The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  'Yes. What's the meaning of this?'

  'An' you his whore?'

  A woman pressed forward and peered in. 'Yeah,' she said, showing the gaps in her teeth. 'That's Peg Hughes right enough. I seen her at the theatre. You can let her go.'

  The man was unconvinced: 'Not a bloody Papist whore?'

  'Nah,' said the woman. 'He's a good Protestant, Rupert.'

  Penitence heard her relaying the information to the crowd as the coach jolted forward. 'That's Rupert's trollop. She's all right.'

  It was getting dark, but she could see a great triple tree of a gallows with bodies still hanging on it like untidy washing outlined against the mauve sky. Tyburn. She rapped on the coach roof. The face of Geoffrey, the footman, appeared upside-down in the window. 'Sorry about that, Ladyship, but we better not stop.'

  'What are we doing this far north? Who were those people?'

  'Don't know, Ladyship. Papist-hunters seems like. But don't you worry now. Boiler didn't like the looks of things on the way up; came this way to avoid trouble.'

  'Well, he didn't avoid it, did he? You'd better drive straight to Spring Gardens. I'll walk to Mistress Behn's from there.'

  Geoffrey's face disappeared for consultation and came back. 'Boiler says he ain't letting you out 'til you're got where you're going. It ain't safe. We'll go High Holborn way and get to Mistress Behn's through the back way.'

  Penitence sank back. She was still smarting. She'd forgotten she was somebody's whore. She'd heard there'd been unrest in London, but had imagined it was on the lines of the usual apprentice riots. The flares of the crowd became twinkles in the distance, and fields gave way to houses as they approached High Holborn where she'd been chased that night.

  Don't remember. Don't remember. She was Rupert's whore because of That Night. Hurriedly, she checked the contents of her overnight bag to keep her mind out of reach of an abasement so absolute that she still couldn't tolerate its memory. Her body was less obedient; she felt the flesh move on her bones in revulsion.

  They were stopped again at the top of Farringdon; scowling, Penitence presented herself for examination as Boiler explained that she was Prince Rupert's Protestant woman.

  The streets had an atmosphere different from any she remembered. Some windows were brightly lit and crowded with people watching the activity below. In other houses they were shuttered.

  The Militia was conspicuous by its absence. Groups with torches battered on Catholics' doors or clustered round some suspect asking questions. One house was burning while men held back the desperate householders. There was a businesslike sense to the violence as if the men and women committing it had fallen into routine.

  At St Bride's Street, Boiler and Geoffrey wouldn't leave to return to Rupert's town-house in Spring Gardens until Aphra's door opened. 'Maister'd flay us anything happened to you.' Her temper was not improved by the temptation to go back with them; there she could have a quiet dinner brought by servants who appeared at the ring of a bell, a bath, a comfortable bed and a book, whereas Aphra's house was less comfortable and invariably full of people, often the wits whom Penitence preferred to avoid. But Aphra would be mortified if she didn't stay with her, and she didn't want her friend to think she'd become grand.

  Sure enough, the room overlooking the Fleet Ditch was occupied by Nell Gwynn, who was fencing with Otway to the danger of a gentleman asleep on the rug, an actor Penitence recognized as one of the Duke of York's players; the artist, John Greenhill, sketch-book propped and paint-brush raised, who was squinting at Aphra's chair, drunkenly oblivious of the fact that his subject had gone to greet her guest; and a gibbering figure in a corner, the playwright Nathaniel Lee, who was mad.

  Penitence told her tale of woe. 'What's happening for God's sake? They seemed to think I was Castlemaine or somebody.'

  'It's the coat of arms, Peg,' called Gwynn. 'Same thing happened to me. They thought I was Charlie's new French bitch. They got me as I was coming past the Cross. Bloody near turned the rattler over. I told 'em. Put my head out the windy. "Peace, good people," I said, "I'm the Protestant whore."'

  Removing a cat from Aphra's sagging couch, Penitence sat down. 'But I don't understand. Was it Papists who murdered this magistrate?'

  'It doesn't matter who murdered him,' said the depressed actor at the other end of the couch, whose name she couldn't remember. 'It's who people think murdered him that matters. They think it was Catholics, so it's Catholics will pay. I'm expecting to get arrested any moment.' He handed a sheaf of pamphlets to Penitence: 'Look at these bloody things.'

  'Nobody's going to arrest anybody,' said Aphra. 'Have some more milk punch. Penitence dear, try some of my milk punch.'

  The pamphlets were varied in style but their message was uniformly and virulently anti-Catholic. One had a woodcut of a Jesuit priest under which was the legend: 'My Religion is Murder, Rapine and Rebellion.'

  Another drew a word-picture of what Londoners could expect when the Papist armies joined with indigenous Catholics 'to ravish your good Protestant wives and daughters, spill out the brains of your babies against the walls of your own houses ...' etc.

  Penitence squinted hard at this particular pamphlet, holding it to the light of the fire to examine it better. 'May I keep this one?'

  The actor said she could keep them all. 'My death warrants.'

  Aphra fed him more milk punch. 'The town's gone lunatic,' she complained to Penitence. 'One would have been tempted to get oneself a horse-pistol if one knew how to use it. I wrote some doggerel to counter all this nonsense the other day — "A pox on the factions of the City" — and, damme, if some Member of Parliament didn't accost me in the theatre and accuse me of eating baby Whigs. One had to be quite sharp with him. "One is a vegetarian," I said. "So blurt to you, sirrah.'"

  The atrocity stories went on. Titus Oates had become so bold he was pointing at the Queen's physician, implying that even the Queen was in the plot to kill the King. Magistrates were advising Catholic widows to marry Protestants to confirm their patriotism. The King was helpless in the face of such rage to help those he knew were innocent.

  Worst of all was the emergency's effect on the theatre. 'You'll have a sad audience for Othello, I fear, Penitence,' Aphra told her. 'Shakespeare was no Whig, and if the plays ain't Whiggish, nobody comes to see 'em.'

  But the company consisted of theatre people so gradually conversation reverted to the really important topics: Killigrew's financial problems; the emergence of the new actress at the Duke of York's, Elizabeth Barry, with whom the Earl of Rochester was besotted; the raging argument over rhyme versus blank verse.

  Soothed, Penitence joined in, caught up on the gossip and watched Aphra with an admiration that grew at every meeting. Tonight her hair was escaping from a turban, her wrap was torn at the hem, and the toe of one of her Turkish slippers had developed a droop. She squatted on a stool, scribbling her latest play in a notebook without missing a word of the conversation she stoked so effortlessly, her pleasure in her disparate guests stimulating an answering affection which encompassed each other.

  Anybody who was anybody and in trouble repaired sooner or later to this room with its second-hand furniture and its smell of cats, to receive Aphra's milk punch and unlimited support. It was poor Nat Lee's asylum. At first Nell Gwynn had been scathing about Aphra, as she was about anyone she suspected of pretension. That was until her mother, a famous drunk, staggered into the Fleet Ditch in an alcoholic stupor and drowned. Aphra's own mother had recently died in terror of the pink snakes crawling over her death-bed and the bereaved daughters, sharing a tragedy which everybody else considered comic, had drawn together.

  And Thomas Otway - even Penitence had advised Aphra not to give him a part in her first play. There were enough risks for a woman dramatist without hazarding a stage-struck, stammering amateur. 'One mustn't be ungenerous in success, Penitence dear,' Aphra had said.

  Penitence was nervous for her: 'You're not a success yet.'

  'I shall be.
'

  And, despite the total silence when Otway stared in manic stagefright at the audience, unable to remember his lines — he had to be replaced in the last act - the play had run for a phenomenal six performances. Otway had subsequently turned his genius to writing plays, and was doing well — but not as well as Aphra.

  It would have distressed Aphra, had she been aware of it, that she had been the subject of the first and only quarrel between Penitence and Rupert. He'd been shocked at the idea of a woman writing at all, but after attending Aphra's second play, The Amorous Prince, he'd said to Penitence over dinner at Spring Gardens: 'It is to be hoped, my dear, that you will not be tempted to appear in any of this female's productions.'

  'And why not?'

  'The first act should have told you why not. It was a seduction scene. The couple just risen from the bed were not married, they weren't even affianced.' He was at his most pompous.

  'Neither are we.'

  'We are not on the stage.'

  'Rupert, for goodness' sake, you've been to a dozen plays more scandalous than that.'

  'They were not written by a woman. Your friend she may be, but she writes too loose for the modesty which should distinguish her sex. Were her work more influenced by the Matchless Orinda, I should have no objection to your appearance in them.'

  Penitence got cross. 'The Matchless Orinda didn't have to earn her living, which is just as well because nobody'd want to go to a Matchless Orinda play. They turn up in hundreds for Aphra's. What do you want her to do? Go modestly into obscurity and a debtors' prison? Go modestly on to the streets?'

  'She could marry, or find a protector — if anyone would have her.'

  'She doesn't want to.' His imperturbability was suffocating her. 'She likes what she's doing. She's good at it. And if she ever asks me for one of her roles, I'll jump at the chance.' Even as she slammed out, she knew she wouldn't. Even as she locked the door of her bedroom that night, though Rupert had been too offended to knock on it, she knew she wouldn't. When she'd sold herself to Rupert she'd promised to protect his honour with her own, and his honour, it seemed, could not survive his whore's appearance in an Aphra Behn play. It was in the contract of sale.

  By God, if it wasn't for Benedick, I'd leave him now. Live with Aphra in freedom and self-respect. She'd scrambled into bed and glared round a room in which every lovely surface, every candlestick and pot-pourri jar, every velvet curtain returned the soft sheen of the moonlight coming through the open lattice. Freedom and self-respect.

  And dog-shit.

  No, she wouldn't. She didn't have the courage.

  Sitting opposite Aphra now, Penitence envied and pitied the woman still fighting the battle she herself had deserted. Hardly a day passed but Aphra was rolled in the verbal equivalent of excreta. Fops came deliberately to her first nights to disrupt what must be a bad play because it was a woman's. Churchmen who accepted bawdiness when it was written by a man condemned her 'immodesty' from the pulpit. Male playwrights were savagely jealous enough of each other's success; when the success was a woman's they were merciless. As it dawned on them it wasn't just novelty value that brought in her audiences, the wits went for Aphra with squibs and lampoons. Wycherley wrote a poem full of double entendre about her showing 'her parts' just to get 'a clap'. Her championing of women's right to marry whom they pleased and her plea for their sexual freedom if they were in love brought attacks on her private life by those who assumed that she took a different lover every night.

  She had to struggle against publishers who were honoured to print Rochester's four-letter-worded poems but delayed Aphra's gentle erotica for fear it would be considered indecent.

  The more she answered her critics back — and she did - the more publicity she got. The more publicity she got, the more she was reviled.

  But Davenant at the Duke's Theatre kept putting on her plays, and her plays kept running beyond the vital third day - which was when the author took the box-office receipts. She was getting over £100 a play, besides what she earned from her poems, her editing and her panegyrics to various members of the royal family.

  What she did with the money was a mystery to anybody who first encountered the shabbiness of the room over the Fleet, but Penitence suspected that most of it went to Aphra's brother and all the other lame dogs she was supporting.

  'What's that? Dear Lord, what's that?' From outside came the crack of a firework, shouts and the tramp of feet.

  'It's early for Guy Fawkes' Night.' Frowning, Aphra got up to go to the door, but the nervous actor stopped her: 'Don't open it. Don't open it. They've come for me.'

  'Better not, Affie,' said Nell Gwynn. 'It's all right, Neville lovey' - That's his name. Neville Payne - 'it's the Pope-burning. Some of the procession'll be coming past here on its way to the City, is all.' 'All?'

  Tenderly, Aphra woke up the drunk who'd been asleep on her carpet, introduced him as 'Master John Hoyle of Lincoln's Inn', and they all went upstairs to watch from the window of Aphra's bedroom, which had a view over the Fleet Bridge to Ludgate.

  The procession was just a tributary from the West End on its way to join the main anti-Catholic demonstration being organized in the City, but it was impressive enough. Even Neville Payne, convinced it was directed against him, pressed forward to see the cheering crowds and the floats, some bearing mitred papal effigies surrounded by women dressed as nuns but displaying their breasts and placards which read 'The Pope's Whores'. One of the floats carried a white-faced, life- sized puppet with a sword through its middle, representing the murdered Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Round its neck was a placard with the words 'Revenge Me'.

  'Good, innit?' asked Nell Gwynn, beating time to the music of the bands.

  'Will you get back, woman?' begged Neville Payne. 'You're attracting attention.'

  They ain't after you, my duck,' said Gwynn. 'It's Dismal Jimmy, Duke of York, as they want the balls off.'

  The procession was piling up against Ludgate's bottleneck. To pass the time one of the floats' attendants erected a scaffold and hanged one of the effigies, then set fire to it. As its straw caught fire, the sack which formed its body began to squirm and then yowl.

  'Oh God, oh God,' whispered Aphra. 'They've put cats inside.'

  The amiability of the crowd was shocking; the display on offer diffused the earlier physical violence with the violence of its entertainment. Traffic still jammed the city gate as a young man on a magnificent horse, accompanied by outriders with flares, rode up to it. It was difficult for the watchers in Aphra's window to distinguish features, but they could see that the long cloak which hung from his shoulders and over his horse's rump was the royal purple which only the King, the Duke of York and Prince Rupert were allowed to wear. But the young man wasn't any of these.

  Delighted, the crowds shouted his name as if it were an incantation: 'Monmouth! Monmouth!'

  'Gawd, it's little Prince Perkin,' said Nelly, gravely. 'My Charlie ain't going to like this. He ain't king yet.'

  Neville Payne clutched at her. 'He's not going to be, is he? Tell me he isn't.'

  'He'd like to be,' Nelly Gwynn told him. 'Shaftesbury and the other Whigs is spreading the tale as his ma was secretly married to Charlie. There's supposed to be a Black Box somewheres as contains the marriage papers.' She snorted. 'Black box my arse. If Charlie married Lucy Walter, I'm the Great Cham of China.'

  Beside Penitence the unshaven, drink-sodden figure of John Hoyle of Lincoln's Inn spoke for the first time: 'The boy has delusions of monarchy. If I don't mistake me, he's touching for the King's Evil. A prerogative of your lover, Nelly, surely.'

  A circle which had cleared around Monmouth allowed them to see figures kneeling within it and Monmouth himself laying his hands on the bowed heads in the traditional royal gesture to cure scrofula.

  Nelly shook her head. 'Charlie ain't going to like it,' she said again. 'He's not a bad young limb, ain't Perkin, but Charlie's a great one for the rightful succession. He won't stand for a bastard being
king, even if it is one of his own.'

  'He'll be dead by then, anyway,' said Penitence. She was tired and wanted to go to bed.

  Hoyle said: 'I agree. Down with all tyrants. What does it matter who's king? They're all the same. Though I fear we shall all live to see that it matters a great deal. Mistress Behn, isn't it a somewhat long interval between drinks in this establishment?'

  Unlike his appearance, Hoyle's voice was beautiful and educated and the moment he addressed it to Aphra Penitence knew they were lovers, a fact confirmed when at last the streets fell quiet, the party broke up and he and Aphra retired to bed together.

  In the small guest bedroom, Penitence worried more about that than the kingdom's future. Here's another one. Aphra was not a promiscuous woman, though her generosity in giving houseroom to male as well as female friends down on their luck led people to believe that she was. Her trouble lay in being attracted to men who inevitably took her money before leaving her for somebody else.

  Her last lover, another young lawyer, Jeffrey Boys, was always in debt, and Penitence was present when his creditors turned up on Aphra's doorstep demanding payment for notes she had signed on his behalf.