The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Back in the attic at last she hugged Dorinda and Job as they hugged each other. In the mutual congratulations one voice was silent, Benedick's.

  Instead, a haggard and displeased actor was looking at her.

  'You lost concentration,' he said. 'After "Kill Claudio" Beatrice was gone.'

  He was ruining something as near perfection as she would ever reach. 'She w-wasn't.'

  'Oh yes she was.'

  She said: 'Th-thumm-they liked it anyw-way.'

  'Th-they liked it anyway,' he mimicked. 'They like anything. They don't know acting from their arse. You gave them short

  change.'

  Surprisingly, Dorinda came to her aid: '1 thought she was ballocking good', and got turned on for her pains.

  'One performance and you're an expert? She was good to "Kill Claudio", then she was bad.'

  'We got the job done anyhow,' sulked Dorinda.

  He spoke very clearly. 'The job, my dear girl, is the play. If those people had been discovered, if the child had been put back into the pest-house, we'd still have given the best we know.' He swung round to Penitence. 'Understand that or you are no actress.'

  The palace of Messina had been broken into shards. She wanted to hurt him back so badly that she managed: '1 d-don't want to be a b-bl-bloody actress. P-pretending to be s-some- body else. It's no job for a g-g-grown woman. N-nor a g-g- grown man neither.'

  'It's a step up from being a whore.' He nodded to his cast, jumped up on her side sill and swung himself back into his room.

  Chapter 11

  The fires burning in the streets outside every twelfth house were adding to the heat and overriding with disinfectant the smells of summer from St Giles's rectory garden.

  'You mean to tell me, Master Boreman, that you know nothing of this?'

  'I know now, Master Flesher,' said the Reverend Boreman, tiredly, 'because you have been so good as to tell me. At length. I did not know before.'

  The inquisition turned its attention on the other occupant of the rectory drawing-room. 'Nor you, Master Boghurst?'

  'It is hardly likely that Sam Bryskett would have informed me of an intention to break the law, if indeed such was his intention.' The apothecary spoke with his usual precision, but Flogger Flesher detected evasion.

  'Your disapproval of the shutting-up law is well known, sir.'

  'Murder I called it and murder it has proved to be, but it is the law and I would not flout it.'

  'Then perhaps, sir, you will tell me whether there are any children remaining at the Ship Inn this morning?'

  'There are none.'

  'Though when you visited last week there was a child yet alive?'

  'There was.'

  'And Bryskett told you today it had died in the interim?'

  'He did.'

  'Ah ha.' Magistrate Flesher had dug up his bone. 'Then the good rector here will be able to prove whether or not he buried it.'

  The Reverend Boreman waited to be overcome by enough anger to inject a flea into the ear of this horrid little man, but it didn't arrive; there was no energy left in him for it to feed on.

  He had held services pleading with God at least to bring back rain and wind from the exile to which He had banished them.

  And, in the week when London's Bill of Mortality for September recorded 8,252 deaths, it had duly rained. For two days fires were put out by a downpour which allowed the clogged sewers to run free, brought down the temperature and the next Bill to 562. There had been other good omens. People said the jackdaws had returned to the Tower. The clapper had fallen out of the Great Bell of Westminster, a portent which had marked the end of the 1625 Plague. Like everybody else, he had allowed himself to hope.

  Then the rain had stopped, the heat had come back and the latest Bill recorded the biggest total yet: 8,297 of London's men, women and children had died. So had hope.

  He got up and took himself towards the door. 'Master Flesher, I now bury wholesale. 1 say the service, the bodies go in the ground and their only name is Legion. My clerk died as he wrote up the register, since when there has been nobody to keep it except as and when I have had the time.'

  'It is an offence not to keep up the parish register.'

  He is almost cherishable, thought the Reverend Boreman. Men practise necrophilia with the naked corpses of young girls in the burying pits, the dying so hate the living that they throw their infected bandages on to them from their windows, corpses stack the streets awaiting burial, a population is swept away, and Magistrate Flesher remains exactly as he was before it all began.

  He said: 'If you wish to exhume the bodies in my churchyard you are at liberty to do so. In the meantime I wish you good- day.'

  At the doorway, the magistrate paused for the last word. 'Harlots and pimps connived at this transgression. They and the Brysketts shall be brought to book for it. I shall report the matter personally to His Grace of Albemarle.'

  Before he'd got into his carriage, the rector had shut the door. He slumped into a chair opposite the apothecary. 'What harlots? What pimps?'

  'The Cock and Pie put on a performance of Much Ado About Nothing from its balcony last night. There can be little doubt it was a conspiracy to beguile every watchman in the Rookery away from his duty.'

  The Reverend Boreman shook his head slowly. 'Lamentable.'

  The apothecary shook his. 'An outrage.'

  The rector leaned forward and poured them both a glass of malmsey from the bottle which he had not offered to Master Flesher. 'Only one hundred and twenty-five in the parish this week, William. Is it passing?' He heard his own words. 'Only', he thought. Nevertheless the number was just over a third of what it had been during the worst week of August.

  'It is passing St Giles, perhaps, but don't raise your hopes too high. It is still capable of return.'

  Hope. He had lost one and a half thousand parishioners, his parish was a desert of empty houses around a stinking, over- spilling churchyard. He had prayed beside hundreds of beds for the deliverance of their occupants, and seen only a handful survive. Every moment of his waking life had presented him with suffering or with obscenities of human behaviour he had previously thought impossible. Hope had long gone. And with it, God help him, faith. But charity clung on, it seemed. It had flickered in Dog Yard last night when a collection of harlots and pimps had braved the law in an attempt to save a child.

  Shakespeare. His wife had been fond of that vagabond's plays. 'We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow,' he said. They had been death knells for too long, too long. Oddly, he felt himself cheered. He squinted across his glass at his friend. 'And how did they perform, these pimps and harlots?'

  Apothecary Boghurst measured out his smile with his usual care. 'I rather think I have never enjoyed a play so well,' he said.

  The day after the play was the first of leisure the Cock and Pie had known for some time.

  Job, overtired with excitement, kept to his room. The actor kept to his, with his shutters closed.

  Dorinda wanted to pick over last night's triumphs but Penitence was too angry. Reflection made her acknowledge the actor's criticism of her performance as justified, but the viciousness of his last thrust had gone deep. As much as anything her anger was disappointment, not only at his lack of insight, but at his rudeness. 'How d-dare he.'

  'He didn't mean it, Prinks,' comforted Dorinda. 'It was all that acting. Makes you raw. He's begun to admire you, that's what it is. I saw his face as you was singing.' Penitence could hear how much it cost her to say it. 'I'll tell him. It's only fair.'

  'You w-won't.' She would not be explained or pleaded for; he should know already. 'I d-don't care what he thinks.'

  'Then stop bloody brooding.'

  Freedom from the real tragedy and the theatrical comedy which had dominated their lives these past weeks brought a silence over the house allowing those it had lost to make their absence felt. Every so often banter from the empty clerestory would reach the two living women with the soundless cla
rity which memory gives to the voices of the dead.

  Her Ladyship's presence was everywhere but unmentioned, both girls conscious that the other had a better right to mourn her. They were aware of their mutual dependence on each other and afraid that, without her, there was no last court of appeal if they fell to quarrelling.

  Despite the heat, they spent most of the day on the balcony. The rain which had fallen almost unnoticed during the hectic days of rehearsal might never have been. Far off, the Thames was a gleam that made the eyes water while the towers of churches and houses seemed to be wriggling on their roofs.

  The Yard shrank under the sun's onslaught, its thatch and wood bleached, new cracks opened in its walls. There was dust in the bottom of the horse-trough.

  'Wonder how Footloose never got it?' mused Dorinda idly, watching the beggar's stumps twitch in the mouth of his barrel as flies landed on them while he dozed away the afternoon.

  'D-don't.' Madness lay in attempting to make sense of the Plague's arbitrariness; why this one, not that one. It wasn't mentioned during the survivors' rooftop gatherings in the cool of the evening. Who dared claim special dispensation from God when He had killed innocent children wholesale? It was better to find reason in utter reasonlessness.

  They watched a long shadow preceding the tidy figure of Master Boghurst sprawl over the Yard as he crossed it. Dogberry heaved himself out from the shade to go and unlock the door of Mistress Hicks's. The apothecary had come to give her and her remaining tenants an official bill of health before their shut-up ended tomorrow.

  'One thing's for sure,' said Dorinda, 'it bit off more than it could chew when it took on Ma Hicks. What we going to do, Prinks?'

  Off her guard, Penitence said: 'We managed before he came, we can manage when he g-goes.'

  'I meant,' said Dorinda, sternly, 'what we going to do when we get let out next week? What we going to do with the rest of our lives? I don't want to go back to the game.'

  Startled, Penitence realized she had acquired responsibility for Dorinda. The girl was Her Ladyship's bequest to her as much as the Cock and Pie itself. 'You won't,' she promised. 'I'll th-think of something.'

  'First thing we'll do,' said Dorinda, 'we'll go and look for Pheeb's little 'un.'

  Your friends, it seemed, were those you got landed with. She wouldn't have chosen her, but if she must explore the featureless plain that was the future, there could be worse companions to take along than Dorinda with her hidden reservoirs of affection and loyalty. And she was right; if Phoebe's child was alive, they must find it.

  'And we could try the acting game,' went on Dorinda. 'Henry says I'd make a good comedienne.'

  Penitence wouldn't join in the speculation because she couldn't think beyond the next day. She was, she suddenly knew, waiting for the actor to go. His departure took on the depth of an abyss she must descend into and climb out of before she found out what of herself was left and usable.

  What was she doing, being angry with him? He was blind, but his blindness merely increased the debt she owed him for his care in rescuing her not just from Rookery attackers but from a lifelong strangulation.

  The freedom when Dogberry unlocked the Cock and Pie's door next week was as nothing to the freedom she had been given through a window that had opened on to poetry and enabled her to speak it.

  'I'm hungry,' said Dorinda. 'What's for dinner?'

  Penitence went down to the kitchens to begin preparing it and heard Dorinda shout, then shout again. She scrambled back up the stairs to the clerestory. Dorinda was rattling the latch of Job's room: 'He don't answer.'

  Ridiculously, she pushed the girl out of the way and jiggled the latch herself. 'He's bolted himself in.'

  'Get an axe. I'll call 'pothecary. Maybe he's still with Ma Hicks.'

  It was a solid door and by the time she'd made enough of a hole in it to put in her hand and draw back the bolt, Dogberry had let in Master Boghurst. She kept calling 'Job, Job', but already they knew. The silence on the other side of the door was terminal.

  He was lying on his bed with his mouth open, as if snoring. His face had the familiar shocking whiteness of the dead.

  Dorinda sobbed: 'How could you, Job, how could you?'

  Penitence felt it too; lonely and grief-stricken. How hurtful of Job to choose to die without benefit of their company. And how brave.

  Dorinda was grabbing the apothecary's arm. 'But he got over it.'

  The apothecary shook his head. 'It has changed its form and come back.' Fastidiously, he brushed the girl's hand off his sleeve. 'Tell me, Penitence, did he have any communication with Mistress Hicks?'

  'He took water over there last night. B-before the play.'

  Master Boghurst lifted one of Job's eyelids. 'The one infected the other. This time, I think, it is carried on the breath. It is as well he locked you out. Mistress Hicks is still alive, but not, I fear, for much longer. Where patients would linger four or five days with the old plague, they now live not forty-eight hours.' He turned to the two girls. 'Wrap him up. I shall help you carry him down.'

  Penitence backed away. Then she was running. It was dark along the clerestory and darker still on the stairs leading to the attics. She ran through the cat nightmare while the Plague stalked ahead of her through the black house intent on killing the most beloved thing. She wouldn't get to it in time. Her foot slipped on one of the stairs and she fell, scraping her shin. She clawed herself up and into her attic.

  There was no light in the actor's room but her window was an oblong of paler darkness. The plank. Where was the plank? She tore her nails as she scrabbled for it, found it and shoved it across the gap between the two windows, and was crawling across, feeling it bend beneath her weight. Her throat was rasping warnings that came out in gasps. The killer was ahead of her, already in the actor's room. Papers fell to the floor as she slithered over his table. She felt her way to the door and groped her way along an unfamiliar landing, to a space, a banister. She went down and came up against a door, wasting minutes searching for its latch.

  A candle on a table, a bed, a figure on it, a figure bending over it.

  She screamed: 'Don't touch her.'

  The actor looked up, bewildered, and then back to Mistress Hicks. 'She's dead. I didn't think she'd die.'

  'Don't touch her, don't touch her.' She ran round the bed. 'It's come back.' She threw herself at him, putting her body between his and the corpse. 'It's come back.'

  She was against him, his arms round her. Her body and his. That's why she knew him. Not through the spirit, not through words. Her body for his, his for hers. Clapped together, squirming to get closer.

  'God, I wanted you,' he said.

  As he carried her up to his bed, kissing her all the way, there was time for a hundred Puritan voices to squeak protests and censure. Dead voices. Corpses. Her body and his, the only living, pulsing, beautiful imperatives in the cemetery of the world around them. Whatever damnation she was condemned to after, she had to have him first. She was centred into a vibrating hole waiting for him to fill it.

  They were on his bed, which smelled of him. She struggled out of the clothes which kept her skin away from his. It wasn't shamelessness, it was necessity. Lord, how she knew him. Through his body she could sense his surprise at his need for her, hear the admonishments which tried to keep him away from her, reproving him like her own Puritan voices and as uselessly.

  Is this what happened? To nipples? Between the legs? How juicily, slidingly, painfully, pervadingly miraculous. They were riding the Pocumscut rapids together, swivelling up waves, down, up, higher, higher, definitely, most definitely, up until she went over the edge of the great fall...

  When she woke up he was already awake. She rubbed her nose against his chest, then stopped. He'd been thinking, lying there and thinking.

  'Boots.'

  'Yes?'

  'I am sorry, so sorry. It shouldn't have happened.' 'Oh?'

  'I've turned out as bad as the rest of them, haven't I?' />
  The rest of who?

  'I was in a bad way, you see. And you've become precious to me.' 'Oh.'

  'Forgive me and don't remember it. Put it down to the Plague.' He became self-consciously brisk, and got out of bed, fumbling for his clothes. 'I must go, before they shut me up again.' His shirt was on. 'I'm going to get out over the roofs. If I can reach the end of the Cut...' He was struggling into his breeches. '... there's a coach waiting for me in the High Street.' Jerkin, hat were being folded into his cloak. He was tying it into a bundle, still trying to think of things to say.

  The bed bumped as he sat down on it to pull on his boots. One, two.