The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  The Triple Alliance? Long may it last. I fought the Dutch fleet more from duty than conviction. Another honest enemy, Mrs Hughes, and glad I am to have them as ally. The true enemy of England, ma'am, is France.. Louis and his Popery. Popery above all. Did I ever recount to you my imprisonment at the hands of Ferdinand III when I was offered my freedom if I would but convert to Rome?'

  This was better. She was ignorant of so much of the European past, and Rupert, who had figured in a great deal of it, linked up history for her. She listened warily as she ate, the slight and occasional Bohemian accent giving his pedantic English a trace of the Oriental. Perhaps he only wants someone to talk to. It would be upsetting to find that he was like all the others and she ended the evening fending off a sexual attack. I should have brought a chaperone after all. He might interpret her lack of one as an invitation. But who could I bring? Dorinda? Mistress Palmer?

  The apartments were dark, tucked away in a corner of Whitehall's vastness overlooking a private garden, and smelled of hounds. A half dozen of them had greeted her entrance and he'd watched her reaction before he commanded them away. 'You are not frightened, Mrs Hughes,' he said. 'That's good. That's good.'

  He seemed to imagine her the epitome of delicate womanhood. She spared him the knowledge that if you could stand up to an Indian dog pack, you could stand up to anything.

  It was the most masculine room she'd ever been in; the space on the walls above the looming furniture was hung with spears, swords and armour. Books were everywhere else. The table was set with exquisite napery, silver and crystal. The food, however, was cold. He apologized. 'I make them run with it from the kitchens, but they never run fast enough.'

  She became apprehensive as the servants cleared the table and left. I liked him. What a pity. He got up to peer out of the casement behind him through which issued the smell of wet autumn leaves. 'I had hoped we could walk in the garden, but it is too damp.'

  Here it comes. She looked around for the inevitable couch, but failed to see one.

  He took his place back at the table, the evening sun outlining his wig and the still-athletic spread of his shoulders. 'Do you know that I have a son, Mrs Hughes?' he asked.

  She did. Charles Sedley had apprised her of the fact as soon as he became aware of the Prince's interest in her. 'Wouldn't think the old boy could still raise his banner, would you' Sedley had said. 'But he did. Got the little bastard on some poor Irish chit whose father fought with our. Rupert in the war. Tricked the girl into thinking she was marrying him, dirty old devil, and chucked her over once he'd had his way with her.'

  Neither the trickery nor the chucking over sounded like the Rupert she knew. But perhaps she didn't know him. She waited.

  He coughed. 'The boy's mother had and still has a claim on me. There was a ceremony, which I somewhat foolishly regarded as merely the blessing of an alliance and she as a wedding.'

  He leaned forward 'She was a Catholic, you see.'

  Penitence nodded, not seeing at all.

  'She has no complaint of me, and were she here she would tell you so. She has found accommodation that suits her better with my sister, the Electress of Hanover. Our son she has been good enough to leave in my care.' He paused. 'I've put him down for Eton.'

  She had to stop herself smiling.

  He was speaking so stiffly now he might have been angry with her. 'I tell you this so that you will understand, madam, why I am unable to offer you marriage. Had my circumstances been simpler, you would now be receiving such a proposal. You must believe that in all other respects my offer is honourable. Safeguards, permanence, a home I hope you will find not unworthy of you, these things I lay at your feet with all the affection of which my soul is capable.'

  Whatever she had been expecting, it wasn't this.

  'You have a son, I believe?' They'd been as quick to pass on the gossip about her as to tell her about him. She nodded. Tou have my assurance that, should you take me, he would be raised with all the consequence of my own.'

  She was silent for so long he said: 'Is it my age, madam? Am I too old for you?' It was the first time he'd shown agitation.

  'No. Oh no. Your Highness ...' This formality was ridiculous. She sounded like a Dryden heroine. '... I am overwhelmed. And muddled.'

  'I beg you not to answer now,' he said. 'For all they think I should be put out to grass, I am a man of the world and did not expect your life to be any less complicated than my own has been. Sir Charles Sedley has been making free with your name, perhaps with your permission, perhaps not. I ask no questions.'

  Why?' Somebody had to break through this courtesy and say something real. 'Why don't you? You don't know anything about me.'

  'It is your future that exercises me, not your past.' He became brisk and rang the small silver bell on the table by his hand for a servant to fetch her cloak. 'You will need time to consider the matter. I shall not take up any more of it.'

  He rose and stalked down the table to hold the great oak chair so that she could get up. He smelled of cologne and camphor. As he kissed her hand, he stayed bending so that he could look into her face. 'I know by your eyes, madam,' he said, 'that should you agree, my honour would be as protected by you as yours by me.'

  She saw his eyes and, for the first time, the passion in them. This calculated reserve wasn't natural to him; he was an impetuous and hot-blooded man. His hand under hers was vibrating. I couldn't. I wish I could, but I couldn't.

  'Yes,' she said, 'it would. That's why I'm not going to do it. Believe me, you have paid me the greatest compliment of my life, sir. But you deserve to be loved. I'm sorry, so sorry, but I don't love you.' She wasn't going to act for him. He deserved the truth.

  For the first time he smiled, and she saw the man who'd fought for a lost cause before. 'An honest woman,' he said, 'and worth waiting for.'

  As he took her through the maze of corridors and courtyards to his coach - odd that she hadn't minded him knowing her address when she'd kept it from Sedley - she babbled mollifications. 'I am enjoying earning my own living, you see. I value my independence.'

  He had no idea what she meant. An independent woman was a contradiction in terms. 'I shall wait to hear from you. God bless you.'

  She waved, then flopped back on to the buttoned leather seat. Well, well, Penitence Hurd. You have come up in the world. Instantly, she was ashamed at her gratification. She must guard against being impressed by titles. It didn't matter that he was a prince of the blood; what mattered was that he was a good man.

  A good man? Prince Robber? Devil Rupert? Scourge of the Puritan cause? If she'd accepted him the shades of her grandparents wouldn't know which to bewail the more — her living-in- sin, or her living-in-sin with the most feared royalist general of the Civil War.

  Speak as you find, she told them, cheerfully. My mother would approve.

  When Charles Sedley had offered to set her up he'd made no mention of Benedick. His proposal was a transaction: 'And a thousand pound cash when we tire of each other.' It wasn't her Sedley wanted in any case. He merely liked the idea of a trophy, a pretty head on the wall of his vanity. 'Actress, Drury Lane, c. 1670.'

  Rupert had offered her his life.

  Bless him, she thought, and yawned. It had been an emotional day. But Benedick's going to Westminster, not Eton.

  To get to Newmarket in good time meant leaving London at three in the morning. Penitence and Dorinda spent the night with the Marshalls in their small house near Temple Bar so that the coach coming to collect them all need make only one stop. Knipp's husband had refused to let her come.

  Dorinda was wild with excitement and nerves — it was her first inclusion in a royal party — and varied between If-only-Her- Ladyship-could-see-me-now and Suppose-they-know-I-was- on-the-game.

  They think we're all on the game,' Becky Marshall told her, and repeated the Awful Warning of Elizabeth Farley.

  'I know, don't 1?' Dorinda said. 'Knipp's already told me. "Don't sell yourself cheap." An' I won't. Tru
st me, them days is over. Asides, Aubrey's intentions is honourable.'

  To find any friend of Charles's capable of honourable intentions was a novelty, and the sight of the Earl's beery face as he hauled Dorinda into his own coach when they joined the royal cavalcade at Whitehall made Penitence doubt it. In the general redistribution she found herself in another coach, alone with Sedley, who had a hangover. She went straight to the attack. 'You've been making free with my name, it appears,' she said. 'You know we're not on those terms, and I'll not have it said that we are.'

  'Oh God,' he moaned, 'wait 'til my head's smaller. I can't stomach Puritans at this hour of the morning.'

  'And you're not coupling with them at nights either,' she said, but he'd already fallen asleep.

  As the mother of a child she didn't keep secret, she was in no position to go around posing as a virgin. But neither would she have it bruited about that she was anybody's for the asking. So far she'd been spared but if once her reputation went she'd be carrion. The court wits would tear her apart.

  They hymned faithlessness in wonderful live-for-the- moment sonnets to their beloveds, but woe to the girl they persuaded, then tired of. Within days, details of how she performed in bed were distributed round town with exact descriptions of her pudenda.

  If she tired of them first the savagery was frightening. Rochester had hounded a mistress who'd thrown him over with:

  While she whines like a dog-drawn bitch; Loathed and despised, kicked out of town, Into some dirty hole alone, To chew her cud of misery And know she owes it all to me. And may no woman better thrive, That dares profane the cunt I swive.

  For an actress to be out of their company meant professional oblivion; to be in it was dangerous. Every minute she was with the court, Penitence was aware of the depth beneath the high wire she balanced on. But if it was frightening, it was exhilarating. With their style, their careless erudition and their wealth they made life a brilliant feast at which the trick, for their guests, was to avoid the poisoned chalice.

  She studied Sedley's chubby face, one side of his wig pulled up against the seat-back, like a spaniel's ear, the mouth whistling alcoholic snores. I don't trust you. But in that case, what was she doing here7 Partly because he wanted her to be. But the honest answer was that she was sick of penury, sick of living in a house with the ghosts of the Plague, sick of worrying about Benedick, sick of thinking of a future when her looks went and with them her career.

  At twenty-five in women's eyes,

  Beauty does fade, at thirty dies ...

  Sedley had written that to her. And she was already twenty- four, going on twenty-five. And she hadn't been out of London since she arrived in it from the Americas. And travelling in upholstered comfort to a new experience in a cavalcade which included a king, a prince, a duke or two, not to mention several earls, had to be good going.

  Just before Baldock there was a stop for a change of horses and relief of bladders, the men of the party wandering off like hungover ghosts into the woods while the ladies were accommodated by hastily erected little tents. Back in the coach, Sedley fell asleep again but Penitence, hanging out of the window, saw the dawn come up over the frosted chalk downs of the Icknield Way and watched the sun bring out the reds of haws and hips in the hedgerows. She switched to the left-hand side after Royston to see the land go flat to the horizon in common fields where vegetable plots alternated with strips of sooty tilled earth in a black and emerald chessboard. In the distance the spires of Cambridge floated on a cushion of mist.

  She was entranced by the variety of landscape England could pack into a distance of sixty miles. Now they were going through tiny villages where even the meanest cottage was pargeted and the thatching put little wolf's ears at either end of each roof. She would have woken up Sedley to ask him why that was, but she dreaded his jeer at her excitement, and thought that in any case he wouldn't know.

  'And that, my dear,' said the Earl of Rochester, pointing at a black stallion being paraded round the stableyard, 'is the original Old Rowley. He's sired nearly as many progeny as our own dear king.'

  "Who is known,' added Sir Charles Sedley, 'as the Father of his People because he's fathered most of 'em.'

  'Nor are his desires above his strength,

  His sceptre and his prick are of a length,'

  sang Rochester. Penitence glanced towards the King only a few feet away, and saw his lips twitch. Well, if he thinks it isn't lese majeste, it isn't.

  And the wits had a point. Royal bastards were well represented at Newmarket, not to mention their mothers. The mother of the Duke of Monmouth, the handsome young man who was showing off by doing steed leaps over Old Rowley, was safely obliterated in the King's past. But the fecund Castlemaine was here with her children, so was Nell Gwynn, and both were pregnant.

  Penitence winced for the barren Queen, though she seemed to be on fairly good terms with the mistresses. 'Has to be' Sedley had told her, 'ever since she lost the fight over Castlemaine when the King insisted on making the whore a Lady of the Queen's Bedchamber.'

  The only one, apart from herself, who seemed to find the situation bizarre was the Prince of Orange. He looked like a boy who had been transported to an Arabian harem and kept blinking as he glanced from the plain little Queen to the lovely, rounded women, one tall and dark, the other small and fair, who were her rivals.

  Unusually for him, Charles patronized the boy. 'Come over here, nephew. You'll not have seen horseflesh like this before.' As William obediently crossed the stableyard, Penitence studied him. The Stuart genes were apparent in his face, though he was shorter than his uncles and had the rounded shoulders of an asthmatic.

  'You should build as good a stables as these at Dieren. I shall send you a brood mare carrying Rowley's foal. Gelderland could provide a fine racecourse.'

  'Over the flats, of course,' drawled Rochester. The wits found the Netherlands' flatness inexhaustibly funny.

  'Thank you, Your Majesty,' said the Prince of Orange. He spoke English well, with a slightly sing-song accent. 'But should France advance on us further, there will be neither time nor land for a racecourse.'

  Sedley and Rochester put languid hands over their mouths and patted away feigned yawns. Charles was irritated. 'Make a friend of France, nephew. You will find Louis a better one than all your Dutch blockheads. Now, let us see if they have taught you to ride.'

  The ladies queued at a mounting block to be hoisted up on horses behind the men for the journey out on to the heath. Dorinda, who was afraid of horses, made the King laugh by shrieking: 'I ain't getting up on a ballocker that big. I'll get the vertigoes.' Eventually she was persuaded, and with her arms around the Earl of Oxford's considerable waist, bumped out of the yard alongside Penitence, who had her arms round Sedley's, followed by the jockeys in their surcoats and tapestried caps.

  It was a glorious day. Gorse and bracken edged the swathes of sheep-nibbled grass that looked as if it had been smoothed on to the hillocks. Rooks, disturbed by the noisy cavalcade, circled over elm and beech hangars which were just beginning to turn into the yellows and copper of autumn.

  'See that lady-in-waiting there, the one up behind Buckingham?' shouted Sedley over his shoulder, pointing at a graceful figure jolting along in front. 'That's Winifred Wells, Charles's latest. Figure of a goddess. Physiognomy of a dreamy sheep.'

  Penitence felt a sudden nausea for herself and her companions.

  The landscape's freshness was a reproach. She wanted to wander off into it alone and read a book by a stream. Homesickness for the innocent forests of Massachusetts brought tears to her eyes.

  'And that one there? Face like a gargoyle and smells? That's one of James's. Where does he find 'em? She'd better watch out. Lord Carnegie doesn't like his wife sleeping with James as well and is trying to contract the pox so that he can pass it on to them both.'

  She shut her ears to everything but the larksong.

  They watched the racing from a pavilion set on a rise, though the male cou
rt was unable to resist joining in the last race which ended with the King passing the winning post to the sound of drums, huzzas and trumpets. He's even brought a band.

  She couldn't help feeling that if as much money and care had been spent on the country's defences as was being lavished on this outing, the Prince of Orange's countrymen would never have forced their way up the Thames. The organization that had gone into arranging the large apiary of tents from which liveried servants buzzed back and forth with refreshments was extraordinary. So was the picnic that came later. Pretty wenches had been hired to waft bracken fronds over the trestles to keep the flies off every kind of meat, fowl and fish in every form known to the royal kitchens, roast, pied, tarted, ragouted, boiled, with pistachio cream, sauces of artichokes, peas and saffron, morelles, truffles.