The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Somebody was dragging her back, which made her irritable. She wanted to be pounded clean.

  'There,' said a voice. 'We're warmer now.'

  They might be. She wasn't. She was turned to stone. Galatea in reverse. She opened her eyes. A heated brick warmed her feet, a spoon was hovering near her mouth and, above it, a face.

  'I heard your arrival and thought, God's dines, a neighbour of one's own gender and station at last. Then, nothing. So I ventured in, and just as well. How did you get so cold, you poor creature?'

  The woman's affected drawl suggested falseness, an attempt at the languid assonance of the upper classes, so did the elaborately untidy hair, the clothes that were not so much worn as draped, but Penitence noticed none of these things at that moment. She saw only the interested yet vague large blue eyes and great kindness.

  'We must eat some of this calves-foot jelly, mustn't we?' The woman sniffed at the spoon. 'One asked for calves-foot jelly, but... My name is Aphra Behn, by the way.'

  'Penitence Hurd,' whispered Penitence.

  'How very ... biblical. Now then, whatever this mess is it's nourishing. We must eat it up or nasty Noll will come and get you. That's what they used to tell us, didn't they? Nasty Noll Cromwell will come and get you.'

  They'd told Penitence no such thing. This woman was a royalist, then. But she was right about the soup; it was nourishing and Penitence felt better after some spoonfuls. Even more nourishing, after Flap Alley, was the friendship on offer from a woman of about her own age.

  Aphra Behn dabbed her patient's mouth. 'There, dear. Oh, the vicissitudes of life, that women like us should be so reduced ... and for such small matters as a hundred and fifty pounds.'

  So Aphra was a fellow-debtor. 'Mine's a hundred and eight.'

  'We shall not despair,' said Aphra, patting her shoulder. 'We shall arise from this darkness and our banners shall yet stream in a new dawn. "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage; minds innocent and quiet take that for an hermitage." Dear Lovelace, also in prison when he wrote that to lift our hearts.'

  There was only one person to lift Penitence's heart and it wasn't Lovelace, whoever he was, nor this prattling woman. Kind as she was, Aphra Behn was a reproach; her mild clear eyes showed no experience of a world where to inhabit a room in Press Yard at all was a step up from somewhere more terrible. For her, it was a step down.

  At that moment Penitence would have cowered from the gaze of her son; it was for him she had prostituted herself, but by that same prostitution she had made herself unworthy of him. It was Dorinda she wanted, the only person to understand and not condemn. Until this moment she hadn't valued enough a relationship that went deeper than friendship and liking - there were times when she actively disliked Dorinda — but existed in the bone, uncosseted and unremarked.

  'Perhaps I should mention at this stage,' said Aphra, 'that one is a playwright and a widow. In that order.'

  'A playwright?' She'd never heard of such a thing as a woman playwright. Penitence asked the one defining question: 'Have you children?'

  'Alas, my lord and I were not blessed with offspring.'

  Penitence lay back on her wooden pillow. This woman was a calves-foot jelly supplier, of no use to desperate states of mind.

  She was wrong, but it took time to know it. As it was, she found the instant, intimate friendship being thrust upon her both warming and surprising. Without being asked, she gave a few details about herself. Recently arrived from the Americas. Trapped by the Plague. In debt.

  There was a squeal from the next room: 'Where's my Aphra? Them bastards taken my Aphra. Aphra-a-a.'

  'Visitors. Excuse me, dear.' Aphra Behn stuck the spoon in Penitence's mouth and left it there while she hurried next door.

  She came back accompanied. 'This is my mother, Penitence. Mistress Johnson. And this my brother. Brother dear, fetch stools from my room. Mistress Hurd should not be alone.'

  Penitence was surprised by the sensitivity, and grateful. The Johnsons looked a mixed blessing; young Master Johnson being languid to the point of vapidity, and old Mistress Johnson undeniably drunk. But Penitence was so frightened of being left alone with the memory of George — even worse, with George himself — that she would have welcomed the company of the undead.

  Slouching, Master Johnson brought the stools, nudged his mother on to one and slumped on to the other. Aphra, begging Penitence's indulgence at discussing personal matters, asked him: 'Did my letters reach the King? What did Sir Thomas say?'

  'The King ain't a goer.' Master Johnson dispensed words as if they might fall into enemy hands. He handed over some letters. 'His foot-licker gave 'em back. Killigrew's another'n. Only stumped up ten decus, which won't keep Ma and me, let alone you.'

  'But he promised,' wailed Aphra.

  Mrs Johnson lurched forward, took the letters and shoved them at Penitence with a blast of alcoholic triumph. 'My Aphra spied for the King.'

  Penitence gave her an indulgent nod.

  'Spied for the King. My Aphra.'

  'Mother!' said Aphra.

  Mistress Johnson winked. Her mouth made shapes that eventually produced more words: 'Spied on the Dutch. And Dissenters. My Aphra.'

  'Mother!'

  'Now she's written to him for to ask why he ain't paid her.'

  'Mother!' Distraught, Aphra held her mother back and explained in a whisper, 'Poor Mother never fitted into England after Papa's tragic death. She has never recovered from that. And now we have fallen on bad times. So insalubrious. So shaming. You must forgive her.'

  Mistress Johnson nudged Penitence in the ribs, shoving the letters under her nose. 'Letter to the King,' she said. 'My Aphra.'

  A dispirited nod from Aphra gave Penitence permission to read them, which she did while the family talked.

  Bartholomew. She really did spy for the King. Either this was an extraordinary charade for which Penitence could divine no purpose, or Aphra Behn had indeed gone to the Netherlands as a spy. Without hiding her light under a bushel, Aphra's letters dwelled on her services as the King's agent in Holland in the previous months. She had extracted secrets from this one, passed on intelligence from that one. But it had been an expensive business and her appeals for money had been ignored by her English spymasters, despite her petition after petition to the King, so that she had sold her jewellery in his royal cause, at last being forced to borrow £150 from an acquaintance in order to purchase her and her family's passage back home.

  Penitence kept glancing up from the letters to study Aphra, finding the story they told and the fluent raciness with which they told it irreconcilable with the woman who'd written them.

  Nothing in Aphra's style of dress complemented anything else; her grubby, low-necked, light-blue gown was of rich taffeta draped with scarves, some silk, some wool woven in barbaric colours, and to Penitence's untutored eye, owed more to the time of Charles I than Charles II. On top of her hair was a red taffeta cap of unknown origin with black feathers, one of them broken and dangling. She wore it with composure, apparently sure that if it wasn't the fashion now it soon would be. Without her youth she would have been merely eccentric, as it was she looked extraordinary, but not extraordinary in the right way; the limp attitudes she affected gave no hint of the recklessness which had sent her traipsing off to the Netherlands to become a spy. Penitence, having never met a woman spy, nor having imagined there could be any such animal, might have expected one to be bold-faced, sharp, something of a hussy. Yet, while the letters denoted their author to be an adventuress, a female with no margin of safety, somebody Penitence's grandmother would have described as 'having no hem to her garments', sitting on Penitence's bed was a woman whose appearance merely revealed amiable oddity.

  Penitence returned to her reading. Even on her return to England, Aphra's pay had been withheld. The acquaintance demanded the return of his loan, she didn't have it, he took out a writ.

  'Sir,' read Aphra's last letter to Killigrew:

  if you co
uld guess at the affliction of my soul, you would, I am sure, pity me. 'Tis tomorrow that I must submit myself to prison. I have cried myself dead, and could find it in my heart to break through all and get to the King and never rise till he were pleased to pay this; but I am sick and weak and unfit for it, or a prison.

  'Killigrew?' asked Penitence, allowing herself to remember the name.

  'He recruited me in the first place,' complained Aphra. 'He is head of the King's Company of Players and a powerful friend of the dear King's.'

  An actor. Faithless, like all actors.

  'He's a powerful welcher,' said Master Johnson, 'nor the dear King ain't much better.'

  'He is our king.' For the first time Aphra was sharp. 'Parliament keeps him short, poor man. Sir Thomas, too, has troubles, the Plague having interrupted the theatre.'

  'He ain't in the Whitt,' pointed out Master Johnson, gloom- ily.

  Neither are you. Despite her own misery, Penitence was being drawn to the suspicion that this woman, little older than her brother, carried him and their mother as if they were baby apes clinging to her back.

  'My guts is gnawing,' grumbled Master Johnson.

  'Of course,' said Aphra, rising. 'We must dine. Mistress Hurd, you will accompany us?'

  Mistress Hurd was not hungry; she was also reluctant to face anybody else. She felt as if P for Prostitute burned on the skin of her forehead. Aphra insisted — 'One begs you, be our guest' — and in minutes Penitence was being towed along a passageway arm in arm with Master Johnson and an unsteady Mrs Johnson while Aphra brought up the rear as if ushering them to her own dining-hall.

  By day Newgate became what it in fact was, a town locked within a town. It shed some nightmares, gained others, while its corridors assumed the bustle of streets of which cells were the shops and meeting-places.

  Twice Aphra called a halt while she stopped off, first at one cell to collect a pair of shoes from the cobbler who inhabited it, and then at another to hand in a tattered pair of gloves for mending to the tailor who sat cross-legged on his bed, his cell crowded with suits of clothes on hangers. Further along, a wig-maker was fitting a customer with a periwig while three others passed the time in a game of cards.

  Every cell door stood open, whatever the activity going on inside. A man enveloped in steam and a slipper bath, whose only item of clothing was his hat, cheerfully raised it to Penitence and Mrs Johnson as they passed.

  'Is no one shut up?' asked Penitence over her shoulder.

  'Not on this wing,' Aphra told her. 'The limbos are elsewhere. That's where they keep those to be transported or executed. And Quakers, of course.'

  What struck Penitence about the prisoners in this part of Newgate was the normality of their demeanour. In one cell, which had curtains at its window, a husband read The Intelligencer while his visiting wife laid a table with provisions from a hamper — Penitence saw her add a sprig of parsley to his plate of chops — as their children played marbles in the corridor outside. Two gentlemen discussing the international situation swept off their hats to Mrs Johnson, Aphra and herself as if they were passing in a street.

  There was no trace on the faces here of the desperation that existed in Flap Alley, no joy either, but few showed outward distress, merely the assurance of people going about their everyday concerns. The debtors and minor felons here had enough resources, or friends, to maintain life at a just-bearable level. They've got used to it, thought Penitence, incredulous.

  The noise as they neared the dining-hall had the echoing resonance of any large gathering in any large, enclosed space. The smell of cabbage struggled for supremacy with the stink of bad health and poverty. The hall itself was beautiful, with the dimensions of a small cathedral nave, hammer-beam roof and high, arched windows, but religiosity ended with them and the huge refectory table down most of the room's length around which some three hundred men, women, children and dogs were eating — the animals making disconcerting pounces into the floor rushes as Newgate's more desperate rats tried to intrude on the feast.

  Flap Alley was well represented. Penitence saw the tall figure of Bet crouching so far over her trencher to protect it from the fingers of the women around her that she was almost kneeling on the table. A mixed crowd of men and women by a wide hatch in the wall shoved and quarrelled for positions in the queue as they lined up for their ration, carrying a variety of dishes or. which to receive it; some only a slice of bread, in one case a chamber pot. The sparse, grey substance splattered on to them by the servers' ladles was, presumably, Whitt stew.

  As Aphra ushered them up the hall, they passed a frail, elderly man urinating against the side wall. Nobody was taking much notice of him, though one diner stopped eating long enough to shout: 'Not in here, Piddler, for Gawd's sake.'

  A long trestle set crossways at the top of the room, like a baronial high table, kept off those prisoners in the body of the hall who subsisted on staple Newgate diet from those who could afford to pay for something better. Not much better — Newgate cooks were skilled at rendering meat, vegetables and gravy into a uniform shade of grey - but brought to its customers on platters by a serving man, though his manner and the keys at his belt showed he was a turnkey only doubling as waiter, while the condition of the napkin tucked under his armpit suggested he should have stayed with the day job.

  Manners were better here. Three or four of the men actually rose as the Johnsons and Penitence took their seats, though one of them clanked noisily in doing so, having a ball and chain attached to one foot and manacles joining his wrists.

  The courtesy was directed mainly at Aphra, obviously a favourite. She introduced Penitence: 'My dear friend, Mistress Hurd, recently arrived from the Americas.'

  There was a general welcome, except from the waiter who grunted: 'Transported, was she? What you want eat, I ain't got all day.'

  'I advise against the pork,' said a small man.

  'And the beef,' said the man in fetters, 'and tell 'em to pour the ale back into the horse that pissed it. 'Morning, Aphra.'

  Apart from Aphra, her brother and Penitence, he was the youngest of the diners, with sharp good looks and over-bright clothes.

  'My poor Swaveley,' said Aphra. 'A very good day to you.'

  Her brother showed his first animation: 'The Swaveley?'

  A woman at the far end of the table said clearly: 'And that such rogues should dine at our table is beyond belief. I shall complain to the Keeper.'

  The waiter turned on her. 'Keeper's orders, so blurt to you, missus. Ordinary wants to talk to him.'

  'The Ordinary can talk to him in his cell,' complained the woman.

  'Can't then,' said Swaveley. 'I'm partickler who I talk to.'

  Even Penitence had heard of Swaveley, a highwayman whose exploits, while committed mainly south of the river, had been widely publicized and gained the Rookery's hard-won admiration. To judge from the nudges and looks accorded him from the body of the hall, in Newgate he had achieved hero status. Even the waiter treated him with respect.

  To Penitence he was merely part of the horrific kaleidoscope that flickered around the edges of her misery. I must get out.

  Aphra was choosing her meat for her, she was aware that Mrs Johnson was agitating for something stronger than ale to go with it and that Swaveley, against Aphra's wishes, was ordering it, that Aphra and her brother were arguing as to which of them should keep the larger share of Killigrew's ten crowns, but these sounds and movements were removed from her. Get out. I must get out. When the food came she forced some down, uncaring as to what it was or how bad, so long as it sustained her strength to plot deliverance. It wasn't until Aphra began pestering Swaveley that she became conscious of another's reality.

  'One begs you to plead,' Aphra was saying, earnestly. 'I beg you. It's a terrible death.'

  'Ain't none of 'em congenial,' said Swaveley. 'Least with this one, me old gaffer gets me horse.'

  Master Johnson nudged Penitence enthusiastically: 'He won't plead. Chosen to be pressed.
Ain't been a pressing in years.'

  'What's pressing?'

  Swaveley put his manacled hands behind his head and leaned back, regarding her with amusement: 'Ain't they got pressing in the colonies?'

  'I d-don't think so.'

  'Backward, ain't they?'

  The diners enlightened her. By 'standing mute', refusing to plead either innocent or guilty, a malefactor earned the right to be pressed to death rather than hanged. 'Peine forte et dure,' moaned Aphra. The procedure's advantage, from the malefactor's point of view, was that it allowed his estate, goods and chattels to be passed on to his heirs instead of forfeited to the crown, as they would be if he went to the gallows.