Sir Nicholas Fenton had gone so far as to take off his trousers and, to the horror of Lady Portland, was blacking his penis. ‘That’ll fright the sentries.’
Everyone repaired to the courtyard where the carriages waited. Jeffreys clambered into his. Penitence ran to it to say goodbye but the Lord Chief Justice refused to look at her. He called to Kirk, who was standing nearby: ‘Withdraw your men, Colonel, we shall need them in Taunton tomorrow. Leave this mistress to be guarded by her husband. I wish him well of her.’ He jabbed his coachman in the back with his staff and was driven off, leaving the other drunks to crowd in the three remaining vehicles.
Nevis was shifting from place to place, checking faces.
Penitence had set aside a punch as a stirrup cup. She ran to fetch it and in going with it from guest to guest kept their attention away from the viscount and his casual remark that he must fetch his sword from his tiring-room. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his robed and turbaned figure retreat into the screen passage and disappear up the newel staircase.
It came down a minute later, buckling on its sword, the black face invisible in the dark of the passage and only the brilliants in the turban catching the reflection of the carriage lamps in the courtyard.
Muskett helped him up on his horse and then got up on another. Penitence handed him the stirrup cup. ‘Good luck with the sentries,’ she said. When he’d drunk, he gave her back the cup and she felt his fingers stroke the back of her hand for a second before he shook the reins and his horse walked forward to join the queue of departing guests at the gatehouse.
Nevis stood on one side of it and Lieutenant Jones on the other, both of them with a lantern held high, scanning the faces as they went by. Kirk was arguing with him: ‘If you’ve been through the house, then he’s not here. We’ll need the men in Taunton tomorrow – from the look of Jeffreys’ complexion he’ll hang the whole town. It’s an order, Nevis.’
Servants carrying lampions were riding ahead of the carriages, each one slowing down until Nevis nodded them through and Jones slapped their horses’ rumps to send them on their way. Behind the next carriage Othello and Muskett were approaching the gatehouse.
The Portmans and Sir Ostyn bade subdued goodbyes. ‘You didn’t tell me as you were betrothed to a viscount,’ Sir Ostyn reproached her.
‘I didn’t know I was,’ she told him.
He peered at her. ‘You don’t look too viddy, maid. Do ee want me to stay?’ He meant it kindly, and she refused as courteously as she could. Just go.
Gilbert the major-domo was supervising the loading of his wagons by the kitchen and came teetering in and out of the courtyard to tell her what couldn’t be found and what would have to be fetched the next day. He was worried and as affronted as his master: ‘You’ve upset him. I said there’d be tears before bedtime. It’s all very well, dear lady, but it isn’t you that gets Gilbert you’re a varlet and a boot at your head.’
She peered over his shoulder to see what was happening at the gatehouse. There was a delay. Nicholas Fenton leaned down from his carriage – it was the last – to scream his thanks and show her his black genitals. She nodded at them, ‘Very nice, Sir Nicholas,’ her eyes on the hold-up where Nevis’s lantern was practically scorching the lampblack on Othello’s face as he examined it.
Please God. If they were discovered now she had added Henry to the list of those who would stand before Jeffreys in the dock.
They were through. The lantern had lowered. Nevis had nodded. Jones had slapped the rump of Othello’s horse and now the rump of Muskett’s. Kirk was following the two of them. Nevis was following him. His men were forming into a phalanx ready to march off. Thank you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you.
She stood on the bridge of the moat waving as the last of the major-domo’s wagons lumbered through the gates at the bottom of the drive to join the cavalcade as it wound its way to the moonlit causeway. She watched the twinkling line until distance extinguished its lights one by one. At Middlezoy, with luck, two of its riders would peel away from it and ride like hell towards Bridgwater and the coast. There would be so many roadblocks to negotiate. Most of the sentries would know Muskett – and they knew the captain-viscount’s horse. Would they let them by?
She wondered how she had the strength to go on worrying. She was empty; no emotion left, yet the part of her that had gone with the man now crossing Sedgemoor still had the ability to be afraid.
The quiet of the night was soothing; her ears vibrated with the noise she had lived with for the past few hours.
She had regained her Priory. She should have had the drawbridge chains repaired so that she could shut out Jeffreys’s brutish world for ever. As it was, she bolted the gatehouse before she did a circuit of the house to make sure Nevis had left nobody behind. The topiary chessmen had retained some of the heat of the day and exuded the sweet smell of yew; the tobacco flowers Rupert had imported from the Americas to remind her of Massachusetts came into their own at night and added to the scent of roses and lavender and bruised grass.
A white shape was peering out from behind one of the chessmen. She made herself run at it – and found it was a pair of drawers. Sir Nicholas’s. Further on she stumbled over a snake and gasped. But it was the dildo.
She had disturbed a bird; she heard a rustling in the bushes down by the moat, and found herself hurrying. She shut the terrace doors of Rupert’s study and locked them, then walked quickly round the rest of the house until she’d regained the courtyard. It was dark, the major-domo had removed all the candles he’d brought and lit none of hers. The moon was still high, but under the shadow of the eaves she had to feel for the lock on the doors of the two wings and try a couple of keys from her chatelaine before she turned them. She had left the doors unlocked on purpose – it showed she had nothing to hide.
She groped her way in through the hall door, locked it behind her and ran her left hand along the screen until it touched the newel post of the stairs. Her high heels clacked loudly into the silence of the house and the top rise of the stairs creaked, as it always did. She put her feet more carefully in obedience with the growing instinct to keep everything quiet.
Unusually, her hall was hot – the major-domo had insisted on lighting the fire – and smelled of meat, tobacco and scented resin. Moonlight curved over her feet as she stepped through its reflection on the floor to open one of the lights and let in the night air. She stood at the window looking over Sedgemoor, wondering how Benedick would feel crossing the moor where so many comrades lay buried. Make sure you don’t join them, my son.
A barn owl flapped past on white, lazy wings, causing her to start back, and behind her the gargoyle screamed.
It kept on screaming as she hared along the passage to her room, threw herself on the bed and ran her fingers over the bedhead searching for Eve’s nipple.
There was a flickering light when the panel drew back and she could hear movement. ‘Henry? What’s the matter?’
‘Your bloody uncle or whatever he is, that’s who’s the matter.’
She could see into the room now. A rushlight stood on the floor near Martin Hughes’s bed. Martin himself had hunched himself into a corner and was uttering monotonous screams, his eyes bulging as he stared at what Penitence had to admit, if you’d just woken up, would be a shock. In an up-thrown light the viscount looked a tall demon from hell. She wriggled into the hole, seized the rushlight, emerged with it and lit one of her bedroom candles. With its aid she found a pot of lanolin grease and some lamb’s-wool which she took back with the rushlight and handed in to the viscount. ‘It’s all right,’ she said soothingly to her great-uncle. ‘He was disguised. You’re safe now, thanks to him. We’ll get you away soon.’
‘Did the boy get away?’ Henry scrubbed lampblack off his face.
‘He got away from here. Oh, Henry, there’s such a long way for him to go.’
‘He’s got Muskett. Muskett’ll see him through.’
‘Yes. I miss Muskett.
’ She’d become dependent on the man.
‘He’ll be back. He’ll see the boy on to the yacht and then he’ll come back for me.’
‘But when you go back to Bridgwater they’ll know you hadn’t made the return journey. They’ll have only seen Muskett riding back.’
‘Good God, woman, where’s your faith in the English militia? For one thing they’re too bloody inefficient to know I haven’t already slipped by them. For another, they’ll have changed the sentries. The morning duty will think I came back for more you-know-what the same night. Which,’ he winked at her – he’d recovered his poise – ‘is not a bad idea.’ He finished wiping the lampblack of his face, and turned to Martin Hughes, whose screams had subsided to a chesty wheeze. Henry poured him a beaker of water from the ewer and held it to the old man’s mouth. ‘Look well on me, Master Hughes. I am to be your great-nephew-in-law. God help me.’
‘Shshh,’ Penitence begged him. ‘Keep your voice down.’
‘Why? Didn’t you check the house? I heard them all go.’
‘I don’t know why, just keep your voice down.’
‘Is there any food left? We’d better get this poor old sod fed.’ He was pleased with himself. She’d seen similar euphoria in Hart and Lacy and Kynaston after a good performance. Known it herself, for that matter.
She had to force herself down to the kitchen. Never before had she felt afraid of the house, but her recent guests had left it menacing and alien.
Jeffreys’s cooks had been charitable enough to leave some scraps and she took them, with a jug of wine, back to the bedroom where Henry had got the old man out of the panel door and laid him on the bed, gently talking to him to reassure him after his fright. From the way Martin fell on the food it was obvious he was better. With a shock, Penitence realized she had fed neither him nor Benedick all day. It seemed dreadful to her that she’d sent her son into such danger on an empty belly.
‘And I got Jeffreys off your back, didn’t I?’ Henry was still triumphant. ‘Or off your front – whatever the bastard’s preference.’
‘You did.’ He had no idea. Jeffreys would hate her for the rest of his life. And you can’t have too few enemies in that class.
‘Why didn’t Rupert marry you?’ Henry asked idly. ‘Left it to me to make an honest woman of you, I expect.’ He stretched. ‘Well, tomorrow we’ll go to my place and get married in the chapel.’
She knew she should keep her mouth shut – they were both too tired for argument – but even in this predicament she could not leave him deceived. ‘I can’t marry you, Henry.’
‘What?’ That he would be refused hadn’t occurred to him.
‘I promised Rupert I would never marry. He was dying.’
‘And now he’s dead. For God’s sake, Boots, you were hardly the bride of Christ. He wouldn’t marry you: I will. It’s a good offer.’
He sounded so aggrieved she almost laughed, but his mouth was thinning into the line it took when he almost hated her. She pleaded: ‘Henry, Rupert gave me everything. What difference does it make? You know I’ll be honoured to be your mistress.’
He got off the bed, grabbed her arm and hurried her to the window; he couldn’t bear that even such as Martin Hughes should hear her talk like that. Until that moment she hadn’t seen how conventional was the core under the unconventional exterior. Perhaps, she thought, it’s all of a piece. He defied everything his father stood for by marrying a Catholic, by becoming an actor, by choosing to serve his country as an agent rather than the more usual politician or soldier. But equally he was the opposite of his promiscuous father in believing firmly in the honourable estate of marriage. And both your choices have been a disappointment: the late Lady Torrington, now me. She knew what it must have taken for him to fight down all his suspicion and jealousy and offer to marry her. It made her love him more, even while she was irritated. He could have asked nicely.
At the window, he shook her. ‘Will you stop thinking like a trollop? I want legitimate heirs.’
Nobody could move her to anger quicker than he could. ‘Is that your reason for marrying?’
‘It’s the usual one.’
Below them moonlight flooded the courtyard, reducing the shadows of the flower pots and the mounting block to dark pools around their bases.
‘For God’s sake,’ Henry was saying, ‘Rupert had no right to demand such a thing. He didn’t marry you himself.’
‘He would have,’ she said sharply. How dare he attack Rupert. ‘But he couldn’t. And he didn’t make me promise. I gave it freely.’
‘Then you’re a—’
Their voices rising, they still heard the creak in the bedroom doorway and then the voice: ‘A fornicators’ quarrel is it?’
Nevis stood there.
It took time for Penitence to register that the man was dripping wet from his cloak to his boots and had a horse-pistol in each hand. The triumph in his eyes was awful. A lamb saw the same expression before the wolf leaped; the slavering joy of a predator about to kill. For the moment she experienced such despair that she was rocked and nearly fell, as if the world had stopped turning.
‘Major Nevis,’ said the viscount. ‘How nice. Swam the moat, I see.’ His voice was as steady as when he talked to Muskett.
‘But kept my powder dry.’ Nevis must have put the guns in his hat; it was the only thing that wasn’t wet. Its long feather gleamed. He edged to the bed and put the mouth of one of the pistols against Martin Hughes’s forehead. The old man’s eyes were shut and he looked, as he’d looked for days, at death’s door. Nevis didn’t give him a second glance. He turned his head and peered into the hole from which the rushlight inside still glimmered. ‘I knew there was a secret room.’
Penitence’s hand, gripping Henry’s, felt him bunch his muscles to leap across the room and attack the man, then relax as he saw it couldn’t be done before the pistol fired. Thank God. He was being sensible. Nevis would kill him, and Martin Hughes too.
‘Nobody in it,’ said Nevis. ‘I suppose Hurd’s gone?’
Penitence said: ‘Who?’ She didn’t know what else to say.
Henry said: ‘He didn’t enjoy the company.’
Nevis nodded. ‘He was the blackamoor. You changed places. I was near half-way to Taunton when I realized. So I came back.’
‘He won’t be sorry you missed him.’
Nevis smiled. ‘Neither am I. I’ve made a better catch. Much better. I’ve got Prince Rupert’s doxy for one.’ He switched his attention to Penitence, whom he’d largely ignored. ‘You’ll burn, mistress.’ It gave him pleasure, but not as much as telling Henry: ‘And I’ve got the Viscount of Severn and Thames. And you’re for the block, master. I’ll see you get the same executioner as Monmouth. He took five strokes of the axe and then had to finish the job with a knife.’
She said: ‘The viscount had no part in the escape. He came back to spend the night with me, as he often does. He knew nothing of my plan to substitute my son in his place. He was in the next bedroom, waiting for me. Why would he help one of the king’s rebels? He’s not been concerned with the rising. He’s a loyal subject.’
She heard herself chattering on and knew that neither of the protagonists was paying her attention; she was that marginal thing, a woman. This was male territory, two stags circling, but of the two it was Nevis, the one with the advantage of a weapon, who was the challenger. She wondered how Henry could have inspired so much enmity, then she thought that it was because he had everything while Nevis, without humour, charm, or connections, survived by hating those who had.
‘Why should he help one of the king’s rebels?’ Nevis picked up her question to play with. He was looking at the viscount. ‘Because the rebel Hurd is his son, that’s why.’
He waited for their reaction. He got more from Penitence than the viscount. How does he know? How could he know? He looked so ordinary yet radiated such omnipotent ill-will. The element of sorcery was added to the shadows of the room.
‘Do you know h
ow I know?’
She shook her head, though he wasn’t looking at her.
‘A little gargoyle told me.’
He’d been in the hall, listening. The spy-holes of the secret room worked two ways. He’d heard her and Henry talking. She tried frantically to think of what they’d said.
‘And a little letter.’ He was becoming confident now, shifting to make himself comfortable on the bed. With a glance down at Martin Hughes, he put the right-hand pistol down on the table to the right of the bed and felt inside his coat. Penitence could practically feel her lover willing the old man to make a move, now, to grab his enemy’s arm. She willed equally hard that he shouldn’t. The other pistol was aimed without a tremor in their direction.
Nevis had a letter in his hand. It was the one MacGregor had sent to Dorinda. After Prue had given it to her she’d kept it in a box on her dressing-table. He began to read, carefully, like a boy showing off to a favourite teacher.
Dear Wife. The lad is determined on it. I would have told all to his unknowing father trusting him to be as inclined as ourselves to wish his son’s retreat from this business of Monmouth but my lord Henry King has left the Netherlands. All the caution the boy will use is to call himself by the name of Hurd. Stay by his mother at the Priory as I shall stay by the lad when we get to England to direct him in need. We are committed to the venture now. Pray the Lord He smiles on the duke’s endeavour so that you and I be reunited in life before we are in heaven. But as He wills. Yr loving husband, Donal MacGregor.
He looked up. ‘You’re a sad slut, Mistress Hughes, you lock up nothing. I’ve moved around your house by day, by night. I’ve found keys, pistols, letters, all for the taking. And this one. It proved you Hurd’s mother. I knew the bastard would come. And just now I heard a gargoyle speak in a woman’s voice, I heard it call a man “Henry” and prove him Hurd’s father.’ He put the letter back in his coat, and the pistol once more against Martin Hughes’s head. ‘Old fornicators. Did Prince Rupert know his drab was employing a mere viscount to fill her twat?’
The Vizard Mask Page 66