With her status among her own kind so low, she had tried to lord it over the Squakheag, imagining herself walking down the main, and only, street of Springfield leading a file of red men and women converted to the pure religion by the fluency of Penitence Hurd.
It hadn’t happened. She had preached to them, often translating word for word the latest of the Reverend Block’s sermons. They had listened with their usual courtesy and then told her of their own gods, who could fly, who walked on four legs and conversed with humans and beasts alike. As far as interest went, the Squakheag won every time. Her starved imagination fell on their stories like a wolf on a leg of pork.
‘If thee must make friends of the tawnee, Penitence Hurd, let it be the praying tawnee, not the savage,’ said her mother. But it was the savages who were fun.
The praying Indians were merely diminished versions of the Puritans who had converted them. They lived in broken-down huts on the edge of white villages, wore the Puritans’ castoffs, attended services at the meeting-house and shouted obedient hallelujahs. The Puritans patronized them, used them as labourers and fined them when they got drunk, which they frequently did.
The unchristened Indians lived in their own places, outnumbering the whites, hunting their old trails, tilling their fields, skimming up and down their rivers, interlacing the New World with an ancient ownership which uneasily reminded the Puritans that, though the Lord had provided them with Zion, they were still interlopers in it.
There had been goodwill on both sides, despite the knowledge, perhaps because of the knowledge, that it was fragile. Her grandfather had paid a fair price for the land on which he’d built his trading post, as the General Court of Massachusetts had insisted he should.
But the two cultures were impossible to reconcile. The Squakheag, like other Indian tribes, were incapable of understanding the Puritan concept of land ownership. How could earth and water belong to anybody? You hunted it, fished it, tilled it, but you couldn’t keep it to yourself.
When she was six her grandfather had taken her downriver to view the pasture he’d bought the year before, and found Umpachala and his family weeding the Indian corn they had planted on it.
Her grandfather prayed for patience. ‘Tell these heathens this is my pasture.’ He had never mastered Algonquian. Penitence delighted in a language in which she didn’t stutter and had learned it from the post’s Indian customers almost before she could speak English. She sang: ‘My grandfather reminds you, O my uncle, that he paid Awashonks for this land.’
Umpachala had acted amazement, staggering back with his arms out wide. ‘He was not using it, little one. How, therefore, was it his?’
The incident passed without trouble that time because the Squakheag were suppliers of the furs Ezekiel Hurd sold in his trading post. He was an ambitious man and in depending on the Squakheag for much of his business he was forced to depend on Penitence. More than once he kept her away from school to take her with him into Indian territory so that she could interpret trade agreements. When he was overtaken by the rheumatics which plagued his later years, he sent her in alone. Her mother and grandmother disapproved, and the Reverend Block had warned against it. ‘Fraternizing with the heathen imperils the child’s soul, Ezekiel.’
‘The Lord has freed the child’s tongue to talk easily with the heathen,’ Penitence’s grandfather pointed out. ‘Through her I may spread the Word among them. And wilt thou deny me the instrument He has provided in order that I may flourish in this wilderness?’ The Reverend Block would have done so if he could, but Ezekiel was a powerful man in the community. The neighbours were censorious at first, though they got used to it and even called on Penitence themselves when they needed some translation. They were frontiersmen; sexual demarcations broke down where all hands, whether male or female, were needed. Tagging women as the weaker sex was difficult in a country where they laboured in the fields and had to carry guns against depredations from bear, an enraged moose or an Iroquois raiding party.
And it had to be acknowledged that socializing with the Squakheag, while it would do Penitence no moral good, wouldn’t harm her physically. Rape of a white woman was unknown; they occasionally beat their own women – and as frequently got beaten back – but there was a strong taboo against rape. It was one of the few crimes of which the Puritans couldn’t accuse even the dreadful Iroquois.
Already set apart by her stutter, through her liking for the Indians, and theirs for her, Penitence increased the suspicion in which her community held her. She was peculiar. One might trade with the savages: one did not have to be sociable. Her classmates called her ‘Squaw-squaw Pen’.
Denied companionship by her own kind, she found it among the Squakheag who called her Taupowau, the wise talker, and adopted her into the tribe.
At the end they’d offered to fight for her.
They had sat in a circle outside Awashonks’s lodge – Indians always made a circle – Awashonks, Penitence, Matoonas, Sosomon, the chief, and Quequelett. Sosomon was still angry at the Reverend Block’s threat to bring soldiers. ‘He has insulted me, the bandy-legged wotawquenange.’
‘He insulted me,’ said Penitence. She was trying to maintain the calm necessary to an Indian council, but she was beginning to panic. The fire at the trading post had killed her family and might well kill her by extension. The Puritan community had known her all her life. It hadn’t liked her much, but it couldn’t, she was sure it couldn’t, be made to believe she was a witch. Could it?
It had been a bad year. A murrain had killed a third of the cattle, lack of rain had rusted the wheat, there had been a string of accidents. The Springfield community was nervous. Even before the fire the Reverend Block had said the Lord was punishing them, ascribing it to the usual transgressions, Sabbath-breaking, unclean thinking, etc., but if he now put it to the congregation that the cause was due to a witch in its midst…
The sun was coming up over Pemawachuatuck, outlining the twisted mountain in a fringe of yellow. Women were lighting their breakfast fires and the smoke was rising in undisturbed threads all over the village.
‘Do the Owanus kill witches?’ asked Awashonks.
‘Yes.’ They’d burned one over the other side of the Bay Colony the year before. The woman had also been a heretic, a Quaker, and her execution had been greeted with general approval. Now Penitence panicked. ‘He can’t. He knows I’m not. He knows I didn’t fire the house. It was an accident. I wasn’t there. I was here. Grandmother was always knocking candles over.’
Young Matoonas leaped up. ‘I am a pniese. I drank the bitter herbs, disgorged, and drank them again in my own vomit. I have made covenant with the god Hobbamock. I am known by my courage and boldness. I shall challenge the Owanus’ priest to combat with hatchets to prove my sister’s honour.’
‘Oh, be quiet,’ everyone said. He was Penitence’s spiritual younger brother, he’d taught her hunting, fishing, woodcraft; she loved him, but he could be a pain when he started boasting.
‘He can’t burn me,’ Penitence said again. ‘Can he?’
‘He’s frightened of you,’ said Awashonks. ‘He might.’
He might. The Puritans could not allow the impropriety of one of their number living among Indians. They were forcing the Reverend Block to get her back, but Awashonks was right – he was afraid she would denounce him as a lecher. He had to get in his own denunciation first.
The council relapsed into silence. She smelled wood-smoke, dung, river, the grease on her companions’ hair. She was being isolated here by her own people. They’d trained her to feel revulsion for these Indians, and sometimes she did. She felt it now. Sosomon looked ridiculous with black paint on his face to disguise his amiability; Matoonas was ridiculous in his pride in an initiation which involved beating his shins with a stick until he could hardly stand, running through snow from sun to sun and drinking his own drugged vomit. And how could she trust in the wisdom of Awashonks, an old woman who wore a sachet of asafoetida round her neck to war
d off evil spirits?
Sosomon said: ‘Hear me. Taupowau is my adopted grandchild. She has helped us in the past and now she appeals for help. If the soldiers come to take her away, we shall fight for her. I have spoken.’ But like everybody else, he looked at Awashonks out of the corner of his eye and waited to see what she said.
‘She can stay and we will fight,’ said Awashonks. She had the high voice that belonged to very old women and very small children. ‘If that is what she wants.’
Down on the river bank the calls of waders were breaking into the nothingness of dawn. The sky hadn’t yet gained colour and the moon was an eerie disc waiting to disappear. Penitence dragged her eyes away from it to look at the face of Awashonks the sachem. She looks like a pickled onion.
It will be war, said Awashonks’s button eyes. Neither side wants it: each side knows it will come. Sooner or later white and red will become tired of wondering how much better it would be if the other disappeared. Something will snap the tension in which we exist. Will it be you?
The Puritans would win. Awashonks had always known it; Penitence knew it in that moment. They might be fewer in number, but their intensity was greater. So was their god. Perhaps not now, certainly not over her, but soon the untidy duality of culture in which she had grown up would disintegrate and out of it would come a neat, unvaried world.
If she went away now and left them all behind she wouldn’t see it happen. If she didn’t see it, it wouldn’t happen.
Politely, she’d got up and declined their offer. She’d thanked them. ‘But I shall go back to the Old Country and search for my aunt.’
They had equipped her with the bead bag and packed it with pipes and their best tobacco, with the small hunting bow Matoonas had taught her to use, with Sosomon’s best knife and all the wampum they had.
The Farewell had taken an entire day. She’d sat impatiently by the fire in the ceremonial ring while they danced the Quatchet, the going-away dance. At the feast they’d fed her with sustaining food, sutsguttahhash with green squash, Jerusalem artichokes with walnuts, fish chowder with wild leeks, and juicy, black thimbleberries.
Hurry, hurry. Let me go before you disappear.
That night she’d lain down on the wide shelf that ran along three sides of Awashonks’s lodge, watching the light from the embers of the fire outside on the crazy patterning of baskets, gourds, turtleshell scoops and baked clay pots hanging from the rafters, the fetishes of children’s gods. The silence from the mound of blankets on the far-side shelf suggested that Awashonks couldn’t sleep either.
In the morning she and Matoonas had loaded his canoe with beaver pelts and gone north to the river’s confluence with the Quintatucquet, where they’d turned south and slipped past the tiny Puritan settlements on the banks until they reached the estuary.
Master Endicott, an old trading partner of her grandfather, had given her passage in return for the beaver pelts. The Lord re-established Himself among the pretty, white spires of the meeting-houses standing against the enamel blue of the sky. His commands were audible in the Customs bells ringing out to announce ships’ arrivals and departures and in the guns from the blockhouse warning incoming vessels to anchor for inspection.
Returned to the society of black-clad, high-hatted men and women, she’d become ashamed of the heathenish bead pectoral on Matoonas’s bare chest and the eagle’s feather drooping from his hair, and had refused to let him see her off. She’d given him one wave as he’d started the long journey back up the Quintatucquet and then turned away.
The Penitence now lying on an attic bed moaned in spiritual pain at that Penitence’s ingratitude.
Somebody else moaned, as if in sympathy. She sat up. There was squeaking too; steady rhythmic squeaking like a bed-frame protesting when you jumped up and down on it. She got out of bed and picked up her candle. The noise was coming from beneath her floorboards, from the next floor down where… oh, where the harlots’ bedrooms were.
The moans became a wail, then an excited crescendo of profanity.
Penitence covered her ears to shut out the sound. Obliterate them, Lord. Send down Thy bolt and pierce these sinners in their uncleanness. Punish these deans and bishops who call the Indians savages.
She fell on her knees. And, Lord, in Thy infinite mercy, guard the people of the Squakheag from all harm.
* * *
Though she’d been late going to bed, Penitence, commanded by the habit of a lifetime, woke up as the night sky began to respond to a sun still below the horizon. During her dreams the previous day’s experiences had enmeshed into an almost frantic need to be clean.
I must wash. This attic, her clothes, her very soul were mired.
She got up, used her chamber pot, then, having wrapped herself in a blanket, carried it downstairs, feeling her way with her other hand.
The greyness coming through the high, east windows of the salon lighted her way along a ghostly clerestory. The place smelled of tobacco, scent and food. The doors of the harlots’ rooms were shut. Were the male fornicators still in them? Did they stay all night or did they return in the early hours to their palaces and cathedrals?
She went through the door at the far end, locating by the snores the room where Kinyans and Job slept, and negotiated the dark cupboard stairs to the kitchen where the embers of a fire in the grate threw out warmth and glow. Something soft touched her leg and she saw that the cats had been allowed into the kitchen and were waiting for her to let them out. Putting the pot on the floor, she drew back the bolts and smelled the air that might have been fresh before it passed the laystall. There was utter silence from the buildings around her, re-emphasizing the Rookery’s godlessness; by this time back home the trading post would have been awake and working.
Cautiously, she crept out into the alley, emptied her pot and left it in the yard while she went into the cold larder to draw water from its well. She returned to the yard and scoured out her pot.
She drew two more buckets from the well, stoked the fire, poured the water into a cauldron and hung it from a jack to warm. Wondering again where the Cock and Pie did its laundry, she sniffed out a clove-scented tub in a cupboard and took a ball of its storax soap.
When the water was ready she lugged it upstairs, bolted her door, stripped, plunged her head into one of the buckets and washed herself from top to toe. After she’d finished she set her undergarments, cap and dress to soak and put on the fresh ones she’d brought in her satchel from America. She felt better; cold, damp – she’d had to rub herself down with the blanket – but better.
The horrors that had manifested themselves the previous night had changed her mind yet again. I must go.
But Penitence Hurd had a careful soul. Undoubtedly she was in the frying pan of hell; however, before she jumped out of it, she had to be sure what temperature of fire awaited her.
She went to her unglazed west window and opened its shutters. Less than six feet away the upper storey of a house loomed towards her. It contained a shuttered window exactly facing hers. She leaned out, looking north along the alley between the houses, and saw it passed the Cock and Pie’s back gate and the laystall before losing itself among more houses. In the other direction were the steps leading down into Dog Yard.
She padded over to the south window. For a moment, as she opened its shutters, she thought she was again facing a brick wall, this time only three feet away. She stepped up and out on to the platform to find that in fact she was on a balcony. The wall, now waist-high, was a parapet formed by the upper part of the Cock and Pie’s peculiar frontage; immediately below her were the medallions, she could see the curve of their blue pottery tops. Further below and to her left was Dog Yard, but a great deal more compelling than that was the view.
The Cock and Pie was the tallest building in the Rookery, and its parish of St Giles the highest point of the West End. The prospect before her, beyond a rickety roofscape, was a panorama of London.
On her few visits to Boston with her gran
dfather, its multiplicity of white-spired churches had been impressive enough; she saw now that it had been a puppy. What lay before her here was the splendid, muscled adult, a coiled, silver-scaled dragon of a city.
The sun rising like a giant orange was giving the morning air such veil-like texture that she could almost rub it between her fingers. Here and there were open spaces where the tops of autumnal trees provided palettes of colour. In between, stacked geometrical confusions of roofs became denser as her eye was led east to where, loomed over by the cathedral and the prissy uprightness of the Tower, they became a squeezed mosaic held by the mould of the City walls. Only the Thames had clear definition; along its bank directly to her south, the streets and gardens were indistinct in a haze from which emerged the chimneys and cupolas of the Strand’s palaces.
She was transfixed by the sense of being waited for. In one of these magical towers there lay an expectation, some marvel, something that accorded to an unknown capability within herself if she could only find out what it was.
But not yet. Contempt had gone, to be replaced by unwilling respect. Sinful it might be, but it was the sin of the very old, a city negligent with wisdom and riches, a city with too much history to care what anybody thought of it, and still worth ferreting in for the wonders it contained.
She felt negligible, provincial, yet excited. To discover whatever it was that beckoned her would need sophistication; London was excluding her and, by excluding her, stimulating the desire to join…
Could she start from here?
Unwillingly, she looked down to see if Dog Yard had been improved by daylight. It hadn’t.
It was too early in Penitence’s experience for her to know that what the area around St Paul’s was to the City of London, Dog Yard was to the Rookery. Anyone with the physique, will-power and sheer luck to survive a Rookery childhood regarded Dog Yard as the next move up. It was its hub, its bourse, the place where you strolled to pick up news and gossip. Just as most of the world’s trade was conducted in the colonnaded loggias of the Royal Exchange, the Rookery’s commerce was concentrated on the cobbles of Dog Yard. The fact that nearly all of it came from theft was neither here nor there; as Will Tippin, Dog Yard’s late pickpocket, had remarked in his speech from the gallows, so did the Royal Exchange’s.
The Vizard Mask Page 5