The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  He turned to look down at her. She could see the shape of his head. 'Now you listen to me, Boots. You're too good for this life. When they let you out next week, you're to start a new one. I want your promise. I'm writing to Killigrew — Dorinda knows who I mean - telling him that if he doesn't take you on he's a fool.'

  She heard the rustle of papers as he stuffed his play into the bundle of clothes.

  'One of these days,' he said, 'if and when I get back, I'm going to walk into the King's Theatre and the voice I'll hear speaking from the stage will be the most beautiful and admired of all voices. And I'll think: "That's my voice. If I've done nothing else with my life, I gave that sound to the world." Promise me now, Boots.'

  He wasn't expecting an answer. He never had.

  He was suddenly fretful. 'I wish I had something for you . .. there's only this.'

  Leave it on the mantelshelf. Like the other clients.

  He was back by the bed, groping for her hands.

  Kiss them and I'll kill you. He laid something heavy across them. It was his sword.

  'God keep you, Boots.'

  He stood for another moment and she knew he wanted help with his exit, stage left.

  Just go.

  And he just went. Climbed out of the window, reached up to the guttering and heaved himself up. There was some scrabbling, and his face appeared upside-down.

  'Keep breathing,' he said, and disappeared.

  After a while she got up and searched for her clothes among the tangle of bed-linen, dressed, and crawled back to her attic, carrying her fee with her.

  They never found Phoebe's child. On their first day of freedom they went looking for him, stepping delicately, like cats, aware there was no level above their heads. Mistress Palmer gave them a cheer. Dogberry nodded as if they'd passed a test he'd set.

  There was nobody else around. The absence was a positive presence, a suspension. Any moment now a door would slam, there'd be a rush of footsteps and the hiders would come running to say peep-bo. It didn't. There wasn't. They never would. The two girls tiptoed, hunched for a surprise that didn't come. The open doors showed overturned cups, beds with ragged blankets thrown back, a pull-along, roughly carved rabbit on wheels.

  For the first time they took in how big was the disaster of which only a ten-thousandth fraction had been played out in the Cock and Pie.

  The address Phoebe had given Dorinda was another empty building. The only person in the street, an old man, said: They're all dead.' Other enquiries brought them the same answer.

  On their way back, they went by Goat Alley. Penitence stopped at the door leading to the printer's. 'What you want here?' asked Dorinda. 'He's dead. The whole family's dead.'

  Their footsteps left prints in the dust on the stairs. Cobwebs were strung across the open door to the loft. 'It's still here,' said Penitence. The press was as she'd last seen it. Some unfinished text was in the forme, a few letters scattered on the floor.

  'Lovely,' said Dorinda. 'Now let's go. I'm breaded.'

  The typeface of the print was worn, but still sharp. Holland- ish from the look of it, like her grandfather's. Smuggled in. Only the Dutch could cast good type; English type was rubbish.

  'Will you ballocking leave it?' Dorinda's voice was sharp. Not finding Phoebe's child had added to her loss. 'The parish'll come and collect all this stuff sooner or later.' The goods of those who had died intestate - and since the Plague had taken whole families there were no heirs for most goods to be passed on to - were sold by the parish to defray the cost of relief.

  'It won't.' She might as well add theft to her sins. 'I'm going to get the Tippin boys to carry it over to the Cock and Pie.'

  'What for? Prinks, what do we want a ballocking great machine like that for?'

  'Our livelihood.'

  Within the month the Cock and Pie publishing house had gained its first commission - some handbills for Dogberry, the former watchman, who had returned to the butchery trade.

  By then Penitence knew she was pregnant.

  The baby was born in the spring.

  Three months later Penitence was arrested for debt.

  BOOK II

  Chapter 1

  For nearly as long as there had been a London there had been a Newgate, one of the seven portals into the city. And for nearly as long as there had been a Newgate it had been a prison. Also known as the Whittington, or Whitt, in honour of the Lord Mayor whose bequest had rebuilt it in the fifteenth century, it was an impressive gateway, providing an equally impressive bottleneck for traffic. Its castellated turrets were five storeys high and over the archway between them were pilasters with statues symbolizing Peace, Security, Plenty and Liberty. Originally, Liberty had a cat at her feet, in memory of Dick Whittington's cat, but this had fallen off. Still, it was a fine gate and had cost considerably more than the prison that lay behind it.

  Penitence Hurd entered it in the company of a boy who'd been fined forty shillings for not paying a penny bridge toll, a female Quaker, a highwayman, and a woman who'd stolen a kerchief worth sixpence.

  They were taken under the archway into the Lodge where their particulars were taken down by a male keeper, and the Quaker's and Penitence's cloaks dragged off them by a squat lady who said they wouldn't be needing them, but that she would.

  Their next stop was the Hold, a room twenty foot by fourteen, with iron bars over a tiny window that looked out on to Newgate Street. Part of the floor was boarded over as a sleeping area, the rest of it decorated with chains, hooks, iron staples and dried excreta.

  The keeper pointed to the spiked aperture over the door and gave them the prison rules in a fast monotone: 'Speaking through that to friends eighteen pence, said friend's visit sixpence, room of your own twenty guineas down and eleven shilling a week, cleaning woman one shilling a week, furniture ten shilling and twelve pence a night for a whore. Any of you lot got the garnish?'

  The highwayman said he had at which the keeper perked up and took him off to share it with him. The woman felon and the boy who hadn't paid his toll both cried, the Quaker didn't.

  Nor did Penitence. Neither did she pray, as the Quaker was doing. Somewhere within her was fear at her plight, but her mind couldn't quite make contact with it. It hadn't been able to experience anything as vivid as fear, or happiness, or even boredom, since her baby was born. Dorinda and Mistress Palmer had delivered the child and laid it in her arms, telling her what a beautiful boy it was, and although she could see for herself that it was the truth she had felt no emotion. She had been quite surprised, when her breasts produced milk, that her body should respond like a mother's.

  Dorinda was the one who called the baby Benedick, rocked him and crooned to him and, when Penitence's milk dried up, found a wet-nurse and toted him back and forth for his feeds, though it was thanks to Penitence's enterprise that the wet- nurse could be paid and the two of them have enough to live on.

  The Plague's toll on licensed and unlicensed printers had been high and as yet there was no influx of printers from the provinces sufficiently daring to take their place. It had been surprisingly easy to find work for the stolen press she had set up in the Cock and Pie's kitchen — Apothecary Boghurst wanted bills printed, so did the late Mistress Hicks's rope- dancer, the Reverend Boreman had hired her to print his polemic against the cowardice of his fellow-priests who had deserted their posts at the first whiff of Plague. Their word of mouth brought in more work until Penitence had as much as she could cope with and had to employ MacGregor, the ex- piper, as a printer's devil.

  She laboured ten hours a day in a lead-heated, paper-filled kitchen, doing the work because it was there to be done, taking no joy from it, not minding it, just filling the limbo in which she existed.

  When the bailiff came to take her off to debtors' prison because she hadn't paid her mortgage, it was Dorinda who protested: 'But nobody asked us for it.'

  'Don't matter anyway,' explained the bailiff. 'Debt's been sold.'

  'How can you se
ll a ballocking debt?'

  The bailiff was surprised by her ignorance. There were agencies which bought debts and then enforced them and would the decoct come along please and make no trouble for a man as was only doing his duty.

  Penitence went.

  Dog Yard turned out, prepared to lynch the bailiff if she gave the word, but she refused to give it. 'It d-doesn't matter.' Nothing mattered, not the sound of Benedick crying as she was led away, not the young Tippins running along beside her bellowing out expert instructions on Newgate survival, not Dorinda promising to somehow, anyhow, pay the money. It was as if it was happening to somebody else.

  It went on being something happening to somebody else. The Quaker was taken off to the dungeon, the boy to the men's quarters, the woman felon produced some cash and was allowed to go to the dining-hall before her incarceration in the women's ward. Penitence, with not a halfpenny to bless herself with, was left alone for the night without food, water, or light.

  In the early hours the lock turned and a man with a large number of keys on his belt came in carrying a lantern and a jug of ale. He held it out to her and Penitence drank it.

  'You don't like me, do you?' he asked.

  She was unaware of having seen him before. In this light she could barely see him now until, obligingly, he held up the lantern. Incuriously, she considered the pockmarked face of a man in late middle age, whose eyes would have been nondescript if it hadn't been for an almost ferocious intensity. The hand holding the lantern had a bad state of shakes.

  She shrugged.

  'Haughty' he said. 'You look down on me, don't you? They told me as there was a lady-in. You're a lady-in, ain't you?'

  She had no idea.

  He came closer, nodding. 'Lady of three ins. In debt. In gaol. And in danger of staying there. 1 like lady-ins as is high-nosed. I won't sard with trollops. I'm particular. I like 'em when they don't like me. Lady-ins ought to have a room of their own, and a soft bed to snuggle in and have some meat in their gravy.' He was shaking so that the lantern vibrated frenetic shadows around the walls. 'Your guts is chiming twelve, ain't they? Want George to fill 'em? George'll do it, George'll put meat in your gravy. There's other ways of garnishing George than crossing George's palm with gelt.'

  She'd guessed that there were. She said: 'No.'

  Oddly, he was gratified. 'Lady-in says no, does she? Too good for old George, is she? Then George'll escort her to her quarters. He can wait, can George. He's waited before.'

  He bowed her out, and accompanied her down a stone passage which was punctuated by snores or moans emerging out of the grilles in its doors on puffs of foul air. The large and insalubrious courtyard it led into smelled fresh in comparison.

  George's lantern swung to show her the windows looking over the courtyard. Some of them were lit and from one of them came the sound of a mandolin. 'Press Yard. Private rooms,' he said. 'You garnish George, he'll garnish you. You don't like me, though, do you?'

  More passages, more smell, a large door requiring an enormous key for its lock. As George opened it fetor came rushing out at the two of them like escaping gas.

  At that particular moment Newgate's common female ward, known to its familiars as Flap Alley, was at its best, which is to say dark and quiet. Down one end of its narrow thirty-foot length some women were gathered on their knees in front of what appeared to be a box on the wall with candlelight from inside it concentrated on their faces and necks. It looked like a painting in which the artist had depicted a nativity scene with female shepherds staring into the illuminated crib. The grime on the canvas darkened the intervening area but George's lantern showed that the box was a bed, one of a series of barrack beds formed by planking which ran in two tiers the length of the side walls partitioned by wooden uprights.

  Penitence saw that each bed within her vision, and presumably those out of it, was occupied not by one woman but two or more. The lower one by her elbow had two women sleeping at different ends with three children tucked in at angles around them. It was, in fact, a room, three feet wide, four high and five long.

  'Looks bad,' said George at her side. 'Whitt fever.' He nudged Penitence. 'You want to remember that. Four go off of Whitt fever for every one as we hang. You want to remember that when George comes for his garnish.'

  One of the women at the far end hauled herself to her feet and came towards them. 'Get the carriers, George,' she said.

  'Gone off, has it?' enquired George, not unsympathetically.

  'And her. Where's that bloody leech? We asked for him yester morning.'

  George shrugged. 'You know him,' he said. He went off and the woman returned to the group. Penitence followed her and looked into the oblong where a rushlight cast a glow on to two yellow-white dead faces, a woman's and a baby's. From the amount of blood on the sacking beneath the woman's legs she had haemorrhaged to death.

  Penitence turned away and went to sit in the shadows next to the empty grate in the end wall. Some part of her was connecting with what she'd just seen; the other part considered the ineffectualness of women. Women cast out, women shut up, women dying, women watching other women die. In the clarity of her depression she saw that the beds were hutches to contain creatures who'd no more control over their own lives than small animals at the mercy of weather and predators; powerless because they were ignorant, ignorant through powerlessness.

  There was quiet until George came back with some keepers carrying a hurdle. Their boots made sharp, authoritative sounds on the stone floor and they were teasing each other about a card game they'd been interrupted in. Whether or not she resented the masculinity of this intrusion, one of the women by the bed suddenly screamed and threw herself at them, clawing. Within seconds the room was in pandemonium, women with children clinging to their skirts emerging from their beds to join in the attack on the men, and in some cases each other, yelling and swearing.

  At the door, George pulled on a bell rope, adding clangour to the general howl. Other keepers came rushing in, carrying buckets of water which they threw indiscriminately over rioters and children alike. The speed with which the scene quietened down with no apparent ill-will on either side indicated that it was a regular occurrence. The bodies were taken away; women, wringing water from their hair and dresses, gathered up their children, went back into their hutches and once more allowed peace to descend on Flap Alley.

  Penitence hauled herself out of the fireplace in which she'd taken shelter and squelched a puddled way along the beds, trying to find one that was empty, knowing it was a hopeless search, that hopelessness was all she would ever feel again, that the women prisoners' rage had come from their own hopelessness, an expression of despair so deep that it could only be expressed in hysteria.

  Eventually, she went back to her spot by the fireplace, took off her wet shoes, tucked her feet under her skirt and went to sleep.

  She was woken by a boot nudging her hip and a voice saying: 'What you in for?'

  One of the women who'd attended the dying mother was looking down at her with the hostility of an old hand for a new recruit, a tall woman whose facial skin seemed to have been soaked too long in water before being squeezed out.

  'Hundred and eight p-pounds,' Penitence told her. Her Ladyship hadn't bothered to pay off much of the mortgage, content to keep her creditor at bay with the appalling rate of interest.

  'Any garnish?'

  Penitence shook her head.

  'You ain't having Colley's bed,' the woman told her fiercely, 'I'm in it now.' She was overtaken by a fit of coughing.

  Penitence nodded wearily. She could die on the floor; it wouldn't be long in any case. Not here.

  'Hungry?'

  Penitence nodded again.

  'Yes,' said the woman, 'and if you ain't got no garnish you'll stay hungry lessen you want to eat Whitt stew what's already gone over a goodish piece o' grass and that don't come 'til noon. You'd better take your turn at the windy.' Coughing, she pointed to where a line of women and children waited i
n a queue behind a grille set in the side of the fireplace wall through which came the uncertain light of dawn and the sounds of traffic. One of their number had her arms through the bars and was shouting: 'Have pity, good people. Have pity on a poor debtor and her childer.'

  'Debtor,' scoffed Penitence's new acquaintance, 'only ones she's in debt to is glaziers for breaking in through too many of their windies.' She had been mollified by Penitence's compliance over the matter of the bed and now indicated that Penitence could get in it. 'A couple hours is all. Don't think you'll have it for regular.'

  The palliasse on the bed's base was soaked with blood. Penitence removed it, clambered in and fell instantly asleep. She had an infinite capacity for sleep these days, dreaming dreary dreams but finding them preferable to waking life.

  She was woken by hearing her name shouted. 'Hurd. Anyone here called Hurd?' She was summoned to the begging window by the queue which bad-temperedly allowed her to go to its head: 'You're asked for, and don't take all bloody day. It ain't your turn.'