The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Outside Sir Hugh's shouts were diminishing as Killigrew persuaded him back to the auditorium. Anne Marshall was panicking as usual. 'Oh hell, oh hell, I can't find my ... oh there they are.' She gave Penitence's cold cheek a kiss. 'You look lovely, dear. Good luck.'

  Coney put her head out of the door: 'Mrs Hughes's cloak.'

  'Mrs Hughes's cloak coming up.' Theatre costumes were guarded like gold, which generally was what they were worth, being mostly royal cast-offs. On performance days the floors on stage and backstage were laid with calico sheets to protect them. Cully, the property boy, hobbled in with the shoulders of the blue silk cloak laid over his rheumatic hands, his assistant holding its train.

  Coney draped it around Penitence's shoulders and fastened it.

  The callboy knocked on the door. 'Act I. Scene iii. Mrs Hughes, please.'

  Penitence clutched Rebecca Marshall again. 'P-p-pplease. I can't remember anything. Not a line.'

  'I know.'

  'Bb-bb-bbut it's gone. I want to g-g-go home.'

  'I know.'

  Between them, the Marshall sisters walked the sagging Penitence to the wings where they stood crammed between John Downes and the cut-out of Othello's ship which had been dragged offstage along the groove that held it. John switched his eyes from his prompter's script for a second and gave her a thumbs-up sign.

  Penitence stared ahead. Through the unglazed window of the prompt-side door the actors on stage appeared unreal and far-away in their brightly lit frame. Hart, black-faced and opulent in green and gold, was declaiming, a puppet facing the unseen monster she could hear breathing in the cavern beyond the footlights. It was an animal. She could smell it. Aphra was out there, and Dorinda and MacGregor, Dogberry and his friends, and it had eaten them, absorbed them into its maw.

  She was limp. She'd reached the stage of terror beyond terror. I'll stutter. I'm going to stutter. I can't even stutter. I'll stand there and they can send me home. I'll die. This can't be happening. It doesn't matter. It's all silly. No job for a grown woman.

  'It's a step up from being a whore. The job, my dear girl, is the play. We give them the best we know. Now breathe.'

  Hart's great voice throbbed out:

  'She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them, This only is the witchcraft I have used.'

  Rebecca Marshall saw Penitence's hands go up to her face as if adjusting a mask. She touched her on the shoulder: 'Decus et Dolor,' she said.

  'Decus et Dolor,' said Penitence.

  'Here comes the lady; let her witness it,' said Othello and held out his arms.

  Desdemona ran on to the stage ...

  She used everything she'd ever known, emitting it out of skin and mouth to the huge shape in green and gold that dominated the stage. The audience was small and had a respectable feel, mostly citizens who hadn't fancied the risque play at the Duke's. She felt their hostility; they wanted a Desdemona they knew, sexually naive. There was a wave of shocked disapproval as she kissed and stroked the black face.

  Hart amazed her; even in rehearsal he'd never responded like this. It wasn't Desdemona's play, it was Othello's, but her rendering was allowing the Moor subtleties that hadn't been explored; he grew as she fed him and fed her back so that she grew alongside, taking the audience with her.

  Then it was the interval before Act II. Marshall came groaning into the tiring-room where Mrs Coney was repowdering Penitence. 'There's stinkards arrived,' she said, 'Sedley and some others. They're with Middleton up on the apron already.'

  I'll stutter. Now I'll stutter.

  'Sick bowl,' called Coney.

  But Becky Marshall had taken Penitence by her shoulders and was shaking her. 'Look at me. It doesn't matter what they do. You and Hart are . . . well, it's like sharing the stage with tigers. You've conquered the cits to the point where they'd cut their throats if you told them to do it. You're not to let them down. Whatever the other bastards do, ignore them. Do you hear me?'

  It was a generous speech; Becky Marshall had wanted to play Desdemona herself.

  'Yes, Becky. Thank you.' Breathe.

  But it was still terrible to stand at the prompt door listening to fops' chatter, rebuilding Desdemona's energy to go out and face it.

  On stage, Kynaston as Cassio was too old a hand to be distracted, but the others with him were being put off their stroke. As John Downes in the wings called out: 'A sail! a sail! a sail!' to signal the arrival of Othello's ship into Cyprus, one of the fops got up and did a hornpipe to the applause of his friends. The citizens in the pit were getting restless at the interruptions. Another moment and the theatre would be in uproar.

  Beside her, Lacy took her hand. 'Last time 1 played lago,' he said, 'we got raided by Cromwell's troopers. Rough? You think those lily-pinks out there are rough? Wait 'til you've been on the end of a Puritan pike.' He crossed himself. 'Decus et Dolor.'

  'Decus et Dolor.' Radiating happiness, she swept out.

  The scene quelled some of the hoots with which the fops and rakes always accorded a new actress in a leading role and, though they rose again at the passion of her greeting to Othello, she felt the aggression waver. It was a matter of mastery, hers or theirs. Power was leaving them as she and Hart sucked it out of them, transmuted it, and turned it into indomitable tragedy.

  She forgot them; she wasn't playing to Othello, but to another man who had believed her to be a whore. She cried Desdemona's cry, 'I have not deserved this', to Henry King.

  In the Willow Song she glimpsed Sir Hugh weeping like a baby and Sedley leaning forward, his hand cupped on his chin. She allowed her voice to break on the last line and felt the anguish of the pit rush forward out of the darkness to comfort her. She begged Othello not to kill her.

  'It is too late.' Hart's voice was begging himself not to kill her.

  She felt the pillow over her face and almost panicked. Suppose he gets carried away. Her last lines were the trickiest; the not-quite-dead-yet was, she felt, Shakespeare overdoing it. 'O! Farewell,' but in the audience somebody sobbed as her hand went limp over the side of the bed.

  At last Othello's body fell on hers: '.. . to die upon a kiss' enveloping her in a smell of stove-blacking. She heard the sigh of the curtain come down on a house that was totally silent.

  'Oh God,' she muttered. 'They didn't like it.'

  'Stay still' Hart's white eye glared at her, like a shark's. 'Anyone can rouse a house. To subdue it is the true artistry. And we've done it.'

  The curtain rose with the bodies still lying on the bed, the dead Emilia (Rebecca Marshall) artistically draped on the floor.

  It wasn't until Hart handed her up that the applause came at her. She stood in it, Hart's hand holding hers high. She loved him. She loved the fops now standing in ovation, loved the beast out there she had conquered, the unicorn that was laying its head in her lap. A fountain of eternal youth played about her.

  I wish Benedick were here. They'd left him with Mistress Palmer, in case the sight of his mother being smothered was too much for him.

  The triumph wasn't complete. It was missing somebody.

  Kynaston and Marshall came on to be washed in their turn, as they deserved. Appreciation gained solid form; flowers, ribbons, coins landed at their feet. Somebody threw a gold watch.

  Anne Marshall was due to speak the prologue and whet appetites for the next day's performance of The Humorous Lieutenant, but Killigrew took her place to say that in view of the reception 'the King's Servants will oblige with yet another rendering of Othello on the morrow'.

  Having received a heart-warming 'Not bad, not bad at all' from John Downes, Penitence made her way to the tiring- room and chaos. The place had been invaded by a dozen or so stinkards dodging Jacko's efforts to eject them, drinking, tweaking the dressers' bottoms, staring down Becky Marshall's cleavage, experimenting with the powders and patches before the looking-glasses.

  A cheer went up at Penitence's entrance and Sir Hugh Middleton threw himself, literal
ly, at her feet. 'You wonderful creature, you moved me. I adore you. Be mine.'

  Sir Charles Sedley bowed before her, for once only in half- mockery. 'Well, well,' he said.

  Penitence hobbled towards her stool with Sir Hugh attached to one of her ankles. She was drained; she'd been hoping for a reflective post-mortem with her fellow-players. As always, the rakes were drunk and, as such, alarming; she felt vulnerable and exposed. Adulation was preferable coming from beyond the footlights.

  She tried to smile and thank them, but became irritable with fatigue. Sir Hugh's hands kept leaving her ankle and going higher up her leg. 'You move me, you splendid creature.'

  She kicked but he hung on. 'I wish somebody would move you.' She appealed to Sedley. 'Can't you get him off?' But he made no attempt, just watched her as if she were a game retriever puppy and he was assessing her reaction to the sound of guns.

  Cully came in, demanding her costume.

  'Let me keep it on, just for tonight,' she begged. Becky Marshall was trying to change behind a screen which, despite the combined efforts of Jacko and Mrs Coney, who was wielding the sick bowl, was rocking as the rakes peeked over it.

  '"Any actress wearing costume for other than theatre purposes to forfeit a week's wages",' Cully quoted, unmoved.

  'Then go and ask Master Hart and Master Lacy to come and remove these people.'

  'Gone home,' said Cully.

  'Sir Tom, then.' It had come to something that she must ask Killigrew for help.

  'Gone home.'

  She had to join Marshall behind the screen in the awkward business of putting her old dress over her head and struggling out of her costume beneath it, with Sir Hugh Middleton crawling round and shouting the colour of her stockings and garters to the others, until Coney brought the sick bowl down on his head.

  'Why is this allowed?' she asked furiously of Marshall.

  Becky shrugged. 'They're the King's friends. This is the King's theatre. We're the theatre's playthings.' She grinned. 'I see Sir Hugh has changed his allegiance, faithless fellow. You're welcome to him.'

  They had to charge for the door, turning down invitations to supper, weekends in the country, carriage rides home. Outside in the corridor Penitence was waylaid by a soberly dressed, round-faced man who offered her a thick manuscript: 'Mrs Hughes, would you do me the honour of reading this play?'

  Some of the rakes were trying to lift her. 'What? Oh, put me down.'

  'It's my play,' the man was running alongside as she was carried through the corridor, shoulder-high, 'I want you for the heroine.'

  As she was carried into Riding Yard Alley, Sir Charles Sedley finally came to her rescue: 'Put her down, my buckos, the lady is out of humour.' He picked the manuscript out of Penitence's hand and read the cover by the light of the stage- door flare. 'The Indian Queen. Full of bombast and rant, I have no doubt. Still, the fellow has a felicity with words and panders to popular taste.'

  Penitence straightened her skirt. 'Who is he?'

  'Dryden? A useful enough scribbler, though not in the same class as myself, in more ways than one.' He eyed her dishevel- ment and the fawning Sir Hugh, whom she was still trying to bat away. 'I really think, my dear, you should find yourself a protector.'

  But for one night at least she had one, many. As she emerged from Riding Yard Alley, there was a cheer from a crowd of very different men.

  That night Penitence was carried home to the Cock and Pie on the shoulders of Drury Lane butchers.

  Chapter 5

  Penitence was sworn in as one of His Majesty's Servants on a fine non-performance day at the beginning of June at the Lord Chamberlain's house in Whitehall. She was dressed in latest 'shepherdess' fashion: a straw hat as big as a coachwheel with blue satin ribbons tied under her chin matching the bows on her silver-kid shoes, a dress of sprigged cream muslin over silk petticoats and a hidden whalebone bodice which cupped her bosom into globes. An inch of lace saved her nipples from exposure — as long as she didn't bend too far forwards.

  She copied Knipp and Marshall in using a walking-cane more as an accessory than an aid, arm extended, fingers quirked, but whereas Knipp's and Marshall's were the usual mock-ivory affairs smuggled out of the property cupboard, hers was gilded and carved in the shape of a shepherd's crook, a token of esteem from the Drury Lane butchers.

  The ceremony, like the Lord Chamberlain himself, was dignified and short. Hart, Kynaston and Lacy stood beside her in the scarlet and gold livery of royal players; Penitence was disappointed to find that the King's actresses weren't presented with a suit of clothes when they were sworn in, only a gold medallion with Charles's head on it.

  As they stepped out into the sunshine and St James's Park, Hart said: 'How do you feel now, young Peg?'

  'Official.' It was a delicious sensation, as if she'd been a thing of two dimensions and, pop, expanded into three.

  Two pubescent girls spied her from under the limes and came rushing up, dragging their father with them. 'Oh Mrs Hughes, we saw you ... indeed, we did, but yesterday. In The Great Favourite.'

  Their father swept off his hat: 'These chits of mine try to say, ma'am, that at last we have seen nobility tread England's boards again. We thank you.'

  Penitence bowed.

  'Bribed,' said Lacy as they walked on. The others nodded sadly.

  Penitence examined her fingernails. 'Nobility,' she sighed. 'What a shame more of us don't have it.'

  Kynaston stared around him: 'And this whippersnapper, this ungrateful weanling, this serpent's tooth, now expects us to treat her.'

  'Let's go to Potiphar's for one,' said Becky Marshall.

  'Let's stay in the park,' said Lacy, careful with his money, 'I'll stand her a milk.'

  'Let's go to Gwynn's house,' said Knipp, 'and the King can stand us all a wine.'

  It was a little early. As Lacy pointed out: 'Better not catch him with his breeches down.'

  It was no hardship to saunter along the lake edge and watch the ducks and pelicans. Penitence had a moment of guilt that she was not spending this free time with Benedick - she was kept so hard at it nowadays learning scripts for productions which frequently only lasted a night before being replaced by another that the words she most often addressed to him were 'Run away and play, darling. Mother's busy.' As for the others at the Cock and Pie, virtually her only intercourse with them took place if they came backstage after the performance and walked her home.

  Why shouldn't I have some pleasure? This had become another standard phrase. For all its work and tensions, King's was like some marvellous pantry to which she had been given the freedom after a lifetime of starvation. Moments like this, relaxed in lovely surroundings among peers whose creativity she respected as they respected hers, whose shop talk was of consuming interest, were addictive candied cherries.

  They were in their playground. In the City, among nouveau riche financiers and merchants, they were less inclined to display themselves, especially the actors when identifiable in livery. There the old Puritan ethic was still in evidence and they could be subject to abuse from citizens who objected to the more risque plays, or even the occasional handful of horse manure thrown by a prudish apprentice. Here, among the parks, palaces and gardens of the old money, they were surrounded by their audience.

  Though even here, she noticed, her companions were keeping a look-out and not just in order to acknowledge the salutes of their adorers. They were still vulnerable to the fury of a wronged husband or wife, or even some rake who had been pilloried by one of the wits' plays or prologues, and who blamed the actor who spoke the offence rather than the author. Last week Hart had been nearly run through by an inflamed fop who'd recognized his own posturing in a prologue written by Howard.

  They wandered on to where the milkmaid was calling as her cows grazed around her. 'Ah,' Lacy said to her, 'sweet child, whose breath is your own and scents all year long of June, like a new-mown haycock.'

  'Just tell us how many you want,' said the milkmaid, wearily.
>
  'Seven,' said Lacy.

  They sat down on a bench while the maid squatted, put her large, red hands round an udder's teats and squirted them towards the pail.

  'I'm sorry the King didn't attend the inauguration, Peg,' said Kynaston. 'He was there for mine.'

  'Ah,' said Becky Marshall, 'but you didn't refuse the King's invitation to bed beforehand.'

  'He never asked.' Kynaston fluttered his eyelashes, and turned on Penitence. 'You didn't. Did you?'

  'She cocking well did,' said Knipp. 'Chiffinch came into the green room yesterday and put it to her.'

  'I didn't know who he was,' explained Penitence. At first he'd been just another among the hot-eyed, well-dressed men who crowded into the actresses' tiring-room after a performance. 'I didn't know he was the King's pimp. It was so ... oblique.' Her voice became lofty: 'His Majesty had enjoyed my interpretation, and should I wish to avail myself of the Privy Stair at any time, His Majesty would be graciously pleased.'