‘Would have been,’ said Alania, simpering at the play-actor, ‘if it hadn’t been for Henry.’
THAT was his name. Henry King.
‘Leaped across the alley, he did,’ went on Alania, ‘leaped. Then tore up one of Prinks’s floorboards to make a bridge for us with his bare hands. His bare hands.’
What else would he use? The man was magical, no doubt, sitting there with his long legs stretched out, his ugly face amused, his good hands, his better-days clothes, but if the girls thought his rescue had been to save them personally, they could think again.
The glimpse of his face as he’d pushed her behind him to confront the men at the foot of the attic stairs had shown love of a fight, some bred-in concept of chivalry which did not exist in her world. He hadn’t done it for her, not for any of them.
Glorying in his agility and the odds, murmuring abuse, one hand with a sword, the other gesturing the mob towards him: the picture was framed in her mind. Now and always. Like a good actor, he had provided an image so beautiful to impose on the other pictures of the terrible night that it might even outlast them. She would take it with her when she set out tomorrow.
Her prejudice had gone, to be replaced by that strange recognition she’d felt as they’d sat on the steps of the Cut together. Whatever history had blown him into Dog Yard, he was familiar to her. Underneath the bravado was desperation at his entrapment in the Rookery; she knew, because it had been her own. There was a level on which she understood the man. She wished she’d had time to dress; wrapped in her bedspread she must look typical Cock and Pie; well, not as typical as Alania and Dorinda, who were allowing theirs to fall open in the area of the chest and legs, but certainly not respectable.
Her Ladyship came in from the Yard. Unpainted, her fat face looked featureless and, for once, her hair was dishevelled. ‘The Watch is rounding them all up for the basket,’ she reported. ‘Jethro Parker and the drayman are back inside the Ship, poor bastards.’
There was a snuffle from the shadows under the clerestory where the only disconsolate, and biggest, figure of the party sat with its head on its knees, sucking raw knuckles. Penitence regarded it with disfavour, finding in it a scapegoat since the mob, the real villain, had been elemental, as blameworthy as an earthquake. Job, the brothel’s physical force, its supposed protector. Much protecting thee did.
She had always considered it disgraceful work for a grown man and now, grown man that he was – and few grew larger than Job – he had failed in it. She’d never forgiven him for ‘The Savage’.
Her Ladyship waddled over to the one remaining table, poured a beaker of Bumpo and took it over to her apple-bully. ‘Weren’t your fault,’ she said. ‘They was too many.’ Wiping his eyes, Job shambled behind her as she walked back to the sofa and sat by her feet, her hand on his head.
Her Ladyship settled herself and looked around her wrecked salon. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that were a to-do.’
The deliberate litotes released a post-mortem. Though the actor was the hero of the hour, there had been other triumphs. Sabina, Dorinda and Phoebe had scored direct hits with their missiles from the clerestory.
‘And what about Prinks with her arrers?’ Penitence found herself the centre of the Cock and Pie’s respect, which warmed her – Dorinda actually patted her admiringly on the back – even while she knew it would confirm her as one of its own in the eyes of the actor.
He was looking at her. ‘O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide,’ he said. ‘More Mistress Amazon than Mistress Boots, it appears. You come from the Americas, I believe?’
Fanny put a heavy arm round Penitence’s shoulders. ‘All the way from New England,’ she said, and she meant well. ‘Right little Puritan when she got here, but we changed all that. One of us now, ain’t you, Prinks?’
‘I am sure she is,’ said the play-actor.
The conversation passed on.
Sir, I am the needlewoman of this establishment. No prostitute, but brought here by circumstance as unfortunate as your own, whatever that may be. She couldn’t say it. For one thing she couldn’t say it, and for another her pride demanded he have as much percipience with regard to her as she for him.
Anyway, it would hurt the girls. Anyway, come the morning they would never see each other again.
Mistress Hicks’s boots clumped on to the floor. ‘Come on, Henry. Take me home. I need me beauty sleep if you don’t.’
Without a blink the actor rose to say his farewells, which he did with much hand-kissing and deprecatory shrugging at the applause.
Her Ladyship curtseyed to him and reverted to her best accent. ‘Any time you wish to avail yourself of the courtesy of the house, sir, my girls will be happy to oblige.’
Penitence, turned away, heard his ‘You are too good, madam, but I am rewarded enough to have been of service’. He offered his landlady his arm. ‘Come to your sleep, Titania.’
When they’d gone, Dorinda said: ‘Gawd, I could eat him.’
Her Ladyship looked at her sharply. ‘Don’t you make no mistake, my girl, he despises us.’
‘He don’t,’ protested Alania. ‘He rescued us. Chatted lovely and all.’
‘He’s a proper nobleman, doing his noblesse obleedge, and God bless him for it. But he still despises us.’
She knows. How does she know?
The brothel-keeper was ushering her brood to bed. ‘Come on, now. Ma Hicks ain’t the only one needing beauty sleep.’ She looked around: ‘Where’s Mary? She ain’t had her Bumpo.’
A search discovered the skivvy to be absent.
‘Last I saw her was when we got her over to Ma Hicks’s,’ said Sabina. ‘She was a trouble on that plank. I thought she’d fall.’
They went out into Dog Yard where constables stood guard over a group of now-quiet rioters waiting in hobbles to be marched off.
‘Where were you when we needed you?’ demanded Her Ladyship. ‘And who’s going to pay for my damage?’
The constable she addressed shrugged.
‘You seen my skivvy?’
Just then they all saw her, emerging from Mistress Hicks’s, staggering so that for a moment they thought she was drunk. She appeared to have gone blind, feeling the air with the palms of her hands as if it were a wall.
‘Mary.’
She turned towards them and fell down.
A constable held Her Ladyship back. ‘Careful.’ Another went over to the figure on the ground and gently lifted the top of the shift with his halberd. He crossed himself. ‘God help us, look at them rings. She’s got it right enough.’
Carefully manoeuvring their halberds under Mary’s armpits, they lifted her to the Cock and Pie and slid her inside its door.
Within the hour, the shutting-up of the Cock and Pie and Mistress Hicks’s, with all their inhabitants, had begun.
Chapter 6
It was the poor’s plague. Like a river obeying gravity in always finding the lowest ground, the Plague observed social laws and did not bother the rich. Approaching the grounds of great houses occupied by few people, it washed back and set off once more along the streets of overcrowded tenements.
Trickling out from St Giles’s, it avoided the meadows that lay north and west, and followed the lines of population down Holborn, through Drury Lane, into St Clement Danes at the City’s western gate, into the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields which, at the end of its long arm, included the royal palace of Whitehall.
On its way along Chancery Lane it passed Lincoln’s Inn only to find that the students, lawyers and barristers had been too quick for it, discharging the readings and fleeing elsewhere, leaving servants in charge. The Plague killed the porter at the gates, and proceeded on its way towards the City.
* * *
‘Item,’ wrote Peter Simkin, ‘a board for the carrying of the dead: 3s.
‘Item. To Harry Weedon, smith, for 108 locks for shutting up: £3 11s.
‘Item. Pails for the carrying of water to shut up persons: 5s 9d.
‘Item. Shrouds…’
His quill jolted as the Reverend Boreman loomed over his shoulder. ‘What do the damned bearers want links for?’ The apothecary was with him.
‘If there’s no reply, Rector,’ said Peter Simkin, not looking up. He was badly behind.
‘No reply to what?’ snapped the Reverend Boreman.
‘No reply from a plague-house,’ explained William Boghurst. ‘It’s becoming all too frequent. There’s no reply to the bearers’ call at night so they have to enter. It usually means all the occupants are dead.’
‘That’s why links and candles. Order of the Examiner,’ added Peter Simkin, still writing.
‘Is it,’ said the Reverend Boreman, flatly. ‘Let us hope the Examiner pays for it.’ The still-living needed the parish’s funds, not the dead.
It was cool in the little vaulted vestry; he’d brought the apothecary in here because it was the only place that was, apart from the church itself – and there the huffing and grunting and creaking and counting from the bell tower as John Gere pulled at the sally got on his nerves. The bell got on his nerves. Tolls for dead men, dead women, dead children. It was tolling away his parish.
At first, when the deep, clear, regular strokes of the passing bell had rung out, men out in the streets had removed their hats in time-honoured courtesy to the dead, but as June came in it had begun to toll nearly all day. On the second of June it was joined in its insistence by the bell of St Martin-in-the-Fields and, further away, that of St Clement Danes, so that men got tired of putting their hats on and off and no longer bothered.
He longed to sit down, but if he did he’d never get up again. ‘Well?’
The apothecary seated himself in the great chair kept for episcopal visits and swung his short legs. Despite the heat, the strings of his close-fitting ancient leather cap were tied in a bow under his chin. ‘I fear I must ask you to extend my apologies to the emergency meeting tonight. I am not at leisure to attend. And I must ask you, Rector, to issue a protest to Magistrate Flesher on my behalf.’
‘Master Flesher will be pleased,’ said the rector.
‘Whether he is or not, I wish my opinion to be on record that as soon as a house is infected, all sound people should be had out of it and not shut up to sicken in their turn. Shutting up is murder. It is against humanity and religion, above all it is against common sense.’ His light voice was unemphatic.
‘We know that. But there’s no money.’ Striding around the vestry, the Reverend Boreman dragged the choir surplices from their pegs. With the choir cancelled for the Plague’s duration, they could be laundered.
‘We are not containing it, Robert.’ William Boghurst might have been commenting on the weather. He was getting on the rector’s nerves.
‘I know that, don’t I?’ Damn, Emmy Smith had died yesterday. Who could he get to do the church laundry now? He bundled the surplices up and kicked them into a corner. ‘What’s the bill this week?’
The parish clerk kept on writing. ‘Near two hundred, Rector.’
‘Where is it?’ It was unlike Simkin to be inexact. ‘It’s Monday. You should be taking it in.’
‘I am, Rector. But until Master Elliot’s back on his feet there’s the churchwardens’ accounts to be finished.’
‘George Elliot won’t be getting back on his feet.’ He’d just come from his churchwarden’s death-bed. The nine tolls John Gere had just rung were his. ‘Where’s the damn Bill?’
Wearily, the parish clerk turned round on his stool. He had ink on his nose. ‘Master Elliot gone? I’m right sorry, Rector. God rest him.’
‘Indeed. What about the Bill?’
‘I farmed it out, Rector. There weren’t no time to copy it proper, it’s got so big, what with being up all night seeing to the relief…’
The Reverend Boreman pulled himself together; they were all doing their best. ‘Nobody blames you, Peter. Who to?’ The number with literary skill had never been high in St Giles, and the Plague was diminishing it fast.
He saw Peter Simkin’s exhausted face crumple. ‘It’s been difficult coping, Rector… I been giving it to Mistress Hurd to write out for me.’
Who the hell was Mistress Hurd? ‘Not that Puritan slut? I thought she was… Good God, man, she’s shut up with the rest of the Cock and Pie.’
William Boghurst intervened. ‘She passes the Bill down in a basket and I have advised Peter Simkin to bake it in his oven to rid it of infection before handling it.’
The Reverend Boreman reminded himself not to breakfast off any more loaves baked by Mistress Simkin. Then he thought: With all the dying, Plague-ridden hands I’ve held these last weeks, what difference does it make?
‘She’s got a neat hand, Rector,’ pleaded Peter Simkin.
Nevertheless, a Puritan who had chosen to live in a notorious brothel… He took a deep breath: ‘Very well, but we will keep this matter from Magistrate Flesher.’ He had to adjust to the inconceivable. He was living through it. ‘And the bishop,’ he added.
As they walked together through the church, the apothecary said: ‘Master Simkin is in need of rest.’
‘So are you. So am I.’
In the porch they braced themselves before going out into the sunlight. The weather was getting on the rector’s nerves. This June was so damnably… jolly. Out of kilter. Like some brash soul being determinedly festive long after the party spirit had gone out of the other guests. The grass needed cutting, but old Ben White had been scythed down himself last week. He said: ‘So you’ve been visiting the Cock and Pie, Master Boghurst.’
‘Professionally.’ The apothecary was undisturbed. ‘My profession, not theirs. As a matter of fact, it is a case in point. It has suffered one death, yet ten souls are imprisoned within it awaiting the inevitable.’
‘Guilty souls.’ The rector looked with disfavour at the dust which was turning his yew trees grey and clouding up from the endless procession of horses and coaches going past his gates on the flight from London to the country. The sound of horses and wheels very nearly drowned the sound of the tolling bell. No wonder that even when he got time to sleep, he couldn’t.
Some of Janet’s roses trailed over the wall from the rectory garden. He should be able to smell them, smell the lavender along the church path that the bees were busy with. Instead the warm air reeked of horse manure and the rank stink of earth from the mounds outlining the two great pits disfiguring this once-blessed place.
He held mass funeral services at night, unbelieving that he was doing it, but doing it. Rebuking the bearers for tipping the bodies in like sacks of rubbish, yet himself becoming more callous, every night more accepting of the unacceptable.
There were so many dead he barely had time for the living. And no money. The 1s 6d a week they paid out of parish funds to the sick and needy wouldn’t keep a cat alive.
A woman framed in the window of a pretty carriage held up by a delay in the traffic was craning her neck to look over the wall at the pits, drumming her gloved fingers on the side of her door. She had rings glittering over her gloves and a scarf over her mouth.
Talk of guilty souls. ‘Have you contributed to the relief of the poor you leave behind, madam?’ he shouted. It had cost 4s 9d – three days’ work – to get those pits dug. Startled, the woman pulled down the carriage blind. They could hear her urging her coachman to drive on. Damn her. He looked up the road, crowded with luggage-laden carriages. Damn them all. ‘I get so angry.’ His heart was pounding.
‘You should rest. Surely, some of them have been generous to the out-parishes. Prince Rupert, the Duchess of York.’
‘Some.’ It was the sense of abandonment. Every time he had to dodge a carriage with a coat of arms on its door, its occupants goggling at the pits as they passed on to safety, he struggled against the impulse to pull them out of it, take them into the sickrooms, make them watch the terror. And sometimes he could have begged them
to take him with them.
* * *
The Rookery had gained a fresh rash of red crosses overnight. Along Butcher’s Cut, Peter Simkin had already counted twelve. Iffen it goes on like this, he thought, it’ll be cheaper to mark houses as don’t have it.
He walked softly, trying not to attract the eyes that would plead through gaps in the boards over the ground-floor windows, and the voices that swore because he wasn’t the apothecary or the relief cart bringing food.
It was hot. The sun made a ragged track of light along the middle of the Cut, intensifying the shadows under the overhang of the upper storeys. One thing, he thought, the Rookery ain’t never been cleaner. The Examiner insisted that laystalls throughout the parish be regularly emptied and rubbish cleared – ‘Item: Street-cleaning: £4s 2d’. The Cut was empty and the quiet outside intensified the sounds coming from each muffled window, the murmuring, the occasional quarrel, children crying and being shouted at.
He tried to imagine those interiors and pictured a squirming dormouse nest. How to afford the food to keep these people? When they obligingly solved the problem by dying, how to afford the cost of burying them?
At the end of the Cut, the figure of a man crossed from one side to another, then back again. He walked with his hands up, his legs jerking him forward in a corkscrew motion on to his own shadow.
Where’s the Watch? Peter Simkin looked round, saw a side alley and escaped down it. He found two watchmen sitting chatting on a stile by the pond in Cow Lane when they should have been patrolling.
Sharply, he ordered them to go and see to the poor soul in the Cut. ‘Another bloody walking corp,’ one of them grumbled. They picked up their grappling hooks and strolled off to do their duty. He’d complain of them to the magistrate at the meeting tonight, but what was the good? The sort of men who were prepared to do their sort of job for the pay the parish was offering were unlikely to be the flower of England.
And they were right; the man in the Cut was a corpse, stumbling its way to its own grave. The Plague was ambulatory; spasms moved its host’s arms and legs like a puppet’s, impelling the dying out of their beds to the open air in a possession that wiped away the personality of the possessed, the last bid of the spirit to keep the body upright and escape the poison which was altering every organ of the body. If they got out into the streets they wandered until they dropped. There’d been one in the High Street yesterday, scattering the few passers-by, causing coaches to stop.
The Vizard Mask Page 12