The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Sir Charles bowed and withdrew.

  The next day, returning from the dining-hall with Aphra, she found her cell full of roses, pots of them, so many she couldn't reach her bed. 'My dear, how charming,' said Aphra, regarding the petalled sea, 'I knew he was much taken with you.'

  Penitence was furious. 'Do you realize the money these cost could nearly pay off my debt?'

  And then she realized. Sir Charles was offering to get her out, had offered, and she'd snubbed him. She'd had no idea. Penitence Hurd, you'll never make a whore.

  She considered it. After all, having put her foot on the ladder of harlotry, she'd be a fool not to climb to its higher rungs. Satin sheets instead of dirty blankets. Mistress to a rich young man about court rather than the twice-weekly drab of a prison turnkey. She'd acquire connections, enter Benedick into a good school when he was old enough.

  Logically, her next move was to send a note to Sedley. It only needed to say 'Yes'. She couldn't hate bedding with Sedley more than she loathed those moments in the condemned cell with George. But I can control George.

  Illogically, she didn't do it. For one thing, when it came to the point of asking Aphra for ink, quill and paper, she was overcome with a fit of gasping as if, like Swaveley, she was being asphyxiated by a great weight. For another, she was optimistic about her chances of paying off her debt by herself.

  No more flowers arrived either, so that was that.

  The profit to Aphra and Penitence from Swaveley's Last Exclamations, combined with that from his Positively Last Exclamations, which went on sale at his hanging in August, came to £94 6s 10d, nearly fifty pounds each.

  They couldn't believe it. 'Is that with all paid?' asked Aphra.

  'Aye,' said MacGregor. All paid. We had to rush a reprint of the reprint for Tyburn.'

  'The Tippins reckoned the crowd above six thousand,' Dorinda told them, 'and I hope Swaveley was grateful for all we done to get 'em there, though he didn't look it. All the stuffing gone out of the poor ballocker. The Tippins lifted so much blunt out of the crowd's pockets as they refused to take wages.'

  'All we need now is more executions,' said MacGregor.

  Penitence winced. 'We'd better call ourselves the Vulture Press.'

  'That's a terrible bad name,' said MacGregor, 'but as we're not likely to display it, it'll do for the now.'

  'What'll we do with your share, Prinks?' asked Dorinda.

  'Pay the b-bills. Buy B-Benedick what he needs. Keep some for housekeeping and pay the rest towards the debt. Deposit it with a lawyer called P-Patterson in Leadenhall Street. He was Her Ladyship's man and he can pay the debtor when we've got enough.' She winked at MacGregor. 'Another Scotsman, but I trust him.'

  The load was lifting. She was going to get out of Newgate. By her own enterprise.

  Newgate's Ordinary went to the Stationers' Company to complain about the emergence of the mysterious and illegal press which had taken away his business. The Stationers promised to try to track it down, but in view of the number of unlicensed presses in operation they weren't sanguine of success.

  However, the Vulture Press laid low for a while. There would be no more hangings until the authorities had accumulated enough death sentences to make the spectacle at Tyburn worthwhile.

  There was nothing for the two young women to do and Aphra, who had been in prison the longer, began to decline. The staple food given to those who couldn't afford to pay proved unfit to eat more often that not, and Aphra, always fastidious, was unable to keep it down.

  Penitence begged her to draw on the money lodged against their debts, but Aphra refused to eat, literally, into it. 'One will never get out if one does.' Penitence began to be frightened that one would die if one didn't. She suspected Aphra's lassitude to be the first stage of Whitt fever which carried off so many in Newgate. 'You can't give way now.'

  Aphra closed her eyes. 'Send The Young King to Rochester and Buckingham,' she murmured. 'Perhaps they will find it worthy to finish it for me.'

  'You'll finish it. And what about that slave? Weren't you going to write his story?'

  Tears oozed out of Aphra's eyes. 'Ah, poor Caesar, both of us doomed to oblivion.'

  'Damned if you are,' said Penitence, irritably. She didn't send the play, but she wrote notes to Buckingham and Rochester informing them of the situation. If Sedley had told her the truth, they might be interested enough in Aphra to save her life. What they pay for blasted ribbon in a day would keep her alive for a month.

  That night, in the condemned cell, she asked George to bring in some decent food. She knew enough not to plead for it. 'I want cheese, good bread, fresh milk and I want it tomorrow,' she commanded, as she stripped. 'And some wine.'

  'You lady-ins,' admired George, 'Whitt fare not good enough, eh? Tell us what you eat in that mansion of yours.'

  What do the rich eat? She could only think of the meals her grandmother had served up in her forest kitchen, and hoped their unfamiliarity would sound sufficiently exotic. 'Pumpkin pie,' she said.

  'Oooh. Pumpkin pie.' He was snuffling at her thighs. 'Oozing gravy.'

  'Lots of gravy. Wild turkey stuffed with blueberries. Chowder...'

  It was gastronomic pornography, and effective. George brimmed earlier than ever. But there was a price. As he left her, he said: 'Ready yourself for tomorrow night. Good food's extra.'

  Aphra was too poorly to ask where the provisions came from, but they improved her slightly. Since she wasn't well enough to leave her bed, Penitence sat and read to her: 'Me, too, the Pierian sisters have made a singer; I too have songs; ay, and the shepherds dub me poet, but I trust them not. For as yet, methinks, gooselike I cackle amid quiring swans.'

  'Oh Virgil,' sighed Aphra, 'if one could but cackle like you.'

  Aphra's hunger for literature was greater than for food. Through reading to her the library she had brought into Newgate with her, Penitence was acquiring a culture she hadn't dreamed of. It still wasn't enough for Aphra: 'Alas, that our sex is denied the teaching of Latin and Greek so that we are barred from the originals. That my eyes could drink in the Greek of Homer.'

  Penitence found some of the English translations hard enough, but she would read on long after Aphra slept, fascinated by Socratic argument, or listening as the bronze trumpets blared their challenge over the walls of Troy, or softly repeating again and again a honeyed Virgilian phrase. If Newgate took her to the depths of human abasement, it also, thanks to Aphra, showed her the heights of human achievement.

  And woman's. She had never heard of the poetess Aphra always referred to as 'Sacred Sappho' — she understood, when she read her, why the Puritans had ignored her existence, nor did the Lesbian's sexual proclivities agree with her own, but she was spellbound by the lovely, feminine fragments of verse that sang themselves into a prison cell with such immediacy from another country twenty centuries away.

  She still doubted whether Aphra's ambition to put her play on in a public theatre was feasible. But at least there was a precedent for a woman to be something more than a writer for purely domestic consumption.

  Who's the Matchless Orinda?' she asked, remembering Sedley.

  Aphra's stricken eyes gained a touch of frost. 'Ugh.'

  'Who?'

  'Mention the fact that one aspires to write,' said Aphra, 'and that's all one hears. "Another Matchless Orinda." If I thought I was to be bracketed with that vapid, watery, flatulent female, I would cut my wrists here and now. Ugh one said, and Ugh one meant.'

  Little wiser, Penitence was not sorry she'd asked; Aphra's flash of spirit had been her first in days.

  But the real panacea was delivered to Newgate late in the evening on the first day of September in the shape of a young man whose eyes seemed too lively for his sober, elegant, clergyman's cloth.

  Penitence collided with him as she ran into Aphra's cell, hearing the screams. She nearly punched him. He held her off, apologizing. 'I assure you, madam, Mistress Behn's cries are of a rapturous nature.'

  A
phra lifted her head. 'Penitence. Oh my dear, we're free.'

  'Ah well...' said the young clergyman.

  'Two hundred guineas. We can leave this minute. This beautiful deliverer, this Mercury—'

  'Sprat,' smirked the young man, 'Thomas Sprat.' '- our benefactors, His Grace of Buckingham—' 'An anonymous gift,' said the Reverend Sprat. '- and the Earl of Rochester. How can words—' 'I was to say it was an appreciation from the Muses,' said the Reverend Sprat, delicately, 'and while 1 am sure that, were the anonymous donors aware of this lady's plight, they would be only too happy .. . but the gift is to liberate you, Mistress Behn.'

  Through tears and tangled hair, Aphra looked at him straight. 'If Penitence isn't freed, neither am I. There's enough now to pay both our debts.'

  So it was arranged. There were comings and goings. A disgruntled Lawyer Patterson was called out from a musical evening at his home to sign notes and swear oaths. Warrants were withdrawn, creditors paid, and in the early hours of the morning a bemused and still-unbelieving Penitence had settled herself alongside Aphra in a carriage which carried a crest it was too dark to see, and was driven to Aldersgate where the young Reverend Sprat, his duty done, delivered them to the cheap lodgings of Mrs and Master Johnson, which, cheap as they were, beat seven bells out of Newgate.

  And half a mile away, a spark from a carelessly left baker's oven in Pudding Lane ignited a pile of faggots lying too near it.

  A red cinder from the burning shop fell on to a pile of hay in a nearby inn yard. The inn caught and the flames ran into Thames Street lined by warehouses stacked with tallow, oil and spirits.

  The new Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth, was woken up and chose to ignore the fire as just another outbreak; the City had them all the time. This one, however, coincided with a dry spell and a strong east wind. Pitch-coated, thatched, closely packed timber buildings fired up like torches.

  The usual teams of men with buckets of water, long-handled fire-hooks and hand-squirts tried dealing with outbreaks as they occurred and then gave up. The only way to fight a fire of these proportions was by wholesale demolition of the houses in its path, and Sir Thomas Bludworth was too concerned about the compensation which would have to be paid to give the order which would have saved London.

  By the sunny, blowy, Sunday morning, crowds of frightened Londoners were evacuating their homes, flinging their goods into boats moored along the north bank, clambering down the steps to the waterside. Some people stayed in their houses until those, too, caught fire, and then ran in panic. Bewildered pigeons remaining overlong on the rooftops before taking flight fell with singed wings as the flames whipped a hundred feet into the air.

  Refugees, Aphra Behn and her family among them, abandoned the City in terror. Some swam the river, others silted up at the gates or queued to cross the mercifully unburned Bridge. The price of a cart went up to £40.

  Not until Monday, when the King and his brother James, Duke of York, took charge, was there any decisive action.

  By then Aphra and the Johnsons were safely ensconced at the Cock and Pie and, like the rest of the Rookery, had a grandstand view of London as it burned to death.

  Smuts stung their eyes, but they couldn't look away from the corona of near-invisible flame that shimmered above the City. Smoke streamed from it over the countryside like the hair of a giant hag. More appalling even than the sight was the noise, the huge, self-satisfied roar of fire punctuated by the crash of avalanching buildings, the percussion of explosions that shook the balcony they stood on as seamen, drafted in from the dockyards, began the systematic destruction of whole streets with gunpowder.

  The history, oh, the history,' cried Aphra.

  Penitence was remembering her walks with Peter Simkin through the carved gateways into the Middle Ages. His ghost, like Aphra, would weep for the streets that had seen Chaucer's pilgrims set off for Canterbury, and cheered Elizabeth's coronation procession.

  There were no tears in her eyes. Aphra's brother, like some of the Rookery men, had gone to help the evacuation and came back with the news that, though five-sixths of the City was lost, nobody had yet reported a death.

  'And Newgate?' she asked him.

  'Gutted.'

  Cleansed. The past of a city was burning, much of it as filthy as her own in it had been. The condemned cell was cauterized by flame. She and London, the two of them, could start again.

  She put her arm round the weeping Aphra and went on watching the holocaust.

  'Good,' she whispered.

  Chapter 4

  Riding yard alley led from the Strand end of Catherine Street and was surprisingly narrow. 'Is this it?' asked Penitence, dubiously.

  'I know, don't I?' said Dorinda. 'It's the back way in. The front's off Drury Lane, though it ain't much wider. But wait 'til you get inside.'

  She led the way, picking up her skirts to avoid a dead cat just visible in the shadows cast by a thin, wintry sun. They followed. 'One went to the old Cockpit, of course,' said Aphra, stung by Dorinda's familiarity with the surroundings, 'but one's been too occupied since they built this one.'

  You tell him that,' sneered Dorinda, over her shoulder. '"One's so sorry, Sir Tom, but prison's kept one so busy.'"

  'Stop it,' said Penitence, automatically. Dorinda's persistent carping at Aphra Behn made home life wearing, and life at the Cock and Pie was wearing enough. The place was nearly as full as it had been in the days of Her Ladyship. The attics were the home of the Johnsons, MacGregor had moved into Job's old room to be near his press, which was in the kitchen, and Mistress Palmer now carried on her laundry business from the scullery, because of the proximity of the well.

  It was paradise compared with Newgate, but on the days when Benedick was teething, and the press was thumping, and MacGregor was shouting at Peter Johnson because he wouldn't help when there was printing work to be done — not that there was much — and Dorinda was tormenting Aphra who was trying to write, and Mrs Johnson had eluded their vigilance and slipped down to the Ship for a bottle, and she didn't know where the next meal for them all was to come from ...

  'He is already aware of it,' said Aphra, with dignity. 'I wrote to him at the time. One is well acquainted with Sir Thomas.'

  She's nervous or she wouldn't be answering back. Usually Aphra was patient with Dorinda.

  Penitence was herself nervous. She had been subjected to Puritan teaching for too long to feel easy about entering the temple of sin which they were now approaching.

  'Didn't get you out, though, did he?' Dorinda stopped before a dusty green doorway and addressed the hulking figure lounging in it: 'These are friends of mine, Jacko.'

  'How's the orange business, Dorry?' By borrowing the necessary money from Sam Bryskett and employing the Tippins to put the fear of God into the then incumbent, Dorinda had bought the orange concession at the King's Theatre and was doing well with it. Such food as appeared on the table at the Cock and Pie came mainly from her small profits.

  'Shockin'. Let us pass, then.'

  'Can't be did,' said Jacko. 'You're all right, but Sir Tom's give orders. Your friends stay outside. They're rehearsing in there.'

  Dorinda's tone sweetened: 'Jacko, my little quiffer, if you don't let us in I'll have to tell Sir Tom as I saw you scratch your neck three times when you was admitting yesterday.'

  'You wouldn't.'

  'I ballocking would.'

  The doorman sighed. 'Pass, friends.'

  Inside the theatre they were in a dark corridor with many doors. Aphra was curious: 'Why shouldn't he scratch?'

  'He's paid to take admittance money,' said Dorinda. 'Every time he scratches his neck he slips a sixpence down the back of his jacket.'

  Penitence's nose was twitching. If she'd been a dog she would have been casting about. She stumbled through the gloom after Dorinda, almost stepping on the girl's heels. Overriding prejudice, turning it into excitement, was this vibration, this wonderful smell, at once strange and at the same time wooing her.

&nb
sp; And then she was there. She stood in the doorway to the pit. To her right, rows of empty benches, raked at an angle of fifteen degrees, led in darkness to the steeper rake of the amphitheatre. Above that were the boxes - she got the impression of gilt leather.

  Dorinda guided Aphra towards Sir Thomas Killigrew's office, but Penitence fell on to a bench and stayed there, her hands gripping it.

  Ahead and slightly above there was light and men's voices, figures moving. She was enveloped in a smell compounded of orange peel, baize, fish-glue, old scent, tobacco and dust. She fixed her eyes on the light and the stage came into focus.

  The front of it made an apron. On that, further back, was the proscenium arch formed by two great golden statues of Neptune on marble pedestals. Its top was a frieze of clouds and nymphs and cherubs that seemed to hold up swathes of red velvet curtain, the tasselled ends of which hung down behind the sea-gods. In the centre of the frieze the royal arms blazed in gold and silver.