The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Penitence kissed her. 'I'll think about it, Nelly.'

  'Well, don't think too long. Ain't either us of getting younger. And any time you want to sell Elizabeth of Bohemia's pearls I'm in the market.'

  When everybody had gone, Penitence took the boys into her drawing-room, sat them down and stood by the fireplace. 'I thought we ought to discuss your future,' she said.

  'Have we got one?' asked Benedick. Of the two, he was showing his grief more openly. Dudley was trying to hide his for her sake.

  'Well,' she said, 'in view of the King's attitude, your advancement may be delayed. In England at any rate, and for a while.'

  'I want to join the army,' Benedick said.

  'You want to join any army,' pointed out Dudley.

  She'd been afraid of that. And Dudley will because he thinks he ought to be military like his father.

  She kept her voice mild. 'I have a suggestion. I have written to the Prince of Orange to ask if you may attend his court for a year or two. He is a relation, after all. He has written back to say he would be delighted.'

  Dudley smiled for the first time since his father's death. 'Seeing the world.'

  'Fighting the French.' Benedick was on his feet.

  No you won't. William had written back to her: 'Had I not known of their connection with my revered late kinsman, 1 should yet welcome the two young gentlemen for your sake. Do not concern yourself, dear madam, that they shall be endangered of body or soul.'

  She'd done her own checking. William's furious defence of his country had given Louis XIV pause; for a while at least the Dutch Netherlands were at peace. Reports from The Hague were of Mary's domesticity, visits to the opera and church, garden-planning, home-building.

  If the boys didn't break their necks hunting — which they could do just as easily in England as in Holland - their bodies would be safe enough and their souls much safer in his care than tasting the debauchery of Whitehall.

  What a fool you are, Charles Stuart, preferring dissolutes to splendid young men like mine and Rupert's.

  The boys wouldn't lack money. She was going to share between them the 1,694 guineas that Rupert's iron chest had contained.

  The only hesitation she felt in sending them to the Netherlands was caused by a letter in her pocket that minute. It was a polite condolence on the death of His Royal Highness, Prince Rupert. It was signed by the Viscount of Severn and Thames and its address was The Hague.

  There was a lot to do. Rupert had left pensions to members of his household who were old enough to retire — and most of them were. Good positions had to be found for those who remained and who didn't want to accompany Penitence into the wilds of Somerset.

  To her surprise, the Reverend Boreman and Mistress Palmer were quite prepared to be uprooted again and replanted in Somerset. Boiler, the coachman, and Johannes and Annie, the nursemaid, were also willing to go with her.

  Penitence watched almost everything she'd known for the last eleven years go under the hammer during the sale of Awdes' contents. She remained dry-eyed until the last lot, an old hunting mare of Rupert's that had gone blind years ago.

  Squire Brewster bid a pound and bought her. 'No, no,' he said with surprising concern for Penitence's anxiety. 'She shall live out her days in high grass. He'd have wanted it so.'

  In the spring Boiler drove the last unsold coach through Awdes' gates to take the Great West Road. Inside it were Penitence, Mistress Palmer, the Reverend Boreman, Dorinda, Ruperta and Tongs. On top sat a lot of cases. Beside it ran a large black poodle.

  Without anything being formally said, Dorinda had now so infiltrated the household that she and Tongs were part of it. The Huguenot apprentice was successfully running the Cock and Pie Press; MacGregor was longer and longer away in the Low Countries and Dorinda referred to him less and less often.

  The arrangement suited Penitence sufficiently for her not to ask questions. Tongs and Ruperta were excellent playmates and, while Dorinda could be a screaming irritant, hers was the down-to-earth voice that saved Penitence from becoming too maudlin in her bereavement.

  Behind the coach came a luggage wagon with Annie and Johannes. The outriders consisted of a large troop of the Earl of Craven's musketeers which the Earl had insisted on sending along to see her safely into Somerset: 'Suppose word got out to highwaymen that you were carrying the dear Queen's necklace, Mrs Hughes. No, no, Rupert would never forgive me.'

  It seemed to Penitence that the coach would attract a good deal more attention with a troop of outriders than without them; Elizabeth of Bohemia's necklace was assuming the weight of a millstone. On the other hand, it was Ruperta's dowry.

  I must find Athelzoy's secret room. Put the damn necklace in it for safety.

  It struck her that she wasn't safe any more. Rupert had protected her, her child and her goods but now she could be preyed on - and not just by thieves. Already the King had shown his pique at her inheritance of his uncle's money by banning her from the stage of his theatre. He might positively punish her. Try to marry her off, perhaps. He would be unlikely to defend her against the harassment of men like Charles Sedley.

  Penitence worked herself up into such a panic that she felt again, as she hadn't in years, the terror of the night when she'd been pursued along High Holborn. Once again she was a hare and any dogs who cared to were free to run her to ground. Only this time she was even more vulnerable in having a leveret. I'll turn and fight this time. They shan't hurt Ruperta.

  'Told you them oysters was crapped,' Mistress Palmer shouted above the rattle of the coach.

  Penitence looked across at her. 'What?'

  'Them oysters. Back at that last inn. Turned you green.'

  'You all right, Prinks?' asked Dorinda. 'You been snuffling.'

  She was being idiotic. She wasn't that important; Rupert hadn't left her so much money that she'd automatically become prey to robbers and fortune-hunters. 'I was worrying about the necklace,' she said, 'with all these soldiers, every thief in London will have gathered I'm taking it down to the country.'

  'Country?' Dorinda put her head out of the window and regarded the green view unfavourably. 'Tunbridge Wells is country. This is ballocking jungle. Any poor sod of a thief as tracks us down here is going to need a restorative. Where are we?'

  'Not far now.' Dorinda was right. If she was a hare, at least she was returning to her forme. She would creep into it. Athelzoy, Rupert's last gift to her, would become a shrine to his memory and she the keeper of its flame, paying the debt she owed him with chastity, devoted motherhood and good works. Sacrificially, she stared out of the window, waiting for the coach to begin its slight climb through secret trees along a winding track

  She'd forgotten the driveway that Rupert had ordered to be blazed through those secret trees. Unfinished, it cut a swathe as ugly as if a Titan had scuffed his way through her woodland to get to the house.

  But as she looked up towards the Priory, Penitence fell in love all over again. Too exposed, yet built to be exposed, its square gatehouses at this remove resembled outcrops against the lovely rectangle of the hall, while the crazed, inspired

  Tudor wings tipped their chimneys like hats to see her back again.

  She gathered Ruperta and Tongs to her so that they could stare out. 'We're home, my pippins.' They would be safe here. Deep in Somerset where nothing ever happened. Far away from the epicentre of politics and kings and courtiers.

  And at long last she could be virtuous; this was Rupert's true legacy to her, independence. Her body was her own. She didn't have to trade it for food or shelter. For her, the supreme luxury that so few women ever knew - sufficient food in the larder and solitude in her own bed.

  No more loving Rupert yet dreading the moment when his ageing hands moved over her skin. Again guilt stabbed her. I didn't love him enough.

  Instinctively her head turned to the north in which general direction lay the ancestral home of the Viscounts of Severn and Thames as if she would direct her decision towards it. B
ut I shall atone. I stay faithful to his memory for ever and ever.

  BOOK IV

  Chapter 1

  Charles II was struck by illness on 2 February 1685.

  The only one of his numerous illegitimate children not called to gather about his bed was the Duke of Monmouth who had been forced into exile after the discovery of the Rye House Plot.

  This latest plot had been in many ways the Whig version of the Popish Plot, except that in this case it was a real one. It was a Protestant plot within a plot. At its core was a plan for killing Charles and his brother James as they passed near Rye House, Hoddesdon, on their way back from Newmarket.

  Unknowing that fanatics in the inner plot were contemplating regicide as a way of protecting the Church and liberties of England, Monmouth had nevertheless been on the fringes of the outer plot and keeping company with men who thought these things could only be saved by insurrection. Shocked, Charles had called his son 'a beast and a blockhead' and sent him away.

  But the King, and especially James, Duke of York, profited from Rye House. Overnight popular feeling went Tory. The public's loyalty, which had been diminishing as Charles's reign became harsher, turned to him and against the Whigs. And he'd used it.

  James, no longer seen as a would-be tyrant but as a victim, was brought back to court. The Whig Party that had called for his exclusion from the throne was all but destroyed. Those who had defamed him went to prison. Old enemies were executed. The Whiggish City of London had its franchises withdrawn. Other boroughs, where there were Whig officers and which regularly returned Whig members to Parliament, were remodelled to put Tories into the ascendancy.

  Now, at the age of fifty-three and after a reign more like a twenty-five-year Bacchanalia, Charles was dying.

  With considerable courage - one virtue the Stuarts never lacked - he endured four days of treatment by his doctors, who, it was said later, 'tortured him like an Indian at the stake', before death released him. It is certain that just before it did he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

  People wept in the streets when tolling bells announced the death of King Charles II but there was no outcry against the accession of King James II and James turned this equanimity to goodwill. Mary was already married to William of Orange. His second daughter, Princess Anne, was now married to the equally impeccably Protestant George of Denmark.

  Thus, the English reasoned, however Catholic this new king proved himself to be, they could at least look forward to the throne passing into safe Protestant hands when he died. And he was fifty-one years old. And he couldn't be that bad, could he?

  Standing in the high pulpit of St Mary's Church, Athelzoy, its vicar announced: 'I shall now read the accession speech of our new and beloved King James the Second.' He glanced nervously down for permission from a slim, middle-aged lady in a large hat sitting at the front of a crowded congregation . . .

  His patron took Prince Rupert's time-piece from her pocket, polished it, shook it, read it and suggested in a clear, carrying voice: 'Perhaps only the relevant parts, Vicar.'

  Very well, Your Ladyship.'

  We could then dispense with a sermon.' Beside her, Sir Ostyn Edwards nodded a vigorous head.

  Very well, Your Ladyship.'

  Dorinda leaned over Tongs's head and hissed: 'Is he speaking English?' Dorinda had continual trouble with Somerset dialect.

  'Yes. He's going to read King James's coronation speech.'

  'Affie and me already heard it.'

  'Then hear it again.' It was all very well for Aphra and Dorinda, newly arrived from London, to be blase about the speech but it had taken time for copies of it to reach Somerset's county town of Taunton, while illiterates — like most of her parishioners here — had to wait until it was read out from the hundreds of Somerset pulpits, as it was in hers today.

  Penitence turned her head to estimate how many of her congregation could read and counted four: Mudge Ridge, Sir Ostyn, of course, just, Hurry Yeo, the landlord of the Hoy Arms, and Hurry Yeo's eleven-year-old daughter who went to school in Taunton and whose immortal soul was considered to be imperilled by doing so, not just because it flew in the face of Nature for girls to read but also because she was doing so at a school run by a couple of women Dissenters.

  Perhaps I should found a school.

  She was the most important person in Athelzoy; therefore it had become her responsibility. Her congregation, her parishioners. The Bishop of Bath and Wells might consider them his but without the wealth Penitence had brought to it the church couldn't support a vicar of its own.

  The whole village had been as dormant as a bulb, potentially fertile but unable to flower until it received the requisite warmth and moisture of cash. Long before the Civil War, and certainly since the death of its only son, the Hoy family had lacked money to vitalize Athelzoy's capability to grow. Penitence, unrealizing at first, had brought the first necessary shower by employing some of the villagers as household labourers and groundsmen.

  The young people who'd left their homes in search of work came flooding back, irrigating themselves and Hurry Yeo's business by patronizing the Hoy Arms, thereby forcing Hurry to employ a tapster.

  Under the guidance of young Mudge Ridge, who'd only needed the capital to turn his own and the Priory's farm into profit-making concerns, Penitence's herd of dairy cattle was improved by the acquisition of a Devon bull. 'And now you'm a dairy farmer you got to have pigs,' said Mudge. Sure enough, within the year two spotted Gloucestershire sows had littered thirty-three hardy piglets which grew up into tasty - and profitable — bacon, chitterlings, puddings and sausages on the waste whey and milk.

  But the biggest money-maker of all, and one fast becoming an industry, was teasel-growing.

  Penitence had been dubious; she barely knew what teasels were, let alone how to grow them. Or, come to that, what to do with them when grown.

  'Let me, let me, Your Ladyship,' Mudge begged. 'You got the soil, over by Sallycombe you got heavy girt clay. Ah pleaded with Old Maister but he were a stubborn old . . . gennulman . . . and couldn't see what I see.'

  'I thought they grew teasels at Sallycombe already,' Penitence said. 'The Dissenters, those Hugheses' — my family — 'aren't they teasellers?'

  'Piddly liddle plots,' said Mudge, scornfully. 'Could'n grow a bunyan. We, you, got fifty, sixty acre pleadin' for teasel.' Splendid young man that he was, his huge, soil-engrained hands were pumping the air. In another moment he'd shake her. 'Can't ee see what I see?'

  Though she let him have his way on twenty of the acres, she couldn't. For two years she couldn't see. The teasels were sown, planted out, weeded with long-bladed, thin spades, then replanted in prepared ridged and furrowed soil, and all Penitence could see was that if it rained too much in June her teasels would be ruined for their purpose, and if she went on paying wages for such intensive labour, she would be ruined. And all for a plant that couldn't be touched with the naked hand, had no scent and reminded her of a stiff-backed, bristle- headed Dogberry.

  It wasn't until the following August's harvest that she'd seen Mudge's vision — wagons taking 250,000 teasel-heads along the Sedgemoor track to the clothiers in Taunton, 250,000 teasels for raising the nap on broadcloth, 250,000 so packed on to staffs that they looked like fuzzy loofahs, thirty staffs to a pack, each pack selling at £15.

  The next year she'd rented ten acres to Mudge for himself and gave the entire village of Athelzoy employment in planting fifty of her own.

  The only people less than pleased with her teasel triumph were the Dissenters who rented the few acres of clay favourable to teasel-growing on Dame Alice Lisle's land. In effect, Penitence's mass production was putting her own great-uncle out of business.

  And by this day in early summer, in her church, surrounded by her villagers, the sun coming in coloured dapples through the new rose window dedicated to the memory of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Penitence didn't give a damn for her great-uncle. Serve him right.

  She listened ca
refully to James's accession speech, giving nods of approval at its repeated reassurance that the King wanted confrontation with nobody. Yes, he affirmed, he was a Roman Catholic, but there need be no concern; on oath he would maintain the Anglican Church and the laws of England. He would not relinquish his own rights, but he would respect the rights of others. 'Just as I have already fought for my country, I shall go on supporting her liberties.'

  Beside her, Sir Ostyn also nodded: 'Ah told un when ah wrote to un to go easy. Upset the liberties ah told un and upset trade.'

  'I'm sure the King found your advice most valuable,' said Penitence. Sir Ostyn was an idiot. Still, I agree with him. She didn't want riot and revolution now that she was about to increase teasel production and expand her outlets, this time to clothiers in the North of England.