Chapter 9

Job didn't die. Alania did. The next day Phoebe and Sabina developed the symptoms. On the day after that Her Ladyship said: 'Penitence, go get a sheet from the attic. We're going to have to make up another bed.'

She was stupefied from tiredness: 'Who for?' 'Me.'

She didn't believe it, couldn't. By the time she'd fetched the sheet, Her Ladyship had got everything ready; a bucket, a candle, a bottle of water and a beaker stood by the couch Fanny had died on. They made up the bed together as they'd done with all the others.

'Are you sure?' Her Ladyship was thinner, but so was she.

Her Ladyship tutted and, with an oddly prudish gesture, pulled aside an inch of peignoir to show the tokens. 'I'm not having any of that old electuary,' she said. 'There's two guineas in a purse under my bed for housekeeping. And get that slut Dorinda on her feet. You'll need her.'

Penitence helped her on to the bed then ran for the stairs.

'Penitence.'

She paused. 'Yes, Ladyship?'

'Whatever I say in the ravings is not to be taken notice of.'

'Yes, Ladyship.'

Dorinda's eyes were closed. They'd checked on her every day, emptied her pot, put food and water by her bed and left her. Downstairs her name was not mentioned.

Penitence shook her with both hands. 'You've got to wake up. You've got to.' The girl's eyes stayed closed but her face was sulky. She's ashamed. The bitch doesn't know how to face me. She wanted nothing so much as to hit the girl till her teeth rattled. Instead, she said: 'Her Ladyship's got it. She's asking for you.'

For a moment the appeal seemed to fail, then Dorinda's lips blew a petulant sigh. 'All bloody right,' she said.

Phoebe began to cough. Her voice bubbled like somebody's under water, but she wouldn't stop talking. 'Haven't seen him since he were born, but I sent three shilling every week.' She turned towards Penitence. The skin of her face shone wet and grey, like clay. 'He's being brought up a gent.' She looked back to Dorinda. 'Turnstile Alley, Cheapside,' she said urgently. Her body arched and she cried out. 'Who'll look out for him now?'

'I will, Pheeb,' said Dorinda. 'Hold on, girl.'

'I'm trying.'

If she hadn't been so tired, Penitence would have been appalled at her own naivety; it had never occurred to her that any of the girls might have had a baby.

'Has Sabby gone?'

'No,' lied Dorinda. 'She's holding on. And there's Her Ladyship, look. And Job. We'll beat it yet.'

Phoebe turned desperate, blind eyes towards the others. 'I'm trying.'

There was a moan from Her Ladyship's bed. Dorinda went to her. Penitence sat on as Phoebe's hand ground the bones of her own. She bent her head down to listen to Phoebe's whisper: 'Sabby's gone, ain't she?'

'Yes. A little while ago.' She'd died almost gratefully, as gratefully as she'd received the infection once she knew Phoebe had it.

Phoebe nodded. 'Ask 'em to put us in together.' There was another burst of agony: 'I know it was sin, Prinks, but He won't punish us, will He? He'll forgive us now, won't He?'

How could He punish this girl any more than He had? Like Dorinda, she lied. 'He's the G-God of love, Pheeb.'

Half an hour later a long moan of breath came out of Phoebe's throat. Gently, Penitence pulled down the lids. 'She's gone,' she said, crying.

'What you sorry for?' Dorinda's voice shook. 'She weren't your friend.'

'Be quiet. B-be quiet. She was nice to me.' Her own voice shook with hysteria, shocking her and Dorinda both. A groaned remonstrance came from Her Ladyship.

Penitence got up and went to the kitchen to draw water for washing the body. Shaking, she began winding, watching the empty bucket go down. A loved soul had just departed and they quarrelled like petulant children. There was no time, that was the trouble. They were too tired to assimilate what was happening or how deeply it affected them. They skated from one death to another with not enough pause to accord them the dignity of grief. They fumbled through perpetual darkness. They were thin. They'd spent the last of Her Ladyship's guineas on eggs and wine for their patients and ate scraps themselves.

Let me keep patience with her. She's new to seeing them die. Phoebe was the last of her sisterhood. And she's a help.

But she was a help only so long as Penitence confined her nursing to Job and the others and left the care of Her Ladyship to Dorinda.

'She's my aunt.' The words echoed back at her from the well, bringing her up short with their peevishness. What was happening? She had become numb to everything but irritability.

Penitence fetched two more sheets for Sabina and Phoebe, checked on Job, who was sleeping, and came back to sit opposite Dorinda on the other side of the comatose body. They quarrelled across it in hisses.

'Sew Pheeb and Sabina in the same sheet.'

'No. They'd tumble about.' There'd be little enough dignity as it was; the death-rate among bearers had left the job to the mercy of men who enjoyed it. They collected at night, like ghouls, and it was whispered that there were terrible practices at the burial pits.

'They got to go together.' The candlelight threw shadows wickedly upwards on to Dorinda's face. 'They were lovers.'

She didn't know what it meant at first. Her mind grasped a concept it hadn't known existed and found it had lost the ability to feel shock. Tears came into her eyes. 'They won't be p-parted in Heaven.' Do I believe that?

She sewed them separately. The effort of carrying them to the door left her and Dorinda gasping. They helped Job on to the pot, gave him a sip of water and settled him down again. They sponged Her Ladyship's hot, loose skin and smoothed back the grey-rooted gold hair. Sometimes she moaned. The suffocating night went on and on.

Somewhere there were the full hedges of August, banks of cow parsley, somewhere ferns curled in the cracks of wet rocks.

She'd abandoned her black dress which absorbed warmth and wore an old basque of Phoebe's, its lacing open to cool the sweat that trickled between her breasts. Dorinda had tried wearing nothing at all, but Her Ladyship had managed to say 'Not nice', so she'd put her shift back on. She sat collapsed in a chair on the other side of Her Ladyship, her knees wide apart, her face shining with sweat, asleep.

Penitence listened to her breathing, to Her Ladyship's, to her own. She became alert to a pain in her chest. Here it is. Time and again a cramp rang the alarm and she panicked. Dorinda, she knew, kept the same internal vigil; so far the alarms were merely symptoms of their lowering general health. Soon ...

Her wrist ached with flapping the fan back and forth over Her Ladyship, but she kept on. We're losing her. The woman's endurance was extraordinary. Night after night the fever came back. Night after night, gasping and rocking, she fought it and was alive the next morning. Each breath bubbled, as had Phoebe's. Her eyes looked straight ahead, never beseeching for help; she waged her battle by herself.

Penitence's only hope for her lay in the recovery Job was making, painfully slowly. If they'd had more and better food, she thought, it would be quicker; he was so skeletal and weak that a rheum could snatch him away.

Penitence dozed and heard Dorinda say: 'She's here, Ladyship.'

The brothel-keeper's eyes were staring in her direction. 'Look after the girls. The papers is under the bed. I'm sorry.'

It was unbearable from a woman who'd apologized for nothing. 'P-please d-don't. You t-took me in.'

The face was settling, but at this it frowned. Understanding left, then came back. 'Your daddy stuttered.'

It was the first human link she'd felt with the worthy, indistinct figure of Ralph Hurd, the Roundhead who had died storming Papists at the Basing House siege in the Civil War. Except as an example of saintliness, he'd rarely been mentioned by her mother and grandparents. And Her Ladyship had known him.

'Tell me, p-please.'

An extraordinary relaxation came over Her Ladyship's clenched face, as if the stifling air had assumed the scent of hay. 'You've got his eyes,' she said. 'He would've married me.'

And there it all was, the old, old explanation, a man who'd chosen the wrong sister and left this one. Had he regretted it? Was her mother's bitterness because her husband had loved Margaret Hughes first? Tell me.

Gentleness became fixed on the thin mouth, the eyes stared.

Come back. But her hand automatically went out to close the lids.

Dorinda knocked it away. 'She ain't.'

'Don't I know? You've g-got to do it now.' Come back. Decorum was going with Her Ladyship. Disorder would take over the world. Come back. I'm not safe without you.

She tried to keep her aunt with her by obeying her rules. She went upstairs to get another sheet, and found there were none left in the press. Frantically she ran to the kitchen. The drying rack was empty. She began to sob. She ran back into the salon. 'There's no sheet. We'll have to wrap her in the one she's lying on.' It was the most terrible thing in the world.

Dorinda had closed Her Ladyship's eyes. She said dully: 'She ain't going dirty. She's going in my prunella cloak.'

She was on the water in the light birch-bark canoe Matoonas had built for her. It was just before dawn and the ducks hadn't come in yet. Over the other side of the river, pelicans floated asleep with their heads and beaks tucked back, like tiny, humped, white islands. Through a prickle of rushes she was watching the river turn from black to steel-grey. The air hadn't yet picked up scents from the land; it smelled of water, an immensity of clean, cold water . ..

'Stop it.' Dorinda was pinioning her arms. 'Stop it now.'

'I c-can't.'

'I know, but you've got to. You taught me that. She'd want you to.' Dorinda's sleeve gently wiped Penitence's nose and chin. 'Sit down a bit. I'll sew her.' Penitence sat.

'Ready now.'

She managed to stand up on legs that shook. Together, grunting, they carried the body over to where Phoebe's and Sabina's lay by the front door and Penitence said the words she had said over Fanny. From outside came the sounds of hooves and the heavy creak of the cart. 'Bring out your dead.'

The lock was being turned. Involuntarily, they moved forward to stand in the moonlight and look up at a sky that had stars in it.

'Get out 'a way.' Two bearers pushed past. They didn't bother with grappling hooks any more. A smell of sickness emanated from the sacking they wore over their heads and shoulders. Outside on the cart, the driver was standing on a pile of corpses. The lantern hanging on his whip-post lit the absorption on his face as he pressed down with his boot.

Each man took a foot end of the first two winding sheets. The white roll that was Phoebe was left crooked against the cart-wheel while the men swung Sabina to get the impetus to throw her up on the piled cart.

Harry Burford, the night-watchman, was chatting to the driver. They were coming back for Her Ladyship. Dorinda's rough stitching came apart as the body bumped over the threshold and her hair trailed across the cobbles.

Penitence ran forward, pushing the hair back, trying to hold the sheet together. One of the men kicked her out of the way.

'Let her alone, you bastards, you bastards.' Dorinda was sobbing and fighting. That's her mother.'

The driver on the cart grinned at the two women and picked up the body of a child by its leg. 'Faggots, five for sixpence,' he said.

The bearers threw Her Ladyship into the cart. One of them came back to the doorway. 'How's about rattling my ballocks afore I go?'

That's enough.' Harry extended his halberd in front of the man and pushed him back. They heard the bearer say: 'They're whores, ain't they?' before the door closed.

It took concentration to go upstairs. She kept mounting one rise and forgetting how to step on to the next so that she stood bewildered before gathering enough wit to do it. There was a band of iron round her chest.

She'd reached the end of the clerestory and was considering the flight up to the attic when somebody called from its top. 'Boots?'

She thought for a long while. 'What?'

There was a moment's silence, then an outburst. 'Where the hell have you been? MacGregor said there were three bodies ...' She stood where she was and he came downstairs, still put out. He had a lantern. 'It seems yours wasn't one of them.'

After a moment she said: 'What?'

He lifted the lantern to look at her face. 'Damn it.' She felt his hand press against her forehead, then he was helping her up the stairs. 'How did you get into this state?' At the top he lifted her up, slung her over his shoulder and carried her and the lantern into the attic. He stooped and slid her on to her bed. She felt the warmth of the lantern on her skin as he lowered it to examine her. She heard an exhalation of relief. 'But you've got to do better than this. Where's that bloody apothecary? Stay here.'

The injunction was needless; she couldn't do anything else. Time, people, ministrations came and went.

The house was the Cock and Pie but at the same time bigger, cavernous, its steps and corridors transformed here and there into uneven galleries of rock. Its darkness was total, though she could see through it. High up in the galleries, a cat was mewing. Men with guns were moving through the house in order to shoot it because it had the Plague; they were out of her sight, somewhere ahead of her, but the malevolence they radiated was so tangible she could track their progress by it.

They would shoot the cat thinking it was just an animal. Exactly who it was she couldn't be sure; someone enormously important to her, vulnerable, in need. She felt fear and love as she had never felt before; almost annihilated with terror, but loving the cat so desperately, she must get to it before they did. It impelled her through the silent house. She kept taking wrong turnings and ending up in empty caves while the creeping men closed in on the mewing. She screamed soundlessly as she ran. Her throat was raw, her breathing painful, but the only compulsion was to get to the cat.

During rises to consciousness she found she was being nagged: 'Do you hear me? I've worked hard on you, you miserable item of humanity. Until I came along you crawled in mud like the base clay you are. I took you up. I transmuted you into gold. For one moment I heard the authentic voice of Beatrice come out of the mouth of a stammering, tuppenny-halfpenny whore. One moment. My achievement out of my Gethsemane. Are you listening to me?'

She wasn't sure. The aggrieved argument held flaws she was too tired to put her finger on; she allowed it to become a lullaby, the only one she'd ever known, and slept to it.

The dream recurred. 'Never knew you had a beau, Prinks.' The voice was rallying but flat, as if its owner talked for the sake of talking and expected no answer. It came into the caverns in the form of light.

Reluctantly she lifted the weight of her eyelids and saw Dorinda's face. 'Who's this Benedick then, you dark horse you?'

'Cat,' said Penitence. She'd left it behind, so valuable, so hurt. Tears oozed out of her eyes and Dorinda dabbed them away. 'Cat, was it? Thought you'd got a secret beau.'

Apothecary Boghurst diagnosed pleurisy and recommended honeyed electuary, seethed red meat, eggs and rest.

It was from Dorinda she received these things, Dorinda who nursed her, washed her, potted her, spooned food into her mouth. Sometimes Job, very gaunt, sat by her bed through the hot nights, but most often it was Dorinda, encouraging her with good news. 'Ma Hicks's beat it, like Job. Henry and MacGregor and the rope-walker's got her through. Henry's going to win the war by sending her against the Dutch. Mistress Palmer still ain't got it. There's two dolly-mops left alive over Hubbard's. The parish Bill's down this week. And Sam and Molly Bryskett's third youngest's still going strong. An' we got a plan.'

'What plan?' She asked out of gratitude; she wasn't very interested.

During her illness, it appeared, matters had got both worse and better. In St Giles the mortality rate was slowing, though London as a whole was suffering a thousand Plague deaths a day. Services were breaking down; parish relief deliveries were intermittent; most serious of all, the water cart only came every four or five days.

Faced with thirst and starvation, the survivors of Dog Yard had organized. There had been rooftop meetings.

'See that?'

'That' was a ladder leading up to an unsuspected skylight in the attic-tiles above the beams. 'You get on to Mistress Crawford's, over a plank on to the Ship, then more planks round to the flat roof of the Stables. That ballocking Dogberry said it was agin promulgation to have gatherings, but 'Pothe- cary said as we was all shut up it didn't make no difference.'

The Yard was pooling rations. Mistress Palmer cooked stews in one of her iron wash-tubs. The pawnbroker's widow baked communal, though kosher, bread. The two remaining Tippin boys risked prison, this time in a noble cause, by making rooftop forays out of the Rookery to the countryside where they acquired chickens and any other edibles left unguarded for the Dog Yard pot.

Obediently, without enthusiasm, Penitence swallowed the proffered spoonful of stew. 'B-beef too?'

Dorinda looked shamefaced: 'Dogberry got that. He's kin to butchers.'

Wearily she remembered that a charitable Dogberry was a contradiction in terms. 'What with?' Her Ladyship's two guineas had long gone.

Dorinda worked herself up into aggression: 'Out your bag, acourse. You been hiding a fortune in there could've bought us Whitehall with some left over.' Seeing Penitence's incomprehension, she said: 'Funk. Fume. You know what it fetches? He's a fumer our Dogberry, do anything for a pipeful, and you got a mass on it.'

The tobacco the Indians had given her. She'd forgotten it. If she'd realized its value before she could have afforded better food for Her Ladyship and the others. Tears dripped down her face. Dorinda wiped them away. 'Wouldn't've made no difference,' she said. 'Get to sleep.'

By day her attic became a gathering place and thoroughfare. Unable to bear the salon, Job and Dorinda used it as a sitting- room and, since the Cock and Pie's well was supplying water to most of the Yard, the actor and his surviving male neighbours from Mistress Hicks's regularly crossed the plank that now served as a bridge over the alley to help wind up buckets and carry them via the ladder to those in need.

Then there was the Plan. Dorinda was full of it. Its aim was to save the Brysketts' last living child from further threat of the Plague. 'Sam Bryskett — Gawd, you ought to see him. Prinks, it's pitiful — he asked for help and it was our Henry came up with it.' The Cock and Pie was to produce a version of Much Ado About Nothing, on its balcony.

Originally, the idea had been to perform extracts, just the Beatrice and Benedick scenes, with the actor narrating the rest of the plot. Dorinda, however, had seen her chance. 'I'm going to act and all.' She had persuaded the actor to include both her and Job in the cast; it meant considerable complication, not least of which was that, due to their illiteracy, the two of them had to be taught their lines by word of mouth. On the other hand, as Dorinda pointed out, it would lengthen the duration of the play and thereby give the Plan a better chance.

Across the alley, the actor was now writing, rewriting and swearing as he turned a comedy intended for a Dramatis personae of eighteen, to say nothing of messengers, watch, attendants, etc., into a play for four, while in Penitence's attic MacGregor, the erstwhile Scottish piper, who could read, spent much of the day repeating Shakespeare's lines so that Dorinda and Job could learn them by heart.

The only one who had no response to the general animation was Penitence. She lay incuriously watching the comings and goings, finding the constant company tiring, too feeble even to experience embarrassment at this most public of convalescences, unsure that it was convalescence. The emotions from the dream, emotions she'd never felt in her waking life, oppressed her. She couldn't free herself of them. The thought of what waited for her in Her Ladyship's room flattened her on to her bed like a stone slab.

So, on an afternoon when nobody was around, she went and faced it.

There was a lining of dust in the frills of the satin valance of Her Ladyship's large bed. As Penitence's hand ran tentatively over the rough floorboards, it encountered furred rolls of more dust, then a knot-hole. With an effort, she pulled up a square section of board, groped in the cavity underneath and retrieved a box. She squatted back on her heels with it on her lap.

It was not the box she had fetched from Lawyer Patterson. It was small, with an arched lid striped by two brass bands. It was the twin of one her grandfather had made for her when she was ten years old, and which was now ashes blowing in the breeze from a Massachusetts river; perhaps it was from the same piece of cherrywood. Perhaps he had made it for his daughter, Margaret, when she, too, was ten years old. She had pokerworked her initials into the lid - M.H. - just as Penitence had.

She was shaken by sudden agony for that unknowing child Margaret Hughes and what had become of her. Still kneeling, she lifted the box on to the bed and opened it. Inside were scrolled papers tied with ribbon.

The first was a deed naming Margaret Hughes of St Giles as purchaser of 'the property called the Cock and Pie, heretofore known as Appleyard House'. It was dated 14 April 1651 and the vendor was a John Appleyard. The price was £186 16s.

The wages of sin must have been high, thought Penitence, for Her Ladyship to have been able to afford a sum like that.

The next roll showed that they hadn't been. It was a deed of mortgage, making the Cock and Pie security for the sum of £185 0s 0d. The interest to be paid on said sum was 45 per cent per annum.

Penitence felt her first reaction in days. She yelped. 'Forty- five per cent?' Her grandfather had only been charged 20 per cent when he'd borrowed for one of his trading ventures, and he'd grumbled enough about that.

Margaret Hughes had signed with a cross, and so had a gentleman called William Calf, described as 'Agent', though agent for whom was not set down. The witnesses were a doctor of divinity and a canon, presumably two of Her Ladyship's clients.

The parchment of the second scroll was less yellowed and its ink fresher than the first. It was the last will and testament of Margaret Hughes. Apart from some small personal items to Job, Kinyans and the girls, it bequeathed all her property and possessions 'to my daughter, Penitence Hoy, yclept Penitence Hurd, recently come from New England'.

She had not needed the proof; at the moment when Her Ladyship's body had been dragged to the burial cart and Dorinda had shouted, a hundred flakes of memory, whispers, looks, hurts, had drawn together into a core of certainty.

Nevertheless, to see the words written was shocking, an official command to remake herself. She rested her head on her mother's coverlet while the person she had thought herself to be disassembled.

Hoy?

Is that all you will tell me? She scrabbled in the nearly empty box and brought out a thin, flat package wrapped in silk. It was a letter. The superscription on its stained outside read: 'Mistress Margaret Hughes, to be found at the George Inn, Taunton'.

Penitence unfolded it carefully. It was coming apart along the heavier creases. It was dated Oxford, April 1646.

Mistress, I must report to you the doleful news that Capt. James Hoy is dead of wounds gained in a skirmish. It is a grief to me to lose an officer as valiant in the field as he was merry in company. At the last he begged me write to you of his affection and send these enclosed pieces and recommend you to the kindness of his people. Would I could do more for the memory of a faithful friend but I and my brother are bid by Parliament to quit England and take ship for Calais.

God keep you, mistress. Your servant, Rupert.

She had to read it twice to decipher the hasty scrawl and three times to absorb its significance.

Rupert? Only royalty signed with a Christian name. Prince Rupert of the Rhine and his brother, Maurice, had been banished by Cromwell at the end of the Civil War.Remorselessly, her mind pursued the logic while the person she had always assumed herself to be unravelled further.

Capt. James Hoy. My father.

The exemplary Ralph Hurd, that martyred saint of the Puritan revolution, faded into smoke and in his place stood a stuttering blue-eyed man who turned her into as much of a stranger as himself.

He had fought on the wrong side. She was not Penitence Hurd, sprig of solid Puritan stock, she was a royalist's bastard. If she was now eighteen years old — if that was not a lie, like everything else she had been told about herself - he had impregnated her mother just in time to go and get himself killed in a last 'skirmish' against Cromwell's forces.

At that moment it was indignation she felt. You stupid, Papist . . . Bartholomew. Wrong side, wrong loyalty, wrong death, wrong time. A most perfect disordering of everyone's life, her mother's, hers, that of the woman who had passed herself off as a mother, his own most of all, a microcosm of upheaval in the upheaval going on around them.

Had Margaret Hughes been a harlot then? But even royalist captains did not make death-bed professions of love for prostitutes, nor recommend them to their families. Perhaps he felt guilt. Perhaps it had been rape. The expression on Her Ladyship's face as she'd died remembering Captain Hoy did not support that premise and Penitence was forced to abandon it.

Still she held on to her indignation for fear that she would be formless without it. Seduction, then; the blandishments of a be-plumed Cavalier from the squirearchy overcoming the scruples of an innocent country Puritan.

However it had happened, if poor, pregnant Margaret Hughes had thrown herself on the charity of the Hoys, she had been rebuffed. Penitence's lips thinned as jeering landed gentry in her mind directed the pleading young woman from their magnificent door.

She was on stronger ground of interpretation when it came to the reaction of her own family. How her grandmother would have shrunk back from the sullied flesh of her flesh, how that hard little mind would have rejected the path of compassion for the road of outraged righteousness. Margaret Hughes had been ostracized.

It must have been around this time, not earlier, that her grandparents had joined the ranks of other Puritan saints in the New Jerusalem of the Americas, leaving the shamed daughter behind, taking her bastard and the virtuous daughter with them. Did they wrench the baby from Margaret Hughes's sinful arms? Or had she, knowing she was to be abandoned and could not support it, begged her sister to bring it up as her own?

And what of the sister? Warily, Penitence's mind explored the loveless parenting she had received from the woman she now knew to have been her aunt, and found it less painful in understanding it better.

Unless Ralph Hurd had been a respectable fiction, his poor widow had had foisted on her, to bring up as her own, a child who had not only been conceived in sin, but fathered by one of her husband's enemies — for all she knew, the man who fired the shot that killed him. It was not a recipe for happy motherhood.

As for the real mother, left in England by her nearest and dearest to suffer the wages of sin ... there would have been no wages but sin's.

Penitence studied the dates on the documents. James Hoy had died in April '46, her birthday was four months later. Five years after that Margaret Hughes had bought the Cock and Pie and begun her career as Her Ladyship.

Knowing what she knew now, Penitence could imagine the poverty of those five years, the struggle to stay respectable, the inexorable sinking below the waves of corruption, the bleaching out of all virtues except that of survival. You had no Her Ladyship to offer you a refuge.

Penitence raised her head and her eyes encountered the black shapes of the manacles, chains and whips that hung on Her Ladyship's pink bedroom wall. Couldn't you have stayed a victim? Did you have to survive so well?

She rewrapped the letter in its silk, retied the ribbons round the scrolls. The reconstructions and rehabilitations she must make to her own and others' past would take time. Oddly, her overriding emotion was still indignation, a child's anger at adult secrecy. How devious they had all been. She had been deterred from loving her mother'aunt and grandparents as she would have liked, but she had respected them for their ideals of plain-dealing and truth. It was they who had taught her to despise deception. She'd trusted them to be who they said they were.

They lined before her now in masks. Why didn't they tell me?

Dorinda was standing at the door, watching. Penitence turned on her: 'How d-did you know?'

Dorinda shrugged. 'Plain as Paddy's pig, it was.'

'Not to me. Why d-didn't she tell me?'

'Oh, Prinks.' Dorinda spoke with tired exasperation. 'What you expect? Your goggles stared at all of us like we was stale herring and you was still swimming. Was she going to look into goggles like that and say "Welcome home and I'm your ma"? Acourse she ballocking wasn't.'

It was a simplistic explanation and probably true, but Penitence had also seen in Her Ladyship a woman who had been leached of the ability to feel anything very much, not sorrow, nor happiness, not good, not evil, and certainly not mother-love. Whatever agony she had gone through when her baby had been taken away, it had been lived with and layered over too long. There had been discomfort when Penitence turned up on her doorstep, a memory that there had been pain, not the pain itself. I was a nuisance.

Her Ladyship had done her duty, given her child her protection, found it proper to pass on the Cock and Pie to her but, if there had been any sensation in the numbness in which she existed, it had brought with it resentment that she should feel anything at all. The affection between them, such as it was, was makeshift, not the love of mother and daughter. Penitence doubted if, on Her Ladyship's side, it was greater than for Dorinda and her other girls.

The only love that had warmed her daughter's life had come from a wizened Indian called Awashonks, the truest mother of them all.

She was so tired. She put the papers back in the box and shut its lid. 'She's left me the Cock and Pie,' she said.

Dorinda's face sharpened with the old jealousy. 'I was a better daughter to her than you ever was.'

Through mental and physical exhaustion, Penitence wrong- footed her. 'I know you were.'

She suffered a relapse, really a form of lethargy in which she reluctantly transferred her identity from respectable child of respectable parents to the bastard of a royalist and a whore- mistress - moreover one who found herself the owner of a brothel.

It was a painful transition for one with a Puritan upbringing, though it was that same upbringing which brought her through it eventually with belief in her individual worth intact. The Church which had formed her might lean heavily towards group responsibility, but its glory lay in the value it put on personal salvation, and it was that which helped her now.

Irritatingly, so did the exchange of fathers. Devout Ralph Hurd, so long presiding over her from his position among the Lord's host, had been credited with many virtues, but merriment wasn't one of them. Now suddenly, perched up on his branch of her family tree, was a man who had been 'merry' in company. Probably drunk, she scolded him. What right had thee to be merry, seducer? But as she frowned at him, he gave her a wink, one stammerer to another, and she very nearly winked back.

The apothecary pronounced her better.

'P-please inform P-Peter Simkin I can help him again with the Mortality B-Bill,' she requested, and found she was weaker than she'd thought when he told her the clerk had died many days before.

'B-but it's over now, isn't it?' she asked through tears. The vibrations of hope rising from Dog Yard had matched her own.

The apothecary looked at her out of his expressionless eyes. 'Sera nimis vita est crastina: vive hodie,' he said. She didn't know what it meant, but it frightened her.

Whatever it was, he was right. The next evening Mistress Palmer called from her balcony to the Watch that there'd been no movement all day from within Mistress Fairley's room. 'And the door's locked.'

It was William Burrows on duty. He called his fellow- watchmen from the Cut, they wound mufflers over their mouths and entered the Buildings. The Yard heard them break down the door, listened to silence, and waited.

Mistress Fairley and both her babies had taken the Plague, but it was only Mistress Fairley had died of it; before doing so, she had smothered each of the children so that they should not be left to die without her.

That night, in pursuance of the plan to save Kitty Bryskett, the only child still alive in Dog Yard, the Cock and Pie went into rehearsal.