The Vizard Mask (79 page)

Sir George's clerk came in bowing, saying that the court was ready when Sir George was.

To Penitence's relief, he rose. 'Alas, dear madam, this nose must be applied once more to the grindstone.' He walked her to the door. 'God give me the strength to do what must be done and do it quickly. Did you hear the Lord Keeper is dead?'

'No. Poor Lord North.'

'Amen. Were I in the King's sight at this moment the position would be mine. Yet here I drudge among the savages while lesser men conspire against me. Shall I be Lord Keeper, my dear?'

'I know you will.'

He nodded. 'And Lord Chancellor hereafter?'

He is aiming high. 'I wish you success, my lord.'

His farewell kisses on her hand went on up her arm, leaving it chicken-flavoured. 'We shall dine well tonight.'

Oh, help.

Back in court it was hotter than ever. The accused, mostly men, though some women, came in batches of a dozen, manacled and chained from foot to foot, four batches an hour for the rest of the afternoon. Some wore the clothes they'd been captured in, others had gangrenous wounds that added to the fetor of the hall. Sir Ostyn sniffed at a pomander. Penitence put her scented handkerchief to her nose and over it scanned the faces carefully in case one of them should be MacGregor's so changed that she might have difficulty recognizing it.

None of the women was Dorinda.

After a while the faces blended into one, a country face stolid with uniform courage. The reading of the charges became a monotonous formality in which only the names changed. Jeffreys lifted his face from his nosegay, and after the barest of consultations with his two colleagues, said over and over again 'Prisoners at the bar, we find you guilty. Sentenced to death', and closed his eyes until the next batch came up. The court became restive; wigs of barristers clustered together for chats, like fungi, prosecutors laughing with defenders. 'Could've stayed at home, they buggers,' said Sir Ostyn, shifting. 'For all the good they're doing they could've left ut to their clerks.'

Penitence saw that Prue had somehow struggled through to the crowd at the door and beckoned her over, but she was unable to move for the crush and after a while Penitence lost sight of her again.

'not guilty?' With the rest of the court Penitence jerked at the Lord Chief Justice's shout. He seemed to have been dozing himself; with his wig awry he'd only just become sensible to the plea of the man in the dock before him.

Penitence had missed hearing the man's name, but whoever he was he was brave to put forward a plea that would take up Judge George Jeffreys's time.

'Not guilty?' He glared at the offender. 'On what grounds do thee plead not guilty, you viper?'

The prisoner protested that the witnesses appearing against him weren't credible. 'One a Papist, my lord, and one a prostitute . ..'

Thou impudent rebel,' bellowed Jeffreys, 'to reflect on the King's evidence. I see thee, villain, I see thee with the halter round thy neck.'

The accused said he was a good Protestant.

'Protestant?' shouted the Lord Chief Justice. 'You mean Presbyterian. I can smell a Presbyterian at forty mile.'

A character witness for the accused came forward, an immaculate but pitying Tory: 'My lord, this poor creature is on the parish.'

The Lord Chief Justice was pleased to grin. 'Do not trouble yourself,' he assured the witness, 'I will ease the parish of the burden.'

The man was sentenced to death. Jeffreys had got into his stride. He was almost turning up his sleeves. 'Do we have more not guilties, Master Clerk?'

Most extraordinarily, they did. With the example of the sentence pronounced on the Protestant pauper, not to mention on Lady Alice Lisle, there were yet dogged men in the cells of Taunton Castle who believed that they were innocent and that Judge Jeffreys would find them so.

With relief Penitence realized that if the court was to work through today's list it would be sitting far into the night and therefore too late for her to dine with the Chief Justice. It was also too late for her to get home across Sedgemoor before dark.

'Not to worry, my boody,' said Sir Ostyn. 'Your 'andsome lover's arranged it. We'm invited to stay at Sir Roger's. 'Tis more convenient. Prue and all, more's the pity, or we could have shared a bed.' He gestured around the courtroom. 'Wouldn't want to miss tomorrow's show by going back home, would us?'

Penitence accepted gratefully and smiled at his perpetual joke that they were lovers. The Pascoes had a splendid house not far away from the Assize Hall in North Street. She even forgave Ostyn's description of men and women on trial for their lives as 'a show' because she too felt the elements of its drama. She had not seen wretches clinging to the dreadful bar of judgement; she had seen actors.

But she could stand no more of it. Tomorrow she would return to the Priory, unsuccessful in her feeble attempt to seduce the chief actor himself, but only too grateful that she had not had to undergo the ordeal of his tiring-room.

Later that night Prue came to her room at the Pascoes' in tears, begging her to plead with Jeffreys for the life of Barnabas Turvey, the young weaver of Chedzoy.

'I love un, oh I love un,' wept Prue, 'I didn't know until I saw un in the dock looking so pale.'

'He was in the dock? Today? Did he plead guilty?' She couldn't remember the name, but there had been so many. 'Prue, I'm so sorry.'

'That bull of Bashing dared sentence un to death. You got to save un, Penitence.' No more 'Your Ladyship'. It was the democratic appeal from one woman to another, implicit in it the reminder that Mudge had saved Benedick.

Penitence told the girl about Jeffreys. 'He said if it were his own brother who'd been proved guilty, he could do nothing. And your Barnabas pleaded guilty.'

Unworthily, she thanked her God that she'd had that conversation with Jeffreys. If she hadn't she knew that, for Prue's sake, she would have had to approach him again tonight.

'He were told to plead.' Prue had managed to persuade a gaoler she knew to let her speak to her beloved through the bars of his cell. 'Deputy prosecutor he said he was, offered un his life if he spoke guilty, all of them their lives. To save time, he said.'

Penitence put the girl into her bed, and climbed in with her. Then he'll keep his life. Some prison, perhaps, and then he'll be free.'

'But they sentenced un to death,' wailed Prue.

'A formality,' said Penitence, believing it. Also she was tired. It had been a long day, one of many long days since her secret room had become occupied. She had so many people to worry about that Prue's weaver came well down the list. She stroked the fair curls off Prue's forehead to persuade her to sleep, and slept herself.

In the morning the girl had gone, and when Penitence, eager to get home, came downstairs to search for her, Lady Pascoe evaded her questions. 'Ah think the maid did see somebody she knows.'

'Who?' Damn the wench. This was no time to be renewing acquaintances.

There was noise and bustle in the street outside, more than usual for such an early hour. Penitence peered through the bottle glass of the Pascoes' dining-room window to see green distortions of figures hurrying past in the direction of the Castle.

'Ah should'n go, my soul,' said Lady Pascoe, "twon't be pretty. They're starting executing.'

Penitence stared at her. 'But they were only sentenced yesterday.' No interval? No appeal? Even the highwayman Swaveley had been given right of appeal.

"Twon't be pretty,' said Lady Pascoe again. Her face was pale. It was said she'd been a Dissenter herself before Sir Roger married her. 'I should'n go.'

Penitence had already gone. The crowd along North Street filtered into the cattle market which was normally held on the green outside the Castle. The crush was so great that Penitence had to ask some people on the steps of a mounting block outside a house if she could stand on it for a moment so that she could look for Prue.

Over the heads of the crowd she saw a covered market place - there was one like it in every town, a slated lichened roof supported on stone pillars to keep the weather off the auctioneer. Militiamen were holding the crowd back from a space in front of it in which stood an empty gibbet and, beside it, a dais which had been set with a red table gleaming with badly applied new paint.

Around and about the square were other spaces where men and women hung with their heads and arms through pillories like still, inelegant statues. In London the crowd would have been pelting them for the joy of throwing things but Taunton had lost its sense of fun. These were the lucky ones from yesterday, the ones who hadn't been sentenced to death. Nobody was looking at them.

Penitence squinted into the early morning sun to make out the design of the yellow flashes on the militia uniforms and saw, with relief, it wasn't the North Somersets'. Henry wouldn't let his men do this.

The attention of the crowd — she had never seen one so quiet — was focused on a cart at the side of the square. A harvest cart, huge, long, rough-wooded, with sloping slatted sides containing a dozen or so men in chains. Around the bottom of the cart, standing on tiptoe so that they could touch the hands of the men through the slats, were women, some screeching, others not. The men were singing.

Within the shade under the market roof, busy shapes were moving. Smoke issued out into the clear air with the sound of bubbling and the smell of tar, reminding Penitence of fences.

She got down from the mounting block, and a man, doffing his cap, took back his place. Run away. Let me run away. But one of the women crying around the cart was Prue Ridge.

It took a while to get to her. People in the crowd were so crammed together and so intent that it was like struggling through a close plantation of saplings. Eventually, she was spewed out in front of the line of militia and had to sidle past their pikes. Edging her way along she stumbled against one of the statue's plinths and automatically apologized. The man's head drooping through the hole in the hinged plank about his neck had its eyes half-open. A large piece of paper pinned to his cap, which still bore the rebel green ribbon, read: 'I am a Monmouth.'

At the next pillory along — 'A Monmouth I will love' — Penitence avoided seeing the face of the girl by passing behind her and saw her back instead. Flies had landed on the blood oozing through the slashes in what had been a flowered cotton dress. An older woman was trying to fan them away with her cap and muttering over and over in a monotone: 'Don't fret, maid, don't fret.' But her eyes, too, were on the cart.

Once again, the scene had been designed for theatre; the placing of the statues, the raised podium, the crowd, but in true theatre there were no flies. This, then, was the epilogue to the virtuoso performance she had witnessed yesterday by the white-wigged, scarlet-robed actor on his bench. He gestured and spoke his lines - and the flesh of lesser men and women was torn open and real blood ran out of it.

There was nowhere she less wanted to go than towards the cart but the soldier guarding it made no move to stop her reluctant approach towards Prue. Behind the cart, down a side road, she glimpsed horses and the uniform of dragoons, ready in case of trouble.

Just then the executioner climbed up on to the dais from the shadows of the market and shouted: 'Next.' Two militia let down the rear gate of the cart and one of the men in it was made to descend. The singing of the remainder grew louder as he was shuffled towards the dais.

'Come away, Prue.' Penitence took her by her arm.

The girl's other hand was through the slats of the cart, clutching the hem of a young man's coat. She turned to Penitence, dazed. 'They promised his life,' she said. 'You said as he'd be saved.'

Some of the men in the cart were wounded but all were singing. Penitence looked up at Prue's lover and saw a white face that had been nice-looking only a few weeks before. He's so young. Barnabas Turvey's splendid throat moved as he shouted the hymn. His eyes, looking down at Prue, were agonized.

There was an involuntary sound from the crowd as if it were trying to gasp for the man from the cart, now being hauled up by three hangman's assistants on a rope thrown over the gibbet arm, his legs kicking in the air. They'd undressed him down to his breeches and taken off his chains. The executioner in his black leather hood watched from the dais, inclining his head slightly at the movements and scratching his armpit, like someone having to make a fine judgement.

As the kicking became feebler he nodded and his assistants eased the rope until the hanged man's feet touched the ground, then caught him as he buckled, and lifted the half- conscious body on to the table.

Penitence later remembered that she was surprised the table wasn't red any more. Somebody had thrown a bucket over it and washed the paint away ready for its next glistening coat.

Two assistants knelt, holding the hanged man's legs. The third took the arms and bent them back so that the ribs formed a ridge above the hollow of the man's belly. At another nod from the executioner, the breeches were pulled off.

The singing above Penitence grew louder to cover the screams. She buried her head against Prue's shoulder but heard the rip of the knife, the slap of entrails as they were thrown into a bucket, then the chopping — sounds she'd heard a hundred times in the kitchen back in Massachusetts as her grandmother quartered a chicken.

She had heard of people being hanged, drawn and quartered but the true enormity of what it entailed had not crossed her mind. I am fearfully and wonderfully made. She cowered before the sacrilege of God-fearing men who dared to take to pieces such a communicating, perpetuating, functioning miracle as another man's body.

'Next.'

'Wait on,' came an aggrieved voice from the shadows under the roof, 'brine bucket's full. We'm filling another.' But the cart tail was already being lowered and another man taken to the gibbet. Two more and it would be Barnabas Turvey's turn.

'Missus.'

She looked up. The boy was kneeling down so that he could speak through the slats. Her tears blurred her view of his face. It could have been Benedick's.