The Vizard Mask (51 page)

'Of course I will. There are the rehearsals. I'll stay with Aphra until you come up for the last performance, then we can either spend the night at Spring Gardens or come straight back.'

'I meant, will you perform? There is the child to consider.'

He didn't really like her acting at all now but, as he was careful not to forbid her, she insisted on appearing at least twice a year. For one thing, it meant she wasn't totally dependent. She'd bought The Compleat Angler with her own money.

'Rupert, I'm as strong as a horse. Anyway, it's Hart's benefit and I can't let him down. Othello was his triumph, and he says I was the best Desdemona he ever had.'

'So you were, so you were. But .. . very well, if you wish, my dear. As a matter of fact, I shall probably be bringing a friend to see it, Viscount Severn and Thames. With your permission, I shall invite him down to Awdes to stay for a night or two afterwards.'

'Of course.' His friends became fewer as more and more of them dropped off the perches; this would be another aristocrat who had outlived his time, like the Earl of Craven or Colonel William Legge; Cavaliers who had fought for Charles 1 and who were derided by his son's court because they still believed in honour. Their opinion of democracy made her hair stand on end - they were against it - and after dinner she usually left them to their pipes, brandy and talk of horsewhipping, but they treated her with a bluff and unfailing chivalry. Speak as you find. What did politics matter? If it came to that, Rupert's didn't bear thinking about, which was why they rarely discussed other than domestic matters.

A couple of pensioners were sitting on the plinth of Henry VI's statue, their sticks between their knees, as the carriage swept into Eton's beautiful schoolyard. They stared, not at Penitence nor Rupert, but at Peter sitting on the footman's seat behind them. Black men were a novelty this far out in the sticks.

The college was still at its lessons, but the Provost came waddling up to greet the illustrious parents, trailing his velvet gown and the smell of a rich dinner which, to judge from his girth, had been superfluous to requirements.

As usual Rupert prayed a half-holiday for all the boys and gained a cheer from the faces at the windows as the Provost signalled his acquiescence. Penitence didn't like the Provost; his expensive robes and obesity contrasted horribly with the condition of the seventy, skinny young Collegers in his charge who, according to Benedick and Dudley, subsisted on an unvarying diet of mutton, bread and beer. The mutton bones were used as bait for the rats which infested the Long Chamber in which the Collegers lived and slept. They catch the rats in their stockings and whack 'em to death.'

As Oppidans - fee-paying students - Benedick and Dudley were permitted to live out. Since their rooms were in the great castle which loomed over college and town, and their father was its Constable, the Provost spared them the frenzied application of the birch with which he corrected the grammar of less favoured boys.

Penitence's cup of gratitude overflowed for Rupert's treatment of Benedick. He'd kept his promise to give her son the consequence he accorded his own; sometimes she thought he gave him more.

Prince and boy had taken to each other from the first. Benedick openly hero-worshipped the man whose shock tactics had swept away the Roundhead cavalry at Worcester, who'd ridden into battle with his dog at his side, who'd activated England's first mine, who could still send a horse-pistol bullet through the tail of the weathercock on Awdes' roof. He listened to Rupert's stories till the cows came home and at play-time charged the box topiary of the ornamental garden with the Cavalier battle-cry 'For a king!', wielding the sword Rupert had insisted on having made for him.

When Penitence, worried by her son's monarchical tendency, had privately suggested to him that there'd been some justice in the Roundheads' cause, he'd disposed of the idea with a 'Pooh to the lobsterbacks. They were dreary.'

It was Dudley who listened to her; but Dudley was a listener. He was about the same age as Benedick, even taller, and fair where Benedick was dark. From studying him, Penitence guessed that his mother had been willowy, freckled and timid. She'd gone into her new relationship with a determination to love the boy as her own, and found she didn't have to try. He tugged at her heart; he was afraid of his father's disapproval, thereby bringing it down on himself; more bookish than athletic, he had to rouse himself to show an interest in Rupert's scientific experiments and talk of war which held such fascination for Benedick.

They spent the afternoon by the river at Cuckoo Weir so that Rupert could fish and the boys bathe. Peter laid linen tablecloths on the grass and set out a picnic of tartlets, quince comfits, toffee apples and gooseberry pasties to cater for the boys' sweet teeth.

'This is high eating, Peter, thank 'ee,' Benedick called through crumbs. Dudley was a good influence on his manners.

Peter stood in dignified isolation three yards away, watching the river, and didn't turn round. 'Your ma chose it,' he said. Over the years Penitence had managed to break down all the household's coldly courteous hostility towards herself, except Peter's. He was a relic from Rupert's buccaneering days, a child who'd been left behind in his village's flight when Rupert's ship anchored off the coast of Guinea. Rupert had brought him home as a souvenir, just as he'd brought a parrot and a monkey. Despite the agony of loss and isolation the boy must have suffered, perhaps because of it, he became an enthusiastic convert to the Church of England, though, Penitence suspected, he tended to confuse Rupert with God.

With education, he'd grown into the post of Rupert's major- domo, and he resented the advent of a woman he regarded as an adventuress into his master's life with a dislike Penitence might have expected from a disapproving mother-in-law.

Benedick joined Rupert in his fishing while Dudley and Penitence settled down to books.

What are you reading?' asked Dudley.

'Othello. To be ready for the performance at King's.'

'What's it about?'

She outlined the plot and then put out a hand to him. 'Desdemona didn't have anybody to fight her Iago, like you and Benedick fought mine.' On the first occasion that she and Rupert had visited the boys at the college, it had been to find both of them with black eyes and plummy mouths. Dudley had refused to say why he'd been fighting, but Benedick, still angry, had blurted it out: 'They called you a whore.'

'Who did?'

'Some of the Oppidans, and some of the Collegers. They said you were a whore because you were an actress and weren't married.'

Rupert had wanted to horsewhip the entire school, not excluding the Provost. Penitence dissuaded him on the grounds that while it might procure her detractors' silence it wouldn't change their opinion.

The incident coincided with King's production of A Merchant of Venice in which she was enjoying a success as Portia. At the end of the season she persuaded Killigrew to bring the play down to Windsor Castle and asked Rupert to invite the entire college. 'There's nobody more respectable than Portia,' she said, 'and the tights will woo them.'

They did. Next term Benedick had reported back, somewhat disgustedly, that the entire school was in love with her. She feared she'd overdone it, because Dudley was too.

She could see that Rupert's announcement that the family was to be increased had disturbed the boy. Perhaps he was jealous, or felt the young's disgust at a parent still indulging in sex. But it wasn't that. Watching a dragonfly skimming between the reeds, he said: 'Is it dangerous, having a baby?'

'Not for me. I'm strong.'

'But it hurts, doesn't it?'

'A bit. Don't worry. You worry too much.'

'I hope it's a girl.'

She said: '1 like sons. If it turns out as well as the two I have now, I shall be a happy mother.' That would be enough of personal matters for him. She put them both back on neutral ground: 'Dudley, I've been meaning to ask. What is a Whig?'

Happily he said: 'I think originally it was some awful Scotsman, a renegade or Covenanter or something like that. But it's coming to mean people who don't want James to succeed to the throne if the King dies.'

'Ah. So what's a Tory?'

'Well, originally, Tories were equally awful Irishmen but now it's being applied to people who don't mind if James succeeds to the throne. I think that's what it means.'

'Thank you, Dudley.'

It was always a relief that, though they were sorry when their outings were over, neither boy dreaded going back to school. They were, after all, doing so on the best possible terms as privileged students, with a dame and staff to look after them in one of the finest castles in the country, doting parents living nearby.

But she had an attack of a recurrent fear as she and Rupert were driven home that evening. God's got something up His sleeve. The prodigality of the cornucopia from which He was pouring life's riches on her and her son was against the Puritan law. There would be an accounting. She hadn't earned it.

Chapter 2

The last time Penitence had been in London, Titus Oates had just emerged as the uncoverer of a Popish Plot to hand England over to the Jesuits. With some of the King's players she had gone to see him on his soapbox in Hyde Park, declaiming to listening crowds the same story that he was telling the Privy Council: there was a plot between Louis XIV, the Jesuits and English Catholics to kill the King and conquer England for France.

It had been an exceptionally hot day in an exceptionally hot summer; she'd been surprised by the size of the crowd prepared to stand crushed together to hear the man.

'Isn't he a picture?' Lacy said. 'Listen to him.'

Her view obscured by the press in front of her, to listen was all Penitence could do at first. The voice was more a wail than speech, like a bad actor depicting the throes of grief.

'Brethren,' it sobbed, 'they have burned down our city once, are we to stand by while they do it again? For they will. Oh yes, in their malignity, they will. I have heard their plans.'

She had looked at the people hemming her in, surprised that they tolerated the artificiality of the performance. London crowds weren't known for their patience towards the absurd. Not only were they not jeering, they were rapt. The crowd's composition was equally unexpected; well-dressed men and women, usually conscious of distinctions, crushed against flat-capped artisans, careless that they were literally rubbing shoulders with the working class.

'Take warning, take warning, my brethren,' the voice throbbed on. 'To my shame I know them. I have heard their plans. They scheme to rise at the Pope's signal and massacre us, their Protestant neighbours, in our beds.'

'Why is it,' said Lacy, beside her, 'that nobody ever gets massacred out of bed?'

Hart and Kynaston had burrowed a path through to the front and at last Penitence set her eyes on Titus Oates. She blinked to make sure it wasn't a trick of the light. It wasn't. The man who was mesmerizing something like three hundred people was ugly — incredibly, memorably ugly. The low forehead, tiny nose, almost invisible eyes and vast, wobbling chins were irresistibly reminiscent of a pig.

'Who is he?' she whispered to Kynaston. 'Where did he come from?'

'An ex-Jesuit,' said Kynaston, 'who's seen the error of his ways. Seen every other damn thing as well.'

'As I speak to you, my brethren,' went on Oates, 'the army of that arch-idolator, Louis, is planning to land his army in Ireland. Our King, our statesmen, our divines of England who protect our Church, all are to be put to the sword.' He dashed the spit from his lips and raised his voice to a howl: 'Beware, my friends, beware the hordes of Babylon.'

The man was a mimic's dream. The actors had stood, enchanted, moving their mouths in time to his. Hart kept humming to get the pitch right.

As they walked away, Kynaston was making notes. 'Such bliss, my dears,' he said, 'I'll do an epilogue as Titus Oates. The difficulty will be out-lampooning the lampoon.'

Becky Marshall was doubtful. 'I think you'll have to be careful, Kynny. The crowd were listening to him.'

The man's a mountebank,' said Lacy. 'You don't mean to tell me, Becky my love, that if there were all these plots, our Titus was standing behind the door each time, listening in. There aren't that many Papists in England. God damn it, there aren't that many doors'

Becky shook her head. 'No smoke without fire.'

'Blurt to that,' said Hart. 'Granted, our revered King has been a teeny bit careless in allowing so many Catholics in his court, not to mention his bed, but I can't believe they'd plot to kill him. Rid the throne of Rowley and you get James.' He shuddered. 'Even the Pope wouldn't want James. What do you think, Peg?'

Penitence had shrugged. 'I don't understand politics,' she said, 'but I wouldn't underestimate him.' She'd seen preachers like Oates in Massachusetts. 'Lying or not, those people back there believed him.'

That had been in the summer.

When she returned for the Othello at the beginning of November, Penitence entered a London that had gone mad with hysteria. Two days before, the body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a Protestant magistrate, had been found murdered on Primrose Hill. And it was to Sir Edmund that Titus Oates had just made a deposition on oath that the Queen's physician and the Duchess of York's secretary had been plotting to poison the King. The assumption was that Sir Edmund had been killed by Papists because he knew too much.

The coach was rocking. Penitence, who'd been dozing since Hammersmith, woke up as she was tipped from one side of the seat to the other. Automatically, she put her arms round her stomach to protect the child within it. She could hear Boiler, the driver, protesting: 'I tell you this is Prince Rupert's coach. It's his lady inside.'

The curtains were ripped open and she found herself staring into angry faces. 'That right?' asked one of them. The man was tapping the side of her coach. 'These Rupert's arms?'

'Yes. What's the meaning of this?'