The Vizard Mask (62 page)

He wouldn't reprove her in public — he rarely reproved her even in private — but she'd shamed him by not letting him defend her and by going to talk to her detractor.

She ignored him. 'Who is that man? Where does he live?'

The landlord turned to her in relief. 'Not one of ours, I tell ee. Comes from over by Sallycombe. Whole viper's nest on them preachifiers as says its their duty to din a respectable body's poor ears every Sunday.' The landlord spat into the sawdust of his floor. 'Sallycombe folk, every one. Why Lady Alice do tolerate un I don't know. I don't. Roundheads and Dissenters they was. Roundheads and Dissenters they still be.'

'What's his name?'

'Martin Hughes, Your Ladyship. A teaseller. Oh, what a viper.'

Mudge Ridge put his head round the inn door. He'd brought his cart to the smithy to have a wheel straightened and was now going home. Would His Highness and lady like a lift?

Penitence accepted; Rupert's hands were still shaking. He didn't speak during the journey back, but sat on the bouncing seat of the farm cart with the dignity of a Cavalier on a charger. Penitence sat beside him and talked to Mudge who walked ahead, leading the horse. He too was apologetic but saw further than the landlord.

'Somerset now,' he explained — he pronounced it Zummerzet - ' 'tis divided twixt Royals and Roundheads, church and meeting-house. Always is, always was. And what with the gentry becoming richer and the Church more Romish, poor folk are turning to Dissenting. Not so much farm folk, mebbe, but weavers and spinners like.'

Weavers and spinners like her maternal grandparents had been before they left for a new world.

Come to that, she hadn't seen either Mudge or Prue Ridge in church this morning either, though their parents had been. Casually she said so.

Mudge glanced over his shoulder at her and she realized that in the old days her grandfather, royalist and churchgoer, would have punished his tenants for non-attendance. She winked at him, and saw his white-lashed blue eyes widen first in surprise and then in relieved amusement.

Back at the Priory she sat Rupert down in the room to the right of the screen passage that they had made into a parlour, poured him a brandy and then knelt at his feet. 'I'm sorry, Rupert.'

'The man shall be whipped despite you. If such unmannerliness goes unpunished there will be revolution come again. The magistrate shall be informed. You shall not be insulted in broad daylight.'

She doubted whether a magistrate could pillory someone for an insult, but perhaps in Somerset it was possible. 'Please, Rupert...'

He held up a hand. 'You shall not speak for him. Such tenderness is out of place. I'll put the vermin in the stocks myself.'

'I hope you won't, Rupert.' She took his hand. 'I'm fairly sure he's my grandmother's brother. The vermin's my great- uncle.'

Chapter 6

The Viscount of Severn and Thames, it transpired, was in the Low Countries and would be unable to accept the kind invitation to dine with His Royal Highness Prince Rupert and Mrs Hughes on May the 4th.

'They say he's thick with Prince William,' Rupert told her, troubled. 'I wish I may not hear he has become a Whig.' Whigs upset him; not only would they exclude James from the succession but their extremists called for the Protestant Duke of Monmouth to be legitimized so that he could be the next king — something Rupert would as soon see done as enthrone the Devil.

'But would you want him a Tory?' she asked and then regretted it as she watched his indecision; she hated seeing Rupert, a man who had always been clear as to where his duty lay, struggling with doubt in his old age. His cousin's rule worried him - not least by suspending Parliament. Every day he received letters from his London financier and merchant friends complaining of the King's gerrymandering to gain political control of the City and its juries. Rupert's loyalty to England's institutions were almost as great as his loyalty to its throne, and he became upset that each was threatening to abolish the other.

No doubts bothered the neighbours who came to dine at the Priory. Church of England Tories to a man, magistrates, sheriffs, nouveau riche clothiers, they expounded the damnation of Whigs in their rich, drawn-out, heavily diphthonged accents. Their equation was crudely simple: Whigs were Dissenters and Dissenters were damned.

Penitence, who knew many aristocratic Church of England Whigs, realized that this far from London she was in a different world; the sons of men who had fought for the crown still despised the men whose fathers had fought for Parliament. Toryism reigned supreme. To be successful was ipso facto to be a Tory. Whiggery, on the other hand, flourished among the defeated Nonconformers: insignificant but independent artisans; weavers, small farmers, craftsmen.

If Martin Hughes was an example of Somerset Whiggery and these local landowners who were her guests and who displayed their wives, wealth and prejudices in the absolute assurance that Prince Rupert would approve them, were typical Tories then she — and she realized for the first time that she was the result of a mating between a representative of both - didn't like either of them much. She felt more in tune with the countryside than its people.

'Y'ear there was naastiness twixt yourself and one of they dang blue-nail preachers, Your Highness,' brayed Sir Ostyn Edwards, Penitence's nearest neighbour and the local magistrate. The news had spread with speed; even the Cartrights, a couple of strong but likeable Tories at Rupert's end of the table, had heard of it - and they lived at Crewkerne, a good ten miles away.

Rupert played it down. 'There was a fellow spouting some foolishness. It was of no matter.' He made no mention of Penitence's presumed relationship with the preacher just as he did not tell the guests that on her paternal side she was a by- blow of Captain Hoy, their contemporary. It was none of their business.

'Trouble-makers and revolutionaries,' pronounced Sir William Portman, the MP for Taunton. 'They're Whigs, sir, weaving, thieving Whigs. You should send 'em down, Ostyn, send 'em down.'

'Ah do,' said Sir Ostyn, indignant. 'Then you gennulmen complain as ah'm taking away your workers.'

'They Hugheses is no workers of maahn,' complained Sir Roger Pascoe. 'Too danged independent. Teasellers. You want to kick 'em off your land, Alice' - he raised his voice; Lady Alice Lisle was deaf - 'I say you want to kick 'em off your land and into my factories, Alice.'

'I don't want to do no such thing then,' said Lady Alice. 'Ah'm not saying they ain't bothersome preachifiers, but ah'm not seeing they starve at your looms for four shillings a week when the going rate be seven and well you know it, Sir Roger.'

Sir Roger beamed, not at all put out. 'And find their own harness, size and wind their own quills. If 'tis good for the trade, 'tis good for the country.'

"Tis good for thy pocket,' scolded Lady Alice. 'Commerce uz made for man, not man for commerce. And I do mean all men, young Maister Pascoe.'

Alice Lisle was the only unaccompanied woman there and the only woman whom Rupert had been advised to invite in her own right. She was a local institution, a widow of seventy or more who ran her manor farm two miles away with efficiency. Bom and bred in the area, part of the landed gentry, she was not only the widow of a Cromwellian but a Dissenter herself. Yet she had outlived disapproval to become a respected part of the landscape. Because they'd known her all their lives, the Tory gentry accepted her and her inconvenient philosophies as they accepted Barrow Mump or Glastonbury Tor, those eccentric hills which rose out of the flat countryside like altars.

'What is a teaseller?' asked Penitence. She'd heard the word twice now in connection with Martin Hughes.

Every head at the table turned in her direction as if in anticipation, though of what she wasn't sure. She had kept silent during most of dinner unless urging her guests to eat. Women, all except Lady Alice, were not encouraged to do more than admire and agree with the male conversation, and most of the wives kept their elaborately dressed heads down and did just that.

Rupert had done his best to make it clear that Penitence was the giver of the feast: 'Is it your wish that I carve, my dear?' and 'Her Ladyship has not yet had time to furnish her table as she would wish, have you, my dear?' But his guests refused to follow his lead. They found the situation peculiar. For years they'd listened with horrified delight to tales of what happened at court, they knew the lechery of princes and the wantonness of actresses and had prepared themselves to witness goings-on. When what went on was a domesticity only unusual in its harmony they were not just wrong-footed but disappointed.

Now they stared down the table at Penitence like boys at a fair watching a sword-swallower who was taking his ease between acts. She fought down the impulse to snap a garter, to appal them as they so obviously wanted to be appalled, and stared back.

'Eh?' grunted Sir Ostyn. He was the local magistrate and recently widowed; there had been much jollity from his friends about his search for a suitable wife. The linenfold panelling of her dining-room made the perfect background for his over- curled fair wig and upturned nose. If you could frame him, thought Penitence, you'd have a fine portrait of a pig. The candlelight shone on richly polished board and silver and was kinder to the faces round it than most of them deserved. Why do I have to bother with these people? I want to go home. I want my daughter.

'Her Ladyship asked what a teaseller was,' prompted Rupert.

'Oh, teaseller,' said Sir Roger, triumphantly. 'Don't know that then in Lunnon. Teaseller's a man as grows teasels.'

She caught Rupert's eye and rose. 'Shall we leave the gentlemen, ladies?' I'm damned if I ask what a teasel is.

Chairs were pushed back as the gentlemen stood up and the ladies exited.

'Do we have our hostess's permission to smoke?' asked Rupert.

Bless him. 'Of course.'

She led the ladies along the screen passage to the north wing and showed them where to find the close-stools in the room Rupert had insisted on for a bathroom, then afterwards led them back to the passage in the hall's undercroft and along it to the parlour. 'I thought we could gossip over our coffee in here,' she said brightly, 'it's small, but warm on this chilly night.'

Lady Pascoe, disconcerted by the Priory's bathroom when her own, larger mansion had none, scrabbled for reascendancy. "Tis small, iss fay,' she said. 'You want to get your man to build un out. My parlour's twice the size.'

It would have to be. 'Coffee? Tea? Or chocolate?'

If she'd been in a more tolerant mood, she'd have realized they were intimidated as much as disapproving. For all she was a fallen woman, she was a sophisticated fallen woman, the intimate of princes, an habitue of wicked London and its even more wicked court. They had to impress on her how little they were impressed, how much bigger their houses were than hers, how much better acquainted they were with local matters, with the Priory itself.

'Ah used to play with the Hoy children when I were a babby,' said Lady Portland. 'Knew every inch of this place. Have ee found the secret room yet?'

Penitence sat up, intrigued for the first time that night. 'No. Where is it?'

'Old Maister Hoy, he'd tease us and never let on. But 'tis yere somewhere.' The plumes in her hair nodded as she looked around the panelling.

The word 'tease' stimulated Lady Pascoe into telling Penitence about teasels, a thistle-type plant apparently, its bristled head much used in the clothing industry for carding. Didn't she know what carding was? Mercy me, they didn't learn 'em much in Lunnon, did they? Well, carding was ...

Lady Alice, the only one of them Penitence really wanted to hear, slept openly and enviably through the whole discourse until the glorious sound of men's boots released them all to follow Rupert and the male guests up the staircase to the hall where Peter was waiting with further trays and trolleys of savouries, sweetmeats and marzipans which, Rupert had assured her, were a necessary topping-up of Somerset stomachs before everybody went home.

The hall, rarely warm and on that early spring night positively chilly, was lit by a fire. Apple logs six feet long filled the grate and sent out scented flames that sparkled the guests' jewellery and changed the expressions on the faces of the gargoyles, one at the bottom of each of the roof's great trussed arches.

Rupert, however, had opened one of the lights so that his guests could see the swathe that he had ordered cut through the woodland where it sloped down towards the Levels.

Sir Ostyn approved. "Bout time this place had a decent approach. You want to line it with logs, corduroy like.'

'Not corduroy,' scoffed Sir Roger. 'Setts. You want setts. Your Highness. And dang great gates at the entrance.' All the men joined in to tell the Prince what he did or didn't want on the Priory's approach.

I don't want it at all. Penitence had protested when Rupert revealed his plan to make a wide, straight drive from the track up to the house, instead of the winding tunnel that snaked around the rise to the Ridges' farmyard. She liked the secrecy of that approach, the way it hid the house so that it came as a beautiful surprise. But Rupert had accused her of over-modesty - 'Thou shouldst not hide the Priory's light under a bushel' - and she had given in because, though the deeds might be in her name, he was the one who'd paid for the place.

Now that the three lights of the hall blazed out into the darkness, she felt less that her Priory was being displayed to advantage and more that it had been stripped to reveal its nakedness. It could be seen by traffic using roads across the moors between Glastonbury and Taunton. Benighted travellers would be attracted to it, thieves and robbers . ..

Behind her Lady Pascoe said: 'I got one like that, only mine's bigger.' Penitence turned, wearily expecting another piece of her furniture to be denigrated. But the woman was pointing at Peter despite the fact that the steward was less than three feet away.

'Mine's younger,' said Mrs Cartwright. 'Got mine in Bristol.'