The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  How could He punish this girl any more than He had? Like Dorinda, she lied. 'He's the G-God of love, Pheeb.'

  Half an hour later a long moan of breath came out of Phoebe's throat. Gently, Penitence pulled down the lids. 'She's gone,' she said, crying.

  'What you sorry for?' Dorinda's voice shook. 'She weren't your friend.'

  'Be quiet. B-be quiet. She was nice to me.' Her own voice shook with hysteria, shocking her and Dorinda both. A groaned remonstrance came from Her Ladyship.

  Penitence got up and went to the kitchen to draw water for washing the body. Shaking, she began winding, watching the empty bucket go down. A loved soul had just departed and they quarrelled like petulant children. There was no time, that was the trouble. They were too tired to assimilate what was happening or how deeply it affected them. They skated from one death to another with not enough pause to accord them the dignity of grief. They fumbled through perpetual darkness. They were thin. They'd spent the last of Her Ladyship's guineas on eggs and wine for their patients and ate scraps themselves.

  Let me keep patience with her. She's new to seeing them die. Phoebe was the last of her sisterhood. And she's a help.

  But she was a help only so long as Penitence confined her nursing to Job and the others and left the care of Her Ladyship to Dorinda.

  'She's my aunt.' The words echoed back at her from the well, bringing her up short with their peevishness. What was happening? She had become numb to everything but irritability.

  Penitence fetched two more sheets for Sabina and Phoebe, checked on Job, who was sleeping, and came back to sit opposite Dorinda on the other side of the comatose body. They quarrelled across it in hisses.

  'Sew Pheeb and Sabina in the same sheet.'

  'No. They'd tumble about.' There'd be little enough dignity as it was; the death-rate among bearers had left the job to the mercy of men who enjoyed it. They collected at night, like ghouls, and it was whispered that there were terrible practices at the burial pits.

  'They got to go together.' The candlelight threw shadows wickedly upwards on to Dorinda's face. 'They were lovers.'

  She didn't know what it meant at first. Her mind grasped a concept it hadn't known existed and found it had lost the ability to feel shock. Tears came into her eyes. 'They won't be p-parted in Heaven.' Do I believe that?

  She sewed them separately. The effort of carrying them to the door left her and Dorinda gasping. They helped Job on to the pot, gave him a sip of water and settled him down again. They sponged Her Ladyship's hot, loose skin and smoothed back the grey-rooted gold hair. Sometimes she moaned. The suffocating night went on and on.

  Somewhere there were the full hedges of August, banks of cow parsley, somewhere ferns curled in the cracks of wet rocks.

  She'd abandoned her black dress which absorbed warmth and wore an old basque of Phoebe's, its lacing open to cool the sweat that trickled between her breasts. Dorinda had tried wearing nothing at all, but Her Ladyship had managed to say 'Not nice', so she'd put her shift back on. She sat collapsed in a chair on the other side of Her Ladyship, her knees wide apart, her face shining with sweat, asleep.

  Penitence listened to her breathing, to Her Ladyship's, to her own. She became alert to a pain in her chest. Here it is. Time and again a cramp rang the alarm and she panicked. Dorinda, she knew, kept the same internal vigil; so far the alarms were merely symptoms of their lowering general health. Soon ...

  Her wrist ached with flapping the fan back and forth over Her Ladyship, but she kept on. We're losing her. The woman's endurance was extraordinary. Night after night the fever came back. Night after night, gasping and rocking, she fought it and was alive the next morning. Each breath bubbled, as had Phoebe's. Her eyes looked straight ahead, never beseeching for help; she waged her battle by herself.

  Penitence's only hope for her lay in the recovery Job was making, painfully slowly. If they'd had more and better food, she thought, it would be quicker; he was so skeletal and weak that a rheum could snatch him away.

  Penitence dozed and heard Dorinda say: 'She's here, Ladyship.'

  The brothel-keeper's eyes were staring in her direction. 'Look after the girls. The papers is under the bed. I'm sorry.'

  It was unbearable from a woman who'd apologized for nothing. 'P-please d-don't. You t-took me in.'

  The face was settling, but at this it frowned. Understanding left, then came back. 'Your daddy stuttered.'

  It was the first human link she'd felt with the worthy, indistinct figure of Ralph Hurd, the Roundhead who had died storming Papists at the Basing House siege in the Civil War. Except as an example of saintliness, he'd rarely been mentioned by her mother and grandparents. And Her Ladyship had known him.

  'Tell me, p-please.'

  An extraordinary relaxation came over Her Ladyship's clenched face, as if the stifling air had assumed the scent of hay. 'You've got his eyes,' she said. 'He would've married me.'

  And there it all was, the old, old explanation, a man who'd chosen the wrong sister and left this one. Had he regretted it? Was her mother's bitterness because her husband had loved Margaret Hughes first? Tell me.

  Gentleness became fixed on the thin mouth, the eyes stared.

  Come back. But her hand automatically went out to close the lids.

  Dorinda knocked it away. 'She ain't.'

  'Don't I know? You've g-got to do it now.' Come back. Decorum was going with Her Ladyship. Disorder would take over the world. Come back. I'm not safe without you.

  She tried to keep her aunt with her by obeying her rules. She went upstairs to get another sheet, and found there were none left in the press. Frantically she ran to the kitchen. The drying rack was empty. She began to sob. She ran back into the salon. 'There's no sheet. We'll have to wrap her in the one she's lying on.' It was the most terrible thing in the world.

  Dorinda had closed Her Ladyship's eyes. She said dully: 'She ain't going dirty. She's going in my prunella cloak.'

  She was on the water in the light birch-bark canoe Matoonas had built for her. It was just before dawn and the ducks hadn't come in yet. Over the other side of the river, pelicans floated asleep with their heads and beaks tucked back, like tiny, humped, white islands. Through a prickle of rushes she was watching the river turn from black to steel-grey. The air hadn't yet picked up scents from the land; it smelled of water, an immensity of clean, cold water . ..

  'Stop it.' Dorinda was pinioning her arms. 'Stop it now.'

  'I c-can't.'

  'I know, but you've got to. You taught me that. She'd want you to.' Dorinda's sleeve gently wiped Penitence's nose and chin. 'Sit down a bit. I'll sew her.' Penitence sat.

  'Ready now.'

  She managed to stand up on legs that shook. Together, grunting, they carried the body over to where Phoebe's and Sabina's lay by the front door and Penitence said the words she had said over Fanny. From outside came the sounds of hooves and the heavy creak of the cart. 'Bring out your dead.'

  The lock was being turned. Involuntarily, they moved forward to stand in the moonlight and look up at a sky that had stars in it.

  'Get out 'a way.' Two bearers pushed past. They didn't bother with grappling hooks any more. A smell of sickness emanated from the sacking they wore over their heads and shoulders. Outside on the cart, the driver was standing on a pile of corpses. The lantern hanging on his whip-post lit the absorption on his face as he pressed down with his boot.

  Each man took a foot end of the first two winding sheets. The white roll that was Phoebe was left crooked against the cart-wheel while the men swung Sabina to get the impetus to throw her up on the piled cart.

  Harry Burford, the night-watchman, was chatting to the driver. They were coming back for Her Ladyship. Dorinda's rough stitching came apart as the body bumped over the threshold and her hair trailed across the cobbles.

  Penitence ran forward, pushing the hair back, trying to hold the sheet together. One of the men kicked her out of the way.

  'Let her alone, you bast
ards, you bastards.' Dorinda was sobbing and fighting. That's her mother.'

  The driver on the cart grinned at the two women and picked up the body of a child by its leg. 'Faggots, five for sixpence,' he said.

  The bearers threw Her Ladyship into the cart. One of them came back to the doorway. 'How's about rattling my ballocks afore I go?'

  That's enough.' Harry extended his halberd in front of the man and pushed him back. They heard the bearer say: 'They're whores, ain't they?' before the door closed.

  It took concentration to go upstairs. She kept mounting one rise and forgetting how to step on to the next so that she stood bewildered before gathering enough wit to do it. There was a band of iron round her chest.

  She'd reached the end of the clerestory and was considering the flight up to the attic when somebody called from its top. 'Boots?'

  She thought for a long while. 'What?'

  There was a moment's silence, then an outburst. 'Where the hell have you been? MacGregor said there were three bodies ...' She stood where she was and he came downstairs, still put out. He had a lantern. 'It seems yours wasn't one of them.'

  After a moment she said: 'What?'

  He lifted the lantern to look at her face. 'Damn it.' She felt his hand press against her forehead, then he was helping her up the stairs. 'How did you get into this state?' At the top he lifted her up, slung her over his shoulder and carried her and the lantern into the attic. He stooped and slid her on to her bed. She felt the warmth of the lantern on her skin as he lowered it to examine her. She heard an exhalation of relief. 'But you've got to do better than this. Where's that bloody apothecary? Stay here.'

  The injunction was needless; she couldn't do anything else. Time, people, ministrations came and went.

  The house was the Cock and Pie but at the same time bigger, cavernous, its steps and corridors transformed here and there into uneven galleries of rock. Its darkness was total, though she could see through it. High up in the galleries, a cat was mewing. Men with guns were moving through the house in order to shoot it because it had the Plague; they were out of her sight, somewhere ahead of her, but the malevolence they radiated was so tangible she could track their progress by it.

  They would shoot the cat thinking it was just an animal. Exactly who it was she couldn't be sure; someone enormously important to her, vulnerable, in need. She felt fear and love as she had never felt before; almost annihilated with terror, but loving the cat so desperately, she must get to it before they did. It impelled her through the silent house. She kept taking wrong turnings and ending up in empty caves while the creeping men closed in on the mewing. She screamed soundlessly as she ran. Her throat was raw, her breathing painful, but the only compulsion was to get to the cat.

  During rises to consciousness she found she was being nagged: 'Do you hear me? I've worked hard on you, you miserable item of humanity. Until I came along you crawled in mud like the base clay you are. I took you up. I transmuted you into gold. For one moment I heard the authentic voice of Beatrice come out of the mouth of a stammering, tuppenny-halfpenny whore. One moment. My achievement out of my Gethsemane. Are you listening to me?'

  She wasn't sure. The aggrieved argument held flaws she was too tired to put her finger on; she allowed it to become a lullaby, the only one she'd ever known, and slept to it.

  The dream recurred. 'Never knew you had a beau, Prinks.' The voice was rallying but flat, as if its owner talked for the sake of talking and expected no answer. It came into the caverns in the form of light.

  Reluctantly she lifted the weight of her eyelids and saw Dorinda's face. 'Who's this Benedick then, you dark horse you?'

  'Cat,' said Penitence. She'd left it behind, so valuable, so hurt. Tears oozed out of her eyes and Dorinda dabbed them away. 'Cat, was it? Thought you'd got a secret beau.'

  Apothecary Boghurst diagnosed pleurisy and recommended honeyed electuary, seethed red meat, eggs and rest.

  It was from Dorinda she received these things, Dorinda who nursed her, washed her, potted her, spooned food into her mouth. Sometimes Job, very gaunt, sat by her bed through the hot nights, but most often it was Dorinda, encouraging her with good news. 'Ma Hicks's beat it, like Job. Henry and MacGregor and the rope-walker's got her through. Henry's going to win the war by sending her against the Dutch. Mistress Palmer still ain't got it. There's two dolly-mops left alive over Hubbard's. The parish Bill's down this week. And Sam and Molly Bryskett's third youngest's still going strong. An' we got a plan.'

  'What plan?' She asked out of gratitude; she wasn't very interested.

  During her illness, it appeared, matters had got both worse and better. In St Giles the mortality rate was slowing, though London as a whole was suffering a thousand Plague deaths a day. Services were breaking down; parish relief deliveries were intermittent; most serious of all, the water cart only came every four or five days.

  Faced with thirst and starvation, the survivors of Dog Yard had organized. There had been rooftop meetings.

  'See that?'

  'That' was a ladder leading up to an unsuspected skylight in the attic-tiles above the beams. 'You get on to Mistress Crawford's, over a plank on to the Ship, then more planks round to the flat roof of the Stables. That ballocking Dogberry said it was agin promulgation to have gatherings, but 'Pothe- cary said as we was all shut up it didn't make no difference.'

  The Yard was pooling rations. Mistress Palmer cooked stews in one of her iron wash-tubs. The pawnbroker's widow baked communal, though kosher, bread. The two remaining Tippin boys risked prison, this time in a noble cause, by making rooftop forays out of the Rookery to the countryside where they acquired chickens and any other edibles left unguarded for the Dog Yard pot.

  Obediently, without enthusiasm, Penitence swallowed the proffered spoonful of stew. 'B-beef too?'

  Dorinda looked shamefaced: 'Dogberry got that. He's kin to butchers.'

  Wearily she remembered that a charitable Dogberry was a contradiction in terms. 'What with?' Her Ladyship's two guineas had long gone.

  Dorinda worked herself up into aggression: 'Out your bag, acourse. You been hiding a fortune in there could've bought us Whitehall with some left over.' Seeing Penitence's incomprehension, she said: 'Funk. Fume. You know what it fetches? He's a fumer our Dogberry, do anything for a pipeful, and you got a mass on it.'

  The tobacco the Indians had given her. She'd forgotten it. If she'd realized its value before she could have afforded better food for Her Ladyship and the others. Tears dripped down her face. Dorinda wiped them away. 'Wouldn't've made no difference,' she said. 'Get to sleep.'

  By day her attic became a gathering place and thoroughfare. Unable to bear the salon, Job and Dorinda used it as a sitting- room and, since the Cock and Pie's well was supplying water to most of the Yard, the actor and his surviving male neighbours from Mistress Hicks's regularly crossed the plank that now served as a bridge over the alley to help wind up buckets and carry them via the ladder to those in need.

  Then there was the Plan. Dorinda was full of it. Its aim was to save the Brysketts' last living child from further threat of the Plague. 'Sam Bryskett — Gawd, you ought to see him. Prinks, it's pitiful — he asked for help and it was our Henry came up with it.' The Cock and Pie was to produce a version of Much Ado About Nothing, on its balcony.

  Originally, the idea had been to perform extracts, just the Beatrice and Benedick scenes, with the actor narrating the rest of the plot. Dorinda, however, had seen her chance. 'I'm going to act and all.' She had persuaded the actor to include both her and Job in the cast; it meant considerable complication, not least of which was that, due to their illiteracy, the two of them had to be taught their lines by word of mouth. On the other hand, as Dorinda pointed out, it would lengthen the duration of the play and thereby give the Plan a better chance.

  Across the alley, the actor was now writing, rewriting and swearing as he turned a comedy intended for a Dramatis personae of eighteen, to say nothing of messengers, watch, attendants
, etc., into a play for four, while in Penitence's attic MacGregor, the erstwhile Scottish piper, who could read, spent much of the day repeating Shakespeare's lines so that Dorinda and Job could learn them by heart.

  The only one who had no response to the general animation was Penitence. She lay incuriously watching the comings and goings, finding the constant company tiring, too feeble even to experience embarrassment at this most public of convalescences, unsure that it was convalescence. The emotions from the dream, emotions she'd never felt in her waking life, oppressed her. She couldn't free herself of them. The thought of what waited for her in Her Ladyship's room flattened her on to her bed like a stone slab.

  So, on an afternoon when nobody was around, she went and faced it.

  There was a lining of dust in the frills of the satin valance of Her Ladyship's large bed. As Penitence's hand ran tentatively over the rough floorboards, it encountered furred rolls of more dust, then a knot-hole. With an effort, she pulled up a square section of board, groped in the cavity underneath and retrieved a box. She squatted back on her heels with it on her lap.