The Vizard Mask

by The Vizard Mask (retail) (epub)

  Mistress Palmer, too, had fitted in well, assuming a position in the household as Benedick’s old nurse, and having her washing done for her.

  It had been a dry autumn and their shoes puffed up dust as they walked down the village street, Rupert’s hat more often off his head than on it as he doffed to curtseying women and the forelock tugs of the men.

  With Royalle trotting beside them, they turned left down Upper Mall where fishing nets made a canopy over their heads along the quay, crossing the creek at High Bridge. Immediately they were in the meadowland that hemmed the Thames.

  Four miles away was Charing Cross, but here cows stood up to their hocks in grass and kingcups, warblers sang in the reeds and willows bent over their own reflection in the river. Compleat Angler country. She’d bought a gold-embossed, calfskin-covered copy of the book for Rupert on his last birthday, hoping it would encourage him to do more fishing rather than risk his neck on the hunting field. He’d been delighted with it.

  She liked to give him unusual birthday presents; this year’s was extra special. She was waiting for the right moment to tell him about it.

  The lane turned into enormous wrought-iron gates and became a drive lined with chestnut trees still to reach full maturity. Beyond, in the distance glowed the rose-brick turrets of Awdes with its cupola and winking, oriel windows.

  Awdes.

  When he’d said he would provide her with a house not unworthy of her, she’d had no idea of the value he put on her. Penitence had expected perhaps a smart little town-house, something like the one Charles had given Nell Gwynn. What she’d got was magnificence; sixty rooms, including one for billiards, an armoury, a tennis court, a dairy, a lake, and an ornamental garden laid out by a Dutch landscaper who’d managed to give it a prospect which included the River Thames.

  Awdes was worthy of a queen; Catherine of Braganza had offered for it as her country home and, thwarted, was now building one of her own nearby.

  Unasked, the king had driven down from Whitehall to inspect his uncle’s love-nest, bringing with him the usual courtiers, among them Sir Charles Sedley who’d been venomous: ‘My, my, we must be good in bed to have earned all this.’

  ‘On the contrary, my dear Charles,’ she’d hissed back, ‘to earn all this we had to be positively wicked in bed.’ Take that, you bastard. She’d watched the thrust go home. He tried to smile but she could almost hear his teeth grinding. She’d never prove it but she knew he’d sent the men who’d smeared her with ordure that night as surely as she knew he’d sent the bullies who’d beaten Kynaston. It would make him writhe to reflect that in punishing her he had been the instrument of what must seem to be her great good fortune. That she and Rupert might be happy together would be gall and wormwood to him – not necessarily from sexual jealousy but because he hated and feared others’ happiness.

  Actually, of course, he’d won; he’d deprived her of something she valued higher than the luxury she now enjoyed – her independence. Though she’d rather be stretched on the rack than let him know it, Sir Charles and his thugs had pushed the price of independence so high that she’d been forced to abandon it. Thanks to him, she was back on the game – what else was being the mistress of a man you didn’t love but prostitution? That the man was rich and noble just made it more successful whoring, the height of harlotry. From sleeping with a Newgate gaoler to sleeping with a prince of the realm – what success. In the eyes of the world she’d reached the pinnacle of prostitution, only second to the great Castlemaine and Gwynn. Even now brothel-keepers might be pointing her out as an example to their young, ambitious whores: ‘You too can become a Peg Hughes.’

  I tried, my dears, she told them, I tried to earn an honest living. They wouldn’t let me. They smeared dog-shit on my teeth.

  ‘You’re very pale, my dear. You’re not too tired?’ Rupert was looking down at her with concern.

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed him. ‘Rupert, you’re the only one who doesn’t make me feel like a trollop.’

  ‘Those damned Brewsters.’ He hated the reminder that the two of them weren’t married.

  ‘It wasn’t the Brewsters. And I don’t mind, you know I don’t.’ The wedding ceremony was mostly hypocrisy, anyway; society’s seal on a trade agreement. That’s what Aphra Behn’s been saying all these years in her plays. An heiress sold into a loveless marriage by her parents was no less a hapless whore than one forced into an alliance with a protector through harsh circumstance. For the thousandth time Penitence felt a rush of admiration for Aphra, still fighting out in the world where they rolled women in crap, still refusing to surrender.

  Arm in arm, she and Rupert turned to skirt the parkland where red deer stood beneath the palisaded oaks. ‘You’re sure you’re not too tired?’

  ‘I’m not decrepit yet, my dear.’

  She was glad to take her opportunity. ‘Indeed you’re not. I have proof that you are not. I’m pregnant.’

  He went white with pleasure. ‘My dear, oh my dear, my dear.’

  When they got to the river path she made him sit down on the bench. He looked quite shaky. He made her sit down, too. ‘We should not have walked so far. I hoped for this.’

  She’d known he had. ‘You didn’t say.’

  ‘It would not have been gentlemanly.’

  She kissed him. ‘Happy birthday for December.’

  ‘Is that when he’ll be born?’

  ‘No, not until the spring. But it’s this year’s present.’

  ‘By God, I’m not that old, am I? Let’s run. No, not run. Let’s drive to Eton this afternoon and tell the boys they’re to have a brother. The world must be informed.’

  ‘Or a sister.’

  He turned that idea over as they walked on; it was new to him. ‘A girl, by God. Let’s hope she takes after her mother.’

  It was a pleasure to give him such intense pleasure, but underneath the velvet contentment he’d wrapped her in remained the old discomfort; unearned, unearned. Once she’d tried to tell him how she felt: ‘I wish you wouldn’t give me so much, Rupert. I’m just as happy with less.’

  They were in bed at the time and he was playful: ‘Would I were richer and could give you more.’

  She’d held him off. ‘You see, I earned my own living. It wasn’t a good living, but I earned it by my own effort. All this…’ She waved her hand around at the lovely Jacobean bedroom. ‘…I haven’t earned it.’

  ‘You make me happy.’

  She knew she did, but that was almost fortuitous, none of her doing; an accident that her particular blend of looks and personality magnetized him. For the security he’d given her, making him happy was the least she could do.

  But never to know again the satisfaction of earning money for herself and Benedick through printing, or through her skill as an actress… to be kept instead of keeping… there were times when she felt the panic of claustrophobia. If she tried to explain this to him he would become distressed and say she’d feel differently if they were married. Which she wouldn’t. Marriage, with its loss of individual legal identity for women, would be worse.

  So she’d left the subject and kissed him and let him get on with making love to her, delighting his man-of-the-world sense of chivalry by simulating a climax – as Dorinda had told her how to do – just as he came to his.

  And there lay her deepest guilt: she couldn’t love him like a lover. She had to grit her teeth to respond to his advances, and got through them on gratitude alone. She was cheating him, although he didn’t know it, and the fact that he didn’t know it made her an even greater cheat. When her periods stopped and she’d realized she was pregnant, she didn’t feel she was carrying a child so much as a recompense.

  Driving down to Windsor in the carriage that afternoon, Rupert said: ‘Will you still go to the theatre next week?’

  ‘Of course I will. There are the rehearsals. I’ll stay with Aphra until you come up for the last performance, then we can either spend the night at Spring Gardens or come strai
ght back.’

  ‘I meant, will you perform? There is the child to consider.’

  He didn’t really like her acting at all now but, as he was careful not to forbid her, she insisted on appearing at least twice a year. For one thing, it meant she wasn’t totally dependent. She’d bought The Compleat Angler with her own money.

  ‘Rupert, I’m as strong as a horse. Anyway, it’s Hart’s benefit and I can’t let him down. Othello was his triumph, and he says I was the best Desdemona he ever had.’

  ‘So you were, so you were. But… very well, if you wish, my dear. As a matter of fact, I shall probably be bringing a friend to see it, Viscount Severn and Thames. With your permission, I shall invite him down to Awdes to stay for a night or two afterwards.’

  ‘Of course.’ His friends became fewer as more and more of them dropped off the perches; this would be another aristocrat who had outlived his time, like the Earl of Craven or Colonel William Legge; Cavaliers who had fought for Charles I and who were derided by his son’s court because they still believed in honour. Their opinion of democracy made her hair stand on end – they were against it – and after dinner she usually left them to their pipes, brandy and talk of horsewhipping, but they treated her with a bluff and unfailing chivalry. Speak as you find. What did politics matter? If it came to that, Rupert’s didn’t bear thinking about, which was why they rarely discussed other than domestic matters.

  A couple of pensioners were sitting on the plinth of Henry VI’s statue, their sticks between their knees, as the carriage swept into Eton’s beautiful schoolyard. They stared, not at Penitence nor Rupert, but at Peter sitting on the footman’s seat behind them. Black men were a novelty this far out in the sticks.

  The college was still at its lessons, but the provost came waddling up to greet the illustrious parents, trailing his velvet gown and the smell of a rich dinner which, to judge from his girth, had been superfluous to requirements.

  As usual Rupert prayed a half-holiday for all the boys and gained a cheer from the faces at the windows as the provost signalled his acquiescence. Penitence didn’t like the provost; his expensive robes and obesity contrasted horribly with the condition of the seventy, skinny young Collegers in his charge who, according to Benedick and Dudley, subsisted on an unvarying diet of mutton, bread and beer. The mutton bones were used as bait for the rats which infested the Long Chamber in which the Collegers lived and slept. ‘They catch the rats in their stockings and whack ‘em to death.’

  As Oppidans – fee-paying students – Benedick and Dudley were permitted to live out. Since their rooms were in the great castle which loomed over college and town, and their father was its constable, the provost spared them the frenzied application of the birch with which he corrected the grammar of less favoured boys.

  Penitence’s cup of gratitude overflowed for Rupert’s treatment of Benedick. He’d kept his promise to give her son the consequence he accorded his own; sometimes she thought he gave him more.

  Prince and boy had taken to each other from the first. Benedick openly hero-worshipped the man whose shock tactics had swept away the Roundhead cavalry at Worcester, who’d ridden into battle with his dog at his side, who’d activated England’s first mine, who could still send a horse-pistol bullet through the tail of the weathercock on Awdes’ roof. He listened to Rupert’s stories till the cows came home and at play-time charged the box topiary of the ornamental garden with the Cavalier battle-cry ‘For a king!’, wielding the sword Rupert had insisted on having made for him.

  When Penitence, worried by her son’s monarchical tendency, had privately suggested to him that there’d been some justice in the Roundheads’ cause, he’d disposed of the idea with a ‘Pooh to the lobsterbacks. They were dreary.’

  It was Dudley who listened to her; but Dudley was a listener. He was about the same age as Benedick, even taller, and fair where Benedick was dark. From studying him, Penitence guessed that his mother had been willowy, freckled and timid. She’d gone into her new relationship with a determination to love the boy as her own, and found she didn’t have to try. He tugged at her heart; he was afraid of his father’s disapproval, thereby bringing it down on himself; more bookish than athletic, he had to rouse himself to show an interest in Rupert’s scientific experiments and talk of war which held such fascination for Benedick.

  They spent the afternoon by the river at Cuckoo Weir so that Rupert could fish and the boys bathe. Peter laid linen tablecloths on the grass and set out a picnic of tartlets, quince comfits, toffee apples and gooseberry pasties to cater for the boys’ sweet teeth.

  ‘This is high eating, Peter, thank ’ee,’ Benedick called through crumbs. Dudley was a good influence on his manners.

  Peter stood in dignified isolation three yards away, watching the river, and didn’t turn round. ‘Your ma chose it,’ he said. Over the years Penitence had managed to break down all the household’s coldly courteous hostility towards herself, except Peter’s. He was a relic from Rupert’s buccaneering days, a child who’d been left behind in his village’s flight when Rupert’s ship anchored off the coast of Guinea. Rupert had brought him home as a souvenir, just as he’d brought a parrot and a monkey. Despite the agony of loss and isolation the boy must have suffered, perhaps because of it, he became an enthusiastic convert to the Church of England, though, Penitence suspected, he tended to confuse Rupert with God.

  With education, he’d grown into the post of Rupert’s major-domo, and he resented the advent of a woman he regarded as an adventuress into his master’s life with a dislike Penitence might have expected from a disapproving mother-in-law.

  Benedick joined Rupert in his fishing while Dudley and Penitence settled down to books.

  ‘What are you reading?’ asked Dudley.

  ‘Othello. To be ready for the performance at King’s.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  She outlined the plot and then put out a hand to him. ‘Desdemona didn’t have anybody to fight her Iago, like you and Benedick fought mine.’ On the first occasion that she and Rupert had visited the boys at the college, it had been to find both of them with black eyes and plummy mouths. Dudley had refused to say why he’d been fighting, but Benedick, still angry, had blurted it out: ‘They called you a whore.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Some of the Oppidans, and some of the Collegers. They said you were a whore because you were an actress and weren’t married.’

  Rupert had wanted to horsewhip the entire school, not excluding the provost. Penitence dissuaded him on the grounds that while it might procure her detractors’ silence it wouldn’t change their opinion.

  The incident coincided with King’s production of A Merchant of Venice in which she was enjoying a success as Portia. At the end of the season she persuaded Killigrew to bring the play down to Windsor Castle and asked Rupert to invite the entire college. ‘There’s nobody more respectable than Portia,’ she said, ‘and the tights will woo them.’

  They did. Next term Benedick had reported back, somewhat disgustedly, that the entire school was in love with her. She feared she’d overdone it, because Dudley was too.

  She could see that Rupert’s announcement that the family was to be increased had disturbed the boy. Perhaps he was jealous, or felt the young’s disgust at a parent still indulging in sex. But it wasn’t that. Watching a dragonfly skimming between the reeds, he said: ‘Is it dangerous, having a baby?’

  ‘Not for me. I’m strong.’

  ‘But it hurts, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A bit. Don’t worry. You worry too much.’

  ‘I hope it’s a girl.’

  She said: ‘I like sons. If it turns out as well as the two I have now, I shall be a happy mother.’ That would be enough of personal matters for him. She put them both back on neutral ground: ‘Dudley, I’ve been meaning to ask. What is a Whig?’

  Happily he said: ‘I think originally it was some awful Scotsman, a renegade or Covenanter or something like that. But it’s coming to me
an people who don’t want James to succeed to the throne if the king dies.’

  ‘Ah. So what’s a Tory?’

  ‘Well, originally, Tories were equally awful Irishmen but now it’s being applied to people who don’t mind if James succeeds to the throne. I think that’s what it means.’

  ‘Thank you, Dudley.’

  It was always a relief that, though they were sorry when their outings were over, neither boy dreaded going back to school. They were, after all, doing so on the best possible terms as privileged students, with a dame and staff to look after them in one of the finest castles in the country, doting parents living nearby.

  But she had an attack of a recurrent fear as she and Rupert were driven home that evening. God’s got something up His sleeve. The prodigality of the cornucopia from which He was pouring life’s riches on her and her son was against the Puritan law. There would be an accounting. She hadn’t earned it.

  Chapter 2

  The last time Penitence had been in London, Titus Oates had just emerged as the uncoverer of a Popish Plot to hand England over to the Jesuits. With some of the King’s players she had gone to see him on his soapbox in Hyde Park, declaiming to listening crowds the same story that he was telling the Privy Council: there was a plot between Louis XIV, the Jesuits and English Catholics to kill the king and conquer England for France.

  It had been an exceptionally hot day in an exceptionally hot summer; she’d been surprised by the size of the crowd prepared to stand crushed together to hear the man.

  ‘Isn’t he a picture?’ Lacy said. ‘Listen to him.’

  Her view obscured by the press in front of her, to listen was all Penitence could do at first. The voice was more a wail than speech, like a bad actor depicting the throes of grief.

  ‘Brethren,’ it sobbed, ‘they have burned down our city once, are we to stand by while they do it again? For they will. Oh yes, in their malignity, they will. I have heard their plans.’