The Vizard Mask (6 page)

Kinyans was stung. 'Don't you go lifting your nose at my froiseys, Miss Prinkum-Prankum. Don't lift your nose at any of us. Know where you'd be if Her Ladyship hadn't taken you in? In the shitten-cum-shites. She knows. She's been there, her and me. Two Somerset dumplings lacking gravy.' He was whipping himself up. 'Iffen she'd turned up her nose, we'd be there yet and I ain't having a vinegar-pissing bare-bones like you look down on her or me. She done what she had to, and she done it wonderful. She's as rare a woman as ever twanged and the day you better her will be when dead men fart...'

The violence of his anger took Penitence aback, even while she decided it was defensive. Thee is ashamed, Master Kinyans. And rightly. It was time she went to bed. She lit a candle and went.

The route to her attic from the kitchens was by way of a cupboard staircase that came out on the north end of the clerestory. The walkway was in deep shadow but down below there was light, tobacco smoke and the quiet that had human breath in it. They were fornicating down there. Should she look? A true Puritan would pass right along, eschewing the sight of fornication. But what exactly did you do when you fornicated? You-know-what, of course, but what else? She peered over.

She had expected scenes from the farmyard; what she saw was surprisingly sedate. Half a dozen or so men were lounging on the couches, all fully and finely dressed. Two of them wore masks, the others had abandoned them to display faces that were no better and no worse than she had seen judging cattle at Springfield market. They were all old, her grandfather's age, fiftyish. One was older than that, white-haired, gently featured, not unlike the Reverend Trubridge at Hartford. The Bishop? The Dean? She could imagine his ascetic face above a pulpit sorrowfully condemning the sin of an adoring congregation.

Her Ladyship was holding a lighted taper to a pipe being smoked by a man whose fat jowls bulged from around the edges of his mask. Dorinda, looking bored, was eating a froisey. The Cock and Pie women, Penitence was relieved to see, had their clothes on, though Fanny and Sabina had regrettably loosened the front of their gowns and seated themselves on two male laps, which they were kneading in a desultory way.

None of them was being paid attention. The men's eyes were fixed on something hidden from her view by the clerestory's overhang. The fat man's masked jaw was so slack his pipe drooped. The ascetic appeared to be contemplating his God. There was a fixed, masculine, breathy silence which made Penitence uncomfortable, reminding her of the Reverend Block before he'd jumped.

Quietly, she crept along the clerestory and leaned over the balustrade to see what godlessness was commanding such concentration.

At the head of the salon a dais had been slid in the space between the staircase and wall and on it, lit by sconces, were Job and Francesca.

She had been expecting some awful idolatry. Oh, what nonsense. Francesca, in wispy white, was stretched on the dais, her hands raised in steepled prayer as if in terror of the figure that bent over her with upraised whip. The impression of fear was abated by her expression which, though lovely, was as bland as it had been at dinner. Penitence wondered how, looking at Job, she could keep a straight face at all.

A bear-skin was slung over one shoulder of his undoubtedly magnificent, if smeary, torso which, in this light, shone orange. His bottom half was in tights, strings of beads hung everywhere, and on top of his shaved head had been stuck a large, somewhat wobbly, plume of yellow feathers. Another plume stuck out from his belt at the back, as with a cock's tail. If the grimace on his face was meant to be threatening, it wasn't succeeding. He looked like a badly pruned laburnum.

What nonsense. Her contempt was complete. How could presumably educated men contemplate such mummery to excite themselves? She knew instinctively that was what they were doing; there was a heat rising from the salon that had nothing to do with temperature.

What sort of men took pleasure in a woman threatened? For, despite his absurdity, Job was meant to look threatening. Apart from the whip there was a tomahawk in his belt ... a tomahawk. He's meant to be an Indian. She gripped the balustrade and a great cry came up in her throat. 'N-n-no. They're n-n-not—'

Her Ladyship's head turned up and a cold beam from her eyes sliced across Penitence's open mouth. 'Go to bed, pippin,' she said softly.

As Penitence turned away, she glimpsed Dorinda knuckling her temple, indicating that they had been interrupted by a madwoman.

She limped into her attic, put the candlestick on the floor, and lowered herself on to her bed as if she'd been physically wounded. Nothing she'd seen since she came to this benighted country had lacerated her soul as deeply as the travesty she'd just witnessed, implicating in its tawdriness an innocence which its audience wasn't fit to understand.

She was homesick for them. She had loved them so much; it had taken exile to realize that they were all she had truly loved.

The candlelight showed the dust on the elm floorboards and gave distorted shapes to the saddle beams overhead. Knowing the power of her memory, she had tried not to dwell on thoughts of home, afraid she would be undone, but they crept in with the shadows ...

She was in the threshing barn, the playhouse and refuge of her childhood. She could hear the voices of the neighbours and the swish of flails as they helped thresh the Hurd grain. Sun streamed through the barn across the threshing floor and on to the notches cut on the cruck to mark the passage of time and tell her grandfather when to call a halt for dinner. When they went she did not go with them, but climbed up into the straw manger, watching the chaff float in the sunbeams, letting herself turn into the eagle god, Tookenchosin, so that she could flap through the door and up over the orchard until she circled above the river.

It was a magic river, the only one in Massachusetts to flow northwards. Her wings shovelled her up and forwards until she rode the wind without effort and it was the river that ebbed away beneath her. The smell of its depths and the warm pools where weed grew drifted up to the tiny holes above her fierce nose.

Below her a red-brown figure stood on a rock in absolute stillness, its back in a lovely curve as it held a fish-spear poised above the water which reflected it. That would be Wahunsona. Further along, Wetatonmi was singing to a birch tree as she stripped it of its bark to cover her canoe. The Squakheag sang explanations and apologies to trees they were about to hurt.

Now she was high above the Squakheag village on the wide bank where the river began its turn east. From up here the lodges of the village looked like little brown chrysalises. She began the circles of her descent out of cold air into that warm, wood-smoked, bear-greased fellowship.

Oh God, oh God. She shouldn't have allowed herself to go back. She was being pierced not only by homesickness, but remorse. Why hadn't she enjoyed them more while she'd had them? There'd always been the remove of superiority, a weighting-down by her responsibility to spread the Word of the Lord among the savages.

With her status among her own kind so low, she had tried to lord it over the Squakheag, imagining herself walking down the main, and only, street of Springfield leading a file of red men and women converted to the pure religion by the fluency of Penitence Hurd.

It hadn't happened. She had preached to them, often translating word for word the latest of the Reverend Block's sermons. They had listened with their usual courtesy and then told her of their own gods, who could fly, who walked on four legs and conversed with humans and beasts alike. As far as interest went, the Squakheag won every time. Her starved imagination fell on their stories like a wolf on a leg of pork.

'If thee must make friends of the tawnee, Penitence Hurd, let it be the praying tawnee, not the savage,' said her mother. But it was the savages who were fun.

The praying Indians were merely diminished versions of the Puritans who had converted them. They lived in broken-down huts on the edge of white villages, wore the Puritans' cast- offs, attended services at the meeting-house and shouted obedient hallelujahs. The Puritans patronized them, used them as labourers and fined them when they got drunk, which they frequently did.

The unchristened Indians lived in their own places, outnumbering the whites, hunting their old trails, tilling their fields, skimming up and down their rivers, interlacing the New World with an ancient ownership which uneasily reminded the Puritans that, though the Lord had provided them with Zion, they were still interlopers in it.

There had been goodwill on both sides, despite the knowledge, perhaps because of the knowledge, that it was fragile. Her grandfather had paid a fair price for the land on which he'd built his trading post, as the General Court of Massachusetts had insisted he should.

But the two cultures were impossible to reconcile. The Squakheag, like other Indian tribes, were incapable of understanding the Puritan concept of land ownership. How could earth and water belong to anybody? You hunted it, fished it, tilled it, but you couldn't keep it to yourself.

When she was six her grandfather had taken her downriver to view the pasture he'd bought the year before, and found Umpachala and his family weeding the Indian corn they had planted on it.

Her grandfather prayed for patience. 'Tell these heathens this is my pasture.' He had never mastered Algonquian. Penitence delighted in a language in which she didn't stutter and had learned it from the post's Indian customers almost before she could speak English. She sang: 'My grandfather reminds you, O my uncle, that he paid Awashonks for this land.'

Umpachala had acted amazement, staggering back with his arms out wide. 'He was not using it, little one. How, therefore, was it his?'

The incident passed without trouble that time because the Squakheag were suppliers of the furs Ezekiel Hurd sold in his trading post. He was an ambitious man and in depending on the Squakheag for much of his business he was forced to depend on Penitence. More than once he kept her away from school to take her with him into Indian territory so that she could interpret trade agreements. When he was overtaken by the rheumatics which plagued his later years, he sent her in alone. Her mother and grandmother disapproved, and the Reverend Block had warned against it. 'Fraternizing with the heathen imperils the child's soul, Ezekiel.'

'The Lord has freed the child's tongue to talk easily with the heathen,' Penitence's grandfather pointed out. 'Through her I may spread the Word among them. And wilt thou deny me the instrument He has provided in order that I may flourish in this wilderness?' The Reverend Block would have done so if he could, but Ezekiel was a powerful man in the community. The neighbours were censorious at first, though they got used to it and even called on Penitence themselves when they needed some translation. They were frontiersmen; sexual demarcations broke down where all hands, whether male or female, were needed. Tagging women as the weaker sex was difficult in a country where they laboured in the fields and had to carry guns against depredations from bear, an enraged moose or an Iroquois raiding party.

And it had to be acknowledged that socializing with the Squakheag, while it would do Penitence no moral good, wouldn't harm her physically. Rape of a white woman was unknown; they occasionally beat their own women — and as frequently got beaten back - but there was a strong taboo against rape. It was one of the few crimes of which the Puritans couldn't accuse even the dreadful Iroquois.

Already set apart by her stutter, through her liking for the Indians, and theirs for her, Penitence increased the suspicion in which her community held her. She was peculiar. One might trade with the savages: one did not have to be sociable. Her classmates called her 'Squaw-squaw Pen'.

Denied companionship by her own kind, she found it among the Squakheag who called her Taupowau, the wise talker, and adopted her into the tribe.

At the end they'd offered to fight for her.

They had sat in a circle outside Awashonks's lodge — Indians always made a circle - Awashonks, Penitence, Matoonas, Sosomon, the chief, and Quequelett. Sosomon was still angry at the Reverend Block's threat to bring soldiers. 'He has insulted me, the bandy-legged wotawquenange.'

'He insulted me,' said Penitence. She was trying to maintain the calm necessary to an Indian council, but she was beginning to panic. The fire at the trading post had killed her family and might well kill her by extension. The Puritan community had known her all her life. It hadn't liked her much, but it couldn't, she was sure it couldn't, be made to believe she was a witch. Could it?

It had been a bad year. A murrain had killed a third of the cattle, lack of rain had rusted the wheat, there had been a string of accidents. The Springfield community was nervous. Even before the fire the Reverend Block had said the Lord was punishing them, ascribing it to the usual transgressions, sabbath-breaking, unclean thinking, etc., but if he now put it to the congregation that the cause was due to a witch in its midst...

The sun was coming up over Pemawachuatuck, outlining the twisted mountain in a fringe of yellow. Women were lighting their breakfast fires and the smoke was rising in undisturbed threads all over the village.

'Do the Owanus kill witches?' asked Awashonks.

'Yes.' They'd burned one over the other side of the Bay Colony the year before. The woman had also been a heretic, a Quaker, and her execution had been greeted with general approval. Now Penitence panicked. 'He can't. He knows I'm not. He knows I didn't fire the house. It was an accident. I wasn't there. I was here. Grandmother was always knocking candles over.'

Young Matoonas leaped up. 'I am a pniese. I drank the bitter herbs, disgorged, and drank them again in my own vomit. I have made covenant with the god Hobbamock. I am known by my courage and boldness. I shall challenge the Owanus' priest to combat with hatchets to prove my sister's honour.'

'Oh, be quiet,' everyone said. He was Penitence's spiritual younger brother, he'd taught her hunting, fishing, woodcraft- she loved him, but he could be a pain when he started boasting.