The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  'You can speak,' said Her Ladyship impatiently, as Penitence drew the figure 18 in the dust of the floor, 'I heard you. So speak.'

  Compelled against her better judgement, heaving, grimacing, going into ludicrous diversions around words that began with 'p', 'b' and 'c', Penitence answered questions about her parentage and her reason for coming to England.

  Very well,' said Her Ladyship at last, getting up. 'You shall have lodging and two meals a day. In memory of Margaret Hughes.' She paused for a moment. 'But for that you do our mending and making, and when we're busy you'll serve the clients with their drink.'

  Penitence shook her head. 'I'll s-s-sew, th-though I'll s-serve no s-s-sinners. And I'll n-not w-w-work on the S-Sabbath.'

  'You'll do as you're bid.'

  'I'll n-n-not s-sin.'

  'Sin?' Her Ladyship's hand clutched the neck of Penitence's gown and almost lifted her off the bed. 'What do you know of sin?' If the woman's face had been intimidating before, now it was dreadful. 'Sin's hunger. Sin's cold. Sin's rape. Sin's dying out there on the streets and nobody caring. Don't you talk to me of sin, you sanctimonious little bitch.'

  Penitence shrank away from the breath that was being puffed into her nostrils. Her Ladyship released her with a shove that sprawled her back on the bed. 'Penitence,' she said, and spat. 'They called you Penitence, did they? I'll give you penitence. You'll work for your penitence, like I did.' The room vibrated as she stamped out of it and slammed the door.

  Behind her, a wavering voice said: 'N-not on the S-Sabbath, I won't.'

  Penitence spent most of the morning on her knees in search of the Lord's guidance, and the afternoon sitting upright arguing with it.

  At first the Lord was adamant: Thee shall leave this house of abomination on the instant.'

  'I agree with thee, Lord. Where shall I go?'

  'Just go,' said the Lord, 'I shall provide.'

  Desperately, she wanted to believe him. But her careful soul and its experience of the London streets demanded a more realistic assurance. As she had learned, wampum was not in currency in Old England. Therefore, she was moneyless. She was also homeless and friendless. Her only allies were red men and women three thousand miles away, but to go back to them would put them in peril. It would imperil her even more. While the Reverend Block was alive it was impossible for her to return to New England; his assertion that she had burned down her grandparents' house would put her on trial, and who would believe her stammering word against the word of that stalwart in the Lord, Ezra Block?

  'I might starve to death, Lord.'

  'Then die and receive eternal life.'

  But she'd only had eighteen years of the old one. In agony, she looked around the attic. There was no comfort for her here, but there would be less on the streets. Would it endanger her soul to stay for a while, until she could find respectable employment? Her Ladyship had as good as promised that she would not force her into you-know-whattery, and on this matter Penitence was prepared to believe her. Besides, for all her animosity — and animosity had always been a constant in Penitence's life - Her Ladyship had known Aunt Margaret, indeed seemed to have been under some sort of obligation to her. To leave here would be for ever to break contact with that fancied, though now departed, figure of whom she would still like to know more.

  'Joseph served the Egyptians when he was in thrall to Pharaoh, Genesis, chapter 39,' she pointed out, 'and his soul retained its honour.'

  'True,' admitted the Lord.

  'Potiphar's wife didn't tempt him into you-know-whattery, nor shall Her Ladyship tempt me.'

  True again,' admitted the Lord.

  'If I have no truck with its sinners, if I observe the Sabbath, if I leave as soon as circumstance permits ...' promised Penitence.

  'Thee hast no other choice,' agreed the Lord.

  Her Ladyship left Penitence to her attic all day, knowing hunger to be the best compromiser of principles. So it was. When Mary, the Cock and Pie's maid-of-all-work, put her head round the door at five o'clock and said: 'Her Ladyship says come and get your peck', Penitence followed her downstairs - to find that Her Ladyship herself had compromised. She was to work in the kitchen with Kinyans, releasing Mary for the more immediately sinful task of serving the Cock and Pie's clients with their drink.

  'And anyway' — this was dark-haired Dorinda, as they all ate their dinner round the big table in the kitchen - 'our gentlemen don't want a crow like her handing them their malmsey, do they, Ladyship?'

  'Civility don't cost nothing, Dorinda,' said Her Ladyship, levelly.

  Dorinda's grimace indicated that she found it expensive, but from then on she kept her observations to herself, contenting herself with a covert kick at Penitence's ankle.

  Penitence kicked back. At school in Springfield, where she'd been bullied by the best, she'd learned that turning the other cheek merely got that one hit as well. Besides, a true Puritan boot could inflict more damage than a harlot's slipper. She munched on while Dorinda's eyes watered.

  'She'll need a change of duds, though, won't she, Ladyship?' asked Phoebe. 'Hers ain't suitable, and besides they're dirty.'

  Suitable for what? Penitence clutched the collar of her best durance coat more closely to her neck. Travel-stained it might be, but a wash-tub could better that, and she wasn't exchanging its bulwark thickness for the flimsy drapes of her fellow-diners.

  'We wear raiment, Phoebe, not duds,' corrected Her Ladyship. 'Penitence shall be provided with cloth of her choosing. No spitting, Sabina. And Fanny, we do not wipe greasy hands on the table. What are the finger bowls for?'

  Penitence, who'd thought they were for thin clear soup, was glad she hadn't yet had time to quaff hers. She was confused by the manners in evidence, even while she was prepared to condemn them as effete. The girls were skilled in the use of the fork, an art still in its infancy in Massachusetts. They dabbed their mouths with clean linen napkins. They drank - from glasses, not beakers - with the little finger elegantly raised. All this, she saw, was in close imitation of Her Ladyship, whose eye was quick to notice a breach in etiquette.

  Even more confusing was the conversation. These females were preparing for a night's pursuance of the most abominable of sins, but instead of the lewdness she had expected, Her Ladyship led them on to topics ranging from the weather to the proposed war with the Dutch.

  'Is the Dutch the same as the Frogs?' asked Fanny.

  'More attention, Fanny, please,' said Her Ladyship. 'Supposing the Dean chooses you again tonight? Suppose he wants to discuss the war? What'll you say?'

  'If he does what he done last time, discussing won't come into it,' said Fanny. It was the first reference to their trade, the first confirmation that it was their trade, and it appalled Penitence by its lightness. She studied Fanny's round, young features for the mark of Satan and failed to find in them anything more diabolical than oafishness.

  Her Ladyship rapped on the table. 'May I remind you ladies it's Saturday? Tableau night. And His Lordship has requested "The Savage".'

  There was a general groan. 'Not "The Savage", Ladyship,' said Phoebe, 'them feathers gives 'em ideas.'

  From the bottom of the table Job complained: 'And that tannin don't half aggravate my pimples, Ladyship, and weeks 'a wear off.'

  'Then set to it, young man. There's the dais and all to get ready.'

  Penitence had been at a loss to fit Job into the scheme of things. At one point her neighbour at the table, Phoebe, the most friendly of the bawds, had nodded her head in his direction and said: 'Job's our apple-squire', which left Penitence no wiser. In the shadows of the salon his vast frame had been unnerving, a troll, but the thin, high, unexpected squeak of a voice that came out of his mouth would have shamed any self-respecting troll, while direct candlelight revealed that, though of an alarming brown colour, he was only a little older than herself with an amiability of expression that bordered on the vacuous.

  Next to him, Mary, the skivvy, was bouncing up and down with the first animati
on Penitence had seen in her. 'Can I be the Maiden, Ladyship? Can I?'

  'No.'

  Mary relapsed into a sulk. 'I obliged last week.'

  'We was busy. Francesca will be the Maiden.'

  Dorinda said nastily: 'Francesca's always the bloody Maiden.'

  Penitence didn't understand what they were talking about, but if Francesca was the girl opposite her, fair-haired and delicately boned, she would be the natural choice to impersonate a maiden. The other female faces round the table, even Mary's, though the skivvy could have been no more than fourteen, wore a hard-bitten awareness which, Penitence supposed, was the result of sinning. Francesca's had the ethereal absent-mindedness of an angel. Surely, she be not a harlot.

  Francesca turned her head towards Dorinda and opened her lovely mouth: 'Fuck yourself, Dory.'

  When supper was over and the two of them were left clearing the table, Kinyans caught Penitence's glances around the kitchen. 'What you staring at, Goggles? Didn't expect this, did you?'

  She hadn't. The place was as well kept, larger and better equipped than her grandmother's. Like all the best farmhouse kitchens, its windows faced east and north, though where, presumably, they had once looked over fields they now faced brick walls and chimneys. The west wall contained a big open fireplace flanked by two brick ovens above which hung every conceivable form of pan and cover, kettle, trivet, skillet, skewer, rake, sieve and mould, all of them burnished to a shine. Hams were smoking in the recesses of the chimney, herbs hung in branches from overhead beams.

  Hastily, to show she was unimpressed by anything in this house of sin, she reassumed the disdain which had become her natural expression since she'd entered it. It annoyed Kinyans into giving her a tour of his kingdom. From what he had learned of Penitence's background from Her Ladyship, he was pleased to employ the fiction that the settlers of the New World had adopted a life of savagery among the Indians. Poking an aggrieved finger into her arm at each revelation, he introduced her to seven variations of roasting jacks and spits, 'No gobbling your meat raw here', the salting- table, the brine tubs, the dough trough, and 'one oven for pastries. See? P-ay-strees. And another oven for bread. What d'you redshanks do? Wind flour and water round a stick and toast it?'

  Penitence thought of her grandmother's manchet, white as a swan's breast and as soft, of the Indians' hundred ways of cooking corn, all of them delicious.

  Leading off from the kitchen was a two-roomed larder, one for an extensive range of ales and wines as well as butter and milk, the other, which was icy-cold, hung with fowls, fish and joints of meat. The cold — and this was impressive - came from the mouth of a large well.

  'Yah,' crowed Kinyans, at last seeing the effect, 'had to scoop your water out the stream, didn't you?'

  They hadn't, but during the course of her life she must have tramped hundreds of yoked miles to fetch and carry from the inconveniently placed well down by the vegetable patch. On the other hand, she spotted glaring omissions from the Cock and Pie's utilities. Where was the laundry? The brewhouse? The hen-run? And where was the privy?

  Returning to the kitchen she stepped out through its back door. Separated from the houses around by a high brick wall were a few square yards of sour earth being made sourer by a family of cats. A spike-topped gate stood open to the alley on her left and revealed what had been playing a discordant counterpoint to the wholesome fugue of the kitchen. A laystall was niched into the wall of the house opposite spilling rotted vegetables, flies and human excreta into the alley itself.

  As she watched, a cat jumped on a dark, sinuous shape and carried the rat back into the Cock and Pie yard to gnaw it.

  Can I suffer this? Could she? It was not the filth she objected to but its proximity. Back home the privy had been a decent little lean-to, thirty yards away from the house, containing a bench with backside-shaped holes through which one voided one's waste into the stream that took it, chuckling, into the Pocumscut which in turn pounded it down the falls and loftily swept off its minuscule remnants to the great Connecticut River and the sea. Back home she could stand at the kitchen door to look out on to hundreds of miles of virgin forest and sniff an air full of pine and balsam. Even when they'd locked her in the wood cellar for some peccadillo or another, she'd known that outside the darkness was the space of a near- empty continent.

  Walls, excreta, rats and cats moved in to form a box, enclosing her, covering her face. She began to gag.

  'Enjoying yourself?' shouted Kinyans. 'Get in here and work.'

  The Cock and Pie catered, in food, drink and women, for the carriage trade, or, rather, the sedan-chair trade — carriages finding it difficult to manoeuvre in the alleys that led to it. Penitence had thought Her Ladyship's references to deans and lords to be pretentious nicknaming. Kinyans disabused her. As they worked, he elaborated at length on the fact that the clientele came from what he called 'the high-game', much of it ecclesiastic.

  'Here, your hands cold? Then rub them pastry crumbs. Fine, mind. Only last week the Bishop, he says to me, Kinyans, he says, your pastry's ambrosia bedecked with gold. And that's a proper bishop. And the Archdeacon, he's one for my pernollys. Kinyans, he says, you keep fatiguing your rolling pin on these little coffins, he says, for no egg has a finer burial. That's noble, that is. No reason why pulpit-drubbers shouldn't have their froiseys same as other gentry.'

  There was no mention of girls, of what went on in the salon and the bedrooms. To hear Kinyans, his cooking was the only reason gentlemen visited the Cock and Pie at all. Penitence could have forgiven them if it had been. The man was an artist.

  While Penitence kneaded, sieved, stoked and sweated, instruments jumped into Kinyans's knobbled hands like magic. A cut, a twist and he'd made a pastry lattice fine as lace. A woodpecker rat-a-tat of chopping, and parsley, sage and mint turned into emerald powder.

  Brought up on sustaining, wholesome Puritan cookery she looked amazed on his quivering orange-flavoured creams, the virginal junkets, the godcakes, slices of golden-fried batter on cherries, the pale toffee-coloured gauffres, the oysters, crayfish on their beds of watercress, prune-stuffed chicken slices on their sallet, sticky gingerbread slabs stuck with gilt-headed cloves, the amber marvel he called 'Open Apple Tart After The Pig'.

  As Mary piled them on trays to take them through to the salon where artificial welcoming cries from the girls indicated that their clients were arriving, Penitence resisted the temptation to snatch. Devil's food, she thought, even as she drooled. To titillate sensual appetite, not to supply good nourishment; finger food for dalliance, sin's platter — else why should it tempt her into this gastronomic equivalent of lust?

  Watching her as she sanded down the chopping block, using elbow grease and both hands, as they cleared up, Kinyans said grudgingly: 'They taught you to work, them redshanks, I'll say that. Come here. I got something for you.'

  The Reverend Block had said much the same thing, in much the same tone. Carefully, Penitence edged round the table to put it between her and the cook. Kinyans advanced and held out his hand, to reveal he was offering nothing more sinister than a savoury wafer. Loftily, Penitence shook her head. It would enhance her credit with the Lord to deny herself something that was at this very moment being partaken by sinners, however delicious. Indeed, the more delicious, the more credit.

  Kinyans was stung. 'Don't you go lifting your nose at my froiseys, Miss Prinkum-Prankum. Don't lift your nose at any of us. Know where you'd be if Her Ladyship hadn't taken you in? In the shitten-cum-shites. She knows. She's been there, her and me. Two Somerset dumplings lacking gravy.' He was whipping himself up. 'Iffen she'd turned up her nose, we'd be there yet and I ain't having a vinegar-pissing bare-bones like you look down on her or me. She done what she had to, and she done it wonderful. She's as rare a woman as ever twanged and the day you better her will be when dead men fart...'

  The violence of his anger took Penitence aback, even while she decided it was defensive. Thee is ashamed, Master Kinyans. And rightly. It was ti
me she went to bed. She lit a candle and went.

  The route to her attic from the kitchens was by way of a cupboard staircase that came out on the north end of the clerestory. The walkway was in deep shadow but down below there was light, tobacco smoke and the quiet that had human breath in it. They were fornicating down there. Should she look? A true Puritan would pass right along, eschewing the sight of fornication. But what exactly did you do when you fornicated? You-know-what, of course, but what else? She peered over.

  She had expected scenes from the farmyard; what she saw was surprisingly sedate. Half a dozen or so men were lounging on the couches, all fully and finely dressed. Two of them wore masks, the others had abandoned them to display faces that were no better and no worse than she had seen judging cattle at Springfield market. They were all old, her grandfather's age, fiftyish. One was older than that, white-haired, gently featured, not unlike the Reverend Trubridge at Hartford. The Bishop? The Dean? She could imagine his ascetic face above a pulpit sorrowfully condemning the sin of an adoring congregation.