The Vizard Mask Read Online Free PDF

shuttered windows, one to her left and another in the wall opposite, suggested they had once been sack hoists. There was a faint, comforting smell of grain, but mainly the place smelled of age. Even the cobwebs were old and hung in flimsy black strings from the rafters, as if the spiders who'd spun them had died too dispirited to breed a new generation.
    Behind her, Dorinda's voice said: 'And a dummy like you ain't welcome.' The door closed and her footsteps retreated, taking the light with them.
    Penitence collapsed on to a packing case. Drearily, she repeated the Puritan formula for adversity. 'Count thy blessings, Pen.' But where were they? Her aunt was dead. She had come three thousand miles to save from a fate worse than death a woman who was dead already. She felt ill. She was facing knowledge of the grossest self-deception. Her aunt hadn't had need of her, it was she who had needed, and needed badly, her aunt.
    Aunt Margaret. Underneath all the opprobrium her mother and grandparents had heaped on the name, it had carried a kindness which had not been present in her mother, nor her grandparents. There had been no father to provide it; he had died fighting for Cromwell before she was born, but since he, too, had been a Hurd — her mother had married a cousin — and also a strong Puritan, it was doubtful if he would have instilled warmth into that enclosed family even if he had lived.
    She knew now that in her need for parental affection she had, unconsciously, transferred it to the fancied figure of the unknown aunt. For all her fault, and through a mysterious proxy of siblings, Aunt Margaret would possess the maternal- ism that was lacking in her sister. As an outcast through frailty, she would have fellow-feeling for the girl who was outcast through handicap. Disguising her need as beneficence, Penitence had come three thousand miles to find love, and the aunt who should have given it had died without so much as a by-your-leave.
    The door opened and a weary-looking girl came in backwards, dragging a plank bed heaped with bedding. She pulled it into the centre of the room and bad-temperedly began making it up. 'Don't help, will you?'
    Penitence didn't; she was barely aware the girl was there, and when she'd gone, she sat on. What was she going to do? Suddenly she stood up, staggered to the bed, still clutching her satchel, fell down on it and went to sleep.
     
    Chapter 2
     
    She was in Massachusetts. In the minister's house again, in Springfield, still grieving for the death of her mother and grandparents. The Reverend Block was kneeling in prayer beside the bed, preparatory to getting into it.
    She fought him off. Screaming. She was running away.
    How could he? Every Sabbath she could remember, his voice had filled the meeting-house under the oak tree with fulminations against sin. The community had applauded his Christianity in taking her in when her grandparents' trading post had burned with her grandparents and mother in it.
    Was it her? Had her gratitude been misconstrued? Had she, without knowing it, led him on? She was stuttering to Goody Fairchild and Goody Fairchild was saying she had led him on. The Reverend Block was a good man, one of the saints. Goody Fairchild's anger was voicing what would be the community's opinion. To believe that its minister was prey to the sins of the flesh would rend its structure; better to disbelieve Penitence of the cursed tongue, Penitence the misfit.
    Running away again, she was following a trail that had been worn twenty inches below the forest floor by generations of moccasined feet. It led her to the familiar lodge filled with wood- and tobacco-smoke, to an old woman smelling of bear grease. As always, her tongue had no trouble with the singsong of the Algonquin language. As always, Awashonks's eyes, like boot-buttons sewn into creased leather, accepted everything while condemning nothing. They hadn't condemned the Reverend Block even.
    'You Owanus,' Awashonks was taking