Mask of Night (5 page)

As I went to kiss her farewell – neither of us was in the mood for anything more celebratory – Lucy began to weep and I was touched until she told me that she was weeping not for herself or even for the both of us, but weeping on account of London.

“What is it, Lucy?”

I had a pretty good idea of what was troubling her. We had not mentioned the outbreak of the disease nor had I described the scene which Abel and I witnessed in Kentish Street. But the subject of plague could not be far from the mind of every Londoner.

Lucy’s were not ordinary fears, however. Richard Milford’s widow possessed the gift of second sight (even if this is more of a curse than a blessing in my view). In her case, the visions were fitful and fragmentary. She had had intimations of her husband’s death, for example. Afterwards she had been certain that I was not guilty of his murder although she could not say who had committed the crime.

Now she said, “I can see things darkly. When I was walking by St Peter’s yesterday I glimpsed an empty street with grass growing in it and a riderless horse, its nostrils stuffed with rue. I heard a low moan coming from the houses on either side. Yet the street was full of people going about their business, and they were laughing and chattering as if they could not see what I saw.”

“Perhaps they were more comfortable like that,” I said.

“They were as good as ghosts.”

I grew cold. I knew better than to try to contradict her visions. Instead I said, “You must get out of London too.”

“I’m not concerned for myself,” she said, and I believed her. “I have cousins in Bromsgrove and an uncle in Middlesex. I will find shelter with one of them when the time comes.”

“The time may not come,” I said.

“Then why is the Chamberlain’s Company leaving London?” she said, unarguably.

“Well, we shall survive,” I said, falling back on the words I’d used to Will Kemp in Dow-gate. I struggled to keep any note of questioning out of my voice. Probably like the citizens near St Peter’s, I did not want to know whether I was going to survive – or rather, if I wasn’t, I did not want to know that I was imminently destined to die. Nor did I wish Lucy to come out with some prevision of her own death.

“We shall survive,” I repeated.

“Oh, Nicholas, I am not thinking of myself or even of you.”

“Nor was I. I meant that whatever happens here, this is a great city. Almost a complete world. It cannot come to an end altogether.”

“Why not?” she said.

I had no answer to this. Like so much about Lucy, the remark was unsettling. I attempted to be cheerful.

“Why, in a few months’ time you’ll be attending the Globe playhouse and laughing at our clowns and sighing with our lovers once more. And so will our fellow Londoners, in droves.”

“I hope so,” she said doubtfully.

“Well then.”

We kissed more thoughtfully and exchanged a few sweet nothings for form’s sake.

Later as I made my way back towards the river, I was unable to shake off the sadness of my departure from the widow. This melancholy might be pleasant enough – parting is such sweet sorrow, as WS has someone say in one of his plays. But neither could I rid myself of my mistress’s fears. I deliberately avoided the area of the city by St Peter’s, in case I should be overcome by the same vision of grassy streets and horses without riders.

No vision was necessary, however, to make me feel uncomfortable. I would have welcomed anywhere some of the laughing, chattering folk whom Lucy had glimpsed the day before. But in every place I looked I seemed to see a gloomy confirmation of her imaginings of decay and emptiness. Not in precise terms but in the general feel of the town.

It was late afternoon and the sky was overcast. The promise of spring which had been hovering in the air for the last few days was withdrawn. Instead there was a dead, spiritless chill which quickened the stride of the few passers-by in the street and kept their shoulders hunched and their collars turned up.

I was walking behind a couple of tripe-women wheeling a tub of filth and offal on a creaky hand-cart. They alone did not seem to feel the cold, but grasped the cart handles and steadied the tub with great chapped hands. These women were most likely heading towards the Thames to deposit their cargo of discarded paunches and entrails. But they did not bother about the slimy red water and the bits of gut which slopped out of the tub and deposited a trail down the street or, no doubt, down the front of their bibs. I wondered whether at this rate there would be any rubbish left for them to throw into our mighty watercourse.

We came to a more open section of the roadway and I watched a kite glide past overhead and then slip abruptly sideways, seeming to lose its balance and fall from the air as it scooped up a bloody gobbet in its talons before soaring skywards again. Something about the bird – the skeletal tips of its great wings, its indifference to human presence – made me shiver.

I didn’t know why the tripe-women were bothering to go as far as the Thames anyway since, as I passed over the Fleet Bridge, I looked down and noticed that the tributary contained more than its usual quota of animal corpses, dogs mostly. If Alderman Farnaby was looking for a place to enforce the city regulations he might begin here by cleaning up this filthy stream.

So it was in this flat, apprehensive mood that I returned to my lodgings. If there was any cause of cheerfulness it was that we were leaving this place the next morning. I did not realize that we were travelling towards greater dangers than those that were stirring in London. Why should I have done? I am not like Lucy Milford, able to glimpse the future in fragments.

This is by way of an experiment.

It is a test, like trying on the costume to see how it fits.

But now you are going on to the next stage.

You have already had a taste of success with the death of the dog. A little rat-like creature which annoyed you by yapping round your feet one day, although you had never been bothered with it before. It eagerly took the meat tainted with the preparation. Poor dog! The mixture was, from one point of view, too effective, for within moments the small thing had twitched its last. You wrapped the tiny body in a strip of cloth and waited until after dark before throwing it on to a neighbouring midden. A lesser dose would probably have been enough, would have given a clearer idea of the quantities and proportions required. A human being, now, would require – how much? – twenty times as much? Even a sick human being, even an old human being?

It happens that there is a sick old woman living nearby. Dying nearby. Old mother Morrison. You’ve never liked her. Used, in fact, to fear and hate her. Still hate and fear her – although now the hate comes first.

You cannot forget how she hit you with a stick when she caught you in her orchard, stealing the fruit. The other children were too quick for her and ran away. You stumbled over an apple-tree root, and she snatched you up and dragged you indoors. There she broke a stick across your buttocks and the back of your legs, cursing all the time. Your screams drowned her curses. She seemed old even then, all those many years ago, with her skin like a withered apple and her hands hooked like claws, grasping that stick. She had some strength in those claws! She haunted you while you were asleep, haunted you for years afterwards so that you feared her for a witch even if others said that she was merely a yeoman’s wife. There was a broom in the corner of the room so you knew that she was witch, though.

Sometimes she visits you in dreams even now, dreams in which you are still little and helpless while she, old as she is, retains all her strength. When you heard that she had fallen sick, you were glad. Then you realized how her sickness might be put to some purpose.

You have intercepted some sweetmeats, added a contribution of your own and sent them on their way to her, taking care (and care is most important from this moment forward in all your dealings!) that it should appear as though the sweetmeats come from someone else. From time to time enquiry is made as to mother Morrison’s welfare, and you are gratified to hear that she is rather worse. It is time she died anyway.

However, reports are not enough – and you cannot make too many enquiries about a poor old woman without rousing suspicion. It is necessary that you ascertain how matters stand for yourself.

Accordingly you have spied on the house where she lives (and is dying) to discover those periods of the day when it is unattended, when the men, her sons and grandsons, have gone out to the fields. It is spring. There is much to be done in the fields. The women of the house will have gone to market, it being a Thursday morning. You know that there is an old servant about but she is nearly as ancient as her mistress, and herself stooped and half-blind.

It is still early in the day when you step out from the shelter of the abandoned hovel where you have been changing into your costume. In contrast to your purposes, the day is calm, clear, bright. You have become accustomed to the distorted view through the eyepieces and find it easy enough to move at some speed. For an instant you wonder what kind of figure you cut as you glide through the trees and across the grass, still muddy and scrubby from the winter. Anyone looking from a distance would surely be struck dumb to see a shape clad in a great black coat, carrying a white cane and surmounted by a headpiece with a beak. They might believe that the devil himself was walking abroad on this fine spring morning in the country.

But you will not be seen, you are as good as invisible. The costume confers invisibility.

As you near the house of the old woman your heart beats even faster. This is the first time you have approached the place since that occasion, many years ago, when you were hauled indoors struggling and screaming. The apple trees are still there, the branches knotty and twisty. The cottage is a comfortable-looking place, fit for comfortable yeomen. You push open the door – it is ajar anyway – and listen to the silence within. Once more you hear the blood rustling in your ears and, beyond that, those little tapping and sighing sounds which every place makes even when empty, especially when empty perhaps.

Except that the house isn’t empty. Old mother Morrison lies a-dying somewhere within. You raise your beak as if to snuff the air and scent out death. Sure enough – and it must be that your senses are heightened by all this bustle and activity – you know that the old woman is in a room on the next floor. You mount the uneven stairs rapidly but careless of any noise. Who is there to hear you or, hearing you, stand in your way?

There is a choice of three doors up here but, by instinct, you make for just one of them and listen outside. After a moment you are rewarded by a wheezing sound from within. You know that she will be alone. Since she is sick she will be allowed a room to herself. Perhaps for the first time in her life she is sleeping alone in a bed. You lift the latch of the door and enter the room.

The window faces east and the light is good and strong on this fine spring morning. There is a pinched-looking bed in one corner containing a woman lying on her back. She is breathing heavily, with her eyes open but unseeing and her arms outstretched. Her hands are clenched on the quilt. Her nose, hooked, is the most prominent feature of her face. The rest of her flesh seems to have fallen away from it.

You stand in the doorway. The wheezing stops. Then, after an age, it resumes, although nothing else about the supine woman changes.

You waver in your purpose. What is that object lying there before you in the corner? A mortal woman who once beat you until her stick broke and who then lived on in your dreams. Look at her now, helpless and alone, wheezing her way out of this world. You wonder whether it was necessary to send her the poisoned sweetmeats since she could plainly have managed the business of dying all by herself. She cannot have more than a few days left . . . a week at most.

You have seen enough and are about to turn round and exit the room when old mother Morrison, sensing the presence of someone, shifts her head on the bolster and stares at you. The eyes which were gazing blankly at the rough ceiling suddenly spark with life. These eyes are overtaken by horror at what they see but there is a moment before that horror when they are filled with an expression which you remember well. An expression of rage and contempt. Jolted, you are dragged back to childhood. You hear your own screams echoing through the walls of this solid yeoman house.

A sudden desire seizes you, a wild desire, to raise your thin cane and bring it down on her head, on her exposed arms and her tight fists, on her entire shrunken frame, and to dole out to her the punishment she meted out to you all those years before. You step closer to the bed and the eyes of old mother Morrison, like black pits on either side of her sharp nose ridge, enlarge in terror. So acute are your own senses now that, despite the distorting effect of the glassy eyepieces, you are able to see yourself in miniature reflected in her own optics.

You are a great black bird with a beak.

You wield a stick in place of talons.

You are about to swoop.

But, all at once, there is nothing to be done.

The terrified widow Morrison, confronted by the image of death, utters a screeching cry as if she were the giant bird not you. She makes a supreme effort to heave herself out of bed. She even manages to lift her head from the bolster and to raise her shoulders, but the strain is too much and she falls back with a great sigh and after that a rattling spasm which is succeeded by stillness. It is over. A spasm seizes your own throat, and you do not know whether to cry out – in grief or in triumph – but all that emerges is a croak which sounds strange even to your own ears.

You glide out of the bedroom and down the crooked stairs. From the far end of the cottage comes a stirring and shuffling but, not even glancing in that direction, you slip through the door and across the balding grass and back to the hovel where you have left your everyday clothing. Now you swiftly divest yourself of your costume . . . your protection . . . your armour. It is odd how you are one person when you are wearing it and quite another when you don your everyday garb.