The Vizard Mask (43 page)

Prince Rupert assisted Penitence to her feet and bowed. 'I shall instruct the troopers to keep back the rabble. Farewell, ma'am.'

'Thank you, Your Highness.'

Sedley and Rochester had been among those pell-melling with the King and all three were in their waistcoats. Charles II expressed a lazy concern as Penitence raised herself from her curtsey. He cupped her under her chin: 'Oddsfish, did the villain scrape this peach? He shall die, what do you say, Rochester?' His eyes were amused and gently malicious.

Did he set Middleton on? She dismissed the thought as unworthy. But he's not displeased that it happened.

The Earl of Rochester said: 'Chop his head off, sire. We need a new pell ball.'

'More than one,' said Sir Charles Sedley. 'Let's detach him from another part of his anatomy.'

Poor Becky Marshall was still trying to instil some of her outrage into the royal ears but she had been wrong-footed and merely sounded shrill.

There was a piercing whistle from the wall which marked the garden end of the houses flanking the pell-mell court and where, to the delight of the crowd, Nell Gwynn had climbed up from the far side of hers and was leaning over to find out what had happened.

Some two hundred people now pressed against the restraining troopers to listen to their king explain the situation to his mistress.

"You all right, Peg?'

'Yes, thank you, Nelly.'

'Now you listen to me, Charlie,' said Gwynn. Your Majesty, I mean. There's too much of it. We get it all the time, in the tiring-room, outside. You got to put a stop to it.'

'Get what, Mrs Gwynn?' asked Rochester, slyly.

'Too much of you. Treating us like we was common as hedges,' said Gwynn. She flirted as she scolded, playing the jester-mistress. The crowd was loving it.

Charles staggered back in mock surrender. 'Pax, O fair one. It shall be done. Laws shall be passed. Edicts issued.'

This game was obviously going to go on for some time. Penitence wondered if she could go home.

The only one paying her attention was Sir Charles Sedley. She felt his shirt-sleeved arm slip under hers. 'I told you you'd need a protector,' he said.

In the end nothing came of it. A sulky Sir Hugh was reprimanded by the Lord Chamberlain. The King ordered members of the audience banned from the actresses' tiring-room, but nobody took any notice.

Neither did Prince Rupert attend the performance of Hamlet. On that same day, 10 June, the Dutch fleet appeared at the mouth of the Medway and bombarded the fort commanding it into surrender before sailing upriver, burning three of the biggest vessels in the Royal Navy and towing off its flagship as a prize.

The news reached Whitehall the next morning.

Charles and James reacted with the energy they had shown during the Great Fire and immediately took horse to supervise personally the sinking of ships in the Thames so that the enemy should be blocked from further advance. The militia was called out in every county and a large field army raised with commendable speed. But although they limited the harm, this time they got no praise. This time, the reverberation of cannon that travelled up the Thames to the ears of Londoners came only from enemy guns.

The Royal Navy had been caught napping, and the greatest damage was political.

Penitence heard the news in Dog Yard as she set out for the theatre. Even in the Rookery, usually unconcerned with anything happening outside a half-mile radius, angry knots of people gathered in Dog Yard to ask the pleasant June air what things were coming to. By Holborn the knots had become crowds. Drury Lane was almost impassable. She detected little panic, only rage. The country had suffered the worst humiliation in its naval history and the howl wasn't directed so much against the Dutch who'd committed the offence, as at those who should have prevented it. She struggled through crowds surrounding upturned tubs on which furious men ranted against the government, Lord Chancellor Clarendon, even against Charles II.

On one tub a man with clerical tippets on his ragged collar was whipping up the anti-Catholicism that seethed just under the surface of any English Protestant crowd. 'Punish the Papists who wind their heresies around our king and make him weak. The Whore of Babylon is loose in the court.' One of his listeners took the opportunity to shout: 'She ain't the only one.'

Further on another tub-thumper was calling up an equally powerful genie: 'And what I say is: Where's our taxes gone? Eh? What they doing with our money if they ain't spending it on our defence. Eh?' He was supplied with the answer he wanted. 'On the back of that Papist bitch, Castlemaine.' The jewels and palaces with which the King had loaded Barbara Villiers, now the Duchess of Cleveland, for keeping his bed warm were resented by the Drury Laners in a way that his conspicuous spending on the latest favourite, Nell Gwynn, was not. Nelly was one of their own and a good Protestant; Castlemaine was haughty and a Roman Catholic and a useful scapegoat.

Passing the butchers' stalls, Penitence was called over to a Dogberry surrounded by fellow-traders, flies and hanging halves of beef. 'She'll know,' he said. 'Here, Pen, is it right last night while the Dutch was attacking, the King was careering around with his women hunting a bloody moth?'

She was glad to dissociate herself from the doings of the court. 'I'm just a poor actress, William. I'm not in that circle.'

'It's bad though, Pen. Iffen you see him, you tell him. We didn't survive the bloody Plague so's we could be murdered in our beds. It wouldn't have happened in good Queen Bess's time. Nor Cromwell's neither.'

It was the first time since arriving in England she'd heard the late Lord Protector's name mentioned with approbation. It seemed that King Charles II's honeymoon with his common people was over.

Her fellow-players were gloomily gathered on stage for rehearsal. She made her apologies for being late. 'Everybody's blaming the King more than the Dutch. They don't seem to be blaming the Dutch at all.'

'Well, it shouldn't have happened, Peg,' said Lacy. 'The Medway fort was only half built, ran out of money. And they say the navy's sinking for lack of supplies.'

'He'll have to treat with the Dutch now,' said Kynaston, 'The war's ruining us.'

"We should never have fought them in the first place.' Becky Marshall was betraying her Presbyterian sympathies. 'I don't mind the Dutch. It's the French who worry me.'

John Downes called Penitence to the wings. 'Letter for you.'

She broke the seal and read neat, but hurried, writing.

I go to plant cannon at Woolwich and down the Medway. Pities be that 1 was not allowed to do so before, as I urged, and that I shall not have the pleasure in watching perform the lady whom I regard as England's noblest actress. May you be in God's keeping and excuse your devoted servant, Rupert.

'Interesting?' asked John.

'From Prince Rupert,' she told him, 'he's gone to war.'

'God love him. He was on our wing at Edgehill, the mad sod. Pity there aren't more like him nowadays.'

Hart's complaint reached them: 'No doubt our audience today, if we have one at all, will be meagre, but do you think it might just possibly notice if Ophelia isn't in it...?'

The audience that afternoon was meagre indeed; for once there were more 'vizards', as the players called the pit prostitutes, than customers, and even they kept clustering in irritating groups to whisper the latest news of the blockade. Hart did his best, but as the four captains bearing Hamlet offstage reached the wings, the corpse was heard to remark: 'Bugger Shakespeare. We're doing Dryden from here on.'

Penitence didn't like Dryden's heroic drama. His rhyming couplets were more difficult to speak than Shakespeare's blank verse - good as far as rhyming couplets went, sometimes even sublime, but needing a lot of work if they weren't to sound banal — and she found his female characters flat; for all their bravura speeches on love and sacrifice, they were empty of humanity.

She didn't like Dryden much either. The genius was there and the poet's country-dumpling head was packed with more learning than any head had a right to be, but she found him curiously lacking in conviction. He had a chameleon quality, a theatre man when among actors, a watchful rake when among rakes, the complete courtier in the presence of the King.

One day, when he was rehearsing them for The Rival Ladies, she placed him. There'd been a quarrel between Anne Marshall and Knipp over who was upstaging whom and Dryden had to separate them. 'Come, come, ladies, a theatre is as it were a little commonwealth, by the good government whereof God's glory may be advanced.'

'A Puritan,' exclaimed Penitence, recognizing a misquotation from the book of management that had dictated her childhood, ' "an household is as it were a little commonwealth" ... how do you know Dod and Cleaver, Master Dryden?'

She was taken aback by his fury: 'And how do you know it, madam? Were you of the Levelling rabble?'

'Neither Levellers nor rabble,' she said. She didn't let insults pass nowadays. 'But people who used their tongues with courtesy.'

Later he sought her out and apologized. 'Though it does no good, Mrs Hughes, to insist on an upbringing hateful both to us and our royal master.'

She shrugged. 'I neither insist on it nor conceal it.'

Discussing the incident with Aphra, she said: 'He's a trimmer. He wrote fulsome praise of Cromwell during the Protectorate. Now he's the complete royalist. I hate trimmers.'

'You're not a playwright dependent on patronage,' said Aphra, who was still unsuccessfully hawking her writing around town. 'But you're happy enough to speak the words he writes. I don't blame the poor man. I'd praise the Devil if I thought he'd put my play on.'

Chastened, Penitence had to admit that Dryden knew what the public wanted. England's pride had been hurt; its people had to look backwards to find heroism and principle, aware their own age had none.

Dryden provided both qualities with grandeur. He also provided spectacle. Killigrew groaned at the expense of exotic costumes, the dancers, the equipment to enable gods and goddesses to descend from the heavens in cars and spirits to rise from the underworld, the storms, the dungeons, the magical effects. But audiences loved it. Crowds flocked in. The carriage trade blocked Drury Lane in both directions.

And it was Peg Hughes it saw. Her blonde hair and height advantage over the other actresses, nearly all of whom were shorter and dark, the stateliness of her walk, thanks to John Downes's training, and the careful diction with which she still had to control her stutter made her Dryden's ideal heroine. 'The perfect Englishwoman,' he said.

That she played an Inca maiden in The Indian Queen and a Spanish girl dressed as a boy in The Rival Ladies didn't matter; Englishness set in exotic climes was what Dryden gave them.

And rant.

'Die, sorceress, die! And all my wrongs die with thee,' shrieked Penitence as she plunged home a stage dagger during the first performance of The Rival Ladies, wondering whether the audience would laugh, and instead hearing it drag in its breath with horror.

She became expert at tortuous lines:

Oh, my dear father! Oh, why may not I,

Since you gave life to me, for you now die?

and made them, if not natural, at least thrilling.

O Lust! O horror! O perfidy!

It seemed to her she emitted more 'O's' than verse. But Dryden's O's were turning her from a promising actress into the toast of London.

What she said became less important than the way she said it. She was gaining power in more ways than one. It only needed her name to figure in large type on a Dryden playbill for the Theatre Royal to be so packed as to be dangerous. Wits, rakes, fops no longer dared interrupt a Hughes—Dryden play for fear of being lynched by the pit. In any case, Penitence could now quell their hesitant jeers with a single 'O!'

Power. She knew what it was on the day Killigrew called her into his office before another performance of The Rival Ladies.

He was sitting on his couch, and patting it. 'Well, my dear girl,' he said, 'it's been a long time.'

She smiled at him and didn't move from the doorway. 'It has indeed, Sir Tom.'

He continued to pat. 'I knew,' he said, tilting his head at her, 'I knew when you were just a little walker you'd have London at your feet one day, and now you have.'

'Yes, Sir Tom.'

'All due to me, you know.'

'Thank you, Sir Tom.'

'Come and give us a kiss then.'

She planted one of her feet on the chair by his desk - she was in boy's costume. 'Davenant sent me round a note of congratulation the other day, Sir Tom. After he'd come to see The Indian Emperor.'

Killigrew had been confidently lounging. Now he sat up. 'Don't believe it. Whatever that street-juggling coxcomb promised you, don't you believe it.'

'I believe,' said Penitence, 'that he thinks I'm even better than Mrs Sanderson. I believe he pays Mrs Sanderson thirty-five shillings a week.'

'Nonsense. There's no actress in the world worth thirty-five shillings a week. Hart only gets two pounds a week. And don't you start blackmailing me, Miss Majesty. For one thing, the King wouldn't let you go.'

'I believe,' said Penitence, 'that Davenant will persuade the Duke to play his brother at cards for me. If I give the word. I believe that the King's been losing heavily lately.'

Sir Tom stood up, took off his wig and flung it to the floor. 'God damn all women. This is my reward for employing the bitches. I should have listened to the Puritans. I should have stuck to boys. I could have trained orang-utans better and cheaper, but no, in the goodness of my heart, I take a gaggle of bare-arsed geese out of the stews, turn them into swans and what happens?' He thrust his face close to Penitence's. 'Eh? They bite the bloody hand that feeds them.'

Penitence forced herself not to recoil. 'But is it going to feed me thirty-five shillings a week?'

Sir Tom jerked his chair from under her foot. 'You've got too big for your boots, madam.'