The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Penitence held up her slate. Her Ladyship's eyes didn't bother with it. They penetrated Penitence's bag, assessed its contents, stripped her and made an educated guess at the price of her body and soul. Her Ladyship was tired, it had been a long night, but she was a professional, and here were professional possibilities. 'Down on your luck, pippin? Come in. Who sent you?' The voice contrasted with the eyes, being reminiscent of warmed molasses. She put her arm round the mopsy's shoulders and guided her gently through the red-lit ante-chamber, fingering the bones beneath the dreadful dress. With a bit of feeding-up, there were definite possibilities, and all of them unexplored. Her Ladyship advertised virgins, but it was a long time since she'd been able to offer her customers a real one.

  As they went through the double doors of the salon, she paused for the effect. The salon always impressed her novices.

  It impressed Penitence, though not favourably. Here was the large hall promised by the exterior of the house, here great oak pillars that held up the roof strode its length in two rows, but they had been striped like a barber's pole in scarlet and yellow and bore gilded plaster capitals of fruit-and-vine design. Hiding the inevitable saddle beams was a much lower false ceiling of pinewood panes painted with poor execution and an overheated imagination.

  A gallery ran along the four walls with its open side pillared, like a clerestory, but it obtruded so far on the left side in order to provide space for the row of rooms behind it that it gave the hall a lop-sided air. Where a ladder had once led up to the solar, there was an imposing staircase with a much- curlicued banister.

  The furniture consisted of low tables, a few gilded chairs and many couches, these last a novelty to Penitence who had been taught that you lay down only when you slept. Gaudy cushions and hangings made the unexpecting eye blink.

  Despite all that had been done to its dimensions and dignity, the country house such as Penitence had grown up in was there under its tawdry paint, like a whiff of Massachusetts air detectable in cheap scent. It was occupied by young ladies relaxing in various stages of undress, but again — and this was the eerie thing — she was reminded by their poses of her grandparents and mother after a hard day in the fields. One had taken off her high-heeled shoes and was rubbing the joints of her feet, just as Grandmother used to, another was loosening her corsets and scratching, another had flopped down on the couch with her feet up and eyes closed.

  Her Ladyship guided her to a couch and sat her down. A couple of the young ladies turned tired, incurious eyes in her direction.

  What's your name, pippin?'

  She held up her slate, showing it round the room. It had no effect. They couldn't read. What sort of city was this that it allowed itself to turn out illiterates? She was going to have to speak, Help me, Lord, she would have to speak. The familiar mountain reared up in front of her. She clenched her fists, hunched her shoulders and ran at it: 'Umm P-p-p-ppp. Umm P-p-pp—' Why didn't they call me Hannah?

  Outwardly the effort was as unsightly as it was inwardly difficult. In order to produce her first words on English soil Penitence's mouth compressed so hard that her neck cords protruded. One shoulder came up like a hunchback's, her hands clawed into her skirt as her body heaved, like a dog vomiting, to relieve itself of words.

  'Ummm P-p-p-p. Umm P-p-p-p-P-Penitence Hurd.'

  One of the young ladies said: 'Gawd help us. Ought to be Patience the time it takes', and there was giggling from some of the others. They began to gather round.

  She never got over it. She saw compassion extended to unfortunates, she heard preachers urge charity towards the blind and the lame, but for her there were only jeers.

  Nobody she'd ever met had made the mental leap to join her behind this oral barrier and realize how high it rose between her and the rest of the world. At first there might be sympathy, nearly always embarrassment, but both inevitably declined into irritation, as if her stammer were an option she had chosen in order to be annoying. Her mother, seeing the Devil everywhere, had suspected his presence in her daughter's tongue and designed a splint for it so that it stuck out of her mouth, like a gargoyle's, kept in place with strings that looped round her ears.

  On and off, she'd spent months in that instrument, her tears shrinking the strings so that they cut into her cheeks.

  Her Ladyship was frowning at the young ladies. 'I'll take your coat, will I, Penitence, while you tell us about it? This is Alania, this Phoebe, and this is Francesca and this is Dorinda, here's Fanny and this is Sabina ...' She desisted in the attempt to take off Penitence's coat when the mopsy drew away. Her Ladyship had recognized her mistake; the dummy had wandered here by accident, looking for somebody. She'd need careful angling before she was landed, but it would still be worth it; the eyes alone . .. the stammer wouldn't matter. The clients wouldn't be demanding conversation.

  Her Ladyship looked round into the dimness behind the pillars, and jerked her head at Job to close the doors. 'Alania, little pet, go and ask Kinyans to bring some supper. Penitence looks starved. And stop that.'

  The giggling ceased. Her Ladyship's fat hand patted Penitence's. The dummy was taking fright; any more and she'd run for it.

  I'm in peril. Wolverines were in this appalling room. A shape, a big one, had moved out from behind the pillars and was blocking her escape.

  Penitence's-ignorance of life was a deficiency of upbringing, not judgement. She was naive, but she was nobody's fool. That she hadn't recognized a brothel when she saw one was because she hadn't been aware that prostitution could be wholesale. She knew of individual harlots, like Jezebel, the Whore of Babylon, Goody Manning — who'd gone into the forest with the pedlar and had her ears clipped for doing it — perhaps her own aunt, but had thought them rarities in the scheme of things. Whoring as a corporate activity hadn't arisen in Puritan Massachusetts.

  She was learning. The air was heavy with the stink of sin. Sin was painted on the walls, incorporated into the pillars, steeped in the floor, sucking at her. This evil Ladyship trapped girls into you-know-whattery. The Searcher was in her pay, a procuress who had never heard of Margaret Hughes. She must get out of here.

  An acolyte, Kinyans, an ugly little man, had entered the salon with trays and was setting out food that made her mouth water. Whatever was wrong in this temple of sin, it didn't extend to its kitchens. And she was famished. If she was going to have to make an escape, she wasn't going to be able to do it unless she ate.

  Carefully, she watched Dorinda and the others eating, then grabbed a chicken leg for herself.

  Kinyans had picked up her slate. '"I do search for my aunt. Margaret Hughes",' he read. His eyebrows went up. 'Well, well.'

  'Never heard of her,' said Alania through a full mouth.

  'Before your time,' said Kinyans. 'But we knew her, didn't we, Ladyship?' There was something in the man's voice. Penitence's hastily swallowed chicken caught in her throat.

  'Was she one of them Cromwell shipped to the West Indies, Ladyship?' asked Sabina.

  There had been a change in the room, some of its menace had withdrawn. Her Ladyship was stroking the beads around her thick, white neck and not looking at anything. She knows. Where's my aunt?

  'Bloody Cromwell,' said Dorinda.

  Penitence moved over to stand square in front of Her Ladyship.

  Slowly, the woman's eyes moved into focus on Penitence's face. There was still calculation in them, they were no less cold, but it was a different calculation and a different cold. 'She's dead.'

  Penitence sagged.

  Her Ladyship stood up. 'Can you sew?'

  'What?'

  'Can you sew? Pull yourself together. Can you sew?'

  Penitence nodded.

  'I'll give you board and lodging. Kinyans, get the skivvy to make her up a bed in the attic. Dorinda, take her up and see her settled.'

  'Isn't she going to—?' began Alania.

  'I said take her up. I'll talk to her after.'

  Penitence followed Dorinda up the curving staircase
that led out of the salon because she didn't know what else to do; the object that had motivated her life these last months had gone, leaving it directionless.

  Had Her Ladyship maintained her menacing sweetness, she might still have attempted to leave, but the woman's voice had reverted to a brusqueness at once more natural to it and reminiscent of the shortness with which Penitence had been addressed for most of her life. She was responding to dislike as the safer emotion. She was too tired to do anything else.

  'Them's our rooms.' Dorinda shifted her shoulders to indicate that they were better than the attic. They were progressing along the clerestory around the top of the salon. The six or so doors leading to 'our rooms' were closed, each of them distinguished by a china name-plate which Penitence was too depressed to read.

  'You're up here,' said Dorinda. She opened a door on to a tiny, curving wooden staircase. Here, on its third storey, the house reverted to an ungilded, untidy maze. The light from the candelabra Dorinda carried flickered into little passages which led off from the landing at the top of the stairs. There were unexpected windows and others that had been blocked in, steps ran up and down to different floor-levels, ceilings were low at some points, at others were replaced by the high rafters of the roof.

  The skivvy sleeps here,' said Dorinda, with disdain. She led on and lifted the latch of a small door: 'You're here.'

  Penitence had to stoop to enter. Dorinda's candelabra revealed a large oblong room in which the only decoration was cobwebs. Plywood packing cases were stacked one side. The height and shape of two shuttered windows, one to her left and another in the wall opposite, suggested they had once been sack hoists. There was a faint, comforting smell of grain, but mainly the place smelled of age. Even the cobwebs were old and hung in flimsy black strings from the rafters, as if the spiders who'd spun them had died too dispirited to breed a new generation.

  Behind her, Dorinda's voice said: 'And a dummy like you ain't welcome.' The door closed and her footsteps retreated, taking the light with them.

  Penitence collapsed on to a packing case. Drearily, she repeated the Puritan formula for adversity. 'Count thy blessings, Pen.' But where were they? Her aunt was dead. She had come three thousand miles to save from a fate worse than death a woman who was dead already. She felt ill. She was facing knowledge of the grossest self-deception. Her aunt hadn't had need of her, it was she who had needed, and needed badly, her aunt.

  Aunt Margaret. Underneath all the opprobrium her mother and grandparents had heaped on the name, it had carried a kindness which had not been present in her mother, nor her grandparents. There had been no father to provide it; he had died fighting for Cromwell before she was born, but since he, too, had been a Hurd — her mother had married a cousin — and also a strong Puritan, it was doubtful if he would have instilled warmth into that enclosed family even if he had lived.

  She knew now that in her need for parental affection she had, unconsciously, transferred it to the fancied figure of the unknown aunt. For all her fault, and through a mysterious proxy of siblings, Aunt Margaret would possess the maternal- ism that was lacking in her sister. As an outcast through frailty, she would have fellow-feeling for the girl who was outcast through handicap. Disguising her need as beneficence, Penitence had come three thousand miles to find love, and the aunt who should have given it had died without so much as a by-your-leave.

  The door opened and a weary-looking girl came in backwards, dragging a plank bed heaped with bedding. She pulled it into the centre of the room and bad-temperedly began making it up. 'Don't help, will you?'

  Penitence didn't; she was barely aware the girl was there, and when she'd gone, she sat on. What was she going to do? Suddenly she stood up, staggered to the bed, still clutching her satchel, fell down on it and went to sleep.

  Chapter 2

  She was in Massachusetts. In the minister's house again, in Springfield, still grieving for the death of her mother and grandparents. The Reverend Block was kneeling in prayer beside the bed, preparatory to getting into it.

  She fought him off. Screaming. She was running away.

  How could he? Every Sabbath she could remember, his voice had filled the meeting-house under the oak tree with fulminations against sin. The community had applauded his Christianity in taking her in when her grandparents' trading post had burned with her grandparents and mother in it.

  Was it her? Had her gratitude been misconstrued? Had she, without knowing it, led him on? She was stuttering to Goody Fairchild and Goody Fairchild was saying she had led him on. The Reverend Block was a good man, one of the saints. Goody Fairchild's anger was voicing what would be the community's opinion. To believe that its minister was prey to the sins of the flesh would rend its structure; better to disbelieve Penitence of the cursed tongue, Penitence the misfit.

  Running away again, she was following a trail that had been worn twenty inches below the forest floor by generations of moccasined feet. It led her to the familiar lodge filled with wood- and tobacco-smoke, to an old woman smelling of bear grease. As always, her tongue had no trouble with the singsong of the Algonquin language. As always, Awashonks's eyes, like boot-buttons sewn into creased leather, accepted everything while condemning nothing. They hadn't condemned the Reverend Block even.

  'You Owanus,' Awashonks was taking her pipe out of her mouth to spit, 'you dam up your bodies' rivers and when they leak you curse them. He wanted. You didn't. Where is the problem?'

  'It wasn't me then?'

  'No. He wanted Nagret when he came here to preach his religion.'

  'What did Nagret do?'

  'She gave it. She liked him. She said he sweated strong.'

  She was aware of nothing, warned of nothing, except relief that the Reverend Block fornicated wholesale. She was wrapping herself in deerskin, lying down to sleep the sun round in the thick, warm air of Awashonks's lodge. In the morning she would go off with Matoonas and hunt moose.

  But there was no sanctuary. A deputation, led by the Reverend Block himself, had come to get her back.

  'Deliver the person of Penitence Hurd to us, O Awashonks, sachem of Squakheag.' The Reverend Block was speaking with the loud precision that the Puritans used to the Indians on formal occasions.

  From her hiding place behind the rock she could hear the voice as clearly as she had heard it every Sabbath at meeting.

  'She is not here.'

  He wouldn't believe Awashonks. He didn't. 'Deliver her or soldiers shall come and force her from thee. She has transgressed and must be punished.'

  'What have I done?' What had she done? Except refuse you-know-what with the Reverend Block. Matoonas was nudging her to keep quiet.

  The flames of the dancing ground's ceremonial fire were flickering on the Indians' gleaming skin and their beads and were absorbed into the matt clothes of the Puritan embassy. She had known these faces, red and white, all her life but in the upward light of the flames they had become equally monstrous.

  'What do you say she has done?'

  'She is a witch. Her tongue is witness to the Devil. How did the trading post burn down, killing those good people, except by her agency?'

  'No. No. No.'

  no. no. no.

  'Sit up.'

  Penitence sat up. A large shape was blocking the light of dawn that was trying to creep in through the opened shutters of the side window. A hot beaker of milk was being pressed into her hands. 'Drink this.'

  'Now then.' Her Ladyship had put on a mantua which hung straight down to her feet from the prow of her bosom. She sat down on the end of the bed, nearly tipping it. 'Who sent you here?'

  Penitence searched in her bag and brought out her Bible. After the fire, her neighbours had found her grandfather's iron box among the calcified spars and ashes. Inside, among the heat-curled flakes of paper, had been a scrap on which the words 'Yr affct dautr, Margaret Hughes. The Rookery, St Giles-in-the-Fields' were just distinguishable. Below the words was a cross, against which was written: 'Margaret Hughes, her
mark'. She opened the book at the beginning of the New Testament and carefully held it for Her Ladyship to see the crumbling pieces arranged on the page.

  'I see. Well, she's dead. Died in the West Indies.'

  Penitence was aware that harlots had been transported to the West Indies by the Commonwealth. The Puritan community in New England had rejoiced and sent letters of praise to Cromwell for cleansing Old England of its sinners. But there was strangeness here. Her Ladyship was lying. The Squakheag, who had developed lying to an art form, had taught her to listen for the nuance that bespoke falsehood and she'd just heard it.

  It may be true she's dead. It is not true about the West Indies. She blinked enquiry at Her Ladyship.

  'A letter,' said Her Ladyship, defiantly. 'Friend of hers out there sent me a letter and wrote she was dead. So she's dead. How old are you?'

  Her Ladyship's face was intimidating. If Penitence hadn't seen the mouth stretched into a smile the night before, she would have thought the heavy, handsome flesh incapable of any expression other than the bitterness that came naturally to it. Her Ladyship's head cocked sideways as if, whatever it was, she didn't believe it. Her pale eyes looked indifferently out through barricades of fat at the omnipresent frailty of mankind.