The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  'Old Rowley ain't getting my Bess,' said Swaveley, firmly. 'Too good for him, she is. Sweet little Doncaster-cut like that, he'd have her pulling a coach, or give her to one of his wenches.'

  'I'm wagering you won't bear three hundred pounds' weight,' blurted out Master Johnson.

  Swaveley grinned. 'Put a dozen more decus on for me, and send the winnings to Bess.'

  He reminded Penitence of the Tippin boys. He was little more than a boy himself, made old, like the Tippins, by enforced cunning. His exaltation from attention and terror made him more alive than anyone in the whole room. His pale nostrils twitched at every movement, his own or anybody else's, like an animal aware of scent imperceptible to humans.

  Benedick could grow up like him. Here was the child of another Rookery who'd opted for the criminal life with its built-in early death. Now it was nearly on him. She wondered whether, if the choice could be offered again, he'd make a different one. Perhaps not. By his lights, he was going out with glory.

  I'll save Benedick. I can't save this lad but I'll save Benedick.

  A large shape exuding the smell of alcohol and sweetish sweat took a seat opposite. 'Tut, tut,' said Newgate's Ordinary, 'eating without benefit of grace? Doubtless you would still wish me to say it?'

  'No,' said everybody, but the Ordinary insisted on intoning some Latin to which nobody paid attention.

  Being among the last things men and women on the scaffold saw before the noose tightened, it was regrettable that the prison chaplain's nose showed signs of having been directed into more ale cups than prayer books. His knobbled and alarmingly puce face shone with perspiration and seemed about to burst. From the stains on his velvet coat and from his aggressive bonhomie, he had dined already, better, and elsewhere.

  'Now, my son,' he said, focusing on Swaveley, 'About your confession . . .'

  'I ain't making one,' said Swaveley, wiping his platter with a piece of bread held in both hands. 'And I ain't having you sing the dismal ditty while I'm being ironed, so stick that in your ribs, old giblets.'

  The Ordinary's forefinger was as brown as his teeth, shading to black at the tip from tamping tobacco. He wagged it at Swaveley, to indicate that he took the insult as jovial raillery. 'If you won't consider your soul, my son, think of your fame. See how I have reconciled our next unfortunates to the public ...' He fetched a sheaf of bills from his pocket and distributed them round the table.

  Swaveley crumpled his between his cuffed hands and flicked it at the Ordinary's stomach. 'I got fame already.'

  Swaveley's generosity in the matter of gin had gained him an ally in Mrs Johnson who toppled affectionately on to his shoulder. 'Knock his hat off,' she said.

  'Mother.'

  Master Johnson was scanning a bill. 'Our Affie could write a better'n 'n this.'

  Aphra, restraining her mother with one hand, scanned hers. 'As a matter of fact, one could.'

  Mrs Johnson toppled again, belligerently: 'My Aphra writes, so there,' she told the Ordinary. 'Wrote to the King.'

  Her professional interest aroused, Penitence glanced at the bill. It was the last, and lurid, confession of a James Spiggot and a Mary Moders before being executed, he for blackmail and theft, she for fraud and prostitution, and as vile a piece of printing as she'd seen.

  'They ain't being turned off 'til Monday,' said the small man. 'Supposing they get reprieved?'

  'Reprieved?' bellowed the Ordinary. 'With a confession as sweet as this? They'd better not.'

  The small man was still considering the bill. 'It could do with a nice woodcut,' he said. 'I could do you a nice woodcut.'

  A turnkey approached the highwayman. 'Couple of wagtails asking for you, Swaveley. Shall I show 'em to your cell?'

  'Pretty?' asked Swaveley.

  'Young anyways,' said the turnkey.

  The highwayman turned to the table and rose. 'My public,' he said. 'Time for me greens, ladies and gents. So farewell.'

  The Ordinary grabbed at his sleeve. 'Spend not thy last days in uncleanness, my son, but go shriven to the feet of God.'

  'Oh, make it up,' Swaveley told him, 'you will anyways.' He shuffled out of the hall to applause, the Ordinary still talking in his wake.

  Mrs Johnson was so overcome that Aphra told her brother to take her home. She and Penitence accompanied them to the guardroom at the prison's entrance where Mrs Johnson took against the hat of the turnkey who insisted on charging Master Johnson sixpence for the privilege of letting them out.

  'My poor mother,' said Aphra, standing at the gate to wave them off. 'Had my father not died when he did, she would have graced her position as Governor-General's wife of Surinam. Alas, his death aboard ship whilst we were yet on our way out there quite o'erwhelmed her.'

  Penitence didn't know where Surinam was, but, watching Mrs Johnson overwhelmed by the desire to sit down in the road, she found it difficult to imagine her, even sober, gracing it in any high capacity. Unless the late Mr Johnson had married beneath him, the Johnsons just weren't the sort of family from whom colonial administrators were chosen. Their accents weren't right, Aphra's being spurious and Mrs Johnson's downright common.

  She didn't want to doubt her new-found friend, but she was inclined to think that Aphra Behn had invented the story.

  By day two in Newgate, all of it spent in Aphra's company, Penitence was inclined to think that she had also invented Mr Behn. Aphra's accounts of him were inconsistent; one moment he'd been a Dutch merchant, the next a City business man. He'd died of old age, he'd died of the Plague. The only definite fact to be ascertained of the late Mr Behn was that he was dead.

  By day three in Newgate, Penitence was inclined to think that Aphra had even invented herself, but by then she didn't care.

  This was an advance for Penitence who, Puritan-like, was irritated by elusiveness. But she had come to recognize Aphra not as a liar but as someone whose imagination created its own truths. She had been born in Kent, that much she acknowledged. Pretty, precocious and, most likely, poor, she had pursued the life of the country gentry whose homes dominated her vision, somehow persuading her family to provide her with an education. The world as young Aphra had wished it to be was exciting and romantic, and her imagination, not to mention her ambition, was so powerful that it had bounced over all unpleasantnesses into adulthood with the excitement and romance still intact. Considering her present position, her refusal to abandon that belief made the woman ridiculous but it also made her generous and formidable. The manicured creation she had become radiated such wish-fulfilling optimism into the darkness of Newgate that it was survivable, not just for herself, but for Penitence who was commandeered into the fiction Aphra made of it.

  'Sister Penitence,' she said, coming into Penitence's cell on Sunday morning, 'did you not hear the bell for Mass?'

  'Aphra,' said Penitence, warningly, 'I am not turning Papist.' Aphra's sojourn in the Netherlands had given her what Penitence considered to be an overly rosy and affectionate view of Flemish convent life and Roman Catholicism in general.

  'Would that we were not forced to,' said Aphra, whose hands were clasped round her Bible, 'but walled up in these cloisters as we are, we must conform or be punished. And think, Sister, perhaps our lovers will find an opportunity to procure our freedom while we are at our devotions.'

  They had two mythical lovers, Castor and Amphion, who spent their days lurking outside the walls plotting their ladies' escape from whatever bondage they happened to be in that day.

  Penitence picked up her Bible; it was easier to swim with Aphra's tide of invention than resist it, and more fun. Besides, she had not yet been to the prison chapel.

  They glided along the corridor, disconcerting the cell inmates by returning their greetings with a 'Pax vobiscum'.

  'How did we get into a convent?' asked Penitence.

  'Sister, Sister,' chided Aphra. 'Can you forget so soon our father's insistence that we marry those rich elderly suitors? Our brave refusal? Do not despair, Castor and Amphion wi
ll rescue us.'

  'They didn't rescue us yesterday,' Penitence pointed out.

  Yesterday she and Aphra had been immured in a harem ruled by a cruel Turk who had captured them in a pirate raid on their ship.

  'They will today,' said Aphra.

  From the regularity in which the two of them were in danger of being forced into marriage with rich and uncongenial suitors, Penitence had come to the conclusion that Aphra had, after all, made a real marriage, that it had been horrible enough to leave her with an aversion to husbands in general and that she had only kept Mr Behn's name because it was more unusual than Johnson and added a foreign shimmer to the haze that was Aphra's past.

  At the bottom of the stairs their way was blocked by Sumner, a debtor who was enjoying more power in his position as head of the prisoners' tribunal than he had as a grocer. Two of his cronies stood at his back. 'I'm sorry to say as the tribunal's been complained to about you, Mistress Behn,' he said, ponderously. 'And your friend here.'

  In her role as a novitiate Aphra genuflected, making him blink. 'Mea culpa, Father. In what have we offended?'

  'You been playing rackets. I'm sorry to say as ladies can't play rackets.'

  A beaten piece of ground with a wall behind Press Yard had been turned into a rackets court. It would never have occurred to Penitence that it was available to women, but it hadn't occurred to Aphra that it was not: 'One was initiated into the game during one's attendance on the Duke of York.' It was a long time since Penitence had done anything athletic, and her dismay at finding herself out of condition, as well as her enjoyment of the game, had made her vow to play regularly. Now, she supposed, she could not. To her surprise, Aphra's sharp 'But we played it' supposed nothing of the sort.

  'Yes, well.' Sumner had been expecting an apology or excuses, but he soldiered on bravely. 'There's been complaints as it ain't ladylike, and Master Giltspur said as he was kept waiting for his game acause you was playing.'

  'Master Giltspur, friend of Dick Cromwell?' asked Aphra.

  'Yes, well, I don't know nothing about that, but he always—'

  'So, if one may sum up,' went on an Aphra in whom all conventual submissiveness had disappeared, 'it comes to this, that women are not to be allowed to exercise for their health in the King's own prison because it interferes with the sport of regicides.'

  'Yes, well. Well, no ...'

  'Mistress Hurd and myself will be on the court tomorrow, Master Sumner, and one is sure that His Majesty, with whom I am in correspondence, will be interested to hear of the politics of those who try to bar us.'

  She swept on, followed by an admiring Penitence. 'Aphra, that was colossal.'

  'They shall not play because they are women,' fumed Aphra. 'Did one serve one's king for thisT

  The chapel was full, not because of the drawing power of the Ordinary's sermons, but because Newgate's latest batch of those condemned to death were on show to visitors — tomorrow being their day for hanging. They had been crowded into a pen erected in the middle of the nave, some swearing and shouting at the congress of people who had come to stare at them. In the pulpit the Ordinary was trying to preach a sermon which could barely be heard over the noise. The Piddler, having just added his contribution to the chaos, was being ejected by an outraged member of the congregation.

  It was two of the visitors who caught Penitence's eye, both men, both exquisitely dressed and both holding pomanders to their noses. They were pleased to be indulging in the fancy that the prisoners were horses in a parade ring.

  'Look ye here, Wilmot, here's a winner.' One of them poked his ivory staff bedecked with ribbons into the thick neck of one of the condemned's better male specimens, who spat on it. 'Regard the muscles. I'll wager a hundred guineas he'll go all of fifteen minutes.'

  'You are a Dutchman, Charles, did your mother never confess? He'll be weighted.' The man called Wilmot lightly struck the prisoner on the shoulder with his own, also be- ribboned, staff. 'Neigh to me, my fine stallion, you've a sweetheart who'll hang on your prick and so pull you out of the race. Not so? It's the light ones who last the course. I won five hundred once on a bare-ribbed mare who lasted seventeen and a half. I pick this one.' He prodded a thin, pale woman who was sitting on the floor, cuddling an equally thin, pale girl of about ten years old. 'Win for me tomorrow, Rosinante, and I'll see your filly gets the stake money.'

  So these are rakes. Although Puritan hagiography had vented most of its spleen on the evil-living and effeminacy of the high-born young men who had attached themselves to the court of Charles II, Penitence was unprepared for the impact of the reality. Their long wigs curled over silk, embroidered coats that were waisted and fell below their knees to show the bottom of frilled breeches and high-heeled shoes. Everything that could bear lace or ribbon was laced and be-ribboned, from the bunches on their shoulders to their insteps. They were a deliberate outrage, in their costume, the strut of their walk and the high flute of their drawl. But what Penitence had not expected was their aggression, a radiation of power without rules; she was in the presence of tigers.

  Because she couldn't cope with the thought of men who could bet on the length of time it would take for human beings to be strangled, she dismissed them. More important was the woman one of them had prodded, and her child. The mother and daughter formed a tableau of stillness in the turbulence of the chapel, noticing nobody, clinging together in their own pen of desperation where their minutes together ticked away in its silence.

  Penitence could hardly bear to look at them, but she couldn't bear to look anywhere else. 'Who's that?'

  'The fair one is Sir Charles Sedley,' said Aphra, excitedly, 'and 1 think, I'm not sure, but I think the other is the Earl of Rochester.'

  'Not them,' said Penitence. 'The mother with the little girl.'

  'That? That's Mary Moders.'

  The prostitute. And nearer to the meaning of the crucifix on the altar than anyone else in the chapel.

  The rakes had tired of their game. The fair one was clambering up into the pulpit and was heard to say in the sudden silence: 'Reverend, I should like to address a few words of comfort to these unfortunates.'

  The Ordinary sweated ingratiatingly as he vacated his position. 'Of course, Sir Charles, I am sure we shall all be edified.'

  'You will, indeed.' Sir Charles folded his hands, raised his eyes to Heaven and spoke in an unctuous sing-song. 'Brethren, our lesson today comes from the Sedley book of epigrams, Chapter 2, verse 1:

  'If death must come as oft as breath departs, Then he must often die who often farts; And if to die be but to lose one's breath, Then death's a fart...'

  He turned his back, wriggled his breeches down, exposed a plump, pink bottom over the edge of the pulpit and broke wind:

  '... And so a fart for death.'

  Pulling up his breeches, he turned round. 'So endeth the lesson.' An astounded silence was broken by a slow handclap from the Earl of Rochester to which Sir Charles, doffing his hat, left the pulpit, bowed to a sickly-smiling Ordinary and rejoined his friend on his way out.

  Aphra pushed forward: 'You may not remember, Sir Charles, but we met at His Grace the Duke of York's a while ago .. . Aphra Behn.'

  She was spoiling his exit but he took the new opportunity. 'Mistress Behn. Wilmot, it's our old friend Mistress Behn. And looking so well. The Duke talks of you constantly. Wilmot, wasn't the Duke talking of Mistress Behn to the King but yesterday?'

  'Never off his lips,' said the Earl of Rochester, yawning.

  To Penitence's fury, Aphra pulled her forward. 'Permit me to present my friend, Mistress Hurd.'

  Sir Charles bowed. 'Mistress Hurd's name is also the toast of court. Ah, how pleasant to stroll through this orangery and find such fruit. Shall we move on out of the sun and sup a dish of tay?'

  Penitence dragged her eyes away from the mother and child. 'Thank you,' she said, 'I prefer the present company.'

  It was a mistake. They couldn't bear contempt. Two pairs of eyes focused on hers, one
pair suddenly vicious, the other interested. 'One can see it would be more congenial to you,' said the Earl of Rochester.

  'I believe we have offended Mistress Hurd,' said Sir Charles Sedley.

  Had she cared enough to bother, she would have told them they were a sacrilege, not in their shamelessness nor their schoolboy shocks, but in their inability to feel pity. However, she didn't care enough, and if she stayed in the same place as Mary Moders and her child any longer, her heart was going to break. She turned on her heel and went back to her cell.

  'Just high-spirited,' said Aphra, when she came back later.

  'Just high decadence,' said Penitence. 'Nor they didn't know you from Adam.'