The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  Here, in Athelzoy, she was in a pocket of Toryism which, like the country as a whole, was delighted with James's speech. Sir Ostyn had joined a rush of magistrates, burgesses and merchants to promise King James their loyalty and assure him they would never put up as a member to the House of Commons anyone who had voted for his exclusion.

  But elsewhere Somerset's non-agricultural working population consisted for the most part of Dissenters - Baptists, Presbyterians, Puritans, Fifth Monarchists, etc. — to whom James's Papistry was anathema. Families like her grandmother's, the Hugheses, the labourers and artisans of this area, had fought hard for Parliament during the Civil War and, despite Charles's promises of magnanimity on his restoration, had suffered for it ever since. James could proffer them rights of worship until he was black in the face; as far as they were concerned he was a Catholic and therefore Beelzebub. They could cause trouble.

  Vicar Lambert finished reading the King's speech in triumph at its happy message and that he'd got most of the words right. 'There, good people,' he said, 'we have now for our Church the word of a king and of a king who was never worse than his word.

  Penitence raised her eyebrows; Vicar Lambert wasn't usually so felicitous in his phrases. He must have heard it from somebody else.

  'That's a good un,' she heard Sir Ostyn say. 'Good watchword, that 'un.' Sir Ostyn was going to do as well out of King James's reign as he had out of King Charles's.

  And Sir Ostyn wanted to marry her.

  Partly it was because he lusted after her, but then, Sir Ostyn lusted after anything with a hole in it, but mostly because he wanted the Priory and her fortune. He made no bones about it and took no notice of her refusals. The only good thing about him was that he was no Charles Sedley, thank God; she could keep him at arm's length and he, in turn, kept off other suitors.

  At the end of the service he tried to get out of the pew door ahead of her, but she swivelled past his bulk so that she could go down the aisle without him. Her hands gently nudged Ruperta and Tongs ahead of her, conscious that every woman in the congregation was taking note of what the three of them were wearing, and knowing it looked superb.

  Out in the churchyard she and the others stood under the stiff branches of its enormous and ancient yew tree while the congregation filed past her. At a lift of Penitence's finger Mary Claymond stepped to one side and waited until Her Ladyship should be ready to talk to her.

  Dorinda mimicked her, holding up a hand in papal blessing and bestowing a 'Nunc, nunc' on each one who passed. Aphra had gone into the throes of composition and was staring at the sky, swaying and muttering.

  After the villagers had made their curtseys or forelock-tugs they gathered by the lych-gate until Penitence left, watching

  Dorinda and Aphra with expectancy. At first they had been so floundered at the visits of Penitence's theatrical friends that they had reacted by deciding they weren't there at all. The clothes, accents, mannerisms had been too strange. When Aphra tried to stimulate a love of literature by quoting poetry at them they were forced to the conclusion that she was mad - an opinion they hadn't changed.

  Dorinda they'd put down as Penitence's personal and female jester.

  Penitence turned to the waiting girl: 'Mary, I wish you to tell your parents that Mudge Ridge will be calling on them at dusk tomorrow with my blessing.'

  Mary gave a bob. 'What bist ee coam vur, Leddyship?'

  'He's to ask for your hand, as you well know, Mary Claymond.' She gave the girl a smile. 'I'm told it's a cool hand at pastry.' In the Somerset villages that was the highest praise a girl could expect.

  Mary bridled. 'Ah don't know if ah'm willing. Maister Ridge be chapel, not church.'

  Penitence was instantly cross. 'It doesn't matter. Haven't you just heard the vicar telling you your king is for tolerance? Do you consider yourself better than your king? I'll have no such nonsense. Mudge is an excellent fellow and you'll be lucky to get him.'

  Leaving the churchyard Penitence paused for a second beside a tiny new headstone which simply read: Royalle, ad 1671-1684. She'd had to fight the diocese to get the dog buried in the churchyard, but she'd won. Rupert would have been pleased.

  As they walked Aphra said: 'One never learned Zummerzet, but do I gather that child just now isn't willing to marry Mudge?'

  'Of course she is,' snapped Penitence. 'She's just playing bashful. It will be a splendid match for her. And Mudge could do with a good dairymaid for a wife.'

  'No impediment for true minds there, then,' said Aphra, idly.

  Penitence looked at her suspiciously. Was I overbearing with

  Mary Claymond? No. It would be a good marriage for them both.

  A May breeze touched the candles of the chestnut beside the duckpond, and sent a shower of tiny white and pink petals on to the water. Ruperta and Tongs, who had sustained adult dignity through the long church service, were being urged by Sir Ostyn to climb the tree after a squirrel's drey he said he'd spotted — and didn't need asking twice.

  'Really, Ostyn,' said Penitence, lifting Tongs down from his back and brushing down the child's bottle-green velvet jacket, 'they'll get their clothes dirty.'

  'Nothin' wrong with a peck of dirt. They don't want to grow up namby-pamby Lunnon ladies. They want to be strong, Zummerset maids. Eh, my boodies? Want to come hunting along of I?'

  'Yes, please, sir,' answered Ruperta immediately, and Tongs echoed her a second or two later. Penitence looked at them with pride. Springs and summers spent in Somerset had put roses in their cheeks, and flesh on Tongs's delicate bones. Nothing namby-pamby about either. Ruperta took after her father in having no physical fear at all but Tongs was the one with courage; she had to overcome terror, and did, every time she mounted a horse.

  They reached the Hoy Arms where Hurry was waiting with the tankard of ale Penitence had ordered him to have ready for Sir Ostyn before they resumed the walk back to the Priory and dinner.

  Dorinda looked over towards the market square. 'That poor bugger called you a doxy again?'

  Civilization had come to Athelzoy in the form of a proper pillory with its articulated yoke that fitted over neck and wrists, instead of the whipping post and rings which had adorned the village in the old days.

  Today, as more often than not, the offender stuck in it was Martin Hughes. She noticed with satisfaction that the man's thin lips were compressed tight in the martyrdom of real pain. The height of the pillory was designed to put maximum strain on the spine.

  'He has been sentenced for condemning the King's coronation,' she pointed out. It was partly true but Sir Ostyn's attention wouldn't have been attracted to the offence if Penitence hadn't complained of it.

  Great-uncle or not, Penitence's patience with the man had run out. The fact that she was cornering the market in teasels had turned his insistence on holding her up as an example of Satan profiting from sin into persecution. Every Sunday he came to Athelzoy to preach against her.

  His thin black figure haunted her, just as she had been haunted and persecuted by the Reverend Block back in Massachusetts. Three months ago, when he was preaching in Taunton's Parade, he'd glimpsed her and pointed her out to the crowd as 'that harlot actress, mistress of the dead dragon prince'.

  But this time the malevolent forces of Puritanism had mistaken their prey. I'm not poor and frightened any more. This time her friends weren't Indians but powerful admirers, like Sir Ostyn Edwards, JP. This time the hare had turned round and bitten the dogs, and it was the shade of the Reverend Block whose head and hands pawed through the pillory yoke as well as Martin Hughes's.

  Watching the scene from the doorway of the Hoy Arms while Sir Ostyn downed his tankard, she muttered to Aphra and Dorinda: 'That'll teach him to accuse me of wallowing in the fruits of sin.'

  'Let's face it, though,' said Dorinda, 'the bastard's right. You are.'

  It was meant as a you-and-I-remember-when, a reminder of war from one survivor to another, but it rumbled at the foundations of a structure Penitence h
ad worked hard to build. Without Dorinda and without Martin Hughes Penitence could — and would — have forgotten that she'd ever been anything but a woman of good standing.

  She turned away sharply to continue the walk.

  She always suggested this walk to her visitors on Sundays; it took her to the village, her village, past her bean- and wheatfields to the view over the sedgemoors where her black,

  Devon cattle grazed the marsh meadows and where, in the distance, hung the flat, mauve cloud that was her teasel crop.

  Expecting to be shunned and not greatly caring as long as she could quietly sacrifice the rest of her life to serving Rupert's memory, she had been surprised how her neighbours' attitude changed towards her once they found that, thanks to her Hurd grandfather, she made a competent farmer and, thanks to Mudge Ridge, was earning a fortune from her teasels. English country gentry, she discovered, hated Frenchmen, Italians, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Papists, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Quakers and Jews, but they were tolerant to a fault of their own kind.

  They farted, belched, played hideous practical jokes and had much in common with the beasts in their own meadows but they were too interdependent to be scandalized by each other's naughtinesses, even if that other was a woman. Viciousness was not in them. Courtiers like Charles Sedley expended wit on the buffoonery of such rustics but they could have taught him a thing or two about group loyalty.

  Not for them the luxury of who's in, who's out, not when they sought each other's permission to hunt over each other's land, not when the Levels flooded and left their manors isolated islands needing neighbourly rescue, not when their best plough broke, or a wheel came off their carriage, or the birth of their baby was proving difficult. Then they needed the help of whoever was nearest, and if whoever nearest had an undesirable past it took a back-seat to the usefulness of her present.

  Graceless and bucolic, Somerset gentry yet had an oysterlike ability to smooth over irritants until they were acceptable. Finding that Penitence was not to be dislodged from the Priory by rudeness, cold-shouldering, advice, or offers of marriage, her neighbours mentally labelled her an oddity, as Lady Alice Lisle was an oddity, and absorbed her. Their labourers helped with Penitence's harvests as hers helped with theirs. When a Pascoe child died the Reverend Boreman was just in time to save its soul by baptism. Some of Rupert's cinchona preserved the life of another Pascoe baby. Sir William

  Portman's contacts were enabling Penitence to sell to the northern clothiers.

  It wasn't to be expected that they'd treat her with kid gloves; their heavy winks were incessant, they made rutting motions with their brawny forearms, but in the company of anyone they considered above or below their class, or with anyone who came from further away than Glastonbury, they included Penitence in their ranks — and closed them.

  As for the lower classes themselves, they were brutal realists. Leddyship was vurrin and touched to boot, but she paid good wages and she paid them regular. QED she had their loyalty.

  So Penitence became Lady of Athelzoy.

  She would have liked not to be a vurriner, to reveal that she was a Hoy, of the same stock that had ruled the village for centuries. But to do so would inevitably revive the scandalous love story of her parents, put her midway across the class divide and link her with pestiferous, trouble-making, Dissenting Hughes.

  And that she could not allow. For the first time in her life Penitence was rich, respectable and in control. It was a giddy- ing sensation. People watched her in case she was displeased. Vicar Lambert consulted her about his sermons. Tradesmen solicited her custom.

  Even at the height of her fame on the stage, she had been vulnerable to the assaults and insults of the tiring-room. Now she could punish her detractors by asking her good neighbour, Sir Ostyn Edwards, JP, to put them in the pillory. She wasn't going to compromise all that by claiming blood kin with those very detractors.

  As the fact that she had been a notorious mistress faded from other people's memories, so it faded from her own. At first she had desired respect because 'Rupert would have wanted it for me'. Then she desired it for its own sake, then she demanded it. The amused voice which, in her first year at Athelzoy, said 'Act the fine lady', had faded to be replaced by a sharp 'You are a fine lady.'

  Dorinda kept spoiling it.

  They crossed the bridge over the Minnow which rushed down to join the more sober Cary which in turn joined the River Parrett as it made its sprawling way towards Bridgwater and the Bristol Channel. Here the land fell away in the varying greens that Penitence loved, the prickled olive of her osier beds, a breeze turning willow leaves silver-green side up, the dark of rushes.

  The sedgemoors called to her in a way she could not account for unless they had provided the bed for her conception — which they probably had. Unattractive in winter, treacherous with quagmire, they nevertheless had drama. Perhaps it was the sky dominating the flatness, or the way the setting sun turned the pools and meres into amber, or the fact that you were dangerously close to sea-level, a speck on a vast green solitude that rolled unhindered and empty to the Bristol Channel.

  Hardly a day passed but she'd taken the opportunity to walk them or ride them on her pony, taking Barnzo, the farrier's son, with her as a guide until now she could look out at them and discern the hidden causeway that led from the track at the bottom of the rise to the Taunton road, and know where she could pick sphagnum moss and which turbary produced the best peat bricks for the Priory fires. It was said of her that she could 'ride the marshes' - the local phrase for knowing them well.

  'The Levels,' she said, breathing them in.

  'Lovely,' said Dorinda. 'Can we go home now? I'm breaded.'

  'You'll never make a Zummerzet maid,' Sir Ostyn teased her.

  'Thank Gawd for that.'

  From the first Dorinda had taken against Athelzoy, and not only Athelzoy but the whole of Somerset. It was too far from London, it had too many smells, was too quiet, too lush, too dark at night, too hot in summer, too full of insects that flew, crawled and buzzed their way up from the marshes. She couldn't understand a word the ballocking cider-suppers said. Teasels did not excite her.

  What kept her returning to it was the benefit and obvious enjoyment her daughter derived from sharing Ruperta's life. Tongs pined when she was anywhere else.

  When Becky Marshall, on a visit, had suggested Dorinda should leave Tongs at the Priory and return with her to join the company at the Duke of York's as a dresser-cum-character- actress, Penitence had seen the gleam of footlights reflected in her friend's eyes, and encouraged her to go. At the same time she resented it on Tongs's behalf and said so to Becky: 'How can she plan to abandon that dear child?'

  And Becky had said: 'I think if I may say so that she's displaying great love in leaving her behind. You're mistress of the household. It's you, not Dorinda, Tongs turns to for instruction. That dear child is more yours than hers.'

  So Dorinda went, mercifully unrecognized by a new generation of theatregoers, to take Sisygambus parts first in one play then another, until she was staying longer in London each year than in Somerset.

  They turned right along the deep, narrow, fern-fringed lane that connected the bottom of the village with the bottom of the Priory drive and came out between oaks on to a green which commanded the Levels on the left and the great wrought-iron gates to the right.

  'Bamzo, Mother.' Ruperta was pointing at a distant horse and cart crawling over the causeway that led from Taunton to this end of Sedgemoor, bringing Athelzoy's Nonconformists from their meeting-house service.

  'I asked Barnzo to call in at Tidy's and see if there was a letter from my son,' explained Penitence to Sir Ostyn. Tidy kept the post office. 'Otherwise the carrier wouldn't bring it until tomorrow.'

  What malevolent spirit named the man Barnzo?' asked Aphra.

  'His head's on crooked,' said Penitence, absently; quite suddenly she was struck by a fear of the horse and cart. Rationally the protuberances from its sides were f
leeces being brought for Athelzoy women to spin into yarn, but they made the shape of the cart into a winged hornet swelling bigger as it crawled towards her.

  There's one in every village,' Sir Ostyn was explaining to Aphra, tapping his temple. 'His yeead's on crooked. He were barnzo. Barnzo.'

  'Born so,' said Penitence at Aphra's incomprehension. 'Children, escort our guests to the house and tell Johannes we're ready for dinner. I'll just wait and see if there's a letter.'

  The girls put their hands into Sir Ostyn's and Aphra's, curtseyed and pulled them towards the house. Penitence, watching them go, saw Sir Ostyn's free hand goose Aphra's backside — and his jump as Aphra goosed him back.

  Dorinda stayed with her. Awkwardly, without talking, the two women watched the cart, holding their fluttering hats to their heads against the strengthening breeze that mixed the smells of grass and marsh with the elusive tang of sea.

  Let there be a letter. Benedick was a hopeless correspondent. Until a few weeks ago she'd received news of him every month from the faithful Dudley, but now Dudley had joined the Christian army's crusade against the Turk and his letters came in batches after long intervals. She worried about him, and about Benedick left behind in the Netherlands without his foster-brother's common sense to steady him. She hadn't heard from either for six weeks.