The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  She was spun round and given a slap across the face that rocked her sideways. 'Get to your room,' said Her Ladyship. 'And don't come down.'

  The sunny attic dissipated some of the claustrophobia, but it was like the bridge of a ship of which the lower decks were already under water, retaining light and air until it, too, went under.

  She'd thrown herself on her knees. Take me back, Lord. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. She had connived at wickedness. How had she been so careless of a God who had this vengeance at His disposal? How had she forgotten the plight of Sodom and Gomorrah? Rummaging frantically in her bag for her Bible, she heard shouts across the alley. The actor was striding his room, venting his own despair, calling on his God.

  She blamed him. Her neighbourly feelings to him had kindled the wrath of the True Puritan Being. She'd slammed her shutters to pray her way back into the Lord's favour in peace. They were shut still.

  But as the days went by with no more deaths at the Cock and Pie, though more crosses appeared in Dog Yard, the Plague accrued its own normality. A macabre imitation took over from the bustle of life as it had been.

  The tramp of the Watch's patrol replaced everyday footsteps. Instead of barrels rattling over the cobblestones to Sam Bryskett's cellar, there was the clatter of keys turning and re-turning in padlocks as the food-and-water carters made their deliveries on long poles. Before the Plague, she'd woken up to old Hannah at the bakery round the corner shouting her muffins: now there was the morning cry of 'Bring out your dead' and the inevitable response 'Here', and turning of more keys.

  Every other day saw a coffin carried out of the Ship — first a child's, then another child's, then Nelly Ogle's - until Penitence became immune to sadness and wondered irritably why they couldn't arrange to die all together and save this hideous prolongation.

  Loyally, Dog Yard followed each coffin to the churchyard on behalf of the shut-up landlord and his wife, and with equal loyalty raided the Ship's depleted cellar for a wake afterwards. The processions were dwindling. More and more Yarders were being shut up themselves.

  Yesterday, for little Nelly Ogle, there had been just three mourners, one of them Footloose, propelling himself along in his bucket. Why didn't he trundle himself off to an uninfected part of the City? If she had his liberty she'd go, she'd crawl.

  He waved at her and she waved back. The movement brought spots shifting before her eyes. Lord. Preserve me. Is it now?

  Not this time, just the heat. The sun right overhead beat down through her hat and made her head swim, but, God, how she did not want to go inside.

  On Her Ladyship's orders all the girls kept to their rooms, with Kinyans setting trays of food from his fast-diminishing store outside their doors. Occasionally she could hear him in the kitchen, otherwise there was silence — apart from the strokes of St Giles's bell which at first had been a hideous memento mori, then an unstopping, brain-scarring assault.Her Ladyship had nursed Mary alone and was the only one to see her die. Penitence on her balcony had watched the small pine coffin carried away. There had been nobody to follow it.

  Today, apart from Mistress Palmer's cat lapping at a puddle which had been dripped by the water cart, the Watch nodding in the sun, and Footloose sitting in the mouth of his vat, the Yard was empty. Any longer out here and she would faint. She went inside, closing her eyes to accustom them to the gloom. Around her the shadows waited with the unfillable hours of twenty-six more days.

  At nights the Plague assumed human, murderous personality. She would jerk awake; it was in the house somewhere, a creak suggested it was creeping up the stairs to kill her. She couldn't get away. By day it became a vast, smothering, soft eiderdown of tedium that baffled the walls of the attic so that sometimes the only sound was the hum of her own listening.

  Automatically, she picked up her Bible, threw it down. To stay still enough to read was to be suffocated; she began to pace the length of the attic, one, two, three ... fourteen, fifteen and a half. The asymmetry of the half always annoyed her. Turn, lengthen pace to lose it. One, two, three ...

  An echo to her footsteps came through the side shutters from across the alley where the play-actor paced his own room. Being longer-legged and in a smaller room, he took six steps before he turned. She'd counted. She'd counted everything, the attic beams, the patches where plaster had fallen off her walls, the revealed laths, the unremitting strokes of the bell.

  Seven more days until Peter Simkin brought another life- saving, death-counting Bill for her to write out. There was no more thread or she could sew something . .. fourteen. And a half. She'd lengthened her pace too much. One, two, three ...

  There was noise outside in the Yard and she went back on to the balcony. Two constables carrying guns were standing on the Mother Hubbard steps. One of them was aiming his musket at Mistress Palmer's cat which, having had its drink, was now sitting on the cobbles with one leg sticking up into the air, grooming its chest. It was brindled, scrabby and blind in one eye, not a nice cat, but she'd become used to seeing it. Mistress Palmer was fond of it.

  The activity had attracted the attention of those with upper, unboarded windows. Mistress Palmer was on her balcony, alternately pleading with the constable not to shoot, and shouting at her cat to run, which it wouldn't

  'Sorry, ma,' said the constable. 'Orders is orders.'

  Penitence put her hands over her ears. The musket barrel exploded and so did the cat.

  Rubbing his shoulder from the recoil, the constable walked into the well of the Yard, picked up what was left of the cat by its tail and put it in a sack.

  From every window, boarded and unboarded, the Yarders loosed their wide repertory of obscenities. Mistress Palmer was crying.

  The other constable pointed to the alley that ran between the Cock and Pie and Mistress Hicks's boarding house. 'There's a nest of 'em along there.'

  Kinyans's cats. She turned and hurried out of the attic. Along the clerestory the whores were in their doorways. Only Her Ladyship's door was shut. 'What's them bangs?'

  'Shooting. K-K-Kinyans' c-c-cats.'

  They followed her. In the yard outside the kitchen, Kinyans was already arguing with the inevitable. 'They're doing no harm, bor.'

  'They been promulgated. Vermin. All cats and dogs to be killed.'

  'Who's going to kill the bloody rats then? Ain't rats vermin?'

  Rats weren't on the constables' brief. 'Orders is orders, granfer. Just get inside.'

  Desperately, Kinyans looked round. In the high-walled yard his cats lay in sun-drenched contentment on upturned barrels; one had its paw over its eyes. 'What about the kittens? You going to shoot them and all?'

  'Don't make this difficult, granfer,' said one of the constables, wearily. 'Just get inside.'

  Fanny put her muscular arm round Kinyans's shoulders and led him gently into the kitchen, closing the door. The old man was sobbing. Outside the shooting began. In between the shots they could hear scrabbling.

  'What you sluts think you're doing?' Her Ladyship, awful in anger and a peignoir, had woken from her nap and come downstairs.

  'They're shooting Kinyans' moggies,' said Phoebe.

  'I'll shoot you if you don't get to your room. Now get.'

  In her attic, there was a new ingress of sun. Her side shutters had been pushed open and the actor, stretching across the alley, was tapping at them with his sword. 'What's happening?'

  In the first blast of religious terror, Penitence had forsworn commerce with the man as she had forsworn every other vice she could think of. The man was an actor, probably a Papist and, ipso facto, a sinner. In the interest of her soul, she had laid him on the altar of the Plague-sending God. But the attrition of a fortnight's isolation made the sacrifice ridiculous, if sacrifice it was. It could do no harm, surely, to answer. The Lord didn't require incivility. 'They're sh-shooting c-c-cats.'

  'You're weeping for a bloody cat?'

  She hadn't known she was weeping. It wasn't for cats.

  From very far away, under
the tolling of the bells, came a new sound, a deep percussion resulting in the faintest vibration of air.

  Thunder. Perhaps it will rain and wash the Plague away.

  The actor was on his feet. 'They're using cannon on cats? What's happening?' He became furious. 'Well, go and ask.'

  He had no prospect into Dog Yard, his only window stared straight into hers. Cannon? He was unhinged. Then it occurred to her that there had been no cloud a moment ago, and to judge from the lancing paths of sunlight coming into her attic, there still wasn't.

  She went out on to the balcony. The sky was as clear as blue enamel. Unusually, the Watch was standing alert, listening to the distant reverberation. They saw her. 'Reckon it's our fleet firing on the Dutch at sea.' They couldn't keep still with the excitement. One kept stabbing at the air with his halberd. 'Up the navy. Blow the bastards out the water.'

  Oh, war. She wandered back to the actor and stuttered it out, to be amazed by his agitation. That men could fire metal balls at each other at a time like this was an irrelevance barely warranting attention.

  'What about France?' he demanded. 'Is she maintaining her neutrality? Courtin's over here as ambassador. What's he doing? Ask, woman, ask.'

  She shook her head. In the first place she doubted if the watchmen knew, and in the second place her stammer wasn't up to it.

  Her refusal brought an outburst of oaths. War with France was likely any minute. Trapped in a pest-ridden hell-hole. At the mercy of common idiots as well as disease. Knowing nothing. Nothing to do.

  And your wine bottle empty. She saw that his hands were shaking. Parish relief didn't include wine on its menu and she doubted if he had the money to send Footloose for more. That'll teach you. Proverbs chapter 20, verse 1: Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging.

  From the lack of it, so was he. He literally stamped in a temper which was now, illogically, turning on her. He threw himself down in his chair by the window table. 'And with you,' he said, 'you as my line of communication. It's your fault. You offend me.'

  Such rudeness. She should slam the shutters, but she didn't. 'M-m-umm-my f-f-f-fault?'

  He wagged his finger. She had illustrated her offence. 'Your fault. Good God, girl, you're heir to the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, of Jonson, of me. Yet you let yourself be walled in within a few inches of this glorious landscape. Talk about shut up, you're not even trying to find the key to the bloody door.'

  The imagery of imprisonment was so exactly her own experience that she was intrigued. 'H-how?' Curiously, she found herself more at ease with him when he was like this than with his ornate artificiality. She was at home with bitterness; with her family, she'd had to be.

  'How? Well, I suppose I could teach you.' He stared gloomily at his boots. 'There's damn all else to do.'

  She stared at him. The man was a mountebank. On the other hand, speech was his business. Suppose ... No, she couldn't. Besides, she'd be dead soon and so would he; the far- off thunder was the Lord telling her to spend her remaining hours in prayer lest she be damned.

  She said: There's n-no t-t-time.'

  His eyes stayed on his boots. 'Oh, I agree. One's social engagements make too many demands. Cut off to 'em then, and leave me alone.'

  She considered. Again, he wasn't proffering help for her sake, but his own. As desperate for distraction from terror and tedium as she was, he needed occupation. Her massacred words grated on his ear; like a houseproud woman with a sluttish neighbour he was offering to straighten her up.

  She was stood in the sun of an autumn schoolyard, outside — she was always outside — a ring of children dipping for a game of Tom Tickler. Fern edging the hard-baked, foot- scuffed yard was turning rust-coloured, the shade of the great maple under which they played dappled the girls' caps red and orange. 'Inty, minty, tuppety, fig.' Charity Trumblett's voice chanted the magic gibberish and her finger jabbed horizontally round the circle. 'Delia, dilia, dominig.'

  'I want to p-p-play.'

  'Otcha, potcha, dominotcha.'

  'Let m-m-m-me p-p-pum-play.'

  'Hi, pon, tusk. Huldy, guldy, boo. Out goes you.'

  A tall black figure was casting its shadow across her boots. 'Why do thy schoolfellows shun thee, Penitence Hurd?'

  A rhetorical question; he knew. His shadow was long; it reached the ring of children under the maple tree. She curtseyed the right answer. 'My t-tongue is c-c-cursed, sir.'

  'Verily, it chatters too freely with the tawnee and too little with Christians. 1 reprimanded thy grandfather, Penitence Hurd. I reprimand thee.'

  Standing in an attic eleven years and three thousand miles away, eighteen-year-old Penitence watched the small, grubby, be-snivelled hand of seven-year-old Penitence reach up in a daring grab at the immaculate white cuff-band. 'I w-w-wish to b-b-be c-c-cured, sir.'

  In those days the Reverend Block still spoke for God. In the distant rumble of guns she could hear his voice: 'Shall the clay say to Him that fashioneth it. What makest thou? Woe unto her that striveth with her Maker. Thou wast afflicted for God's purpose, child, not thine.'

  And from that day to this God's purpose had not been revealed to her. In sending little coffins out of the Ship, it still wasn't revealed to her.

  Otcha, potcha, dominotcha.

  Her gaze focused back on the actor's face. He'd closed his eyes. She knew what she would be letting herself in for by exposing her stammer to this man: domination, quite possibly the wrath of the Lord her God, and most certainly humiliation. But what else had she endured all her life? She could stay outside the circle no longer, she had to be dipped in by somebody, even this sinner.

  Huldy, guldy, boo. Out goes you.

  The actor became aware that the clear eyes of the next- door whore were still watching him, and opened his own. 'Well?'

  She nodded.

  Chapter 7

  'Breathe, for God's sake.' 'I a-am.'

  'From the stomach, like I told you.' The actor in the window across the alley put his hand across his lower ribs. 'Like this.' 'I'll g-get the P-Pla-Pl-umm-Plague.' 'Well, it's too late now. Breathe.'

  She took in a lungful of alley air and nearly burst before he let her release it.

  'Now.' He took up his quill as a sign of his schoolmasterly status. It formed another in the vertical lines of which he consisted; lank hair to his shoulders, long cheeks and nose, the points of his stuff shirt-collar over the slashed leather jerkin, the excellent hands protruding into the sunlight which reached his table in the mornings leaving the rest of him in shadow. 'Talk.' 'Uh?'

  'Talk. I've got to hear what you do when you talk. Tell me your name, tell me anything. It doesn't matter. Just say it.'

  It doesn't matter. There was the trouble, or part of it; his disinterest in who she really was. To him she was the prostitute across the alley he was trying to improve because improvement was possible and because it passed the hours of shut-up. She had been right to expect humiliation from these lessons and already it was being doubled by his indifference.

  Dorinda tripled it. From her window immediately below them came her voice: 'Her name's Pen Hurd. She's our American whore.' With the precision of the jealous, Dorinda had located the crack of misunderstanding and was whittling it wider.

  'Madam, I don't care if she's the Witch of Endor. Don't interrupt.' He frowned across at Penitence. 'Talk.'

  Shall I suffer this? Better to retreat into the dignity of loneliness, stay on the outside of life where she belonged. But it wasn't life behind her in the shadows of the attic, it was the slow death of listening to the daily round of the Plague and waiting for it to suck her into its anonymity. She got ready, balled her hands, lifted her shoulders, sucked in her breath . . .

  'Don't do that. Relax your hands, let your body go. And for the love of God, will you breathe. Tell me your name.'

  'P-Pe-Pp-e-Ppe—' The plosive reared up against the hedge between them, tried to leap and tangled itself in invisible foliage. 'I c-c-can't.'

  'Look,' he said, patiently,
'I heard you singing the song of barbarians. Where did you learn it?'

  'N-nn-no-ot ba-ba-bar-bumm-bar-barians.' Such ignorance. 'Alg-gonquin.'

  The French priests told me the Algonquin were barbarians. They said the only good Indians were Iroquois.'

  She knew what he was doing, riling her into speech, but she couldn't stop her rise to the bait. French priests sent to convert the Iroquois were trouble-makers and liars, the Iroquois themselves vicious savages, unfit to lick an Algonquian moccasin.

  Writhing, she tumbled into a panegyric of Awashonks, Matoonas and their people, scrambling through thickets of stutter, watching words she had to abandon fall into the alley, crawled up syllables, persisting in the truth about her Indians because it had to be told and because telling it brought a whiff of Pocumscut air into her Plague-ridden nostrils.