The Vizard Mask

by Diana Norman

  'Mistress Behn will wish to see me.'

  'She's ill and she doesn't. I'm not having her pestered for a conversion, and certainly not by someone who called her vile.'

  He wasn't disconcerted. 'Whom do I have the honour of addressing? Is it Mistress Peg Hughes? I know these things, d'ye see. And I was a great admirer of Prince Rupert, nor have I heard anything to tarnish the name of his mistress. Apart, of course, that ye lived in sin.' He beamed at her.

  Penitence's eyes opened wide. A bubble of amusement, the first in weeks, had to be suppressed.

  He was assuring her of his good intentions. 'No, no, Mrs Hughes. I've come on another mission — for the King, not the Lord this time. I have been his right-hand man in exile, I have marched with him from his landing, I have advised, cajoled, argued with and for him, and now I wish him celebrated.'

  'Oh, come in.' It was like allowing a pack of panting, piddling, happy puppies into the house. 'But you go when I say you go.'

  He lowered his voice in what Penitence suspected he believed to be a whisper. 'Is it the pox the poor soul has?'

  'No it isn't. How dare you?'

  He was pleased. 'I never believed the story.'

  He was a primitive, Penitence decided, whose thoughts slid immediately to his tongue but he radiated a naive goodwill that would have been endearing if there hadn't been so much of it.

  She had to leap at his arm to stop him giving Aphra's hand a vigorous shake. 'Is it the gout, Mistress Behn? I'm heartily sorry. My granny died of it. But I'm unconscionable glad to meet ye. There's some of your pieces, though not all, have given me pleasure. I'm a bonny writer myself and I know one when I see one.'

  It was one of Aphra's good days and she was amused. 'In what can I serve you, Dr Burnet?'

  'Serve your King, mistress, serve your King. I'm here to give ye a commission, which I'm pleased to do since I see from the state of your hoose that you've fallen on hard times.' He shot his cuffs in admiration of himself. 'I've criticized ye, I know, though for your own good, but I need ye to write a coronation ode for our new King Billy, a panegyric surpassing the one ye penned for the unworthy James.'

  Penitence was triumphant. Whatever could be said against this man, he wasn't unintelligent; he'd hobnobbed with crowned heads all over Europe, he'd written histories, his prose style was that of a considerable journalist - and he'd come to a woman, a despised woman, to set the seal on William's victory. Oh, Aphra, the whirligig of time certainly brings in its revenges.

  'D'ye see, ma'am, I'll be frank.' Do you mean you haven't been? 'Our new king has every virtue but that of pleasing the masses. He has a cold way. I've had to speak tae the man and he took it ill, but you're a crowd-pleaser, Mistress Aphra, they'll listen to ye. Will ye laud great Caesar as he should be lauded? Ye'll be well rewarded.'

  Aphra was charming but immediately Penitence knew she wouldn't do it. Her eyes showed anguish but she wasn't going to do it: 'Dear Dr Bumet, one recognizes the Princess Mary and her right to succeed, but not her husband's. The breeze that wafts o'er the cheering crowds leaves me unpitied, on the forsaken, barren shore to sigh with echo and the murmuring wind.'

  Burnet worked on it. 'Ye'll not do it?'

  'No.'

  He was a tenacious man and by the time they got rid of him, Aphra was gasping for air, as if Burnet had used up the room's supply. Tears dripped down her cheeks. 'The first commission one has ever refused.'

  'I can call him back. Affie, are you sure? He'll be a good thing, William, I think. There's been no killing, no war, it must be the most peaceful revolution the world's ever seen.'

  Aphra's shoulders heaved with the effort to speak. 'He's a usurper. One doesn't pass kings back and forth like lumps of sugar. Good or bad, James is one's king.'

  You stupid female. Penitence's anger surprised herself. The divine right of kings is over and the right of people is beginning. She had to turn away. Why couldn't the woman apply some of her romanticism to a concept greater than drawing a sword to fight for a man because he had a crown on his head?

  Behind her, puffs of breath managed to shape themselves into a sentence. 'One is not a whore, Penitence.'

  And I am. That was why she was so angry. Of all them who had battled to enter some other profession than prostitution, only Aphra hadn't failed. The theatre had beckoned her generation of women and they'd run through the doors, clutching such talent as they had in the hope of using it for the first time in a way that didn't involve dependence on a man's bed. It had been too difficult; Nelly, Dorinda, Knipp, the Marshalls, herself, all of them, had been forced back into the market as mistresses or, what was little different in terms of sale, wives.

  Only Aphra had never sold her flesh. She'd chosen her men badly, but she'd chosen them out of love pure and simple. And now the same independence that had performed the miracle of earning her own living had rejected the accolade which belonged not just to her but to her weaker sisters who'd reached for it.

  The Whigs aren't going to forgive you, Aphra. They'd stamp on her memory until it disappeared into the mud they'd spent years preparing for it. And neither will I.

  Unforgiving, Penitence went on nursing her friend through agonies so resembling a drawn-out drowning that even Chloe prayed for her beloved to die, and on the last day went to Westminster Abbey.

  'Wait there,' she told the hackney coach driver.

  She'd never liked the Abbey much. Its enormous, marble- plaqued, gold-encrusted walls held less sanctity in her view than the parish church of Athelzoy. In the first place you had to pay threepence a head to get in, except for services. And inside lurked the official tomb guides, waiting to be tipped for intoning the Abbey's history. It was too close to Whitehall Palace, too far from God. If it had been left to her, Rupert would have been interred at Hammersmith. As it was, they hadn't let her into Henry VII's chapel to see him buried.

  At the huge house in Dean's Yard, she made short shrift of the servants who tried to tell her Dean Sprat was resting from his efforts expended during the coronation of William and Mary four days before. 'He will see me.' It was a command.

  'My dear Mrs Hughes, how nice to meet you again. In what may I serve?' The attractive young man who'd procured Aphra's and her release from Newgate when he was chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham had expanded into overweight middle age. He'd shown agile footwork to keep his position at all under the new reign: he'd collaborated too much with the old one.

  Like his abbey, Thomas Sprat had been too close to the centre of power for his soul's good. The eyes that had once been amused were careful. Assessor's eyes.

  'I should like you to come with me. Aphra Behn is dying.' Penitence watched the name resurrect the mad, bad days when it had been less important to serve God than create a good aphorism, when he'd helped Buckingham write and perform The Rehearsal, when he'd wiled away the nights on Aphra's milk punch and discussion of rhyme versus blank verse. 'She's asking for you.'

  In the place of the stately dean was a young man, vastly daring: 'Then I'll come.' He regretted it, because Penitence made the hackney's driver go like Jehu. 'Mrs Hughes, is this pace necessary?'

  'Yes.'

  She and Chloe sat on the stairs while he administered the sacraments; they could hear the whistle of Aphra's breath as she dragged it in to speak, but her voice, like his, was a murmur. 'He's got to allow it,' said Chloe. 'He must.'

  There were tears in Dean Sprat's eyes when he emerged, but also anxiety. 'She wants to be buried in Poets' Comer,' he said.

  'I know,' said Penitence. 'What did you tell her?'

  'I told her "Yes". At that moment what else could I do? Death was looking at me. But. ..'

  'That's all right then,' said Penitence, firmly.

  'Mrs Hughes, it is not all right. I must excuse myself from a commitment when it was merely a word to ease a dying woman.'

  'Why?'

  'It was not a promise. How could it be? The decision as to who should or should not be buried in the Abbey is not mine alone. Th
e Chapter, let me tell you, will not allow it.'

  Why?'

  'Mrs Hughes, the days of King Charles are over; the Protestant wind is blowing with an almost Puritan vigour and will find our friend a less ... shall we say, less worthy figure than those of us who understand these things.'

  'Well, I don't understand these things,' said Penitence. 'She's going to be buried in the Abbey with the other poets. That's what she wanted. That's what you promised. That's what she's getting.'

  The Dean had recovered his poise; before her eyes he was ageing back into the pompous cleric. 'Do not make me regret I came, Mrs Hughes. I did it from sentiment for times past. For one thing, Poets' Corner is not a place for women and never will be, despite Mrs Behn's magnificent effrontery. To put her alongside Shakespeare's memorial? Spenser? She goes too far.' He was justifying himself by whipping up indignation, but Penitence's was the product of a lifetime. He backed away from her, fumbling for the door-latch.

  'P-ppoets Corner, Sprat. She's going to Pp-pp-oets' Corner.'

  Chapter 3

  Aphra struggled above the rising tide in her own lungs until the early hours of the next morning when her heart stopped.

  The sudden quiet of the room magnified the dreadful breathing that had gone before it so that, as they laid her out, the first tweet of a bird waking outside seemed to break through wool.

  Penitence pulled Chloe away from the body and sat with her in the window-seat watching the dawn come up over the rooftops behind Aphra's small, overgrown back yard.

  'We were lovers,' said Chloe.

  'I know.' Phoebe and Sabina. Aphra and Chloe. Her friend might have lost the love of men but in her great need she had found the love of woman.

  By mid-morning they had assumed the briskness that goes with the strange comfort of death's arrangements.

  'She's left me the house.'

  'Good,' said Penitence.

  'And George Jenkins is to see to publishing The Widow Ranter and Betterton's to put it on.'

  'Good.'

  'And she asked me to give you this when she'd gone. She said she hoped it would do.'

  'This' was a manuscript written while she could still hold a pen, though its last pages were scarcely legible. It was in novel form, she'd called it Oroonoko, and it was about a slave.

  Penitence had to read it twice before she realized it was a masterpiece. The first time she was disappointed; it was coolly written and at the same time fantastically romantic. Aphra had made her slave not one of the poor thousands shipped from Africa to Jamaica, but an educated prince of his African country, Coromantien, in love with a black general's daughter, and betrayed by an English sea-captain to be sold in the slave- market of Surinam.

  Once Aphra got her hero to Surinam the descriptions of place and people became sharp. The white men who ran the country, she wrote, were worse than transported criminals. It was the native Indians who lived in the first state of innocence. 'Religion here would but destroy the tranquillity they possess by ignorance; and laws would but teach them to know offences of which they have no notion.'

  There was the feel of authenticity in the details she gave of the slave trade's organization in Surinam: the quayside sales, the overseers of plantations, the auctions and the shame of it.

  Oroonoko harangued his fellow-slaves. 'An ass, or dog, or horse, having done his duty, could lie down in retreat, and rise to work again, and while he did his duty, endure no stripes', Aphra made him say:

  But men, villainous, senseless men, such as they, toiled on all the tedious week 'till black Friday; and then

  whether they worked or not, whether they were faulty or meriting, they, promiscuously, the innocent with the guilty, suffered the infamous whip.

  Of course, Oroonoko's love, Imoinda, arrived in Surinam a slave and the couple were reunited, revolted against their masters, suffered terrible fates. Then she died and then he died, thought Penitence. It was stirring, crowd-pleasing stuff.

  It wasn't the tract Penitence had hoped for. It was more: a good story, a blast against the moral savagery of slavery and it was Aphra's testimony against the concept of human beings as property. Oroonoko's subject was a black man, but he was an extension of everything Aphra had ever written about the human soul, male and female: it was about freedom. The first blast of the trumpet.

  It will do, Affie. It will do very well.

  Attached to the final page of the manuscript was a verse from a poem Aphra had written to the laurel tree:

  And after monarchs, poets claim a share As the next worthy thy prized wreaths to wear. Among that number do not me disdain, Me, the most humble of that glorious train.

  As a sop, Dean Sprat had a grave dug for Aphra in his Abbey's east cloister. Chloe was prepared to opt for that. 'She's the first female commoner to get into the Abbey on her own merit, Penitence.'

  'It's not good enough.' Penitence was angry. Angry at Aphra, for Aphra, with Aphra; she could feel anger lapping against her sanity, fed by the thousand insults thrown at her friend, at all her friends, at herself, all the women who'd made a break for freedom and been brought down by the dogs of male hatred and rolled in their dirt. 'She's to go in Poets' Corner.' It all depended on that. If she could see Aphra resting where she belonged this slopping, rising fury inside her might subside enough not to burst the mental restraint only just holding it back. 'She wrote Oroonoko.'

  Then, on the day of the funeral as mourners gathered in Aphra's room, an Abbey messenger knocked at the front door and handed Chloe a letter. It said that Aphra couldn't be buried in the Abbey at all.

  In the absence of the Dean, and in the presence of his deputy, we, the Prebendaries of the Chapter, are in agreement that the interment of Mistress Behn in the Abbey is not suitable. Therefore we have sent to her parish church of St Bride's and received back word from its priest that her obsequies may take place there this afternoon.

  Penitence tore up the letter, dragged the weeping Chloe off the open coffin, told Betterton to screw down the lid, and when he'd done, plonked Aphra's pen and inkwell on it. 'All right,' she said, 'who's carrying the damn thing to the Abbey?'

  Benedick, Betterton, Neville Payne and young Thomas Creech, a promising poet whom Aphra had befriended, heaved the coffin down the steps to the crepe-clad cart drawn by black-plumed, black-caparisoned horses. Chloe, who had chosen to wear the most peculiar of Aphra's peculiar caps, took her place behind it as chief mourner. The driver assumed a mournful expression, the drummer began beating his muffled skins and they set off.

  It was a windy day with occasional scurries of rain. Orange flags and decorations still hanging from some of the balconies flapped sideways and paper rosettes rolled along the streets, making the horses shy, jerking the coffin so that the pen and inkwell fell off and Penitence had to carry them.

  While the blowing detritus lodged itself in conduits, the funeral procession picked up the eccentric pieces of humanity that had loved Aphra Behn.

  Jacob Tonson, her publisher, emerged from his bookshop, suitably clad in black — he always was. As they passed along the Strand they were joined by a gaggle of actresses who'd been rehearsing at Duke's. Holding on to their hats, skirts lifting, ribbons whipping their faces, they pulled a hobbling John Downes along with them. The proprietor of Will's

  Coffee-House standing at his door, wiping his hands on his apron, said: 'Aphra?' and fell in beside Betterton. Sam Bryskett and Dogberry with some of his theatregoing butchers came in from Covent Garden; so did two flower-sellers and a stationer. John Hoyle, coat-collar up, hat down, sneering, lurched into the ranks from the Red Lion, and Rebecca Marshall ran up from her house near Charing Cross, bringing her grocer with her.

  Just before Whitehall a small crowd that had gathered round a tree to stare up into its branches fell back as a figure swung down and ran towards the coffin, making the horses swerve. Dressed in a nightshirt, his head wrapped in brown paper tied with string, Aphra's fellow-playwright, Nat Lee, had come from Bedlam. Penitence had visited him
in it. He smiled beautifully at her. 'I escaped.' He was shaking with excitement and cold and there were scars on his wrists. 'I've brought Nero for her.'

  'Nero?' said Dogberry, nervously. 'That bugger's not coming too, is he?'

  'It's his play,' explained Penitence. 'He wants to put a copy in Aphra's grave. I said he could.'

  Benedick put his cloak round the madman and the cortege moved off again. Penitence held Nat's hand as he trotted beside her on bare feet. 'I loved her,' he said. 'But I never told her.'

  'She knows now.'

  At the avenue to Whitehall the gravel became too much for Nat's feet so they perched him on the end of the funeral cart. The crowd at the Holbein Gate gaped as they went through. Windows opened and some of the Palace servants, thinking they were mummers, sent up a cheer. 'Not far wrong, either,' said Betterton, waving his hat.

  By the time the procession reached the Great West Door of the Abbey it had grown fifty-odd strong. A Yeoman of the Guard, who was throwing dice in the porch with a tomb- guide, swore when he saw it. 'They never told me there was a burying today. They tell you, Charlie?'