The Vizard Mask (63 page)

Unable to bear it, Penitence left them to compare slave- trade goods and took the opportunity to sit next to Lady Alice. 'This Martin Hughes,' she said, 'Martin hughes, Lady Alice. Where does he live? live, dear.'

If she mentally put a white linen cap on the head of the man who'd stood at the steps of the cross, she saw her grandmother; the same piercing eyes, the same lips thinned in dislike of everything human. Even coming from a man's throat, the voice had the exact timbre of the one which extolled the younger brother who'd stayed behind 'to fly the Lord's banner in the battle against sin'.

And so had his great-niece encountered him, standing on the steps of a cross in Athelzoy, still flying it.

There was nothing wrong with Lady Alice Lisle's memory; over the years both Hughes and Hurds had been in service to the Lisle family. 'We was all zealous workers for the Lord, but they Hugheses, and especially Tabitha and her brother Martin, they was hot for it. Sour little madam, Tabitha, mind. How she ever caught the eye of that 'andsome Ezekiel Hurd I'll never know. Never know.' Lady Alice glowered. 'She made un join the brethren, so's they could accuse everybody else of lustful thoughts. Oh ma dear Lord, to they the naked truth was a lustful thought to be done penance for. Managed three lustful thoughts, though, to ma certain knowledge — Martha, then John, then ...'

Penitence's lips formed the shapes. 'Margaret.'

'Margaret,' said Lady Alice. 'Poor maid. Lovely maid she was.' She gestured Penitence close. 'Caught the eye of the son of this very house. More than the eye, too. Mad for her, young Jack Hoy. Might even have wed her, though t'would have been against his fayther's wishes, but the poor lad got heself killed in the war.'

'What happened to her?'

'Oh.' The wrinkles in the fuzzed skin round Lady Alice's mouth deepened as if drawn in by purse-strings. 'The Hoys they turned her away. And Tabitha, hard-hearted besom, took the poor maid's babby off her. Threw her own daughter from her house. I said to her: Give the poor maid back her babby and I'll take un in, I said. Let her who is without sin among you, let her cast the first stone. I did. But Tabitha's heart were stone. "The strumpet brought shame on our house," she says. "Let her pursue the path of wickedness while we follow the Lord in righteousness." Oh, that woman's heart were stone. Like her eyes.'

I remember. Age had petrified it harder. Affection was a fissure in the dyke of righteousness which might let in the flood of sin; it was cemented over; there was not a smile, not an indulgence, not a cuddle her granddaughter could remember. And good daughter Martha had slavishly copied that same Christless Christianity. Poor Martha. In a rush of pity, Penitence forgave the woman who'd passed as her mother for so many years. Had Tabitha realized it, all her strength of character had been inherited by bad daughter Margaret.

'She took un all off to the Americkies — babby, Martha, poor Ezekiel — and left that sad maid to fend alone. Many's the time I've wondered about that maid.'

She became a successful brothel-keeper.

'And you her spitting image' said Lady Alice, craftily. There was nothing wrong with her eyesight, either. 'Same surname as Tabitha's, too.'

Penitence smiled at her. 'May I come to call on you tomorrow? to-mor-row?' There was still a great deal she wished to know. It had been a long time since she'd had a family; perhaps there were other members less righteous than Martin Hughes who would welcome her, reminisce, show her where her mother had met and fallen in love with the son of Athelzoy Priory.

Whether she would tell all to Lady Alice she hadn't decided. The old woman obviously guessed something. But even Rupert didn't have the whole story yet; not what had happened to her mother after her abandonment, nor where her daughter had been reunited with her.

Perhaps it was time she told Rupert about the Cock and Pie.

As it turned out, she didn't get the chance. That night he developed a headache which didn't go away. When she took off his wig to help him to bed, she saw that the wound on his forehead was suppurating. He insisted on getting up next morning, but by the afternoon admitted defeat and went back to bed. 'Take no notice of me, my dear. You've had no time to enjoy your new home.'

She ignored him and went downstairs to discuss with Peter the feasibility of making the coach journey back to Awdes.

'He'll refuse a doctor, wherever we take him' Peter pointed out.

She was frightened. Somerset had become the end of the world; unfamiliar and resourceless. 'He might have Apothecary Boghurst. We'll make a bed for him in the coach.'

It frightened her even more that Rupert put up no opposition as Peter and Boiler half-carried him to the coach. He lay with his head on her lap and she tried to shield it by tensing herself against the jolts, not even noticing until it was five miles behind her that she had left Athelzoy Priory without a goodbye glance. By the time they reached the outskirts of London three days later, Rupert was so ill Penitence risked the extra miles and took him on to the house in Spring Gardens so that Apothecary Boghurst could get to him quicker.

Chapter 7

It was a long-drawn-out death. Rupert partially recovered for the summer but in the autumn relapses became frequent until recovery ceased altogether. When Penitence pulled back the curtains each morning she resented the rumble of carriages and the street-cries, a world persisting in going about its business while its great warrior was dying.

He knew he was. At the beginning of November he made his will. When the lawyers had gone, he was tired and she sat beside his bed while he dozed. He woke up with a start and didn't seem to know where he was. Then he asked: Will you marry again?'

The 'again' nearly undid her. 'No.'

The Earl of Craven, for whom she thanked God, called every day but, apart from him, those who kept the vigil with her were mainly the servants, and her own friends like Aphra and Dorinda, the Reverend Boreham and Apothecary Boghurst, and the dog Royalle, who refused to leave the bedside.

The King didn't attend, though she kept him informed.

On her instructions the secretary wrote to the remaining children of James I's daughter and Frederick V of Bohemia. The Elector Palatinate had just died but in any case had ceased correspondence with his younger brother, furious that Rupert had given their mother's jewels to a mistress — though the only filial support their mother had found in her old age had come from Rupert. Sophie was now the Electress of Hanover, Louise was in a convent, and neither could find time to come.

Only in the bedroom of the house in Spring Gardens did the age of loyalty right or wrong persist while the prince who'd personified it relived it in his confused mind. Weeping, Lord Craven and Penitence hung on to his hands as he tried to wave a ghostly cavalry into battle and shouted orders to long- dead men.

When they'd got him to sleep she would sit and and wait for Craven's remembrances of his friend. They always began: 'You should have seen him. . .' and they always ended with him crying.

You should have seen him outside Bristol. Clad in scarlet and silver lace on his black barbary horse. The "Dragon Prince" Cromwell called him, but he respected him, oh yes, even that rogue respected him. These royal drunkards that command us today, what respect is due to them but ropes to hang themselves?'

Through Craven's eyes she watched the young Rupert and a handful of half-armed Cavaliers scattering the steel hauberks of the Parliamentarians at Powick Bridge, riding against the imperturbable pikes of the London trained bands at the first battle of Newbury. 'Time and again he saved the Cause. Endangered it once or twice, too, but always extricated it again, always. It was not his fault it was beaten.'

She asked the question she had never thought to ask Rupert. 'Why did he settle in England?'

Craven smiled. 'Do you know, my dear, I sometimes think it was for his enemies. He was never a political man, nor did it occur to him to question the Tightness of his uncle's quarrel with Parliament. But he told me once the fortitude of the Roundheads impressed him. Just before the end of the war, he wrote to me that if he rode so he broke his neck, he would not be unhappy that England have his bones.' The Earl was crying again.

If he was reliving his old campaigns, the wounds they'd inflicted reanimated so that he could suffer them again. Every morning and evening when Penitence or Peter soaked the dressings from his legs and head, pus oozed out from flesh that was turning green. Ruperta complained of the smell when Penitence lifted her on to the bed to kiss him and for the first time got a smack from her mother. 'Kiss your father.'

It was only Ruperta who brought something like coherence into Rupert's ramblings. In a lucid period he managed to convey to Craven that his Order of the Garter must be sent to the King with another request for a marriage to be arranged between her and Burford.

Charles ignored it.

On the 27th of November he began to cough. Master Boghurst said: 'It won't be long now. Fetch your sons.'

The boys knelt at the end of the bed, but as the coughing and the night dragged on Penitence had chairs brought for them to sleep on. Only she and Peter stayed awake. In the morning Rupert was still alive.

She lost track of time and place. Sometimes it was Henry King's hand she held, sometimes Dorinda's. Once Her Ladyship's. She dreamed of Awashonks and woke up with a jump and thought that the dark eyes staring reproachfully at her were those of the Squakheag's sachem. They were Peter's.

It was still dark the next morning, the 29th, when Peter's scream set Royalle howling.

Downstairs in the drawing-room the Earl of Craven, as executor, read the will to the household. Rupert had left nothing to his legitimate family. There were bequests to the servants, Dudley got his property in Germany, the rest was left to Penitence and Ruperta 'with his wish,' said Craven, 'that Benedick shall share in his mother's fortune'.

Attached to the will was a special, loving message to Ruperta, which the Earl solemnly read to her in her high chair, that she be a good girl and always obey Lord Craven and her mother.

Penitence was not consulted about the funeral, which was organized by the Earl Marshal. Rupert's body was taken out of the house in Spring Gardens to the Painted Chamber at Whitehall for a lying-in-state and from there to Westminster Abbey for interment.

Two companies of foot led the cortege, followed by Rupert's male household servants, followed by barons' younger sons, viscounts' younger sons, Privy Councillors, eldest sons of barons and viscounts and earls' younger sons, through the panoply of precedence to the officer carrying Rupert's coronet on a cushion in front of the coffin.

The Earl of Craven, in a cloak with a long train borne by two supporters, was the chief mourner. Behind him were more earls and viscounts, Yeomen of the Guard and Rupert's outdoor servants, gunsmiths, Boiler and the other coachmen, and watermen.

Peter should have headed the procession of household staff but by the time the funeral took place he was dead. They'd had to lift him away from Rupert's death-bed and carried him upstairs to lie him down on what turned out to be his own. Penitence had carried food to his room every day and beseeched him to eat but the black man's will had suspended every process which kept his body animated. Oddly, he emanated no grief; just a stubborn refusal to live. His lower lip stuck out as if he were sulking, only retracting when Penitence tried to force a spoon into his mouth.

It seemed vital that he should live; Penitence's bereavement had brought with it guilt that she had never loved Rupert enough or in the way he'd wanted. She hoped he'd not known that she didn't. But I knew. Her sexual pretences she remembered not as attempts to please but as the grubby simulations of a brothel. She'd short-changed him; even now, perhaps, she could make up something of the lack by preserving this, his loved and loving servant. Besides, Peter was woven into the fabric of over ten years of her life and she couldn't bear to lose any more of it. 'Try and eat, Peter. What will I do without you?'

She was holding his unresisting hand and realized it had gone cold. She threw herself on his body, weeping; his death emphasized Rupert's in a way nothing else had; it added to her guilt that she hadn't been able to keep him alive. He'd been so much more loyal to Rupert by dying than she had in living.

'Nonsense,' the Reverend Boreman told her sharply. 'What are you about, woman? Are we heathens that we have to die because our lord does?'

'Peter wasn't a heathen,' she sobbed.

'He was a slave. He didn't want to live any more. Are you a slave?'

Yes. I sold myself. Rupert bought me.

Dorinda was even more contemptuous. 'So he bought you. It was a fair trade; you made him happy. What they want for their ballocking money? Get some sleep, for Christ's sake.'

Women were allowed no part in Rupert's funeral, neither were illegitimate sons - who had not been ennobled. Penitence, Dudley and Benedick watched the service by peering over heads from the public's end of the Abbey nave. They weren't invited to the funeral meats either.

They ate their own at a small gathering in Spring Gardens, mostly of theatre people.

'They could have given you a place at the front of the Abbey,' said Aphra Behn, indignantly. 'Everybody knows how important you were to him.'

'What now?' asked Nelly Gwynn. 'You staying on here?'

'I can't. I'm being evicted.' Spring Gardens was in the King's gift which had been extended only to Rupert. Awdes, which had been leased for Rupert's lifetime, was also closing to her.

'Always got a home with me, Peg.'

'She'll come to St Bride's,' said Aphra.

'She'll bloody come to the Cock and Pie,' said Dorinda.

Becky Marshall also proffered her house. Penitence thanked them all, and promised to visit. 'But for now I'll go to Somerset.'

She was still being tortured by the guilt of the bereaved. I didn't love him enough. Why didn't I take better care of him? Could I have taken better care of him? Somerset was hideously far away from her friends and everything she knew but it was the home Rupert had bought for her and she felt she would be expiating something she owed him if she stayed in it.