‘High-spirited,’ said Aphra, automatically. ‘But think, should his father die he will come and claim you, and little Benedick will be heir to a fortune.’
‘Should his wife die, and his legitimate children die, and if I don’t spit in his eye. Look at me, Aphra, I want you to p-p-promise that you will never, ever, repeat what I told you tonight.’
Aphra sobered. ‘Has it been so terrible?’
‘Yes, it has. Benedick and I will manage without him.’
‘But…’
‘If, if we get the Swaveley bill printed before the poor man’s buried.’
‘As good as done,’ said Aphra. ‘It only remains to be written.’
‘Then write it.’
Left alone, Penitence stayed at her window. The warmth of the June night managed to overlay the staleness of Press Yard with the scent of lilac. Aphra had taken Henry King away and replaced him with an unrecognizable person from a world for which Penitence had only contempt. The funny, gangling, attractive man had gone, had never existed. He’d worn a mask and been somebody else underneath it. Well and good. All the easier to dismiss him.
She could almost smile at the romance Aphra had made out of their pitiful affair. If Aphra Behn had charge of the world it would be more entertaining than the squalid feculence it was. Tomorrow was the night George came for his rent. A week after that a young man would be lain on the cobbles below and crushed to death.
And not a Leander to save either of us. Whoever he was.
* * *
There hadn’t been a pressing at Newgate since the execution of a Major Strangeways for the murder of his brother-in-law eleven years previously, so the prison went en fête for Swaveley’s. All those with rooms overlooking Press Yard were turned out of them for the day to accommodate the Quality, who were paying high prices for a good view. A grandstand was erected in the Yard itself for judges, aldermen and other dignitaries. It was rumoured the king might attend, or at least send one of his mistresses.
Quakers and hard-core criminals kept in the limbos were transferred to a deeper dungeon where their cries would not disturb the occasion.
There was even an attempt to clean Newgate in the unlikely event that the authorities might wish to inspect it, but that petered out after the Yard had been scrubbed.
‘I wonder they don’t put up bunting,’ said Engraver Clarins, bitter at having to vacate his room on the men’s side.
Aphra’s complaints at having to vacate her room included several references to the patriotism of the late Mr Behn and her own services to the king and secured her, Penitence, Mrs and Master Johnson a place in one of the attics high under the roof of the Keeper’s own apartments, the servants whose room it was having been impressed to wait on visitors for the day.
Aphra had attended the early morning service to which Swaveley was dragged for his last communion. ‘Poor boy, he looks so pale and that poxy Ordinary continually dunning him to repent. As they took him out I managed to tell him where we’d be. One said we’d wave.’
‘That should keep his spirits up,’ said Penitence. There had to be executions – her grandfather had taken her to a few in Springfield in order to impress on her the fate which awaited sinners – but this air of holiday was getting on her nerves. The colours of the scarlet-robed judges, the gold chains of the aldermen, servants’ liveries, the ladies’ hats made the stand into a tapestry depicting knights and ladies watching a tourney.
On a trestle gallery the small band of musicians had exhausted all the sacred music it knew and fallen back on the profane played slow.
She noticed that everyone was carrying one of the Ordinary’s bills. ‘Complimentary copies,’ said Aphra. ‘That should cost the swine.’
Their own had been on sale all over London for two days and, such was the interest, the Tippins were reporting a good response. At this moment Dorinda, MacGregor and other Dog Yarders were selling them to the large crowd at the prison gates. They were ready to run another reprint which would include Swaveley’s last exclamations. The Ordinary hadn’t bothered to wait to see what they were, and his carried Swaveley’s supposed, suitably penitent, final words.
Swaveley had done them proud, but Aphra had done them prouder, drawing a nice line between the racy and the improving. ‘You can head others off following my example,’ Swaveley had told her, and then smirked, ‘always supposing they could.’ She had put his seduction of his employer’s wife while he was yet an apprentice into the first paragraph. For his woodcut Clarins had enquired of old turnkeys the procedure followed in a pressing and his picture of a prone man with a heavy weight being placed on his chest gave their bill a graphic drama lacking in the Ordinary’s.
Voices, two of which Penitence recognized, carried up to their attic from the Keeper’s apartments below, complaining at the wait.
‘Where is the rogue?’ asked a woman’s voice. ‘He’s damned late.’
‘And him with a pressing engagement,’ answered a male’s. The court rakes had arrived, with female companions, and were employing their wit.
‘Rochester and Sedley,’ said Aphra, ‘and, if I’m not mistaken, the Duke of Buckingham.’
The door to the cells opened. There was silence. Swaveley appeared, naked except for breeches, a turnkey on one side, the executioner in his mask on the other. The Ordinary followed, intoning.
‘He’s so frightened,’ said Penitence. The boy was having to be supported. That’s enough. He’s learned his lesson. Let’s all go home.
‘Whoo hoo.’ Mrs Johnson was leaning out of the window and had to be dragged back by her daughter. ‘Mother!’
The band began playing Blow’s requiem as Swaveley was led to the middle of the Yard and laid down, and the irons on his legs and wrists attached to stakes.
Executioner and turnkey stood back to attention while another turnkey came into the Yard pulling a low trolley containing a large piece of stone. They’ve rehearsed this.
The executioner looked towards the stand, a judge stood up and nodded. There was a drum roll. The three men around the spreadeagled figure stooped and, with an effort, lifted the stone off the trolley and on to Swaveley’s chest.
Air left the boy’s lungs in a whoomph heard all over Press Yard.
The executioner regarded the stone critically, like a bricklayer, then straightened his back. ‘Three hundred pounds,’ he called. The Ordinary was on his knees, hands steepled in prayer.
It’s a stone specially made for this. What was the matter with the mind of man that it could put such care into cruelty?
‘I can’t bear it,’ she said quietly to Aphra, ‘I’m going.’
Aphra took her arm in a surprisingly strong grip. ‘He’s bearing it, and we’re profiting from it,’ she said. ‘We stay.’
She stayed. Master Johnson was bemoaning his lost bet. Below, other wagers were being laid: ‘Three and twenty-five.’ ‘Three and fifty.’
Aphra quoted:
‘At Golgotha, they glut their insatiate eyes
With scenes of blood, and human sacrifice.’
‘Who wrote that?’ asked Penitence.
‘I did. In Surinam. There was a slave there, a negro they’d shipped from Africa. He became our friend. His name was Caesar.’
Penitence stared at her. Aphra was astonishing; the memory of the slave was causing her pain. All artificiality had dropped away. ‘What happened?’
‘They killed him. They took his wife from him. Sold her to another plantation. He set up a revolt with other slaves.’ She shrugged. ‘He was defeated, of course. They tied him to a stake and hacked him to pieces.’
‘Oh.’
‘He was my friend,’ said Aphra.
Yawns issued from the window below where the rakes and their women were becoming bored. ‘He’s just lying there,’ complained a female voice.
‘True, he’s very flat.’
Penitence had hoped for Swaveley that the stone would be dropped on him, killing him instantly; instead he was slowly being asphy
xiated as it crushed his lungs. Head arched back, his mouth opened and shut like a fish’s to snatch shallow, panting breaths.
‘Tell them to hasten the matter, my lord, I beg you,’ said a voice, whether from humanity or impatience.
Some signal passed from the Keeper’s window to one of the judges on the stand, who nodded, and raised a hand to the executioner. The trolley was taken to fetch two smaller stones. ‘Three hundred and twenty-five pounds,’ announced the executioner.
Swaveley’s mouth opened wider. The judge signalled again.
‘Three hundred and fifty.’
Stop it. Get it over with. Stop it.
Swaveley’s left hand struggled against its manacle. He was trying to speak. The Ordinary was alarmed and shaking his head, but the executioner bent down to Swaveley’s mouth and looked to the judge. ‘He wants to plead guilty, my lord.’
The Ordinary was protesting; his Awful Warning was being spoiled. But the judge – after a glance at the Keeper’s window – signalled that the stones be lifted. Swaveley’s feet trailed on the ground as he was dragged away to face trial and hanging.
On their way down the backstairs, the party from the attic encountered Sir Charles Sedley. ‘Mistress Aphra, Mistress Penitence,’ he said, ‘one was hoping the occasion would ferret you out. We are downcast by its dullness and beg you to enliven us. Your friends too.’ He bowed to Mrs Johnson.
Penitence was surprised he had remembered their names, but was in no mood to make sport for the likes of him. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, and hurried on, hearing Aphra make introductions.
Gaining her room, she shut the door. She wanted quiet.
An hour later there was a tap on the door. ‘Beg your indulgence, madam,’ said Sir Charles Sedley.
Since Penitence didn’t ask him to sit down, he lounged against the dirty wall, the sun from the window shimmering on his silk coat and the gloss of his wig, intensifying the perfume he was wearing, glancing off his rings as he flapped his hands and commented on the heat and went through the procedure of taking snuff. If she hadn’t been sure he had been sent as the result of some bet. Penitence would have thought him unsettled. He unsettled her; she wanted rid of him. ‘What is your b-business, sir?’
‘My b-business, ma’am. My b-business is with your eyes. I wished to assure myself they were as astonishing as I remembered and, behold, they are.’ As Penitence’s lips tightened, he added: ‘Though one has seen kinder over a duelling pistol.’
His own, which watched her carefully, were bloodshot. He wasn’t much older than herself and had excellent baby skin with a bloom on it. It oozed perspiration in tiny bubbles of the fat which would one day overwhelm him.
‘Since that’s settled,’ she said, ‘I wish you good-day.’
‘Cruel charmer, would you banish me so soon?’ He had a slow delivery; words drooped out of his mouth to make everything he said sound like a jeer. ‘I await Rochester and Buckingham who are much taken with Mistress Behn. At this moment the three of them discuss the art of writing and the beginning of her play. It seems we have another Matchless Orinda on our hands.’
Refusing him the satisfaction, Penitence didn’t ask who the Matchless Orinda was.
‘But you, mistress, are more intriguing than she – of Puritan persuasion, I gather, with leanings towards the stage. One has one’s own connections with the theatre, and it might be that one could assist the latter aspiration.’ His eyelids drooped. ‘Though certainly not the former.’
DAMN Aphra. Must the woman blab everything? ‘I have no aspiration, sir, except to be left alone.’
‘You should, you should. Those eyes could conquer an audience as they have conquered me. But give me a kiss and I shall wing to the errand.’
The only winging he’d do would be back to his friends to tell them he’d seduced the poor slut in the cell. There was too much silk here, an overwhelming plumpness like an eiderdown filling the room; she wanted to claw her way out.
The door opened. ‘I say, Penitence, do you want a woodcut done of the hanging?’ Clarins, lovely, unprepossessing and cloth-coated, had come to discuss important things in plain language.
Sir Charles bowed and withdrew.
The next day, returning from the dining-hall with Aphra, she found her cell full of roses, pots of them, so many she couldn’t reach her bed. ‘My dear, how charming,’ said Aphra, regarding the petalled sea, ‘I knew he was much taken with you.’
Penitence was furious. ‘Do you realize the money these cost could nearly pay off my debt?’
And then she realized. Sir Charles was offering to get her out, had offered, and she’d snubbed him. She’d had no idea. Penitence Hurd, you’ll never make a whore.
She considered it. After all, having put her foot on the ladder of harlotry, she’d be a fool not to climb to its higher rungs. Satin sheets instead of dirty blankets. Mistress to a rich young man about court rather than the twice-weekly drab of a prison turnkey. She’d acquire connections, enter Benedick into a good school when he was old enough.
Logically, her next move was to send a note to Sedley. It only needed to say ‘Yes’. She couldn’t hate bedding with Sedley more than she loathed those moments in the condemned cell with George. But I can control George.
Illogically, she didn’t do it. For one thing, when it came to the point of asking Aphra for ink, quill and paper, she was overcome with a fit of gasping as if, like Swaveley, she was being asphyxiated by a great weight. For another, she was optimistic about her chances of paying off her debt by herself.
No more flowers arrived either, so that was that.
* * *
The profit to Aphra and Penitence from Swaveley’s Last Exclamations, combined with that from his Positively Last Exclamations, which went on sale at his hanging in August, came to £94 6s 10d, nearly fifty pounds each.
They couldn’t believe it. ‘Is that with all paid?’ asked Aphra.
‘Aye,’ said MacGregor. ‘All paid. We had to rush a reprint of the reprint for Tyburn.’
‘The Tippins reckoned the crowd above six thousand,’ Dorinda told them, ‘and I hope Swaveley was grateful for all we done to get ’em there, though he didn’t look it. All the stuffing gone out of the poor ballocker. The Tippins lifted so much blunt out of the crowd’s pockets as they refused to take wages.’
‘All we need now is more executions,’ said MacGregor.
Penitence winced. ‘We’d better call ourselves the Vulture Press.’
‘That’s a terrible bad name,’ said MacGregor, ‘but as we’re not likely to display it, it’ll do for the now.’
‘What’ll we do with your share, Prinks?’ asked Dorinda.
‘Pay the b-bills. Buy B-Benedick what he needs. Keep some for housekeeping and pay the rest towards the debt. Deposit it with a lawyer called P-Patterson in Leadenhall Street. He was Her Ladyship’s man and he can pay the debtor when we’ve got enough.’ She winked at MacGregor. ‘Another Scotsman, but I trust him.’
The load was lifting. She was going to get out of Newgate. By her own enterprise.
* * *
Newgate’s Ordinary went to the Stationers’ Company to complain about the emergence of the mysterious and illegal press which had taken away his business. The Stationers promised to try to track it down, but in view of the number of unlicensed presses in operation they weren’t sanguine of success.
However, the Vulture Press laid low for a while. There would be no more hangings until the authorities had accumulated enough death sentences to make the spectacle at Tyburn worthwhile.
There was nothing for the two young women to do and Aphra, who had been in prison the longer, began to decline. The staple food given to those who couldn’t afford to pay proved unfit to eat more often than not, and Aphra, always fastidious, was unable to keep it down.
Penitence begged her to draw on the money lodged against their debts, but Aphra refused to eat, literally, into it. ‘One will never get out if one does.’ Penitence began to be frightened that one
would die if one didn’t. She suspected Aphra’s lassitude to be the first stage of Whitt fever which carried off so many in Newgate. ‘You can’t give way now.’
Aphra closed her eyes. ‘Send The Young King to Rochester and Buckingham,’ she murmured. ‘Perhaps they will find it worthy to finish it for me.’
‘You’ll finish it. And what about that slave? Weren’t you going to write his story?’
Tears oozed out of Aphra’s eyes. ‘Ah, poor Caesar, both of us doomed to oblivion.’
‘Damned if you are,’ said Penitence, irritably. She didn’t send the play, but she wrote notes to Buckingham and Rochester informing them of the situation. If Sedley had told her the truth, they might be interested enough in Aphra to save her life. What they pay for blasted ribbon in a day would keep her alive for a month.
That night, in the condemned cell, she asked George to bring in some decent food. She knew enough not to plead for it. ‘I want cheese, good bread, fresh milk and I want it tomorrow,’ she commanded, as she stripped. ‘And some wine.’
‘You lady-ins,’ admired George, ‘Whitt fare not good enough, eh? Tell us what you eat in that mansion of yours.’
What do the rich eat? She could only think of the meals her grandmother had served up in her forest kitchen, and hoped their unfamiliarity would sound sufficiently exotic. ‘Pumpkin pie,’ she said.
‘Oooh. Pumpkin pie.’ He was snuffling at her thighs. ‘Oozing gravy.’
‘Lots of gravy. Wild turkey stuffed with blueberries. Chowder…’
It was gastronomic pornography, and effective. George brimmed earlier than ever. But there was a price. As he left her, he said: ‘Ready yourself for tomorrow night. Good food’s extra.’
* * *
Aphra was too poorly to ask where the provisions came from, but they improved her slightly. Since she wasn’t well enough to leave her bed, Penitence sat and read to her: ‘Me, too, the Pierian sisters have made a singer; I too have songs; ay, and the shepherds dub me poet, but I trust them not. For as yet, methinks, gooselike I cackle amid quiring swans.’
The Vizard Mask Page 28