The Vizard Mask

by The Vizard Mask (retail) (epub)

  ‘Oh ma dear Lord,’ whispered Sir Ostyn to Penitence, ‘if he can treat a witness so, what will he do to Lady Alice?’

  What would he do to me? She was committing the same crime.

  The captain who had found the two rebels hidden in Lady Alice’s house was called to give testimony. The prosecutor was redundant; it was the Lord Chief Justice who did the questioning.

  What a performance. She hadn’t seen a Richard III like it, not even Lacy’s. The man posed, varied his tone, sometimes making his audience laugh, lulling it with gentleness, causing it to jump, repelling, attracting, displaying a brilliance of grasp that kept it stunned.

  The play – Penitence corrected the thought – the case rested on whether or not, when she gave the two men shelter, Lady Alice had known they were rebels. Lady Alice protested that she had not. Penitence wished she would say so with more emphasis; she had aged since the two of them had last supped a dish of tea together, her head shook and her deafness caused her to cup her hand round her ear. Jeffreys had allowed a court official to stand beside her in the dock to repeat everything that was being said. Penitence wished too that Alice had worn less starkly Puritan dress. But she was proud of her; her neighbour was conducting herself with dignity; her face had the blinking composure of the very old.

  Now Jeffreys was summing up – lethally. How could the dame not have known the men were rebels? ‘And if she knew,’ rang out his wonderful voice, ‘neither her age nor her sex are to move you. I charge you, good jurymen, as you will answer at the bar of the Last Judgement, deliver your verdict according to conscience and truth.’

  When the judges and jury retired, the court became bedlam. Penitence heard fors and againsts all around her.

  ‘Always for Dissenters, she was.’

  ‘Kindly old besom yet. And wept for the king when he died.’

  ‘She knew they to be rebels though.’

  ‘’Course she knew, but hiding hunted deer ain’t the same as poaching. ’Tis only womanly. They’ll never burn her.’

  Penitence turned to Sir Ostyn. ‘Burn her? They mean to burn her?’

  His piglike face was miserable.

  ‘’Tis the punishment, Peg.’

  She shook his arm. ‘Burn her? For an act of charity?’ She had forgotten that Alice’s crime was her own, only being able to picture judicial flames scorching up that frail wrinkled body. ‘They’d be too ashamed.’ The witch-finding bonfires of the Interregnum had produced a reluctance among sophisticated people – and, surely Jeffreys, monster though he was, was a sophisticated monster – to return to such barbarism. This was a new age. For all his faults, Charles had encouraged toleration and science. James could not, he could not put the clock back.

  Sir Ostyn hushed her. The court rose as jury and judges came back.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘My lord,’ the chairman of the jury was perplexed and nervous, ‘the men Lady Alice was accused of hiding, they’m not convicted yet. What we’d dearly like to know, my lord, is if ’tis treason to hide a man as hasn’t yet been proved a rebel?’

  ‘It is all the same,’ Jeffreys assured them.

  ‘But we’re not sure she did know them to be rebels, my lord.’ It took great daring.

  In the silence of the court it was possible to hear the bell of St Mary’s Tower ring for one o’clock. There had been no adjournment at midday and the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys was shifting on his bench. The chairman of the jury flinched as if wishing to take cover.

  ‘I cannot conceive,’ shouted Jeffreys, ‘how, in so plain a case, you should even have left the box. If I have not an instant decision, I shall adjourn the case and you shall be locked up all night.’

  ‘See, Peg,’ said Sir Ostyn, as jury and judges left the court again, ‘this is the pity of ut. I’m frit as he’ll have to make an example of the old soul. He’s got more to try at Dorchester, more at Exeter, before he do move on to Wells and Bristol. He’s got to make an example of un here.’

  She didn’t understand. ‘It’s Lady Alice. She’s your neighbour.’

  An usher was trying to edge along the close-packed row of public seats in which they were sitting. He leaned over and whispered: ‘His Chief Lordship asks if Mistress Hughes would wish to take refreshment with him at his chambers in the break.’

  No, Mistress Hughes wouldn’t. But the respectful glances that were being cast at her by all those within range of the whisper brought her to her senses. Whatever happened to Lady Alice, Penitence had her own neck to think of, and the closer she was to Jeffreys, the less likely that same neck – and Benedick’s, and Martin Hughes’s, and Dorinda’s and MacGregor’s – would be subjected to the axe or the rope. She nodded, and got up. ‘Give un my regards, mind,’ said Sir Ostyn.

  Despite the usher clearing the way, it was slow going through the press to the doors. The noise of conversation and argument stopped as the jury filed back again into its box and the judges to their dais.

  Reluctantly, Penitence turned round. The scene was still a stage-set; Jeffreys with his wide, red face and scarlet robes might have emerged, steaming, from a trap door to hell; Lady Alice a study in dry white and black, her head nodding, her eyes focusing perhaps on memories of her long life or her arthritis, everybody’s grandmother.

  ‘Guilty, my lord.’

  Jeffreys sentenced her to be burned alive.

  * * *

  ‘By the Lord, madam,’ said Jeffreys, waving a capon leg, ‘but it refreshes the eye to rest it on your sweet face. What say you, my lords?’

  Justices Wythens and Levinz agreed that it did and got on with eating and drinking at the well-stocked table of the inn next door to the Castle.

  Penitence refused all food, but accepted a glass of wine, hoping it would settle her stomach and stop her hand shaking. She drew the Lord Chief Justice to a corner. ‘Can nothing be done? Can I do nothing to persuade you?’

  Jeffreys frowned. ‘You regret Lady Alice, mistress?’

  ‘I do,’ she told him.

  He said unexpectedly: ‘So do I. But I am the king’s servant and he must be protected. I have pronounced the legal sentence for a traitor, which is what she is.’

  ‘She is so old.’ Penitence took a deep breath. ‘There are neighbours,’ she said meaningfully, ‘perhaps even one’s friends, who have become innocently, maybe foolishly, embroiled in the… the rebellion. If one appealed to you for mercy on them… one’s gratitude, my lord, would be undying.’

  Their eyes met. She knew her timing was wrong; the proper moment to offer him her services would be tonight, after he’d dined well. But the dreadful sentence had added Lady Alice to Penitence’s list as another brand that must – this time literally – be plucked from the burning. She could think of nothing else. Subtlety and craft deserted her with the picture of that harmless old body tied to a stake flickering constantly in her brain. It could be Dorinda’s. It could be Benedick’s.

  ‘Mistress.’ He was no fool. His yellow-streaked eyes held a warning. ‘It is to be hoped you have no such neighbours or friends. Should they be my own brother, I would pronounce guilty men guilty. The king was most grievously endangered. Blood must form such a moat around him as nobody shall cross again.’ His red face approached hers. She could smell sweat and the dust of his wig. ‘However lovely the supplicant, she should make no difference to the sentence. Whether or not it is carried out rests with the king.’ He winked. ‘In that matter, mistress, I shall always be your friend.’

  He began ushering her back to the table. ‘As for Lady Alice, I have ordered her to be given pen, paper and ink and told her to employ them well.’

  ‘She can appeal to the king, you mean?’

  ‘She knows what I mean. It is out of my hands.’

  Penitence felt better. There was no doubt that with any other judge than Jeffreys Lady Alice would have been found not guilty. But as the man saw it, he was doing his job. At least he’d enough humanity to advise Alice to appeal. James would surely show clemency. And she he
rself now knew where she stood; Jeffreys had indicated clearly that he could not be bribed to alter a decision by money or fair words, but that, after he’d made it, his influence with the king might yet be employed – for a consideration.

  He was waiting for her reaction. Aphra’s words on Jeffreys came back to her: You can’t have too many friends in that class. She feared the man but in her circumstances she could not afford him as an enemy. She employed her best stage smile; she wasn’t an actress for nothing.

  He was delighted. ‘This lady,’ he announced to his fellow-judges, ‘is an oasis for us travellers in this benighted desert. Let us drink of her. She shall sing to us, pour her song like nectar over our parched souls.’ Their apathetic response irritated him. ‘If some of us have souls.’ He turned to her. ‘Do we dine together tonight, my dear?’

  Oh God. ‘I fear you may be too laboured, my lord.’

  ‘Too laboured? I would say we are too laboured. We are lighting such a candle of justicial labour as shall never be put out. Some thirteen hundred rebels yet to try and I vow we’ll have sentenced them all within the month if it kills us which, what with constant travel, the smell of rogue ever in our nostrils, and plagued by the stone, it may well.’

  He was using the royal ‘we’, since his companions looked fit and well. He didn’t. His hands clenched occasionally and he winced from pain. The usher had told Penitence that Sir George’s valet had told him that the great judge suffered terrible from the stone. ‘Pissed sixty-three stones on the journey to Taunton. Sixty-three.’

  The amount he was drinking – ‘On doctors’ orders, madam, doctors’ orders’ – was adding a purple tinge to his face. ‘We shall see how many we can try before the day ends. And Lord send they plead guilty. If all the dogs plead not guilty we shall be trying them till Doomsday. We must attempt the blandishment of the king’s mercy offered to them if they plead guilty to save precious time.’

  Justice Wythens, a dry little man, shifted in his chair. ‘I would challenge the legality of offering men an inducement to plead guilty.’

  ‘Would you? Would you?’ Sir George Jeffreys leaned forward.

  Justice Wythens of the King’s Bench leaned back. ‘In view of the fact that some will be sentenced to death just the same…’

  ‘Presbyterians,’ shouted Jeffreys. ‘These are no men but Presbyterian dogs who bared their teeth against their king. There’s no promise binding to such as they. I tell you, we make an example here and now or stand condemned ourselves of failure of duty to our country.’

  The other two judges rose. ‘Time for a whiff of tobacco before we return to the pillory,’ said Levinz. ‘Excuse me, my dear.’

  To be alone with the Lord Chief Justice was alarming; sick or not, the man radiated appetite: ‘And when do you sing for me, Peg? I shall never be too laboured for thee.’ He was reaching for her hand.

  ‘There is an entertainment planned by the burgesses for tomorrow night, my lord.’

  ‘Pox to it. A hall with draughts and tinny trumpets, I know them, I know them. In London I was given an invitation to your house.’

  Sir George’s clerk came in bowing, saying that the court was ready when Sir George was.

  To Penitence’s relief, he rose. ‘Alas, dear madam, this nose must be applied once more to the grindstone.’ He walked her to the door. ‘God give me the strength to do what must be done and do it quickly. Did you hear the Lord Keeper is dead?’

  ‘No. Poor Lord North.’

  ‘Amen. Were I in the king’s sight at this moment the position would be mine. Yet here I drudge among the savages while lesser men conspire against me. Shall I be Lord Keeper, my dear?’

  ‘I know you will.’

  He nodded. ‘And Lord Chancellor hereafter?’

  He is aiming high. ‘I wish you success, my lord.’

  His farewell kisses on her hand went on up her arm, leaving it chicken-flavoured. ‘We shall dine well tonight.’

  Oh, help.

  Back in court it was hotter than ever. The accused, mostly men, though some women, came in batches of a dozen, manacled and chained from foot to foot, four batches an hour for the rest of the afternoon. Some wore the clothes they’d been captured in, others had gangrenous wounds that added to the fetor of the hall. Sir Ostyn sniffed at a pomander. Penitence put her scented handkerchief to her nose and over it scanned the faces carefully in case one of them should be MacGregor’s so changed that she might have difficulty recognizing it.

  None of the women was Dorinda.

  After a while the faces blended into one, a country face stolid with uniform courage. The reading of the charges became a monotonous formality in which only the names changed. Jeffreys lifted his face from his nosegay, and after the barest of consultations with his two colleagues, said over and over again ‘Prisoners at the bar, we find you guilty. Sentenced to death’, and closed his eyes until the next batch came up. The court became restive; wigs of barristers clustered together for chats, like fungi, prosecutors laughing with defenders. ‘Could’ve stayed at home, they buggers,’ said Sir Ostyn, shifting. ‘For all the good they’re doing they could’ve left ut to their clerks.’

  Penitence saw that Prue had somehow struggled through to the crowd at the door and beckoned her over, but she was unable to move for the crush and after a while Penitence lost sight of her again.

  ‘NOT GUILTY?’ With the rest of the court Penitence jerked at the Lord Chief Justice’s shout. He seemed to have been dozing himself; with his wig awry he’d only just become sensible to the plea of the man in the dock before him.

  Penitence had missed hearing the man’s name, but whoever he was he was brave to put forward a plea that would take up Judge George Jeffreys’s time.

  ‘Not guilty?’ He glared at the offender. ‘On what grounds do thee plead not guilty, you viper?’

  The prisoner protested that the witnesses appearing against him weren’t credible. ‘One a Papist, my lord, and one a prostitute…’

  ‘Thou impudent rebel,’ bellowed Jeffreys, ‘to reflect on the king’s evidence. I see thee, villain, I see thee with the halter round thy neck.’

  The accused said he was a good Protestant.

  ‘Protestant?’ shouted the Lord Chief Justice. ‘You mean Presbyterian. I can smell a Presbyterian at forty mile.’

  A character witness for the accused came forward, an immaculate but pitying Tory: ‘My lord, this poor creature is on the parish.’

  The Lord Chief Justice was pleased to grin. ‘Do not trouble yourself,’ he assured the witness, ‘I will ease the parish of the burden.’

  The man was sentenced to death. Jeffreys had got into his stride. He was almost turning up his sleeves. ‘Do we have more not guilties, Master Clerk?’

  Most extraordinarily, they did. With the example of the sentence pronounced on the Protestant pauper, not to mention on Lady Alice Lisle, there were yet dogged men in the cells of Taunton Castle who believed that they were innocent and that Judge Jeffreys would find them so.

  With relief Penitence realized that if the court was to work through today’s list it would be sitting far into the night and therefore too late for her to dine with the Chief Justice. It was also too late for her to get home across Sedgemoor before dark.

  ‘Not to worry, my boody,’ said Sir Ostyn. ‘Your ’andsome lover’s arranged it. We’m invited to stay at Sir Roger’s. ’Tis more convenient. Prue and all, more’s the pity, or we could have shared a bed.’ He gestured around the courtroom. ‘Wouldn’t want to miss tomorrow’s show by going back home, would us?’

  Penitence accepted gratefully and smiled at his perpetual joke that they were lovers. The Pascoes had a splendid house not far away from the Assize Hall in North Street. She even forgave Ostyn’s description of men and women on trial for their lives as ‘a show’ because she too felt the elements of its drama. She had not seen wretches clinging to the dreadful bar of judgement; she had seen actors.

  But she could stand no more of it. Tomorrow she would
return to the Priory, unsuccessful in her feeble attempt to seduce the chief actor himself, but only too grateful that she had not had to undergo the ordeal of his tiring-room.

  Later that night Prue came to her room at the Pascoes’ in tears, begging her to plead with Jeffreys for the life of Barnabas Turvey, the young weaver of Chedzoy.

  ‘I love un, oh I love un,’ wept Prue, ‘I didn’t know until I saw un in the dock looking so pale.’

  ‘He was in the dock? Today? Did he plead guilty?’ She couldn’t remember the name, but there had been so many. ‘Prue, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘That bull of Bashing dared sentence un to death. You got to save un, Penitence.’ No more ‘Your Ladyship’. It was the democratic appeal from one woman to another, implicit in it the reminder that Mudge had saved Benedick.

  Penitence told the girl about Jeffreys. ‘He said if it were his own brother who’d been proved guilty, he could do nothing. And your Barnabas pleaded guilty.’

  Unworthily, she thanked her God that she’d had that conversation with Jeffreys. If she hadn’t she knew that, for Prue’s sake, she would have had to approach him again tonight.

  ‘He were told to plead.’ Prue had managed to persuade a gaoler she knew to let her speak to her beloved through the bars of his cell. ‘Deputy prosecutor he said he was, offered un his life if he spoke guilty, all of them their lives. To save time, he said.’

  Penitence put the girl into her bed, and climbed in with her. ‘Then he’ll keep his life. Some prison, perhaps, and then he’ll be free.’

  ‘But they sentenced un to death,’ wailed Prue.

  ‘A formality,’ said Penitence, believing it. Also she was tired. It had been a long day, one of many long days since her secret room had become occupied. She had so many people to worry about that Prue’s weaver came well down the list. She stroked the fair curls off Prue’s forehead to persuade her to sleep, and slept herself.

  In the morning the girl had gone, and when Penitence, eager to get home, came downstairs to search for her, Lady Pascoe evaded her questions. ‘Ah think the maid did see somebody she knows.’