The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  The audience that afternoon was meagre indeed; for once there were more 'vizards', as the players called the pit prostitutes, than customers, and even they kept clustering in irritating groups to whisper the latest news of the blockade. Hart did his best, but as the four captains bearing Hamlet offstage reached the wings, the corpse was heard to remark: 'Bugger Shakespeare. We're doing Dryden from here on.'

  Penitence didn't like Dryden's heroic drama. His rhyming couplets were more difficult to speak than Shakespeare's blank verse - good as far as rhyming couplets went, sometimes even sublime, but needing a lot of work if they weren't to sound banal — and she found his female characters flat; for all their bravura speeches on love and sacrifice, they were empty of humanity.

  She didn't like Dryden much either. The genius was there and the poet's country-dumpling head was packed with more learning than any head had a right to be, but she found him curiously lacking in conviction. He had a chameleon quality, a theatre man when among actors, a watchful rake when among rakes, the complete courtier in the presence of the King.

  One day, when he was rehearsing them for The Rival Ladies, she placed him. There'd been a quarrel between Anne Marshall and Knipp over who was upstaging whom and Dryden had to separate them. 'Come, come, ladies, a theatre is as it were a little commonwealth, by the good government whereof God's glory may be advanced.'

  'A Puritan,' exclaimed Penitence, recognizing a misquotation from the book of management that had dictated her childhood, ' "an household is as it were a little commonwealth" ... how do you know Dod and Cleaver, Master Dryden?'

  She was taken aback by his fury: 'And how do you know it, madam? Were you of the Levelling rabble?'

  'Neither Levellers nor rabble,' she said. She didn't let insults pass nowadays. 'But people who used their tongues with courtesy.'

  Later he sought her out and apologized. 'Though it does no good, Mrs Hughes, to insist on an upbringing hateful both to us and our royal master.'

  She shrugged. 'I neither insist on it nor conceal it.'

  Discussing the incident with Aphra, she said: 'He's a trimmer. He wrote fulsome praise of Cromwell during the Protectorate. Now he's the complete royalist. I hate trimmers.'

  'You're not a playwright dependent on patronage,' said Aphra, who was still unsuccessfully hawking her writing around town. 'But you're happy enough to speak the words he writes. I don't blame the poor man. I'd praise the Devil if I thought he'd put my play on.'

  Chastened, Penitence had to admit that Dryden knew what the public wanted. England's pride had been hurt; its people had to look backwards to find heroism and principle, aware their own age had none.

  Dryden provided both qualities with grandeur. He also provided spectacle. Killigrew groaned at the expense of exotic costumes, the dancers, the equipment to enable gods and goddesses to descend from the heavens in cars and spirits to rise from the underworld, the storms, the dungeons, the magical effects. But audiences loved it. Crowds flocked in. The carriage trade blocked Drury Lane in both directions.

  And it was Peg Hughes it saw. Her blonde hair and height advantage over the other actresses, nearly all of whom were shorter and dark, the stateliness of her walk, thanks to John Downes's training, and the careful diction with which she still had to control her stutter made her Dryden's ideal heroine. 'The perfect Englishwoman,' he said.

  That she played an Inca maiden in The Indian Queen and a Spanish girl dressed as a boy in The Rival Ladies didn't matter; Englishness set in exotic climes was what Dryden gave them.

  And rant.

  'Die, sorceress, die! And all my wrongs die with thee,' shrieked Penitence as she plunged home a stage dagger during the first performance of The Rival Ladies, wondering whether the audience would laugh, and instead hearing it drag in its breath with horror.

  She became expert at tortuous lines:

  Oh, my dear father! Oh, why may not I,

  Since you gave life to me, for you now die?

  and made them, if not natural, at least thrilling.

  O Lust! O horror! O perfidy!

  It seemed to her she emitted more 'O's' than verse. But Dryden's O's were turning her from a promising actress into the toast of London.

  What she said became less important than the way she said it. She was gaining power in more ways than one. It only needed her name to figure in large type on a Dryden playbill for the Theatre Royal to be so packed as to be dangerous. Wits, rakes, fops no longer dared interrupt a Hughes—Dryden play for fear of being lynched by the pit. In any case, Penitence could now quell their hesitant jeers with a single 'O!'

  Power. She knew what it was on the day Killigrew called her into his office before another performance of The Rival Ladies.

  He was sitting on his couch, and patting it. 'Well, my dear girl,' he said, 'it's been a long time.'

  She smiled at him and didn't move from the doorway. 'It has indeed, Sir Tom.'

  He continued to pat. 'I knew,' he said, tilting his head at her, 'I knew when you were just a little walker you'd have London at your feet one day, and now you have.'

  'Yes, Sir Tom.'

  'All due to me, you know.'

  'Thank you, Sir Tom.'

  'Come and give us a kiss then.'

  She planted one of her feet on the chair by his desk - she was in boy's costume. 'Davenant sent me round a note of congratulation the other day, Sir Tom. After he'd come to see The Indian Emperor.'

  Killigrew had been confidently lounging. Now he sat up. 'Don't believe it. Whatever that street-juggling coxcomb promised you, don't you believe it.'

  'I believe,' said Penitence, 'that he thinks I'm even better than Mrs Sanderson. I believe he pays Mrs Sanderson thirty-five shillings a week.'

  'Nonsense. There's no actress in the world worth thirty-five shillings a week. Hart only gets two pounds a week. And don't you start blackmailing me, Miss Majesty. For one thing, the King wouldn't let you go.'

  'I believe,' said Penitence, 'that Davenant will persuade the Duke to play his brother at cards for me. If I give the word. I believe that the King's been losing heavily lately.'

  Sir Tom stood up, took off his wig and flung it to the floor. 'God damn all women. This is my reward for employing the bitches. I should have listened to the Puritans. I should have stuck to boys. I could have trained orang-utans better and cheaper, but no, in the goodness of my heart, I take a gaggle of bare-arsed geese out of the stews, turn them into swans and what happens?' He thrust his face close to Penitence's. 'Eh? They bite the bloody hand that feeds them.'

  Penitence forced herself not to recoil. 'But is it going to feed me thirty-five shillings a week?'

  Sir Tom jerked his chair from under her foot. 'You've got too big for your boots, madam.'

  She looked down at her boots, a pair of gilded kid, cast-offs from one of Castlemaine's young royal bastards; they fitted perfectly. 'It's nearly curtain-up time,' she said. 'Do 1 go on today or don't I?' Even with the door closed, they could hear the subdued roar of a packed house coming from the auditorium. 'What?' Sir Tom had mumbled something.

  'I said,' he said nastily, 'I suppose you'll have to go on. And don't blame me if the whole company goes bankrupt.'

  'There's just one more thing,' she said. Might as well go the whole hog. 'I should like Dorinda to become a walker.'

  'Who the hell's Dorinda?'

  'The orange-girl.' Doesn't he remember anybody he leches?

  'That Dorinda.' Sir Tom became reflective. 'Amazing girl. Twat like a corkscrew. Certainly, certainly.' He sighed. 'What's another harlot? Anything else, madam? No husband you want a dukedom for?'

  'No thank you, Sir Tom. I have no husband.'

  'That's a mercy for some poor devil. Now get out on that stage. And I tell you this, madam, I'm regretting the day—'

  'There is one last thing. I wish you would reconsider Aphra Behn's play.'

  Killigrew got up, pushed past her, opened the door and pointed. 'Out. It's bad enough being blackmailed by sluts of actresses, b
ut ruin myself with some female's scribble I shall not. Out.'

  Penitence outed. Becky Marshall, also in boy's costume, was waiting for her in the corridor. 'Did it work?'

  Penitence took her hands and swung her round. 'It worked. I avoided the couch and I got a rise.'

  Her ambition leaped like a mountain goat into higher, greener pasture. It was true Hart received only a £2 a week salary, but as a shareholder in the company he also got £1,000 a year. Why shouldn't a woman become a shareholder?

  Telling Dorinda that she had procured her at least a start in the theatre was another ferocious joy. As they walked home together that night, their plans ran into fantasy.

  'I'll put Benedick's name down for Westminster School.'

  'We can do up the Cock and Pie.'

  'We could leave the Rookery altogether. We could move into Westminster.'

  'Pity about Aphra's play.'

  'We'll put it on ourselves. We'll have our own theatre.'

  Drury Laners stared at them as they twirled along, their voices calling out into the summer evening.

  At the entrance to Dog Yard Dorinda, at least, calmed down. 'I'll lease out the orange business. Can't afford to lose them profits.'

  'Oranges,' scoffed Penitence. 'We won't need them for long. We're professional women now.'

  'I always was,' said Dorinda.

  'A real profession. Respectable. Well, respectable-ish. Oh, Dorry, we're independent. We can survive. We don't have to sleep with any man ever again.'

  They stood in the middle of the Yard so long, transfixed by the thought, that Footloose came trundling over to see what was the matter. From the window of Mother Hubbard's where a new generation of girls had taken over from the old, a voice asked a passer-by: 'Want some fickytoodle, dearie?'

  Penitence snatched Footloose's cap from his head and threw it in the air. 'We don't have to sleep with anybody ever again.'

  'Lessen we want to,' said Dorinda, catching the cap and kissing the scabby head before replacing its covering.

  Hearing their voices, Benedick came toddling out of the Cock and Pie's door. Penitence ran up the steps and lifted him before he fell down them. She put him on her shoulder and turned so that he could survey the empires of the earth.

  Dog Yard was in the shadow cast by the tall wooden frame of Mother Hubbard's, but the sunset was gilding the tattered rooftops and the view beyond. 'We're rising, my son,' she said.

  As Penitence rose so did the City of London. In place of the destroyed ancient forest of buildings sprang up an elegant plantation.

  It wasn't as elegant as it might have been; Christopher Wren's visionary plan as Surveyor-General which would, if built, have rivalled Rome or the Paris redesigned by Henri IV, was rejected as too expensive. Obstruction, procrastination and corruption inevitably took the fine edge off even the compromise.

  But if Wren wasn't allowed to design Utopia, he designed practically everything else. Under his supervision fifty-one churches began to raise their differing and beautiful steeples into the empty sky, some like pagodas, some tiered, or with columns, consoles and obelisks, some Flemish, others Gothic.

  The labour to rebuild houses and shops, big or small, went on every day and sometimes into the night by the light of flares. Timber was brought not only from all over the country but from as far away as Norway. Brick kilns ringed the city with smoke, the one at Moorgate alone turning out over a million bricks a year.

  Anguish for the past was replaced by pride in the new as a modern, wider-thoroughfared city of brick, stone and tile emerged from the ruins.

  Yet for all the growth, there was a sense of incompleteness. Londoners up to their elbows in plaster would pause as they looked towards the uncrowned rise on which had floated the great whale to which their homes and churches had been the accompanying school of porpoises. It would take years, perhaps they would never live to see it; until St Paul's was resurrected London could not be London.

  But up on the hill, a foundation stone was being laid without ceremony. 'Here,' Christopher Wren said. 'We'll start here. Get a flat stone and put it here.'

  His workmen looked around the scree of fire-scarred rubble. 'Which one?'

  'Any one.'

  The nearest and flattest was part of an old gravestone; as they tipped it down on to the spot that Wren indicated they saw what word was on it.

  'Resurgam.'

  Entering his mother's bedroom for a morning kiss, Benedick took one look and yelled. Mistress Palmer came running. 'Gawdelpus, what you wearing that bloody thing for? You look like the Devil crapped hisself flying.'

  Penitence was struggling to undo the mask strings that had got tied up with her back hair. 'I slept in it. It's got ... blast the thing, don't fret, darling, it's only Mama ... cream on the inside. It's to feed the skin. There, now give us a kiss.'

  'You got bloody gloves on an' all.'

  'Same thing. And I wish you'd watch your language in front of the boy.'

  'I don't fright him shitless, that's one thing', and muttering that in her day they used soap and water, Mrs Palmer took herself off.

  'We'll have to get you a tutor,' Penitence told her son.

  'Don't want a tutor. You said MacGregor was my tutor. He's learning me—'

  'Teaching.'

  '—teaching me ever so well. You ain't heard me read my new horn book.' Benedick's small forefinger traced a 'B' in the grease on his mother's face. 'Will I read it to you now?'

  'I've got to get up and make pretty.'

  Benedick bounced up and down on her stomach. 'Why? Why do you? You said you was resting today. You said we'd go to the park.'

  He was a dark-haired child with fine, sallow skin. As he glowered at Penitence just then she saw his father and shut her eyes to get rid of the image. So far the boy hadn't questioned his one-parent state — so many of his contemporaries in the Rookery lacked a father that it seemed a natural condition to him.

  She was prepared for when he did. 'Your father is dead, Benedick.' She wanted Henry King dead. Every day she wanted him deader. The nights were a different matter, but by day she obliterated the man's personality. Each year increased her resentment at the ease with which he'd gone away and stayed away, until her memory of the man deliberately diminished him into the caricature of a seducer. She'd forbidden Dorinda and MacGregor to mention him.

  The first time she heard his name at the theatre, when Hart and Lacy were discussing the possibility of putting on a translation of Tartuffe, it was a shock. 'I wish Henry

  King were still with us,' Hart said. 'He was the Moliere expert.'

  'Ah, Henry,' sighed Knipp, 'I miss him.'

  It was like hearing that a centaur, some mythical creature, had once dropped in for tea. It was against her pride to seek more information, though she would have welcomed it unsought. There were other mentions, but none seemed to know where he had come from or gone to and, typical players that they were, concerned themselves with him only as he had affected their theatrical lives.

  The momentary resemblance hardened her heart against the boy. 'I must shop for when I go to the races with the King,' she told him. 'You want Mama to look nice, don't you?'

  'I wish he'd fight battles, then I could go. I want to go to war.'

  She rinsed her face and began sorting through the silver-gilt boxes, tweezers and bowls that Sir Hugh Middleton had given her as a peace offering. 'Your Auntie Aphra should never have taken you to see Henry the Fifth.'

  'Wasn't it grand when they killed all those Frenchies?'

  'It wasn't very grand when the Frenchies killed the little boys in the baggage train.' Lemon juice on Spanish wool cleared the last of the grease from her face. A little cochineal went on the cheekbone as her son dispatched the nobility of France with her long-handled powder-puff.

  'I wish I had a sword.'

  You should have. We had to sell it. 'Sir Charles says he'll give you one he had as a boy.'

  'Will he?' His face went sullen. 'Don't like Sir Charles Sedley-pe
dley-wedley. Why do you like him? He makes fun of me.'

  'He makes fun of everybody. Powder-puff please.'

  'Can't we go to the park?'

  'Come here.' As he stood between her knees they looked at each other with mutual incomprehension. They spent so little time together that she was self-conscious when she talked to him. 'Benedick, you know when we went to Auntie Knipp's house?'

  He nodded.