The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  It was not the box she had fetched from Lawyer Patterson. It was small, with an arched lid striped by two brass bands. It was the twin of one her grandfather had made for her when she was ten years old, and which was now ashes blowing in the breeze from a Massachusetts river; perhaps it was from the same piece of cherrywood. Perhaps he had made it for his daughter, Margaret, when she, too, was ten years old. She had pokerworked her initials into the lid - M.H. - just as Penitence had.

  She was shaken by sudden agony for that unknowing child Margaret Hughes and what had become of her. Still kneeling, she lifted the box on to the bed and opened it. Inside were scrolled papers tied with ribbon.

  The first was a deed naming Margaret Hughes of St Giles as purchaser of 'the property called the Cock and Pie, heretofore known as Appleyard House'. It was dated 14 April 1651 and the vendor was a John Appleyard. The price was £186 16s.

  The wages of sin must have been high, thought Penitence, for Her Ladyship to have been able to afford a sum like that.

  The next roll showed that they hadn't been. It was a deed of mortgage, making the Cock and Pie security for the sum of £185 0s 0d. The interest to be paid on said sum was 45 per cent per annum.

  Penitence felt her first reaction in days. She yelped. 'Forty- five per cent?' Her grandfather had only been charged 20 per cent when he'd borrowed for one of his trading ventures, and he'd grumbled enough about that.

  Margaret Hughes had signed with a cross, and so had a gentleman called William Calf, described as 'Agent', though agent for whom was not set down. The witnesses were a doctor of divinity and a canon, presumably two of Her Ladyship's clients.

  The parchment of the second scroll was less yellowed and its ink fresher than the first. It was the last will and testament of Margaret Hughes. Apart from some small personal items to Job, Kinyans and the girls, it bequeathed all her property and possessions 'to my daughter, Penitence Hoy, yclept Penitence Hurd, recently come from New England'.

  She had not needed the proof; at the moment when Her Ladyship's body had been dragged to the burial cart and Dorinda had shouted, a hundred flakes of memory, whispers, looks, hurts, had drawn together into a core of certainty.

  Nevertheless, to see the words written was shocking, an official command to remake herself. She rested her head on her mother's coverlet while the person she had thought herself to be disassembled.

  Hoy?

  Is that all you will tell me? She scrabbled in the nearly empty box and brought out a thin, flat package wrapped in silk. It was a letter. The superscription on its stained outside read: 'Mistress Margaret Hughes, to be found at the George Inn, Taunton'.

  Penitence unfolded it carefully. It was coming apart along the heavier creases. It was dated Oxford, April 1646.

  Mistress, I must report to you the doleful news that Capt. James Hoy is dead of wounds gained in a skirmish. It is a grief to me to lose an officer as valiant in the field as he was merry in company. At the last he begged me write to you of his affection and send these enclosed pieces and recommend you to the kindness of his people. Would I could do more for the memory of a faithful friend but I and my brother are bid by Parliament to quit England and take ship for Calais.

  God keep you, mistress. Your servant, Rupert.

  She had to read it twice to decipher the hasty scrawl and three times to absorb its significance.

  Rupert? Only royalty signed with a Christian name. Prince Rupert of the Rhine and his brother, Maurice, had been banished by Cromwell at the end of the Civil War.Remorselessly, her mind pursued the logic while the person she had always assumed herself to be unravelled further.

  Capt. James Hoy. My father.

  The exemplary Ralph Hurd, that martyred saint of the Puritan revolution, faded into smoke and in his place stood a stuttering blue-eyed man who turned her into as much of a stranger as himself.

  He had fought on the wrong side. She was not Penitence Hurd, sprig of solid Puritan stock, she was a royalist's bastard. If she was now eighteen years old — if that was not a lie, like everything else she had been told about herself - he had impregnated her mother just in time to go and get himself killed in a last 'skirmish' against Cromwell's forces.

  At that moment it was indignation she felt. You stupid, Papist . . . Bartholomew. Wrong side, wrong loyalty, wrong death, wrong time. A most perfect disordering of everyone's life, her mother's, hers, that of the woman who had passed herself off as a mother, his own most of all, a microcosm of upheaval in the upheaval going on around them.

  Had Margaret Hughes been a harlot then? But even royalist captains did not make death-bed professions of love for prostitutes, nor recommend them to their families. Perhaps he felt guilt. Perhaps it had been rape. The expression on Her Ladyship's face as she'd died remembering Captain Hoy did not support that premise and Penitence was forced to abandon it.

  Still she held on to her indignation for fear that she would be formless without it. Seduction, then; the blandishments of a be-plumed Cavalier from the squirearchy overcoming the scruples of an innocent country Puritan.

  However it had happened, if poor, pregnant Margaret Hughes had thrown herself on the charity of the Hoys, she had been rebuffed. Penitence's lips thinned as jeering landed gentry in her mind directed the pleading young woman from their magnificent door.

  She was on stronger ground of interpretation when it came to the reaction of her own family. How her grandmother would have shrunk back from the sullied flesh of her flesh, how that hard little mind would have rejected the path of compassion for the road of outraged righteousness. Margaret Hughes had been ostracized.

  It must have been around this time, not earlier, that her grandparents had joined the ranks of other Puritan saints in the New Jerusalem of the Americas, leaving the shamed daughter behind, taking her bastard and the virtuous daughter with them. Did they wrench the baby from Margaret Hughes's sinful arms? Or had she, knowing she was to be abandoned and could not support it, begged her sister to bring it up as her own?

  And what of the sister? Warily, Penitence's mind explored the loveless parenting she had received from the woman she now knew to have been her aunt, and found it less painful in understanding it better.

  Unless Ralph Hurd had been a respectable fiction, his poor widow had had foisted on her, to bring up as her own, a child who had not only been conceived in sin, but fathered by one of her husband's enemies — for all she knew, the man who fired the shot that killed him. It was not a recipe for happy motherhood.

  As for the real mother, left in England by her nearest and dearest to suffer the wages of sin ... there would have been no wages but sin's.

  Penitence studied the dates on the documents. James Hoy had died in April '46, her birthday was four months later. Five years after that Margaret Hughes had bought the Cock and Pie and begun her career as Her Ladyship.

  Knowing what she knew now, Penitence could imagine the poverty of those five years, the struggle to stay respectable, the inexorable sinking below the waves of corruption, the bleaching out of all virtues except that of survival. You had no Her Ladyship to offer you a refuge.

  Penitence raised her head and her eyes encountered the black shapes of the manacles, chains and whips that hung on Her Ladyship's pink bedroom wall. Couldn't you have stayed a victim? Did you have to survive so well?

  She rewrapped the letter in its silk, retied the ribbons round the scrolls. The reconstructions and rehabilitations she must make to her own and others' past would take time. Oddly, her overriding emotion was still indignation, a child's anger at adult secrecy. How devious they had all been. She had been deterred from loving her mother'aunt and grandparents as she would have liked, but she had respected them for their ideals of plain-dealing and truth. It was they who had taught her to despise deception. She'd trusted them to be who they said they were.

  They lined before her now in masks. Why didn't they tell me?

  Dorinda was standing at the door, watching. Penitence turned on her: 'How d-did you know?'


  Dorinda shrugged. 'Plain as Paddy's pig, it was.'

  'Not to me. Why d-didn't she tell me?'

  'Oh, Prinks.' Dorinda spoke with tired exasperation. 'What you expect? Your goggles stared at all of us like we was stale herring and you was still swimming. Was she going to look into goggles like that and say "Welcome home and I'm your ma"? Acourse she ballocking wasn't.'

  It was a simplistic explanation and probably true, but Penitence had also seen in Her Ladyship a woman who had been leached of the ability to feel anything very much, not sorrow, nor happiness, not good, not evil, and certainly not mother-love. Whatever agony she had gone through when her baby had been taken away, it had been lived with and layered over too long. There had been discomfort when Penitence turned up on her doorstep, a memory that there had been pain, not the pain itself. I was a nuisance.

  Her Ladyship had done her duty, given her child her protection, found it proper to pass on the Cock and Pie to her but, if there had been any sensation in the numbness in which she existed, it had brought with it resentment that she should feel anything at all. The affection between them, such as it was, was makeshift, not the love of mother and daughter. Penitence doubted if, on Her Ladyship's side, it was greater than for Dorinda and her other girls.

  The only love that had warmed her daughter's life had come from a wizened Indian called Awashonks, the truest mother of them all.

  She was so tired. She put the papers back in the box and shut its lid. 'She's left me the Cock and Pie,' she said.

  Dorinda's face sharpened with the old jealousy. 'I was a better daughter to her than you ever was.'

  Through mental and physical exhaustion, Penitence wrong- footed her. 'I know you were.'

  She suffered a relapse, really a form of lethargy in which she reluctantly transferred her identity from respectable child of respectable parents to the bastard of a royalist and a whore- mistress - moreover one who found herself the owner of a brothel.

  It was a painful transition for one with a Puritan upbringing, though it was that same upbringing which brought her through it eventually with belief in her individual worth intact. The Church which had formed her might lean heavily towards group responsibility, but its glory lay in the value it put on personal salvation, and it was that which helped her now.

  Irritatingly, so did the exchange of fathers. Devout Ralph Hurd, so long presiding over her from his position among the Lord's host, had been credited with many virtues, but merriment wasn't one of them. Now suddenly, perched up on his branch of her family tree, was a man who had been 'merry' in company. Probably drunk, she scolded him. What right had thee to be merry, seducer? But as she frowned at him, he gave her a wink, one stammerer to another, and she very nearly winked back.

  The apothecary pronounced her better.

  'P-please inform P-Peter Simkin I can help him again with the Mortality B-Bill,' she requested, and found she was weaker than she'd thought when he told her the clerk had died many days before.

  'B-but it's over now, isn't it?' she asked through tears. The vibrations of hope rising from Dog Yard had matched her own.

  The apothecary looked at her out of his expressionless eyes. 'Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie,' he said. She didn't know what it meant, but it frightened her.

  Whatever it was, he was right. The next evening Mistress Palmer called from her balcony to the Watch that there'd been no movement all day from within Mistress Fairley's room. 'And the door's locked.'

  It was William Burrows on duty. He called his fellow- watchmen from the Cut, they wound mufflers over their mouths and entered the Buildings. The Yard heard them break down the door, listened to silence, and waited.

  Mistress Fairley and both her babies had taken the Plague, but it was only Mistress Fairley had died of it; before doing so, she had smothered each of the children so that they should not be left to die without her.

  That night, in pursuance of the plan to save Kitty Bryskett, the only child still alive in Dog Yard, the Cock and Pie went into rehearsal.

  Chapter 10

  Beatrice and Benedick danced together in Leonato's pillared hall in Messina, ignoring the fact that their raised fingertips were separated by a five-foot width above the stinking alley in the Rookery and that the light was going. Most of the rehearsals took place at night; it was cooler, though not much.

  'Will you not tell me who told you so?' asked Beatrice.

  'No, you shall pardon me.'

  'Nor will you not tell me who you are?'

  'Not now.'

  'That I was disdainful, and that I had my good wit out of the "Hundred Merry Tales"? Well, this was Signior Benedick that said so.'

  'For God's sake, Beatrice.' The play-actor dropped his hand and hammered with it on his table. 'We've been through this. The first line's a question so put a bloody rise on it. Say it again.' She said it again .. .

  'Hand up, woman. You're supposed to be dancing with

  Benedick, not goosing him. Extend your fingers. Gracefully. That's good. Again.'

  His attitude towards her had changed; such patience as he'd shown in enabling her to speak in the first place had gone now that she could.

  The irony was that it was only as Beatrice that she could speak to him at all. When, as everyday Penitence, she talked to Dorinda or Job or exchanged news with the rest of the Yard she stammered very little now. If, as Penitence, she tried addressing herself to her mentor, the stammer became so appalling that she didn't say anything.

  Nor did he notice. The play was the thing and only the play. It was Beatrice he was rehearsing, Beatrice's voice he listened for and corrected: the woman who played her needed no other purpose. He was a Pygmalion chipping away at his sculpture to produce his ideal woman and the ideal woman was not Galatea, but Beatrice.

  Beatrice didn't mind. Shakespeare had given her a hundred revenges in his lines; the actor's strictures enabled her to deliver them better.

  It was Penitence, still rocked by the revelation of an unsuspected identity, who minded. She minded that she was being treated like two people, one important, one insignificant. She minded that she was becoming two people: Penitence, the retiring identical twin of an outgoing and popular sister, Beatrice. Every time his nod of dismissal betokened the end of a rehearsal, she took off the vizard mask and, watching him, had the uncanny experience of seeing her unmasked self disappear.

  Unmasked, she resented that she had not even been consulted on whether she would co-operate on the play. She went on with it because it was only as Beatrice that she regained visibility and - she accused herself of being fanciful, but it was true - because Beatrice willed it.

  Beatrice lived for and in the hours at the window, falling in love with Benedick more deeply with each one.

  A shuffle from the alley below told her that Dogberry had come on night duty. They paused while he settled himself on the stool which was now his regular stall. Thought you were going to start the love bit.'

  'We are' said the actor, shortly.

  'Good.'

  The dance scene was brief. As usual, Beatrice wiped the floor with Benedick.

  'Very well, then,' said the play-actor, 'Beatrice has been gulled into believing Benedick loves her, we know he does, etc., etc., he's been gulled into believing she loves him, we know she does, di-da-di-da, poor Hero's been wrongly accused of unchastity but Claudio believes it, tum-ti-tum, and now we get to it.' He peered across the alley which was lit fitfully from below by Dogberry's lantern and above by a harvest moon. We've finished the masked scene. Take it off.'

  She shook her head.

  'Take it off. It's served its turn. You can't go out on that balcony next week in a mask, for Lord's sake.'

  Beatrice was the mask, the mask was Beatrice. Besides, Beatrice's love for Benedick was such that Penitence needed to stay free of it; there must be no confusion of roles.

  'Don't you realize, we haven't got time for this.' His fury was partly from exhaustion. Dorinda thought he was a marvel to w
ork so hard for the Plan, but from the unidentified source by which she understood him Penitence knew that the approaching end of shut-up was unnerving him. The forty-day period since Mistress Hicks had contracted the Plague would be over two days after the play's performance. The Cock and Pie's shut-up extended a week longer. They were all strung up on tenterhooks from the ever-present threat of another death shutting them up for a further forty days, or, if il was their own, for eternity. The gallantry with which he had borne his imprisonment, like his temper, was getting threadbare as his release came nearer.

  He was rubbing the back of his neck. 'How can it stay so bloody hot, so bloody long?' He looked down at Dogberry to ask, as he always did: 'Why don't you go and get me a drink?' Dogberry gave his usual answer.

  The actor took in a breath and let it out again. 'Look,