The Vizard Mask (56 page)

What he took was another drink, though as he sat down again he seemed to have sobered. 'I'm offering now,' he said, 'if you'll leave Rupert alone. And I'm offering marriage, which is more than the others did, I'll bet.'

'Marriage?'

'Certainly. My first wife was a trollop, why change a noble tradition?'

She ignored the insult as she tried to work out what on earth he was trying to do. Underneath the drink and the irony and the sheer bloody rudeness there was purpose. '1 see,' she said slowly. 'You think Rupert turned down the kingship because of me.'

'Practically said so. You've got the poor old sod besotted, anyone can see that. "I'd not replace my lady for the greatest queen in Christendom." Very words. He'd have to, you see. Low as England's fallen, she hasn't stopped ... stooped to making harlots queens — not unless nobly born, anyway.' He lurched forward in his chair so that for the first time since entering the room she saw his face. 'Leave him alone, Boots. You come away with me. Now.'

Did he honestly think he could hold out a tastier bit of meat and the bitch would follow him? He didn't understand her any more than he understood Rupert. He didn't understand anything. If ever there had been a moment when she could have told him about herself, she wouldn't wish it back now. This was war. She wouldn't tell him she hadn't been a harlot when they met if they stuck red-hot coals under her fingernails. She wished she had been. She wished she'd whored with every man she'd ever met because it hurt him.

She was exultant. It hurt him. He'd felt something for that stuttering wench across the Rookery alley. He'd created a passable woman out of the clay he'd found to hand and been proud of it. He'd patented his Galatea and resented the use other men had made of it.

What a fool. She could hurt and hurt him. 'Marriage?' she said. 'With you? Viscount, you're nowhere near my price.'

She turned to exit left as he lunged at her, side-stepped so that he staggered against the fireplace. Drunkard. He was shaking and mumbling, then he dropped. Oh God, he's ill. She dragged him away from the flames and ran to fetch Peter.

'Mai aire the French call it,' said Rupert, 'from the noxious

mists of swamps. I've seen it before, in Africa, though you don't have to go that far to get it. His Majesty's recent illness was not unlike.'

'It doesn't matter what it's like or unlike. What can we do for it?'

Infuriatingly, Rupert tapped the footboard of the Viscount's rattling bed. 'It is the point, my dear, forgive me. Charles was cured not by doctors — as if those meddlesome idiots could cure anybody — but by the powder of a bark from a South American tree. It was brought back from there by the wife of the Viceroy of Peru, who was successfully treated with it after the manner of the natives of those parts ...'

Penitence clenched her teeth. It was no good hurrying him. She pulled the blankets higher over the shaking figure in the bed and gestured to Peter to fetch more. If this bark was any good Rupert would have access to it; the King's illness had occurred at Windsor when Rupert, as its Constable, had been in attendance. But quick, quick. He's dying.

'... and is named Cinchona after her. Both Charles and 1 experimented with Robert Talbor to find the right dosage and . ..'

'Can we get it?'

'Indeed. I have some in my laboratory at Windsor. I shall ride there this minute. But, my dear . ..'

'Yes?'

'I shall have to stay on, I fear. The forest court is due to sit and 1 must take my place on the bench; then the King is coming down for the races. May I ask of you to remain here and take care of our poor friend? He is too recently in England to have gathered his own household, and it's too long a journey in his condition for him to be carried to his family seat down in the west.'

'I'll stay, Rupert.'

'It is not infectious, or I wouldn't ask. It will be merely a matter of instructing the servants and overseeing their nursing. Do not overtire yourself. Peter shall come with me to bring back the cinchona.'

'You take Boiler,' Peter's deep voice came from the doorway, where he'd been hovering again, 'I ain't leaving here.'

Penitence looked up. As Rupert's oldest retainer, the black man got away with liberties allowed to nobody else, but he was showing a suspicion that alarmed her. Rupert didn't notice.

At long last she stood at his stirrup waiting to say goodbye when he came to the end of the numerous instructions about the estate he had for Peter and Samuel, the steward. His strictures always ended with the same words: 'In all things you are to obey my lady as myself.'

'Take care, my lord,' she said. They were formal in front of servants. 'If the headaches return you are to come home.'

He bent down to kiss her hand. 'We have not yet had time to discuss your father. I have been thinking of the matter. Did you know he was heir to a manor?'

'Was he?'

'The manor of Hoy. An old family. Somewhere in Somerset, I believe.' He nodded to himself. 'I shall investigate further.'

She watched his erect back as he rode away down the chestnut avenue, with Boiler following on his palfrey. At the gates, he turned and doffed his hat, swinging it above his head like a boy in a gesture the royalist cavalry would have known well. Bless him, oh, bless him.

By the time she'd got upstairs to the sickroom, Peter was installed by the Viscount's bed. 'I'll be staying here,' he said. And it was more a threat than a promise.

Chapter 4

She tried to confine herself to the hundred duties implicit in the running of a big house. Nevertheless, the compulsion to be with the patient fretted her nerves when she wasn't, and took her back to his room at every spare moment. There was a wrangle with Peter when she proposed to watch through the night.

'I'm staying. Ain't seemly for you to spend the night here.'

Tou need your sleep, Peter. Go to bed.'

'Ain't seemly.'

'Don't be so prudish. I need no chaperone. He's my lord's friend. And if he weren't, he's in no condition to accost me.'

Peter's big lower lip was stuck out as it always was when he was being stubborn. 'I'm staying.' The implication in the flat, curiously well-spoken words was that she might do the accosting.

'It's an order.' She feared rebellion, but though the lower lip stuck out further than ever, he went. Does every damn male but Rupert think me a whore? It's my duty as hostess to nurse the man, that's all.

It wasn't all. For years she'd been recommending his death to God, and now that God seemed to be obliging, she was surprised by a desperate pity. He lay curled up like a foetus, his hands clasped over each other, his nails blue with the cold that made his teeth chatter, as if he was in an open field in winter instead of a bed piled with blankets.

She went to the fireplace and stoked it to subdue the impulse to cuddle the poor creature back to warmth as she'd cuddled Benedick in coal-less winters.

Memories which had been superimposed by his desertion began to surface. He'd sat by her sickbed once and nagged her back to life. 'I've worked hard on you,' his voice had said, 'you miserable item of humanity.' He'd called her his achievement in Gethsemane. The Rookery had been the Place of the Skull for them all then, but for him there had been the special refinement in remembering his wife's adultery. Not for him the satisfaction of calling out his rival - you couldn't challenge a king to a duel — instead, escape to the bottle and the grim reflection of his own humiliation in the most degraded part of London. All women must have seemed prostitutes to him then, so how could he have believed her anything other than a whore? But he'd meant to come back. So he said.

'Thirteen years to come back across the channel,' she told the shivering figure on the bed. 'You shouldn't rush about so. Tired you out.'

Very well, if Charles made his treaty with France in 1670 and Henry King had spent seven years incarcerated through learning of it, that left time unaccounted for. 'You'd have been too late in any case.'

Too late for what? To scatter a few pieces of gold into the grateful claws of a street wench he'd remembered to be sorry for? That he'd named a pet rat for? Ho, ho, Henry King. There was a surprise for your homecoming.

A moan of 'Cold' came from the bed.

'Serves you right,' she said.

Emotions came and went too fast to be analysed. Resentment subsided, rose again, subsided, became panic when the shivering fits gave way to fever and delirium. The back of his neck was hot against her arm as she raised his head to give him the cinchona infusion, and she had trouble getting him to drink. Glaring, he grabbed her hair and shouted: 'But that was in another country.'

The notes Rupert had sent her were not reassuring:

After the fever will come great sweating and some relief until he be taken cold again two or three or four days after. If the ague do reoccur every day then he will be so weakened that he may be collapsed and die. These rallies and relapses may so continue if it be he lack vitality.

The 'great sweating' occurred towards dawn.

She called for fresh sheets too soon and had to summon more. Watching Johannes and Herbert, two of the footmen, bundle the perspiration-soaked linen ready for the laundry, she gave a sudden start. She left them sponging the patient down with marjoram water and, leaving instructions that on no account was he to get cold, scurried off.

She found Mistress Palmer haranguing the laundry maid who was hanging out clothes in the yard. She took her into the kitchen garden.

'What, that mummer as put on the play for us that time?' Mistress Palmer was intrigued.

'Yes.'

'As lodged with old Ma Hicks?'

'Yes.'

'Him as is Benedick's—?'

'For God's sake, keep your voice down. Yes.' Mistress Palmer was the only one of her household who'd recognize Henry King — the Reverend Boreman had never met him. 'I just don't want you catching sight of the Viscount of Severn and Thames and launching into Rookery reminiscences.'

'A-course I won't,' said Mistress Palmer stoutly, 'I want to keep my position, same as you. It's nice here.'

'It's not a matter of keeping our position. I don't want him knowing about Benedick and I don't want the Prince upset.'

'Shouldn't think you do. Who wants to go back to the old Yard, and them times? Remember that night when you come crawling home covered in the sticky? And look at you now, sparklers on your fambles, fart-catchers behind your chair at dinner...'

Penitence left, feeling more a Jezebel than before.

Peter was back in the sickroom, sitting on a stool by the door with his arms folded. Her patient was awake but querulously weak. He gagged when she gave him the infusion. 'I escaped prison to get away from better stuff than this.'

'You escaped?' It was indicative of her interest that she added: When?' rather than 'How?'

'I don't know,' he said irritably. 'A year ago? Forced to take the pretty way home, via the Americas. Only ship I could get.'

Thirteen years accounted for. One layer of resentment peeled away, to be replaced by another. He could have written.

She sent down to the kitchens for invalid food and left Peter to spoon it into him while she went to rest. In the afternoon, which was overcast, she ordered the torchere lit in his room and sat near it with her embroidery while he slept. On his stool, Peter's head dropped on his chest as he dozed.

There was a shout from the bed. She dropped her frame and ran to him. He clutched at her. 'I dreamed I was back.' He was shaking, though not from cold.

Seven years. For the first time they became his years, not hers. Appalled, she got a glimpse of wasted day after wasted day dragged out under a tomb's lid which he could have had no expectation of lifting. 'There,' she said, 'there. You're safe now. You're home.'

He tucked her hands under his cheek and went to sleep on them. So as not to shift him, she knelt awkwardly on the bed- steps, not caring what Peter thought. For her those same years had been showered with applause and achievement, thanks to him. Tears were dropping down on to her arms, and, gently, she extricated one hand to wipe them away.

In the evening, after more cinchona and some broth, he became revived and spiteful. 'Did I tell you I had a pet rat in prison, Peter?'

'No, lord.'

'Pet rat. Called it Boots. Taught it tricks.'

'A clever rat, lord?'

'A very clever rat, Peter. When she came to me, all she could do was squeak. By the time I'd finished with her she could talk, what do you think of that?'

'You're joshing me, lord.'

'I'm not. She could even sing. She used to sing Bathazar's song.'

'What happened to the rat, lord?'

The Viscount lay back on his pillows. 'Oh, she went off to another's cell where the crumbs were better. You know what rats are.'

Penitence bit off her silk, jabbed her needle into her embroidery and got up. 'Good-night, my lord.'

'Going?'

'Yes.'

'Sing to me. Balthazar's song. To remind me of Boots.'

'I only sing professionally, my lord. I'll send you our lutist. That's what he's employed for.'

It was soothing to walk in the knot garden. As she paced round the tortuous pattern, the light from the terrace's flambeaux showed up the hedges as black, raised stitching against the pale background of the gravel.

He definitely thought his tuition of her had established some sort of chattels-right. What she couldn't fathom was whether he resented Rupert's possession of the chattels which were more rightfully his, or whether, as he saw it, the same chattels were proving a stumbling block between Rupert and the crown.

Like the knot garden, their relationship had a repeating pattern. Its form depended on the illness. On the third day he began shivering again and was reduced to being pitiful. In the fever that followed his mind wandered away into Grand Designs and prisons. Afterwards he was exhausted and pettish until the the cycle started once more three days later.

When the second fever, which was very bad, was at its height, he shouted out again: 'But that was in another country.'