The Vizard Mask (48 page)

'Who's Bentinck?'

'Get him.'

'I don't know where he is, where anything is and I'm not stumbling around in the dark. Wait till dawn. I'll get him then.'

He was sick again. She didn't know how his slight frame could have held so much, and wondered if they'd poisoned him, but perhaps alcohol was a poison to him. There was a silver ewer of water and a basin on a chest. She helped him drink and bathed his face with a scarf she took from a chair.

His eyes began to focus. 'The water-giver,' he said. 'Twice in one day. I am ashamed before you.'

'Don't be. They made me drunk as well.'

'I am ashamed.' He was lost in his own misery.

They never listen. She sat on the bed so that their heads were level. 'Do you hear me? They made me drunk too. They got me into bed with a man I don't like.'

'You say this to ease my shame.'

'So that we're shamed together.' He was so young. 'Now go to sleep. I won't let anyone in. When it's dawn I'll find Bentinck.'

'What sort of people?' he asked. 'What sort of people do this?'

She didn't know the answer to that. As he closed his eyes, she went back to the window to watch for the morning. She must have dozed again, because rustling movement woke her up. The boy was holding on to the bedpost, fighting nausea, but impelled by God knew what sense of form to be on his feet. He'd taken a woman's petticoat off a chair and put it on, knowing he looked ridiculous, trusting her, courteously insisting on joining her vigil. He pattered over to the window and took the seat opposite her.

What a nice thing to do. She said easily: 'Is it a pretty part of the Lowlands, Orange?' He might forget to be sick if he talked.

'It is nowhere near the Netherlands. It is in southern France. Once it was an independent principality. There was a William of Orange among the knights of Charlemagne. Now Louis has gobbled it up and kills its Protestant children.' He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. 'This I don't understand. I tell my Uncle Charles: "Beware of Louis. He intends to gobble up all Europe. England, too, perhaps.'" He gave a shrug, just like Rowley's, and deepened his voice: '"Be easy, nephew. Louis is one of us."' He leaned forward. 'But if he is one of us, why has England joined my country and Sweden in the Triple Alliance against him?'

She gave him a shrug back. Politics were beyond her. 'Aren't you a Dutchman, then?'

'What is it you call a dog of many breeds?'

'A mongrel.'

'I am a mongrel. Of my great-grandparents three were Germanic, two French, one Italian, a Scot - your James the First — one Scandinavian. But, yes, I am a Dutchman.' His adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed. 'I wish I were home.'

Oh, bless him. He was only little. 'Tell me about home.'

The scent of late roses and honeysuckle came through the window from the garden, but his longing was so intense he replaced it with a sea breeze that blew without impediment across illimited skies and dykes and sand-piled dunes and tough, salt-stained people. She heard carillons ring out across canals and markets where countrywomen brought their produce in boats, a land of painters and thinkers and poets. 'It is very clean,' he kept saying, then he apologized. 'But, of course, you love your country too.'

'I don't know where it is.' And it was her turn to tell him about the forests of Massachusetts and their Indians, and the Pocumscut and the Puritans.

She could see him, as she had done, contrasting it with the cloying, tarnished sensuality that enmired them both. 'I ran away from the Puritans, or, rather, their hypocrisy,' she said, 'but from here they look . . . worthy.'

He nodded. 'They have a cause, at least,' he said, 'an ideal. Here there is no cause. Those men tonight believe nothing.'

He got up and paced, ignoring the swish of his petticoat. 'Do you know what my uncle said to me? He said' — again the voice went unconsciously deeper - ' "Nephew, if France should annexe the Netherlands, Louis would ensure you were given part of them for your kingdom. He is your relative. He will see you right. Listen less to your Dutch blockheads."'

He collapsed back in the chair. 'But they are not blockheads. The Dutch are my people. It is difficult to think I heard him say that.'

1 expect he did. Charles was clever and in many ways amiable, but he horrified her. She couldn't rid herself of the sense that under the elaborate, many-layered complexities of his soul there yawned a vacuum. Empty, still, cold, nothing. There could be no understanding between this young man and the gilded King. That William might cherish above himself his religion, his people and the flat lands they lived on, was outside his uncle's comprehension.

'He thinks I am a prig,' said the Prince of Orange.

'You are,' she said. 'And so, I find, am I.'

They shook hands.

They heard the bang of a door, then another, hammering, protests from sleepy throats, more banging. The noise got closer and under it was a deep note, a growling, as if a she- bear was lurching up the corridor, searching for its cub. 'Bentinck,' said William.

Penitence unlocked the door, noticing for the first time that it was full morning. The figure just barging out of a room it had been investigating was as ursine as Homo sapiens could be, huge-shouldered, outheld menacing arms, squat-legged — and very angry. She gestured it into the room and shrank back as it lumbered furiously past her.

The Prince smiled at it. 'Mrs Hughes, may I present my faithful friend, Hans William Bentinck. Bentinck, your breeches.'

There was a grunt of surprise, but the young man's enormous hands went immediately to the ties at his waist. Thoughtfully, Penitence turned her back. When she faced them again, William wore a pair of breeches he had to hold up, and the bear was in a petticoat.

The Prince of Orange bowed. 'You are for ever my good friend, Mrs Hughes.'

Penitence curtseyed. 'Always yours to command, Your Highness.'

And both of them meant it.

'He'll be furious,' said Becky. 'There's three more days of royal relaxation still to go. You'll have to get his dispensation to leave. You're one of his servants, after all.'

'It's me who's furious,' Penitence pointed out. 'As you once said, if we're under his protection, why doesn't he protect us? Anyway, I found the house major-domo or whatever he is, and told him I need a coach to go home at once because I'm ill.' She held her head. 'And it's true. What did they put in that orange-water?'

Becky's face cleared. 'If you're ill, then you can't go back by yourself. You're not leaving me here alone.'

A passing maid helped them downstairs with their luggage and hat-boxes. But as they tiptoed across the hall, they were glimpsed through the open door of the card room.

The two women faced the men who came crowding out, Buckingham, Sedley, Rochester, Harry Jermyn, Lord Chesterfield, and the others, some unshaven, most of them pale from lack of sleep, and all vindictive from a night's drinking and gossip. Sedley looked triumphant.

'Going, ladies?' asked Buckingham. 'But surely, my dears, not after last night. Was it not the occasion when the great Sedley prick finally conquered the shy Hughes clitoris?'

She'd known. And she'd prepared. She opened her eyes wide. 'Did it?' she asked. 'I beg you next time, Sir Charles, to make it greater. I fear I didn't notice.'

She saw Sedley's face change before she swept on and the guffaws started.

As she settled in the carriage, she said: 'I'm not an actress for nothing.'

Becky was still gasping. 'Let's hope you can go on being one.'

*

'How is he?'

The light from a candle played on her face while Kynaston's landlady examined Penitence with suspicion. 'Better than his enemies'd have him,' she said, 'but bad enough.' She led the way up a creaking cupboard-staircase and unlatched a door. 'In here.'

Kynaston's apartment belied the appearance of both its entrance and its landlady. A fire in the grate threw reflections on the beeswax shine of the spare, fine pieces of furniture, his portrait had pride of place on one wall and a nice Oriental rug on the other. The bed-hangings were fresh, sprigged cotton. Yet the figure on the bed, bandaged and hideously bruised, altered it into a battle-ground. Knipp, sitting beside it, put a finger to her lips.

Tiptoeing, Penitence whispered again: 'How is he?'

'They broke both his arms. They were trying for his face, but he managed to cover it for the most part. He saved his teeth at least.'

'Did he say who they were?'

Knipp shrugged and avoided her eyes. 'Two men with cudgels, he said; he'd never seen them before.'

What does the doctor say?'

'He's splinted the arms and given him a medicine. He should mend. But he's very feverish.'

Penitence sat down on the other side of the bed and, so as not to feel helpless, put out her hand to smooth Kynaston's wet hair, then drew back for fear of hurting him more; there was nowhere on the forehead that wasn't bruised. The message telling her Kynaston had been attacked had arrived at the Cock and Pie that morning while she was still trying to recover from her late arrival back from Newmarket. She looked across at Knipp who was radiating a proprietorial hostility. 'I came as soon as I could,' she said, 'but I was on stage this afternoon.'

'I'm sure you're mighty busy.'

Penitence ignored the tone. 'What did they take?'

Who?'

The robbers.'

'Nothing. They weren't after his purse.'

She didn't understand. 'What then?'

Knipp shrugged. 'Perhaps you'll sit with him a while. I've got to get home. My husband'll never believe I'm not cavorting.' She blew a kiss on to her fingers and very gently touched one of the splinted arms. 'Poor Kynaston, it'll be a long time before he cavorts again.' As she got up, she said: 'How was the King? How was Newmarket?' But as Penitence started to tell her she interrupted with instructions. 'And this is his posset. He's to drink it as soon as he wakes. The gozunda is in the usual place, he'll need your help to piss in it.' At the door she turned. 'If you're not too grand, that is.'

Penitence tidied the medicine table, tucked the bedclothes more neatly around the twitching patient, and sat down for her vigil.

Knipp's attitude hurt her. She supposed it was a natural enough jealousy, Knipp's career being on the decline and her own in full flower, but the little comedienne hadn't shown such resentment before. Perhaps it hadn't helped that when the attack on Kynaston had taken place, she and the others had been apparently enjoying themselves with the court.

Enjoying ourselves. Knipp, if you only knew.

It was very quiet. She got out her script for the Tyrannick Love they were doing in three weeks' time, and began rereading her part. Through the half-open casement came the alarm call of a thrush as it flew from whatever had disturbed its rest outside. She went to the window, hoping to see an owl. She liked owls.

The house was one of a terrace overlooking a square just off Hatton Garden. It was a damp still night, but one of the branches of an oak tree opposite was shaking from something more weighty than an owl. A cat? Weightier than a cat.

Squinting into the shadow of the branches she thought she discerned a human shape. She blinked, and it became a distortion of the tree trunk. Nevertheless, she barred Kynaston's door. Perhaps the disgruntled husband, the creditor, or whoever it was who'd beaten him, was out for more blood than had been shed already. She'd tell the Watch to keep a guard on him.

A pretty clock, a gift from one of Kynaston's admirers, chimed once and woke the patient up. She helped him to the pot, then held the posset glass while he drank. 'How do you feel, poor lamb?'

He groaned. 'I want the truth, Peg. Don't spare me. Am I marked for life?'

Bless him. A true actor. 'You'll mend as good as new.' But he wouldn't content himself until she fetched a looking-glass.

'Oh, my God. Banquo after the murder.' He fell back on his pillow, and if he'd been able to lift his hand he'd have draped it over his eyes.

'Who was it? What were they after?'

He looked painfully towards her, then away. 'Don't you know?'

Suddenly she did. 'Not Sedley?'

Win a pair of gloves. I heard one of them say it would teach me to ape my betters.' A spasm of pain caught him as he shifted. 'And it will. Believe me, Peg, it will. I'm sorry. I know he's a friend of yours. But you can't offend the court and get away with it.'

'No friend of mine,' she said. She should have guessed. Sir John Coventry had sneered at the King's morals and had his nose slit. Kynaston had made fun of Sedley's pretentious dress. Retaliation on both had been swift and horrible. She heard the Prince of Orange's question: 'What sort of people do this?' People with whom, until two days ago, she had been pleased to consort. No wonder Knipp had shown her disdain.

'No friend of mine,' she said again, but the actor was asleep.

What sort of people? Men who had lost touch with the ordinary and the decent. Self-styled gods who sent thunderbolts against mortals that dared challenge them.

Oddly, it wasn't Sedley she blamed but the man who led him and others in their wild tarantella, thickening the poison in their blood rather than dislodging it, a king who saw his sailors starving from lack of pay and gave his mistress £25,000 to gamble away in one night. He invited them into his dance, the clever, beautiful men and women whose talent, under a better monarch, could have been directed towards something more useful than debauchery. He had infected them all, Sedley, Rochester, Castlemaine, Gwynn, with his contempt for decency. He nearly infected me. For she, too, had felt the centrifugal pull of the whirling circle, and let go just in time.

But you can't offend the court and get away with it.

Disturbed, she went to the window again. There was nothing there. Yes, there was. Dragging footsteps were coming down the road.

She ran down to the front door and opened it. 'Dorry, what's happened?' She helped the girl up the stairs and sat her by the fire to get her warm.

Dorinda looked towards the bed. 'How is he?'

'Bad, but he'll survive. Tell me. Was the Earl married already?'