The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  He's dead. They're both dead. She was having a premonition of the news, the sting of the insect as it crawled towards her, ever bigger. Having seen it as monstrous she couldn't dislodge its misshape from her eye. Barnzo's poor face and leather cap became a head with mandibles and multi-faceted eyes. Then he waved — 'Letter from Holland, Leddyship' — and reverted to a simpleton driving a cart full of people and fleeces.

  She snatched the letter from his hand, and frowned her disapproval at his passengers: her own dear Mudge and Prue Ridge, Jack and Mistress Fuller, the Mackrells, the Yeo child, Jan and Betty Creech and their baby. Good people all of them, but Dissenters from the mainstream religion that Penitence was beginning to consider essential to the well-being of the country's economy.

  Barnzo's ever-nodding head nodded with deliberation at her: 'King Monmouth be coming to Somerset.'

  'Shshhh.' Mistress Fuller put her hand over her son's mouth, and Penitence sympathized. 'If Sir Ostyn heard you, Barnzo, you'd go to prison.' She looked at Mudge: 'What set this off?'

  'Oh, there's rumours at meeting.' He was reluctant.

  'There's always rumours,' she scolded. 'And people like you stupid enough to encourage them. Monmouth won't dare come. Not after the Argyll fiasco.'

  The Earl of Argyll had invaded Scotland in what had been supposed to be a two-pronged attack against James's Catholic reign — the Duke of Monmouth to provide the other prong by landing somewhere in England to raise a Protestant rebellion. In view of the fact that Argyll had been captured after a month of incompetence it was not expected that Monmouth, who was known to be unable to raise sufficient men or money from his fellow-exiles in the Netherlands, would make the same mistake.

  'They be arresting our friends in Taunton,' burst out Barnzo.

  'They're rounding up trouble-makers all over England,' said Penitence, who'd been told so by Sir Ostyn. 'We don't want silly men making trouble, do we.' She looked squarely at Mudge: 'Do we? Not with the teasel harvest coming on.'

  Mudge grinned at her. 'Won't be, Leddyship. Not from I.' There were nods from the others in the cart.

  'Good.' She slapped the tired horse's rump to set it on its way towards the village and turned to her letter.

  'That's mine,' said Dorinda.

  Penitence stared at her, slipping her nail along the sealing wax. 'It's my letter. It's from Benedick and Dudley.' She had to hold the letter in the air to foil Dorinda's grab for it.

  'It's mine. Look at the ballocking name on it.'

  'You heard. It's from Holland. Of course it's for me.' To tell Dorinda she was a jealous slut was a warm and beautiful temptation she would give way to any moment.

  Dorinda gave way to her own: '"Leddyship", "Leddyship",' she minced. 'Everything's for Leddyship.' Her voice dropped: 'You've got too big for your boots, you. Poncing about like the virgin of the manor just because a lot of turnip-pickers have to do what you tell 'em.'

  'You're jealous,' screamed Penitence. 'Your man's left you with nothing except what I give you. You're jealous because Tongs loves me better than you.' She was back in the attic of the Cock and Pie; she felt her hands reaching for Dorinda's hair and stopped, appalled.

  'Perhaps,' said Dorinda in a court accent, 'you would be good enough to regard the superscription on that there letter.'

  Penitence looked down and, shamefaced, handed it over.

  Dorinda turned her back to read it. MacGregor had taught her to read, but she still moved her lips. The back of her head and shoulders made the same shape as on the day she'd carried Benedick away from the window of Newgate prison.

  How could I say those things to you? You, who sheltered my son for me. Penitence said, gently: 'Is it from MacGregor?'

  'Yes.'

  'Is he well? I didn't know he was back in the Netherlands.'

  'Don't know everything, then, do you?'

  When it came to MacGregor, thought Penitence, she knew nothing. Twenty years on and off she'd been acquainted with the man and all she could relate of him was that he was a radical Scotsman never radical in her presence. It was as if her interest had glissaded over him without picking anything up, as if he withdrew to make himself invisible. He must have opinions. She knew he had opinions; otherwise why did he care to publish the anti-Catholic, anti-James ravings of crackpot exiles? But he'd never expressed them to her. Dorinda had once said it was because he was afraid of her. Henry King liked him. Damn it. Who cared who Henry King liked or didn't?

  Now she was sorry she hadn't taken more trouble to know the man. Obviously he was still important to Dorinda. Come to think of it, he'd been an important, or at least constant, part of Benedick's childhood, a male presence insubstantially but for ever there in the chaotic scramble that had been her efforts to feed them all.

  She tried again. 'Is he coming back to England soon?'

  'Mind your own business.' Dorinda's tone was not so much rude as abstracted.

  If you won't, you won't. But later Penitence was always grateful to remember that she ignored the snub and edged across the distance between them to take Dorinda's hand.

  Dorinda took hers away but, again, not with hostility. She folded the letter and carefully tucked it in her pocket.

  Ahead of them the house and the lovely jumble of its roofs and chimneys lifted Penitence's heart as it always did. How right Rupert had been about an approach that set it off. In silence they walked towards it.

  Over dinner Sir Ostyn entertained them with a hoof-by- hoof account of the twenty-six-mile pursuit of a hind by the Acland Staghounds in which he'd taken part the day before. After the meal, in the hall, when the women took the opportunity to duck beneath his sentences and exchange their own news - they hadn't met together for two months - he listened, rapt, as if to Scheherazades. That they were independent women - rare cattle in Somerset - intrigued and appalled him. But if they paused he took up the chase again, certain they would be spellbound.

  As he talked, Penitence tried to keep her eyes away from the gargoyle opposite her. Don't stare at it. They'll see.

  She had found the Priory's secret room. At least, she knew where it was. She just couldn't get into it.

  Three years it had taken the house to yield even that much of its secret. Three years of increasingly dispirited search for that holy grail of the householder, a safe hiding-place, until, at last, she'd thrown in her hand and taken Elizabeth of Bohemia's necklace back to London in a hat-box and lodged it in the Earl of Craven's bank. Then, of course, she'd made her discovery.

  It had been the night of the flood, when the Bristol Channel had broken through the coastal defences and come snaking across the moors, almost to the bottom of the Priory's drive. She had been in the hall, playing spillikins with Ruperta and Tongs, trying to keep the children's minds off the terrible sound of the wind while the rest of the household scurried from one window to another to fasten the shutters more securely.

  The candles had guttered in the shrieking draught and she'd looked up and noticed for the first time that the mouth, nostrils and eyes of the gargoyle in the north-east corner of the hall were an empty black.

  On hands and knees, to the girls' delight, she'd crawled until she was opposite one of the other gargoyles and glanced up into its leer. Its nostrils were grey, not black. They were stopped up.

  A crawl back to the corner gargoyle. Very clever. Of the six gargoyles in the hall, this was in the deepest shadow and the one the eye shied away from. Not because it was ugly — the others were uglier — but because it pervaded unpleasantness; this was a gargoyle who wished you ill, knew your future and waited with watchful attention for it to happen.

  When the girls had gone to bed, she'd fetched a stool and some tapers. Standing on tiptoe she put a taper up the gargoyle's nose and wiggled it about. The face was a mask; at the back it was hollow — she tied on another taper to the end of the first and inserted it further - very hollow.

  The noise of the wind covered the scrape of the ladder as she dragged it up to the hall then searc
hed the house for withies.

  She'd approached her face to the gargoyle's with reluctance. But to be close to it was to wonder at the artistry of the stonemason who'd made so repellent a thing with a few digs of a chisel.

  The mask slanted downwards at an angle of forty-five degrees to the floor of the hall, making it difficult for her to peer through its apertures. She bound two withies together with string, constructing a rod about four feet long, and fed it through the gross mouth, then added another.

  It was impossible to estimate the full dimensions of the space she was investigating, but she pushed six feet of withies through without coming against any obstruction.

  She tried twisting the gargoyle to see if it moved but it was all of a piece with the wall. The air from its holes smelled of stone and age, but not damp. When she put her mouth to the gargoyle's mouth and said 'Hello' she nearly fell off the ladder as she heard her voice deepen and reverberate back at her. 'Hallooo.'

  She had found the room. But how to get into it?

  That night and subsequent nights Penitence measured and paced. The length of the passage between the hall and the solar corresponded with the other side of the wall. So did the height. The room wasn't in the long side of the hall, then, but somewhere in the end of its rectangle, built into the north wall, perhaps between the fireplace and the corner.

  But that was where it got difficult. At that end the hall dovetailed into the later wing, the Tudor north wing, where the floors were not on the same level as the hall's. Indeed, there were so many corners, cupboards, tiny flights of stairs, that it was almost impossible to spot any discrepancy which would indicate the secret room's whereabouts.

  Eventually she thought she'd tracked it down to behind the south wall of her bedroom which backed on to the north-hand side of the fireplace end of the hall. If her reckonings were correct, somewhere between the two was a damn great gap. But there was no door.

  She could have screamed with frustration. There was no point in being the proud possessor of a secret room if you had to employ labourers to break down a wall to get into it but all her tappings and furtive removals of suspected panels revealed nothing.

  'Have you read my play, Penitence?'

  She'd had to wait until spring until she could reasonably order the hall fire to be allowed to go out and she could creep into the grate to examine the right-hand side of its flue. Taking what the locals called a 'pickass' with her, she'd inflicted considerable damage to the brickwork before coming up against the infuriating solidity of more stone.

  'Have you read it, Penitence? Penitence, dear, have you read The Widow Ranter?'

  'I'm sorry, Affie, I was miles away. Yes, I read it. All last night. How did you think of her? It's wonderful.'

  And it was. It wasn't Shakespeare, but it was marvellous entertainment and moved at a gallop. Set in Virginia during the Indian Wars, its dramatic meat was a conventionally tragic love-story between an English soldier and the native queen.

  But what was new in this sort of drama was the eponymous comic heroine, Widow Ranter herself, lusty, hard-drinking, smoking, cursing, prepared to fight for and with the man she loved. In every other play such a virago ended with a submissive speech to her lover. Not the Widow Ranter. Unreformed, impenitent, she and her man went off into the sunset to a comradely happy ending.

  'When is Duke's putting it on?' she asked.

  Aphra sat back in her chair: 'When can you play her?'

  'How'd it be if I came to one of they old mummeries of yourn one day?' asked Sir Ostyn. 'Ah ain't never seen a play.'

  'They wouldn't let you in, dear,' said Aphra and turned back to Penitence, who'd been struck dumb.

  'You want me for the Widow Ranter?' It was a part to murder for. It stole the play. And it could be played by an actress d'un certain age.

  'Betterton's asked for you. He saw you in the old days.'

  Thomas Betterton was the leading light of the new generation at the Duke of York's and Aphra must have pressed him to ask for her; her stage appearances had been few enough when Rupert was alive; since his death they had ceased altogether.

  To go back. Shall I? Can I? The thought that she would never act again had been bitter, but she had laid it on the altar of Rupert's memory with a self-sacrificial: 'He wouldn't want me to.' Anyway, her role as lady of the manor had called for acting and she'd played it to the hilt. Should I? Perhaps it wasn't worthy of her present status to return to that raffish world, that seedy, degenerate, delicious world.

  Those watching Penitence noticed the hauteur that had become natural to her expression relax into something wist- fuller and certainly more human. Aphra took advantage of it. 'Come back with Dorinda and me,' she said. 'Three weeks' rehearsal, six performances — you can be back here at Athelzoy before the teasels whelp, or whatever they do.'

  'Not me,' said Dorinda, 'I'm staying on here for a bit.' She half-raised herself from her chair to bow at Penitence: 'With your permission, Your Ladyship.'

  'Of course.' Penitence ignored the sneer; she was puzzled. But it made her decision easier to know that Dorinda would be here to help the Reverend Boreman and Annie keep an eye on the girls. 'In that case . .. Affie, yes please.'

  As luck would have it, Penitence found the door to the secret room two days before she journeyed to London - or, rather, Ruperta and Tongs found it.

  Because Penitence was keeping Annie busy helping her to pack, the two little girls were making their own amusement and had ventured into forbidden territory to bounce on Penitence's bed.

  She heard the protesting creak of the tester's great timbers from downstairs and was hurrying to put a stop to the horseplay when a crash and cry alarmed her into a run. Two guilty pairs of eyes regarded from the bed, the blue squeezed up with pain.

  'She didn't mean it.' Tongs had her thin arm round Ruperta's neck, protecting her, as usual. 'She fell over and it came off.'

  'It' was the central panel of the bedhead which hung askew.

  Sternly, Penitence examined her daughter's bruised leg, pronounced it fit to walk on and banished her and Tongs to the kitchens.

  Left alone to examine the damage to the bed, she saw that nothing, in fact, was broken. Although it was carved to look all of a piece with the bedhead, the heavy two-and-a-half-foot- square panel was actually a separate piece of oak tongued at the top and bottom to slide aside along concealed grooves in the panels above and below it. Ruperta's fall had shoved the wood sideways and dislodged part of it out of its runners.

  Penitence was so busy fitting it back that she only noticed what was behind the gap it left when it was too late. There was a click as the panel slid into place, covering up the section of wall it had exposed — in which she'd seen part of a door.

  Trembling with excitement, she tried to slide the panel sideways again, but it wouldn't move. Damn. The click had been a catch dropping back into place. She pushed and tugged uselessly, she stood up on the pillows and tried reaching over the top of the bedhead to feel down the back, but the bed had been made to stand flush against the wall and she couldn't intrude more than her fingertips. Damn. Damn.

  She sat down to think. She could get an axe and whack the panel open or she could get a team up from the fields and pull the bed out. And sell tickets while I'm about it. There seemed little point in a secret room that was public knowledge. No, there was an easier way to open the panel, the way its designer had intended; she just had to find it.

  Penitence sat back on her heels and looked at her bedhead, its carving shining a rich black in the morning sun, like an encrusted cliff still wet from the tide. Two rows of smaller panels surrounded the one that moved — or, at present, didn't — each one a biblical story depicted by stiff-legged figures in early Tudor dress. Hunting between the panels, floppy-eared dachshunds sniffed the trail of a hare, gazehounds lolloped after stag, until the round was reversed and the stag hunted dachshunds and the hare the gazehounds. It always made her smile.

  Across the top was an inscription in We
lsh - 'kyffarwth aigwna harry ap:ll'. Rupert had given her a rough translation: 'An Expert was Harry ap Llewellyn who Wrought this.'

  Now she knew why the Hoy who commissioned the bed brought a Welshman to carve it, doubtless sending him back to Wales when he'd done it with instructions to keep his mouth shut as to what lay behind it.

  'Very well, Harry Ap:Ll,' said Penitence. 'Where do I press?'

  The central panel was of Adam and Eve. Adam stood on one side of the Tree of Knowledge with his left hand coyly hiding his genitals. On the other side, a convenient tress of her long hair hid Eve's. Coiling round the Tree was a dragon-like serpent, teeth exposed in a grin as its snout pointed towards Eve's bare breast.