The Vizard Mask (49 page)

'No,' said Dorinda lightly. 'He wasn't married. Lovely ceremony it was. You ought to've been there. Bought me a beautiful dress, he did. Priest all prinked in black, coronet of flowers, stocking thrown, friends there to catch it, kisses, champagne for afters, bed sprinkled with holy water. Lovely, it was. Proper Haymarket.'

Penitence stroked her hands and waited.

Dorinda took in a breath. 'Only thing was, the priest turns up again next morning along of the rest. But he wasn't in black. Wasn't a priest at all, just another friend of his. I'd been goose-capped, doodled, coneyed. Gawd, how they laughed.'

Penitence rested her head on her friend's shoulder.

'Thing is. Prinks,' Dorinda's tone was remorselessly unconcerned, '1 don't know why he done it. We'd been to bed. He knew I wasn't no lily-white holding out for a ring. Thing is' - for the first time her voice shook — 'I loved the ballocker. I thought I did. So why all the flash?'

Because it amused him. 'What did you do?'

'Come home. Nothing else to do.' Her shoes were soaking and in tatters. She must have walked miles. Penitence took them off and rubbed the poor feet. 'Ma Palmer told me about Kynaston, so I come on here.' She got up and went to the bed. 'Who done it? Sedley?'

'Two of his bullies.'

Dorinda shook her head, almost admiringly. Them courtiers,' she said. 'Done us both in.'

'You'll bounce back, the two of you.'

She looked down at the body on the bed. 'He might. I won't.'

'You will.'

Dorinda looked up. 'Oh yes,' she said, 'I'll be a ballocking sensation, won't I? Our Sedley'll write a play about it. Roxolana, or the Fooled Bride. The stinkards'll laugh me off the stage, and I can't blame 'em. No, I'm finished.'

Even as she protested, Penitence knew it was probably true. She felt a surge of hatred at the pitilessness of men. 'I'll go and get you a hot drink,' she said. 'Becky's to take over at dawn. Then I'll take you home.'

But Dorinda wanted to be alone. 'You go. You done your turn. Get back to Benedick, he ain't seen much of you lately. I want to think a bit. I'll see Kynny's all right.' She tried to smile. 'I'm good at men in bed.'

Nothing would move her. 'For fuck's sake, leave me alone.'

Reluctantly, Penitence left her.

Outside she stood in the doorway to accustom her eyes to the darkness. The trees and hedges of the square were still. High clouds moved at their own volition, suffusing the air with a mist of rain and allowing glimpses of a moon that put a soft shine on leaves and roofs. Her footsteps repeated a rhythm on the damp surface of the road: What sort of people? What sort of people?

What sort of man went to expense and trouble to humiliate a woman who'd done him no harm?

As she reconstructed the image of the Earl of Oxford in her mind, fat, laughing, at ease, she set him in the context of a court which — she saw it now — devoted itself to the humiliation of women. Castlemaine and Gwynn and all the other mistresses, parading their clothes and their tempers in their ceaseless battle to outdo each other, were pet monkeys kept for tricks, goaded by their masters to perform more and more outlandish antics. The poor little woman with the dark-haired top lip, the Queen of England, was forced not only to accept the attendance of her husband's bed-fellows, but to seem to enjoy it.

What sort of people? What sort of men?

No sort at all? Perhaps, just men? It worried her. Suppose there was a civil war in progress of which one side, women, was in ignorance, but which the other, the male army, knew about and waged. I'm getting fanciful.

Her imagination had released monsters into the sleeping streets; they were padding behind her. She looked round but saw nothing.

She was right, then, to have stood up to them. She grinned as her jeer at his potency wiped the victory off Sedley's remembered face. A strike for our side.

The grin faded. She was being followed. Somewhere in the darkness to her rear there'd been a splash as a foot went into a puddle. Reluctance to look round again froze her neck and shoulders. She was half-way up Holborn and on both sides the shuttered shopfronts with tall, gable-ended storeys above them contained empty road straight ahead for as far as she could see. She had grown careless with carriages, or chairs, or link-boys to bring her home and forgotten that gangs padded the streets at night.

But it was, what, four in the morning? The whole world was asleep. What gang would hang around when there was nobody to prey on?

She quickened her pace. If she could reach the High, she knew a dozen back alleys through to the Rookery and safety. They wouldn't be able to follow her there.

Ridiculous. It was someone going home as innocently as herself. She forced herself to turn around, but the buildings threw impenetrable shadows on to both sides of the road, leaving a paler path between them.

There was somebody there, though. Instinct bred in the forest was panicking her breath and legs to escape danger. She began to trot. Knock on a door and ask for shelter? But nobody here lived on the ground floor; if she could waken an occupant it would be minutes before they let her in, if they let her in at all. Too long.

A soft drumming out of synchronization with the falls of her own feet confirmed her into picking up her skirts and running. The drumming quickened. Where's my knife? Why didn't I wear my knife? Oh, Matoonas, I've gone soft.

The Vine, she'd turn off north at the Vine. If she got into Kingsgate and turned left she'd be bound to strike a cut- through to the Rookery.

Somebody ahead. Thank God, thank God. A large male shape. Another soul.

As she raced towards it, she recognized something wrong. The man faced her not with enquiry but expectation. She saw the white of teeth. He was smiling. The link between him and her pursuer flashed over her like a whip. They've been sent.

There was an opening on her right between her and the man ahead. Blindly, she ran into it, slipped in a puddle, got up and ran on into deeper darkness. She heard the call of greeting between the two behind and the squelch of their boots.

Scream? But screams meant nothing around here. It would make horror official, encourage the tiger to hear the bleat of the goat.

Left. Go left. The Rookery would gather her in, resort of coiners, whores and thieves, outcasts, her true home. She didn't know this alley, she was terrified it would end in a wall. Leprous wood, overhanging washing, silence except for her own running.

What would they do? Rape her? Disfigure her? Whatever it was, they'd won. She was broken. A rat squeaking with panic. Who were they? Sedley's men? Sir Hugh Middleton's? The King's? It didn't matter. You can't offend the court and get away with it. Fool. What a fool. Behind her was the executive of the world's power come to punish her puny defiance. I'm sorry. I'll join. I can't take you on. There's no independence for us. Let me join. Don't hurt me.

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.

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.