The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  After she'd had a slight haemorrhage, Rupert, with desperation overcoming his aversion, sent an invitation to Dorinda to come and stay at Awdes 'so that you may deliver your own child into healthful air and be a companion to my lady, who is in sore need of your comfort', and issued another to Aphra Behn.

  The two women were just what Penitence needed - Dorinda bracing and in the same parturating boat as herself, and Aphra the only person in the world who could appreciate her horror for the plight of the Indians.

  She listened carefully to the outpouring. 'I really think one is going to have to speak out against slavery.'

  Penitence grabbed her hand. 'When?' If one voice — and that her friend's — was raised against the concept that any human being should own the life of another, she could be eased of some guilt at least.

  But Aphra had become a realist. 'When I've got time, and when I know it can sell,' said Aphra firmly. Penitence pressed her no more; perhaps because she had failed in her bid to support herself she had an almost mystical admiration for Aphra who had succeeded.

  They turned to other matters. Aphra, as usual, was a source of all news. 'The tide's turning against those fearful Whigs at last,' she said. 'Nobody believed Oates about the dear Queen planning to poison the King. And executing all those poor Catholics, well, it nearly killed His Majesty to have to sign the death warrants. Even the mob cried when poor, dear Viscount Stafford went to the block. It shouted out "God bless you, my lord, you are a murdered man.'" Her face was as near vicious as its amiability would allow as she added: 'A pity it didn't think of that months ago when it was believing everything Oates said and was howling for Papist blood. Poor, dear Neville Payne is only now out of the Tower.'

  'Mob?' asked Penitence.

  'Oh my dear, we have two new words invented this terrible year. "Mob" and "Sham". And now Shaftesbury and his Whigs are not only trying to exclude the poor, dear Duke of York from the succession, but their more extreme faction is trying to persuade Charles to name Monmouth as his heir, which he will not do, of course. Reading all those horrible pamphlets that are maligning poor James, one is so happy that one dedicated The Rover to him.'

  Penitence realized too late that in Aphra and Dorinda she was storing gunpowder and match under her roof.

  'Malign poor James, eh?' asked Dorinda. 'Ballocking crippler. Do you know what he done to MacGregor's family?'

  'Where is MacGregor?' interposed Penitence quickly. She had been surprised that Dorinda had accepted Rupert's invitation so easily, leaving the Cock and Pie Press in the charge of an apprentice.

  'Away,' said Dorinda curtly, and turned back to Aphra.

  Aphra's stout defence, that Scotland's barbarities were committed by its government and were not the responsibility of poor, dear James, led to a quarrel that Penitence only calmed with difficulty. At last, with Dorinda puffing and Aphra exuding a stubborn sorrow, she turned the conversation to the theatre, though even here they were on dangerous ground since the playhouses had become microcosms of the political divisions outside them, and fights were breaking out between Tories and Whigs in the audiences.

  After dinner they sat in her drawing-room and Aphra read them selections from her plays and poems. Penitence was startled by how good they were. Aphra had mastered her craft; she was funny, a brilliant plotter and she was pulling in the crowds. But the theme that ran through almost all her work was a plea for equality of love between the sexes. Time and again she attacked the property-marriage system, her most usual heroines battling not to be married off against their wishes.

  It was a brave stance. The loose-living aristocrats of Aphra's audiences were rigidly old-fashioned when it came to trading their daughters for enhanced lands and prestige. 'The critics savage one for encouraging daughters into rebellion, but I shall attack slavery where I find it. In New England's forests. Or old England's parlours.'

  'You tell 'em, Affie,' said Dorinda, invigorated.Aphra smiled over at her hostess. There is slavery for women, too, Penitence. One has to earn one's bread, and one can only fight one form of slavery at a time.'

  'I'm beginning to think it's indivisible.'

  The evening ended with love-poems. Outside the windows snow was falling on the knot garden, making it into white embroidery. Inside, Aphra's warble was of an erotic, Arcadian spring:

  'Your body easy and all tempting lay,

  Inspiring wishes which the eyes betray.'

  'Give us "Amyntas led me to a grove", Affie.'

  'His charming eyes no aid required,

  To tell their softening tale;

  On her that was already fired,

  'Twas easy to prevail.

  He did but kiss and clasp me round,

  Whilst those his thoughts expressed:

  And laid me gently on the ground.

  Ah, who can guess the rest?'

  In the silence, Dorinda heaved a deep sigh. 'Gawd,' she said, softly, 'I can.'

  So could Penitence. She became brisk. 'It's time for bed, ladies.' Both women looked as tired as she felt. Dorinda had already confided that she was tormented by a fear that the venereal disease she had contracted in her prostitute days, though it seemed cured, might affect her child.

  Aphra was drawn and thin; the indignation with which she talked of her critics she made amusing, but Penitence knew they hurt her. 'One sends off one's plays with ... "Va, mon enfant! Prends ta fortune", ... only to see the poor things stabbed like Hypatia by male pens. "A woman make a play? Bum it for immodesty!" One could almost be vexed.'

  The Earl of Rochester, her adored patron, was dying a profligate's death, and her poems revealed that her love-life was unhappy. According to Dorinda, who kept up with theatre gossip, her lover John Hoyle was being unfaithful with men as well as other women.

  They were all tired, she thought; three tired women worn down by the attrition of being women. Damn men. Damn them for starting wars, for their politics and plotting and most of all for making women love them.

  After Aphra went back to Town, there was no less tension. Dorinda behaved herself when Rupert was around, but in Penitence's company she sneered at their richness of living. 'How many cooks? Forgotten the time when all we had was poor old Kinyans, ain't you?'

  'Three cooks,' said Penitence, patiently, 'five scullions, and a lad to turn the spits. And I haven't forgotten Kinyans.'

  Or: 'Nice taste in ruby earrings your Queen of ballocking Bohemia. We was in the wrong end of business, Her Ladyship and me.'

  She'd finally touched a nerve. Penitence dragged her out into the herb garden where they couldn't be overheard. 'One more word,' she hissed, 'one more word implying I took up with Rupert for his jewels or his cooks or any other bloody thing, and I'll kill you.'

  'What was it for then? His vibrant young body?'

  Peace, good people. I'm the Protestant whore. 'Leave me alone. Leave me alone.'

  Desperately, she waddled off to the stone bench where she had sat with Henry King. After a moment, Dorinda waddled after her, sat down and took her hand. 'You looked like your ma, just then.'

  'I got tired' Penitence told her quietly. 'After that night, after they covered me in the dog mess, I couldn't fight any more. I took the easy way out.'

  'Yeah, I know. I didn't mean it.'

  'Yes, you did. And you're right. It was still whoring. But I do love him. Not like he wants me to, but I'm good for him.'

  'I know. Don't take no notice of me.'

  The turf steps had taken well. Dunstan had scythed them. Achingly, her robin hopped around their feet while blackbirds flew in and out of their nests in the yew hedge in the endless business of feeding their young.

  Penitence rallied. 'And because you and MacGregor have turned republican, it doesn't mean that all this' — she waved her hand round the lovely garden — 'is wrong. Rupert's a very good man.'

  'I know he is, Prinks. And I ain't republican neither. I don't understand what MacGregor's going on about half the time. But he's a good man and all, and he thinks if that ba
llocking James gets to the throne, it's England as'll be rolled in the dog turd. And I believe him.' She took in a breath of herb-scented air. 'Oops, I'm going to have to pee again.'

  They helped each other up, and went back to the house, discussing the more pressing business of what late pregnancy did to the bladder.

  Dorinda's was a terrible labour; after over forty-eight hours of it a panicking Penitence, two weeks away from her own, sent Boiler and a coach to St Giles-in-the-Fields to fetch Apothecary Boghurst, the only medical expert she trusted. Because he charged less than doctors, he'd attended many a difficult birth in the Rookery.

  Outside the door of Dorinda's bedroom, she warned him not to mention hers or Dorinda's connection with the Cock and Pie. The little man hadn't changed one iota. 'I am no doctor, madam, but I comply to the teaching of Hippocrates.'

  'Was he any good with babies?'

  Dorinda's bed was surrounded by women. Besides Mistress Palmer there was Mistress Dobbs, the Hammersmith midwife, Annie the dairymaid, whose child had died and who was present in her capacity as the coming baby's wet-nurse, and three maids.

  The room smelled of the butter with which the midwife had been trying to grease the baby's passage out into the world, and tangy earth.

  Apothecary Boghurst sniffed. 'Hollyhock roots?'

  'Yes, Doctor,' said Mistress Dobbs, 'I been pounding 'em small.'

  'Have you stuffed any up her yet?'

  'I was just about to, Doctor.'

  'Out.'

  Mistress Palmer and Penitence were allowed to stay. The midwife's complaints to her companions diminished down the hall.

  Dorinda's hair was wet with sweat and she bit convulsively at the leather pulling-strap. From under the mattress knife- handles stuck out, making it look like a giant slab of meat prepared for cooking. Apothecary Boghurst drew out the knives and threw them into a comer.

  'Put 'em there to cut the pain, 'pothecary,' protested Mistress Palmer.

  'They haven't.'

  Ashamed, Penitence put out her bruised hand once again for Dorinda's dreadful grip. Witnessing the suffering without being able to alleviate it had so demoralized her that she'd followed the midwife's lead like a sheep. Even so, she demurred when, after the examination, Boghurst put the coal tongs into the fire and then plunged them into the bowl of briony water warming near it.

  'You're not going to put those in her?'

  The apothecary took her to one side. 'It's the mother or the child,' he said. 'I doubt if we can save both. If I don't act now, we'll save neither. Tie her hands to the bedhead, and both take a leg each.'

  Gripping Dorinda's foreleg to her chest, Penitence prayed, hopelessly, for God's mercy on her. The shrieks echoed screams from the Plague and New England. Why isn't there more kindness in the world when delivery into it is torment like this?

  The cord was cut and the bloodied scrap that was the baby was taken away by Mistress Palmer while the apothecary delivered the afterbirth. The silence of the room settled like wool on their ringing ears. With her forehead still resting on Dorinda's white knee, Penitence began to doze.

  There was a tiny choke and a mewl of tentative complaint.

  Mistress Palmer whispered a Magnificat: 'The little bugger's alive.'

  Another whisper came from the bed. 'Is it all right?' Apothecary Boghurst got up to look and nodded. Incapable of surprise, Penitence watched tears roll down his cheeks as they were rolling down hers. 'You have a brave daughter, mistress,' he told Dorinda.

  When Penitence went down to send up the wet-nurse, she was crying for the baby's bravery, Dorinda's, the apothecary's, Mistress Palmer's, her own, the courage of creation in the face of insuperable odds. 'There is a God,' she sobbed to an alarmed Rupert. 'He's upstairs.'

  He took her to the Awdes chapel to give thanks, and she gave it to the God who had appeared in Dorinda's bedroom, something neither male nor female but a raw, squirming, indomitable amoeba of both.

  She couldn't stop sobbing. Dorinda's travail hadn't been only in her labour but in every minute of her progress from childhood to womanhood in a world organized for her obliteration. 'Make it easier for her baby,' Penitence prayed. 'Make it easier for mine.'

  Dorinda named her baby Penitence, though the child was always known to her intimates as Tongs.

  Penitence's daughter, born sixteen days later, was called Ruperta.

  Chapter 5

  Against the fashion of the class to which she now belonged, Penitence not only insisted on breast-feeding her daughter but spent every available minute with her. Their first separation came when Prince Rupert decided to take Penitence on a visit to a destination he refused to name.

  Penitence didn't want to go. 'It's no good saying she must stand on her own feet, Rupert; she's still only toddling.' She was surprised at him wanting to leave the child; his adoration of Ruperta was almost painful. Even the King of England had been summoned to worship at the cradle-side, and had obediently pronounced the baby 'wondrous appealing, a thief of future men's hearts'.

  'She has already stolen mine,' Rupert told him. 'I think my Lord Burford would not prove an unsuitable match for her.' The Earl of Burford was Charles's elder son by Nell Gwynn.

  But it was an unsatisfactory visit; the King refused to commit himself on the proposed marriage, and was even more elusive on Rupert's other request — that Dudley and Benedick be given titles.

  Rupert was beside himself with rage. 'He ennobles the bastards of every adulterous punk in his bed, while I, who fought for him and his father before him, see my fine lads remain commoners.'

  'You seem prepared to marry Ruperta off to one of those same bastards,' said Penitence, coldly.

  'Gwynn is an honest trull,' he told her — he'd always liked Nelly, 'and young Burford an honest boy. None of Monmouth's pretensions to the throne there. And yes, yes, my dear, Ruperta shall not be wed against her wishes. I merely wanted to establish the principle of her worth, but Charles wouldn't know a principle if it bade him good-day.'

  Penitence nodded. 'I heard you tell him.'

  Well, what would you have? Mop and bow and hold my tongue like a damned courtier? Here I support, from my own pension, honest tarpaulins he should have paid years ago, while he lavishes a hundred thousand pounds on that new French harlot. Where does he get the money, eh? Eh? Torrington had the right of it. The King of England's in the pay of France.' He was stamping around the drawing-room, holding his head.

  Penitence became frightened. 'My dear, you'll make yourself ill. Come and sit down.'

  It was because his health was becoming as unstable as his temper that she agreed to go with him on the mysterious journey, though it was agony to leave Ruperta. She hadn't been in any condition, let alone had the time, to enjoy Benedick's childhood; she didn't want to miss a minute of this one. And Ruperta was an especially rewarding child: healthy, chuckling and with the promise of an extraordinary beauty discernible in her chubby face - Stuart beauty; the cleft of the chin was there, and the large eyes, though in her case they were blue. As the King had said when he looked at her: 'You'll not dispute this one's paternity, cousin.'

  Ruperta was another in the long list of debts she owed Rupert. Paying again, Penitence thought, miserably, as she waved goodbye from the coach. Dorinda, who was to stay at Awdes during Penitence's absence, stood on the steps to watch them go, Ruperta holding one of her hands and Tongs the other, both of then waving.

  'Has that woman no home of her own?' asked Rupert as he frequently did, sometimes as a joke, at other times with something like resentment that he so frequently returned to Awdes from Windsor Castle to find Dorinda in residence. Whenever MacGregor was away — and he was away a lot — Penitence invited her to come and stay.

  'She's my friend,' said Penitence, firmly, as she always did, 'and Tongs needs all the good country air she can get.'

  'A poor little thing.' He was in good humour today. He enjoyed patronizing Tongs, his goddaughter, mainly because she was a scrawny, colicky baby who, with her
frequent illnesses, highlighted his own child's looks and splendid health.

  To Penitence as much as to Dorinda she was a miracle, and she loved her.

  'Where are we going, Rupert?'

  'West.' It was his little secret. Wherever it was, a contingent of servants had been sent ahead a week before.

  'The Americas?' She had a fantastic moment of hope that he had found Awashonks and Matoonas and the rest and that she would see them again.

  'Not so far, madam. Ask no questions and you'll be told no lies.'