The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  As Penitence was about to introduce Martin, Mr Spragge held up a hand and smiled her back into line. His whisper was one used by reassuring doctors at a death-bed: 'And this must be Master Smith for whom we are pleased to be arranging a passage.'

  'It's kind of you,' she said humbly. The cost of the passage alone was £500 - the Royal African Company wasn't being all that kind — but that it was smuggling out at all a man it must suspect to be a rebel against its king was a cause for gratitude due to the intervention of the Earl of Craven and the fact that Rupert had been a prominent shareholder.

  'Not at all, Mrs Hughes.' Mr Spragge beckoned with his discreetly be-ringed fingers at a lurker in the shadows and ordered it to show Mr Smith to his cabin on the Bonaventura. 'You shall have time to say your goodbyes later, Mr Smith,' he confided, 'but perhaps you would like to settle in for now. You will be sailing on the afternoon tide.' His soft voice hoped that would be suitable, but Penitence saw that it didn't matter if it was or wasn't. He wants Uncle Martin away as quickly as possible. She was impressed.

  She accepted a dish of excellent coffee from Henrietta who asked vaguely if she'd come far and told her that she and Mr Spragge had four children and lived in a sugar house in Prince Street.

  'Sugar house?'

  Henrietta looked around for help. 'Mr Spragge says it is a pleasantry to call it so. I think because this is a sugar town built on the sugar trade.' Henrietta seemed spun from sugar herself with her fair, frizzy hair and light, frosted-blue, absent- minded eyes. The pastel flowers appliqued on to her dress looked like marzipan roses.

  'On that matter,' said Mr Spragge, soothingly, returning from the door, 'I have the Earl of Craven's permission to try and interest you in investing in our enterprise, Mrs Hughes.' He sat down and paused. Penitence wondered which smile he was going to use now. He seemed to have a selection. It was admiring. 'We in the Company know how much trust our late patron, Prince Rupert, put in you, Mrs Hughes.'

  She translated 'put his trust in you' as left you a lot of money'. Elizabeth of Bohemia's necklace. Lord Craven hadn't seen fit to mention to the Royal Africans that it was sold. She inclined her head.

  'Have you ever thought, Mrs Hughes, of how even princes in these troubled times can no longer rest assured of traditional income but, like that dear, modern-thinking man, Prince Rupert, must invest in the life-blood of this great country of ours, trade?'

  She hadn't, but she knew that for the next hour or so she was going to. Well, it was not unrestful to be plied with coffee, cakes and compliments and listen to ways of earning money with what remained of her inheritance. It had been an expensive year.

  The Royal Africans not only made money, it appeared, they practically minted it. They couldn't fail. If one ship in three came in a man . .. begging her pardon, a woman ... sustained no loss. If two came in she was a good gainer. If all three, she was rich for life. And on an average only one ship in five miscarried.

  Mr Spragge's smile bared his soul. 'Even I, Mrs Hughes, invested my widower's mite ... beg pardon, Henrietta, a little pleasantry ... and though the cargo was indifferent and reached the We'st Indies in poor condition, the profit on the venture was 38 per cent. Thirty. Eight. Per cent. What think you of that?'

  He stifled her answer with a benediction from his hand. 'Wait, Mrs Hughes. There is no need to make a decision at once. Come, bid goodbye to your uncle, look over the Bonaventura — she is the latest addition to our fleet, just commissioned — and then you may wish to meet some other partners of your ... of Prince Rupert.'

  Like most people, Penitence had always been excited by dock quaysides. On these Bristolian wharves it was like passing through an olfactory rainbow to walk past the barrels of spices, tobaccos, sugars and wines. In a strange way the unimpressed dockers unloading ivories, apes, tea, coffee and peacocks as if they were everyday goods highlighted the exotic, like the grey, English water lapping against the ornamented, foreign hulls.

  But it was from these docks that the transports had left for the Atlantic crossing, packed with rebel Englishmen being carried to their ten years' bondage or, more likely, their death. MacGregor had been among them and his difficult-to-remember face haunted Penitence's mind's eye more, not less, as the days went by, as if Dorinda's ghost were etching it there to remind her of her debt to him.

  The Bonaventura, a big ketch, was gleaming new and smelled of wood and lanolin. Uncle Martin Hughes's stern cabin was well fitted; she would have thought it a sight too good for him if she hadn't found, to her consternation, that she was having pangs at the thought of his going.

  He, however, was surly: 'These tarpaulins baint going to the West Indies,' he said, accusingly. 'You told me West Indies.'

  She turned on Spragge. 'I paid for the West Indies.'

  The smile was understanding but held reproof. 'Anxious as we are to oblige a protege of our dear departed prince, Mrs Hughes, you must realize that the Bonauentura has been built to ply between the Guinea Coast and the West Indies. First she must pick up her cargo in Africa before taking it on to Jamaica. It will make but a week or two's difference to Mr Smith's arrival.'

  She turned back to Martin Hughes where he had sat himself down on his bunk and got out his Bible. This, then, was the moment of their goodbyes. With thunderous proper feeling, Mr Spragge whispered that he and Henrietta would wait outside while she said them.

  Penitence and her great-uncle were left alone. The boat rocked in the wake of some passing ship and she heard the slap of water against the hull. It reminded her of the sound she wished she could forget, of entrails being thrown into the executioner's bucket. I saved you from that at least. 'You'll write and tell me,' she begged him. 'MacGregor first and then the Indians. You'll let me know if you haven't enough money.' Irritating to the last, he put his finger on the line he had appeared to reach, looked up and nodded before returning to scripture.

  Impulsively she found herself saying, wishing she wasn't: 'Won't you bless me before you go?' Of all people she had reason to know that water was thicker than blood but, with Martin Hughes's departure, the last of her mother's family would be gone from her for ever and she no nearer to understanding them than the day she left Massachusetts.

  'Thee were a colicky babby,' he said, and because she'd been expecting a rebuff she didn't hear what he said for a moment.

  'Was I?'

  'On this very quayside I bade thee goodbye before thy grandmother took thee to the Americas and thee did sick bile on my best broadcloth.' 'Did I?'

  'Admit thy transgression, come to repentance and thee shalt have my blessing.'

  All love must be for the Lord; the more affection one saint of the Pure Church felt for another human being, the greater his responsibility to save that soul for the Lord. She supposed he must be admitting some sort of fondness. He'd probably felt the same for her mother. She hadn't come to repentance either. 'Goodbye, Uncle Martin,' she said.

  To her chagrin she was blinking back tears as she rejoined the Spragges on deck where sailors were stowing and lashing casks. Above their heads men with bare feet curling like a monkey's ran up and down the ratlines. Spragge busied himself to expound the ship's seaworthiness. It was probably still short of investors. Penitence nodded dumbly as he suggested she might like to see the cargo hold - 'We pride ourselves it is the most up-to-date in the trade' — and followed him down a ladder into a hole that smelled of a carpenter's shop where curls of wood brushed her feet as she stepped down on to planking.

  She found herself in a narrow passageway formed by the bulkhead on one side and slatted shelving that took up all the space on the other. If the shelves hadn't extended back so far she would have thought them built for a library — the height between each would have taken a large book although the uprights occurred, apparently unnecessarily, every sixteen inches and had a ring screwed into them which corresponded to a ring in the slats some six foot further in.

  The effect of the cubbyholes and new wood would have been pleasant if it hadn't reminded
her of Flap Alley. My God, in Newgate human beings used to have to sleep in cubicles only a little bigger than that. She nearly said it aloud, but thought that Mr Spragge would be shocked at a potential investor who'd been in Newgate. Or perhaps he wouldn't. Rebels, criminals — if they had money, the Royal African Company seemed prepared to do business with them.

  'Do note, Mrs Hughes, that on a ship of this size we can carry as many as 516. Note too the ventilation overhead ...'

  Five hundred and sixteen? She felt goosebumps go down her arms. 'What is it you transport?'

  Mr Spragge expelled a what-have-we-been-talking-about breath and fixed on a patient smile. 'Our cargo is slaves, Mrs Hughes. That's the trade. Slaves to Jamaica. This is where we stack them.'

  'Excuse me,' she said, 'I meant the cargo you said you'd be plying from Africa to . .. oh, my God.'

  Mr Spragge's smile was playfully tolerant of women's ignorance of what wagged the world. 'Mrs Hughes, how do you think the sugar grows, is cut, refined?' He bobbed his raised finger forward, like a schoolmaster. 'Ships, slaves, sugar. Sugar, ships, slaves, the great triangle of navigation. Since 1680 the Royal African Company has shipped 5,000 a year and hopes to ...'

  As he went on talking his voice faded against the sickness rising in Penitence. This is where we stack them. Unwillingly, she was lifted up and squeezed into her allotted space on the shelves. Her right hand and leg were shackled to someone else's left hand and leg. She lay in a space smaller than a corpse's in a coffin. The wood of the shelf above hers almost touched her nose. Her body bucked with the rise and fall of the ship, water poured in through the holes in the cargo cover and ordure from the slave above dripped down on to her stomach and legs ...

  She was clawing at the ladder, fighting to get into the air, holding on to the canvas on a boom, retching.

  When she could next take notice of anything, Henrietta was wafting a handkerchief back and forth in front of her face as if lack of air had been her trouble while Mr Spragge, more astute, was explaining that such over-sensitivity was unnecessary; that discomfort wasn't the same for blacks as for whites. 'They don't feel the same privation. And when they get to the plantations they are so happy. Henrietta, dear one, tell Mrs Hughes of our voyage to the Barbados and how happy the negroes were in their new home.'

  Henrietta looked around as if trying to recall the voyage. 'Yes, indeed,' she said. 'They were very happy. Except that I thought it very odd to see the black cooks chained to the fireplaces.'

  'You see, Mrs Hughes, they're not the same as us ...'

  'They are' she whispered. 'They are.' She could see Peter's black suffering face as he watched with her over the dying Rupert. She turned on Spragge so that he recoiled and bumped his head on the boom. 'You would not do this if Prince Rupert were alive.'

  He blinked, genuinely puzzled. 'Why would we not? I don't think you understand, Mrs Hughes. Slaves, sugar, ships — they are the raison d'etre of the Company. Your ... His Highness was one of its founders.'

  'No,' she said, 'Rupert didn't know of it.'

  As he protested, she pulled herself together, pushed him and Henrietta away, wiped her mouth, tied the ribbons of her hat more firmly under her chin and set off for the gangplank. At the taffrail gate she swayed for a moment. 'He didn't know of it. Not Rupert.'

  Penitence never remembered finding the livery stable and her horse, though the houses she passed stayed in her memory.

  Sugar houses, pretending their roofs were gingerbread and their mullions sticks of barley-sugar when in fact their foundations stood in human blood, like the skeletons of baby-sacrifices found under ancient hearthstones.

  Not Rupert.

  She stayed a wordless night in the barn at Lower Langford and didn't remember that either. She hitched the cart to the horse and drove it south, only vaguely aware of what she was doing or the countryside she passed through.

  What has happened? Why do I feel like this? It wasn't as if she had not known of slavery, but it had always been out there, as drawing and quartering had been out there until she had been present at its execution. Now, whatever damned thing it was that had assisted her to become part Indian, or part eagle, the same thing that had enabled her to become Beatrice and

  Desdemona, had entombed her. For one moment she had been slid into a living coffin and seen the lid slam.

  Matoonas. Awashonks. Forgive me. She should have given up everything to go and find them, left behind child, protector, comfort, house ... Nothing she sacrificed would have been too much payment to save them from those human stacks. Blocked into a space of inches when they had run free through a thousand square miles, they would shrivel into dust.

  In that moment she knew her Indians were dead.

  Rupert always knew. She faced it.

  Fifty times he must have told her the story of Peter, when he and his brother Maurice had moored in the bay of a village on the Guinea coast and gone ashore to find the villagers fled and a small, bewildered, black boy scrabbling at his knees. 'They thought we were slavers, you see, my dear,' Rupert would always say.

  And you were. You took Peter home, Christianized him, you knew he could feel pain, happiness, jealousy, love — above all, love — and you could still join other men in an enterprise to market his brothers and sisters in the same way you would sell cattle or coal.

  The cargo was indifferent. Arrived in poor condition.

  Rupert rose up before her, stiffly dignified, loving, the most decent man of his generation.

  She longed to forgive him but it wasn't her wrong to forgive. If you can't see how great a wrong it is, who else will?

  Nobody was equipped to see what she saw. She was the freak. It was her peculiarity to have spent a childhood learning that people of one colour could suffer the same pain as those of another. Her adolescence in the Rookery had seen women bought and sold. Forced from one country to another, from one man to another, the struggle she and other women had waged and lost against their rightlessness opened a window on to universal injustice.

  Consignments. Profit. Trade. Applied to human beings, the words were ultimate blasphemy. She knew it. Dorinda had known it. Now, if MacGregor was alive still, he would know it. But who else?

  The devastating loneliness of her knowledge dwindled her into an ant crawling across the table-top of the Somerset Levels.

  'Aphra.'

  The November air took the word from her mouth and froze it into vapour. She watched it drift to join the steam rising from the horse's back. But Aphra would know, had known. The strange woman had divined the indivisibility of freedom; that unless it applied to both sexes and all races it was not freedom at all. Aphra would speak out for it. Nobody would listen, of course, but the great truth would have been said and perhaps one day somebody would hear it.

  Still she was as lonely as when she'd first stepped off the ship from Massachusetts into the slums of London. The pale, lowering sun gleamed on bare branches and, along the route, tarred, iron-bound pieces of flesh swung in the light, cold airs with a not unmusical reverberation. She wanted Aphra, the only person in England who would understand her misery. And she wanted MacGregor. Stay alive, MacGregor. With MacGregor saved she would be less lonely for Dorinda and might pay back at least part of the appalling debt she owed them both. She wanted the camaraderie of the Cock and Pie days to rush in and fill the vacuum in which she now lived.

  And now she had lost Rupert, or at least the assurance in ultimate human decency which is what Rupert had meant to her. Oh my dear, how could you?

  Trundling through her winter landscape, Penitence became colder and freer as the last shackle of her own bondage fell away and she recognized the great and true simplification; that all men, all women, were flawed and that all power, therefore, should be checked and balanced with no person having absolute rule over another

  She absolved Rupert; how could he have been expected to see the world as she saw it? But she also absolved herself; the agreement between them had been honoured by both sides durin
g his lifetime but now, in not being what she had thought him, he had forfeited his right to her fidelity after his death.

  The light was going fast as she reached the bridge over the Cary at Chedzoy. The rebel piece of flesh on its pole was a dim ornament, like a deformed stone pineapple at the gates to a great house.

  Tickle up that old nag, Leddyship, or you'll be spending the night in the Levels,' Matt Fry said to her as she passed.

  Penitence neither saw nor heard him.

  God damn it, she thought wearily, I could have married Henry after all.