Joyfully watching the dunking from her balcony, Penitence had assumed Mistress Hicks was merely protecting her rent, but Dog Yard saw it as love pure and simple.
Phoebe, watching it with her, said: ‘Gawd Almighty, anyone else she’d a’ ground him for mustard and thrown him out.’
Dorinda and Alania, both infatuated, followed him to the Cockpit. They spent their spare time hanging round the theatre and swallowed, if not the anchor, a large part of the stage; both adorned their faces with patches and drawled my dears at every opportunity. They were seriously thinking of becoming theatre orange-girls. ‘Killigrew took him on, my dear,’ Alania told Penitence in the lofty, non-explanatory way of one who knew who Killigrew was to one who didn’t, ‘to help him with a French play that our Henry’s translated by Molly someone. Did you know our Henry speaks French? My dear, like a native.’
The French being a people associated with Papistry and now, apparently, one which suffered women to write plays, did little to raise Penitence’s estimation of the actor. She was at a loss that others were unable to discern, as she did, the contempt for the Rookery and its people which underlay the man’s supposed charm.
She confided her puzzlement to Phoebe.
‘He don’t belong here, Prinks,’ Phoebe said. ‘If you ask me, he don’t belong in the theatre, neither. One of them as lost their place under Cromwell, I wouldn’t be surprised, and can’t get it back. Acourse he don’t like it. But it ain’t us he looks down on. It’s hisself.’
Penitence recognized the wisdom, though she preferred her dislike. She was discomfited that, as tonight, the thought of him took up so much of her attention. She must uplift it.
She sat down on her bed and took up her Bible, allowing it to fall open where it would. It chose the Song of Solomon, pages the Puritans of her community had regarded as one of the Lord’s oversights and turned over quickly. She had not read it before.
The words wound themselves round her before she could stop them; spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, frankincense and aloes wafted her into the enclosed garden with its sealed fountain. Sometimes it was a woman speaking the words, sometimes a man – and a man with a very unsound attitude to his sister. The beloved came leaping over the hills like a hind to look forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice.
She shut the Bible with a snap. The only enclosed garden round here was Dog Yard, through which the Searcher was even now tapping her way. And the only lattice was the play-actor’s.
What is it? Perhaps the sight of Hyde Park’s beautiful women in beautiful clothes tonight made her want to imitate beauty. Perhaps, tomorrow, she would beg some material from Her Ladyship and make herself a new gown. Black, of course, high-necked, but new.
The impulse to go out into the scented night to find what was calling her was strong, and had to be resisted. Instead, unable to express her agitation in any other form, she laid herself down on her bed, put her hands behind her neck and sang.
Singing had always been her joy. When she sang she didn’t stutter, a phenomenon that had brought more than one beating from her mother, who’d argued that if she could sing freely it was perversity on her part to stutter when she talked.
Usually, she sang psalms, but not tonight. Psalms held no outlet for the unchristian beat in her veins.
When, later, the actor came home, he entered a Dog Yard whose residents sat on their doorsteps in the moonlight, listening to a strong young soprano echo round its court and alleys in a throbbing minor key, singing of corn-planting in a language they did not understand, of a god, Cautantowwit, provider of harvest 3,000 miles away, of young men’s return from winter initiation to a people they had never heard of.
He sat down next to his landlady on her step. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Puritan cat next door,’ said Mistress Hicks. ‘Where’s my rent?’
He handed over the money. ‘Cat?’
‘Cat. Tart. Whore. The one in the hat.’
‘Ah, Mistress Boots.’
‘Don’t know her name. Wauling like a bloody cat, though.’
But they sat on. Springtime had struggled through even to Dog Yard in clumps of valerian sprouting between the cracks in its stones, and in an unsuspected hazel showering catkins over Footloose’s vat. The beggar was propped in the mouth of his huge barrel, swinging his stumps in time to the song. Mistress Parker leaned against a washing-draped crenel on the roof of the Buildings. In a window further down, Mistress Fairley was dreamily breast-feeding two babies at the same time. Along to the left, the Cock and Pie girls had pulled stools on to the flagstones, the better to enjoy the air. Even such Tippins as weren’t off burgling had gathered in unusual silence to drink their ale on the steps of the Ship. It was a rare moment.
‘Odd,’ said the actor. He produced his leather bottle and proffered it to his landlady.
Mistress Hicks drank. ‘Takes all sorts,’ she said. ‘Must be some as fancy her or that Ladyship wouldn’t keep her. She ain’t in the charity business.’
‘I’m sure. But when I was in Paris there were missionary priests from Quebec who had brought back some of their Indian converts to show King Louis. They made them sing. Their song wasn’t dissimilar to hers. Odd that a poor little whore in a Rookery brothel should sing a song of the Iroquois. Rather gloriously, too.’
‘Life’s odd,’ said Mistress Hicks.
They drank to that philosophical pearl.
‘An’ don’t go boozin’ in the Ship for a bit. They got illness. Sam Bryskett’s called in the ’pothecary.’
They drank to Sam Bryskett’s continued health and sat on together, listening.
So passed one of Dog Yard’s rare nights of peace. Its last.
* * *
The next day, the collated Bill of Mortality for all London, its liberties and out-parishes that week was on the desk of the Lord Mayor.
Abortive: 4 … Aged: 45 … Broke her skull by a fall in the street: 1 … Childbed: 28 … Dropsie: 32 … Gout: 1 … Grief: 3 … Lethargy: 1 … Purples: 2 … Quinsie: 5 … Suddenly: 2 … Vomiting: 10 … Wind: 4 … Worms: 20.
The infinitely varied ways in which people could die always fascinated Sir John Lawrence. ‘What’s Purples?’
‘I don’t know, my lord.’
‘No more do I. And Suddenly could mean anything.’ He checked the total. ‘It’s up.’
‘Somewhat, my lord,’ said the clerk to the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks. ‘Been a hard winter.’
Sir John ran his finger down the ‘p’s. ‘Pox in plenty again.’
‘St Giles,’ said the clerk, smugly. ‘It’s always them.’
‘They’re the only ones honest enough to admit it.’ Sir John’s finger went up the column a notch. ‘No Plague.’
‘No, my lord.’
‘Why not?’ Sir John leaned forward over his desk, tapping it. ‘Nat Hodges personally told me he attended three mortal cases in Westminster last Tuesday week. They’re not down here. Why not?’
The clerk to the Clerks shuffled. Cripus, how he hated new brooms; the old Lord Mayor had passed the Bills without a glance. ‘Manifestly, my lord, Westminster’s Searcher said different.’
‘Manifestly,’ said Sir John, catching the word and bouncing it, ‘manifestly, Westminster’s Searcher, like all searchers, couldn’t tell the difference between Plague and Phthisis. Manifestly, for two groats she’d say they were carried off by the choir invisible.’
The clerk to the Clerks wondered why he’d been backed into defending a system which manifestly had its flaws. Because it was the system; always was, always would be. Doctors didn’t record deaths, searchers did.
But Sir John was like that; aggressive, a little man with large ideas. Out to make his mark. He’d try reason. ‘My lord, it’s twenty year since the last bad outbreak. Manifestly’ – oh, Cripus – ‘there’s doctors never seen a case of Plague. The searchers is old women and they got long memories.’
‘They’ve got long pockets.’ The Lord Mayor
glared. ‘You listen to me, Master Clerk. This will be a good mayoral year for London, a great year. If there’s Plague, I’m nipping it in the bud. One clerk hiding a plague spot and I’ll Barbados him so fast he won’t have time to say goodbye. They tell me, as Chief Magistrate. And me first. Is that manifest enough?’
When the Clerks’ clerk had gone, the Lord Mayor’s secretary, who was also his nephew, said gently, ‘Hard on him, my lord.’
‘Him and his manifestly.’ Sir John Lawrence went to the window of the Guildhall, holding up a hand to ward off reproach. ‘It’s not his fault, I know isolated cases crop up occasionally, I know all that. But the thing comes in twenty-year cycles, I know that.’ He whirled round on his little shoes. ‘And so do you. In ’25, again in the mid-’40s. How many thousand?’
Young Simmons said: ‘Before my time, my lord.’
‘It wasn’t before mine.’ He remembered the terror. ‘Men dug their own graves and laid in them to die, knowing their wives couldn’t carry them. Nobody else would touch them.’
Every twenty years. Not this twentieth, for Christ’s dear body. He’d worked for this; alderman, sheriff, staying loyal to young Charles in exile. The first civic dignitary to be knighted after the Restoration – and he’d deserved it. Now with the rightful king back on the throne, and himself – between them they’d give London such days as it hadn’t seen since the time of Dick Whittington. He wouldn’t be robbed of it.
* * *
In the rectory of St Giles-in-the-Fields, the Reverend Boreman broke a long silence. ‘And there’s no possibility it was fever?’
William Boghurst shook his head. ‘The tokens were plain. I was apprentice to my father in the ’25 outbreak. One saw them then.’
The Reverend Boreman persisted. ‘The Searcher says it was rickets.’
‘She’s wrong.’
‘They do say,’ said Peter Simkin, almost to himself, ‘they do say as the Searcher buys meat every day now instead of once a week.’
‘God damn the hag,’ shouted the Reverend Boreman. ‘So it could be rife.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said the apothecary, calmly. ‘The Ship is the most popular inn in the Rookery. And the largest.’
The Reverend Boreman got up and strode to the rectory drawing-room windows which were open to let in the May scents of his garden. It was at its best this time of year. His wife had planted it. ‘Plague,’ he said. He realized he was rubbing his thumb and third finger together, a nervous habit Janet had tried to cure him of. He’d christened all the Bryskett children. Eight? Nine? Red-headed every one. Sad, sad Sam Bryskett, a better fellow than most in the Rookery. God help him.
‘The Lord Mayor’s instructions was to tell him immediate, Rector,’ said Peter Simkin. ‘So’s he could isolate it.’
‘Isolate it? How? The parish hasn’t even a pest-house.’
‘The Worshipful Company’s clerk was telling me as Sir John had plans to take all the healthy out from a plague parish and move all the sufferers in. If it came. Isolate it, like.’
The Reverend Boreman snorted. ‘Easier said than done.’
‘But,’ went on the parish clerk, doggedly, ‘I was also told as how the Privy Council’s sent down orders for shutting-ups.’
The Reverend Boreman was receiving too much information too quickly, but one thing stood out: ‘You mean to tell me, Peter Simkin, that the Privy Council has suspected an epidemic?’
‘Looks like it, Rector.’
‘One imagines that St Giles is not the only parish to have more deaths than usual,’ said the apothecary. ‘It has been suspected, but concealed. Myself,’ he continued, ‘I recommend my electuary antidote, an infusion first compounded by my father which proved highly efficacious. Eightpence an ounce.’
‘Make some up,’ the rector told him. ‘A lot.’ He was putting off the moment that would solidify the phantasm into reality. Suffering, work, responsibility, would come crashing in. He was too old; perhaps he should retire now and let a younger man… die. Oh, God, that was what he would be doing. He was afraid. Christ in heaven, he was afraid. ‘Well, Peter Simkin, be off and alert the Lord Mayor. And the wardmote. Sexton, of course. Tell the parish officers to be here tonight.’
As Simkin went, the rector turned to the apothecary. ‘We must inform Doctor Whaley. He’ll be needed.’
William Boghurst laced his fingers. ‘I called in at the good doctor’s house on my way. He has been called away. Suddenly. With his family. A visit. To his sister who is ailing. In the North.’
‘I see.’ The wall between his garden and the churchyard was covered with Janet’s favourite pink rose. If she’d been alive and the children still at home, would he have emulated Whaley and run for it? But she wasn’t. They weren’t.
The apothecary’s self-righteous little voice was saying: ‘I must take issue with the Privy Council’s policy of shutting up, if that is intended. It did no good in ’25, it will do no good again. It results in even more concealment, to say nothing of flight. Above all, it is unchristian. I go so far as to say it is murder.’
‘No ailing sister, then?’ He turned round and saw the apothecary blink behind his spectacles.
‘As it happens I do have a sister who is, indeed, unwell. She has the rheumatics. Unfortunately, she lives in the parish.’
‘You’ll stay?’
‘Oh yes.’
Boghurst and Boreman, thought the Reverend Boreman. Defenders of St Giles. And who would remember them? Ah well, perhaps God would.
He crossed over to where the apothecary sat and pressed his hands on the thin, prim shoulders. ‘Let us say our prayers, my son,’ he said.
* * *
‘G-g-go?’ Penitence stared at Her Ladyship. ‘W-where shall I g-go?’
‘Listen, will you? We’re busy. A-first Leadenhall Street. Number forty-two. Ask for Master Patterson. He’s a scrivener and my legal man. Say you’ve come for Her Ladyship’s papers. Understand? Her Ladyship’s papers. Then back here and pack your bag. Tomorrow you go.’
‘B-b-but w-where shall I g-go?’ asked Penitence again.
There was knocking from below, and Her Ladyship hurried out.
Penitence stood where she was, waiting, oddly shocked. It was one thing to have been trying to leave the Cock and Pie under her own volition; quite another to be ejected. What have I done? Her sewing had been more than adequate.
It had been a shock in itself to be summoned to Her Ladyship’s bedroom. After the first glance she’d kept her eyes away from the flounced pink voile which framed the chains and fetters decorating the wall beyond the bed.
She winced at Her Ladyship’s agonizingly ladylike vowels floating up the staircase. ‘Not at all, my lord. I understand perfectly. This way, my lord. Can I suggest our Mistress Fanny? Prime of all my rosebuds.’
The busy click of the woman’s heels and the slower march of male boots passed outside the boudoir door on their way along the clerestory.
Her Ladyship came back, puffing, but before she could return to the room there was another knock on the great outside door. She went downstairs again and ushered another client up – this time for Sabina.
Penitence found it puzzling. It was so early. The Cock and Pie’s clientele usually visited under cover of darkness.
Her Ladyship came in and lumbered over to a walnut bureau from which she took a purse. ‘There’s two guineas in that. It’ll keep you till you find work.’
‘W-w-umm-where?’ Penitence asked again.
Her Ladyship’s lips went thin with irritation. ‘Away from London. Go to Taunton and join the rest of the God-botherers. Your aunt came from Taunton. Mention her name at the George in Fore Street.’
It was disconcerting to have her dearest wish materialize in this fashion. She was grateful, but now that it came to it she was floundered by the prospect of change. ‘W-why?’
‘Why what?’ snapped Her Ladyship. She shoved the purse under Penitence’s nose. ‘Here’s your wages. Take it. There won’t be no more.’
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br /> Penitence went into her stammering attitude. Her head went down, her hands fisted. ‘Bu-bu-b-b-umm-bu-but why?’
‘Acause trade’s finished, is why. No more gentlemen, is why. No more sewing, is why.’ Her Ladyship sat down on a stool with a pink cushion. She stared at her hands. ‘From here on the clientele we get won’t care iffen we’re ragged.’
There was another thunderous knock on the outside door. Angrily, Her Ladyship heaved herself up and went to the balustrade outside. ‘You answer it, Job. If he’s sober and can pay, let him in. Tell Mary to show him up to Francesca. It’s her turn.’
Penitence persisted. ‘B-b-but it’s so b-b-b-busy.’
Her Ladyship shut the drawer of the bureau. ‘We’re busy all right.’ She turned on Penitence, who flinched back. ‘You want to know why? We’re busy acause the gentlemen’s got wind of Plague.’
‘P-p-plague?’
Her Ladyship did what she’d never done; she imitated Penitence’s stutter. ‘P-p-plague. Oh, they don’t know there’s Plague at the Ship. But they know there’s Plague around town somewheres.’
Bewildered, Penitence caught at the most immediate fact. ‘The Ship?’
Her Ladyship let out a deep breath. ‘Sam Bryskett’s littlest. Died in the night.’
The littlest. That would be Jenny. Was Jenny. Unseeing, she stretched out her hand and took the purse Her Ladyship held. She was frightened and she would go, of course she would go, and quickly, but this woman, wicked as she might be, had provided a rock for her to cling to these past months.
She found herself saying: ‘W-why don’t you come too?’
Something happened in the brothel-keeper’s large face; she went back to the bureau and stood before it for a second or two before she turned around. Penitence flinched again. How had she offended?
The Vizard Mask Page 9