Mask of Night Read online

  No more thinking, no more wondering.

  If I didn’t move now I was done for.

  I rose up swiftly from my death-bed.

  The figure standing by the sideboard turned at once. He must have seen the movement from the corner of his eyepiece. To him, I was a dead man resurrected. He said something – an oath, an exclamation – and let fall the great ewer. It hit the bare boards and rang like a clear bell. I was already half-way towards the door.

  Then I was through the door and into the lobby.

  There was no light out here but by instinct I found the door to the street. It was closed of course. I fumbled frantically for the handle, with one ear cocked for the sounds of pursuit from behind. At some level I registered that there was no sound. Perhaps Kite had dropped dead from terror. Where was that other hooded figure?

  Thankfully the door wasn’t locked. It swung inwards.

  I almost fell through it and out into Grove Street.

  The first surprise was that it was still light, half light. There were people about. The false bearers had lost no time in hastening to Cope’s house, relying on their dark garments for pretext. Their cart stood near the door. Between the shafts a piebald nag wearily waited.

  I blinked like a man emerging from a cave.

  Three or four passers-by watched me while I considered what to do next.

  “Help me,” I said stretching out my hand.

  It was hardly a shout to my mind, more of a reasoned statement.

  Then why were they looking so startled, why were they backing away, why were they taking to their heels and disappearing round the corner?

  Because, an inner voice said, what they see is a man emerging from a house where the windows are curtained or shuttered. The man looks wild and desperate. He is covered with the tokens of pestilence, those silvery-black swellings are all over his face and hands.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “I’m not – ”

  No good, said the inner voice, they’ll never believe you. They’ve gone now, anyway. You are a marked man. You are a dead man.

  Then my inner voice said no more, for I received a great blow to the back of my head. I staggered and swung round to see a hooded figure. Then I lost my footing and the black cloak slid past me until I fell to the cobbled ground on a level with the figure’s feet. Then the ground seemed to heave before opening up to let me in.

  Cupid’s Car

  You kneel beside him in the street after he has tumbled down. He has cracked his head on the cobbles and blood is seeping across his face. You suspected a trick once you recognized him indoors, inside a house that does not belong to him. Now, by the fading light of day outside, you examine the supposed marks of the pestilence. You know that he is a resourceful individual who uses imposture to make his living and therefore you doubt that the marks are genuine.

  Well, Revill may have eluded you in the house of Mistress Root but now he has put himself right into the mouth of danger. If he is not yet dead – and he isn’t, you can see his chest rise and fall – he soon will be. And if he wanted to play at death he will soon discover that the game has turned earnest.

  There is no one in Grove Street. Any passer-by would be terrified by what they could see: a hooded body-carrier bending over the corpse of a plague victim.

  Now Kite emerges from the house in a great state.

  “We are discovered!”

  He looks at the body on the ground.

  “Revill?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was the dead man?”

  “Not quite dead. Help me put him in the cart.”

  “He came horribly to life.”

  “He never died.”

  “There are others still inside,” says Kite. Even through the hood you can hear the quivering confusion in his voice.

  “How many inside?”

  “I don’t know. They were shouting. I turned the key on the door to the back quarters of the house.”

  “Good.”

  You are surprised that Kite had sufficient presence of mind for this. But any calmness has now deserted him. The frightened ostler flaps about Revill’s body like a giant bird.

  “Good! How can you say good! We are discovered, I tell you!”

  “Put him in the cart,” you say. “What will people think?”

  Together you hoist up the actor’s body and throw it in the back. You make to return indoors but Kite grabs your arm.

  “We must fly.”

  Shaking off his arm, you step into the dark house. Swiftly you make your way to the chamber off the lobby and scoop up as much as you can carry from the sideboard. Distantly you hear shouts and thumps coming from the back of the house. Revill’s friends, doubtless. So it was a trick, a trap. You wrap the goods up in a carpet which was covering a table, and carry the load out into the street. Kite is still flapping about, a crow at dusk.

  Calmly you instruct him to get on to the driver’s perch.

  He does so but looks round at Revill’s slumped body and the little pile of silverware which peeps out from the folds of the carpet. You can read his mind although his face is shrouded. He is afraid of being stopped and questioned even though it is nearly dark by this stage.

  “Contaminated goods,” you say simply. “No one will question us.”

  No one is even going to stop you. Hasn’t the little ostler realized by now that the best disguise lies in boldness? The pair of you are performing a service for this fair city. You are clearing victims from houses afflicted by plague . . . or by poison. If they were left to rot, the bodies would spread their diseases far and wide as the noxious fumes seeped out of them and through cracked windows and flawed walls. You are taking the bodies to a place where they can do no further harm, to a place where – from one aspect – they may even do some good. Indeed you should be rewarded for your services. You are quite entitled to whatever small pickings you manage to collect on the way.

  No one is going to stop you. You glide along at dusk or dawn, two hooded shapes, like licensed angels of death. You feel invulnerable. You think of how many corpses have been borne to their destination in the rear of this battered cart in the space of a few days. Men, women and children. Husbands and wives. Lovers thrown together in a last embrace. Why, the wagon has been a regular Cupid’s car. It is nearly finished now. Time for you to quit the town.

  You may feel invulnerable but Master Christopher Kite, ostler of the Golden Cross Inn, does not. While you are sitting beside him, he steers the horse and cart through the streets without a word. You can feel his body shaking, a constant shivery motion which is independent of the bumpy progress of the cart. Suddenly he removes his hood and flings it into the back.

  “I thought you were afraid of being seen?” you say.

  “I am tired of this,” he says.

  Then he falls quiet again. The only sound is the creaking of the cartwheels. You could remove your headpiece too but somehow it feels more . . . natural . . . to wear it at the moment. It is like a second skin.

  “What happened to Hoby?” says Kite eventually.

  You glance up at the sky. There is a streak of light to the west but, even as you watch through your eyepieces, the light goes out. The moon is rising in another quarter of the sky, deathly pale.

  “Hoby drowned, and bequeathed us his horse and cart.”

  You turn to look at Kite, and wonder how you must appear to him. A monstrous bird on its perch, slowly angling its monstrous head in the dark. You can scarcely see him but you sense his fear. Odd how as he grows more fearful, you become calmer.

  “Drowned? Hoby’s wife says different,” says Kite, but he doesn’t find it easy to get the words out since he understands the implication of what he’s saying.

  “Does she now?” you say.

  Perhaps there are one or two further small tasks to perform before you will be able to quit Oxford.

  “There’s drowning and drowning,” says Kite.

  “It was good riddance to Hoby,” you say. “He was tak
ing our goods and selling them on his own account.”

  “I am tired of all this,” Kite says again.

  You are passing St Ebbe’s. The bells are tolling dully. The horse knows the way. You reach behind you and grasp the stick which you seized from the lobby of the house in Grove Street. The stick which you used to strike down Nicholas Revill. More of a club than a stick, perhaps stored in the lobby so that the servant who kept the front door had something with which to threaten unwelcome callers. It was conveniently to hand when the player blundered past you and out into the street.

  Your fingers close round the haft of the club.

  Kit Kite reins in the horse as the cart reaches its destination. The ostler turns to jump down from the cart. As he does so you catch him a strong blow on the side of the head. The club jars in your hand. What a solid little nut the ostler has! Kite falls on to the ground and you remove your hood, get down from your side and walk round to where he lies. He is not stirring but you give him another blow to make sure. Then you tug Revill’s body from the back of the cart and place it beside Kite’s. You think to give Revill another blow too, but your arm is suddenly weary from all this striking. Leave him to the hands of another. He will not last long inside.

  Then you go to rap on the door.

  I woke up in hell.

  I did not realize I did not realize it straightaway. I was lying on my side on a hard, cold surface. Something was gumming up my eyelids and I raised my hand to my face. There was a clotty substance spread all over it which I realized soon enough was blood. My head throbbed and an exploratory touch established both that it was likely to be my blood and that it had come from a tender, embossed area on my forehead.

  Still alive then. Thank God, I suppose.

  I moistened the fingers of one hand and wiped at my eyes, clearing away the muck which was deposited there. I tentatively opened one eye then both, but was none the wiser. I was in a dark place.

  I lay on the hard surface, considering how I had arrived here. I tried to piece together the last few minutes – no, the last few hours – but they were like scraps of paper covered with scrawled words which I couldn’t read. Finally I got a sort of order out of them. I’d spent a period in a house somewhere, followed by the appearance of masked figures and a frantic attempt to escape into the open air. Something had happened in the open. What was it? I had held out my hand to strangers in the street but they fled from me. Time passed. I saw a vision of a cloaked figure and a view of his feet and a cobbled roadway. Then nothing but blackness and a jolting, jagged movement.

  I moved my limbs where I lay, moved them singly then together. They were delicate but serviceable so far as I could tell. I made to sit up and immediately felt sick and very feeble. My guts heaved and I retched. My mouth gaped like a gargoyle and water sprung from my eyes. The retching left me even weaker, and I lay back down, thinking that if I never had to move again it would be no great sacrifice. But my vision and my head were beginning to clear. That house was in Grove Street, I recalled. It was the property of a merchant called Edmund Cope. My friend Jack Wilson had been briefly attached to the merchant’s wife. Lucky Jack. I was there because I and my friends were laying a trap for the counterfeit body-carriers. Ah yes. I reached for my face once more and felt the bumps and pustules of the false plague-sores.

  I could smell now and, over and above the disagreeable odour of myself, there was something worse, much worse. And I could see now that I was not lying in absolute darkness. In the distance there was a pale striped square from which a little light was emanating. For a time I hoped that I was back in Cope’s place, and that the thieves had simply abandoned me there. In that case where were Abel and Jack?

  But I wasn’t in the Grove Street house. This chamber was emptier, danker and colder, and terrible in a way that I didn’t want to consider yet. The air was thick and unwholesome. As my eyes grew accustomed to the surroundings I realized that the pale square was an opening, set high up in a wall. The unearthly light coming through it was slight enough. It was night-time and the moon was riding high overhead, infiltrating the room.

  Very carefully I lifted myself up, at first on all fours then upright. I was shivering like a man with fever but I managed to stand without being sick again, without falling over. Slowly, slowly, I crossed the room, putting one leg in front of the other, skirting various objects on the way. I reached the wall in which the window was set. Perhaps on account of the chill which the wall gave off, I sensed that the room was at least half below ground level. The “window” was an unglazed opening, positioned just above head height. The stripes I’d noticed were iron bars. The night air was chill but clean and fresh, and I drank it down in great gulps. Then, leaning against the roughcast wall, I surveyed the place where I found myself.

  Around me were shapes, some of them mercifully shrouded, lying on blocks or tables. I did not have to examine them. They were human bodies. I counted four or five, with others possibly in the far corners. I was in a dead room. My knees gave way and I sank to the floor, my back sliding against the slimy stone of the wall. I would have vomited again but there was nothing more to bring up.

  I don’t know how long I was huddled into a ball at the base of the wall, trying to squeeze myself into nothingness, so terrible was this place. There is a kind of pity in consciousness perhaps which takes us away from the continued contemplation of horror. I went numb and retreated into some distant inner region where, if you had enquired after my name or trade, I most likely couldn’t have answered.

  The next thing I was aware of was a growing light in the room. Of course it was spring-time in the world beyond this room, and morning comes early in the spring. I was rolled up against the wall, stiff and aching. The dawn light showed off the bodies lying flat on their backs atop primitive tables. Next to some of the shapes were cutting implements and in one place, incongruously, a pair of scales. Without moving from my position I could see that one of the corpses was that of Kit Kite, the ostler. I recognized his sandy head, although like mine it was bloodied. This surprised me for wasn’t Kite one of the counterfeit body-carriers? If so, what was he doing in this charnel house, this shambles?

  I forced myself to inspect the other corpses by the half-light seeping through the window but backed away when I observed that at least two of them bore the authentic marks of the plague, the swellings and buboes which Abel had so artfully faked for me. One of the others I knew. It was Mistress Angelica Root, her poor face bloated and purplish but still recognizable.

  Had I really thanked God for preserving me alive? Well, I would not be alive for much longer, surely, having spent the night shut up in such a foul place, wherever it was. The disease which I had played with as an impostor would seize me after all. I would perish as my mother and father had. Strange to say, this realization did not throw me into a state of terror. Perhaps my reserves of terror were all used up.

  There was a door to this chamber or cellar but it was firmly sealed. I beat against it and called out but there was no response. I was almost more afraid of someone coming than of no one coming. I went back to the barred window. By raising myself on tiptoe I could stick a hand through the bars and waggle my fingers. I yelled out but failed to convince even myself of my plight. Also there would be nobody about at this early hour, perhaps five in the morning, and I soon gave up.

  Then a great calm came over me, almost a lightness of mind. Maybe it was hunger or tiredness, maybe it was the preliminary to the end, in the same way a drowning man is said to fall into a reverie during his last moments. I went back to my position beneath the window opening. I sat down and stretched out my legs in front of me as easily as if I were reclining on a river bank.

  In this dream-like state some association between the dead store-house and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet came to me. When Juliet swallows the sleeping potion prepared by Friar Laurence she dies to the world and is borne off to the vault of the Capulet family. Here she lies among the corpses for two days, waiting to be a
wakened by her lover’s kiss. When she does wake, though, it is to find Romeo already dead at her feet, a horror surpassing all the other horrors. Despite this Juliet possesses sufficient fortitude to pick up Romeo’s dagger and sheathe it in her body. If a young girl could so steel herself then a grown male player should certainly be able to . . .

  This was not a play, I told myself, even if there was something unreal about it all.

  Who was going to unlock the door of the cellar and enter this charnel house? Not Romeo for sure.

  Yet someone would come. (It was what I was afraid of, that someone would come.) We were here for a reason, Revill and the dead.

  I thought about the reason. Plague victims are usually buried as rapidly as possible, after being removed from their dwellings at unobtrusive hours. They are forked unceremoniously into a common pit. Yet there were in this room at least two apparent victims of King Pest – why were they still above ground? And how to explain the presence of Kit Kite and Mistress Root in this dreadful chamber? The one had been poisoned, I was certain, while the other looked to have been beaten to death.

  Why would anyone want to accumulate corpses, with all their attendant dangers? They have no value, not even a brass pin’s worth. They cannot be cut up and their remains interrogated, everyone knows that. The doctor is not permitted to do this. If a man dies, a man dies. Unless there are patent marks of violence on him, it is not for us to enquire into the reasons for his passing. It is God’s will. So I’ve heard.