The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  At first he'd suggested she approach London's Puritan communities. 'They ain't popular, I grant you,' he'd said, 'but they'd find you work.'

  She'd rejected the idea. It was possible the Reverend Block had sent word from the Americas that a certain Penitence Hurd, a stuttering woman, was an arsonist and a witch. She was safer with Peter Simkin, for all that he belonged to the wrong church. The little man had an undemanding, motiveless kindness; in his company she was emboldened to venture the odd sentence. She ventured one now: 'Rats, t-t-too. A lot of d-d-dead rats.'

  He hadn't noticed the rats; it was dead humans that worried him.

  Should I tell him about the Searcher? To her certain knowledge, the Searcher had taken two bribes — she was Dog Yarder enough nowadays to think of them as 'angel's oil' — in the past week; one from Dog Yard's pawnbroker whose lodger had been found dead in bed, the other from Sam Bryskett, who'd had a customer fall dead on Ship premises. Word had it the corpses were pustulated. Afraid for their business, both men had crossed the Searcher's palm with silver to report the causes of death as non-infectious.

  But the Plague had died out, surely. And she knew from her own experience that the Searcher could pretend to diagnose Plague in order to encourage silver across her palm. Let sleeping dogs lie. Sleeping corpses, anyway. She liked Sam Bryskett and his red-headed family, and, she was surprised to find, her loyalty to Dog Yard made her reluctant to betray it to an outsider like this parish clerk, nice man though he was.

  Anyway, it wasn't a day for talking death. Today she would live for ever; everybody would live for ever. She always enjoyed these Monday walks; it was a pleasure to stroll past buildings that gladdened the eye instead of threatening to fall down, to smell coffee-shops and bakeries instead of laystalls. And today London had erupted into spring, as if an apologetic God was trying to make up for His bad winter.

  What had been a stone city became a garden in which buildings dwindled to ornaments set among the greenery; London regained its countryside as drovers came in from the home counties and grazed their flocks of sheep and geese on its open spaces, and cocks crowed the alert to warm, soft dawns.

  She sniffed appreciatively at the combination of blossom, new grass and horse-dung as she and Peter Simkin made their usual detour to Hyde Park, because Peter liked to be able to describe to his wife - a large lady tied to their house in the High Street by an even larger brood of children — what the fashionable were up to. In winter they had gone there to watch the skaters swoop and circle like brilliant-coloured swallows over the frozen Serpentine. Today she was shocked by the maypole, even as she tapped her foot in time to the flutes accompanying the Mayday milkmaids dancing round it and plaiting its bright ribbons.

  Peter Simkin pointed as riders went by. There's Lady Castlemaine, look, Pen. The King's friend.'

  The King's trollop more like. 'She's in m-m-m-man's attire.'

  'Fashion, Pen. Fashion.'

  Foppery. Extravagance. Look at the sheen on that plush. Even as she sniffed, Penitence noted the lovely cut of the long-tailed coat for future reference. It would suit Francesca.

  All the way into the City, her Puritan egalitarianism warred with appreciation of beauty; the new stage-coach stations were attracting passengers now that the roads were passable again, even at a shilling per five miles. Mouth-watering pigskin luggage with brass locks was piled on the coach roofs while ladies, clambering inside, lifted gowns to reveal brocaded petticoats and high-heeled, pom-pommed shoes. In the India shop languid men and women sipped tea in an exotic-smelling cave while rolls of Smyrna cottons and Persian silk were flung down for their inspection. Next door, the lace shop frothed with Burgundian, Holland, cut and point-work that shaded from clotted cream to May blossom. 'I'll have some of the Flanders for baby's bib,' a female customer was saying. 'Eighteen shillings a yard? Extortion. Oh well, if one must, one must.'

  Eighteen shillings. With eighteen shillings the unknown mother and baby who'd died in Dog Yard would be living yet.

  At Bride Lane they parted. Peter Simkin entered the curl- icued portals of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks Hall and handed in the list. The secretary who took it gave it a glance and said: 'St Giles up again, Master Simkin? More pox, I'll be bound.'

  But as he dined off steak pie and porter at the Ring o' Bells in the Vintry, Peter Simkin heard his fellow-clerks from St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster and St Clement Danes admit that their lists were up too.

  'Like our Searcher says, the cold nipped 'em,' said St Clement Danes, and the others agreed.

  The talk turned to the war against the Dutch, but it seemed to Peter Simkin that the steak pie and porter lacked their usual flavour.

  Outside, Penitence was waiting for him. He handed her a thumb-bread he'd saved from dinner. 'Any luck?'

  Munching, Penitence shook her head. 'P-p-printing's out.'

  The week before she had abandoned the idea of sewing as an employment prospect; London was awash with Huguenots escaping from Louis XIV's persecution, and all of them, as far as she could tell, were in the clothing trade. The answer was always the same: there were more seamstresses than there was work.

  Today she'd tried peddling her other expertise and gone round every printing shop in the area of St Paul's, to be told they rarely employed journeyman printers and didn't employ women at all.

  She'd been surprised to discover how few master printers there were. The recent Licensing Act, it appeared, limited their number to thirty-six. 'Is that L-London?' She'd asked at Stationers' Hall. The porter, who was ushering her out, shook his head. 'Country-wide.'

  A country with only thirty-six printers. And them only allowed to print what they're told. There'd been more in New England; admittedly they'd mostly been small, apart from the one in Cambridge, but they'd been free. Small wonder there were so many illegal cock-robin shops, like the one in the Rookery's Goat Alley. She blamed it on the King. Cromwell wouldn't have stood for it.

  'Ain't you got no other skills?' asked Peter Simkin, sympathetically. She hadn't; at least, none that would give her employment. There wasn't much call in London for tracking moose.

  From her balcony that night Penitence Hurd watched the sun go down. Then she went to bed. Then she got up again and watched the moon come up.

  What is it? What was calling her? What demon down there in the scented night was whispering this itch into her veins?

  Perhaps it was the war. The City that day had throbbed with hatred against the Dutch; merchants grumbling that Norway was nothing more than the United Provinces' forest, that the Rhine banks and the Dordogne were just Dutch vineyards, that Spain and Ireland grazed Hollandish sheep, that the Bank of Amsterdam dominated trade between the Old and the New Worlds.

  Bartholomew the Dutch. She didn't give a fig for them, or the war. Some older battle was pulsing in her blood, some unchristian thing which this night had rolled up all the springiness of springtime into a cowslip ball and tossed it into her lap.

  She crossed her attic and opened the shutters of the other window merely to let in more air, and happened to notice, not that she was interested, that the play-actor's window was in darkness. He hadn't come back from Drury Lane yet.

  The man was making a considerable impact on Dog Yard, which had taken to him, or, as Penitence thought, been taken in by him. His elaborate speech, which the Yarders would have called 'high-sniffing', i.e. supercilious, in anybody else, was offset by his poverty and boozing, familiar conditions which matched their own.

  Mistress Palmer smuggled his washing into the Cock and Pie's, so that his linen was now laundered at an unknowing Her Ladyship's expense. Footloose ran or, rather, trundled his errands, Sam Bryskett allowed him free ale on condition he brought his fellow-Thespians to drink at the Ship, which he did. Fulker, the pawnbroker, advanced him cash without pledge and the Tippins not only didn't rob him, but saw that nobody else did either.

  The most astonishing victim to his charm was Mistress Hicks, though there the conquest was mutu
al. On the morning when he'd been found slumped over the table at which he wrote far into the night, too drunk to go to the theatre, Mistress Hicks had hauled him downstairs by his hair, dunked it and the rest of his head in the horse-trough and then personally accompanied him to Drury Lane where she had kicked his backside through the door of the Cockpit Theatre. Her threat to do it again had kept him sufficiently sober to do his work ever since.

  Joyfully watching the dunking from her balcony, Penitence had assumed Mistress Hicks was merely protecting her rent, but Dog Yard saw it as love pure and simple.

  Phoebe, watching it with her, said: 'Gawd Almighty, anyone else she'd a' ground him for mustard and thrown him out.'

  Dorinda and Alania, both infatuated, followed him to the Cockpit. They spent their spare time hanging round the theatre and swallowed, if not the anchor, a large part of the stage; both adorned their faces with patches and drawled my dears at every opportunity. They were seriously thinking of becoming theatre orange-girls. 'Killigrew took him on, my dear,' Alania told Penitence in the lofty, non-explanatory way of one who knew who Killigrew was to one who didn't, 'to help him with a French play that our Henry's translated by Molly someone. Did you know our Henry speaks French? My dear, like a native.'

  The French being a people associated with Papistry and now, apparently, one which suffered women to write plays, did little to raise Penitence's estimation of the actor. She was at a loss that others were unable to discern, as she did, the contempt for the Rookery and its people which underlay the man's supposed charm.

  She confided her puzzlement to Phoebe.

  'He don't belong here, Prinks,' Phoebe said. 'If you ask me, he don't belong in the theatre, neither. One of them as lost their place under Cromwell, I wouldn't be surprised, and can't get it back. Acourse he don't like it. But it ain't us he looks down on. It's hisself.'

  Penitence recognized the wisdom, though she preferred her dislike. She was discomfited that, as tonight, the thought of him took up so much of her attention. She must uplift it.

  She sat down on her bed and took up her Bible, allowing it to fall open where it would. It chose the Song of Solomon, pages the Puritans of her community had regarded as one of the Lord's oversights and turned over quickly. She had not read it before.

  The words wound themselves round her before she could stop them; spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, frankincense and aloes wafted her into the enclosed garden with its sealed fountain. Sometimes it was a woman speaking the words, sometimes a man - and a man with a very unsound attitude to his sister. The beloved came leaping over the hills like a hind to look forth at the windows, showing himself through the lattice.

  She shut the Bible with a snap. The only enclosed garden round here was Dog Yard through which the Searcher was even now tapping her way. And the only lattice was the playactor's.

  What is it? Perhaps the sight of Hyde Park's beautiful women in beautiful clothes tonight made her want to imitate beauty. Perhaps, tomorrow, she would beg some material from Her Ladyship and make herself a new gown. Black, of course, high-necked, but new.

  The impulse to go out into the scented night to find what was calling her was strong, and had to be resisted. Instead, unable to express her agitation in any other form, she laid herself down on her bed, put her hands behind her neck and sang.

  Singing had always been her joy. When she sang she didn't stutter, a phenomenon that had brought more than one beating from her mother who'd argued that if she could sing freely it was perversity on her part to stutter when she talked.

  Usually, she sang psalms, but not tonight. Psalms held no outlet for the unchristian beat in her veins.

  When, later, the actor came home, he entered a Dog Yard whose residents sat on their doorsteps in the moonlight, listening to a strong young soprano echo round its court and alleys in a throbbing minor key, singing of corn-planting in a language they did not understand, of a god, Cautantowwit, provider of harvest three thousand miles away, of young men's return from winter initiation to a people they had never heard of.

  He sat down next to his landlady on her step. Who's that?'

  'Puritan cat next door,' said Mistress Hicks. 'Where's my rent?'

  He handed over the money. 'Cat?'

  'Cat. Tart. Whore. The one in the hat.'

  'Ah, Mistress Boots.'

  'Don't know her name. Wauling like a bloody cat, though.'

  But they sat on. Springtime had struggled through even to Dog Yard in clumps of valerian sprouting between the cracks in its stones, and in an unsuspected hazel showering catkins over Footloose's vat. The beggar was propped in the mouth of his huge barrel, swinging his stumps in time to the song. Mistress Parker leaned against a washing-draped crenel on the roof of the Buildings. In a window further down, Mistress Fairley was dreamily breast-feeding two babies at the same time. Along to the left, the Cock and Pie girls had pulled stools on to the flagstones, the better to enjoy the air. Even such Tippins as weren't off burgling had gathered in unusual silence to drink their ale on the steps of the Ship. It was a rare moment.

  'Odd,' said the actor. He produced his leather bottle and proffered it to his landlady.

  Mistress Hicks drank. 'Takes all sorts,' she said. 'Must be some as fancy her or that Ladyship wouldn't keep her. She ain't in the charity business.'

  'I'm sure. But when I was in Paris there were missionary priests from Quebec who had brought back some of their Indian converts to show King Louis. They made them sing. Their song wasn't dissimilar to hers. Odd that a poor little whore in a Rookery brothel should sing a song of the Iroquois. Rather gloriously, too.'

  'Life's odd,' said Mistress Hicks.

  They drank to that philosophical pearl.

  'An' don't go boozin' in the Ship for a bit. They got illness. Sam Bryskett's called in the 'pothecary.'

  They drank to Sam Bryskett's continued health and sat on together, listening.

  So passed one of Dog Yard's rare nights of peace. Its last.

  The next day, the collated Bill of Mortality for all London, its liberties and out-parishes that week was on the desk of the Lord Mayor.

  Abortive: 4 . .. Aged: 45 ... Broke her skull by a fall in the street: 1 ... Childbed: 28 . .. Dropsie: 32 ... Gout: 1 ... Grief: 3 ... Lethargy: 1 . . . Purples: 2 ... Quinsie: 5 . .. Suddenly: 2 ... Vomiting: 10 . . . Wind: 4 ... Worms: 20.

  The infinitely varied ways in which people could die always fascinated Sir John Lawrence. 'What's Purples?'

  'I don't know, my lord.'

  'No more do I. And Suddenly could mean anything.' He checked the total. 'It's up.'

  'Somewhat, my lord,' said the clerk to the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks. 'Been a hard winter.'

  Sir John ran his finger down the 'p's. 'Pox in plenty again.'

  'St Giles,' said the clerk, smugly. 'It's always them.'

  'They're the only ones honest enough to admit it.' Sir John's finger went up the column a notch. 'No Plague.'

  'No, my lord.'

  'Why not?' Sir John leaned forward over his desk, tapping it. 'Nat Hodges personally told me he attended three mortal cases in Westminster last Tuesday week. They're not down here. Why not?'

  The clerk to the Clerks shuffled. Cripus, how he hated new brooms; the old Lord Mayor had passed the Bills without a glance. 'Manifestly, my lord, Westminster's Searcher said different.'

  'Manifestly,' said Sir John, catching the word and bouncing it, 'manifestly, Westminster's Searcher, like all searchers, couldn't tell the difference between Plague and Phthisis. Manifestly, for two groats she'd say they were carried off by the choir invisible.'

  The clerk to the Clerks wondered why he'd been backed into defending a system which manifestly had its flaws. Because it was the system; always was, always would be. Doctors didn't record deaths, searchers did.

  But Sir John was like that; aggressive, a little man with large ideas. Out to make his mark. He'd try reason. 'My lord, it's twenty year since the last bad outbreak. Manifestly' — oh, C
ripus - 'there's doctors never seen a case of Plague. The Searchers is old women and they got long memories.'

  'They've got long pockets.' The Lord Mayor glared. 'You listen to me, Master Clerk. This will be a good mayoral year for London, a great year. If there's Plague, I'm nipping it in the bud. One clerk hiding a plague spot and I'll Barbados him so fast he won't have time to say goodbye. They tell me, as Chief Magistrate. And me first. Is that manifest enough?'

  When the Clerks' clerk had gone, the Lord Mayor's secretary, who was also his nephew, said gently, 'Hard on him, my lord.'

  'Him and his manifestly.' Sir John Lawrence went to the window of the Guildhall, holding up a hand to ward off reproach. 'It's not his fault, I know isolated cases crop up occasionally, I know all that. But the thing comes in twenty- year cycles, I know that.' He whirled round on his little shoes. And so do you. In '25, again in the mid-'40s. How many thousand?'