The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Ahead was a broken drainpipe outlined against space, like a hook, with moonlight catching the drip from its mouth. She'd seen it before. Another fifty yards and she would be in the mouth of Dog Yard, near the blessed, blessed Ship. Some steps.

  She didn't make them. They caught her. She felt a hand drag her skirt. More hands wiping against her face. Not a sound from them but panting. Flesh on hers, fingers on her breasts, clawing through her hair. Their smell. Another, fetid and alien.

  That was when she began screaming until one of the hands went into her mouth and smeared her teeth.

  Then they went.

  Three minutes later, woken by a hand hitting and hitting the Cock and Pie door, Mistress Palmer opened it to a creature that squirmed as if trying to shrink from its own flesh, a gagging, whispering woman whose eyes stared at her through a mask of dog excreta.

  Next morning Penitence wrote a letter to Prince Rupert agreeing to be his mistress.

  BOOK III

  Chapter 1

  Without warning, the English fleet fired on a convoy of Dutch merchantmen, and the country found, somewhat to its surprise and despite the alliance between them, that it was once again at war with the Netherlands. It didn't mind particularly. The Dutch had too much of the world's trade for their own good - and England's. But when a season of naval warfare passed without a palpable English victory, even a Cavalier Parliament decided enough was enough and refused to vote the King sufficient money to go on with it.

  Had it been coincidence that war was declared on the Low Countries just as Louis XIV's gigantic army, outnumbering the Dutch nine to one, invaded them? If it hadn't, if Charles had meant to show that it was wiser to throw in with the French than the Dutch, it was a mistake because English perception changed. Suddenly the Netherlands were no longer a pain in England's commercial backside; they were being overrun, starved and tortured by a people more congenial as an enemy than they had ever been — the French. What's more, the remnant of their pitiful army was fighting — and fighting bravely — against the invader under their new, young general, Prince William of Orange.

  People remembered the Armada, when another small and gallant Protestant nation had stood up to the might of a Catholic oppressor.

  Who did the King and his advisers favour? Young William, cutting his country's dykes to flood the enemy's advance, like Good Queen Bess facing the hostile sea at Tilbury? Or Louis XIV's army, so reminiscent of the menacing crescent of Philip of Spain's galleons?

  Protestant or Catholic? The question hung in the air.

  Then the King took a new mistress, Louise de Keroualle, a French Catholic, as, almost in the same breath, he brought in a Declaration of Indulgence suspending laws against those who dissented from the established Church. It was his right, he said, his 'supreme power in ecclesiastical matters'.

  It wouldn't have mattered much that Nonconformists, Puritans, even damned Quakers and the like, were given the right to worship legally, but the Indulgence also included Catholics.

  This might be good Old Rowley showing his usual tolerance, but with everything that had gone before, it looked a good deal more like the thin end of the Catholic wedge.

  Who said the King had 'supreme power in ecclesiastical matters' anyway? Was Charles going the way of his father and trying to impose absolute monarchy? Was England secretly in the hands of Jesuits?

  There was an outcry. Even the House of Lords refused to support the King. Charles was not only forced to withdraw his Indulgence, but a new and less compliant Parliament countered with the Test Act requiring anyone holding public office to pass a test which included Church of England communion, oaths of allegiance and a denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation — in other words, a hurdle no true Catholic could jump.

  And the first person to balk at it was James, Duke of York. Honourably, he came out of the closet and admitted his adherence to the Church of Rome, resigning as Lord High Admiral - a post then given to his Protestant cousin, Prince Rupert.

  It alarmed the country to discover the King's own brother a Catholic; he was, after all, heir to the throne. The Queen had still not borne a child and hope was fading that she ever would. If Charles should die, England would have its first Roman Catholic monarch since Bloody Mary of unpleasant memory.

  True, James's two daughters, Mary and Anne, were being brought up as good Protestants, and a marriage was being arranged between Mary and the Prince of Orange, but. ..

  At this point there were two ominous happenings. The King, renowned for his superb health, fell violently ill. And

  James, now widowed, cast about for a new wife and chose a beautiful Italian princess, Mary of Modena, a Catholic.

  The certainties on which the reign had begun were splintering. The King recovered, but he had shown he could not be relied on to outlive his brother. He couldn't even be relied on to defend his realm against Papists. Having turned morality upside-down, corrupted an entire aristocracy, created a theatre which extolled adultery as a virtue, he might very well die and leave an even worse mess behind him. The country was going to the dogs.

  Good God, there was even a woman making a success of playwrighting.

  The door of Hammersmith parish church stood open to let in the late October sun, the scent of leaves and cowpats and singeing horn from the forge down the lane where Coppy was defying Sunday and getting horses shod for the hunt tomorrow.

  Inside it smelled of incense and Sunday best.

  'And what is this thing, the Whig?' demanded Parson Fowler, lifting his hands to Heaven and thereby displaying the hole in the armpit of his cassock. 'I tell you it is an old enemy under a new name, a creature hateful to God, a latitu ... a latidinarian which is, parentis mutandis, an abomination in the sight of God . ..'

  Penitence, sitting in the front pew, heard the Reverend Boreman, her new chaplain, shift in the pew behind her, and smiled. The parson's sermons got on his nerves at the best of times, but the man's misuse of Latin put him out of temper, mainly because he was one of the few in the congregation to know it was misuse.

  She wouldn't have minded learning what a Whig was — the term was being bandied about — but she was unlikely to be enlightened by Parson Fowler who probably wasn't sure himself. She let his thick Middlesex-accented harangue rattle past her, much as she had let the politics of the last years go by, unheeded. Politics were the court, and court life was now only peripheral to her own.

  She put her hand over Rupert's and squeezed it to wake him up. Rupert's own form of criticism of the vicar was to fall asleep during his sermons. 'Blwah?' he said.

  The parson hunched his shoulders and beamed uncertainly: 'Would Your Royal Highness be so good?'

  Rupert stood up and marched across to the side aisle, to the effigy bearing a plaque, 'The Glorious Martyr King Charles the First of blessed Memory', and fetched the silver casket beneath it to the altar rail.

  He still looks pale. He'd given her the fright of her life when his old head wound reopened after a strenuous game of tennis. He'd refused a doctor - he had a horror of doctors - and hadn't even wanted her to dress it; 'Too unsightly. Leave it to Peter.'

  'I certainly won't,' she'd said. 'It's my job.' He loathed showing weakness in front of her for fear of accentuating their age-difference, but his gratitude for her nursing had been pathetic. He's growing old too quickly. He said he was more content than he'd ever been, and probably he was - his famous anger came rarely nowadays, and had never shown itself to her in any case. But his wars had caught up with him.

  He's like me. He's retired hurt.

  Rupert lifted the lid of the casket and the vicar poured wine and prayer on to the pickled heart of Sir Nicholas Crispe, Bart, contained within it. She heard the Reverend Boreman muttering. This was too heathenish for him. But Sir Nicholas had written in his will that he wished his heart refreshed with wine on every anniversary of his death, and as he'd been a friend of Rupert's and the builder of the home they lived in, the household was bound to attend. 'Noblesse obl
ige', Rupert said it was.

  'Good vintage is it, Sir Nick?' shouted somebody. It sounded like the Brewster son. Rupert returned to their pew, erect and glowering at the daring. Everybody else called a more decorous 'God bless Sir Nicholas', and they all knelt for final prayers.

  It was a spacious church — Sir Nick had built this too — with a pretty ceiling of painted compartments. Into its quiet came the sound of birdsong and Coppy's hammering.

  Tranquillity, thought Penitence. But unearned tranquillity. In escaping to the safety of Rupert's protection, she had not imagined how very much it would feel like desertion and how undeserved its peace.

  There was a rustle of cassock past her as the vicar sprinted to the door to be ready to shake hands with his congregation; not that anybody would move until Rupert did. With great deliberation the Prince got to his feet and offered her his arm; together, with their household behind, they walked down the nave, every eye upon them. Royalle, Rupert's giant black poodle, followed them out.

  Outside in the churchyard they had to pause for more noblesse oblige, nodding kindly to the villagers, enquiring after Mistress Cole's rheumatism and Jem Harper's youngest. Rupert was punctilious about this, though he was held in too much awe to get more than a 'Going on well, sir, thank 'ee kindly'. If she'd been alone, they'd have answered with more enthusiasm and anatomical detail. Jem added, with a nod at Penitence: 'That poultice of Mistress's eased his little cough something wonderful, sir.'

  Rupert was gratified. 'Her Ladyship is skilled in these matters.'

  Now it was the turn of the local gentry. They were surrounded by men and women like bullocks; the Brewsters bred large. 'Fine morning, Your Royal Highness and mmm .. .'

  'Your Ladyship,' prompted Rupert.

  'Your Ladyship,' said Squire Brewster, deliberately having trouble getting his tongue round it. 'Hunting tomorrow, Your Highness? Us could be doing with that lymerer of yours.'

  Rupert looked at Penitence, who looked stolidly back. 'You may have the lymerer, Sir John, but not me, I fear. Her Ladyship still over-cossets me.' He loved the idea that he was henpecked. 'These women, you know.'

  You want to get her trained, Highness. A wife like Lady Brewster, now, she do know her place. Don't 'ee, Betty?'

  'Ah well,' said Lady Brewster, managing to invest her sigh with a distinction between a wife and a mistress. 'There 'tis.'

  They couldn't get over it. At first they'd watched her in church with fascinated horror, as if at any moment she might strip and dance on the altar, on the principle that actresses would be actresses. And once, when Rupert had been away, the elder Brewster boy tried to kiss her on the principle that mistresses would be mistresses. Now they merely larded their conversation with heavy subtleties. But Lady Brewster, Penitence noticed, was wearing a fair copy of the striped gown which she herself had worn last Easter Sunday, though the short sleeves tended to show the woman's muscles somewhat blue in the October nip and the panniers to emphasize her hips.

  At the lych-gate the Brewsters piled into a spanking new open carriage, a replica of the one Rupert had bought in the spring. Bob, their coachman, was raising his eyes at the trouble he'd been put to for a quarter-of-a-mile drive. Penitence helped Mistress Palmer into Rupert's with the other servants and smiled at Lady Brewster: 'It's such a fine day, His Royal Highness and I thought we'd walk home.' It was petty, but wrong-footing the Brewsters was one of life's little triumphs.

  With your permission,' said the Reverend Boreman, grimly, 'I shall go and give that bumpkin parson another lesson in Latin.'

  'Don't you go hoeing his cabbages again,' warned Penitence. 'It put your back out last time.' They watched him hobble off across the churchyard to the decrepit parsonage.

  'He was a good choice, my dear.' She'd been surprised when Rupert had suggested she have a chaplain. Since Rupert had been made Constable of Windsor Castle, his own chaplain was now installed there.

  'Do I need one?' she'd asked.

  'It is usual for one of your position.'

  'I can't get used to being positioned so high.' She hadn't thought her old friend from St Giles would agree, but a heart attack had prompted his retirement away from his old parish and into this less onerous post in the country. It had worked out well. The air was doing him good, and London was near enough for his friends to come and stay at the pleasant little house Rupert had given him on the estate.

  Mistress Palmer, too, had fitted in well, assuming a position in the household as Benedick's old nurse, and having her washing done for her.

  It had been a dry autumn and their shoes puffed up dust as they walked down the village street, Rupert's hat more often off his head than on it as he doffed to curtseying women and the forelock tugs of the men.

  With Royalle trotting beside them, they turned left down Upper Mall where fishing nets made a canopy over their heads along the quay, crossing the creek at High Bridge. Immediately they were in the meadowland that hemmed the Thames.

  Four miles away was Charing Cross, but here cows stood up to their hocks in grass and kingcups, warblers sang in the reeds and willows bent over their own reflection in the river. Compleat Angler country. She'd bought a gold-embossed, calfskin-covered copy of the book for Rupert on his last birthday, hoping it would encourage him to do more fishing rather than risk his neck on the hunting field. He'd been delighted with it.

  She liked to give him unusual birthday presents; this year's was extra special. She was waiting for the right moment to tell him about it.

  The lane turned into enormous wrought-iron gates and became a drive lined with chestnut trees still to reach full maturity. Beyond, in the distance glowed the rose-brick turrets of Awdes with its cupola and winking, oriel windows.

  Awdes.

  When he'd said he would provide her with a house not unworthy of her, she'd had no idea of the value he put on her. Penitence had expected perhaps a smart little town-house, something like the one Charles had given Nell Gwynn. What she'd got was magnificence; sixty rooms, including one for billiards, an armoury, a tennis court, a dairy, a lake, and an ornamental garden laid out by a Dutch landscaper who'd managed to give it a prospect which included the River Thames.

  Awdes was worthy of a queen; Catherine of Braganza had offered for it as her country home and, thwarted, was now building one of her own nearby.

  Unasked, the King had driven down from Whitehall to inspect his uncle's love-nest, bringing with him the usual courtiers, among them Sir Charles Sedley who'd been venomous: 'My, my, we must be good in bed to have earned all this.'

  'On the contrary, my dear Charles,' she'd hissed back, 'to earn all this we had to be positively wicked in bed.' Take that, you bastard. She'd watched the thrust go home. He tried to smile but she could almost hear his teeth grinding. She'd never prove it but she knew he'd sent the men who'd smeared her with ordure that night as surely as she knew he'd sent the bullies who'd beaten Kynaston. It would make him writhe to reflect that in punishing her he had been the instrument of what must seem to be her great good fortune. That she and Rupert might be happy together would be gall and wormwood to him — not necessarily from sexual jealousy but because he hated and feared others' happiness.

  Actually, of course, he'd won; he'd deprived her of something she valued higher than the luxury she now enjoyed — her independence. Though she'd rather be stretched on the rack than let him know it, Sir Charles and his thugs had pushed the price of independence so high that she'd been forced to abandon it. Thanks to him, she was back on the game - what else was being the mistress of a man you didn't love but prostitution? That the man was rich and noble just made it more successful whoring, the height of harlotry. From sleeping with a Newgate gaoler to sleeping with a prince of the realm — what success. In the eyes of the world she'd reached the pinnacle of prostitution, only second to the great Castlemaine and Gwynn. Even now brothel-keepers might be pointing her out as an example to their young, ambitious whores: 'You too can become a Peg Hughes.'

  I tried, my d
ears, she told them, ' tried to earn an honest living. They wouldn't let me. They smeared dog-shit on my teeth.

  'You're very pale, my dear. You're not too tired?' Rupert was looking down at her with concern.

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed him. 'Rupert, you're the only one who doesn't make me feel like a trollop.'

  Those damned Brewsters.' He hated the reminder that the two of them weren't married.

  'It wasn't the Brewsters. And I don't mind, you know I don't.' The wedding ceremony was mostly hypocrisy, anyway; society's seal on a trade agreement. That's what Aphra Behn's been saying all these years in her plays. An heiress sold into a loveless marriage by her parents was no less a hapless whore than one forced into an alliance with a protector through harsh circumstance. For the thousandth time Penitence felt a rush of admiration for Aphra, still fighting out in the world where they rolled women in crap, still refusing to surrender.