The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Well, there were only two places in London to go for news. One was Whitehall, which was where the trouble was; the other the Exchange and she had to go there anyway to get Aphra's beeswax.

  It wasn't until she entered the colonnades of the Exchange that she realized how she'd let herself go. Once she'd turned every head in the place. Now she saw faces that then had recognized her go by without a sign that they'd ever known her. Sir Walter Legge, he who had waylaid her at the Drury Lane entrance every night for weeks, actually pushed past her as if she were no more than the flower-seller who had her pitch by the East India Company stairs. Am I so old? She was thin from hard work, her hands were calloused and her nails ragged, her dress was out of date and, anyway, faded. She saw Sir Charles Sedley in the distance and shrank back. At least I've not got fat. Or bald.

  But if she was commonplace she was invisible. Hanging around on the edge of groups, asking questions and being patronized with a 'my good woman' in the answer, she learned the reports as they came in.

  The embassies of Catholic countries had been attacked and set on fire last night; the Spanish ambassador's library had gone up in flames. A mob had got into Whitehall hunting for Father Petre, the royal Jesuit adviser. Parks were being ravaged, deer killed, roads blocked by self-appointed police who stopped every traveller until he'd proved he wasn't a Papist.

  Yes, my good woman, the Queen and the baby Prince of Wales had gone — her informant was a contemptuous young clerk. No, he knew not where. They'd been smuggled to Gravesend and aboard a boat. Now, if she would step aside . ..

  Yesterday, Tuesday, it appeared, the King had ordered the Lord Mayor to attend Whitehall with the Sheriffs of London and exhorted them to be vigorous in their duty. He would stay at his post. He'd found it necessary to send his wife and child out of the country, he'd told them, but he himself was calling a Parliament and negotiating with the Prince of Orange, whose forces were now stationed seventy miles from London.

  Back once more at Aphra's house, Penitence learned the sequel to this — from Dryden. It was symptomatic of the extraordinary time they were all living through that yesterday the playwright had been able to stride into Whitehall Palace, assured of his right as Poet Laureate, and now skulked for reassurance in the faded familiarity of Aphra's room, afraid not just for his Laureateship but for his life. Having written an attack on the Dutch under Charles and converted to Catholicism under James, he could not look forward to being popular with a new, Protestant regime. At the moment, it was hurt at his king's defection that he felt most.

  'He told Lord Northumberland to guard his bedchamber door and call him at the usual time today,' he said. 'I was there with all the courtiers and lords waiting to make the morning bow, and the bedchamber was empty. He'd gone in the night — down a secret stair. And taken the Great Seal with him.'

  The country could cope with a runaway king but its machinery was seriously disturbed by the loss of the Great Seal, which was later dragged up out of the Thames by a fisherman. Without it law and order could not be maintained. The head had parted from the still-running chicken. Government buildings were suddenly full of constitutional lawyers, ministers, clerks busying themselves in laying out documents and searching archives for a precedent that would tell them what to do and wishing the crowds in the street outside would stop singing long enough for them to find it.

  English confusion to Popery drink.

  Lillibullero bullen a la.

  The Lord Mayor was seen to faint in panic when they brought before him a low-looking fellow in sailor's garb who turned out to be the Lord Chancellor, Sir George Jeffreys, formerly Judge Jeffreys, apprehended in a Wapping tavern trying to escape on a boat.

  Jeffreys had been manhandled by the mob who'd caught him and it was said by those who rescued and marched him to the Tower where he had sent so many others that his shaking lips kept forming the pout of a 'w' as if he would ask 'Why?'

  At last news came from Whitehall to say that poor Lord Northumberland, Lord of the Bedchamber who was also commander of the palace troop of Life Guards, had done the only thing he could - declared for the Prince of Orange. The remaining officers of the army had met and passed a resolution to submit to William's authority. Such peers as were still in London were repairing to the Guildhall to form a provisional government.

  Nobody slept that night. People ran to and from each other's houses carrying news. Aphra insisted that her door be left open so that she could know what was going on but the continual, chattering consternation of her friends tired her out, as did her grief for the king she had loved. At dawn Chloe locked the door and insisted she rest.

  It was then, going upstairs to her own bed and seeing the thin winter sun washing the street outside, that Penitence realized what she had witnessed in the last twenty-four hours. I've seen a revolution.

  Pride in her adopted country suffused her. In all the reports she'd heard that day, not one had mentioned loss of life.

  There'd been kerfuffle, damage, insults — it would take considerable diplomacy to soothe the heads of countries whose embassies had gone — but no loss of life.

  There was a revolution. And nobody got killed.

  William marched into London with the drums beating 'Lillibullero'. Penitence didn't go to see him do it; Aphra was too ill and Chloe too worn out with nursing her for them to be left. Besides, it poured with rain all day, turning the orange ribbons strung across the streets into brown strings.

  From the window she watched people carrying oranges stuck on sticks splash up Fleet Street on their way towards St James's Park for the welcoming parade and found the rain symbolic; already London felt like the aftermath of a party whose guests had sobered.

  Her only gesture to the new order had been to go out and buy some clothes; it was time to revive what looks she had left - in case Aphra had visitors.

  It was years since she'd had time to study her reflection, and the shops' looking-glasses were brutal. Her facial skin had weathered and contrasted too sharply with the white of her shoulders and chest to wear anything low-cut. There were crow's-feet by the side of her eyes and, oh God, a close examination of her hair showed an occasional silver thread. The hairdresser's assistant, who worked on her nails, tactfully suggested she wear gloves.

  Wildly, Penitence laid out money on paints, hair washes, creams, scents and dresses and reverted to sleeping in an oiled mask. Betterton was hoping to put on The Widow Ranter and Aphra still earmarked the part for her. Even playing a harpy, Penitence had no intention of going on stage looking like one.

  Titus Oates was out of prison, calling down the Lord's retribution on those who had put him there, and rabid Protestants were enjoying revenge on those they regarded as collaborators. While Aphra had never turned Roman Catholic, her house was becoming a daytime refuge for those who had, and she was well known as a supporter of the disgraced King; accordingly refuse was thrown at her door. Both Penitence and Chloe had been threatened in the street by fanatics as 'Papist sluts of that whore of Babylon'.

  Dryden, Neville Payne, Betterton, all the old set who had done little to earn the approbation of the new regime, came under cover of darkness to Aphra's to sit by her fire and talk and wonder what would happen to the theatre under Queen Mary. Aphra was their totem, the fulcrum on which they teetered, wobbling now, but with increasing cheerfulness the longer they stayed by her warmth and kept the door shut on the winter outside.

  In her company, the old days came back, Nelly Gwynn was resurrected, Rochester, Buckingham, all the wits' stories and escapades were repeated, Charles's naughtinesses, Castlemaine's extravagances, the tarnished gilt was polished up and presented as solid gold.

  Penitence remembered it differently and in any case they made her cross. Can't they see how ill she is? They drained Aphra's energy, as if hers was the only source available to them, as deeply as they drained her milk punch bowl, apparently uncaring where either commodity came from - the punch was provided by Penitence had they bothered to ask — or h
ow much they cost.

  Penitence restrained her impatience with them better than Chloe, whose scoldings they ignored, because Aphra would have been mortified if her guests were embarrassed. They gathered round her bed like a court round a throne, occasionally sitting on it, hammering it to make a point, not noticing that every jerk made her lips clench with pain. She pretended to them that she stayed in bed from choice — 'One grows lazy with age, my dears. Should Love come through the door again, here one lies — ready.'

  In fact, she was barely able to walk; it wasn't only the arthritis that crippled her but breathlessness. Just getting up to use the pot set her gasping. Her colour was bad, her ankles and legs swollen. When her guests were gone, she sat in a stupor of exhaustion and came out of it chiding herself for having wasted writing time.

  She wrote continually; Penitence went to the publishers every week with some new work — the last volume of Love Letters, verses for a collection of poems she was bringing out, translations, histories, and long stories which were in a form new to Penitence and which Aphra called her 'novels'.

  Emboldened by the thought that Aphra would not flourish under a queen as straitlaced as Mary, her enemies redoubled their attacks. 'Sappho, famous for her gout and guilt', was a poem accusing her of subsidizing her writing by prostitution. Penitence told Dryden to burn it, but Aphra learned of it. 'Well, my dear, one should be honoured; they said the same of the original Sappho.'

  Another was anonymous and referred to Aphra as:

  That lewd harlot, that poetic queen,

  Famed through Whitefriars, you know who I mean ...

  Plagued with a sciatica, she's besides lame,

  Her limbs distortured, nerves shrunk up with pain.

  And therefore I'll all sharp reflections shun,

  Poverty, poetry, pox, are plagues enough for one.

  Does she still have to put up with this? Hadn't twenty years of pleasing the public earned her some respite?

  There was none. Aphra didn't give herself any either. When it was Penitence's turn to sit up with her, she heard Aphra's pen scratching away until the early hours.

  The first visitor from the victors' camp was Benedick, ringleted, in velvet and triumphant. Penitence spent a long time hugging him, and he her, before taking him in to Aphra, the woman who had taught him to read and whom he still called 'Aunt'.

  He marched in: 'Make room for the victor of Wincanton.'

  Penitence guided him away from Aphra's bed, which he was about to sit on. 'What happened at Wincanton?'

  'The only damned engagement we had all the way from Devon. We were outnumbered by James's troops, but as it turned out they were only Irish. We fought over a hedge. Actually, it could have gone badly — there were four of them to every one of us, but some of the Somerset locals gave out that the rest of the Prince's army was coming up, at which the Irish fell back. So we carried the day, and the hedge, and William congratulated me later on my superb courage.' He looked modestly down at his nails. 'I should be surprised if I'm not Sir Benedick when the Prince comes into his own.'

  So like his father. The very inflection of the voice was the same,- his son had spent the last years modelling himself on Henry. Well, he could have done worse. He was waiting for her to ask where his father was, but she had her pride.

  'How they loved us in the West. I suppose, after Monmouth, poor things . .. Those luscious cream-fed girls. I tell you, ladies, one had to fight to maintain one's virginity, but, no, no, I said, my heart belongs to one more beauteous than you.' He bowed to Aphra, and she fluttered her eyelashes back. She was still susceptible to handsome young men.

  But it must be hurting her, thought Penitence, to be entertaining one, however handsome, who'd fought against her beloved king. She'd have to get used to it; the Lords Temporal and Spiritual who'd formed the provisional government had judged that by his flight — to Louis XIV — James had not only abdicated but deprived his son of the right to to be proved his true heir. Thus the throne devolved on his elder daughter Mary, the Princess of Orange.

  Benedick, however, kept talking as if it was a foregone conclusion that William would be asked to take the crown.

  For the first time Aphra bridled. 'He can't be king, my dear; he has no right. Mary is a Stuart and the next in line. William is only her consort.'

  Benedick shook his head. 'He's not a man likely to content himself with being his wife's gentleman usher.'

  Penitence interrupted to keep the peace: 'Where and how is MacGregor?'

  Her son smiled at her: 'He's very well. He's gone to Scotland with the Viscount of Severn and Thames to help him prepare a report for William on the situation up there.'

  'Ah,' she said. 'Good.' Damn the boy. Would he say nothing else?

  He turned to Aphra. 'The Viscount is my father. I am his acknowledged son.'

  'So I hear,' said Aphra. 'I knew him first as Leander. Do you remember telling me about him in Newgate, Penitence?'

  Benedick said: 'Did I tell you that on the way from Torbay MacGregor and I called in at Athelzoy looking to see my old mother? The girls and everybody else are well and send their best love.'

  As Penitence showed him out, she asked: 'Do I look old?'

  'You look sixteen.'

  She said with indifference: 'I hope your father is well.'

  'Ah ha.'

  'Ah ha what?'

  'Just ah ha. I don't think he wanted to go to Scotland.'

  She became interested in a piece of fluff on his coat and flicked it off. 'Indeed.'

  Benedick's hands took her shoulders and squared her to face him. 'Mama, I know you promised Prince Rupert never to marry, but do you think he'd have wanted you to remain lonely for the rest of your life?'

  'Is that what your father told you?'

  'I asked him why you two didn't marry and that's what he said.'

  How nice of Henry. And how nice and romantic of their son to believe him, though it left her looking the culprit for the estrangement. Nor could she disabuse the boy. Benedick, your father has good reason to believe your mother a harlot and cannot stomach the thought. Hardly.

  Won't you marry him? He's a very fine man, you know.'

  'I know he is,' she said. 'But I think you'll find he won't ask me again. The mountain doesn't really go to Mahomet.'

  Whether the throne should be occupied by Mary as queen or regent, with William as consort, king or regent, or any combination of the foregoing, was solved by the Prince and Princess of Orange themselves. Mary, still in The Hague, wrote to say she had no wish to rule without her husband.

  William, who had held aloof from dictating terms, now explained himself. He esteemed his wife, he said, as much as it was possible for man to esteem woman, but not even from her

  would he accept a subordinate place. He did not desire to take any part in English affairs, but if he did consent to do so there was only one part he would play. He must be offered the throne for life, or go back home.

  It cleared the air. It was now obvious that William and Mary must be King and Queen; the head of each must appear on the coin of the realm, writs must run in the names of both.

  However, to make sure the excesses of previous Stuarts were never perpetrated again, it was thought necessary to set down the fundamental principles of the English constitution. No money to be exacted by the sovereign, no standing army to be kept up in peacetime without permission of Parliament. There must be rights of petition, of electors to choose their representatives freely, to debate, to a pure and merciful administration of justice.

  As documents go the one drawn up in a few hours by a committee under the chairmanship of a low-born young barrister named Somers didn't look particularly impressive. But no other country had it.

  It was called the Declaration of Rights.

  While arrangements for the Coronation went ahead, the little house in St Bride's received another visitor from the court.

  Penitence opened the door to a large, fair-wigged clergyman radiating such bounciness
that just looking at him was tiring.

  'Gilbert Burnet at your service, mistress.' He was a Scot and had an orange ribbon on his hat. 'And begging audience with Mistress Aphra Behn, if you please.'

  'Doctor Gilbert Burnet?'

  He was delighted. 'Indeed, mistress. I see my fame has preceded me.'

  'It has. What do you want?' If this was the man who had assailed Rochester with exhortations to repentance on his death-bed, the Earl had paid for at least some of his vices. Dr Burnet was not someone you'd want at your lowest ebb.