The Vizard Mask

by The Vizard Mask (retail) (epub)

  She studied Sedley’s chubby face, one side of his wig pulled up against the seat-back, like a spaniel’s ear, the mouth whistling alcoholic snores. I don’t trust you. But in that case, what was she doing here? Partly because he wanted her to be. But the honest answer was that she was sick of penury, sick of living in a house with the ghosts of the Plague, sick of worrying about Benedick, sick of thinking of a future when her looks went and with them her career.

  At twenty-five in women’s eyes,

  Beauty does fade, at thirty dies…

  Sedley had written that to her. And she was already twenty-four, going on twenty-five. And she hadn’t been out of London since she arrived in it from the Americas. And travelling in upholstered comfort to a new experience in a cavalcade which included a king, a prince, a duke or two, not to mention several earls, had to be good going.

  Just before Baldock there was a stop for a change of horses and relief of bladders, the men of the party wandering off like hungover ghosts into the woods while the ladies were accommodated by hastily erected little tents. Back in the coach, Sedley fell asleep again but Penitence, hanging out of the window, saw the dawn come up over the frosted chalk downs of the Icknield Way and watched the sun bring out the reds of haws and hips in the hedgerows. She switched to the left-hand side after Royston to see the land go flat to the horizon in common fields where vegetable plots alternated with strips of sooty tilled earth in a black and emerald chessboard. In the distance the spires of Cambridge floated on a cushion of mist.

  She was entranced by the variety of landscape England could pack into a distance of sixty miles. Now they were going through tiny villages where even the meanest cottage was pargeted and the thatching put little wolf’s ears at either end of each roof. She would have woken up Sedley to ask him why that was, but she dreaded his jeer at her excitement, and thought that in any case he wouldn’t know.

  * * *

  ‘And that, my dear,’ said the Earl of Rochester, pointing at a black stallion being paraded round the stableyard, ‘is the original Old Rowley. He’s sired nearly as many progeny as our own dear king.’

  ‘Who is known,’ added Sir Charles Sedley, ‘as the Father of his People because he’s fathered most of ’em.’

  ‘Nor are his desires above his strength,

  His sceptre and his prick are of a length,’

  sang Rochester. Penitence glanced towards the king only a few feet away, and saw his lips twitch. Well, if he thinks it isn’t lèse majesté, it isn’t.

  And the wits had a point. Royal bastards were well represented at Newmarket, not to mention their mothers. The mother of the Duke of Monmouth, the handsome young man who was showing off by doing steed leaps over Old Rowley, was safely obliterated in the king’s past. But the fecund Castlemaine was here with her children, so was Nell Gwynn, and both were pregnant.

  Penitence winced for the barren queen, though she seemed to be on fairly good terms with the mistresses. ‘Has to be,’ Sedley had told her, ‘ever since she lost the fight over Castlemaine when the king insisted on making the whore a Lady of the Queen’s Bedchamber.’

  The only one, apart from herself, who seemed to find the situation bizarre was the Prince of Orange. He looked like a boy who had been transported to an Arabian harem and kept blinking as he glanced from the plain little queen to the lovely, rounded women, one tall and dark, the other small and fair, who were her rivals.

  Unusually for him, Charles patronized the boy. ‘Come over here, nephew. You’ll not have seen horseflesh like this before.’ As William obediently crossed the stableyard, Penitence studied him. The Stuart genes were apparent in his face, though he was shorter than his uncles and had the rounded shoulders of an asthmatic.

  ‘You should build as good a stables as these at Dieren. I shall send you a brood mare carrying Rowley’s foal. Gelderland could provide a fine racecourse.’

  ‘Over the flats, of course,’ drawled Rochester. The wits found the Netherlands’ flatness inexhaustibly funny.

  ‘Thank you, Your Majesty,’ said the Prince of Orange. He spoke English well, with a slightly sing-song accent. ‘But should France advance on us further, there will be neither time nor land for a racecourse.’

  Sedley and Rochester put languid hands over their mouths and patted away feigned yawns. Charles was irritated. ‘Make a friend of France, nephew. You will find Louis a better one than all your Dutch blockheads. Now, let us see if they have taught you to ride.’

  The ladies queued at a mounting block to be hoisted up on horses behind the men for the journey out on to the heath. Dorinda, who was afraid of horses, made the king laugh by shrieking: ‘I ain’t getting up on a ballocker that big. I’ll get the vertigoes.’ Eventually she was persuaded, and with her arms around the Earl of Oxford’s considerable waist, bumped out of the yard alongside Penitence, who had her arms round Sedley’s, followed by the jockeys in their surcoats and tapestried caps.

  It was a glorious day. Gorse and bracken edged the swathes of sheep-nibbled grass that looked as if it had been smoothed on to the hillocks. Rooks, disturbed by the noisy cavalcade, circled over elm and beech hangars which were just beginning to turn into the yellows and copper of autumn.

  ‘See that lady-in-waiting there, the one up behind Buckingham?’ shouted Sedley over his shoulder, pointing at a graceful figure jolting along in front. ‘That’s Winifred Wells, Charles’s latest. Figure of a goddess. Physiognomy of a dreamy sheep.’

  Penitence felt a sudden nausea for herself and her companions. The landscape’s freshness was a reproach. She wanted to wander off into it alone and read a book by a stream. Homesickness for the innocent forests of Massachusetts brought tears to her eyes.

  ‘And that one there? Face like a gargoyle and smells? That’s one of James’s. Where does he find ’em? She’d better watch out. Lord Carnegie doesn’t like his wife sleeping with James as well and is trying to contract the pox so that he can pass it on to them both.’

  She shut her ears to everything but the larksong.

  They watched the racing from a pavilion set on a rise, though the male court was unable to resist joining in the last race which ended with the king passing the winning post to the sound of drums, huzzas and trumpets. He’s even brought a band.

  She couldn’t help feeling that if as much money and care had been spent on the country’s defences as was being lavished on this outing, the Prince of Orange’s countrymen would never have forced their way up the Thames. The organization that had gone into arranging the large apiary of tents from which liveried servants buzzed back and forth with refreshments was extraordinary. So was the picnic that came later. Pretty wenches had been hired to waft bracken fronds over the trestles to keep the flies off every kind of meat, fowl and fish in every form known to the royal kitchens, roast, pied, tarted, ragouted, boiled, with pistachio cream, sauces of artichokes, peas and saffron, morelles, truffles.

  To foster the back-to-nature spirit, the company sat on silk cushions and, much to Dorinda’s relief, ate with their fingers.

  Having helped Penitence to sweetbreads and asparagus, Sedley disappeared behind a small hill of chops. ‘What will you drink? Beer, Lambeth ale, mead, claret, champagne, Spanish or Rhenish?’

  What she wanted most was cold water. Taking a fine pewter tankard with her, she went looking for a brook and found a stream running along the edge of a wood. She knelt beside it and drank, enjoying the rustle of leaf and water, examining paw prints and remembering her tracking days.

  ‘Another water-drinker,’ said a voice. It was the Prince of Orange. He had no receptacle and after she’d curtseyed she offered him her tankard. ‘They try to make me drunk, I think,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘They would.’ As he drank she remembered Becky had said the boy was special, something like that, and thought Becky was probably right. Somebody’d said he was younger than the Duke of Monmouth, but his fewer years had given him a caution the king’s son would never know. She decided she liked him.


  ‘Lovely lady,’ he said, ‘I am bewildered by so many lovely ladies. Who do you belong to?’ When she raised her eyebrows he apologized: ‘Forgive me. My English.’

  ‘I’m an actress. And, thank God, I don’t belong to anybody.’

  ‘So?’ He had a nice smile when he was animated. ‘An actress? Do you know Molière? I have a friend has introduced me to Molière. I like him very much.’

  ‘So do I.’ They strolled back over the heath, talking theatre. He had recently produced a ballet, he told her. As if he were becoming too informal, he put his hands behind his back and asked conscientiously: ‘Have you always been an actress?’

  ‘No, before that I was a printer.’

  They had to stop then while he questioned her, and if he’d been knowledgeable about the theatre, he was twice so on the printing trade. ‘My country makes the finest type, I think.’

  ‘So do I.’ She found herself telling him about the Cock and Pie Press, then remembered and looked suspiciously around at the bushes. ‘But please don’t mention it to the king. I’m not licensed.’

  ‘You have no free press in England?’ He was horrified.

  ‘I must go,’ she said. Sedley was coming towards them, chewing a capon.

  He insisted on shaking hands. ‘Goodbye, madame.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  Sedley put an arm round her waist to draw her back to the picnic. ‘It’s not safe to let you near princes,’ he said, ‘young or old.’

  Dorinda and her earl had also been for a walk. Dorinda floated to where Penitence was sitting with Sedley and the Marshalls. ‘He’s done it,’ she whispered. ‘He’s only gone and done it. Asked me to marry him.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Sedley, while the girls fell on her.

  ‘I’m so happy for you,’ said Penitence, ‘if you’re sure.’

  ‘If I’m sure?’ Dorinda was still whispering. ‘If I’m sure? What do you think? But it’s got to be hush until the dirty deed’s done. Acause of his family. We’re creeping off soon. He’s found a priest as’ll tie the knot. Wish me luck.’

  When she’d gone to rejoin her beloved, Penitence and Rebecca looked at each other, doubting the ease of the fairytale. Becky asked Sedley quietly: ‘The earl’s not married already, is he?’

  ‘Quiet your virginal suspicion, my dear,’ he said, ‘the noble de Vere is between wives at the minute.’ The way he said it did nothing to lessen Penitence’s unease for her friend, but when she went to look for her to offer herself as bridesmaid, the earl and his future countess were nowhere to be seen.

  There was a diversion as the queen and some of her ladies borrowed red petticoats and waistcoats from the servants’ tents and, amidst a lot of giggling, set off on cart-horses, accompanied by guards dressed as peasants, to visit a nearby fair in what they hoped was bucolic incognito.

  ‘Incognito,’ scoffed Sedley. ‘They look about as countrified as the Old Bailey.’

  There was the night’s jollification still to come, but Penitence was beginning to look forward to the whole thing being over. The reality of court life, though dazzling and magnetic, was also full of tension. And with the departure of the queen on her country-fair adventure, what little restraint there’d been on those who remained behind was lifted.

  Penitence and Becky were constantly harassed for sexual favours by courtiers who assumed, probably rightly, that was why actresses had been invited. Anne early deserted them and disappeared with the Earl of Dorset. The drinking became frenetic; Rochester got pale and vague as he grew drunker, Sedley got redder and a foul-mouthed nuisance. She had to keep batting him off, like a hornet.

  Day turned to night, the pastel silks and muslins of afternoon costume were laid aside for deeper colours and richer cloth. The venue became the lovely gallery of the Earl of Suffolk’s palace at Audley End. Cards replaced horses, dalliance was transferred from behind bushes to couches in discreet niches. Everybody became drunker. She and Becky sang for their supper, but got booed for not singing bawdy enough songs, though they’d seemed bawdy when they’d rehearsed them. Sir George Etherege took their place and, wavering, plaintively sang:

  ‘Love’s chiefest magic lies

  In women’s cunts, not in their eyes…’

  Penitence saw William of Orange trying to take his leave of the king and go to bed, but being impeded by the Duke of Buckingham who lectured him on incivility.

  Fatigue, the noise, tobacco smoke and fumes from the brandy glasses gave her the sensation of drunkenness from which she kept waking up to vignettes of awful clarity, Sedley pawing at her breasts, the king pawing at Castlemaine’s, Buckingham repeating his lecture, this time to a legal-looking gentleman who seemed to have wandered in by mistake… ‘and I advise you, my lord, to keep a whore, for it is politically ill-advised in this court to be faithful to your wife.’

  Everything’s upside-down. She’d stepped into a distorting mirror where immorality was as rigid as the Puritans’ adherence to piety. If she half-closed her eyes the impact of the candlelight on the costumes and jewels created a rainbow shimmering. They’re so beautiful. These are the cleverest people in England. They must be right. The room was whirling. She was very thirsty. The orange-water in her glass tasted strange.

  There were a lot of dogs around. A bitch was suckling some whelps on a satin-covered couch to the discomfiture of a couple who had other uses for it. The man tried to push the bitch off, there was a snarl. The king lurched to his feet: ‘Leave my dog alone, varlet.’

  The courtier held out a bleeding finger. ‘God save Your Majesty, but God damn your dogs.’

  ‘That’s funny,’ Penitence said and laughed. ‘That’s so funny.’

  ‘And you’re so desirable,’ said Sedley. They were in a dark corridor, which struck cold after the heat of the gallery.

  ‘Where’s Becky?’

  ‘She’ll be along in a minute. You’re so lovely, so desirable.’

  ‘Where’s the Prince of Orange? Orange-water. Something in my orange-water.’

  ‘Quiet now. Buckingham’s putting something in his. In here, you beauty, you lovely baggage.’

  ‘Can’t see.’

  ‘Over here. Ups-a-daisy.’

  ‘It’s cold,’ she said. The silk bedcover was chill against the back of her shoulders.

  ‘Here’s something’ll warm you.’

  Part of her mind was aware of what was happening, but it was stuck high up in the corner of the bed’s tester which she could just see in the moonlight, and she couldn’t reach it. Her body was crying: Why not? Why assume the mask of lust and not experience it?

  Tell me no more of constancy,

  The frivolous pretence

  Of cold age, narrow jealousy,

  Disease and want of sense.

  Constancy was withering her, and for whom? He’d left her, paid her and left. ‘You’re right,’ she sobbed, ‘I’ve grown old for him.’

  ‘You’re beautiful, you Puritan bitch. Stay still.’

  She wished he wouldn’t talk. So long since he’d lit the heat between her legs to warm her. Rub me, rub me back to life.

  He was rubbing hard; her head was knocking against the bedhead. Why did he spoil it with swearing? Not nice.

  ‘God damn it.’ She woke up. ‘No you don’t. Get away from me.’

  ‘Stay still, you whore. I’m coming.’

  ‘NO.’ With all her strength she jackknifed, jerking Sedley out of and off her. He lay screaming and bucking, then collapsed.

  ‘You got me drunk… you, you,’ she couldn’t think of a word bad enough for him, or for her, ‘you vile thing.’ She stumbled against a wall, feeling for the door, traced the shape of a panel to a doorknob and turned it, shook it. It was locked. No key.

  She was in fuming control now. She marched back to the bed and slapped the shape on it. ‘When I say so, do you hear me? When I say so. Me. Not you.’ He mumbled something. She pulled the bed-curtains back further and saw the gleam of the key that was still in his hand. She found l
ater that it had scored her skin.

  Out in the deeper darkness of the corridor, she stopped and ran her hands down her body. Her breasts were hanging out of her basque. She pulled it up. Where’s my damn room? Don’t they keep servants in this damn house? There was a hullabaloo going on somewhere to her right. Staggering, she moved towards it, slowing down as it resolved into the sound of shouts, drunken laughter and, in a recessed echo, high-pitched screams. There was a draught curtain between her corridor and the next. Carefully, she peeped round it.

  A group of men – she recognized Buckhurst and Rochester – were standing around a wild figure, cheering it on as it hammered on a door. ‘Go to it, Your Highness.’ It was Buckingham’s voice. ‘What are maids of honour for but to lose their honour to princes?’

  The feminine screams were coming from behind the door, but it looked strong enough, and was obviously locked.

  Poor little devil. They’ve done it to him too. Keeping the curtain across her, she edged forward to lift a flambeau out of its sconce. Nobody noticed. As she scurried back, her eye’s retina retained the image of the Prince of Orange’s face, distorted and streaked with tears.

  She tried every door except to the room Sedley was in, and at last found one that opened. Inside it was empty, the bed’s curtains open and its coverlet neatly laid back. Women’s clothes lay over the chairs, but their owners had presumably found other beds. She shut the door and locked it, put the flambeau in a Chinese vase and sat in a chair by the open window, welcoming the cold on her skin.

  No good searching for her own room in this enormous house until things had quietened down. Then she’d find it – once the drunks had retired they’d sleep like the dead – put on walking shoes and her cloak and set off home. Highwaymen, dogs, distance, what were they to her after a royal recreation?

  Out of her self-disgust had come at least negative knowledge of who she was. Not them. Never them. A deluded, prating, one-time whore of an actress she might be, but when St Peter asked her on the Day of Judgement where she belonged she knew enough now to say: ‘Not with them.’