The Vizard Mask (55 page)

'You were never cruel, Your Highness,' said the Viscount.

Penitence experienced a wave of relief. He loves Rupert. He won't hurt him.

'What days. Portugal, the Azores, the Indies, Africa. Remember, Peter? We gained you, at least.' He frowned. 'And lost him I loved best in the world.'

Rupert's brother, Prince Maurice, had drowned in a West Indies hurricane. Rupert never mentioned him without crying.

In the silence, the Viscount broke the spell of reminiscence.

'And how did you and my lord first encounter each other, Mrs Hughes?'

Again it was Rupert who answered. 'My lady' - he emphasized the words gently - 'was making her first appearance as Desdemona, a role she has since made her own, as you saw today. 1 was hard put to win her, but eventually she was persuaded to grace me these eight years.' He raised his glass to Penitence. 'And yet has the ability to surprise me.'

'I'm sure she has,' said the Viscount.

At the end of dinner, she was glad to withdraw to her parlour. The whiff of tobacco smoke and port came from the dining-room. She heard the men go out into the garden to do what men did out there, and return to Rupert's library. She wanted to go to bed: she couldn't go to bed.

The sound of raised voices brought her to her feet. They were quarrelling. He's told Rupert. This must be faced at once. As she entered the library, both of them were on their feet, the Viscount doing some heated talking. Rupert was surprised to see her, but courteous as ever. 'Please sit down, my dear. A glass of port.' To Henry King he said: 'I have no secrets from my lady.'

The Viscount, it appeared, did. He slammed his hand on the mantelpiece and stood with his back to the room, staring at the fire.

Rupert, tight-lipped, handed her the port. 'The Viscount has returned from abroad on a mission, my dear. He is come to offer me the throne of England.'

Penitence sat very still and waited.

Rupert took a chair near hers and faced her, though she wasn't the one he was talking to. 'He seems to be ignoring three things: firstly, that it is not his to give away; secondly that I fought a war to preserve the rightful succession of the crown, and thirdly that Charles is my cousin to whom I have sworn eternal loyalty.'

'Charles can keep it,' said the Viscount to the fire. 'It's James who must not have it after.'

'James too is my cousin.'

'And a Catholic.'

'His religion is immaterial.'

The Viscount turned round. 'Is it? His personal faith isn't in question, I grant you. He could salaam to Allah three times a day as far as I'm concerned. But the man will try and impose it on the country. I tell you I know. If the English would accept it, which they won't, could you see them in slavery?'

It was an added strangeness to this night that here, within twenty-four hours, was someone else prophesying that James would be a tyrant. Reluctantly, Penitence turned her gaze away from Rupert's face to the Viscount's, where it stayed.

'And it is slavery,' he was saying. 'Spain is crumbling under her monasteries' weight. France is trying to whip the world into submission with it. You're a man of science, Rupert, for God's sake, would you see all progress stopped because the Pope doesn't like it? Rome still holds Galileo a heretic and pretends that the sun revolves round the earth.'

I thought it did, I thought it did. I thought I knew you. Where was the actor in Mistress Hicks's window? This wasn't him; this was some other man.

'He would not impose it,' said Rupert stubbornly.

'I happen to know that he will. He's a fool and he will. And the English won't stand for it. They fought against absolutism before: they'll do it again, and we'll have another bloody revolution on our hands. The people I represent are trying to prevent it. Why won't you?'

'James would not impose it,' persisted Rupert.

'He'll sell us out to France. Charles has already done it.'

Rupert stood up. The fire cast his shadow across the rugs and floorboards to Penitence's feet, where it mingled with the other man's. 'You are a guest in my house, or I should run you through.'

The Viscount stood where he was. 'Your Highness, seven years spent in a French prison have earned me the right to say that. They've earned me the right for you to listen.'

Rupert sat down.

Agonized, Penitence thought: Seven years in prison. And then she thought, ignobly: Where's he been for the other six?

The Viscount picked up a stool, carried it over to them and sat at Rupert's feet, leaning forward. 'You must believe me, my lord. This has nothing to do with Charles's personal betrayal of me. I've long forgiven him that. I swore fealty to him as you did - at the same time, if you remember — and I'll keep my oath. It's James I won't serve. But the fact remains that Charles signed a secret treaty with Louis in '70. His sister was the go-between.' His long fingers were outlined against the light of the fire as he counted on them. 'The parties to it were Louis, Charles, James and Madame, nobody else.'

'I fear you have taken pains for nothing, my lord,' said Rupert. 'The Cabal knew of it. Even I knew of it eventually. The treaty with France is no secret. Charles was merely insuring his country against all eventualities, as a cunning monarch must.'

There was a treaty within a treaty. The Cabal only thought it knew the terms. What it didn't know was that Charles has promised not to oppose Louis' domination of the Netherlands. Nor did it know the very considerable sums Louis is paying him for his compliance. Nor did it know that, for more money, Charles has promised to go over to the Church of Rome.'

'No!' Rupert rose to his feet, almost pushing the Viscount off his stool as he stamped across the room. 'I'll not believe it.'

The Viscount followed him, relentless. 'I was a better secret agent than Charles thought I would be, and the information was given to me. I didn't believe it at first; like you, I didn't want to. Then my informant was found murdered and I thought: Hello, hello. When the secret police arrested me the next day, it began to look as if I knew something Louis didn't want me to know. By the time I'd spent seven years in La Reynie's prison, it had become a bloody certainty. Especially as Charles never lifted a finger to get me out.'

'We didn't know where you were. I sent to Louis myself—'

'Charles knew. He may have had enough compunction to stop Louis having my body weighted and dropped down an oubliette, but he knew.'

Oddly the anger in the room had dissipated. Rupert poured himself and the Viscount more port from the open tantalus and the two men sat down facing each other on opposite sides of the fire, stretching out their legs as if they'd come to the end of a long, not unpleasant, day.

'You have been hardly used, Anthony. I'm sorry.'

The Viscount held up his glass, and twisted it, watching flames shine through and turn it to ruby. 'So is the King. It was, he tells me, all the fault of his Scoutmaster-General. I'm to be given a handsome pension.'

A log crashed down on to the hearth and he put out a leg to kick it into the grate. 'I'm not complaining, Rupert. I was serving my country, and England is greater than her individual kings and certainly greater than her viscounts. It's England I'm frightened for. Charles thinks he's playing a subtle game — he calls it the Grand Design. But he's a child compared to that monster across the water. It's Louis who's playing with him. As for James, Louis'll eat him and spit out the pips. Louis XIV is a genius and if he's not stopped soon, he will rule all Europe - England included.' He tossed back his drink and got up. 'So I'm not serving James. He'd not mean to allow it perhaps, but Louis would have this country in his pocket before breakfast.'

Suddenly he leaned forward until he was almost kneeling. 'Your Highness, there need be no bloodshed. Half England already wants James excluded from the succession, and if it were known that you were prepared to take his place, the other half would come over. I beg you to consider. Allow your country what she needs, a king of moderation and common sense.'

Penitence knew the answer before it was made. To Rupert kingship was sacred and inviolable. An uncomplicated man who lived by the rules of precedence, he clung to tradition because it had provided the only certainty in a world of revolution and toppling thrones. His anger when someone of lower rank, like the Prince of Orange, was given preference over himself arose not from vanity but from a terror of disorder.

Bless him, he was singing:

'Loyalty is still the same.

Whether it win or lose the game:

True as the dial to the sun,

Although it be not shone upon.'

The deep bass voice dragged out the last note, and Rupert smiled. 'Remember, Anthony?' Kindly, he patted the Viscount on the shoulder. 'Tell them I am flattered by their offer. But it is not theirs to make.'

The Viscount gave in. 'I told them that's what you'd say.'

They accompanied him to his door and bade good-night.

To her relief, Rupert merely took her on to her bedroom and didn't come in. He kissed her hand.' You need your sleep. Don't think hardly of Torrington. He is not the revolutionary he seems, and will settle when he has time to recover from his hard experience. Indeed, he has served the King better than the King deserves. Did you know Charles took his wife?'

He nodded at her surprise. 'The woman died in childbirth and it was hushed up, but Torrington is no Roger Castlemaine to accept honours in return for being royally cuckolded. He disappeared for a while, and returned to the King's service only because his country needed him.'

And I know where he went to.

As he always did when he'd been badly disturbed, Rupert kept touching the wound on his forehead.

'Does it ache again?' she asked him. 'Come in and I'll bathe

it.'

He wouldn't. She wondered what had upset him most; turning down the kingship, or learning of Charles's perfidy in secretly treating with the French against his Dutch allies.

'Do you know, my dear' he told her, 'that worse than all is the knowledge that the King could stoop to treat any friend as he has treated Anthony Torrington. Having fouled the wife, how could he then further allow the husband to suffer imprisonment? The man was on Charles's service.'

'Because he fouled the wife,' said Penitence. 'David sent Uriah the Hittite into the forefront of the battle for the same reason.'

Rupert shook his head. 'It bodes no good. "And the thing David had done displeased the Lord."'

She said, and meant it: 'You would have made a splendid king.'

In her room she slumped into the window-seat looking out on the ornamental garden. Why did you come back? Except, he hadn't. There'd been no trace of Henry King in that would-be kingmaker with his weighty past, with his loyalties and even more terrible disloyalties.

'Your father is dead,' she had told Benedick, according to plan. But the actor who had woven enchantment across a dirty alley in the midst of poverty and plague had never quite died for her until now.

Now he was dead. Some grand soul inhabited Henry King's body, an aristocrat who had no need of common theatre because he strutted on the stage of the world, a Uriah the Hittite generous enough to return from the dead and forgive his particular David, who offered thrones as another man might say 'Take a card,' and irreconcilable with the mountebank in the Rookery.

That man had been merely a facet of this one's multi-sided personality, a character produced for the occasion, to fill out time while the real person within recovered from humiliation.

Henry King had bereaved her twice, once in leaving her and now again by proving that he had never existed in the first place. The flimsy weave of resentment and hurt and fury with which for thirteen years she covered over the abyss he'd left behind him gave way. She hadn't known she could feel such grief. God DAMN you, Henry King.

She had to rock, to walk, ease the pain by physical movement. Beyond the dark knots and loops of the ornamental garden hedges was lawn shadowed by splayed branches of cypress. She twitched a cloak over her shoulders and went downstairs.

On her way across the hall, she saw through the open library door that Peter had neglected to cover the fire with its night-time elm logs. She went in to see to it. As she put the guard in place, a voice to her right said: 'Hello, Boots.'

As easily as it had once crossed the alley between two windows, the voice crossed thirteen years to make her young and fragile again. She wanted to hello him back, bridge the distance in time just for a minute, but she didn't. This man had abandoned her; it was Rupert who had picked up and protected the pieces he'd left.

'Good-night, Viscount,' she said, and turned to go.

'You've done well for yourself, Boots, I'll say that. Pro ... proud I saw the potential.'

He's drunk. He was sitting in a watchman's chair on the other side of the fire, his face in shadow, but the decanters in the tantalus on the table by his hand were considerably more depleted than they had been. He was drunk when we first met and he's drunk now. She plumped up a cushion and kept on her way.

The voice pursued her. 'Why don't you run away with me?' As she spun round he staggered up to his feet and wagged a tremulous finger at her: 'Mean it. We'll run away. You with the Queen of Bohemia's jewels and me with my pension, we'll be in clover.'

The temptation to hurt him was too strong to be resisted. She took the chair opposite. 'Thank you,' she said, 'I'm already suited.'

'Aren't you though? Done well for yourself. I used to worry about you. I used to say to Boots — she was my pet rat in prison — "Boots," I used to say to her, "if I'm ever out of here, I'll go back and see how your namesake's getting on, poor little trollop." Nee .. . needn't have worried. Here she is, dripping pearls in a prince's bed. Whored her way right up the social ladder. Did you fuck Charles in the process, or is he the next rung?'

What bliss. She felt a ferocious, combative joy. He'd wanted to return to the gutter-rat he'd left and be magnanimous to it. She yawned, patting her mouth and letting her rings flash in the firelight. 'He didn't offer enough,' she said. 'Like you.' Take that.