‘Civility don’t cost nothing, Dorinda,’ said Her Ladyship, levelly.
Dorinda’s grimace indicated that she found it expensive, but from then on she kept her observations to herself, contenting herself with a covert kick at Penitence’s ankle.
Penitence kicked back. At school in Springfield, where she’d been bullied by the best, she’d learned that turning the other cheek merely got that one hit as well. Besides, a true Puritan boot could inflict more damage than a harlot’s slipper. She munched on while Dorinda’s eyes watered.
‘She’ll need a change of duds, though, won’t she, Ladyship?’ asked Phoebe. ‘Hers ain’t suitable, and besides they’re dirty.’
Suitable for what? Penitence clutched the collar of her best durance coat more closely to her neck. Travel-stained it might be, but a wash-tub could better that, and she wasn’t exchanging its bulwark thickness for the flimsy drapes of her fellow-diners.
‘We wear raiment, Phoebe, not duds,’ corrected Her Ladyship. ‘Penitence shall be provided with cloth of her choosing. No spitting, Sabina. And Fanny, we do not wipe greasy hands on the table. What are the finger bowls for?’
Penitence, who’d thought they were for thin clear soup, was glad she hadn’t yet had time to quaff hers. She was confused by the manners in evidence, even while she was prepared to condemn them as effete. The girls were skilled in the use of the fork, an art still in its infancy in Massachusetts. They dabbed their mouths with clean linen napkins. They drank – from glasses, not beakers – with the little finger elegantly raised. All this, she saw, was in close imitation of Her Ladyship, whose eye was quick to notice a breach in etiquette.
Even more confusing was the conversation. These females were preparing for a night’s pursuance of the most abominable of sins, but instead of the lewdness she had expected, Her Ladyship led them on to topics ranging from the weather to the proposed war with the Dutch.
‘Is the Dutch the same as the Frogs?’ asked Fanny.
‘More attention, Fanny, please,’ said Her Ladyship. ‘Supposing the dean chooses you again tonight? Suppose he wants to discuss the war? What’ll you say?’
‘If he does what he done last time, discussing won’t come into it,’ said Fanny. It was the first reference to their trade, the first confirmation that it was their trade, and it appalled Penitence by its lightness. She studied Fanny’s round, young features for the mark of Satan and failed to find in them anything more diabolical than oafishness.
Her Ladyship rapped on the table. ‘May I remind you ladies it’s Saturday? Tableau night. And His Lordship has requested “The Savage”.’
There was a general groan. ‘Not “The Savage”, Ladyship,’ said Phoebe, ‘them feathers gives ’em ideas.’
From the bottom of the table Job complained: ‘And that tannin don’t half aggravate my pimples, Ladyship, and weeks ’a wear off.’
‘Then set to it, young man. There’s the dais and all to get ready.’
Penitence had been at a loss to fit Job into the scheme of things. At one point her neighbour at the table, Phoebe, the most friendly of the bawds, had nodded her head in his direction and said: ‘Job’s our apple-squire’, which left Penitence no wiser. In the shadows of the salon his vast frame had been unnerving, a troll, but the thin, high, unexpected squeak of a voice that came out of his mouth would have shamed any self-respecting troll, while direct candlelight revealed that, though of an alarming brown colour, he was only a little older than herself with an amiability of expression that bordered on the vacuous.
Next to him, Mary, the skivvy, was bouncing up and down with the first animation Penitence had seen in her. ‘Can I be the Maiden, Ladyship? Can I?’
‘No.’
Mary relapsed into a sulk. ‘I obliged last week.’
‘We was busy. Francesca will be the Maiden.’
Dorinda said nastily: ‘Francesca’s always the bloody Maiden.’
Penitence didn’t understand what they were talking about, but if Francesca was the girl opposite her, fair-haired and delicately boned, she would be the natural choice to impersonate a maiden. The other female faces round the table, even Mary’s, though the skivvy could have been no more than fourteen, wore a hard-bitten awareness which, Penitence supposed, was the result of sinning. Francesca’s had the ethereal absent-mindedness of an angel. Surely, she be not a harlot.
Francesca turned her head towards Dorinda and opened her lovely mouth: ‘Fuck yourself, Dory.’
When supper was over and the two of them were left clearing the table, Kinyans caught Penitence’s glances around the kitchen. ‘What you staring at, Goggles? Didn’t expect this, did you?’
She hadn’t. The place was as well kept, larger and better equipped than her grandmother’s. Like all the best farmhouse kitchens, its windows faced east and north, though where, presumably, they had once looked over fields they now faced brick walls and chimneys. The west wall contained a big open fireplace flanked by two brick ovens above which hung every conceivable form of pan and cover, kettle, trivet, skillet, skewer, rake, sieve and mould, all of them burnished to a shine. Hams were smoking in the recesses of the chimney, herbs hung in branches from overhead beams.
Hastily, to show she was unimpressed by anything in this house of sin, she reassumed the disdain which had become her natural expression since she’d entered it. It annoyed Kinyans into giving her a tour of his kingdom. From what he had learned of Penitence’s background from Her Ladyship, he was pleased to employ the fiction that the settlers of the New World had adopted a life of savagery among the Indians. Poking an aggrieved finger into her arm at each revelation, he introduced her to seven variations of roasting jacks and spits, ‘No gobbling your meat raw here’, the salting-table, the brine tubs, the dough trough, and ‘one oven for pastries. See? P-ay-strees. And another oven for bread. What d’you redshanks do? Wind flour and water round a stick and toast it?’
Penitence thought of her grandmother’s manchet, white as a swan’s breast and as soft, of the Indians’ hundred ways of cooking corn, all of them delicious.
Leading off from the kitchen was a two-roomed larder, one for an extensive range of ales and wines as well as butter and milk, the other, which was icy-cold, hung with fowls, fish and joints of meat. The cold – and this was impressive – came from the mouth of a large well.
‘Yah,’ crowed Kinyans, at last seeing the effect, ‘had to scoop your water out the stream, didn’t you?’
They hadn’t, but during the course of her life she must have tramped hundreds of yoked miles to fetch and carry from the inconveniently placed well down by the vegetable patch. On the other hand, she spotted glaring omissions from the Cock and Pie’s utilities. Where was the laundry? The brewhouse? The hen-run? And where was the privy?
Returning to the kitchen she stepped out through its back door. Separated from the houses around by a high brick wall were a few square yards of sour earth being made sourer by a family of cats. A spike-topped gate stood open to the alley on her left and revealed what had been playing a discordant counterpoint to the wholesome fugue of the kitchen. A laystall was niched into the wall of the house opposite spilling rotted vegetables, flies and human excreta into the alley itself.
As she watched, a cat jumped on a dark, sinuous shape and carried the rat back into the Cock and Pie yard to gnaw it.
Can I suffer this? Could she? It was not the filth she objected to but its proximity. Back home the privy had been a decent little lean-to, thirty yards away from the house, containing a bench with backside-shaped holes through which one voided one’s waste into the stream that took it, chuckling, into the Pocumscut which in turn pounded it down the falls and loftily swept off its minuscule remnants to the great Connecticut River and the sea. Back home she could stand at the kitchen door to look out on to hundreds of miles of virgin forest and sniff an air full of pine and balsam. Even when they’d locked her in the wood cellar for some peccadillo or another, she’d known that outside the darkness was the space of
a near-empty continent.
Walls, excreta, rats and cats moved in to form a box, enclosing her, covering her face. She began to gag.
‘Enjoying yourself?’ shouted Kinyans. ‘Get in here and work.’
The Cock and Pie catered, in food, drink and women, for the carriage trade, or, rather, the sedan-chair trade – carriages finding it difficult to manoeuvre in the alleys that led to it. Penitence had thought Her Ladyship’s references to deans and lords to be pretentious nicknaming. Kinyans disabused her. As they worked, he elaborated at length on the fact that the clientele came from what he called ‘the high-game’, much of it ecclesiastic.
‘Here, your hands cold? Then rub them pastry crumbs. Fine, mind. Only last week the bishop, he says to me, Kinyans, he says, your pastry’s ambrosia bedecked with gold. And that’s a proper bishop. And the archdeacon, he’s one for my pemollys. Kinyans, he says, you keep fatiguing your rolling pin on these little coffins, he says, for no egg has a finer burial. That’s noble, that is. No reason why pulpit-drubbers shouldn’t have their froiseys same as other gentry.’
There was no mention of girls, of what went on in the salon and the bedrooms. To hear Kinyans, his cooking was the only reason gentlemen visited the Cock and Pie at all. Penitence could have forgiven them if it had been. The man was an artist.
While Penitence kneaded, sieved, stoked and sweated, instruments jumped into Kinyans’s knobbled hands like magic. A cut, a twist and he’d made a pastry lattice fine as lace. A woodpecker rat-a-tat of chopping, and parsley, sage and mint turned into emerald powder.
Brought up on sustaining, wholesome Puritan cookery she looked amazed on his quivering orange-flavoured creams, the virginal junkets, the godcakes, slices of golden-fried batter on cherries, the pale toffee-coloured gauffres, the oysters, crayfish on their beds of watercress, prune-stuffed chicken slices on their sallet, sticky gingerbread slabs stuck with gilt-headed cloves, the amber marvel he called ‘Open Apple Tart After The Pig’.
As Mary piled them on trays to take them through to the salon where artificial welcoming cries from the girls indicated that their clients were arriving, Penitence resisted the temptation to snatch. Devil’s food, she thought, even as she drooled. To titillate sensual appetite, not to supply good nourishment; finger food for dalliance, sin’s platter – else why should it tempt her into this gastronomic equivalent of lust?
Watching her as she sanded down the chopping block, using elbow grease and both hands, as they cleared up, Kinyans said grudgingly: ‘They taught you to work, them redshanks, I’ll say that. Come here. I got something for you.’
The Reverend Block had said much the same thing, in much the same tone. Carefully, Penitence edged round the table to put it between her and the cook. Kinyans advanced and held out his hand, to reveal he was offering nothing more sinister than a savoury wafer. Loftily, Penitence shook her head. It would enhance her credit with the Lord to deny herself something that was at this very moment being partaken by sinners, however delicious. Indeed, the more delicious, the more credit.
Kinyans was stung. ‘Don’t you go lifting your nose at my froiseys, Miss Prinkum-Prankum. Don’t lift your nose at any of us. Know where you’d be if Her Ladyship hadn’t taken you in? In the shitten-cum-shites. She knows. She’s been there, her and me. Two Somerset dumplings lacking gravy.’ He was whipping himself up. ‘Iffen she’d turned up her nose, we’d be there yet and I ain’t having a vinegar-pissing bare-bones like you look down on her or me. She done what she had to, and she done it wonderful. She’s as rare a woman as ever twanged and the day you better her will be when dead men fart…’
The violence of his anger took Penitence aback, even while she decided it was defensive. Thee is ashamed, Master Kinyans. And rightly. It was time she went to bed. She lit a candle and went.
The route to her attic from the kitchens was by way of a cupboard staircase that came out on the north end of the clerestory. The walkway was in deep shadow but down below there was light, tobacco smoke and the quiet that had human breath in it. They were fornicating down there. Should she look? A true Puritan would pass right along, eschewing the sight of fornication. But what exactly did you do when you fornicated? You-know-what, of course, but what else? She peered over.
She had expected scenes from the farmyard; what she saw was surprisingly sedate. Half a dozen or so men were lounging on the couches, all fully and finely dressed. Two of them wore masks, the others had abandoned them to display faces that were no better and no worse than she had seen judging cattle at Springfield market. They were all old, her grandfather’s age, fiftyish. One was older than that, white-haired, gently featured, not unlike the Reverend Trubridge at Hartford. The bishop? The dean? She could imagine his ascetic face above a pulpit sorrowfully condemning the sin of an adoring congregation.
Her Ladyship was holding a lighted taper to a pipe being smoked by a man whose fat jowls bulged from around the edges of his mask. Dorinda, looking bored, was eating a froisey. The Cock and Pie women, Penitence was relieved to see, had their clothes on, though Fanny and Sabina had regrettably loosened the front of their gowns and seated themselves on two male laps, which they were kneading in a desultory way.
None of them was being paid attention. The men’s eyes were fixed on something hidden from her view by the clerestory’s overhang. The fat man’s masked jaw was so slack his pipe drooped. The ascetic appeared to be contemplating his God. There was a fixed, masculine, breathy silence which made Penitence uncomfortable, reminding her of the Reverend Block before he’d jumped.
Quietly, she crept along the clerestory and leaned over the balustrade to see what godlessness was commanding such concentration.
At the head of the salon a dais had been slid in the space between the staircase and wall and on it, lit by sconces, were Job and Francesca.
She had been expecting some awful idolatry. Oh, what nonsense. Francesca, in wispy white, was stretched on the dais, her hands raised in steepled prayer as if in terror of the figure that bent over her with upraised whip. The impression of fear was abated by her expression which, though lovely, was as bland as it had been at dinner. Penitence wondered how, looking at Job, she could keep a straight face at all.
A bear-skin was slung over one shoulder of his undoubtedly magnificent, if smeary, torso which, in this light, shone orange. His bottom half was in tights, strings of beads hung everywhere, and on top of his shaved head had been stuck a large, somewhat wobbly, plume of yellow feathers. Another plume stuck out from his belt at the back, as with a cock’s tail. If the grimace on his face was meant to be threatening, it wasn’t succeeding. He looked like a badly pruned laburnum.
What nonsense. Her contempt was complete. How could presumably educated men contemplate such mummery to excite themselves? She knew instinctively that was what they were doing; there was a heat rising from the salon that had nothing to do with temperature.
What sort of men took pleasure in a woman threatened? For, despite his absurdity, Job was meant to look threatening. Apart from the whip there was a tomahawk in his belt… a tomahawk. He’s meant to be an Indian. She gripped the balustrade and a great cry came up in her throat. ‘N-n-no. They’re n-n-not—’
Her Ladyship’s head turned up and a cold beam from her eyes sliced across Penitence’s open mouth. ‘Go to bed, pippin,’ she said softly.
As Penitence turned away, she glimpsed Dorinda knuckling her temple, indicating that they had been interrupted by a madwoman.
She limped into her attic, put the candlestick on the floor, and lowered herself on to her bed as if she’d been physically wounded. Nothing she’d seen since she came to this benighted country had lacerated her soul as deeply as the travesty she’d just witnessed, implicating in its tawdriness an innocence which its audience wasn’t fit to understand.
She was homesick for them. She had loved them so much; it had taken exile to realize that they were all she had truly loved.
The candlelight showed the dust on the elm floorboards an
d gave distorted shapes to the saddle beams overhead. Knowing the power of her memory, she had tried not to dwell on thoughts of home, afraid she would be undone, but they crept in with the shadows…
She was in the threshing barn, the playhouse and refuge of her childhood. She could hear the voices of the neighbours and the swish of flails as they helped thresh the Hurd grain. Sun streamed through the barn across the threshing floor and on to the notches cut on the cruck to mark the passage of time and tell her grandfather when to call a halt for dinner. When they went she did not go with them, but climbed up into the straw manger, watching the chaff float in the sunbeams, letting herself turn into the eagle god, Tookenchosin, so that she could flap through the door and up over the orchard until she circled above the river.
It was a magic river, the only one in Massachusetts to flow northwards. Her wings shovelled her up and forwards until she rode the wind without effort and it was the river that ebbed away beneath her. The smell of its depths and the warm pools where weed grew drifted up to the tiny holes above her fierce nose.
Below her a red-brown figure stood on a rock in absolute stillness, its back in a lovely curve as it held a fish-spear poised above the water which reflected it. That would be Wahunsona. Further along, Wetatonmi was singing to a birch tree as she stripped it of its bark to cover her canoe. The Squakheag sang explanations and apologies to trees they were about to hurt.
Now she was high above the Squakheag village on the wide bank where the river began its turn east. From up here the lodges of the village looked like little brown chrysalises. She began the circles of her descent out of cold air into that warm, wood-smoked, bear-greased fellowship.
Oh God, oh God. She shouldn’t have allowed herself to go back. She was being pierced not only by homesickness, but remorse. Why hadn’t she enjoyed them more while she’d had them? There’d always been the remove of superiority, a weighting-down by her responsibility to spread the Word of the Lord among the savages.
The Vizard Mask Page 4