‘You will.’
Dorinda looked up. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll be a ballocking sensation, won’t I? Our Sedley’ll write a play about it. Roxolana, or the Fooled Bride. The stinkards’ll laugh me off the stage, and I can’t blame ’em. No, I’m finished.’
Even as she protested, Penitence knew it was probably true. She felt a surge of hatred at the pitilessness of men. ‘I’ll go and get you a hot drink,’ she said. ‘Becky’s to take over at dawn. Then I’ll take you home.’
But Dorinda wanted to be alone. ‘You go. You done your turn. Get back to Benedick, he ain’t seen much of you lately. I want to think a bit. I’ll see Kynny’s all right.’ She tried to smile. ‘I’m good at men in bed.’
Nothing would move her. ‘For fuck’s sake, leave me alone.’
Reluctantly, Penitence left her.
Outside she stood in the doorway to accustom her eyes to the darkness. The trees and hedges of the square were still. High clouds moved at their own volition, suffusing the air with a mist of rain and allowing glimpses of a moon that put a soft shine on leaves and roofs. Her footsteps repeated a rhythm on the damp surface of the road: What sort of people? What sort of people?
What sort of man went to expense and trouble to humiliate a woman who’d done him no harm?
As she reconstructed the image of the Earl of Oxford in her mind, fat, laughing, at ease, she set him in the context of a court which – she saw it now – devoted itself to the humiliation of women. Castlemaine and Gwynn and all the other mistresses, parading their clothes and their tempers in their ceaseless battle to outdo each other, were pet monkeys kept for tricks, goaded by their masters to perform more and more outlandish antics. The poor little woman with the dark-haired top lip, the Queen of England, was forced not only to accept the attendance of her husband’s bed-fellows, but to seem to enjoy it.
What sort of people? What sort of men?
No sort at all? Perhaps, just men? It worried her. Suppose there was a civil war in progress of which one side, women, was in ignorance, but which the other, the male army, knew about and waged. I’m getting fanciful.
Her imagination had released monsters into the sleeping streets; they were padding behind her. She looked round but saw nothing.
She was right, then, to have stood up to them. She grinned as her jeer at his potency wiped the victory off Sedley’s remembered face. A strike for our side.
The grin faded. She was being followed. Somewhere in the darkness to her rear there’d been a splash as a foot went into a puddle. Reluctance to look round again froze her neck and shoulders. She was half-way up Holborn and on both sides the shuttered shopfronts with tall, gable-ended storeys above them contained empty road straight ahead for as far as she could see. She had grown careless with carriages, or chairs, or link-boys to bring her home and forgotten that gangs padded the streets at night.
But it was, what, four in the morning? The whole world was asleep. What gang would hang around when there was nobody to prey on?
She quickened her pace. If she could reach the High, she knew a dozen back alleys through to the Rookery and safety. They wouldn’t be able to follow her there.
Ridiculous. It was someone going home as innocently as herself. She forced herself to turn around, but the buildings threw impenetrable shadows on to both sides of the road, leaving a paler path between them.
There was somebody there, though. Instinct bred in the forest was panicking her breath and legs to escape danger. She began to trot. Knock on a door and ask for shelter? But nobody here lived on the ground floor; if she could waken an occupant it would be minutes before they let her in, if they let her in at all. Too long.
A soft drumming out of synchronization with the falls of her own feet confirmed her into picking up her skirts and running. The drumming quickened. Where’s my knife? Why didn’t I wear my knife? Oh, Matoonas, I’ve gone soft.
The Vine, she’d turn off north at the Vine. If she got into Kingsgate and turned left she’d be bound to strike a cut-through to the Rookery.
Somebody ahead. Thank God, thank God. A large male shape. Another soul.
As she raced towards it, she recognized something wrong. The man faced her not with enquiry but expectation. She saw the white of teeth. He was smiling. The link between him and her pursuer flashed over her like a whip. They’ve been sent.
There was an opening on her right between her and the man ahead. Blindly, she ran into it, slipped in a puddle, got up and ran on into deeper darkness. She heard the call of greeting between the two behind and the squelch of their boots.
Scream? But screams meant nothing around here. It would make horror official, encourage the tiger to hear the bleat of the goat.
Left. Go left. The Rookery would gather her in, resort of coiners, whores and thieves, outcasts, her true home. She didn’t know this alley, she was terrified it would end in a wall. Leprous wood, overhanging washing, silence except for her own running.
What would they do? Rape her? Disfigure her? Whatever it was, they’d won. She was broken. A rat squeaking with panic. Who were they? Sedley’s men? Sir Hugh Middleton’s? The king’s? It didn’t matter. You can’t offend the court and get away with it. Fool. What a fool. Behind her was the executive of the world’s power come to punish her puny defiance. I’m sorry. I’ll join. I can’t take you on. There’s no independence for us. Let me join. Don’t hurt me.
Ahead was a broken drainpipe outlined against space, like a hook, with moonlight catching the drip from its mouth. She’d seen it before. Another fifty yards and she would be in the mouth of Dog Yard, near the blessed, blessed Ship. Some steps.
She didn’t make them. They caught her. She felt a hand drag her skirt. More hands wiping against her face. Not a sound from them but panting. Flesh on hers, fingers on her breasts, clawing through her hair. Their smell. Another, fetid and alien.
That was when she began screaming until one of the hands went into her mouth and smeared her teeth.
Then they went.
Three minutes later, woken by a hand hitting and hitting the Cock and Pie door, Mistress Palmer opened it to a creature that squirmed as if trying to shrink from its own flesh, a gagging, whispering woman whose eyes stared at her through a mask of dog excreta.
* * *
Next morning Penitence wrote a letter to Prince Rupert agreeing to be his mistress.
BOOK III
Chapter 1
Without warning, the English fleet fired on a convoy of Dutch merchantmen, and the country found, somewhat to its surprise and despite the alliance between them, that it was once again at war with the Netherlands. It didn’t mind particularly. The Dutch had too much of the world’s trade for their own good – and England’s. But when a season of naval warfare passed without a palpable English victory, even a Cavalier Parliament decided enough was enough and refused to vote the king sufficient money to go on with it.
Had it been coincidence that war was declared on the Low Countries just as Louis XIV’s gigantic army, outnumbering the Dutch nine to one, invaded them? If it hadn’t, if Charles had meant to show that it was wiser to throw in with the French than the Dutch, it was a mistake, because English perception changed. Suddenly the Netherlands were no longer a pain in England’s commercial backside; they were being overrun, starved and tortured by a people more congenial as an enemy than they had ever been – the French. What’s more, the remnant of their pitiful army was fighting – and fighting bravely – against the invader under their new, young general, Prince William of Orange.
People remembered the Armada, when another small and gallant Protestant nation had stood up to the might of a Catholic oppressor.
Who did the king and his advisers favour? Young William, cutting his country’s dykes to flood the enemy’s advance, like Good Queen Bess facing the hostile sea at Tilbury? Or Louis XIV’s army, so reminiscent of the menacing crescent of Philip of Spain’s galleons?
Protestant or Catholic? The question hung in the air.
Th
en the king took a new mistress, Louise de Kéroualle, a French Catholic, as, almost in the same breath, he brought in a Declaration of Indulgence suspending laws against those who dissented from the established Church. It was his right, he said, his ‘supreme power in ecclesiastical matters’.
It wouldn’t have mattered much that Nonconformists, Puritans, even damned Quakers and the like, were given the right to worship legally, but the Indulgence also included Catholics.
This might be good Old Rowley showing his usual tolerance, but with everything that had gone before, it looked a good deal more like the thin end of the Catholic wedge.
Who said the king had ‘supreme power in ecclesiastical matters’ anyway? Was Charles going the way of his father and trying to impose absolute monarchy? Was England secretly in the hands of Jesuits?
There was an outcry. Even the House of Lords refused to support the king. Charles was not only forced to withdraw his Indulgence, but a new and less compliant Parliament countered with the Test Act, requiring anyone holding public office to pass a test which included Church of England communion, oaths of allegiance and a denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation – in other words, a hurdle no true Catholic could jump.
And the first person to balk at it was James, Duke of York. Honourably, he came out of the closet and admitted his adherence to the Church of Rome, resigning as Lord High Admiral – a post then given to his Protestant cousin, Prince Rupert.
It alarmed the country to discover the king’s own brother a Catholic; he was, after all, heir to the throne. The queen had still not borne a child and hope was fading that she ever would. If Charles should die, England would have its first Roman Catholic monarch since Bloody Mary of unpleasant memory.
True, James’s two daughters, Mary and Anne, were being brought up as good Protestants, and a marriage was being arranged between Mary and the Prince of Orange, but…
At this point there were two ominous happenings. The king, renowned for his superb health, fell violently ill. And James, now widowed, cast about for a new wife and chose a beautiful Italian princess, Mary of Modena, a Catholic.
The certainties on which the reign had begun were splintering. The king recovered, but he had shown he could not be relied on to outlive his brother. He couldn’t even be relied on to defend his realm against Papists. Having turned morality upside-down, corrupted an entire aristocracy, created a theatre which extolled adultery as a virtue, he might very well die and leave an even worse mess behind him. The country was going to the dogs.
Good God, there was even a woman making a success of playwrighting.
* * *
The door of Hammersmith parish church stood open to let in the late October sun, the scent of leaves and cowpats and singeing horn from the forge down the lane where Coppy was defying Sunday and getting horses shod for the hunt tomorrow.
Inside it smelled of incense and Sunday best.
‘And what is this thing, the Whig?’ demanded Parson Fowler, lifting his hands to heaven and thereby displaying the hole in the armpit of his cassock. ‘I tell you it is an old enemy under a new name, a creature hateful to God, a latitu… a latidinarian which is, parentis mutandis, an abomination in the sight of God…’
Penitence, sitting in the front pew, heard the Reverend Boreman, her new chaplain, shift in the pew behind her, and smiled. The parson’s sermons got on his nerves at the best of times, but the man’s misuse of Latin put him out of temper, mainly because he was one of the few in the congregation to know it was misuse.
She wouldn’t have minded learning what a Whig was – the term was being bandied about – but she was unlikely to be enlightened by Parson Fowler, who probably wasn’t sure himself. She let his thick Middlesex-accented harangue rattle past her, much as she had let the politics of the last years go by, unheeded. Politics were the court, and court life was now only peripheral to her own.
She put her hand over Rupert’s and squeezed it to wake him up. Rupert’s own form of criticism of the vicar was to fall asleep during his sermons. ‘Blwah?’ he said.
The parson hunched his shoulders and beamed uncertainly: ‘Would Your Royal Highness be so good?’
Rupert stood up and marched across to the side aisle, to the effigy bearing a plaque, ‘The Glorious Martyr King Charles the First of blessed Memory’, and fetched the silver casket beneath it to the altar rail.
He still looks pale. He’d given her the fright of her life when his old head wound reopened after a strenuous game of tennis. He’d refused a doctor – he had a horror of doctors – and hadn’t even wanted her to dress it; ‘Too unsightly. Leave it to Peter.’
‘I certainly won’t,’ she’d said. ‘It’s my job.’ He loathed showing weakness in front of her for fear of accentuating their age difference, but his gratitude for her nursing had been pathetic. He’s growing old too quickly. He said he was more content than he’d ever been, and probably he was – his famous anger came rarely nowadays, and had never shown itself to her in any case. But his wars had caught up with him.
He’s like me. He’s retired hurt.
Rupert lifted the lid of the casket and the vicar poured wine and prayer on to the pickled heart of Sir Nicholas Crispe, Bart, contained within it. She heard the Reverend Boreman muttering. This was too heathenish for him. But Sir Nicholas had written in his will that he wished his heart refreshed with wine on every anniversary of his death, and as he’d been a friend of Rupert’s and the builder of the home they lived in, the household was bound to attend. ‘Noblesse oblige’, Rupert said it was.
‘Good vintage is it, Sir Nick?’ shouted somebody. It sounded like the Brewster son. Rupert returned to their pew, erect and glowering at the daring. Everybody else called a more decorous ‘God bless Sir Nicholas’, and they all knelt for final prayers.
It was a spacious church – Sir Nick had built this too – with a pretty ceiling of painted compartments. Into its quiet came the sound of birdsong and Coppy’s hammering.
Tranquillity, thought Penitence. But unearned tranquillity. In escaping to the safety of Rupert’s protection, she had not imagined how very much it would feel like desertion and how undeserved its peace.
There was a rustle of cassock past her as the vicar sprinted to the door to be ready to shake hands with his congregation; not that anybody would move until Rupert did. With great deliberation the prince got to his feet and offered her his arm; together, with their household behind, they walked down the nave, every eye upon them. Royalle, Rupert’s giant black poodle, followed them out.
Outside in the churchyard they had to pause for more noblesse oblige, nodding kindly to the villagers, enquiring after Mistress Cole’s rheumatism and Jem Harper’s youngest. Rupert was punctilious about this, though he was held in too much awe to get more than a ‘Going on well, sir, thank ’ee kindly’. If she’d been alone, they’d have answered with more enthusiasm and anatomical detail. Jem added, with a nod at Penitence: ‘That poultice of mistress’s eased his little cough something wonderful, sir.’
Rupert was gratified. ‘Her Ladyship is skilled in these matters.’
Now it was the turn of the local gentry. They were surrounded by men and women like bullocks; the Brewsters bred large. ‘Fine morning, Your Royal Highness and mmm…’
‘Your Ladyship,’ prompted Rupert.
‘Your Ladyship,’ said Squire Brewster, deliberately having trouble getting his tongue round it. ‘Hunting tomorrow, Your Highness? Us could be doing with that lymerer of yours.’
Rupert looked at Penitence, who looked stolidly back. ‘You may have the lymerer, Sir John, but not me, I fear. Her Ladyship still over-cossets me.’ He loved the idea that he was henpecked. ‘These women, you know.’
‘You want to get her trained, Highness. A wife like Lady Brewster, now, she do know her place. Don’t ’ee, Betty?’
‘Ah well,’ said Lady Brewster, managing to invest her sigh with a distinction between a wife and a mistress. ‘There ’tis.’
They couldn’t ge
t over it. At first they’d watched her in church with fascinated horror, as if at any moment she might strip and dance on the altar, on the principle that actresses would be actresses. And once, when Rupert had been away, the elder Brewster boy tried to kiss her on the principle that mistresses would be mistresses. Now they merely larded their conversation with heavy subtleties. But Lady Brewster, Penitence noticed, was wearing a fair copy of the striped gown which she herself had worn last Easter Sunday, though the short sleeves tended to show the woman’s muscles somewhat blue in the October nip and the panniers to emphasize her hips.
At the lych-gate the Brewsters piled into a spanking new open carriage, a replica of the one Rupert had bought in the spring. Bob, their coachman, was raising his eyes at the trouble he’d been put to for a quarter-of-a-mile drive. Penitence helped Mistress Palmer into Rupert’s with the other servants and smiled at Lady Brewster: ‘It’s such a fine day, His Royal Highness and I thought we’d walk home.’ It was petty, but wrong-footing the Brewsters was one of life’s little triumphs.
‘With your permission,’ said the Reverend Boreman, grimly, ‘I shall go and give that bumpkin parson another lesson in Latin.’
‘Don’t you go hoeing his cabbages again,’ warned Penitence. ‘It put your back out last time.’ They watched him hobble off across the churchyard to the decrepit parsonage.
‘He was a good choice, my dear.’ She’d been surprised when Rupert had suggested she have a chaplain. Since Rupert had been made Constable of Windsor Castle, his own chaplain was now installed there.
‘Do I need one?’ she’d asked.
‘It is usual for one of your position.’
‘I can’t get used to being positioned so high.’ She hadn’t thought her old friend from St Giles would agree, but a heart attack had prompted his retirement away from his old parish and into this less onerous post in the country. It had worked out well. The air was doing him good, and London was near enough for his friends to come and stay at the pleasant little house Rupert had given him on the estate.
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