Authors: Diana Norman
Tags: #17th Century, #United States, #England/Great Britian, #Prostitution, #Fiction - Historical
Mrs Coney stepped back and looked at Penitence with her head on one side. 'Does she need more powder. Marshy?'
Rebecca Marshall put down her own powder-puff. 'Lord, no. Here, put some of this on her cheeks.' She passed over a leaf of Spanish rouge.
'Hart said "a lily".'
'He didn't say Hamlet's ghost. Watch out.' Penitence was gulping.
'Sick bowl,' called Mrs Coney. 'Quick.'
A bowl was brought. Penitence vomited into it. Sighing, Coney wiped her face and began again. 'There, pigeon. You're not the first.'
The argument outside grew louder. Sir Hugh Middleton was refusing to accept the ruling that no male except the property boy was allowed in the tiring-room on first afternoons. 'Becky,' he was shouting, 'Becky, my little bone-ache.'
Marshall covered her ears. Why do we have to put up with this? I'm going to complain to the King. I never encouraged the stinkard.'
'Cully's called for Sir Tom to take him away.' Coney patted Penitence's hair and put on its wreath of flowers. 'There now, pigeon, you look lovely. Don't she look lovely, Marshy?'
'She does indeed.' Rebecca gave her own hair a final pat, and stood up. Carefully, one by one, she uncurled Penitence's fingers from around the posy of roses Dorinda and Aphra had given her before she left home. 'Let go now, there's a good girl.'
Freed, Penitence's hands fastened desperately on the front of Rebecca's robe. 'I c-can't remember the first line.'
'I know. Stand up now.'
Outside Sir Hugh's shouts were diminishing as Killigrew persuaded him back to the auditorium. Anne Marshall was panicking as usual. 'Oh hell, oh hell, I can't find my ... oh there they are.' She gave Penitence's cold cheek a kiss. 'You look lovely, dear. Good luck.'
Coney put her head out of the door: 'Mrs Hughes's cloak.'
'Mrs Hughes's cloak coming up.' Theatre costumes were guarded like gold, which generally was what they were worth, being mostly royal cast-offs. On performance days the floors on stage and backstage were laid with calico sheets to protect them. Cully, the property boy, hobbled in with the shoulders of the blue silk cloak laid over his rheumatic hands, his assistant holding its train.
Coney draped it around Penitence's shoulders and fastened it.
The callboy knocked on the door. 'Act I. Scene iii. Mrs Hughes, please.'
Penitence clutched Rebecca Marshall again. 'P-p-pplease. I can't remember anything. Not a line.'
'I know.'
'Bb-bb-bbut it's gone. I want to g-g-go home.'
'I know.'
Between them, the Marshall sisters walked the sagging Penitence to the wings where they stood crammed between John Downes and the cut-out of Othello's ship which had been dragged offstage along the groove that held it. John switched his eyes from his prompter's script for a second and gave her a thumbs-up sign.
Penitence stared ahead. Through the unglazed window of the prompt-side door the actors on stage appeared unreal and far-away in their brightly lit frame. Hart, black-faced and opulent in green and gold, was declaiming, a puppet facing the unseen monster she could hear breathing in the cavern beyond the footlights. It was an animal. She could smell it. Aphra was out there, and Dorinda and MacGregor, Dogberry and his friends, and it had eaten them, absorbed them into its maw.
She was limp. She'd reached the stage of terror beyond terror. I'll stutter. I'm going to stutter. I can't even stutter. I'll stand there and they can send me home. I'll die. This can't be happening. It doesn't matter. It's all silly. No job for a grown woman.
'It's a step up from being a whore. The job, my dear girl, is the play. We give them the best we know. Now breathe.'
Hart's great voice throbbed out:
'She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them, This only is the witchcraft I have used.'
Rebecca Marshall saw Penitence's hands go up to her face as if adjusting a mask. She touched her on the shoulder: 'Decus et Dolor,' she said.
'Decus et Dolor,' said Penitence.
'Here comes the lady; let her witness it,' said Othello and held out his arms.
Desdemona ran on to the stage ...
She used everything she'd ever known, emitting it out of skin and mouth to the huge shape in green and gold that dominated the stage. The audience was small and had a respectable feel, mostly citizens who hadn't fancied the risque play at the Duke's. She felt their hostility; they wanted a Desdemona they knew, sexually naive. There was a wave of shocked disapproval as she kissed and stroked the black face.
Hart amazed her; even in rehearsal he'd never responded like this. It wasn't Desdemona's play, it was Othello's, but her rendering was allowing the Moor subtleties that hadn't been explored; he grew as she fed him and fed her back so that she grew alongside, taking the audience with her.
Then it was the interval before Act II. Marshall came groaning into the tiring-room where Mrs Coney was repowdering Penitence. 'There's stinkards arrived,' she said, 'Sedley and some others. They're with Middleton up on the apron already.'
I'll stutter. Now I'll stutter.
'Sick bowl,' called Coney.
But Becky Marshall had taken Penitence by her shoulders and was shaking her. 'Look at me. It doesn't matter what they do. You and Hart are . . . well, it's like sharing the stage with tigers. You've conquered the cits to the point where they'd cut their throats if you told them to do it. You're not to let them down. Whatever the other bastards do, ignore them. Do you hear me?'
It was a generous speech; Becky Marshall had wanted to play Desdemona herself.
'Yes, Becky. Thank you.' Breathe.
But it was still terrible to stand at the prompt door listening to fops' chatter, rebuilding Desdemona's energy to go out and face it.
On stage, Kynaston as Cassio was too old a hand to be distracted, but the others with him were being put off their stroke. As John Downes in the wings called out: 'A sail! a sail! a sail!' to signal the arrival of Othello's ship into Cyprus, one of the fops got up and did a hornpipe to the applause of his friends. The citizens in the pit were getting restless at the interruptions. Another moment and the theatre would be in uproar.
Beside her, Lacy took her hand. 'Last time 1 played lago,' he said, 'we got raided by Cromwell's troopers. Rough? You think those lily-pinks out there are rough? Wait 'til you've been on the end of a Puritan pike.' He crossed himself. 'Decus et Dolor.'
'Decus et Dolor.' Radiating happiness, she swept out.
The scene quelled some of the hoots with which the fops and rakes always accorded a new actress in a leading role and, though they rose again at the passion of her greeting to Othello, she felt the aggression waver. It was a matter of mastery, hers or theirs. Power was leaving them as she and Hart sucked it out of them, transmuted it, and turned it into indomitable tragedy.
She forgot them; she wasn't playing to Othello, but to another man who had believed her to be a whore. She cried Desdemona's cry, 'I have not deserved this', to Henry King.
In the Willow Song she glimpsed Sir Hugh weeping like a baby and Sedley leaning forward, his hand cupped on his chin. She allowed her voice to break on the last line and felt the anguish of the pit rush forward out of the darkness to comfort her. She begged Othello not to kill her.
'It is too late.' Hart's voice was begging himself not to kill her.
She felt the pillow over her face and almost panicked. Suppose he gets carried away. Her last lines were the trickiest; the not-quite-dead-yet was, she felt, Shakespeare overdoing it. 'O! Farewell,' but in the audience somebody sobbed as her hand went limp over the side of the bed.
At last Othello's body fell on hers: '.. . to die upon a kiss' enveloping her in a smell of stove-blacking. She heard the sigh of the curtain come down on a house that was totally silent.
'Oh God,' she muttered. 'They didn't like it.'
'Stay still' Hart's white eye glared at her, like a shark's. 'Anyone can rouse a house. To subdue it is the true artistry. And we've done it.'
The curtain rose with the bodies still lying on the bed, the dead Emilia (Rebecca Marshall) artistically draped on the floor.
It wasn't until Hart handed her up that the applause came at her. She stood in it, Hart's hand holding hers high. She loved him. She loved the fops now standing in ovation, loved the beast out there she had conquered, the unicorn that was laying its head in her lap. A fountain of eternal youth played about her.
I wish Benedick were here. They'd left him with Mistress Palmer, in case the sight of his mother being smothered was too much for him.
The triumph wasn't complete. It was missing somebody.
Kynaston and Marshall came on to be washed in their turn, as they deserved. Appreciation gained solid form; flowers, ribbons, coins landed at their feet. Somebody threw a gold watch.
Anne Marshall was due to speak the prologue and whet appetites for the next day's performance of The Humorous Lieutenant, but Killigrew took her place to say that in view of the reception 'the King's Servants will oblige with yet another rendering of Othello on the morrow'.
Having received a heart-warming 'Not bad, not bad at all' from John Downes, Penitence made her way to the tiring- room and chaos. The place had been invaded by a dozen or so stinkards dodging Jacko's efforts to eject them, drinking, tweaking the dressers' bottoms, staring down Becky Marshall's cleavage, experimenting with the powders and patches before the looking-glasses.
A cheer went up at Penitence's entrance and Sir Hugh Middleton threw himself, literally, at her feet. 'You wonderful creature, you moved me. I adore you. Be mine.'
Sir Charles Sedley bowed before her, for once only in half- mockery. 'Well, well,' he said.
Penitence hobbled towards her stool with Sir Hugh attached to one of her ankles. She was drained; she'd been hoping for a reflective post-mortem with her fellow-players. As always, the rakes were drunk and, as such, alarming; she felt vulnerable and exposed. Adulation was preferable coming from beyond the footlights.
She tried to smile and thank them, but became irritable with fatigue. Sir Hugh's hands kept leaving her ankle and going higher up her leg. 'You move me, you splendid creature.'
She kicked but he hung on. 'I wish somebody would move you.' She appealed to Sedley. 'Can't you get him off?' But he made no attempt, just watched her as if she were a game retriever puppy and he was assessing her reaction to the sound of guns.
Cully came in, demanding her costume.
'Let me keep it on, just for tonight,' she begged. Becky Marshall was trying to change behind a screen which, despite the combined efforts of Jacko and Mrs Coney, who was wielding the sick bowl, was rocking as the rakes peeked over it.
'"Any actress wearing costume for other than theatre purposes to forfeit a week's wages",' Cully quoted, unmoved.
'Then go and ask Master Hart and Master Lacy to come and remove these people.'
'Gone home,' said Cully.
'Sir Tom, then.' It had come to something that she must ask Killigrew for help.
'Gone home.'
She had to join Marshall behind the screen in the awkward business of putting her old dress over her head and struggling out of her costume beneath it, with Sir Hugh Middleton crawling round and shouting the colour of her stockings and garters to the others, until Coney brought the sick bowl down on his head.
'Why is this allowed?' she asked furiously of Marshall.
Becky shrugged. 'They're the King's friends. This is the King's theatre. We're the theatre's playthings.' She grinned. 'I see Sir Hugh has changed his allegiance, faithless fellow. You're welcome to him.'
They had to charge for the door, turning down invitations to supper, weekends in the country, carriage rides home. Outside in the corridor Penitence was waylaid by a soberly dressed, round-faced man who offered her a thick manuscript: 'Mrs Hughes, would you do me the honour of reading this play?'
Some of the rakes were trying to lift her. 'What? Oh, put me down.'
'It's my play,' the man was running alongside as she was carried through the corridor, shoulder-high, 'I want you for the heroine.'
As she was carried into Riding Yard Alley, Sir Charles Sedley finally came to her rescue: 'Put her down, my buckos, the lady is out of humour.' He picked the manuscript out of Penitence's hand and read the cover by the light of the stage- door flare. 'The Indian Queen. Full of bombast and rant, I have no doubt. Still, the fellow has a felicity with words and panders to popular taste.'
Penitence straightened her skirt. 'Who is he?'
'Dryden? A useful enough scribbler, though not in the same class as myself, in more ways than one.' He eyed her dishevel- ment and the fawning Sir Hugh, whom she was still trying to bat away. 'I really think, my dear, you should find yourself a protector.'
But for one night at least she had one, many. As she emerged from Riding Yard Alley, there was a cheer from a crowd of very different men.
That night Penitence was carried home to the Cock and Pie on the shoulders of Drury Lane butchers.
Chapter 5
Penitence was sworn in as one of His Majesty's Servants on a fine non-performance day at the beginning of June at the Lord Chamberlain's house in Whitehall. She was dressed in latest 'shepherdess' fashion: a straw hat as big as a coachwheel with blue satin ribbons tied under her chin matching the bows on her silver-kid shoes, a dress of sprigged cream muslin over silk petticoats and a hidden whalebone bodice which cupped her bosom into globes. An inch of lace saved her nipples from exposure — as long as she didn't bend too far forwards.
She copied Knipp and Marshall in using a walking-cane more as an accessory than an aid, arm extended, fingers quirked, but whereas Knipp's and Marshall's were the usual mock-ivory affairs smuggled out of the property cupboard, hers was gilded and carved in the shape of a shepherd's crook, a token of esteem from the Drury Lane butchers.
The ceremony, like the Lord Chamberlain himself, was dignified and short. Hart, Kynaston and Lacy stood beside her in the scarlet and gold livery of royal players; Penitence was disappointed to find that the King's actresses weren't presented with a suit of clothes when they were sworn in, only a gold medallion with Charles's head on it.