The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  'As long as me teeth, mistress. My father served the old Viscount.'

  'So you knew the first Lady Torrington?'

  'I did.' The tone was non-committal.

  'I knew him during the Plague.' She heard her voice softening and couldn't help it.

  'Yes, mistress. 1 gather. We was all worried where he'd gone to.'

  'Major Hurd is his son.' She didn't know why she said it.

  'Is he, mistress?' She'd caught Muskett looking from Benedick to Henry and back to Benedick and she knew the resemblance had not escaped him, but, as far as Muskett was concerned, if the Viscount didn't acknowledge Major Hurd as his son, then no son of his was Major Hurd.

  With the twinkling lights in the wall blanked out, the secret room became more unpleasant than ever. Penitence left Muskett with his patient and eased herself out of it to sit on the bed. The room had been tidied, though it still showed signs of its wrecking. 'Benedick, there are things I should tell you.'

  They'd had little time to talk since he'd been fit. She hadn't yet found out what sort of person he was now, what change the battle of Sedgemoor must have wrought in him. He'd become a cipher for the baby he'd once been. She felt the same protective agony, had the same cat nightmare she'd known when she'd been in Newgate, as if he was the mewling, helpless little thing he'd been then instead of a grown man.

  She said abruptly: 'Why did you join Monmouth?'

  He didn't turn round from the window. 'Prince Rupert would have done the same.'

  'Prince Rupert would never have tried to unthrone a legitimate king,' she said.

  He didn't want to discuss it. Instead he pointed to the slanted view beyond the courtyard over the western Levels where the rising sun was turning the early morning mist into a golden rose. 'Where is that?'

  'King's Sedgemoor.'

  He hadn't connected it to the night flashed with gunfire. He fell quiet. She could have wept for him. Well, he was going to have plenty to distract him. 'Benedick,' she said again, 'I must tell you things.'

  So she told him. First about MacGregor and his Aunt Dorinda. To her amazement, instead of being distressed for them, he was angry: Aunt Dorry? God damn it, can't a fellow go off to war without all his female relatives running after him?' He was ashamed, of course, but Penitence could have hit him again. They've no idea. They thought of the world as a ringed-off space with women circling it, like an audience, with no other involvement than a spectator's. 'Where is she? With MacGregor?'

  'We don't know.'

  'Then we'll just have to go and find them. Where's my sword?'

  From far away, somewhere among the infinitely changing green of reed and meadow came the boom of a bittern.

  'Benedick,' said Penitence. Her voice failed and she had to try again. 'Benedick. Out there is a river called the Parrett. On its estuary tomorrow night a boat will be waiting to take you back to the Netherlands. Tomorrow night you will be aboard the sodding thing. I want that clearly understood. To the Netherlands. You and your father.'

  He'd been almost smiling until then. 'What father? Why do you keep on about my father? He's dead.'

  She didn't make it elaborate, just told him that during the Great Plague she and his father had been thrown together, that he had been called away on service to his country, most of it spent in a French prison, without knowing he'd left a son behind him.

  He was quiet for a long time, digesting it. She began to worry that she wouldn't be ready for when Sir Ostyn Edwards came to fetch her to take her to the Assizes, but she dared not interrupt the boy's thoughts.

  'Do you know,' he said, 'I always knew my father wasn't dead. Your voice would change as you said it. I thought he might be Prince Rupert.'

  'No.' How sad. You never knew what was harboured in the mind of your child. 'Oh.'

  She said brightly and ridiculously, 'The Viscount is very nice. His family name is Torrington. Anthony Torrington. 1 call him Henry.' He's got good teeth. She began to get irritated. I'm not selling a horse.

  'Why?'

  'Does it matter?' Do you want a father or don't you?

  'Will he make an honest woman of you?'

  'I beg your pardon?' She was furious now.

  'Is he going to marry you? Will he acknowledge me?'

  That's all she was to her own son, a chattel to be passed around for his benefit. 'No,' she shouted, 'because I won't marry him. I'm going to stay a dishonest woman like I've always been, and if you don't like it you can go hang yourself and save King James the trouble.' She stalked over to her dressing-table, adjusted the sliver of silvered glass that was the only decently sized piece left of the mirror, and began to brush her hair.

  After a while she felt her son's hands on her shoulders and looked up at him. He was as tall as his father. 'I suppose,' he said, 'you haven't done badly. For a dishonest woman.'

  'Thank you.' She patted his hands. 'And no more nonsense about trying to find Aunt Dorinda. I can do that better alone. You're a risk to me as long as you're in the country. I'll fare better when you're out of it.'

  'Yes, I see that. But it was typical of her, wasn't it? To risk her life for mine? She and MacGregor were always so kind to me.'

  Was it? Were they?' How unheeding of other people's virtues and relationships she had been as she'd plotted and clawed her way through her life.

  'A viscount,' mused Benedick. 'Not so bad a choice for a father after all. What does that make me?'

  She couldn't resist it. 'A bastard.'

  Chapter 5

  'Proper little maypole,' said Sir Ostyn admiringly as he helped Penitence into his carriage. 'A sight for sore eyes, you are, my 'andsome. Us'll have a tumble together on the way.'

  Penitence stood on the step and looked down at him. 'I'm prepared to go in my donkey cart,' she warned him. He'd recovered some of his confidence since the trouncing it had taken at the hands of Nevis. She was glad for him, but not enough to have to put up with being fumbled all the way to Taunton. 'Besides, Prue's coming with us.'

  He was not put out. 'Tumble the maid too, if ee like.'

  She had dressed carefully in her best and known as she did it that she was inviting trouble. She had so overplayed the coquette for Jeffreys the last time she and the Lord Chief Justice met that he would more than likely wish to bed her after their dinner together tonight.

  She'd stood a long while in her shift before her pier glass holding up first one robe then another and calculating like a Treasury clerk.

  If Henry has deserted me .. . plus more importantly, if he has deserted his son . . . equals me to save Benedick from the gallows.

  The man with the authority to free Benedick . . . plus Dorinda and MacGregor if they should so need . .. equals me offering my body to same man in exchange.

  She subdued revulsion and in doing it realized that she had achieved true whoredom in looking beyond the act to the reward. I must save my son. The hanging of my son would not be a survivable event. I am my mother's daughter. She whored for her survival: if it proves necessary I shall whore for mine.

  In the end she'd chosen the dark blue cotton; it showed up her still-excellent skin.

  Sir Ostyn and Penitence didn't arrive at Taunton Castle until eleven o'clock but they had only missed a few minutes of the Assize's first case. Most of the morning had been taken up by the ceremonial attendant on the opening of the Assize. Trumpets had been blown, red carpets laid, nosegays exchanged, speeches given. Everybody who was anybody in Somerset was displaying his or her loyalty to King James by his or her attendance and best clothes.

  So crowded was the court that at first Sir Ostyn was refused admission, despite his magistracy. It was Penitence who got them both in by displaying the Lord Chief justice's letter, which so impressed the usher that he flung himself into the courtroom at a crouch and came out dragging two protesting gentry whose places she and Sir Ostyn took.

  The first case was Lady Alice Lisle's.

  It was like being mummified. The deep sills of the Castle's high windows were
filled by spectators who refused the ushers' pleas to descend and who blocked out so much sunlight that candles had to be lit. The heat, the smell, the gloom enclosed Penitence so that she almost panicked, until she was drawn into the drama being enacted at the other end of the long hall where candles illuminated two protagonists like footlights.

  Jeffreys was lit while the wigs of the two judges on either side of him merely made grey frames around faces that had disappeared.

  And the aged woman in the dock was lit, her white cap and Puritan collar brilliant and sharp-etched.

  A disembodied voice was mumbling from the witness box, cut short by the carrying bass of Sir George Jeffreys. 'They block the light. Hold up a candle that we may see his brazen face.'

  A candle was held up to reveal a male witness doggedly muttering as tears rolled down his face. Penitence knew him; it was Lady Alice's steward.

  'That is all nonsense,' said Sir George. 'Dost thou imagine any man hereabouts so weak as to believe thee?'

  'She thought them only Presbyterians, my lord, not rebels. She thought they was mere in danger for preaching.'

  Lit from below the Lord Chief Justice's mouth seemed to sprout tusks. For the first time Penitence heard an echo of the Welsh accent he had tried to lose. 'There is not one of those snivelling, lying, canting Presbyterian rascals but, one way or other, had a hand in the late horrid conspiracy and rebellion. I hope, gentlemen of the jury, that you take note of the horrible carriage of this fellow. A pagan would be ashamed of such villainy.'

  'Oh ma dear Lord,' whispered Sir Ostyn to Penitence, 'if he can treat a witness so, what will he do to Lady Alice?'

  What would he do to me? She was committing the same crime.

  The captain who had found the two rebels hidden in Lady Alice's house was called to give testimony. The prosecutor was redundant; it was the Lord Chief Justice who did the questioning.

  What a performance. She hadn't seen a Richard III like it, not even Lacy's. The man posed, varied his tone, sometimes making his audience laugh, lulling it with gentleness, causing it to jump, repelling, attracting, displaying a brilliance of grasp that kept it stunned.

  The play - Penitence corrected the thought — the case rested on whether or not, when she gave the two men shelter, Lady Alice had known they were rebels. Lady Alice protested that she had not. Penitence wished she would say so with more emphasis; she had aged since the two of them had last supped a dish of tea together, her head shook and her deafness caused her to cup her hand round her ear. Jeffreys had allowed a court official to stand beside her in the dock to repeat everything that was being said. Penitence wished too that Alice had worn less starkly Puritan dress. But she was proud of her; her neighbour was conducting herself with dignity; her face had the blinking composure of the very old.

  Now Jeffreys was summing up — lethally. How could the dame not have known the men were rebels? 'And if she knew,' rang out his wonderful voice, 'neither her age nor her sex are to move you. I charge you, good jurymen, as you will answer at the bar of the Last Judgement, deliver your verdict according to conscience and truth.'

  When the judges and jury retired, the court became bedlam. Penitence heard fors and againsts all around her.

  'Always for Dissenters, she was.'

  'Kindly old besom yet. And wept for the King when he died.'

  'She knew they to be rebels though.'

  "Course she knew, but hiding hunted deer ain't the same as poaching. 'Tis only womanly. They'll never burn her.'

  Penitence turned to Sir Ostyn. 'Burn her? They mean to burn her?'

  His piglike face was miserable.

  "Tis the punishment, Peg.'

  She shook his arm. 'Burn her? For an act of charity?' She had forgotten that Alice's crime was her own, only being able to picture judicial flames scorching up that frail wrinkled body. 'They'd be too ashamed.' The witch-finding bonfires of the Interregnum had produced a reluctance among sophisticated people - and, surely Jeffreys, monster though he was, was a sophisticated monster - to return to such barbarism. This was a new age. For all his faults, Charles had encouraged toleration and science. James could not, he could not put the clock back.

  Sir Ostyn hushed her. The court rose as jury and judges came back.

  'Yes?'

  'My lord,' the chairman of the jury was perplexed and nervous, 'the men Lady Alice was accused of hiding, they'm not convicted yet. What we'd dearly like to know, my lord, is if 'tis treason to hide a man as hasn't yet been proved a rebel?'

  'It is all the same,' Jeffreys assured them.

  'But we're not sure she did know them to be rebels, my lord.' It took great daring.

  In the silence of the court it was possible to hear the bell of St Mary's Tower ring for one o'clock. There had been no adjournment at midday and the Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys was shifting on his bench. The chairman of the jury flinched as if wishing to take cover.

  'I cannot conceive,' shouted Jeffreys, 'how, in so plain a case, you should even have left the box. If I have not an instant decision, I shall adjourn the case and you shall be locked up all night.'

  'See, Peg,' said Sir Ostyn, as jury and judges left the court again, 'this is the pity of ut. I'm frit as he'll have to make an example of the old soul. He's got more to try at Dorchester, more at Exeter, before he do move on to Wells and Bristol. He's got to make an example of un here.'

  She didn't understand. 'It's Lady Alice. She's your neighbour.'

  An usher was trying to edge along the close-packed row of public seats in which they were sitting. He leaned over and whispered: 'His Chief Lordship asks if Mistress Hughes would wish to take refreshment with him at his chambers in the break.'

  No, Mistress Hughes wouldn't. But the respectful glances that were being cast at her by all those within range of the whisper brought her to her senses. Whatever happened to Lady Alice, Penitence had her own neck to think of, and the closer she was to Jeffreys, the less likely that same neck - and Benedick's, and Martin Hughes's, and Dorinda's and MacGregor's - would be subjected to the axe or the rope. She nodded, and got up. 'Give un my regards, mind,' said Sir Ostyn.

  Despite the usher clearing the way, it was slow-going through the press to the doors. The noise of conversation and argument stopped as the jury filed back again into its box and the judges to their dais.

  Reluctantly, Penitence turned round. The scene was still a stage-set; Jeffreys with his wide, red face and scarlet robes might have emerged, steaming, from a trap door to Hell; Lady Alice a study in dry white and black, her head nodding, her eyes focusing perhaps on memories of her long life or her arthritis, everybody's grandmother.

  'Guilty, my lord.'

  Jeffreys sentenced her to be burned alive.

  'By the Lord, madam,' said Jeffreys, waving a capon leg, 'but it refreshes the eye to rest it on your sweet face. What say you, my lords?'

  Justices Wythens and Levinz agreed that it did and got on with eating and drinking at the well-stocked table of the inn next door to the Castle.

  Penitence refused all food, but accepted a glass of wine, hoping it would settle her stomach and stop her hand shaking. She drew the Lord Chief Justice to a corner. 'Can nothing be done? Can I do nothing to persuade you?'

  Jeffreys frowned. 'You regret Lady Alice, mistress?'

  'I do,' she told him.

  He said unexpectedly: 'So do I. But 1 am the King's servant and he must be protected. I have pronounced the legal sentence for a traitor, which is what she is.'

  'She is so old.' Penitence took a deep breath. 'There are neighbours,' she said meaningfully, 'perhaps even one's friends, who have become innocently, maybe foolishly, embroiled in the .. . the rebellion. If one appealed to you for mercy on them ... one's gratitude, my lord, would be undying.'

  Their eyes met. She knew her timing was wrong; the proper moment to offer him her services would be tonight, after he'd dined well. But the dreadful sentence had added Lady Alice to Penitence's list as another brand that must — this time literal
ly — be plucked from the burning. She could think of nothing else. Subtlety and craft deserted her with the picture of that harmless old body tied to a stake flickering constantly in her brain. It could be Dorinda's. It could be Benedick's.

  'Mistress.' He was no fool. His yellow-streaked eyes held a warning. 'It is to be hoped you have no such neighbours or friends. Should they be my own brother, I would pronounce guilty men guilty. The King was most grievously endangered. Blood must form such a moat around him as nobody shall cross again.' His red face approached hers. She could smell sweat and the dust of his wig. 'However lovely the supplicant, she should make no difference to the sentence. Whether or not it is carried out rests with the King.' He winked. 'In that matter, mistress, I shall always be your friend.'