The Vizard Mask (36 page)

Penitence had hoped for Swaveley that the stone would be dropped on him, killing him instantly; instead he was slowly being asphyxiated as it crushed his lungs. Head arched back, his mouth opened and shut like a fish's to snatch shallow, panting breaths.

'Tell them to hasten the matter, my lord, I beg you,' said a voice, whether from humanity or impatience.

Some signal passed from the Keeper's window to one of the judges on the stand, who nodded, and raised a hand to the executioner. The trolley was taken to fetch two smaller stones. 'Three hundred and twenty-five pounds,' announced the executioner.

Swaveley's mouth opened wider. The judge signalled again.

'Three hundred and fifty.'

Stop it. Get it over with. Stop it.

Swaveley's left hand struggled against its manacle. He was

trying to speak. The Ordinary was alarmed and shaking his head, but the executioner bent down to Swaveley's mouth and looked to the judge. 'He wants to plead guilty, my lord.'

The Ordinary was protesting; his Awful Warning was being spoiled. But the judge - after a glance at the Keeper's window - signalled that the stones be lifted. Swaveley's feet trailed on the ground as he was dragged away to face trial and hanging.

On their way down the backstairs, the party from the attic encountered Sir Charles Sedley. 'Mistress Aphra, Mistress Penitence,' he said, 'one was hoping the occasion would ferret you out. We are downcast by its dullness and beg you to enliven us. Your friends too.' He bowed to Mrs Johnson.

Penitence was surprised he had remembered their names, but was in no mood to make sport for the likes of him. 'Forgive me,' she said, and hurried on, hearing Aphra make introductions.

Gaining her room, she shut the door. She wanted quiet.

An hour later there was a tap on the door. 'Beg your indulgence, madam,' said Sir Charles Sedley.

Since Penitence didn't ask him to sit down, he lounged against the dirty wall, the sun from the window shimmering on his silk coat and the gloss of his wig, intensifying the perfume he was wearing, glancing off his rings as he flapped his hands and commented on the heat and went through the procedure of taking snuff. If she hadn't been sure he had been sent as the result of some bet, Penitence would have thought him unsettled. He unsettled her; she wanted rid of him. 'What is your b-business, sir?'

'My b-business, ma'am. My b-business is with your eyes. I wished to assure myself they were as astonishing as I remembered and, behold, they are.' As Penitence's lips tightened, he added: 'Though one has seen kinder over a duelling pistol.'

His own, which watched her carefully, were bloodshot. He wasn't much older than herself and had excellent baby skin with a bloom on it. It oozed perspiration in tiny bubbles of the fat which would one day overwhelm him.

'Since that's settled,' she said, 'I wish you good-day.'

'Cruel charmer, would you banish me so soon?' He had a slow delivery; words drooped out of his mouth to make everything he said sound like a jeer. 'I await Rochester and Buckingham who are much taken with Mistress Behn. At this moment the three of them discuss the art of writing and the beginning of her play. It seems we have another Matchless Orinda on our hands.'

Refusing him the satisfaction, Penitence didn't ask who the Matchless Orinda was.

'But you, mistress, are more intriguing than she — of Puritan persuasion, I gather, with leanings towards the stage. One has one's own connections with the theatre, and it might be that one could assist the latter aspiration.' His eyelids drooped. 'Though certainly not the former.'

damn Aphra. Must the woman blab everything? 'I have no aspiration, sir, except to be left alone.'

'You should, you should. Those eyes could conquer an audience as they have conquered me. But give me a kiss and I shall wing to the errand.'

The only winging he'd do would be back to his friends to tell them he'd seduced the poor slut in the cell. There was too much silk here, an overwhelming plumpness like an eiderdown filling the room; she wanted to claw her way out.

The door opened. 'I say, Penitence, do you want a woodcut done of the hanging?' Clarins, lovely, unprepossessing and cloth-coated, had come to discuss important things in plain language.

Sir Charles bowed and withdrew.

The next day, returning from the dining-hall with Aphra, she found her cell full of roses, pots of them, so many she couldn't reach her bed. 'My dear, how charming,' said Aphra, regarding the petalled sea, 'I knew he was much taken with you.'

Penitence was furious. 'Do you realize the money these cost could nearly pay off my debt?'

And then she realized. Sir Charles was offering to get her out, had offered, and she'd snubbed him. She'd had no idea. Penitence Hurd, you'll never make a whore.

She considered it. After all, having put her foot on the ladder of harlotry, she'd be a fool not to climb to its higher rungs. Satin sheets instead of dirty blankets. Mistress to a rich young man about court rather than the twice-weekly drab of a prison turnkey. She'd acquire connections, enter Benedick into a good school when he was old enough.

Logically, her next move was to send a note to Sedley. It only needed to say 'Yes'. She couldn't hate bedding with Sedley more than she loathed those moments in the condemned cell with George. But I can control George.

Illogically, she didn't do it. For one thing, when it came to the point of asking Aphra for ink, quill and paper, she was overcome with a fit of gasping as if, like Swaveley, she was being asphyxiated by a great weight. For another, she was optimistic about her chances of paying off her debt by herself.

No more flowers arrived either, so that was that.

The profit to Aphra and Penitence from Swaveley's Last Exclamations, combined with that from his Positively Last Exclamations, which went on sale at his hanging in August, came to £94 6s 10d, nearly fifty pounds each.

They couldn't believe it. 'Is that with all paid?' asked Aphra.

'Aye,' said MacGregor. All paid. We had to rush a reprint of the reprint for Tyburn.'

'The Tippins reckoned the crowd above six thousand,' Dorinda told them, 'and I hope Swaveley was grateful for all we done to get 'em there, though he didn't look it. All the stuffing gone out of the poor ballocker. The Tippins lifted so much blunt out of the crowd's pockets as they refused to take wages.'

'All we need now is more executions,' said MacGregor.

Penitence winced. 'We'd better call ourselves the Vulture Press.'

'That's a terrible bad name,' said MacGregor, 'but as we're not likely to display it, it'll do for the now.'

'What'll we do with your share, Prinks?' asked Dorinda.

'Pay the b-bills. Buy B-Benedick what he needs. Keep some for housekeeping and pay the rest towards the debt. Deposit it with a lawyer called P-Patterson in Leadenhall Street. He was Her Ladyship's man and he can pay the debtor when we've got enough.' She winked at MacGregor. 'Another Scotsman, but I trust him.'

The load was lifting. She was going to get out of Newgate. By her own enterprise.

Newgate's Ordinary went to the Stationers' Company to complain about the emergence of the mysterious and illegal press which had taken away his business. The Stationers promised to try to track it down, but in view of the number of unlicensed presses in operation they weren't sanguine of success.

However, the Vulture Press laid low for a while. There would be no more hangings until the authorities had accumulated enough death sentences to make the spectacle at Tyburn worthwhile.

There was nothing for the two young women to do and Aphra, who had been in prison the longer, began to decline. The staple food given to those who couldn't afford to pay proved unfit to eat more often that not, and Aphra, always fastidious, was unable to keep it down.

Penitence begged her to draw on the money lodged against their debts, but Aphra refused to eat, literally, into it. 'One will never get out if one does.' Penitence began to be frightened that one would die if one didn't. She suspected Aphra's lassitude to be the first stage of Whitt fever which carried off so many in Newgate. 'You can't give way now.'

Aphra closed her eyes. 'Send The Young King to Rochester and Buckingham,' she murmured. 'Perhaps they will find it worthy to finish it for me.'

'You'll finish it. And what about that slave? Weren't you going to write his story?'

Tears oozed out of Aphra's eyes. 'Ah, poor Caesar, both of us doomed to oblivion.'

'Damned if you are,' said Penitence, irritably. She didn't send the play, but she wrote notes to Buckingham and Rochester informing them of the situation. If Sedley had told her the truth, they might be interested enough in Aphra to save her life. What they pay for blasted ribbon in a day would keep her alive for a month.

That night, in the condemned cell, she asked George to bring in some decent food. She knew enough not to plead for it. 'I want cheese, good bread, fresh milk and I want it tomorrow,' she commanded, as she stripped. 'And some wine.'

'You lady-ins,' admired George, 'Whitt fare not good enough, eh? Tell us what you eat in that mansion of yours.'

What do the rich eat? She could only think of the meals her grandmother had served up in her forest kitchen, and hoped their unfamiliarity would sound sufficiently exotic. 'Pumpkin pie,' she said.

'Oooh. Pumpkin pie.' He was snuffling at her thighs. 'Oozing gravy.'

'Lots of gravy. Wild turkey stuffed with blueberries. Chowder...'

It was gastronomic pornography, and effective. George brimmed earlier than ever. But there was a price. As he left her, he said: 'Ready yourself for tomorrow night. Good food's extra.'

Aphra was too poorly to ask where the provisions came from, but they improved her slightly. Since she wasn't well enough to leave her bed, Penitence sat and read to her: 'Me, too, the Pierian sisters have made a singer; I too have songs; ay, and the shepherds dub me poet, but I trust them not. For as yet, methinks, gooselike I cackle amid quiring swans.'

'Oh Virgil,' sighed Aphra, 'if one could but cackle like you.'

Aphra's hunger for literature was greater than for food. Through reading to her the library she had brought into Newgate with her, Penitence was acquiring a culture she hadn't dreamed of. It still wasn't enough for Aphra: 'Alas, that our sex is denied the teaching of Latin and Greek so that we are barred from the originals. That my eyes could drink in the Greek of Homer.'

Penitence found some of the English translations hard enough, but she would read on long after Aphra slept, fascinated by Socratic argument, or listening as the bronze trumpets blared their challenge over the walls of Troy, or softly repeating again and again a honeyed Virgilian phrase. If Newgate took her to the depths of human abasement, it also, thanks to Aphra, showed her the heights of human achievement.

And woman's. She had never heard of the poetess Aphra always referred to as 'Sacred Sappho' — she understood, when she read her, why the Puritans had ignored her existence, nor did the Lesbian's sexual proclivities agree with her own, but she was spellbound by the lovely, feminine fragments of verse that sang themselves into a prison cell with such immediacy from another country twenty centuries away.

She still doubted whether Aphra's ambition to put her play on in a public theatre was feasible. But at least there was a precedent for a woman to be something more than a writer for purely domestic consumption.

Who's the Matchless Orinda?' she asked, remembering Sedley.

Aphra's stricken eyes gained a touch of frost. 'Ugh.'

'Who?'

'Mention the fact that one aspires to write,' said Aphra, 'and that's all one hears. "Another Matchless Orinda." If I thought I was to be bracketed with that vapid, watery, flatulent female, I would cut my wrists here and now. Ugh one said, and Ugh one meant.'

Little wiser, Penitence was not sorry she'd asked; Aphra's flash of spirit had been her first in days.

But the real panacea was delivered to Newgate late in the evening on the first day of September in the shape of a young man whose eyes seemed too lively for his sober, elegant, clergyman's cloth.

Penitence collided with him as she ran into Aphra's cell, hearing the screams. She nearly punched him. He held her off, apologizing. 'I assure you, madam, Mistress Behn's cries are of a rapturous nature.'

Aphra lifted her head. 'Penitence. Oh my dear, we're free.'

'Ah well...' said the young clergyman.

'Two hundred guineas. We can leave this minute. This beautiful deliverer, this Mercury—'

'Sprat,' smirked the young man, 'Thomas Sprat.' '- our benefactors, His Grace of Buckingham—' 'An anonymous gift,' said the Reverend Sprat. '- and the Earl of Rochester. How can words—' 'I was to say it was an appreciation from the Muses,' said the Reverend Sprat, delicately, 'and while 1 am sure that, were the anonymous donors aware of this lady's plight, they would be only too happy .. . but the gift is to liberate you, Mistress Behn.'

Through tears and tangled hair, Aphra looked at him straight. 'If Penitence isn't freed, neither am I. There's enough now to pay both our debts.'

So it was arranged. There were comings and goings. A disgruntled Lawyer Patterson was called out from a musical evening at his home to sign notes and swear oaths. Warrants were withdrawn, creditors paid, and in the early hours of the morning a bemused and still-unbelieving Penitence had settled herself alongside Aphra in a carriage which carried a crest it was too dark to see, and was driven to Aldersgate where the young Reverend Sprat, his duty done, delivered them to the cheap lodgings of Mrs and Master Johnson, which, cheap as they were, beat seven bells out of Newgate.

And half a mile away, a spark from a carelessly left baker's oven in Pudding Lane ignited a pile of faggots lying too near it.

A red cinder from the burning shop fell on to a pile of hay in a nearby inn yard. The inn caught and the flames ran into Thames Street lined by warehouses stacked with tallow, oil and spirits.

The new Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, was woken up and chose to ignore the fire as just another outbreak; the City had them all the time. This one, however, coincided with a dry spell and a strong east wind. Pitch-coated, thatched, closely packed timber buildings fired up like torches.