The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  She had no flintlock, but she slipped the knife from its sheath on her wrist in one concealed movement, as Matoonas had taught her to do.

  Just as the Drury Lane beadle's nose could detect a possible charge on his parish, so the Reverend Robert Boreman, rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields, had suffered enough from Puritans in the Interregnum to smell them at forty paces. The one at his gate was young and female, but stank of bigotry. 'What do you want?'

  Penitence was no more amicable towards the Reverend Boreman than he to her. To be seeking assistance at the gate of an Anglican church was nearly as bad as asking help from the Pope. However, she knew she'd been lucky to get this far. In the walk between Drury Lane and here she had been pestered, pawed and propositioned. Two women, one old, one young, had tried to enrol her for Lord-knew-what. ('Put you in the way of riches, dearie.') A man had tried to steal her purse and she had been forced to jab her knife at him.

  From this high point above the river, she had looked around at the jumbled roofscape and known that unless she had a guide she was defeated. She'd made for the spire.

  The Reverend Boreman groped for his spectacles and took the proffered slate to the lamp by his lych-gate. '"Penitence Hurd."' He was right, only damned Puritans could have called a child 'Penitence'. Searching for her aunt, last address St Giles Rookery. Despite himself he was touched. 'My child,' he said, 'go home. Go back to where you came from. Where do you come from?'

  The girl retrieved the slate and wrote: 'New England.'

  New England. What was wrong with the old one? Stiff- necked, hypocritical heretics calling themselves pilgrims sailing off to create their joyless Zion and plague the poor savages. New England indeed. Still, he could hardly send her back there.

  Was your aunt born here? Married here?' Another shake of the head that wobbled the ridiculous hat. No, of course not. Her aunt was probably not married at all; indeed, if this was the child of Dissenters, she was a bastard whose parents imagined that some words said over them by a magistrate rendered them married. Nothing the Puritans had done had upset the Reverend Boreman more than denying the sacraments of the wedding service. On the other hand, if the aunt was a Puritan, what was she doing in the Rookery? He found himself curious. 'Are you dumb?' Obviously, she wasn't deaf.

  'Shall I try to tell him?' She was tired, it would be too hard, and she wanted no involvement with a church that had persecuted her people. Besides, he was the height and shape of the Reverend Block back home, dressed in black, white tippets to his collar just like the Reverend Block's, only older. The sooner she got away from him the sooner her stomach would stop heaving. Insistently, she pointed to the slate.

  The Reverend Boreman shrugged. 'On your own head be it. I must warn you that the Rookery is the lowest sink of sin, and that if your aunt is still in it she is undoubtedly defiled or dead, probably both.' He didn't believe in sugaring the pill, and merely having to admit the existence of such a place in his parish shamed him. God knows he'd done his best. 'Ah, Peter Simkin.'

  His clerk joined him at the gate. 'I'm away to alert the Searcher, Rector.'

  'Peter, here is a person from the Americas trying to find her aunt. Last known address the Rookery.' The two men exchanged looks.

  Peter Simkin turned to Penitence: 'What's her name?' It might be that the Rookery woman was a member of the congregation, though unlikely; precious few were.

  As Penitence wrote, the rector said acidly: 'Our young friend from the Americas, though not dumb it seems, does not deign to speak to us.'

  '"Margaret Hughes" read Peter Simkin. 'Plain. Also unknown.'

  'Oh, take her along to the Searcher,' said the Reverend Boreman. 'If anyone knows this woman, she will.' It had been a long day and he wanted his supper. 'And don't forget to get Sexton to toll the bell and ask John Gere to dig the grave.' Reluctantly, he added to Penitence: 'If you don't find your aunt, you'd better come back.' He'd have to procure her employment, or put her in the workhouse if she was indigent, which he was sure she was.

  He lingered to watch Penitence and the slightly shorter figure of his clerk disappear along the High Street into the shadows. Another bit of jetsam washed into this penance of a backwater. How long, O Lord, how long before he procured a decent parish? How had he offended? He did his best, badgering the authorities for drainage, an almshouse, more help to save souls. And what did he get? Jetsam. By the day more poor were coughed out by the overcrowded city to turn this once pleasant suburb into a Gehenna.

  Whores, pimps, beggars, buggerers, playwrights, even Jews - and poor Jews at that - washed up in St Giles-in-the-Fields. Fields indeed. He remembered the fields, he'd walked there with his wife, God rest her soul. And now they were a laystall and had gained their first American Puritan. Well, she'd have to take her chance with the rest.

  He strode off to the rectory and the supper provided by his housekeeper. First he washed his hands, as he always did, and wished he felt less like Pontius Pilate while doing it.

  There's a death in the Buildings, see.' The neat little clerk was brightly informative. 'Lucky for you, else you'd have had to wait for another corpse. Can't call on the Searcher except to view the corpse for the cause of death. Against the rules. Mind you, you wouldn't've waited long. They die here pretty frequent.'

  Penitence could believe it. The difficulty would be not to. Her boots were fouled with the excreta, mud and rubbish of the alley they had turned into. The only light, apart from Peter Simkin's lantern, was a moon that came and went between cloud. The few shutters were closed; where they'd rotted or broken off, scraps of sacking hung between the night and the even darker interiors.

  'They retire early round here' said Simkin, 'saves candles.'

  Here and there the holes emitted the cries of a baby or an altercation, but otherwise there was the quiet imposed by hopelessness. Her home had been in a wilderness miles from other human habitation and it hadn't been as silent as this. Penitence bent over in a sudden cramp that was part hunger and part homesickness for river sounds, a nightjar, her grandmother humming a psalm.

  'Careful,' said Simkin, 'falling down here ain't recommended.'

  They went deeper into the maze and stopped before an afterthought of a house squeezed in between two others, with a door that was at least intact, if small. The clerk hammered on it.

  'Threepence a corpse,' he said to Penitence. 'Penny under the going rate, but she gets more business than most. Stand back if I was you.' He stood back himself as shuffling footsteps approached the other side of the door and it opened.

  Penitence had been expecting something horrible, but even worse was the shrouding of the old woman's face so that neither then nor later did she see it, leaving her to imagine leprosy, or even a blank.

  'Harrison. The Buildings,' said the clerk. 'And this young lady's looking for a Margaret Hughes, last seen in the Rookery.'

  There was a wheeze from within the shawl. 'Tuppence.'

  Peter Simkin turned to Penitence. 'She wants paying for finding. You got tuppence?' Penitence nodded. 'Off you go then.' He left.

  After much wheezing and muttering within the house, the Searcher emerged, more be-shawled than ever and carrying a white staff. A movement of the bundle that was her head indicated that Penitence should fall in behind her and she went off at a brisk shuffle. It was almost the nastiest of all the nasty walks Penitence had taken that day. She wasn't interfered with - the few pedestrians pressed against walls as the Searcher went by - but every step took her deeper into this unclued labyrinth until they were going along tiny alleys so dark that the Searcher's white wand was the only thing visible and moved as if with a life of its own. Some inhabitant, a woman, was screaming but it was impossible to locate the sound.

  This was the Rookery. As they passed each closed door, the Searcher whispered. Reluctantly, Penitence caught her up to listen. The whisper wasn't for her benefit; each building was eliciting a response of memory from this basic brain. Top floor, convulsions.' 'Second floor back, childbed.' 'Baseme
nt, frightened.' 'Worms, attic.'

  They passed 'Palsy, third floor front', and stopped before a door. A frightened-looking man opened it and retreated before the Searcher. From outside Penitence could see a candle held over a bed in a room that contained little else. The Searcher went to the bed and drew back a cover. Penitence heard children crying and a woman's voice, weeping and pleading.

  The Searcher came shuffling back to the door, followed by the man who was begging: 'It ain't the you-know. You'll say it ain't. It's rickets, she had rickets.'

  'Shilling,' said the Searcher, and the man counted some coins into her hand.

  As they continued up the alley, Penitence heard more wheezing. The Searcher was laughing. Ain't Plague, but Tom Fool thought it were.' The shawls caught sight of Penitence, the voice stopped talking to itself and addressed her: 'Rickets. Ain't Plague.' Penitence, hypnotized, shook her head. 'Rickets and hectick fever. They're frit of Plague round here. Had it bad in the twenties.' She pointed ahead: Dog Yard.'

  Penitence pressed ahead into a courtyard of light and noise so welcome that it took time to absorb how sinful it was. Here, in a broken-cobbled area about sixty feet long and thirty wide, was the Rookery's largest and only professional alehouse and, therefore, its social centre. Here, every human degradation which London had forced on Penitence's attention was represented in the women drinking on the doorsteps, their knees wide apart, their mouths loose and shrieking, in the men who staggered and lolled, in the children who dabbled in the guttered sewers. A young woman sitting at an open window fed a toddler from one breast and clutched a bottle against the other. A cock-fight was exciting wagers and shouts in one corner, a dice game in another where, high above it, an altercation was in progress between two women over the washing-line strung between their windows.

  Penitence saw no good in the place; she had gone beyond seeing good at all in this terrible capital city. Quick to recognize and resent disdain, the Dog Yarders didn't see much in her either. Catcalls commenting on her appearance and making suggestions as to her hat broke out - until the Searcher emerged beside her, at which they stopped.

  Everything stopped. Like a small, muffled Gorgon, the Searcher hobbled through a crowd frozen in mid-movement into a tableau in which the only sound was the flutter of cocks' wings and the tap of the Searcher's wand.

  Nobody followed them as they climbed steep street steps to the high north side of the Yard and stopped outside a door on the edge of it. The shawls whispered to Penitence: 'Margaret Hughes.'

  Three thousand miles of anticipation, and she was here. She had expected a feeling of the momentous, but it escaped her in fatigue and confusion. She was not sure she was here at all; any reality she recognized had been left behind on Master Endicott's ship. The Searcher grabbed her arm. 'Tuppence.'

  Penitence had no idea of the rate of exchange, but in the circumstances she was prepared to overpay. She felt in her satchel and brought out her smallest string of wampum. The shawls directed their attention on it, and said again: 'Tuppence.' Penitence pressed the wampum, the shawls rejected it. 'Tuppence.'

  Penitence panicked. Back home this many shells, a fifth of a fathom, would be worth five shillings. True, she hadn't seen any wampum changing hands since she'd been in London, but her grandfather and other merchants had traded in little else. If its value hadn't survived the Atlantic crossing, she was in extreme trouble, unless her aunt had money, which, considering the surroundings, was unlikely.

  The Searcher had turned nasty and was spitting words with which Penitence was unacquainted. Penitence held open her satchel and shrugged. 'Wampum or nothing.1 The Searcher sniffed at the satchel, sniffed again and was suddenly scrabbling like a burrowing animal at earth.

  Relieved that she had means to pay the old woman after all, Penitence held her off with one hand while managing to open the box inside her satchel and extract one of its carefully packed contents.

  The Searcher took the pipe into her disfigured hands, sniffed the tobacco in its bowl with the reverence of a communicant receiving the host and hobbled off with it, leaving Penitence to knock on the door.

  Down below, Dog Yard relaxed at the departure of the Searcher, but much of its interest remained on Penitence. She sensed a change of mood; the catcalls redoubled but with a difference. Where before the Yarders had merely resented her as an uppity stranger, now they appeared to have placed her. The mewing to which she was subjected was as derisory as the hoots had been, but more amicable. The words, as far as she could understand them, were definitely filthier, with a tinge of contempt. The Yarders seemed to have gained advantage over her.

  One of the washing-line quarrelers remarked: 'I thought I seen all the quiffs there was, but that's a new one on me.' She called down to Penitence: 'Here you. Under the tile. Her Ladyship running a new line?'

  Even had she been able to answer it, Penitence did not understand the question. She knocked more smartly and made a show of studying the house before her.

  It was a peculiar house, the biggest in Dog Yard, and the only one in good repair from what she could see of it. In height and breadth it was reassuringly like the large farmhouses back home that the settlers of Massachusetts had built for themselves, copying the medieval halls of England. It was the wrong way round. Impatiently pacing, Penitence peered down the alleys on either side and saw that it continued irregularly backwards for at least fifty feet. Its age suggested that it had once stood in solitary grandeur, looking over the fields of St Giles, until tenements accommodating the City's overflow had sidled up on its back and front so that its southerly side was now the frontage that faced her and the Yard.

  What was bizarre was the addition to this frontage, a rectangular extension of brick which stood out from the main wall of the house by what seemed only four or five unnecessary feet. It was like a shield, windowless and with a door that could have withstood a battering ram. Its only ornamentation was a red lantern hanging above the door and, along its top, which rose over half-way to the house's gable, six china medallions containing life-sized portraits of ladies. The inevitable sign protruding from above the door showed a cockerel rampant on the crust of an enormous pie, though the words beneath it read, confusingly: 'Her Ladyship'.

  Presumably her aunt had gone into the catering trade, since the place didn't seem to be an inn. What will she say when she reads my name? Penitence got out her slate and rehearsed several enjoyable possibilities in all of which her aunt ended by weeping tears over the niece who had come to save her.

  'Thy aunt fell from grace, child. We have cast her out. Let thee be silent.' Thin-lipped, her mother and her grandparents had refused to tell her anything more, always the same answer in the same words since she'd been old enough to ask.

  In Puritan terms a fall from grace could involve anything: adultery, murder, dancing round the maypole, celebrating Christmas, or using starch. It must have been for one of the deeper sins, probably you-know-what. How deplorable, how shameful, how different.

  The young Penitence had obediently condemned this fallen aunt, but her censure had been tinged with curiosity and the older she got, the more curious she became. Her own adolescent falls from grace, though petty, had made even more intriguing an aunt who had fallen on a grand scale. She had begun to dream that naughty Aunt Margaret would one day arrive at the Hurd trading post; sometimes she imagined her as being rowed up the Pocumscut in a scarlet barge, dripping jewels and wickedness, sometimes as emerging from the forest, a thin, dying figure begging forgiveness with its last breath.

  Whatever she needed forgiveness for, Penitence, as one of the saints of the Pure Church, had come three thousand miles to save her from it. And she needed to do it quickly. There were footsteps prancing up and down behind her in what she guessed was mimicry and might, at any moment, become attack. Pray thee hurry, Aunt. She knocked again. There was an impression that life was going on in the house's deeper recesses, but it wasn't coming to the door.

  At last, footsteps approached from inside. Th
e door opened, not to let Penitence in, but to allow half a dozen black-clad gentlemen out. In the glow from the shop's interior their clothes had the unmistakable sheen of richness, a phenomenon almost as sinister as the holes where their faces should have been. All of them were masked. They passed the shrinking Penitence so that she saw their glossy, contained shapes against the rags of the crowd and the untidy clutter of the Yard buildings. It flashed into her mind that these, predatory and beautiful, were the Rookery's rooks.

  Migratory rooks. From the shadows around the Yard emerged a succession of attendants carrying sedan chairs; a fat one turned back. There was a glimpse of flesh and teeth as the mask said 'Most interesting, Your Ladyship.'

  'Come again, my lord.' The chairs were trotted across the court, be-ringed hands through the windows scattering coins on the cobbles. In an instant Dog Yard became patched with heaps of struggling bodies.

  Penitence turned to the lady in the doorway, who was a large-scale burst of colour from her black-rooted golden hair to her surprisingly tiny jewelled slippers. In between was an acreage of scarlet satin topped by black and white lace lying so low round her shoulders that Penitence's Puritan fingers twitched to hitch it up.

  The twitch lasted until she met the lady's eyes, which were of such a light blue as to be nearly colourless, and cold enough to freeze fingers in their sockets. 'What?'