The Vizard Mask

by The Vizard Mask (retail) (epub)

  ‘Always were, dear,’ said Alania, languidly adding another to the apparently infinite number of euphemisms for the female pudenda. ‘Make me one if I buy the silk?’

  Penitence nodded.

  ‘You’re not a bad old bundle, Prinks.’

  She’d left the door of her room open, and in going past it Penitence hesitated. All the girls’ rooms, though small, were equipped with large mirrors which she now knew – another piece of knowledge she could have done without – had other functions than to see if one’s hair was tidy.

  Standing by the open door, Penitence battled with the temptation to look at herself. Not a bad old bundle. Was this how she seemed to others?

  Until now, glimpses of her own reflection had been in buckets of water. Mirrors were vanity. ‘The Devil stares back from the looking-glass.’ Who’d said that? Oh, Reverend Block, the old Bartholomew. On the other hand, though she had cast out the teachings of the Reverend Block, she had not abandoned his God. She was merely in the process of reassessing Him.

  Sternly, she resisted the mirror’s temptation and took herself off to her attic. She would not imperil her soul by narcissism because some coxcomb hadn’t noticed its worth.

  Instead, she went to her balcony. Despite the cold, she had taken to standing here every evening to watch the sun go down over London.

  This time at the end of every day transfixed her. Misery, vileness, crime – nobody knew better than she what went on in the hidden streets. Yet in these moments they were wiped away by distance and a sunset that magicked frosted spires and roofs into pure amber and sent a golden wave along the Thames. Again, tonight more than ever, she felt the sense of expectation.

  A shuffle and tap below drew her attention downwards, back to Dog Yard and its depressing mortality. The Searcher was crossing the court to the Ship Inn steps. It occurred to her that the Searcher was much in evidence these nights.

  Behind her, the attic filled with invective and Dorinda’s bad temper. ‘What are you doing out there, gawdelpus? Get your fun in here. And where’s my ballocking jacket?’

  But by the time Penitence had climbed back into the room, the girl had stopped and was staring out of the side window. ‘Well,’ she said to herself, slowly, ‘and how’s your poor feet?’

  Penitence peered with her. The room across the alley, which had been shuttered since she’d arrived, had become an oblong of candlelight. An unsuspected grate in its far wall held a fire before which they could see the actor. He had divested himself of cloak and hat and was sitting on a chair, his arms behind his head, apparently lost in an unhappy exploration of the cracks in Mistress Hicks’s ceiling.

  Dorinda was appreciative. ‘And who’s that bit of butter and bacon?’

  Penitence shrugged. ‘S-some actor.’

  Firmly, Penitence closed the shutters. Dorinda’s eyes didn’t move. ‘He looks like he looks, and my gentlemen look like my gentlemen. And they say there’s a God.’

  It happened again. She kept getting stabbed by pity at the girls’ weariness with their profession; now even Dorinda, most unlikeable, foulest-mouthed of the trollops, was gnawing at the jaws of the trap.

  She could give the girl a pious ‘Go and sin no more’. But if Dorinda asked: ‘Go where?’ she would be answerless. She’d searched the Bible only to find no solution to that one. The soles of her boots were wearing out in her own attempt to find somewhere else to go, and the jaws of her trap were padded compared with the teeth that held this girl where she was.

  Mildly she said: ‘I’ve near f-f-finished the jacket,’ and Dorinda, recovered, said: ‘About time.’ She stood quiet while Penitence put it on her, smoothing and patting. Dorinda’s jealousy was subsiding; Her Ladyship’s attitude towards Penitence, a wariness that verged on hostility, gave it no cause. It was puzzling; Penitence knew she was repaying Her Ladyship’s charity by hard work; the hostility must be connected not so much with herself as with her aunt. Undoubtedly, Her Ladyship owed a debt to the memory of Margaret Hughes, but had not liked her much.

  The woman’s exploitation of her girls seemed less appalling as Penitence found out what it had saved them from, and there were times when, in her loneliness, Penitence very nearly envied the Cock and Pie’s camaraderie, the sisters-in-arms spirit, which Her Ladyship fostered between her girls and herself without allowing it to lapse into disrespect.

  ‘Not pulpit-bashing tonight?’ asked Dorinda.

  Penitence shook her head. She’d stopped preaching. Sometimes it worried her; was she guilty of what her grandfather had denounced as ‘Anythingarianism’, becoming so tolerant that she no longer possessed any fixed views on right and wrong?

  Well, if she was an Anythingarian, she was still closer to Jesus’s teaching than the Reverend Block’s cut-their-ears-off-and-brand-them school of divinity. She’d learned that much.

  Lord, she was tired; tired of confusion, and the girls who caused it, tired of this cold attic.

  She stood back. ‘P-p-perfect.’

  Dorinda looked round for a looking-glass and found none. She marched over to the shutters and flung them back. ‘Hey, Play-actor.’

  Penitence rushed forward to stop her, but the man was already looking in their direction. He bowed from his chair.

  ‘This is my friend, Penitence,’ said Dorinda.

  The actor bowed again.

  ‘Like my new jacket?’ asked Dorinda, twirling.

  He squinted blearily and nodded. He wanted to be left alone.

  Horrifyingly, Dorinda said: ‘Why don’t you leap over and take it off?’

  He stretched and came to the window. ‘Madam, between you and me is a great gulf fixed: your honour, mine, and that bloody great drop down there. I wish you and your friend richer pickings tonight than my old carcase.’

  He bowed, reached for his bottle, and went back to his chair.

  ‘Well,’ said Dorinda, ‘he put it nice.’

  Penitence wrested the girl’s hands from the shutters and banged them to. ‘H-how c-cccc-could you?’

  Dorinda’s mouth was twisted ‘Let him know he’s neighbour to a cat-house right away,’ she said. ‘Gentlemen like him, they get that look when they find out. So I tell ’em. And ballocks to them.’

  Again that unsuspected vulnerability, and this time complicated with self-punishment. The girl had declared herself a whore on the principle that, being attracted, she must kill the likelihood of attracting. She thrust her face towards Penitence’s. ‘Fancy him yourself, do you?’

  She most certainly did not. But it rankled that such a man should think her a whore. When Dorinda went, she wondered if she should go back to the window and explain. Prithee, sir, I am no prostitute.

  She practised it. ‘Prithee, sir, I am no prostitute.’ It was a peculiarity of her affliction that when she was alone she did not stammer. The ‘p’s came out in beautiful puffs of sound.

  But the statement hung ludicrous in the air, and how much more ludicrous would she appear as she heaved out the terrible syllables in delivering it from her window. Pri-prri-pri, pro-ppro-pro.

  Damned if she did; damned if she didn’t.

  She got angry. Who was this busking mountebank to pity her, either as stutterer or strumpet? What did she, whose soul would be saved on the Day of Judgement, care for the opinion of one who would be sucked, screaming, into the Pit?

  A beautifully enunciated, soul-endangering phrase spoke itself into the attic, alarming its utterer even as she uttered it. ‘Ballocks to him,’ it said.

  Chapter 4

  Mondays were Bills of Mortality days. On Mondays Peter Simkin took himself, an ink pot, a quill, a ruler and paper into the vestry of St Giles’s church and copied from its register of births, marriages and deaths the names of those who had died in his parish in the previous seven days, and why.

  He drew lines for the columns, then checked through the register list for the deaths to write them down in alphabetical order which, since death did not come alphabetically, meant arranging them on a sla
te before he could make the final fair copy. His comfort lay in the fact that all over London, parish clerks like himself were going through the same procedure, though St Giles’s parish, being overcrowded, poorer and more frequently visited by death than others, involved greater work for less pay than theirs.

  Like the rector, he was ashamed by the number of times he had to write ‘Pox’ in the column detailing the cause of death.

  Usually the job took him not quite an hour. On this first Monday of April it took him nearer two. He counted the number of deaths again. Thirty-one. Usually they averaged out at nineteen. He went to the vestry door and called in his rector to show him the list.

  ‘I know,’ said the Reverend Boreman. ‘It’s been a bad winter.’

  ‘Eight fevers,’ Peter pointed out. ‘A deal of fever.’

  The Reverend Boreman shrugged. They were dependent on what the Searcher told them. ‘And how many with the pox this week?’

  Embarrassed, Peter Simkin moved his eyes. Following them, the Reverend Boreman looked over to a dark corner of the vestry where a prim figure sat under the choir surplices. She was here again. Peter Simkin had told him she was inhabiting the Cock and Pie, in which case she’d be cognizant with the word ‘pox’ by now, even though she was not, again according to Simkin, taking part in its raison d’être. He was even inclined to believe it; in that Puritan get-up she could inspire lust only in the religiously deranged. He nodded ‘Mistress’ and received a frigid curtsey in reply.

  ‘The cold,’ he repeated. ‘Things will improve now spring’s here.’

  Doubtfully, Peter Simkin rolled up his list, adjusted his hat and set off for the City, with Penitence loping along at his side. Their acquaintance, renewed by a meeting in the High Street, had led to mutual weekly forays to the City, he to deliver St Giles’s Bill of Mortality to the authorities, she to try to look for new employment.

  At first he’d suggested she approach London’s Puritan communities. ‘They ain’t popular, I grant you,’ he’d said, ‘but they’d find you work.’

  She’d rejected the idea. It was possible the Reverend Block had sent word from the Americas that a certain Penitence Hurd, a stuttering woman, was an arsonist and a witch. She was safer with Peter Simkin, for all that he belonged to the wrong church. The little man had an undemanding, motiveless kindness; in his company she was emboldened to venture the odd sentence. She ventured one now: ‘Rats, t-t-too. A lot of d-d-dead rats.’

  He hadn’t noticed the rats; it was dead humans that worried him.

  Should I tell him about the Searcher? To her certain knowledge, the Searcher had taken two bribes – she was Dog Yarder enough nowadays to think of them as ‘angel’s oil’ – in the past week; one from Dog Yard’s pawnbroker, whose lodger had been found dead in bed, the other from Sam Bryskett, who’d had a customer fall dead on Ship premises. Word had it the corpses were pustulated. Afraid for their business, both men had crossed the Searcher’s palm with silver to report the causes of death as non-infectious.

  But the Plague had died out, surely. And she knew from her own experience that the Searcher could pretend to diagnose Plague in order to encourage silver across her palm. Let sleeping dogs lie. Sleeping corpses, anyway. She liked Sam Bryskett and his red-headed family, and, she was surprised to find, her loyalty to Dog Yard made her reluctant to betray it to an outsider like this parish clerk, nice man though he was.

  Anyway, it wasn’t a day for talking death. Today she would live for ever; everybody would live for ever. She always enjoyed these Monday walks; it was a pleasure to stroll past buildings that gladdened the eye instead of threatening to fall down, to smell coffee-shops and bakeries instead of laystalls. And today London had erupted into spring, as if an apologetic God was trying to make up for His bad winter.

  What had been a stone city became a garden in which buildings dwindled to ornaments set among the greenery; London regained its countryside as drovers came in from the home counties and grazed their flocks of sheep and geese on its open spaces, and cocks crowed the alert to warm, soft dawns.

  She sniffed appreciatively at the combination of blossom, new grass and horse-dung as she and Peter Simkin made their usual detour to Hyde Park, because Peter liked to be able to describe to his wife – a large lady tied to their house in the High Street by an even larger brood of children – what the fashionable were up to. In winter they had gone there to watch the skaters swoop and circle like brilliant-coloured swallows over the frozen Serpentine. Today she was shocked by the maypole, even as she tapped her foot in time to the flutes accompanying the Mayday milkmaids dancing round it and plaiting its bright ribbons.

  Peter Simkin pointed as riders went by. ‘There’s Lady Castlemaine, look, Pen. The king’s friend.’

  The king’s trollop more like. ‘She’s in m-m-m-man’s attire.’

  ‘Fashion, Pen. Fashion.’

  Foppery. Extravagance. Look at the sheen on that plush.Even as she sniffed, Penitence noted the lovely cut of the long-tailed coat for future reference. It would suit Francesca.

  All the way into the City, her Puritan egalitarianism warred with appreciation of beauty; the new stage-coach stations were attracting passengers now that the roads were passable again, even at a shilling per five miles. Mouth-watering pigskin luggage with brass locks was piled on the coach roofs while ladies, clambering inside, lifted gowns to reveal brocaded petticoats and high-heeled, pom-pommed shoes. In the India shop languid men and women sipped tea in an exotic-smelling cave while rolls of Smyrna cottons and Persian silk were flung down for their inspection. Next door, the lace shop frothed with Burgundian, Holland, cut and point-work that shaded from clotted cream to May blossom. ‘I’ll have some of the Flanders for baby’s bib,’ a female customer was saying. ‘Eighteen shillings a yard? Extortion. Oh well, if one must, one must.’

  Eighteen shillings. With eighteen shillings the unknown mother and baby who’d died in Dog Yard would be living yet.

  At Bride Lane they parted. Peter Simkin entered the curlicued portals of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks Hall and handed in the list. The secretary who took it gave it a glance and said: ‘St Giles up again, Master Simkin? More pox, I’ll be bound.’

  But as he dined off steak pie and porter at the Ring o’ Bells in the Vintry, Peter Simkin heard his fellow-clerks from St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster and St Clement Danes admit that their lists were up too.

  ‘Like our Searcher says, the cold nipped ’em,’ said St Clement Danes, and the others agreed.

  The talk turned to the war against the Dutch, but it seemed to Peter Simkin that the steak pie and porter lacked their usual flavour.

  Outside, Penitence was waiting for him. He handed her a thumb-bread he’d saved from dinner. ‘Any luck?’

  Munching, Penitence shook her head. ‘P-p-printing’s out.’

  The week before she had abandoned the idea of sewing as an employment prospect; London was awash with Huguenots escaping from Louis XIV’s persecution, and all of them, as far as she could tell, were in the clothing trade. The answer was always the same: there were more seamstresses than there was work.

  Today she’d tried peddling her other expertise and gone round every printing shop in the area of St Paul’s, to be told they rarely employed journeyman printers and didn’t employ women at all.

  She’d been surprised to discover how few master printers there were. The recent Licensing Act, it appeared, limited their number to thirty-six. ‘Is that L-London?’ She’d asked at Stationers’ Hall. The porter, who was ushering her out, shook his head. ‘Country-wide.’

  A country with only thirty-six printers. And them only allowed to print what they’re told. There’d been more in New England; admittedly they’d mostly been small, apart from the one in Cambridge, but they’d been free. Small wonder there were so many illegal cock-robin shops, like the one in the Rookery’s Goat Alley. She blamed it on the king. Cromwell wouldn’t have stood for it.

  ‘Ain’t you got no other ski
lls?’ asked Peter Simkin, sympathetically. She hadn’t; at least, none that would give her employment. There wasn’t much call in London for tracking moose.

  From her balcony that night Penitence Hurd watched the sun go down. Then she went to bed. Then she got up again and watched the moon come up.

  What is it? What was calling her? What demon down there in the scented night was whispering this itch into her veins?

  Perhaps it was the war. The City that day had throbbed with hatred against the Dutch; merchants grumbling that Norway was nothing more than the United Provinces’ forest, that the Rhine banks and the Dordogne were just Dutch vineyards, that Spain and Ireland grazed Hollandish sheep, that the Bank of Amsterdam dominated trade between the Old and the New Worlds.

  Bartholomew the Dutch. She didn’t give a fig for them, or the war. Some older battle was pulsing in her blood, some unchristian thing which this night had rolled up all the springiness of springtime into a cowslip ball and tossed it into her lap.

  She crossed her attic and opened the shutters of the other window merely to let in more air, and happened to notice, not that she was interested, that the play-actor’s window was in darkness. He hadn’t come back from Drury Lane yet.

  The man was making a considerable impact on Dog Yard, which had taken to him, or, as Penitence thought, been taken in by him. His elaborate speech, which the Yarders would have called ‘high-sniffing’, i.e. supercilious, in anybody else, was offset by his poverty and boozing, familiar conditions which matched their own.

  Mistress Palmer smuggled his washing into the Cock and Pie’s, so that his linen was now laundered at an unknowing Her Ladyship’s expense. Footloose ran or, rather, trundled his errands, Sam Bryskett allowed him free ale on condition he brought his fellow-Thespians to drink at the Ship, which he did. Fulker, the pawnbroker, advanced him cash without pledge and the Tippins not only didn’t rob him, but saw that nobody else did either.

  The most astonishing victim to his charm was Mistress Hicks, though there the conquest was mutual. On the morning when he’d been found slumped over the table at which he wrote far into the night, too drunk to go to the theatre, Mistress Hicks had hauled him downstairs by his hair, dunked it and the rest of his head in the horse-trough and then personally accompanied him to Drury Lane where she had kicked his backside through the door of the Cockpit Theatre. Her threat to do it again had kept him sufficiently sober to do his work ever since.