Chameleon in a Mirror

by Ruth Nestvold

  On stage, Nell Gwyn turned on a sullen Will Smith accusingly. “Well, sir, you may be gay; all Happiness, all Joys pursue you still, Fortune's your Slave, and gives you every hour choice of new Hearts and Beauties, till you are cloy'd with the repeated Bliss, which others vainly languish for — But know, false Man, that I shall be reveng'd.”

  Will Smith looked convincingly disgusted. “Pox o' this whining — my Bus'ness is to laugh and love — a pox on't; I hate your sullen Lover, a Man shall lose as much time to put you in Humour now, as would serve to gain a new Woman.”

  Nell Gwyn raised her dainty chin defiantly. “I scorn to cool that Fire I cannot raise, or do the Drudgery of your virtuous Mistress.”

  Aphra felt her own chin go up and smiled. Her drudgery was also over. The man at her side had asked too much of her once too often. Clarinda had given Aphra something as well — a model for how to say no.

  After the rover and his virginal bride decided to brave the storms of the marriage bed and exited, Nell Gwyn stepped out to the front of the stage to speak the epilogue. “The banisht Cavaliers! a Roving Blade! A popish Carnival! a Masquerade! The Devil's in't if this will please the Nation, In these our blessed Times of Reformation ...”

  With this invitation, the actress and royal mistress was so drowned out by the applause that she finally gave up the attempt to recite the rest. Behind her mask, Aphra's warm brown eyes sparkled with a film of moisture. At the sight, Billie had to blink rapidly.

  She was so glad she'd stayed.

  Their party remained in the pit until it began to empty, then made their way backstage. Among friends, Aphra removed her mask. The Earl of Rochester left his paramour to join them. “The King enjoyed the play exceedingly,” Rochester said, bending over Aphra's hand. “As did I.”

  “The acting was exceptional,” Aphra said, upholding the pretense that she was not the author of the play. From the looks they'd been subjected to, however, Billie suspected most of the audience had a good idea who'd written it.

  Billie left Aphra with the Earl and joined the admiring circle around Elizabeth Barry. If possible, she would like to take leave from the actress. But Ravenscroft was soon at her elbow, following Billie with his infectious mood and high spirits, not letting her out of his sight. Although he could not be openly possessive with her in pants, it came down to very much the same thing.

  Slowly, the sparks and fops and libertines began to depart for supper, taking one actress and then another with them. As the crowds thinned, Billie became increasingly nervous. Ravenscroft was showing no sign of leaving. When Betterton suggested dinner at a nearby inn, Billie made her way to Aphra's side and took her elbow. “Could you draw Damon off for me?” she murmured under her breath, what she hoped was a flirtatious smile on her face.

  Aphra nodded and smiled back. As good as her word, Aphra joined Ravenscroft, laying a delicate hand on his arm. Billie kept well back as Aphra's party began to move toward one of the doors. As soon as they disappeared, Billie turned and headed to the tiring room. Before she reached it, she heard footsteps behind her. She whirled around to find Ravenscroft striding down the hall with uncharacteristic swiftness. When he caught up with her, he took her in his arms and kissed her thoroughly.

  Billie pushed him away with a gasp. Her reaction had been typical and immediate. “What are you at?” she said, breathing heavily. “Someone will see and they will get you for buggery!”

  Ravenscroft laughed confidently. Her reaction had probably told him all he thought he needed to know. “And you, lad? No one will get you and no one will get me — half of London knows you for what you are.”

  “What are you doing here? Everyone has left for supper.”

  “I noticed you were not of our company and volunteered to come back to find you.”

  “You shouldn't have.”

  “Why not? You are obviously glad to see me.”

  Billie shook her head. “I'm leaving. I'm going back.”

  Ravenscroft gripped her shoulders. “You are not. I have worked it all out. I will arrange a settlement with my wife. With my contract from the King's Company, I can pay her off.”

  Billie closed her eyes and leaned against the wall. “No.”

  “Is that not what you want?” There was a pleading note in his voice she'd never heard before.

  “No!” Oh, how could he do this to her, make the leaving so much harder? The man was a dratted manipulator, but there was something so charming about him, so humorous and sardonic, that she forgave him every time. And now he was begging. Begging confidently, but begging. “You don't understand, Damon. I'm a tourist here.”

  “A tourist?” Ravenscroft repeated. His grip on her shoulders tightened.

  “A visitor. A stranger passing through. I don't belong.”

  “You're no stranger. All of London knows the American cousins by now.” His voice still held humor, but it was beginning to lose the lilt of confidence.

  “Too much of a stranger to stay.” She didn't dare meet his eyes.

  “We will see about that.” His hands left her shoulders, and he enfolded her in a crushing embrace, his lips seeking hers. He pushed her up against the wall and kissed her like the expert he was. She could feel him along every inch of her body, the pressure of his thighs, the pressure at her crotch. Billie groaned under his lips. Ravenscroft lifted his head with a smile.

  It was now or never. Billie pulled away from him, ran the few steps to the tiring room, and slammed the door behind her. She was barely able to turn the key in the lock before Ravenscroft tried the handle.

  “I will wait, Clarinda,” Ravenscroft said, his voice muffled through the wood. Billie leaned her head against the door and clenched her eyes together tightly. No, she did not want what Ravenscroft was offering. It proved he wanted her more than she'd ever imagined — but what of his wife? What if the Other Woman — whose name Billie didn't even know — loved her husband, loved him and suffered, something Billie found quite likely? Billie couldn't take him away from her. And she didn't want the man on the other side of the door anyway, couldn't want him. She wanted the security of some kind of social net, however thin; wanted the freedoms the social upheavals of the last hundred years had achieved; wanted options for herself, something more than reliance on a man; wanted modern medicine and computers and airplanes and automobiles. She wanted the twenty-first century and her brother and her parents and hot showers and cell phones.

  Billie pushed away from the door and retrieved the satchel from behind the chair. Pulling her driver's license out of her wallet, she faced the mirror. She began to recite the lyrics to a song she had written before she left her own time — years ago, it seemed now.

  “Cease your conversing with yourself, Clarinda, and come out and converse with me,” she heard through the door. She ignored Ravenscroft with effort, focused on her own eyes in the mirror, and continued her recitation. With a mixture of relief and regret, she noticed the vertigo and nausea coming on, and grasped the table in front of her. As the world around her spun, she couldn't help wondering how long Ravenscroft would wait.

  Or what he would think when they forced the door.

  30

  And standing where sadly he now might descry

  From the banks of the Stoure the desolute Wye,

  He lamented for Behn, o'er that place of her birth,

  And said amongst women there was not one on earth,

  Her superior in fancy, in language, or wit,

  Yet own'd that a little too loosely she writ.

  Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, “The Circuit of Apollo”

  Billie lay on the floor of the classroom, her heart and stomach aching. Had it really been right to return? A beautiful man with golden eyes had just promised to turn his life inside out for her, and she'd locked the door and fled through the mirror. But staying with him would entail stealing a husband away from a woman she didn't even know. Not only that, it would mean leaving everything she'd grown up with, for good. She could har
dly stick around the Restoration for the course of a relationship, and then return to her own time, years older than when she'd left — while everyone she knew in the twenty-first century had only aged a day. It was enough to give her a headache if she thought about it too long.

  The sound of traffic penetrated her misery. To her surprise, it was reassuring, comforting even. Billie covered her face with her hands and drew a deep breath. She was back in her own time.

  Once she calmed down, she grabbed the edge of a table and pulled herself up. Her legs were still a little unsteady as she wandered over to a window and gazed out, just in time to see a red double-decker go by. Buses! Cars! Fast vehicles emitting toxic fumes! At least they didn't emit nauseating piles of evil-smelling garbage that attracted hordes of flies and often remained in the street until it rained.

  And she wasn't going to run into any hangings on the street corners.

  Billie's mood did such a sudden about-face that it made her almost as dizzy as hopping centuries. She was home. Almost. At least close enough that she felt tears start in the corners of her eyes. It was London and not the Pacific Northwest, but it had planes and trains and automobiles and telephones, and she could call her brother right now if she wanted to.

  And wake him up in the middle of the night and strengthen his suspicion that something was seriously wrong with her.

  Billie turned away from the window with a painful mixture of relief and longing. What she needed now was a bathroom. Amenities. In the popular consciousness, amenities meant nothing compared to love, but only those who had lived without them could truly appreciate how vital flush toilets could be to happiness. Billie had made do with chamber pots and privies for half a year, and she still had not been able to reconcile herself to them. Besides, she had experience in how difficult it could be transplanting to a different culture. If she was starting to feel out of place after only a year in modern London, how would she feel after a few years in Restoration London, Ravenscroft or no Ravenscroft?

  She stood, zipped her jeans, and flushed, determined to ban passion and turmoil with a Restoration playwright from her mind.

  Billie glanced at a wall clock. She still had a research date with a colleague — assuming the time travel was still working as it had the first time, and she'd stumbled back to the future on the right day.

  Billie entered Aileen's hotel with a shoulder bag full of Behn biographies. Aileen met her in the lobby, then led her to her room.

  “It's incredible that you're willing to do this,” Billie said as Aileen ran her keycard through the slot. “We can hardly throw together anything publishable in only a day.”

  Aileen shrugged. “I'm no longer interested in being part of any publication this conference might put out. I may not be a Behn scholar, but I was angry too.”

  “I'm glad you don't think this will put a kink in your career or anything.”

  Aileen raised her eyebrows. “I'd be more worried about my own career if I were you.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Billie dropped the bag full of books and papers on the bed. “My career planning is due for some reevaluation, I think.”

  “Don't let this symposium rule your decision.”

  Maybe not this symposium, but certainly everything that happened since it started. “Well, you have to admit that it's an eye-opener.”

  “True.” Aileen opened the laptop on her desk and switched it on, all business now. “Do you have any ideas on how we might be able to make this presentation more than just an answer to the Behn critics we've heard so far?”

  Billie thought about the things she'd learned in the seventeenth century — and the things she would never be able to prove. Then it hit her.

  The letter.

  She tensed, and her hand sought the pocket of the brocade jacket, knowing what she would find. Of course the letter was there. She hadn't returned to Mary Twysden's house since the old Earl threw her out. Now it was certain that no one would ever find it.

  Unless Billie went back to the past again and returned it.

  Aileen looked up from her computer. “Billie? Is something the matter?”

  She shook her head. “I just remembered something I'd forgotten. And no, I'm afraid I'm a bit low on brilliant ideas. We'll just have to stick to defending the playwright's reputation the best we can.”

  “Good. Where do you suggest we start with Aphra's defense?”

  Billie smiled to herself at Aileen's switch from “Behn” to “Aphra.” “If we're answering her critics, we might as well start with the earliest ones we can dig up.”

  “There,” Aileen said, pulling the USB stick out of the port. “We just have to hope the printers in the hotel business center work.”

  “Are you going to do that now?” Billie asked, suppressing a yawn.

  Aileen chuckled and began collecting the plates room service had brought while they were busy putting together the new presentation. “No, no. Morning will be soon enough.”

  “Good.” Billie picked up glasses from a side table and added them to the tray. “By the way, thanks for letting me stay here tonight.”

  “It's late, and you don't have anywhere else to go, do you?”

  Billie grimaced — returning to the apartment she shared with Richard certainly was not an option. “Not really.”

  After Fogerty's labored attempt at a humorous introduction, Aileen stepped up to the podium. She thanked Fogerty graciously, shuffled the hastily printed pages, and began. “Given the tone of several of the papers that have been presented here in the last few days, I felt it necessary to change the subject of my originally planned lecture, 'Aphra Behn's Kent During Cromwell' to 'Appropriations and Misrepresentations: 300 Years of Behn Scholarship' in order to provide something of an answer to charges that have been leveled against the dramatist. I would like to add that I couldn't have done this on such short notice without the invaluable help of Willa Armstrong, who will also be assisting me in the presentation of this paper.”

  Billie rose and walked to the microphone, thoroughly enjoying the look of consternation on Fogerty's face. “Behn's literary reputation has been characterized from the beginning by misconceptions and attempts to belittle her accomplishments,” she said when she reached the podium. “We would like to correct the picture of a woman writing merely for money, disappointed in love, broken in the end. Behn's influence on the novel was profound. She longed for fame, but she needed fortune too. She thought of herself as a craftswoman, not a hack. But it is as a hack she has come down to us, a popular writer pandering to the tastes of the masses, no matter how low those tastes were.”

  She stepped aside, making room for Aileen. “Until feminist scholars began taking over Behn criticism in the 1970s, Aphra Behn's literary reputation revolved mostly around the indecency of her works. Her plays were no more indecent than those of Etherege or Wycherley or Dryden, but as she herself recognized, when the same conventions were used by a woman, they were much more offensive. In the forward to her play, Sir Patient Fancy, Behn complained about the criticism she received at the hands of her own sex.”

  As Billie recited the quote from Aphra, she resisted the temptation to imitate a Restoration accent. “'I printed this Play with all the impatient haste one ought to do, who would be vindicated from the most unjust and silly aspersion, Woman could cast on Woman; and which only my being a Woman has procured me; That it was Baudy, the least and most Excusable fault in the Men writers ...: but from a Woman it was unnaturall ...'“

  “What Behn went through during her lifetime, however, was nothing compared to what she was subjected to after her death,” Aileen continued. “In 1703, the satirist Thomas Brown invented an exchange of letters between the actress Anne Bracegirdle and the dramatist Aphra Behn, in which Behn is characterized as a lewd, cunning woman who traded sexual favors for help with her plays.”

  Billie stepped forward to read another quote, this time from Thomas Brown: “'But oh! that I had but one glance into your own accounts; there I am sure, sho
uld I find a complete register of all the poets of your standing, from the Laureate down to the White-friars ballad-monger; at this rate, well might you be esteemed a female wit, since the least return your versifying admirers could make you for your favours was first to lend you their assistance, and then oblige you with their applause.'“

  Aileen took over again. “Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Behn's reputation remained for the most part that of a pornographic writer little better than the author of Fanny Hill. Alexander Pope's lines, 'The stage how loosely does Astrea tread, / Who fairly puts all Characters to bed,' lived on in memory longer than Behn's own works, and she became as much a scandalous historical figure as she was an author.

  “In the twentieth century, a new element was added to this biologization of Behn's literary reputation, when well-known details of her life were called into question. In 1913, an article appeared in PMLA which dominated the tenor of Behn scholarship for over 50 years. In 'Mrs. Behn's Biography, a Fiction,' Ernest Bernbaum claimed that Behn had never gone to Surinam and never even married any Mr. Behn. In this way, the tradition of Behn's lack of morality could be carried over into the twentieth century. And this in the face of contemporary written accounts, including Thomas Culpepper's Adversaria, in which he confirms the existence of her husband. Behn's detractors were best off ignoring the information provided by Culpepper, or else they'd have no case: he was a man with an influential position in the court of Charles II, and he claimed to be Behn's foster brother, which would have quite demolished the argument that Behn had trouble even maintaining a foothold on the fringes of society. It was much better not to draw attention to Culpepper's comments at all.”

  Billie scanned the audience before it was her turn again, relieved to see a number of smiling faces, not only female. “Although the claims made by Bernbaum have been sufficiently refuted by numerous scholars in the last decades, for some reason the rumors still persist in many standard literary references. This only highlights the kind of sloppy thinking that has been used to slander Behn throughout history and slight her accomplishments. The image of Behn which emerges is that of a clever marginal figure, but one who stole her plays and lied about her background, fictionalizing herself the same way she fictionalized the slave Oroonoko. This school of criticism allows Behn biographical creativity, but not literary creativity.