay alive, MacGregor. With MacGregor saved she would be less lonely for Dorinda and might pay back at least part of the appalling debt she owed them both. She wanted the camaraderie of the Cock and Pie days to rush in and fill the vacuum in which she now lived.

And now she had lost Rupert, or at least the assurance in ultimate human decency which is what Rupert had meant to her. Oh my dear, how could you?

Trundling through her winter landscape, Penitence became colder and freer as the last shackle of her own bondage fell away and she recognized the great and true simplification; that all men, all women, were flawed and that all power, therefore, should be checked and balanced with no person having absolute rule over another

She absolved Rupert; how could he have been expected to see the world as she saw it? But she also absolved herself; the agreement between them had been honoured by both sides during his lifetime but now, in not being what she had thought him, he had forfeited his right to her fidelity after his death.

The light was going fast as she reached the bridge over the Cary at Chedzoy. The rebel piece of flesh on its pole was a dim ornament, like a deformed stone pineapple at the gates to a great house.

Tickle up that old nag, Leddyship, or you'll be spending the night in the Levels,' Matt Fry said to her as she passed.

Penitence neither saw nor heard him.

God damn it, she thought wearily, I could have married Henry after all.

Chapter 2

In asking Parliament to vote him extra money for a bigger standing army, James hit a nerve for the first time.

For one thing, the House of Commons had a traditional suspicion of kings who had their own, strong armies. Also it was full of gentlemen who were proud of the militia, who liked nothing better than putting on their breastplates at weekends and drilling their servants up and down the countryside.

For another thing, during the emergency, the King had appointed army officers who were Roman Catholics. Under the Test Acts — those same laws which had forced James himself to resign as Lord Admiral when he was Duke of York — they held their posts illegally. Not only did James declare that he would not remove such men from their posts, but he wanted the Test Acts and other laws against Dissenters repealed.

Parliament might have nodded at allowing Protestant Nonconformists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers and the like to worship as they pleased, but abolition would also give Roman Catholics freedom. Didn't the King know the country wouldn't stand for that?

The fact that the country's Roman Catholics were well behaved, that there were barely enough of them to form a regiment let alone rule, and that the Pope himself had told his representatives in England to pursue only a moderate and constitutional policy, none of this mattered; no dread went quite so deep into the English psyche as fear of Popery.

The appearance on the throne of the Prince of Darkness himself couldn't horrify the English more than the thought of Roman rule. Indeed, they couldn't distinguish between the two. The massacre of St Bartholomew, the numerous Catholic conspiracies against the life of Good Queen Bess, the Gunpowder Plot, now Louis XIV's assault on his French Protestants after the abrogation of the Treaty of Nantes - all these terrors were attributed to a faith which was seen to free its members from the rules of morality as long as they advanced their Church. It was why Titus Oates's fabrications of Jesuits-under- the-beds during the Popish Plot scare had spread such panic.

Much depended on James recognizing that this deep-seated antipathy of English men and women, high and low, was not to be dispelled by reason nor force.

It appeared that he couldn't. When Parliament proved evasive he showed his displeasure and dissolved it. He was, he said, 'resolved to give liberty of conscience to all Dissenters whatsoever, having ever been against persecution for conscience' sake'. It was a noble sentiment and he backed it up by issuing a general pardon which released 1,200 Quakers as well as Anabaptists from prison.

But a darker strain showed in James's toleration. Protestant ministers, commissioners, administrators and army officers — especially army officers — were finding themselves dismissed and replaced by Roman Catholics.

The alarm bells began to ring.

For a while Society buzzed with the news that the former actress Peg Hughes, Rupert of the Rhine's mistress, had been cast off by the Viscount of Severn and Thames after a brief affair and that the Viscount had also quarrelled with the King and gone across the water to offer his services to Prince William of Orange. Then, other more important matters attracting its attention, Society forgot them both.

Penitence spent the next three years on her Priory estate trying to attract as little attention as possible. While it could not be proved that she'd had a hand in helping Monmouth rebels escape justice, the events of the summer of 1685 had done her reputation no good and she needed to retrieve it if her daughter and foster-child were to be received into Society without the doubtful repute of their mother staining their chances.

Mistress Palmer took the news of Dorinda's death with the philosophic detachment of the aged. 'Lord keep her. There's another Dog Yarder gone. Well, we all got to go some time.'

Tongs, however, grieved more deeply for her mother and father than Penitence had expected, considering that in the last year or two she had seen them so little. It was no good promising her that MacGregor would return one day — he hadn't. No good, either, to put up a memorial to her mother in order to give the child a focus for her grief since Dorinda's body had gone into a quicklime pit along with other prisoners and, as she'd died a suspect rebel, was refused commemoration.

It took two years, the intervention of Aphra Behn, the Earl of Craven and £300, for Penitence to receive permission to put up a tablet to her friend in the church at Athelzoy.

The Reverend Boreman, who was becoming old and inflexible, wanted it inscribed with the words: 'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.'

Penitence's anger was remembered by all those who witnessed it: 'I won't have her judged. I won't have her judged. Do you hear me?' More and more it seemed to her that if their only choice was between starvation and sale, the lot of poor Englishwomen was no better than a slave's. 'Let anybody, anybody, fling a stone at her and it'll get flung back right in their bloody eye.'

In the end Dorinda's tablet bore the legend: 'No greater love than this'.

Penitence was becoming as short-tempered as she was short-staffed. The blood-letting of the Assizes, the transportations and deaths in prison had taken their toll of the young, male population, while feeding a billeted army was costing the West Country dear. There weren't enough labourers to keep the Levels well drained and that first winter after the rebellion saw the Parrett flood the moors as it hadn't for years, drowning cattle and winter crops. Penitence was only able to plant a few acres of teasels with the manpower available which meant that she was going to lose her markets in the North of England. She watched her yew chessmen become merely untidy bushes because there was nobody to topiary them.

Worst of all, she had to watch Prue's young face set into intolerant and bitter lines as the girl found her only comfort in the Lord of vengeance who was being increasingly worshipped in the chapels around Sedgemoor.

The one bright beam into their greyness came through the same grapevine which had informed Penitence of Mudge Ridge's escape. Now she received word that he, too, had reached Holland. Penitence sent back some of her fast- dwindling money and Benedick's address.

After eighteen months she received another letter, this time from across the Atlantic. Once she had waded through the obligatory exhortations for her repentance and recommendations to the Lord for her unclean soul, Uncle Martin settled down into a surprisingly communicative, if unpunctuated, style.