The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Carefully manoeuvring their halberds under Mary's armpits, they lifted her to the Cock and Pie and slid her inside its door.

  Within the hour, the shutting-up of the Cock and Pie and Mistress Hicks's, with all their inhabitants, had begun.

  Chapter 6

  It was the poor's plague. Like a river obeying gravity in always finding the lowest ground, the Plague observed social laws and did not bother the rich. Approaching the grounds of great houses occupied by few people, it washed back and set off once more along the streets of overcrowded tenements.

  Trickling out from St Giles's, it avoided the meadows that lay north and west, and followed the lines of population down Holborn, through Drury Lane, into St Clement Danes at the City's western gate, into the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields which, at the end of its long arm, included the royal palace of Whitehall.

  On its way along Chancery Lane it passed Lincoln's Inn only to find that the students, lawyers and barristers had been too quick for it, discharging the readings and fleeing elsewhere, leaving servants in charge. The Plague killed the porter at the gates, and proceeded on its way towards the City.

  'Item,' wrote Peter Simkin, 'a board for the carrying of the dead: 3s.

  'Item. To Harry Weedon, smith, for 108 locks for shutting up: £3 11s.

  'Item. Pails for the carrying of water to shut up persons: 5s 9d.

  'Item. To Mr Mann for links and candles for the night bearers: £2.

  'Item. Shrouds ...'

  His quill jolted as the Reverend Boreman loomed over his shoulder. 'What do the damned bearers want links for?' The apothecary was with him.

  'If there's no reply, Rector' said Peter Simkin, not looking up. He was badly behind.

  'No reply to what?' snapped the Reverend Boreman.

  'No reply from a plague-house' explained William Boghurst. 'It's becoming all too frequent. There's no reply to the bearers' call at night so they have to enter. It usually means all the occupants are dead.'

  'That's why links and candles. Order of the Examiner,' added Peter Simkin, still writing.

  'Is it,' said the Reverend Boreman, flatly. 'Let us hope the Examiner pays for it.' The still-living needed the parish's funds, not the dead.

  It was cool in the little vaulted vestry; he'd brought the apothecary in here because it was the only place that was, apart from the church itself — and there the huffing and grunting and creaking and counting from the bell tower as John Gere pulled at the sally got on his nerves. The bell got on his nerves. Tolls for dead men, dead women, dead children. It was tolling away his parish.

  At first, when the deep, clear, regular strokes of the passing bell had rung out, men out in the streets had removed their hats in time-honoured courtesy to the dead, but as June came in it had begun to toll nearly all day. On the second of June it was joined in its insistence by the bell of St Martin-in-the-Fields and, further away, that of St Clement Danes, so that men got tired of putting their hats on and off and no longer bothered.

  He longed to sit down, but if he did he'd never get up again. 'Well?'

  The apothecary seated himself in the great chair kept for episcopal visits and swung his short legs. Despite the heat, the strings of his close-fitting ancient leather cap were tied in a bow under his chin. 'I fear I must ask you to extend my apologies to the emergency meeting tonight. I am not at leisure to attend. And I must ask you, Rector, to issue a protest to Magistrate Flesher on my behalf.'

  'Master Flesher will be pleased,' said the rector.

  'Whether he is or not, I wish my opinion to be on record that as soon as a house is infected, all sound people should be had out of it and not shut up to sicken in their turn. Shutting up is murder. It is against humanity and religion, above all it is against common sense.' His light voice was unemphatic.

  We know that. But there's no money.' Striding around the vestry, the Reverend Boreman dragged the choir surplices from their pegs. With the choir cancelled for the Plague's duration, they could be laundered.

  We are not containing it, Robert.' William Boghurst might have been commenting on the weather. He was getting on the rector's nerves.

  'I know that, don't I?' Damn, Emmy Smith had died yesterday. Who could he get to do the church laundry now? He bundled the surplices up and kicked them into a corner. 'What's the bill this week?'

  The parish clerk kept on writing. TMear two hundred, Rector.'

  'Where is it?' It was unlike Simkin to be inexact. 'It's Monday. You should be taking it in.'

  'I am, Rector. But until Master Elliot's back on his feet there's the churchwardens' accounts to be finished.'

  'George Elliot won't be getting back on his feet.' He'd just come from his churchwarden's death-bed. The nine tolls John Gere had just rung were his. Where's the damn Bill?'

  Wearily, the parish clerk turned round on his stool. He had ink on his nose. 'Master Elliot gone? I'm right sorry, Rector. God rest him.'

  'Indeed. What about the Bill?'

  'I farmed it out, Rector. There weren't no time to copy it proper, it's got so big, what with being up all night seeing to the relief . . .'

  The Reverend Boreman pulled himself together; they were all doing their best. 'Nobody blames you, Peter. Who to?' The number with literary skill had never been high in St Giles, and the Plague was diminishing it fast.

  He saw Peter Simkin's exhausted face crumple. 'It's been difficult coping, Rector ... I been giving it to Mistress Hurd to write out for me.'

  Who the hell was Mistress Hurd? 'Not that Puritan slut? I thought she was ... Good God, man, she's shut up with the rest of the Cock and Pie.'

  William Boghurst intervened. 'She passes the Bill down in a basket and I have advised Peter Simkin to bake it in his oven to rid it of infection before handling it.'

  The Reverend Boreman reminded himself not to breakfast off any more loaves baked by Mistress Simkin. Then he thought: With all the dying, Plague-ridden hands I've held these last weeks, what difference does it make?

  'She's got a neat hand, Rector,' pleaded Peter Simkin.

  Nevertheless, a Puritan who had chosen to live in a notorious brothel ... He took a deep breath: Very well, but we will keep this matter from Magistrate Flesher.' He had to adjust to the inconceivable. He was living through it. 'And the Bishop' he added.

  As they walked together through the church, the apothecary said: 'Master Simkin is in need of rest.'

  'So are you. So am I.'

  In the porch they braced themselves before going out into the sunlight. The weather was getting on the rector's nerves. This June was so damnably ... jolly. Out of kilter. Like some brash soul being determinedly festive long after the party spirit had gone out of the other guests. The grass needed cutting, but old Ben White had been scythed down himself last week. He said: 'So you've been visiting the Cock and Pie, Master Boghurst.'

  'Professionally.' The apothecary was undisturbed. 'My profession, not theirs. As a matter of fact, it is a case in point. It has suffered one death, yet ten souls are imprisoned within it awaiting the inevitable.'

  'Guilty souls.' The rector looked with disfavour at the dust which was turning his yew trees grey and clouding up from the endless procession of horses and coaches going past his gates on the flight from London to the country. The sound of horses and wheels very nearly drowned the sound of the tolling bell. No wonder that even when he got time to sleep, he couldn't.

  Some of Janet's roses trailed over the wall from the rectory garden. He should be able to smell them, smell the lavender along the church path that the bees were busy with. Instead the warm air reeked of horse manure and the rank stink of earth from the mounds outlining the two great pits disfiguring this once-blessed place.

  He held mass funeral services at night, unbelieving that he was doing it, but doing it. Rebuking the bearers for tipping the bodies in like sacks of rubbish, yet himself becoming more callous, every night more accepting of the unacceptable.

  There were so many dead he barely had time for the l
iving. And no money. The 1s 6d a week they paid out of parish funds to the sick and needy wouldn't keep a cat alive.

  A woman framed in the window of a pretty carriage held up by a delay in the traffic was craning her neck to look over the wall at the pits, drumming her gloved fingers on the side of her door. She had rings glittering over her gloves and a scarf over her mouth.

  Talk of guilty souls. 'Have you contributed to the relief of the poor you leave behind, madam?' he shouted. It had cost 4s 9d - three days' work - to get those pits dug. Startled, the woman pulled down the carriage blind. They could hear her urging her coachman to drive on. Damn her. He looked up the road, crowded with luggage-laden carriages. Damn them all. 'I get so angry.' His heart was pounding.

  You should rest. Surely, some of them have been generous to the out-parishes. Prince Rupert, the Duchess of York.'

  'Some.' It was the sense of abandonment. Every time he had to dodge a carriage with a coat of arms on its door, its occupants goggling at the pits as they passed on to safety, he struggled against the impulse to pull them out of it, take them into the sickrooms, make them watch the terror. And sometimes he could have begged them to take him with them.

  The Rookery had gained a fresh rash of red crosses overnight. Along Butcher's Cut, Peter Simkin had already counted twelve. Iffen it goes on like this, he thought, it'll be cheaper to mark houses as don't have it.

  He walked softly, trying not to attract the eyes that would plead through gaps in the boards over the ground-floor windows, and the voices that swore because he wasn't the apothecary or the relief cart bringing food.

  It was hot. The sun made a ragged track of light along the middle of the Cut, intensifying the shadows under the overhang of the upper storeys. One thing, he thought, the Rookery ain't never been cleaner. The Examiner insisted that laystalls throughout the parish be regularly emptied and rubbish cleared — 'Item: Street-cleaning: £4s 1d'. The Cut was empty and the quiet outside intensified the sounds coming from each muffled window, the murmuring, the occasional quarrel, children crying and being shouted at.

  He tried to imagine those interiors and pictured a squirming dormouse nest. How to afford the food to keep these people?

  When they obligingly solved the problem by dying, how to afford the cost of burying them?

  At the end of the Cut, the figure of a man crossed from one side to another, then back again. He walked with his hands up, his legs jerking him forward in a corkscrew motion on to his own shadow.

  Where's the Watch? Peter Simkin looked round, saw a side alley and escaped down it. He found two watchmen sitting chatting on a stile by the pond in Cow Lane when they should have been patrolling.

  Sharply, he ordered them to go and see to the poor soul in the Cut. 'Another bloody walking corp,' one of them grumbled. They picked up their grappling hooks and strolled off to do their duty. He'd complain of them to the magistrate at the meeting tonight, but what was the good? The sort of men who were prepared to do their sort of job for the pay the parish was offering were unlikely to be the flower of England.

  And they were right; the man in the Cut was a corpse, stumbling its way to its own grave. The Plague was ambulatory; spasms moved its host's arms and legs like a puppet's, impelling the dying out of their beds to the open air in a possession that wiped away the personality of the possessed, the last bid of the spirit to keep the body upright and escape the poison which was altering every organ of the body. If they got out into the streets they wandered until they dropped. There'd been one in the High Street yesterday, scattering the few passers-by, causing coaches to stop.

  Peter Simkin clenched his hands on the rough wood of the stile. 'I'm so frit, so frit, Lord.' Every morning he and Mary scanned each other's and the little ones' bared upper parts for the tokens, and got down on their knees in gratitude for unblemished skin. But for how long? Day before yesterday it took the littlest of the Evans family, two doors down. 'Tell me what to do, Lord, anything, and I'll do it. Only spare us that cross.'

  The level in the pond was low and covered in duckweed; there was another cost - bringing water in carts to the shut- ups.

  A loud bang from a street or two away made him jump. They'd started then. 'Item. Powder and shot for killing vermin: £6 0s 9d! He'd better get on. The thought of the trudge to Parish Clerks' Hall was daunting, but not as daunting as the hostility when he got there. St Giles-in-the-Fields had become synonymous with Plague and he its scapegoat. His fellow- clerks had made it clear they didn't want him dining with them in the Ring o' Bells any more. He ate with the other pariahs, St Martin's and Clement Danes.

  And he'd been upset by an article in his Newes last week which, trying to calm the City, assured it that there were only nineteen Plague cases within its walls; it was St Giles where the infection raged, and that, it said, due to poverty and sluttishness. The tenor was that St Giles haa made its bed and could lie in it.

  He'd been shamed. For his parish. For his favourite newspaper's lack of charity. It didn't mention that more and more servants and journeymen, left with no work by their employers' flight from the City, were swelling St Giles's overcrowding and contributing to its sluttishness. He hadn't shown it to Rector. The poor man was in enough of a taking as it was.

  Ahead of him the tall, boarded shape of Mother Hubbard's looked so like a windmill that, as always, he found himself mentally sketching in the missing sails. Two girls hung out of its high side window and he braced himself for the calls — 'Want some fickytoodle, dearie?' - with which Mother Hubbard's advertised its wares. None came. Surprised, he looked up and saw the girls' eyes were lacklustre, watching him pass because he was there to be watched, like a beetle.

  He understood as he turned the corner and saw the red cross on their door. Apothecary Boghurst was wrong then. He'd said whores were protected against Plague by their pox. Lord have mercy.

  He paused on the west steps of Dog Yard and waved across to the figure peering over the balcony opposite. There she was, her old domed hat shading her face from the sun.

  Lord have mercy on her and all. Ever since that night when he'd led her to the Searcher, he'd felt responsible for her somehow. Rector said she'd be defiled by now. The Cock and Pie is pitch and she has touched it.' But he'd swear she was still a maid. Probably always would be. A born old maid, for all her pretty eyes. All straitlace and stumbling tongue, though a neat hand with the quill.

  As he went down the steps to cross the Yard, the heat trapped in its well of gimcrack houses enclosed him like an oven. Red crosses everywhere. He held his breath until he'd climbed the steps to the walkway below the balcony. The Yard watchman, sitting on them, nodded a greeting and shifted his halberd so that he could pass.

  The basket was already hanging down on its string. Almost guiltily, he put a glove on his right hand and took out the slate on which the deaths had been scrawled as they'd been reported, and the columned paper on which she'd categorized them in her neat, small writing.

  'All well, then, Pen?' His voice echoed discomfortingly around the Yard. He could hardly see her face as he squinted up into the sun, but the hat nodded. 'Not long now, eh?' She spread and closed her fingers. Eyes watering, he counted. Twenty-six more days. Twenty-six if the Cock and Pie stayed healthy; forty more on top of that if it didn't.

  Awkwardly, he searched about for something to say. 'They'll be coming round to shoot cats and dogs in a while. Don't be frit of the bangs. Sooner the vermin's gone, the sooner it'll be over.' Another nod. He pointed down the side alley in the direction of the laystall. 'They clean out the you-know satisfactory?' He'd told them to. Another nod.

  That was it, then. He didn't know what else to say and he daren't put off the City any longer. 'Keep you, Pen.' He felt her eyes, all their eyes, follow him until he'd turned the corner by the Stables.

  Suffering the heat, Penitence stayed on the balcony, facing the direction the little parish clerk had taken. At nights she fetched her mattress out here and slept on it, the stars helping the illusion th
at she was in Awashonks's hut with the raised door-flap leading to unlimited space.

  By day she pretended she could step out into the view and down to Hyde Park where deer flicked their tails under the trees, or walk along the river. She knew London was emptying; every morning when she carried her night-pail downstairs, she passed the window at the back of the attics which looked across the roofs to the beginning of the countryside, and saw the dotted snake that was the Tottenham Court road crammed with traffic going north. The Thames was sparse of boats, and at every dusk fewer and fewer windows lit up in the towers of the Strand palaces.

  But distance kept reality at bay, and so did she, or else go mad.

  She'd made an exhibition of herself during the shutting-up, fighting to open the door that three constables on the other side were holding closed. 'Not me, not me. I don't belong.' The coffin lid was closing down. Any sense of companionship with the others had gone. It was a mistake, she was here by mischance. She couldn't die in the Cock and Pie, she was no sinner. I don't belong. She was too panicked to feel shame.