The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  'I see.' She didn't. The state of the country was here, in Hammersmith, with its seasonal rhythm and its bucolic, unimaginative Squire Brewsters and its dairymaids and smiths and its regular attendance in the parish church to celebrate that pleasant compromise, the Anglican communion, a beautiful, unchanging and unshakeable solidity.

  'I see I don't convince you. Let us hope nothing ever does.' He sat down and poured himself another glass. 'I understand you have a son.'

  'We have two.' To head him off, she hurried out the first thing she could think of: 'Do you have children?' And remembered.

  'Most unfortunately,' he said steadily, 'the late Lady Tor- rington died in childbirth and the baby with her. It is doubtful, in any case, that it was mine. No, I have no children.'

  Once again she had a horrified glimpse through his eyes. If it hadn't been for her debt to Rupert, she would have told him then that he had a fine son, offered Benedick up as a restitution for the man's suffering. But it was time to pay. 'I'm having another baby in the spring,' she said, and in that moment saw that he'd lulled himself into believing Rupert so old that their relationship was platonic.

  She thought he'd attack her. He's drunk.

  'Ah, how charming,' he said. 'A small stranger, a patterer of tiny feet. Let's drink to the little bastard.' He aimed his glass into the flames and it shattered against the fireback.

  Jesus, how primitive they were. Like rutting stags with their harems. He'd slept with her once and he still hated the idea that she should be impregnated by anybody else. Yet it hadn't occurred to him that the son she did have might be his.

  With disdain she knew he'd return to the old theme, and he did. 'By God, Boots, you've come a long way since the Rookery.'

  She flashed back: '1 have. You haven't.'

  Anger always seemed to make him drunker. He put his finger to his lips. 'Naughty Viscount,' he said. 'Mustn't disturb the happy scene. Mustn't upset the cosy little nest, the rich cosy little nest. We don't want memories from our past vomiting all over our nice carpet, we've forgotten the dead in the Plague and the dead Indians, left them all behind, haven't we? Requiescat in oblivion. Boots has moved on.'

  She got up to go, but stopped. 'What dead Indians?'

  'Seem to remember some young whore telling me she'd been brought up American Puritan among Indians. Don't think about them, don't think about the Rookery. They're dead. All dead like Ma Hicks an' rest of unsavoury past.'

  'Dead? Why are the Indians dead?'

  'Massacre.' He'd taken her glass to pour himself another drink. 'Thought the Prince'd have told you. Or too busy in bed, was he?' He staggered towards her. 'A war, mistress. Between settler and Indian. Massacre. Don't concern yourself. Been over a long time.'

  'Which settlers?' She hit the glass out of his hand, so that it joined the other in the fire. 'Damn you, which Indians? The Squakheag?'

  He stared at her, sobering. 'Don't know. We anchored in the Connecticut estuary on my pretty way home. Things not so pretty. War was over an' the Indians were being rounded up and transported to the West Indies.'

  They had been transfixed in her mind as in amber, both

  Puritan and Indian; white-collared women sitting on their porches in the sun in the act of spinning; a canoe on the shining Pocumscut, its occupant with a paddle raised in a stroke that didn't come down.

  The Viscount's voice came from far away. 'I'm sorry,' he was saying, 'I'm sorry. I'm a fool.'

  Massacre.

  She felt him hold her for a moment before he guided her to a chair and left her to call Peter to fetch her maid.

  In the morning, they bade each other polite goodbyes in front of the gathered household and he rode away. She heard later that he had gone to Holland.

  Rupert was obdurate. 'My dear, you must see that such a voyage at this time, in your condition, is impossible.'

  'Why? Why is it? You've got ships that go over there.'

  'Hudson's Bay and Rupert Land are a considerable distance from New England, and even if they were not, there is no question of your making the journey. I am astounded you should think of such a thing.'

  Why didn't you tell me?'

  He pulled her to him so that she was sitting on his knee. 'Since I was unaware of your connection with the Americas, there was no cause for it,' he said, reasonably. 'It seems I have been entertaining a Puritan unawares.'

  She couldn't stop crying, her wet face and nose were making a mess of his velvet coat. 'Please, Rupert. I must go.'

  'My dear, what could you do if you did? The war has been over two years or more. Peace has been restored. You have no family there. I cannot let you risk either your health or that of our child. If you wish I shall have enquiries made.' He fumbled in his sleeve and produced a lace-and-lawn handkerchief. 'Look at you, you are not well now. Your valiant efforts in nursing Torrington back to life have worn you out. Blow your nose. There, see, you are upsetting Royalle. He's concerned for his little mistress.'

  Penitence put an arm round the poodle's curly black neck and sobbed on. 'I beg you.'

  'I shall not countenance your going and there's an end of it. No.'

  Rupert sent orders to his Hudson's Bay agents to discover what they could from survivors of the war in New England, white or red. In the meantime, as a result of enquiries in the home ports, a varied and bewildered stream of men began arriving at Awdes to be greeted by the awesome figure of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, conducted to a drawing-room and questioned by his pregnant mistress.

  Mostly these were sea-captains who had their information second-hand and at first Penitence thought they were exaggerating the scale of the horror that had overwhelmed New England. It had ruined all trade, they reported, aggrieved, except in slaves. 'And they ain't no good for slaves, Indians,' one jolly-faced captain told her, 'most on 'em wounded or starving when I takes 'em aboard at New Haven, and half of 'em dead by the time I off-loads in Jamaica. Don't hold their price, Indians.'

  All the captains referred to it as 'King Philip's War' after the Indian who, they said, had started it.

  'But who is King Philip?' asked Penitence again and again. The captains didn't know the tribes. An Indian. Now a dead Indian.

  Rupert procured copies of documents for her from the Duke of York, who was holding a watching brief on the New England settlement for his brother. And it was from these that she learned just how terrible the war had been. Of the region's ninety towns, fifty had been razed or destroyed, thousands of lives had been lost, and with agriculture destroyed the war debt would take fifty years to pay off.

  There were complaints from the surviving settlers to the Duke of York against the peace treaty his representative, New York's governor Edmund Andros, had imposed on them and the Indians the year before; 'a patched-up thing which do leave lying, cheating, murthering savages still in possession of no little part of the country and the massacring of us unavenged.'

  In one document there was an eye-witness account of what had happened at Lancaster. The Indians, it said, had swooped down on their peaceful settlements inflicting untold violence and horrible torture 'whereof some of their victims were flayed alive, or impaled on sharp stakes, or roasted over slow fires'.

  Rupert came over and took the paper from her hand. 'If you distress yourself like this, my dear, I must forbid you reading.'

  She stared up at him. 'My Indians wouldn't have done this. Not Awashonks's people. Rupert, what went wrong?'

  The next day she received a visitor who could tell her. His name was Fitzwilliam; he was young, well-bred and highly intelligent and Rupert had prevailed on him to come to Awdes because he had been one of James's agents sent out from England to take stock of the New England situation.

  He was also a flirt. 'Most honoured to meet you, ma'am. Fell in love with you when I was fifteen. Saw your Desdemona, and your Beatrice. Based me ideas of womanhood on 'em ever since.'

  She was too concerned to be flattered. 'How did the war start, Master Fitzwilliam?'

  'It starte
d in 1620, ma'am, when the first pilgrim set foot on New England soil, if you'll pardon me saying so — I understand from his Royal Highness that you are Puritan-related.' There was an echo of the Viscount's 'Done well for yourself in the young man's amused look around Awdes' sitting room.

  'Please,' she said. 'Just tell me.'

  He shrugged. 'It don't work, ma'am. Two different peoples, civilized and savage, livin' side by side. It don't work. Now I liked the tawnee, what I saw of him, and if I'd been there with him and he'd been open to argument I'd have told him the moment the Mayflower hove over the horizon to slit his own throat. Quicker in the long run. Cut out the middle man. He was doomed, d'ye see.'

  She opened her mouth to reprove his flippancy, then shut it. He was right. Even as a child, without knowing why, she'd cherished her Squakheag as one might cherish the last pieces of some wonderful, exotic fruit before being condemned to an eternal diet of bread.

  'We used to understand each other. We used to live side by side,' she said, helplessly, as if by saying it she could make it true. But as Fitzwilliam talked Penitence recognized the small quarrels which she remembered between her grandfather's white neighbours and the local Indians grown into an explosive inability of two inimical cultures to coexist.

  With their nomadic form of agriculture, the Indians needed sixteen or twenty times as much acreage as did settler families. With their system of agriculture, the settlers allowed their animals to roam, trampling the Indians' cornfields, and blocked with their river nets the supply of fish to the natives' traditional fishing sites.

  'And the beaver hat's gone out of fashion, ma'am, you see,' Fitzwilliam told her, raising astonished eyebrows that it should ever have been in, 'so the Indian's fur trade went. Actually, the beaver's gone now, anyway. The Puritans don't need to trade with the Indian any more; they're exporting to England and the Continent. Good old pounds, shillings and pence've replaced wampum as the medium of exchange. Your Indian chiefs had begun selling off land in exchange for cloth, and axes and kettles and such. Puritan population up. Indian population down.'

  More and more Indian land went under the Puritan plough, more and more protesting, trespassing natives were tried by a court they didn't recognize in a tongue they didn't understand and fined sums in sterling they had to sell more land to raise.

  New white settlers flooding into Massachusetts Bay were prepared to be violent in a way the original pilgrims and their descendants had not been.

  Indians began to die in incidents which Fitzwilliam put down as much to ignorance as cruelty, as when some English sailors spotted a squaw canoeing herself and her baby across Dorchester Bay and decided to test the story they'd heard that all Indian babies were bom with the ability to swim. They'd rammed the canoe with their boat and upset it, causing the baby to be thrown overboard. The anguished mother had dived in after him and eventually managed to bring up her son's body. 'Dead of course,' said Fitzwilliam, and then said with contrition: 'His Highness will horsewhip me for upsetting you. But that's the sort of thing that built up tawnee resentment, d'ye see.'

  'I need to know.'

  'Turned out the squaw was the wife of an important sachem and the baby was his son. Well then,' sighed Fitzwilliam, 'after that, the soldiers of the Plymouth settlement went to arrest for some infringement the sachem of the Pokanokets, a young brave they called Alexander, and marched him off at gunpoint.' He looked puzzled. 'He was taken with an inward fury at the humiliation. He died.'

  Penitence nodded. Indians, capable of enduring any physical hardship, died easily from shame.

  'And it turned out he was another important sachem.'

  On top of all the other injustices his people had suffered, to Philip, Alexander's brother, this was one too many. He made his declaration of war: 'The English who came first to this country were but an handful of people, forlorn, poor and distressed. My father was then sachem, he relieved their distresses in the most kind and hospitable manner. He gave them land to plant and build upon .. . they flourished and increased. By various means they got possession of a great part of his territory. My elder brother became sachem ... he was seized and confined and thereby thrown into illness and died. Soon after I became sachem they disarmed all my people . .. their land was taken. But a small part of the dominion of my ancestors remains. I am determined not to live until I have no country.'

  It began in local skirmishes that led to bigger attacks and counter-attacks until it encompassed all the territories of the Wampanoag, the southern federation of which the Pokanokets were a part, releasing years of repressed anger, then on to Nipmucks, the Narragansetts, spreading north along the Connecticut River to the Nowottocks and the Pocumtucks, until it set alight the entire Algonquian nation.

  Springfield, where Penitence had gone to school, had burned, so had Lancaster, Sudbury, Marlborough, Mendon, Chelmsford, Warwick and many others. Little wooden towns named out of homesickness went up in flames, and with them the slashed Bibles and bodies of their men, women and children.

  'I fear the savagery weren't only the Indians', 'Fitzwilliam told Penitence. 'Friendly Indian communities were slaughtered by Puritan soldiers who didn't care whether their tribe was innocent or not if it was red. Red men, women and children were rounded up, taken to the coast and sold for slaves.'

  'The Squakheag? Did you hear of an Indian called Awashonks? Or Matoonas?'

  He shook his head. She could see that she had disappointed him; she hadn't been actressy enough; it was eccentric of her to know individual Indians. His account of the war had been more balanced than most, but it was an historian's. He had seen the inevitable rise of the white English Christian and the decline of the red savage; he might have been remarking on the disappearance of a species of mammal.

  After he'd gone, she kept up her search among the documents for names and places she knew, like a woman looking for the remains of her family among ruins, but the disaster had been too huge for mention of individual neighbours or of the lodges of Awashonks's people.

  She stopped reading. The slaughter had taken place two years ago while she, with her ears shut to politics, had lived soft. The screams and war-cries and flames had quieted. The dead were long buried, and she hadn't known. She hadn't thought of New England for years.

  Yet she should have. She owed little to the Puritans of her childhood, though it distressed her amazingly that their ordered society had suffered such horror, but she owed a great deal to its Indians. Apart from an affection she hadn't found among her own people, they had probably saved her life by helping her escape from the Reverend Block and his accusations of witchcraft. Not only had she never repaid them, it was likely she had done them positive harm by involving them. However innocently, she had added one more layer to the distrust between red and white along the Pocumscut River.

  What can I do? What can I do?

  When Rupert came in, she ran to him. We've got to see if they were sold as slaves. Help me find them, Rupert. I must go back.'

  He was kind but firm: 'My dear, your most immediate debt is to the child. I shall make what enquiries I can, but with that you must be content.' She saw that he was certain they must be dead and she would never find them. All that his enquiries would uncover would be more horror; more babies dying, more mothers screaming.

  In any case, as she could tell, he regarded the Indians as another species and her anguish merely as an hysteria caused by her pregnancy. Wearily, she went back to the table, folded up the documents and tied them. 'I don't want to know any more,' she said.

  She was thirty-two years old now, not eighteen, and the pregnancy was difficult, made more difficult by dreams that increased her sense of guilt and betrayal. Sometimes the dream was of Henry King and she would wake up feeling disloyal to Rupert. Other dreams took her back to her New England childhood and she'd wake to find herself sobbing. In these dreams her Indians were always running, not after something nor away from anything else, just running in the unhurried ease of movement the young braves used whe
n they travelled long distances; she'd hear the gentle thud of their moccasins along the worn, forest tracks, see the sun shining through the leaves to dapple their bodies as if they moved through water.

  They'll die. If they'd been netted, put into the dry fields of slavery, they would die gasping like fish for the freedom of their element. They could only breathe if they had unlimited space in which to do it. They wouldn't survive in chains.

  And what of New England now? What would it be if this wonderful dimension was for ever gone from the forests leaving them impoverished and empty? Whiteness would spread through what had been shot through with colour like a wildflower meadow as the delicate balance that had held for a thousand years gave way under Puritanism.

  How could you make them slaves? You went there to escape from slavery.