The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Two weeks later Sir Ostyn Edwards discovered the whereabouts of Dorinda and MacGregor. Both had been taken to the tiny, beehive lock-up at Glastonbury on the other side of the Poldens after capture, where a semi-literate clerk had entered Dorinda on the prison roll as Mags Roger and MacGregor as M. Rigger. Under those names they had been transferred to Wells to await the coming of Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys and the Assize.

  When Penitence reached Wells the next day the trial was over. MacGregor had been sentenced to transportation.

  Dorinda hadn't come to trial. Six weeks in an overcrowded prison during the height of summer had been too much for her and she had died ten days previously of gaol fever.

  BOOK V

  Chapter 1

  It was in the aftermath of the Monmouth rebellion that King James II showed the same inability to understand the English character that had taken his father to the block.

  Until then he'd done well, mobilized his army quickly, dealt a swift and exemplary punishment to the rebels. Whig opposition to his monarchy was in disarray to the point of being non-existent. Parliament, shaken by the uprising, was James's creature and voted him more money than it had ever voted his brother — and he had the power to keep this Parliament for as long as he wished.

  There were mutters against Jeffreys's Assizes but nobody had expected the rebels to be treated merely as naughty boys. Many wished the King could have answered Lady Alice Lisle's appeal more mercifully but instead of pardoning the old woman whose crime had been to hide a fugitive, he merely commuted the sentence from burning to beheading. Nevertheless both Church and Commons felt that here was a stern, forceful, sober, hard-working king, quite unlike his frivolous brother, who had made it clear to waverers from Toryism what they could expect if they caused trouble. If it was that same king's peculiarity to be a practising Roman Catholic, well, let him.

  That should have been that.

  Then, after Jeffreys's return, the King suddenly ordered the death of another 239 rebels. Even Jeffreys seemed to have thought that enough had been enough; 'I was hated by the kingdom for doing so much in the West, and was ill received by the King for not having done more,' he said later. The blocks, cleavers, stakes had to be got out again. Gallows were re-erected. More wagons brought more salt to the towns for the pickling of more men's quarters. Once again the smell of human entrails pervaded market squares. Towns and villages which had got used to the sight of the head or haunch of somebody they knew on top of the flagpoles found a new piece of tarred anatomy staring at them from a signpost. Some people had never got used to it; the West wasn't London where the head of some traitor or another always decorated the Bridge. Lord Stawell, a loyal Tory, protested at the distribution of limbs across the countryside and was rewarded by having three more men hanged and dismembered at his gates.

  Now, when everybody had thought the killing over, it was begun again. Bits of bodies were broadcast over Dorset, Somerset and Devon, a strewing of death that went on through October and into November until everybody, with the possible exception of Kirk and his Lambs, was sick of it and recalled the suffering of the Protestant martyrs under Bloody Mary.

  Then there were the transportations. Transportees went into exile for ever and were usually made to serve as slaves for the first five years. In the case of the Monmouth rebels this enforced labour was increased to ten years by royal decree.

  Again, it wasn't the punishment that was considered outrageous nor even, this time, the scale; it was the royal greed. The profit from selling nearly 1,000 transportees as slaves to the sugar plantations of the West Indies at from £10 to £15 a head was given not to those who had dealt with the rebellion but to nine courtiers, including the Queen, some of them (like the Queen) Catholics.

  The Maids of Taunton, the schoolgirls who had proffered a flag to Monmouth on his arrival, were not tried or sentenced but it was considered that a royal pardon was needed for their misdemeanour - the pardon's price to be set and collected by the Queen's maids of honour and the children to be threatened with outlawry until it was. Most of the children's parents being propertied, the court agent acting for the maids of honour set the figure at £7,000.

  After months of pleading and haggling the maids of honour accepted a price based on £50 to £100 per girl, the children's value having dropped after the death of one of them in prison.

  Not only in the West Country was it perceived after all this that the greater sufferers had been those who had done least in the rebellion while those who had helped to organize and lead it had, with the exception of Monmouth himself, been allowed to buy their freedom.

  On a crisp mid-November morning, a horse pulling a cart of teasels with a countrywoman on its driving-seat plodded up to the small stone bridge that crossed the Cary near Chedzoy.

  The militiaman guarding the bridge, who'd been watching its approach across the Levels, shifted his pike and transferred his weight from one foot to the other to deliver his challenge: "Marning, Ladyship. On our own today, is ut?'

  Penitence got down for a chat and adopted the local dialect which was her langue de guerre. 'What's going to come of trade Ah don't know, Matt Fry. Not a driver to be had; poor zouls 'm either on their way to the sugar plantations or weeding the rhines or guarding their arses, like you.'

  'Folk needs protecting, missus.'

  'Lord's sake, who from?' She pointed up at the gibbet on the other side of the bridge's foot from which hung an iron- bound, unidentifiable, tarred piece of human meat of which the shiny black surface had been worn away here and there, enabling a couple of rooks to peck at the baconized interior. 'Can't even scare crows, so ee can't.'

  'Bridgwater again, is it?' asked Matt Fry, unperturbed. 'Thought you'd sold all your middlings.'

  'These be piddlings.' She led him round to the back of the cart and picked up one of the staffs to show him the smaller teasel heads that had been rejected from the first-class batches. 'Don't fetch the same, but 'tis all profit.'

  They chatted some more before Penitence got back on the driving-seat, shook the reins and moved off, removing Nevis's horse-pistol from the pocket under her apron back to the space under the footboard.

  The moors were more populated at this time of the year than any other; the drains and rhines which took away at least a little of the winter floods had to be cleared. Gangs of men, women and children made straight lines along the hidden ditches with dark weed forming a tideline at their feet, and called out a greeting to Penitence who called it back. Against a great, colourless sky skeins of geese flew in, also calling, to their winter quarters. The low scrub which covered the uncultivated stretches had its usual grey touched with frost to contrast with the startling emerald of its mosses, the scarlet hips and the infinitely variable yellow carpets of willow and hawthorn leaves. The air smelled of rich, autumnal compost.

  After a mile there was a rustle from the hedgehog stars that filled the back of the cart and Penitence spoke, apparently to her horse. 'No you can't. We're still the wrong side of the Poldens.'

  She spoke again: 'Well, think of it as improving your soul by discomfiting your body. "Make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." Romans something. All right, 13. Hush now, we'll be passing more drainers in a minute.'

  They weren't, but it was a good way of ensuring peace.

  Further along she pulled up the cart at a signpost and addressed the air once more: 'To the left it says Bridgwater and to the right Woolavington. Is this where we turn?'

  She nodded and pulled on the right-hand rein, turning the cart north. The signpost was decorated with a head around which had been tied a ribbon with the words: 'A Monmouth'. At the foot of the post somebody had lain a posy of rose-hips and old man's beard.

  She wondered if the old man in the back of the cart would recognize whose it had been. It might be that young lad of Prue's. Anger she would never be rid of came over her again in a wave. How dare they pull apart what they could not put together. Lady Alice's dignified old head toppl
ing into the executioner's basket. I am wonderfully and terribly made. How much suffering there had been. What had Dorinda gone through? What was MacGregor going through at this moment? She was so lonely.

  A letter from Benedick, signed O. Moor, had enquired earnestly after her health, told her of Mr Moor's safe arrival in the Netherlands and mentioned making the acquaintance of a certain Henry King, Esquire. It hadn't been safe to say more. While she rejoiced they had finally found each other she would have given a lot to see how father and son got on together and felt all the lonelier at the thought that she never would. For a moment she was so overcome by pity for herself and humanity in general that she nearly let her great-uncle arise from the prickles of his prison to join her, but not quite. You never pitied Martin Hughes that much. His patroness beheaded, his congregation decimated, a fugitive in his own countryside, forced to kill a man to save himself and others, even these awful experiences could not lend the man pathos. For once, he was at her mercy.

  So, as they lumbered up one side of the Poldens and descended down on to the causeway that crossed the wet meadows of the Glastonbury vale, she told him what was to be done about her Indians. 'First MacGregor, of course,' she said, 'and then the Squakheag. They'll have completed their five years. No, I do not want them converted; they are a good deal nearer the Lord than you are.'

  For good measure she told him about the Reverend Block. 'A prating, bigoted, lustful hypocrite who'd have watched me burn,' she shouted to the air, getting angry as she remembered. 'If it wasn't for him, I'd never have left Massachusetts.'

  What would I have become? The narrow-minded wife of some Puritan farmer? Eccentric Indian-lover? Dead in the King Philip War? 'You remind me of him,' she told the teasels.

  Actually, she doubted if Uncle Martin Hughes had lusted after anybody his whole life long, but she paid him the compliment of letting the insult stand.

  At first she had begged him to tell her about his niece, the girl who had become Her Ladyship, but he'd refused to discuss the sinner who had not only borne a child out of wedlock but borne it to the son of the hated family which had fought his own during the Civil War.

  'Didn't you ever wonder what happened to her after you all cast her out?' she'd asked him, but he had shaken his obstinate grey head and for a moment she had seen her grandmother in him and known that his loveless form of Puritanism was a homage to the one woman whom he had ever found worthy of affection, his sister Tabitha, and that she had been a stronger influence on him than he on her.

  The only other person he seemed to hold in esteem was, surprisingly, the Viscount, for whom he felt the camaraderie of men who'd overcome a common enemy. 'Thee should have married un,' he'd told her, 'I heard un offer. Wilt play the harlot like thy mother?'

  'Yes,' she'd said. 'And proud to.' He provoked that sort of response. The fact that she'd taken him in, nursed him and was now attempting to get him out of the country, had not brought a word of gratitude. True, he'd killed Nevis but that had been to save his own life as much as hers and Henry's and had anyway overlaid her feeling for him with an irrational aversion. Her eyes tried to avoid seeing his right hand; for her it was always covered in blood. Nevis had to die, she would tell herself, yet the casual way in which her uncle and her lover had combined to cause it and then cover it up still shocked her. Even now she was reluctant to go into her own hall, and more reluctant yet to go near the moat. As for eating fish from the stewpond fed by the spring that ran from the moat. ..

  That apart, the presence of a man in her house for whom the authorities were still hunting meant that she dared not bring the children and staff back to it but had to beg the Cartwrights to keep them at Crewkerne a bit longer, while she camped out in the Priory with Prue and a staff from the village that went home at night. Which meant being unable to tell Tongs of her mother's death, a task she was dreading and therefore wanted to put off no longer.

  Yet how could she expect a child not yet seven years old to take in what she herself couldn't absorb? She and Dorinda had survived the Plague together, childbirth together, the woman couldn't be dead. She was at the Cock and Pie, cursing Penitence for not going to see her. It wasn't bearable that she'd died. And suffered before she'd died. And died for Benedick.

  Given the opportunity of this cart ride, Penitence explained all this to her uncle at length and in detail. 'And,' she ended, 'you're costing me a lot of money, you miserable, canting, hypocritical, ungrateful old man.'

  She'd had to go up to London to confide in the Earl of Craven. Elizabeth of Bohemia's necklace had been sold to Nell Gwynn, and half the proceeds put in trust for Ruperta; the rest, Penitence's half, was dwindling fast. Part had been outlaid on Martin Hughes's behalf, but while in London she had also encountered Hurry Yeo, the landlord of the Hoy Arms, his wife and the other parents and representatives of the Maids of Taunton trying to buy their daughters' pardon from the King.

  They were pitiful. Unused to London, its ways and its prices, they had already run through most of the money with which they'd hoped to free their children. At Whitehall they were being passed from secretary to secretary, made to wait outside doors — sometimes for days — for agents who never attended to them, or might tomorrow. And all the while the thought of what was happening to their little girls in prison was sending them mad.

  Landlord Yeo had lost so much weight Penitence almost hadn't recognized him, while Mrs Yeo's colour was bad and her feet and ankles had swelled alarmingly. 'Iss fay, there's ache in that danged old Whitehall,' she said tiredly to Penitence, not meaning her own pain only, but that of the hundreds of rebels' relatives battering their heads against Whitehall obfuscation in an effort to purchase their loved ones from death or, what was often the same thing, transportation.

  Penitence offered the Yeos and some of the other Maids of Taunton parents free accommodation at the Cock and Pie, procured the assistance of the Earl of Craven and John Churchill in the prosecution of their pleas, and advanced them £100 each. Damn Monmouth. 'Damn Monmouth,' she shouted. A pheasant dithering on the bank decided not to cross the track after all and rustled back into the scented, rusty-coloured bracken.

  The teasels rebuked Penitence as a foul-mouthed harpy and for that she let them remain undisturbed while another five miles went by before allowing her great-uncle out of them.

  At Lower Langford they spent the night with a fellow- preacher of Uncle Martin's. There couldn't have been more double-knocking, passwords and general secrecy than if the man been putting up Monmouth himself. Penitence, tired, demanded her bed which turned out to be in the hay loft of the barn but was at least quiet. The next morning she also demanded hot water and repaired with it back to the barn to make up her face and dress herself in her best blue velvet and sapphire earrings. There were still ten miles to go, this time on horseback, but there would be no opportunity to change before Bristol where she must make a good impression.

  She looked carefully into her travelling mirror in the bad November light which was reluctantly seeping into the barn. Stress had caught her up and was showing itself in hollowing cheeks and temples. Old. I'm old. No wonder he doesn't want me. He's making jealousy his excuse to marry somebody young enough to give him children.

  'Jezebel,' said Uncle Martin Hughes without heat, coming into the barn, his invariable response to seeing her regard herself in the looking-glass, to her powders and perfumes on the dressing-table, or when she wore earrings or her hair uncapped.

  'Fop,' answered Penitence for once. She had provided him with some of Rupert's clothes altered to fit his shorter frame. The black embroidered coat hanging down to his skinny knees with the lace gorget at his throat, the feathered hat and silver-buckled shoes, wore him rather than he them. She grinned.

  He said: 'Shamed in the sight of the Lord I be.' But his great-niece detected an interrogative note as if he wanted to know how he looked.

  She put Nevis's pistol into a saddle-bag: 'Just in case some highwayman fancies my earrings or your buckles.'

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bsp; 'By the Lord, let un try.' He surprised her. For a moment she was warmed by a sense of comradeship which went as she placed the fur-edged, satin-lined hood of her travelling cape over her hair and he called her 'Jezebel' again. She supposed it was a compliment of sorts; it meant she had committed the sin of looking pretty.

  They were leaving the cart until Penitence returned — the teasels were payment for their night's accommodation and the risk the preacher had taken in giving it to them. Martin mounted the horse and Penitence got up behind him and they took the road for Bristol.

  Penitence was surprised by the beauty of the houses. Though smaller than London, Bristol ran the capital close in its foreign trade. The shop windows displayed fine hats, silvers and pewters, gilt leather trunks, beaten gold jewellery. Best of all were the cloths: the silks, the various cottons, niccanees, cuttanees, buckshaws, nillias and salempores thrown over chairs and counters glowing like flower gardens behind the dark glass of the shopfronts. 'Jezebel,' intoned Uncle Martin, as he peered in with her.

  The inn was called the Blackamoor and Elephant, and, so that illiterates wouldn't miss it, its balcony was decorated by two enormous plaques, one bearing the head of a negro, the other an elephant's. Inside it consisted of corridors, tiny rooms and doors, a puzzle of black wood, redolent with beeswax and old wine. At the mention of her name, a bowing landlord showed them upstairs to the parlour, where a softly spoken, carefully smiling gentleman and his pretty wife were waiting for them. 'Mrs Hughes, a pleasure. I am John Spragge, secretary to the Royal African Company. My wife, Henrietta.'