The Vizard Mask

by The Vizard Mask (retail) (epub)

  ‘Who?’ Damn the wench. This was no time to be renewing acquaintances.

  There was noise and bustle in the street outside, more than usual for such an early hour. Penitence peered through the bottle glass of the Pascoes’ dining-room window to see green distortions of figures hurrying past in the direction of the Castle.

  ‘Ah should’n go, my soul,’ said Lady Pascoe, ‘’twon’t be pretty. They’re starting executing.’

  Penitence stared at her. ‘But they were only sentenced yesterday.’ No interval? No appeal? Even the highwayman Swaveley had been given right of appeal.

  ‘’Twon’t be pretty,’ said Lady Pascoe again. Her face was pale. It was said she’d been a Dissenter herself before Sir Roger married her. ‘I should’n go.’

  Penitence had already gone. The crowd along North Street filtered into the cattle market which was normally held on the green outside the Castle. The crush was so great that Penitence had to ask some people on the steps of a mounting block outside a house if she could stand on it for a moment so that she could look for Prue.

  Over the heads of the crowd she saw a covered market-place – there was one like it in every town, a slated lichened roof supported on stone pillars to keep the weather off the auctioneer. Militiamen were holding the crowd back from a space in front of it in which stood an empty gibbet and, beside it, a dais which had been set with a red table gleaming with badly applied new paint.

  Around and about the square were other spaces where men and women hung with their heads and arms through pillories like still, inelegant statues. In London the crowd would have been pelting them for the joy of throwing things, but Taunton had lost its sense of fun. These were the lucky ones from yesterday, the ones who hadn’t been sentenced to death. Nobody was looking at them.

  Penitence squinted into the early morning sun to make out the design of the yellow flashes on the militia uniforms and saw, with relief, it wasn’t the North Somersets’. Henry wouldn’t let his men do this.

  The attention of the crowd – she had never seen one so quiet – was focused on a cart at the side of the square. A harvest cart, huge, long, rough-wooded, with sloping slatted sides containing a dozen or so men in chains. Around the bottom of the cart, standing on tiptoe so that they could touch the hands of the men through the slats, were women, some screeching, others not. The men were singing.

  Within the shade under the market roof, busy shapes were moving. Smoke issued out into the clear air with the sound of bubbling and the smell of tar, reminding Penitence of fences.

  She got down from the mounting block, and a man, doffing his cap, took back his place. Run away. Let me run away. But one of the women crying around the cart was Prue Ridge.

  It took a while to get to her. People in the crowd were so crammed together and so intent that it was like struggling through a close plantation of saplings. Eventually, she was spewed out in front of the line of militia and had to sidle past their pikes. Edging her way along she stumbled against one of the statue’s plinths and automatically apologized. The man’s head drooping through the hole in the hinged plank about his neck had its eyes half-open. A large piece of paper pinned to his cap, which still bore the rebel green ribbon, read: ‘I am a Monmouth.’

  At the next pillory along – ‘A Monmouth I will love’ – Penitence avoided seeing the face of the girl by passing behind her and saw her back instead. Flies had landed on the blood oozing through the slashes in what had been a flowered cotton dress. An older woman was trying to fan them away with her cap and muttering over and over in a monotone: ‘Don’t fret, maid, don’t fret.’ But her eyes, too, were on the cart.

  Once again, the scene had been designed for theatre; the placing of the statues, the raised podium, the crowd, but in true theatre there were no flies. This, then, was the epilogue to the virtuoso performance she had witnessed yesterday by the white-wigged, scarlet-robed actor on his bench. He gestured and spoke his lines – and the flesh of lesser men and women was torn open and real blood ran out of it.

  There was nowhere she less wanted to go than towards the cart, but the soldier guarding it made no move to stop her reluctant approach towards Prue. Behind the cart, down a side road, she glimpsed horses and the uniform of dragoons, ready in case of trouble.

  Just then the executioner climbed up on to the dais from the shadows of the market and shouted: ‘Next.’ Two militia let down the rear gate of the cart and one of the men in it was made to descend. The singing of the remainder grew louder as he was shuffled towards the dais.

  ‘Come away, Prue.’ Penitence took her by her arm.

  The girl’s other hand was through the slats of the cart, clutching the hem of a young man’s coat. She turned to Penitence, dazed. ‘They promised his life,’ she said. ‘You said as he’d be saved.’

  Some of the men in the cart were wounded but all were singing. Penitence looked up at Prue’s lover and saw a white face that had been nice-looking only a few weeks before. He’s so young. Barnabas Turvey’s splendid throat moved as he shouted the hymn. His eyes, looking down at Prue, were agonized.

  There was an involuntary sound from the crowd as if it were trying to gasp for the man from the cart, now being hauled up by three hangman’s assistants on a rope thrown over the gibbet arm, his legs kicking in the air. They’d undressed him down to his breeches and taken off his chains. The executioner in his black leather hood watched from the dais, inclining his head slightly at the movements and scratching his armpit, like someone having to make a fine judgement.

  As the kicking became feebler he nodded and his assistants eased the rope until the hanged man’s feet touched the ground, then caught him as he buckled, and lifted the half-conscious body on to the table.

  Penitence later remembered that she was surprised the table wasn’t red any more. Somebody had thrown a bucket over it and washed the paint away ready for its next glistening coat.

  Two assistants knelt, holding the hanged man’s legs. The third took the arms and bent them back so that the ribs formed a ridge above the hollow of the man’s belly. At another nod from the executioner, the breeches were pulled off.

  The singing above Penitence grew louder to cover the screams. She buried her head against Prue’s shoulder but heard the rip of the knife, the slap of entrails as they were thrown into a bucket, then the chopping – sounds she’d heard a hundred times in the kitchen back in Massachusetts as her grandmother quartered a chicken.

  She had heard of people being hanged, drawn and quartered but the true enormity of what it entailed had not crossed her mind. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. She cowered before the sacrilege of God-fearing men who dared to take to pieces such a communicating, perpetuating, functioning miracle as another man’s body.

  ‘Next.’

  ‘Wait on,’ came an aggrieved voice from the shadows under the roof, ‘brine bucket’s full. We’m filling another.’ But the cart tail was already being lowered and another man taken to the gibbet. Two more and it would be Barnabas Turvey’s turn.

  ‘Missus.’

  She looked up. The boy was kneeling down so that he could speak through the slats. Her tears blurred her view of his face. It could have been Benedick’s.

  ‘If you’ve pity, missus, take her from here.’

  She sobbed and nodded. His manacled hands were gently peeling Prue’s fingers from his coat, and with all her strength Penitence tugged the girl away. They heard his voice call: ‘Lord bless thee, Prue, and tell un I died a Monmouth.’

  * * *

  In Fore Street, amazingly, a brightly dressed man approached her and doffed his cap as if he and she lived in a normal world.

  ‘Sir George’s major-domo, dear lady,’ he said, and said it again. With her arm around Prue she looked beyond him, unhearing.

  ‘…I see what it is, dear lady, you fear for your provisions. It’s often so, but we bring our own, and a staff.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Have no fear. It will all be arranged.
Sir George enjoys his little surprise visits, but in my experience the lady likes some warning to pretty herself.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Mistress.’ The man was becoming agitated and officious. ‘Your attention would be appreciated. The Lord Chief Justice intends to surprise you for supper this night. He was pleased to say that, since Mahomet would not attend on the mountain, the mountain must come to Mahomet.’

  ‘What mountain?’

  It was only as she and Prue walked the ten miles home across the moor that she became collected enough to understand that the Lord Chief Justice of England had asked himself to the Priory for dinner.

  * * *

  ‘Will he come, Muskett?’

  Tired as she was from the long walk home, Penitence paced the main bedroom because she couldn’t keep still. After what she had witnessed in Taunton’s market square that morning she could not look on her son where he sat by the window without seeing his body torn apart as the bodies of the men on the cart had been torn apart. She couldn’t even rejoice that Martin Hughes was better. What was the point of his old carcase recovering if it too was to be quartered? He lay on the bed, the panel behind his head open in case they needed to use it quickly, and grumbled at Prue who was feeding him gruel because now and then she fell into a trance and stared at the spoon with sightless eyes.

  I want Henry. She was as helpless now as she had been on that day in the Rookery when he’d rescued her from her attackers. Mentally she crawled as she had then, a deer writhing from the dogs on its back.

  ‘He’ll come, missus,’ said Muskett.

  She was unreasonable in her panic. ‘What if he does? He can’t get Benedick away with the house full of Jeffreys’ men. He’ll miss the tide.’

  ‘There’s other tides.’

  Muskett was a rock, but she was unnerved by the sense that a destroyer was approaching her house with hastening, predestined steps. We’ll be betrayed. The risk increased every second. They’d been lucky not to be betrayed before. And now, since the horror displayed outside the Castle today, who wouldn’t scruple to tell the authorities that she was hiding a Dissenting rebel? After all, Lady Alice, held in higher esteem and greater affection than she was, had been betrayed, sold to the authorities by a woman in return for a husband who’d been arrested after Sedgemoor. How much easier to betray the former mistress of Prince Rupert and her canting uncle. Even those who’d originally given the old man shelter hadn’t liked him enough to go on giving it. She didn’t blame them. I don’t like him much myself.

  He was grumbling again that Prue was withholding the next mouthful. It was the voice that had called damnation on her head a hundred times.

  ‘Shut your noise,’ she snapped at him.

  She wouldn’t care if he were captured, she wouldn’t care if she were. It was Benedick that concerned her, only and totally her son.

  He was also grumbling. ‘Mother, find me a sword and I can shift for myself. I’ll make for the coast on my own.’

  ‘You shut your noise as well,’ she told him. Still weak, in a countryside overrun with royalist troops, he’d be picked up in a day. Deliver my soul from the sword: my darling from the power of the dog. How exactly the psalmist had known her situation. Would Henry come? How would it help if he came? I just want him here. He was her deus ex machina. He’d delivered her from her enemies before, though then the enemies were simple robbers, not the ranged forces of the state.

  ‘Sit down, missus.’ Muskett’s square hands took hers and led her to the window-sill. ‘You can watch for His Lordship and tell us what Judge Jeffreys plans for tonight. See if us can work out a plan of our own.’

  She hated to think what plans Jeffreys had for tonight. She tried hard to recall what his major-domo had told her. ‘He’s sending over his own household that travels with him to prepare the house and the dinner. A small affair, with a few friends.’

  ‘Ah now. That’s the way to go. Sneak the major down the north-wing stairs, like, when they’re at table.’

  ‘It’d be terribly dangerous,’ she said. ‘Jeffreys’ staff is large and I know he has a detachment of dragoons to guard him wherever he goes. They’ll station men at the gatehouse to stop comings – and goings.’

  ‘A idea, though.’ Muskett licked his finger and drew a line on the glass. ‘Keep that un for later. What then?’

  ‘Well, then I suppose I provide the entertainment. Jeffreys wants me to sing. And, oh that’s right, he wants me to do some Shakespeare.’

  ‘Play-acting?’

  ‘A soliloquy or two perhaps.’

  ‘And where’ll you do that, missus?’

  She’d got his drift. The years passed her back to another time of horror, when another child had needed to be rescued. ‘Oh, Muskett. We did it once. Your master and I. We lured the watchmen away from their posts.’

  ‘That’s the way to go.’ Muskett never smiled; everything he said was straight-faced, but she could tell he was pleased by the way he drew another, longer line on the glass. ‘Put up a stage round the back. Away from the gatehouse, like. You and the captain do your luring. I’ll get the major across the moat and away to the captain’s yacht quick as a ferret.’

  Penitence said quietly: ‘And the other gentleman?’ She jerked her head towards the bed and Martin Hughes.

  ‘No,’ said Muskett firmly.

  She didn’t blame him. The old man was too old, too ill and definitely too unpredictable to make such a journey, especially at the speed at which Muskett and Benedick would have to travel. Well, she’d think of what to do with him when the crippling load of Benedick’s danger was lifted off her shoulders.

  Muskett turned to Benedick. ‘Fine actor, the captain. You ought to see him, Major.’

  ‘I’m not so bad myself,’ said Penitence. The preciousness of the moments on the Cock and Pie balcony when she’d played Beatrice to Henry’s Benedick were back with her. The horror of the Plague had eroded over the years; the memories strongest now were of human courage. She could recall in perfect detail the scene on the roofs opposite as she’d sung Balthazar’s song: Mistress Palmer’s face, Mistress Hicks’s, the child attached to the chimney. They made her braver.

  ‘For the visage mask of actors do but hide the skull of sin,’ shouted a voice from the bed. One of Martin Hughes’s set responses had been stimulated by the word ‘actor’.

  ‘We should have left him in the marsh,’ Penitence said to Muskett. She was feeling better.

  The sergeant paid her no attention. He was regarding the old man with interest. ‘Isn’t there a play where there’s a blackamoor masked?’

  ‘Othello? He’s not played in a mask any more. We use lampblack. As a matter of fact…’

  She stared at the sergeant. He’d just spat liberally on his finger and wiped a large smear across the entire window. He bent down to put his impassive face directly opposite hers. ‘That’s the way to go, missus.’

  They had a few minutes to discuss the way before Judge Jeffreys’s major-domo arrived at the head of a procession of carts bringing provisions and staff. Followed by Major Nevis with Sir Ostyn Edwards and a warrant to search the house. Followed by the Rt Hon. Viscount of Severn and Thames. Followed by the Lord Chief Justice of England, Sir George Jeffreys and friends.

  * * *

  Nevis’s men searched the house again under the apologetic aegis of Sir Ostyn Edwards. ‘Proper sorry I be, Peg, but some bugger says old Martin Hughes is hiding hereabouts. Ah told that danged Nevis as you’d as soon shelter Old Nick. “Her’s had him put in the stocks afore now,” I told un, but would he listen?’

  They stood in the hall, watching cupboards emptied, soot brought down the chimney, bayonets inserted between the stones of the wall to see if any could be dislodged. ‘Proper pig of a man, and I told un,’ said Sir Ostyn, ‘but ’tis the military makes the law now. Of course, who he’s after is the rebel Hurd. Bagged all the others, Wade, Ffoulkes and Goodenough, but not Hurd. Last seen being carried off the field in this d
irection, seemingly.’

  Penitence’s hands clenched. The magistrate, puzzled, took one of them in his to comfort her and exclaimed at its coldness. He cocked a lashless eye at her face. ‘Bain’t seen any such animal, have thee, Peg?’

  ‘No,’ she said, and he nodded in relief.

  I should be indignant. She should be protesting at Nevis’s suspicions, but she had to concentrate so hard on suppressing panic that she had no energy left for even spurious rage.

  A crash and shouts from upstairs told her that Nevis’s instinct had again led him to concentrate his search on the main north-wing bedroom. She ran upstairs, followed by Sir Ostyn.

  Muskett, shouting, was being restrained by two of Nevis’s men. If possible the room was in even worse condition than it had been after Nevis’s previous search. The sliver of looking-glass had been ground under somebody’s boot, every drawer lay scattered, the bed had been stripped down to its frame and her newly mended mattress once more torn open. The crash had been caused by the tester which had given way under the weight of one of Nevis’s soldiers as he crawled into the space between it and the ceiling of the room. The bedhead, however, was still untouched.

  Now she was angry. Or panicked. Or both. She strode to the bed and pulled the soldier off it. For good measure she kicked him. Then she turned on Nevis. ‘By what right do you do this again? I would remind you I am a loyal subject of King James and his late cousin’s good friend. I shall inform the king of your repeated vandalism, and complain to the Lord Chief Justice when he dines here tonight.’

  ‘And so I will too.’ Considering his previous reduction at Nevis’s hands, Sir Ostyn was showing courage.

  Nevis was not impressed. She wondered what would impress Nevis. His face was not unpleasant but it was unmemorable. Away from him, when she tried to recall it, she couldn’t bring it to mind because it was unrepresentative of the animosity she felt streaming from the soul behind it. There was no way to reach the man because he took no sustenance from people around him, apparently desiring nobody’s goodwill but his own, following some route he had set for himself. She had impeded him; set up a block between him and the man he was hunting down. But he had the antennae of an ant, and like an ant would find a way up, round, down or across to his goal without ceasing, until he was squashed.