The Vizard Mask

by The Vizard Mask (retail) (epub)

  ‘Balance,’ he told her, curtly, when she asked why. ‘And you’ll never play Penthesilea if you can’t use a sword.’

  ‘I’ll never play Penthesilea anyway,’ she said, fishing. ‘Nobody here notices me, except you.’

  ‘I’m not bloody surprised,’ he said, ‘the way you lunge. You’re not casting for trout. Now lunge.’ She got nothing out of him. He’d been an actor in the days of Charles I. He was as old as Killigrew, but leaner and without the lust. In a rare confidence, he told her he’d once met Shakespeare’s brother.

  ‘What was he like? What did he say Shakespeare was like?’

  ‘Couldn’t remember much, witless old fart.’

  Like all actors in the Civil War, Hart among them, he’d fought for the king, receiving a wound that had finished his stage career. But the theatre took care of its own. No actor, however old or decrepit, wandered the streets begging his bread. John more than earned his: he was prompter, he copied out parts, hired walkers and stagehands, trained them, ordered the meals, and made sure before he went home that the candle-snuffer had put out every flame in the building – including the stove which warmed the back of the auditorium in winter. Penitence doubted if the theatre would have stayed vertical without him. Since his efforts went unremarked, she also doubted whether the pains he was taking to fit her for the stage would bear fruit.

  She was wrong. After a performance in May of Flora’s Vagaries she came offstage with the other walkers and John put a scrap of paper in her hand: ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I got you to walk like a human being, let’s see if you can talk like one.’

  ‘It’s a part?’

  ‘It’s a line.’

  ‘Oh, John. Thank you.’ She read it. ‘“Pray spare her, Your Majesty.”’ She read the cue. ‘I speak this to… King Lear?’

  ‘It ain’t Shakespeare’s,’ said John bitterly. ‘Some scribbler’s adapted his into a comedy.’ He had no high opinion of authors. ‘Said he was rescuing the spars of Lear. I didn’t know it was shipwrecked.’

  In her excitement, Penitence didn’t care if the author had put in song and dance – actually, he had. That night the Cock and Pie turned critic as Penitence practised in its salon: ‘P-pray spare her, Your Majesty. P-pray spare her, Your Majesty. P-pray spare her, Your Majesty.’

  ‘I’d leave out the praying bit,’ said Dorinda. ‘Just spare her.’

  ‘Why does it begin with a “p”?’ moaned Penitence. ‘Why? Why?’ Benedick, tottering over the floor towards her, fell over and she picked him up. ‘Your mama wanted to earn you some money, yes she did, and she can’t say the first word right, no she can’t.’

  ‘You said all them words lovely that night on the balcony,’ said Mistress Palmer.

  ‘And will again,’ said Aphra. They all looked at her, unused to hearing her stern. ‘You were rescuing the Brysketts’ child that night, Penitence. Next week you will be rescuing your own.’

  Breathe. ‘Pray spare her, Your Majesty,’ said Penitence.

  The Cock and Pie applauded.

  * * *

  For the first two acts of The English King – her line came in the third – Penitence was more aware of the audience than at any time so far; walkers were generally kept at a distance from it at the back of the set. She had, in any case, been too occupied with her own moves and in watching the actors, to concern herself with how they were being received, relying on John’s dictum: ‘If they don’t throw things, it’s a success.’

  Now, because for the space of five words its attention would be on her, she became alive to the creature beyond the chandeliers and footlights.

  Dr Rhodes, the author who had been good enough to rescue Shakespeare and his Lear, had paid Killigrew to put the play on and packed the benches with friends and admirers, most of them new to the theatre. Penitence, peering through the curtain before it went up, saw the pit full of citizens dressed in Sunday best, gaping at the prostitutes in their vizard masks who hoped to be mistaken for young ladies, and the young ladies in their masks giggling with their beaux and hoping they wouldn’t be.

  The musicians behind their spiked rail were tuning up just below the stage. Dorinda strolled the benches, selling her oranges. The lemonade girl had lit the chandelier in her kiosk beside the entrance door and was doing brisk business, though not as brisk as her rival selling hot Burgundian. Servants who were saving seats for their masters were romping and quarrelling. Aphra was in one of the boxes, now such an accepted part of theatre furniture she no longer had to hide.

  A hand pulled Penitence away. ‘Get off,’ said John Downes, wrathfully, ‘that’s unprofessional.’

  ‘It looks a good quiet house.’

  He was gloomy. ‘Don’t wager on it. The court’s back at Whitehall.’

  ‘Do you think the king will come?’

  ‘Not for this hocus. But the young buggers who attend him might. Your friend’s bill could fetch ’em.’ Aphra, with gritted teeth, had written a description of the play that could have dragged in a Puritan.

  Waiting behind the prompt door with her fellow-walkers and Nelly Gwynn, who was playing Cordelia, Penitence practised her breathing and the technique of metamorphosis she had used as a child to escape from the restrictions of home and fly as an eagle upriver to the Indian camp.

  The chatter from the auditorium fell away, the violins and trumpets muted to a hum. She altered herself to her part, thinking herself smaller, a little thing, admiring, adoring the mistress whose sisters treated her so wickedly. It didn’t work as effectively as usual; that she was to speak into that maw out front obtruded itself around the edges. It came to her that, if she was to be an actress at all, part of her would have to be in touch with that space and respond to it.

  Lacy, who was playing the king, finished the prologue.

  ‘Here we go, my cockies, Decus et Dolor,’ said Gwynn and they were on.

  The author’s claque was polite, enjoying Gwynn’s pert performance, and the juggler, and the spirits rising through the traps, and the thunder. Penitence silently emoted for all she was worth.

  It wasn’t until Act II, Scene ii that noise from the pit obtruded itself on her notice. Loud, careless voices were asking where they should sit, demanding that citizens move up, shouting whoo-hoo at Dorinda and the masks. ‘They’re here,’ breathed Mrs Warner, next to Penitence. ‘Damn ’em.’

  It was one of Lacy’s big scenes – bravely he ranted on as protests came up from the musicians’ pit and a heavily powdered face adorned with patches appeared between two footlights, its periwig raised at the front in a pile of curls like a hat. ‘Peep-bo.’ Cheered by his friends, the fop heaved his thin, be-ribboned body on to the apron, arranged himself and took snuff. ‘Can see now.’

  ‘Well, we can’t,’ shouted a stout citizen.

  ‘Then blurt to you, sirrah.’ Wavering, the fop turned to the cast: ‘Continue. Oop, no, wait. Got to get the others up.’ Things went downhill from there. More beautifully clad drunks joined their friend. They dragged King Lear’s throne to the side of the stage and sat on it. They shouted for ‘Nelly, give us a song’, and took against Goneril and Regan. When Becky Marshall, in villainess’s make-up as Goneril, came on, they booed. She was joined by Regan (Anne Marshall), also heavily browed. ‘Oh Gawd,’ said a fop, ‘there’s two of ’em.’

  Gwynn had her bottom pinched, and kicked backwards at the offender without faltering in her line. One of the fops was sick and a fight broke out as a citizen tried to drag him off the stage.

  Heroically, the King’s cast continued to play as if their audience was hanging on every word.

  Her line was coming up. ‘The job, my dear girl,’ said a voice from long ago, ‘is the play.’ Breathe. There were people out there who’d paid for their seats and deserved the best.

  Lear was castigating Cordelia. It was time to save her. She ran forward on cue… a fop put out his foot and tripped her. She slid along on her front to King Lear and ended up with her head on his toes.

  Amid t
he laughter in which even the author’s claque joined, she lifted up her face to Lacy’s glare. ‘Pray save her, Your Majesty,’ she said. It had been a short theatrical career. As the king spumed her entreaty she limped back to her place, resisting the temptation to kill the fop and then herself.

  Understandings were cleared up, Edgar and Cordelia were paired off. King Lear and his daughter, reunited, pirouetted happily forward to face the jeers of the fops and the counter-cheers of the citizens.

  Gwynn, perhaps the only one capable of quietening the house, was sent out to give the epilogue.

  Behind the curtain Lacy’s eyes scanned the assembled walkers and stopped on Penitence. He looked grim. ‘Is she one of yours, John?’

  John Downes came on stage. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I won’t be fallen on. Forfeit her.’

  ‘She’s not on salary, Lacy.’

  ‘No? Well, she is now. Put her down for ten shillings a week. And forfeit her five.’

  * * *

  In June she had a small speaking part in an adaptation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Valentinian, an even smaller one three nights later as another Persian lady in Cambyses. She was a page in The Death of Richard II, and Ursula in yet another Much Ado.

  In the kitchen printing works at the Cock and Pie, while MacGregor set the type – Penitence didn’t do it any longer in case it stained her fingers, confining herself to the guillotine – and Aphra rolled the ink and Dorinda operated the press’s lever and Mistress Palmer sang in toneless song to her washboard in the scullery next door, each tiny role was analysed until it squeaked.

  ‘I detect malice in Ursula. Do you think I should give her malice?’

  ‘You should give her some peace,’ said Dorinda, ‘I’m sick of the cow.’

  ‘She’s only there to get sent on errands, Penitence,’ said Aphra.

  ‘She’s still a person. What do you think, MacGregor?’

  ‘I like her fine. I wonder, now, should we have some italics here?’ Aphra joined him to ponder it. Her handbills were the only work the Vulture Press had. Other unlicensed presses had come in from the provinces to fill the vacuum left by the Plague. And even the handbill business was diminishing as Killigrew cut more and more of his theatre’s costs.

  Penitence slammed the guillotine handle down, and the knife cut a badly angled line into the sheets, sending strips on to the floor where Benedick was playing, tethered by a washing-line because of the well’s proximity. ‘I’m sorry to bore you,’ she said, pettishly, ‘but somebody’s got to tell me if I’m doing it right.’

  There were plenty of people to tell her if she did it wrong. Knipp, the Marshalls and the others were quick with their disapproval if she didn’t cue them exactly right or if she put more into her part than was necessary, thereby distracting from their own. Even the good-tempered Gwynn was forced to reprimand her: ‘Don’t overdo it, ducky. They come to see me, not you.’

  The rest of the time she acted into what seemed a vacuum. She tried to tell herself and the others that her eye was on the £l a week a top actress earned, and to an extent it was, but the spur that goaded her was the frenzy to express something within her which had woken on the balcony of the Cock and Pie when the people on the rooftops had been moved by one impulse – hers.

  That night she had experienced control; she had used magic as a projectile, she had been the gyrating stoat bringing the birds closer. She had tasted power after a lifetime of powerlessness and she wanted, she lusted, to taste it again.

  Then Hart told her she was to play Desdemona. She was so astounded she almost argued him out of it. ‘But she’s the heroine.’ They had just come offstage after the last curtain of The Indian Emperor and Hart’s large painted eyes were tired. ‘Thank you for telling me, dear. Of course she’s the heroine, or she was when I played her in the old days. What you do with her remains to be seen. Now run away and learn the words. We go on in a month.’

  Penitence floated home, babbling. ‘It’s the first time she’s ever been played by an actress. The first time. Othello hasn’t been put on since only men played women’s parts. Hart’s been watching me, he says, and he thinks I can do it.’

  The Cock and Pie was sure of it and MacGregor insisted they have a night out with ale all round at the Ship to spread the news.

  The Ship was the same fine inn it had always been, but much of its atmosphere had gone with its children. Mistress Bryskett was a broken woman and rarely put in an appearance. Her remaining child had never come back; the friends who’d taken her to the country had begged to keep her, and since the little girl was thriving in the good air, she had been allowed to remain. Sam was quieter and sterner, but that night he insisted on treating everybody. ‘Playing the heroine? Make her jolly then eh, Prinks? Need a bit of jolly nowadays.’

  ‘I’ll do my best, Sam.’ Penitence couldn’t bear to mention the word ‘tragedy’ in the presence of the Brysketts, and Sam, who never left his inn, was unlikely ever to find out that Othello lacked jollity. She doubted if any of the Rookery would; the theatre may have had common appeal in Shakespeare’s day but now it was almost exclusively the resort of the upper class.

  She reckoned without Dogberry. The ex-watchman had made the Ship his local, though he now had a thriving butchery business in Drury Lane. He put a proprietorial arm round her waist and hoisted her on to a table: ‘We’re drinking tonight to my progeny,’ he announced, ‘as I taught everything I know to. The hours I spent in the alley listening to this girl go through her lines was… hours. The toast is Mistress. Penitence. Hurd. My progeny. May she bring the house down and the butchery trade be there to watch it.’ As he lifted her down among cheers, he was troubled. ‘Penitence Hurd,’ he said. ‘It don’t sound right, Prinks. All right for pummelling pulpits, but not for bringing houses down.’

  Hart said much the same thing. ‘You’ll have to change it, dear. It won’t look good on the programme. We’re trying to entertain them, not save their souls.’

  ‘Can’t it be just Pen Hurd?’

  Hart shuddered. ‘We’re not in the cattle business, either.’

  She was not averse to a change of name. The Indians, who regarded names as magic, had always changed theirs when they wanted to make a new start in life. Matoonas, when she’d first known him, had been Manitowwock and only became Matoonas after passing the test of his initiation ceremony. In this, her great departure, she would be not unhappy to leave behind the detritus carried by her old name. ‘Penitence’, after all, had been foisted on her as an atonement for her mother’s sin, and strictly speaking, she was a Hoy, like her putative father, a FitzHoy, rather than a Hurd.

  Aphra suggested ‘Miranda’ and Dorinda ‘Roxolana’. Oddly enough, it was Mistress Palmer who said: ‘Her Ladyship’d been so proud of you. Why not do her proud, eh? Take her name.’

  ‘Margaret Hughes,’ Penitence told Hart, firmly.

  He raised his eyes. ‘Most exciting, dear, I’m sure. Very well, if you must, you must. Only I think we’ll give it a teeny bit more verve and make it Peg Hughes.’

  So Peg Hughes was what went on the posters.

  It was only because Hart, having played Desdemona as a young man, had always coveted the part of the Moor that King’s was putting on Othello at all. Nobody else was sanguine about its chances of running more than one night; tragedy was out of date: heroic drama was what the public wanted nowadays, while Charles II was well known for his preference for comedy. ‘I don’t care, it’s a great play,’ Hart said stubbornly.

  What he really meant, Penitence discovered when they began rehearsals, was that it was a great part and he intended Desdemona to be merely a sounding board to his playing of it. He had picked Penitence, an unknown, because she was unknown.

  ‘She’s the epitome of innocence,’ he told Penitence in their first coaching session. ‘And, while one wouldn’t wish to cast aspersions on the other ladies of this company, to represent any of them as lily chaste would make a cat laugh, let alone an audience.’

 
; Penitence was used to the double standard of morality as it applied to Puritan men and women, but was surprised to discover it in the free and easy atmosphere of the theatre. Hart, for all his elaborate effeminacy, was no lily maid himself. Some women, though not Penitence, found his slim, well-preserved body and languid air irresistible; his affairs were legion. It was rumoured in the walkers’ foyer that his present one was with the seventeen-year-old Nell Gwynn. But she was forced to admit he knew his public. The fops could jeer at anything. Hart was afraid of casting Gwynn or Knipp or either of the Marshalls in case Othello’s demand of Desdemona, ‘Are you not a strumpet?’, was answered by a roar of ‘Yes’ from the pit.

  ‘Whereas you, dear,’ he said, ‘look like a primrose nobody’s picked yet.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Though, does one gather there’s a little fatherless bud?’

  ‘My son, yes.’ She was too proud of Benedick to conceal him and had even brought him to the theatre once or twice.

  He nodded. ‘Well, don’t worry. The audience won’t know. Married or unmarried, all our lady Thespians are “Mrs”. Since our dear king was restored, the title “Mistress” has acquired unfortunate connotations. But we digress. Now then…’

  Penitence reported back to the Cock and Pie in discontent. ‘He wants me to play her all insipid. He keeps referring to her in terms of little white flowers.’

  ‘’Course he does,’ said Dorinda. ‘He’s the cock. He don’t want no hen sharing his ballocking applause.’

  ‘One’s never seen the play,’ said Aphra, ‘but, reading it, I am forced to say that Desdemona appears insipid. A Venetian Matchless Orinda.’