The Vizard Mask (44 page)

She looked down at her boots, a pair of gilded kid, cast-offs from one of Castlemaine's young royal bastards; they fitted perfectly. 'It's nearly curtain-up time,' she said. 'Do 1 go on today or don't I?' Even with the door closed, they could hear the subdued roar of a packed house coming from the auditorium. 'What?' Sir Tom had mumbled something.

'I said,' he said nastily, 'I suppose you'll have to go on. And don't blame me if the whole company goes bankrupt.'

'There's just one more thing,' she said. Might as well go the whole hog. 'I should like Dorinda to become a walker.'

'Who the hell's Dorinda?'

'The orange-girl.' Doesn't he remember anybody he leches?

'That Dorinda.' Sir Tom became reflective. 'Amazing girl. Twat like a corkscrew. Certainly, certainly.' He sighed. 'What's another harlot? Anything else, madam? No husband you want a dukedom for?'

'No thank you, Sir Tom. I have no husband.'

'That's a mercy for some poor devil. Now get out on that stage. And I tell you this, madam, I'm regretting the day—'

'There is one last thing. I wish you would reconsider Aphra Behn's play.'

Killigrew got up, pushed past her, opened the door and pointed. 'Out. It's bad enough being blackmailed by sluts of actresses, but ruin myself with some female's scribble I shall not. Out.'

Penitence outed. Becky Marshall, also in boy's costume, was waiting for her in the corridor. 'Did it work?'

Penitence took her hands and swung her round. 'It worked. I avoided the couch and I got a rise.'

Her ambition leaped like a mountain goat into higher, greener pasture. It was true Hart received only a £2 a week salary, but as a shareholder in the company he also got £1,000 a year. Why shouldn't a woman become a shareholder?

Telling Dorinda that she had procured her at least a start in the theatre was another ferocious joy. As they walked home together that night, their plans ran into fantasy.

'I'll put Benedick's name down for Westminster School.'

'We can do up the Cock and Pie.'

'We could leave the Rookery altogether. We could move into Westminster.'

'Pity about Aphra's play.'

'We'll put it on ourselves. We'll have our own theatre.'

Drury Laners stared at them as they twirled along, their voices calling out into the summer evening.

At the entrance to Dog Yard Dorinda, at least, calmed down. 'I'll lease out the orange business. Can't afford to lose them profits.'

'Oranges,' scoffed Penitence. 'We won't need them for long. We're professional women now.'

'I always was,' said Dorinda.

'A real profession. Respectable. Well, respectable-ish. Oh, Dorry, we're independent. We can survive. We don't have to sleep with any man ever again.'

They stood in the middle of the Yard so long, transfixed by the thought, that Footloose came trundling over to see what was the matter. From the window of Mother Hubbard's where a new generation of girls had taken over from the old, a voice asked a passer-by: 'Want some fickytoodle, dearie?'

Penitence snatched Footloose's cap from his head and threw it in the air. 'We don't have to sleep with anybody ever again.'

'Lessen we want to,' said Dorinda, catching the cap and kissing the scabby head before replacing its covering.

Hearing their voices, Benedick came toddling out of the Cock and Pie's door. Penitence ran up the steps and lifted him before he fell down them. She put him on her shoulder and turned so that he could survey the empires of the earth.

Dog Yard was in the shadow cast by the tall wooden frame of Mother Hubbard's, but the sunset was gilding the tattered rooftops and the view beyond. 'We're rising, my son,' she said.

As Penitence rose so did the City of London. In place of the destroyed ancient forest of buildings sprang up an elegant plantation.

It wasn't as elegant as it might have been; Christopher Wren's visionary plan as Surveyor-General which would, if built, have rivalled Rome or the Paris redesigned by Henri IV, was rejected as too expensive. Obstruction, procrastination and corruption inevitably took the fine edge off even the compromise.

But if Wren wasn't allowed to design Utopia, he designed practically everything else. Under his supervision fifty-one churches began to raise their differing and beautiful steeples into the empty sky, some like pagodas, some tiered, or with columns, consoles and obelisks, some Flemish, others Gothic.

The labour to rebuild houses and shops, big or small, went on every day and sometimes into the night by the light of flares. Timber was brought not only from all over the country but from as far away as Norway. Brick kilns ringed the city with smoke, the one at Moorgate alone turning out over a million bricks a year.

Anguish for the past was replaced by pride in the new as a modern, wider-thoroughfared city of brick, stone and tile emerged from the ruins.

Yet for all the growth, there was a sense of incompleteness. Londoners up to their elbows in plaster would pause as they looked towards the uncrowned rise on which had floated the great whale to which their homes and churches had been the accompanying school of porpoises. It would take years, perhaps they would never live to see it; until St Paul's was resurrected London could not be London.

But up on the hill, a foundation stone was being laid without ceremony. 'Here,' Christopher Wren said. 'We'll start here. Get a flat stone and put it here.'

His workmen looked around the scree of fire-scarred rubble. 'Which one?'

'Any one.'

The nearest and flattest was part of an old gravestone; as they tipped it down on to the spot that Wren indicated they saw what word was on it.

'Resurgam.'

Entering his mother's bedroom for a morning kiss, Benedick took one look and yelled. Mistress Palmer came running. 'Gawdelpus, what you wearing that bloody thing for? You look like the Devil crapped hisself flying.'

Penitence was struggling to undo the mask strings that had got tied up with her back hair. 'I slept in it. It's got ... blast the thing, don't fret, darling, it's only Mama ... cream on the inside. It's to feed the skin. There, now give us a kiss.'

'You got bloody gloves on an' all.'

'Same thing. And I wish you'd watch your language in front of the boy.'

'I don't fright him shitless, that's one thing', and muttering that in her day they used soap and water, Mrs Palmer took herself off.

'We'll have to get you a tutor,' Penitence told her son.

'Don't want a tutor. You said MacGregor was my tutor. He's learning me—'

'Teaching.'

'—teaching me ever so well. You ain't heard me read my new horn book.' Benedick's small forefinger traced a 'B' in the grease on his mother's face. 'Will I read it to you now?'

'I've got to get up and make pretty.'

Benedick bounced up and down on her stomach. 'Why? Why do you? You said you was resting today. You said we'd go to the park.'

He was a dark-haired child with fine, sallow skin. As he glowered at Penitence just then she saw his father and shut her eyes to get rid of the image. So far the boy hadn't questioned his one-parent state — so many of his contemporaries in the Rookery lacked a father that it seemed a natural condition to him.

She was prepared for when he did. 'Your father is dead, Benedick.' She wanted Henry King dead. Every day she wanted him deader. The nights were a different matter, but by day she obliterated the man's personality. Each year increased her resentment at the ease with which he'd gone away and stayed away, until her memory of the man deliberately diminished him into the caricature of a seducer. She'd forbidden Dorinda and MacGregor to mention him.

The first time she heard his name at the theatre, when Hart and Lacy were discussing the possibility of putting on a translation of Tartuffe, it was a shock. 'I wish Henry

King were still with us,' Hart said. 'He was the Moliere expert.'

'Ah, Henry,' sighed Knipp, 'I miss him.'

It was like hearing that a centaur, some mythical creature, had once dropped in for tea. It was against her pride to seek more information, though she would have welcomed it unsought. There were other mentions, but none seemed to know where he had come from or gone to and, typical players that they were, concerned themselves with him only as he had affected their theatrical lives.

The momentary resemblance hardened her heart against the boy. 'I must shop for when I go to the races with the King,' she told him. 'You want Mama to look nice, don't you?'

'I wish he'd fight battles, then I could go. I want to go to war.'

She rinsed her face and began sorting through the silver-gilt boxes, tweezers and bowls that Sir Hugh Middleton had given her as a peace offering. 'Your Auntie Aphra should never have taken you to see Henry the Fifth.'

'Wasn't it grand when they killed all those Frenchies?'

'It wasn't very grand when the Frenchies killed the little boys in the baggage train.' Lemon juice on Spanish wool cleared the last of the grease from her face. A little cochineal went on the cheekbone as her son dispatched the nobility of France with her long-handled powder-puff.

'I wish I had a sword.'

You should have. We had to sell it. 'Sir Charles says he'll give you one he had as a boy.'

'Will he?' His face went sullen. 'Don't like Sir Charles Sedley-pedley-wedley. Why do you like him? He makes fun of me.'

'He makes fun of everybody. Powder-puff please.'

'Can't we go to the park?'

'Come here.' As he stood between her knees they looked at each other with mutual incomprehension. They spent so little time together that she was self-conscious when she talked to him. 'Benedick, you know when we went to Auntie Knipp's house?'

He nodded.

'And there wasn't much furniture in it?'

'It was cold.'

'It was cold. That's because she doesn't earn as much money as I do and can't buy coal. And that's because her husband doesn't let her go out and make friends. And if you don't make friends you don't get good parts to play and people don't give you presents.'

'Auntie Dorry's got lots of friends. She gets very good parts. Wasn't she bloody funny yesterday?'

'Very funny. I've told you not to swear.' Dorinda had now adopted the stage-name Roxolana she'd once suggested for Penitence, and her success on the boards had taken Penitence aback; having taught her friend everything she knew, it had been disconcerting to discover that, as far as comic timing went, Dorinda had a thing or two to teach her. 'But you do see, Benedick, that if you're to leam Latin and Greek and how to use a sword and—'

'And he died and then she died.'

She couldn't help grinning; he'd picked up theatre slang quickly. 'But you do see. We've got to have money if you're to go to school. And so I've got to go out and about.'

He'd lost concentration. 'I've got a lot of friends, haven't I? I've got the Tippins and—'

'Exactly' she said grimly. 'Now then. Shall I put a patch here? Or here?'

She gave the day's instructions to MacGregor and Mistress Palmer and stepped out into Dog Yard, the scent of 'Hughes' chypre which Charles Lillie of Lillie's-in-the-Strand had created especially for her battling against the Yard's stinks, and losing.

She kept to the terrace past the Ship in order to avoid the mud and ordure below the steps. Here I am — she always glissaded into this thought at this point — most popular actress in England and still living in this hell-hole.

"Morning, Pen.'

'Good morning, Sam.'

From the pawnbroker's across the way, Mistress Fulker, who was carrying on her dead husband's business, yelled: 'Time's up on that ticker, Pen. You going to redeem it or not?'

Everywhere else they treat me with respect. Should she redeem the watch or sell it? It was gold, a tribute from an unknown admirer. Unlikely that Mistress Fulker would pay anything near its true value. 'I'll speak to you tomorrow.' Damned if she was going to haggle in public.

She had to back away as a young Tippin ran up and seemed about to clutch her skirt. 'Here, Pen, can Benny come out to play?'

'No,' she told him, coldly. 'Benedick is at his lessons.'

I've got to get us out of here. Merely to emerge out of the Rookery with one's shoes and petticoat unstained was a problem. She had to refuse Sedley's offers to send a carriage for her because she dared not let his servants see the sort of place she lived in. She certainly couldn't afford a carriage of her own. Yet to rent a house in an area which sported pavements or even duckboards would take up too much of the money she was saving for Benedick's education.

She was less worried about the boy's health than she had been — anybody who could survive babyhood in the Rookery usually survived the rest. But unless she made a move soon, his language, let alone the bad habits he was picking up from the Tippins and their ilk, would debar him from a school like Westminster.

She'd thought a salary of £91 a year plus the money from her benefit performances plus the gifts, most of which she turned into cash, would be enough to maintain a decent lifestyle and, more importantly, her independence.

She'd reckoned without the necessity of appearing affluent. This was Restoration England. You were what you wore and how you wore it. She'd told Benedick the stark truth; Knipp was getting fewer and fewer parts, not because she was a bad actress, but because she had a jealous husband who suspected every present and who refused to allow her to make the social round of the coffee-shops where the playwrights — and it was playwrights who did the casting - hung out, or to appear in the park where the public appetite was whetted by the sight of its heroines. Knipp was disappearing.

If Peg Hughes was to stay visible, she had to buy silk stockings at 15s, scented gloves at 12s a pair, have her mantuas made in Italy, her shoes at St James's and her cosmetics in the Strand. The lace adorning her handkerchief alone cost 5s a yard. By rights she should have employed a personal hairdresser, but had managed to come to an arrangement with Nell Gwynn's, who moonlighted.

Holding her skirts high and lurching from one clean piece of ground to another she reached Holborn where the traffic had left so much manure that she had to pause and make a calculation, not only whether she should sacrifice a florin and hire a hackney to take her to the Royal Exchange but whether, by doing so, she would commit that gravest of social sins and arrive on time. 'Always keep 'em waiting,' Gwynn had advised her in a tutorial on how to treat men. Easy enough for Nelly, who never rose before midday, but an effort for Penitence, who had punctuality engraved on her soul. In the interest of her shoes, however, she hailed a hackney which, luckily, was delayed by the usual jam at the Poultry.