The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Questions kept interrupting Penitence's prayers as she knelt by her bed that night. Kinyans had now made two references to Somerset. His accent reminded her of home, where many of the settlers, like her own family, had originated from the West Country, that hotbed of Nonconformity. Had her aunt come to London with him and Her Ladyship? He'd indicated that she had not died in the West Indies. Had she died at all?

  Her imagination dwelled on an Aunt Margaret grown so rich that an envious Ladyship was keeping her niece from her out of malice. Or was she in prison? Hanged? Did Her Ladyship, out of pity, shield her from shame?

  Neither case seemed likely, yet the idea that her aunt was alive rooted itself in Penitence's lonely soul, wildly bringing hope at the same time that it dismayed her with the knowledge that the only key to Margaret Hughes's whereabouts was held by the Cock and Pie. The next day it began to snow. Winter had come early.

  So Penitence Hurd stayed on at the Cock and Pie and made everyone's life a misery.

  Each girl coming to the attic for a fitting at her hands endured a biblical warning with it. It wasn't easy with a stutter and a mouth full of pins, but Penitence had rationalized her dependence on the brothel as a mission. If the Lord had marooned her on this island of evil, it was for His purpose.

  Alania got Isaiah, 'O that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments.'

  The inseparable Phoebe and Sabina got the Beatitudes, while Dorinda, Penitence's bete noire, got Kings II, Chapter 9 — the death of Jezebel.

  She reduced Mary, the skivvy, to such hysterics with a selection from the Epistle to the Romans on the carnally minded that Her Ladyship, in a fury, paid one of her rare visits to the attic. 'I'll not have a chit like you bothering my girls.'Her hand clamped the scruff of Penitence's neck, dragged her to the front window and lifted her on to the balcony, forcing her to look over the parapet. 'See down there?'

  They had all been down to see it. Dawn had revealed a pile of clothes bunched against the Ship's steps which had not been there when night fell, more detritus the wind had blown into the sink of Dog Yard, human detritus — a woman clutching a baby, both dead.

  They were still there, decently covered by one of Mistress Bryskett's sheets and surrounded by Dog Yarders awaiting the arrival of the parish coffiner. The Searcher was just rising from her knees by the bodies.

  Her Ladyship called down to Mistress Palmer: 'What she say done it?' Nobody questioned the Searcher directly.

  Mistress Palmer looked up, flapping her crossed arms against her sides to keep warm.'Quinsies, she says.'

  'And my aunt's my uncle,' scoffed Her Ladyship. 'Anyone know 'em?'

  Mistress Palmer shook her head. 'Not from round here.'

  Then suppose you get my sheets done,' suggested Her Ladyship.

  Without a word spoken, and glimpsed as it was through snow, Mistress Palmer's expression managed to convey that Her Ladyship should try drying sheets in this weather, that if circumstances were different she, Mistress Palmer, wouldn't demean herself washing for a brothel, whatever airs it gave itself, and that once Her Ladyship had got them, Her Ladyship could stuff them up her fundament. Nevertheless, she returned to the Buildings where her window steamed droplets into the freezing air.

  'Quinsies,' spat Her Ladyship again, releasing Penitence's neck. 'And cold. And no work. And nowhere to go.'

  The coffiners had arrived, two men carrying a pine box on a hand-cart. The edges of the unknown woman's skirt stuck to the ice when they lifted her body, and they jerked it to get them free. The baby was a foetal-shaped ball as they dropped it into the coffin on to its mother.

  Tears froze on Penitence's eyelids. Lord, Thee sees each sparrow that falls.

  'And weak,' whispered Her Ladyship. In her blue-mauve mottled face her eyes were dry. She turned them on Penitence. 'See?' Penitence nodded.

  At the door her Ladyship looked back. 'And leave pestering Kinyans about your aunt. She's dead.'

  Dorinda swaggered in: 'She beat you?' Penitence picked up her sewing, a flowered muslin gown for Francesca, feeling for the needle with her frozen, mittened fingers. 'She should've,' said Dorinda. 'She's good at it. Beats her clients, does Her Ladyship. Beats the Bishop.'

  At last she'd got her response. Penitence looked up, amazed.

  Dorinda grinned. 'Didn't know that, did you, you prinking crophead. You don't know nothing. He likes it, don't he. Brings him to the brim.'

  There was much Penitence didn't know; unwillingly, she was learning. Shocking her became a pastime, the harlots' revenge on her piety. They insisted on enlightening her as to what 'obliging' entailed. The revelations were dreadful. 'Don't you pray at me, Prinks,' said Fanny — Kinyans's name for Penitence had been generally adopted — 'I got enough praying last night. My gentleman likes praying while he's poking.'

  She tried to shut her ears against the stream of professional secrets poured into them, tried not to show her nausea at the undreamed-of variations on the sexual act demanded by the girls' clients; the fulders, the rancums, the pissers, the floggers, the Athanasians, the fumblers, suckers, rippers, fugoists — insight into human frailty at its most contorted was laid before her. With detail.

  The one thing the girls did not divulge was the clients' names. 'We got our honour,' Alania told her loftily. Some, Penitence knew, protected their identity by remaining masked, even while abandoning all other apparel; she had seen for herself on 'The Savage' night that others did not. Whether these reverend gentlemen could relax in the knowledge that their mutual sinning inhibited each from denouncing the others to their parishioners, Penitence did not enquire. She didn't want to know.

  At first she had rammed her bed against her door each night in fear that Her Ladyship should send one of these appalling men up to her attic. But this didn't happen, and the girls resented what they regarded as nepotism.

  'Living off our backs, you are,' complained Dorinda. 'Just because Her Ladyship knew your ballocking aunt.'

  In fact, Penitence more than paid for her keep. In the Puritan tradition, careless work was an offence against the Lord and Penitence could no more sew a crooked seam than she could fly. Cock and Pie couture was now in better order than it had been in the days when sewing had to be sent out to jobbing needlewomen, yet by and large its girls remained unappreciative. They were jealous of what appeared to be her special standing with Her Ladyship, who was their nurse, provider, instructress, adviser and confessor.

  'Favoured, ain't you?' sneered Alania. It took time for Penitence to realize that being permitted to retain her virginity was a favour. Apart from Job and Kinyans, there were no other exemptions from the Cock and Pie's trade. Fourteen- year-old Mary was called on to oblige when the house was busy and even Her Ladyship provided the occasional service to established clients who had special, and painful, requirements.

  It was useless for Penitence to point out to the girls that they were being exploited, though she did. 'B-b-better for her that a m-ummm-m-millstone were hanged about her neck.'

  'Don't you hang no m-m-millstones round Her Ladyship,' warned Dorinda, repeating what Sabina had said: 'She's been a good mother to us.'

  And one day — it was Christmas Day — Penitence was amazed to reflect that, in a sense, it was true.

  Phoebe put her head round the door. 'Ain't you coming down to dinner?'

  Penitence shook her head. She was reading her Bible.

  'There's goose,' wheedled Phoebe, stepping inside, 'and cider meat and mutton sausages, and Kinyans's made his sugar pigs.'

  Penitence swallowed. From outside came the chimes of bells celebrating the birth of their churches' Lord.

  'Her Ladyship's asking. And Dorinda, she wants you to an' all.' At Penitence's look of disbelief, Phoebe sat herself down on the bed. 'Don't be hard, Prinks. You think Dorry obliges acause she likes it? Any of us like it? There weren't no choice.' She sighed. 'Maybe it's different in the Americas.'

  It was. Sin was sin in the Chosen Land. You didn't do it. Well, the Reverend Block had tried,
but if you did do it, you certainly didn't excuse it as the only choice. Stonily, Penitence read on.

  'Poor old Dorry got done by her granddad when she was four,' mused Phoebe.

  'N-n-no.' It was forced out of Penitence. 'She's 1-lying.'

  'Her mum used to let him because it kept the old bugger off her.'

  'She's 1-1-Iying. She's 1-umm-lying.'

  Phoebe shrugged. And the shrug was proof. It was so true that it didn't matter who believed it or didn't.

  'Won't you come down?' pleaded Phoebe, patiently.

  'I c-cca-ccan't.' Christmas was a heathen festival. Puritans didn't celebrate it.

  Phoebe got up,.sighing. 'Don't then.' She looked around the scrubbed, undecorated attic and at the scrubbed, undecorated girl who sat in it, and was moved to drop a kiss on her head. 'Merry Christmas, Prinks.'

  Alone, Penitence sat on, unseeing. Was Phoebe right? Did the Cock and Pie girls dislike what they did? Were they not, after all, the separate genus of her teaching, harlotis vulgaris, a garish plant which flourished in ordure? Were they as human but less fortunate than herself?

  Ordure was the bed of their trade, but they didn't flourish in it. Most of them had already developed the first stages of syphilis, the weeping ulcers around their private parts which would eventually kill them.

  Penitence recalled the times they'd forced details of their professional lives upon her — and saw faces intent on punishing themselves as much as her. She recollected conversations, sentences casually let slip during fittings, which had vouchsafed glimpses into their past. At the time she'd deliberately shut her mind to them as further attempts to appal her; now she allowed it to rove over them, wandering along a dark corridor in which doors gave glimpses into Hell.

  Beggary, abandonment, beatings, starvation; for most of the girls there had been the accompaniment of sexual assault so persistent that it made the Reverend Block's attempt on Penitence's virtue appear almost benign. She had been able to fight off one guilt-ridden clergyman, she realized; they'd been subjected to violation by men in that darkly hopeless wolf-pit, the lowest stratum of humanity, where the rays of Christianity, even the basic taboos against incest, hadn't penetrated.

  No wonder, then, that to them the Cock and Pie was sanctuary. No wonder the woman who insisted on standards for them and their clients had become an adored commander- in-chief. Any client who flouted Her Ladyship's requirements of behaviour was turned away, however good his money. Unwilling conscripts in a dirty war the girls might be, but now they had at least joined a crack regiment.

  It became too dark to read her Bible, even if she'd been reading it in the first place.

  Frowning, she got down on to her knees to say her nightly prayers and, for the first time since she'd arrived in it, Penitence included in them one of true charity for the girls of the Cock and Pie.

  Chapter 3

  The printing shop in Goat Alley had the blue-black smell of ink mixing with dust, sweat, lye and hot lead that brought back memories of the shed where her grandfather had kept his press. There was no signboard outside; the shop's trade, like most in the Rookery, was illegal.

  An apprentice, who was contributing more than his fair share to the sweat, grimaced as Penitence climbed the last steps up to the door of the garret. "Ware stranger, Dada.'

  The printer looked up from the screws he was adjusting on the press head. 'Out. Nobody allowed, women especial. Orders taken downstairs.'

  Penitence had pared her sentence to the bone - 'Have you work?' — and wobbled only slightly on the 'w'.

  The printer advanced on her. 'The wife cleans round here. Out.'

  Penitence shook her head. 'I'm a per-per-umm-per—'

  'Puritan?' guessed the printer. 'No God-botherers allowed. Out.'

  'I'm a per-per-um-per—'

  'Peach? Pest? Pushy?' The son was getting the hang of it.

  'Pp-printer,' said Penitence. 'Grandfather took me on as a pp-pp—'

  'Pox doctor?'

  '- prentice,' finished Penitence. 'Also I can umm I can porr- proooumm-proo . . .' Oh, Bartholomew the trade. '. .. pp-proof- read.'

  'What you think I do?' asked the apprentice with resentment.

  'G-get it wr-rong.' Penitence held out the theatre poster she had taken off a wall in Drury Lane. Apart from giving even unstandardized spelling a bad name, some sentences were upside-down.

  The printer followed Penitence's forefinger along the errors, then cuffed his son round the ear. 'No wonder they never paid us.' But to Penitence he brazened it out. 'What's it to you, Goody-boots? Four-line capitals and Roman they wanted, four-line capitals and Roman they got.'

  Ezekiel Hurd had been a master printer before he'd been forced out of England by Charles I, and he'd made a profitable sideline from his press in the Americas, teaching Penitence everything he knew. However, if this idiot here wouldn't admit his need for help, she was wasting her time.

  They got four-line capitals and p-p-pica,' she said. She was at her best when she was angry.

  Out in the alley again, she tapped her hat more firmly over the scarf she'd wound round her ears. She was in one of her

  must-leave-the-Cock-and-Pie phases. As the long, cold winter wore on, her contempt for its girls was being replaced by something nearer pity, but her contempt for herself in remaining there was unabated. Kinyans steadily refused to disclose any more information about Margaret Hughes, and she was beginning to lose hope that he ever would.

  Broaching that unlicensed Bartholomew of a printer for employment had been an impulse brought on by the familiar smell issuing from his window as she'd passed it on her way back from buying threads at the drapery in St Giles's High Street.

  Be not downcast, Pen. All things work for good to them that love God. And standing around here wouldn't buy baby a new bonnet. Her feet were losing feeling, the winter evening setting in. The High Street had been lively with traffic - she could still hear it - but there was none in this alley, no flambeaux either. The cold was one more enemy in its inhabitants' fight for survival and had driven them indoors. She was getting to know her way around the Rookery, but she didn't trust it after dark.

  Icicles like the Sword of Damocles hung over her head as she loped past quiet, gimcrack houses where the whiteness of the roofs indicated that if the rooms beneath them were warmed at all the fires were too pitiful to send up warmth to the rafters.

  New England's winters had been colder than this, but its houses had been built to withstand them. Matoonas had shown her how to use snowshoes ...

  Her mind was in Massachusetts and her body proceeding along Butcher's Cut when two figures barred her way. They had rags tied across the lower halves of their faces. A muffled, very young voice said: 'You know what we want, lady.' Boys, but dangerous boys.

  She shifted the basket she was carrying to her left arm and got ready to flip her knife out of its sheath on her right. 'N- no.' Why did I say that? Can I take on two?

  Driven to the lie by desperation, she quavered: 'I'm a f-friend of the T-t-tippins.'

  One of the boys said: 'Who's the fucking Tippins?' He was advancing.

  Strangers, then. Young footpads from outside the area. If they'd been local, they'd have known this was Tippin territory, with only Tippins allowed to rob it.

  If it came to it, she could throw her knife into the leg of the biggest and outrun the scrawny, shoeless one. But she'd rather it didn't come to it. She began to back up the Cut, shouting 'Help'.

  Nothing happened, except that the buildings around her became more silent, as if huddling away from trouble. The youths were coming at her. Carefully, she stood up on a step to give herself the advantage of height, rapping the knife in her hand on the door behind her and shouting 'Help' again.

  Nobody, nothing. She was on her own.

  No, she wasn't. From some way behind came an unsteady thump of footsteps and a voice making anticipatory 'Oh ho' noises.

  She turned to see whose it was, and slipped on the ice of the step.

/>   Her spine jarred but instinct rolled her over as the boys grasped her ankles and she kicked, crawling in the direction of the newcomer, her head raised like a deer with a wolf on its hindquarters — and saw, coming towards her, the gentleman.

  For all her fright, she classed him immediately. More to the point she saw he was on her side. And he was big.

  The grip on her legs relaxed. Above her, the gentleman waveringly faced her attackers, smiling as if he loved them: 'How now, you secret, black and midnight bastards,' he said. 'That's not nice. Don't do it.'

  Without taking his eyes off her attackers, he proffered a hand to Penitence and she hauled herself up by it.

  The youths had stepped back. She saw their eyes calculate ratios of cudgels to the half-drawn sword in the gentleman's scabbard, lengths, heights, needs and possibilities, and come to a conclusion. They ran.

  She let go the hand and, despite the pain in her coccyx, sat down on the steps to relieve her shaking legs. The gentleman was having a lovely time, shouting, 'Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither', after the retreating backs, bowing to the heads which, now they weren't needed, had emerged from windows. He returned to Penitence and swept off his hat. 'At your service, mistress. Are you hurt?'