The Vizard Mask (60 page)

There was a tiny choke and a mewl of tentative complaint.

Mistress Palmer whispered a Magnificat: 'The little bugger's alive.'

Another whisper came from the bed. 'Is it all right?' Apothecary Boghurst got up to look and nodded. Incapable of surprise, Penitence watched tears roll down his cheeks as they were rolling down hers. 'You have a brave daughter, mistress,' he told Dorinda.

When Penitence went down to send up the wet-nurse, she was crying for the baby's bravery, Dorinda's, the apothecary's, Mistress Palmer's, her own, the courage of creation in the face of insuperable odds. 'There is a God,' she sobbed to an alarmed Rupert. 'He's upstairs.'

He took her to the Awdes chapel to give thanks, and she gave it to the God who had appeared in Dorinda's bedroom, something neither male nor female but a raw, squirming, indomitable amoeba of both.

She couldn't stop sobbing. Dorinda's travail hadn't been only in her labour but in every minute of her progress from childhood to womanhood in a world organized for her obliteration. 'Make it easier for her baby,' Penitence prayed. 'Make it easier for mine.'

Dorinda named her baby Penitence, though the child was always known to her intimates as Tongs.

Penitence's daughter, born sixteen days later, was called Ruperta.

Chapter 5

Against the fashion of the class to which she now belonged, Penitence not only insisted on breast-feeding her daughter but spent every available minute with her. Their first separation came when Prince Rupert decided to take Penitence on a visit to a destination he refused to name.

Penitence didn't want to go. 'It's no good saying she must stand on her own feet, Rupert; she's still only toddling.' She was surprised at him wanting to leave the child; his adoration of Ruperta was almost painful. Even the King of England had been summoned to worship at the cradle-side, and had obediently pronounced the baby 'wondrous appealing, a thief of future men's hearts'.

'She has already stolen mine,' Rupert told him. 'I think my Lord Burford would not prove an unsuitable match for her.' The Earl of Burford was Charles's elder son by Nell Gwynn.

But it was an unsatisfactory visit; the King refused to commit himself on the proposed marriage, and was even more elusive on Rupert's other request — that Dudley and Benedick be given titles.

Rupert was beside himself with rage. 'He ennobles the bastards of every adulterous punk in his bed, while I, who fought for him and his father before him, see my fine lads remain commoners.'

'You seem prepared to marry Ruperta off to one of those same bastards,' said Penitence, coldly.

'Gwynn is an honest trull,' he told her — he'd always liked Nelly, 'and young Burford an honest boy. None of Monmouth's pretensions to the throne there. And yes, yes, my dear, Ruperta shall not be wed against her wishes. I merely wanted to establish the principle of her worth, but Charles wouldn't know a principle if it bade him good-day.'

Penitence nodded. 'I heard you tell him.'

Well, what would you have? Mop and bow and hold my tongue like a damned courtier? Here I support, from my own pension, honest tarpaulins he should have paid years ago, while he lavishes a hundred thousand pounds on that new French harlot. Where does he get the money, eh? Eh? Torrington had the right of it. The King of England's in the pay of France.' He was stamping around the drawing-room, holding his head.

Penitence became frightened. 'My dear, you'll make yourself ill. Come and sit down.'

It was because his health was becoming as unstable as his temper that she agreed to go with him on the mysterious journey, though it was agony to leave Ruperta. She hadn't been in any condition, let alone had the time, to enjoy Benedick's childhood; she didn't want to miss a minute of this one. And Ruperta was an especially rewarding child: healthy, chuckling and with the promise of an extraordinary beauty discernible in her chubby face - Stuart beauty; the cleft of the chin was there, and the large eyes, though in her case they were blue. As the King had said when he looked at her: 'You'll not dispute this one's paternity, cousin.'

Ruperta was another in the long list of debts she owed Rupert. Paying again, Penitence thought, miserably, as she waved goodbye from the coach. Dorinda, who was to stay at Awdes during Penitence's absence, stood on the steps to watch them go, Ruperta holding one of her hands and Tongs the other, both of then waving.

'Has that woman no home of her own?' asked Rupert as he frequently did, sometimes as a joke, at other times with something like resentment that he so frequently returned to Awdes from Windsor Castle to find Dorinda in residence. Whenever MacGregor was away — and he was away a lot — Penitence invited her to come and stay.

'She's my friend,' said Penitence, firmly, as she always did, 'and Tongs needs all the good country air she can get.'

'A poor little thing.' He was in good humour today. He enjoyed patronizing Tongs, his goddaughter, mainly because she was a scrawny, colicky baby who, with her frequent illnesses, highlighted his own child's looks and splendid health.

To Penitence as much as to Dorinda she was a miracle, and she loved her.

'Where are we going, Rupert?'

'West.' It was his little secret. Wherever it was, a contingent of servants had been sent ahead a week before.

'The Americas?' She had a fantastic moment of hope that he had found Awashonks and Matoonas and the rest and that she would see them again.

'Not so far, madam. Ask no questions and you'll be told no lies.'

Penitence sulked. I want my baby. Men always pushed you in directions you didn't want to go.

But as the coach rattled on westwards, she became enlivened by the change of scene. She hadn't, after all, left Awdes in over a year, partly afraid that Rupert's suggestions that she accompany him to Town might involve her in another meeting with the Viscount of Severn and Thames to the disquiet of her emotions. She had allowed motherhood to overwhelm her, neglecting her looks, current events and, more importantly, Rupert himself. Pull yourself together. Her milk had been drying up in any case. With Dorinda, Annie, who'd been promoted to nursemaid, Mistress Palmer, the Reverend Boreman and the rest of the Awdes household to look after her Ruperta would be safe enough.

It was a fine late April. Along the firm roads the countryside was regaining colour and patches of interesting shade from the unfurling leaves of trees and the cow parsley frothing in the banks. They stopped at inns where Rupert had hired all the accommodation for the night so that they could have privacy and only their own staff to attend them.

She began to enjoy herself. On the second day they were crossing the sweep of Salisbury Plain and made a detour to see Stonehenge. Rupert twitted her Puritanism for making her uneasy in the presence of the great pagan stones. 'How my Cavaliers would rub their eyes to see me now in thrall to a Roundhead.'

He'd fought over nearly all the territory they passed through and had an anecdote for every mile of it. Penitence had heard most of them before, but to see the location renewed their interest.

After the plain the country grew less neat, more jumbled with trees and colour. Increasingly their progress was slowed by the declivity of a hill and the steep rise of the one after it.

For Dorinda, who considered that civilization stopped outside a five-mile radius of London, this would be here-be- dragons country. She'd make her will. Yet, though the villages and towns they passed through were increasingly remote, they were often impressive and prosperous, even if their traffic was halted by slow men driving flocks of even slower sheep, and the buildings were preponderantly Tudor, or earlier.

'This was for Parliament,' Rupert would say of one town, or 'There were brave Royalists here,' of another, and left her with a confused sense of political geography that the nearer a place was to sea-level the more it had supported the Roundheads, whereas if it had been set on a hill it was certain to have declared for the King.

'We are in Somerset now,' Rupert said, and pointed north. 'Somewhere over there is the ancestral home of your former patient.' He mistook her alarm for blankness. 'Anthony, my dear. The Viscount of Severn and Thames.'

'We're not going to visit him, are we?'

'No, no. Though it is a remarkably fine house. But we should never get away; he would wish to fete his nurse.'

I don't think he would, Rupert. Immediately the countryside took on significance from being in his county, but because it was his county she knew she would for ever be uneasy in it.

By the evening of the fourth day they had reached very strange countryside indeed, a land that was almost uniformly flat, so flat that anything which interrupted the straight line of the horizon, a gaggle of pollarded willows, a church tower, attracted the eye with an almost mystical significance. Their road became a causeway over reedy marsh where the hooves of cattle made sucking sounds as they grazed, leaving dark pools of water in the deep prints they left behind.

The landscape was the loneliest they had passed through, alien with the song of birds she had never seen before, rustling with strange grasses, and yet she was teased by a feeling that if the carriage wheels would only stop their rolling she would be able to speak the place-names, or know what was the medical use of the little catkinned myrtle that spread over the bogs, or tell Rupert the local nickname for the tiny, bearded bird fluttering in the rushes. It was like being haunted by a phantasm that flickered just beyond the range of vision.

'Is this still Somerset?'

'Still Somerset.'

'I feel very strange, Rupert.'

'Not long now, my dear. We're nearly there.'

But she was far from tired; as the carriage left the causeway and began to negotiate a slight climb, she clung to the window frame so that she could look behind her to the apparently endless, level expanse of varying greens. 'What is that place?'

'Those are the sedgemoors, my dear.'

Sedgemoors. 'The Levels.'

He was surprised. 'Yes, the Somerset Levels. Have you heard of them?'

'I can't remember.'

The carriage was proceeding through a winding avenue of horse-chestnuts which looked as if it might be going somewhere grand and instead debouched them into a farmyard. Penitence thought they had come the wrong way but they drove on, scattering hens, through an archway and along a track. The carriage halted.

'I think perhaps we should walk from here, my dear,' Rupert said.

Now she knew, though not for anything would she have spoiled his surprise. Bless him, oh bless him.

In front of her was a moat where the arch of an uncompromising, square, stone gatehouse made a tunnel's entrance on to a flat wooden bridge that led to the moat's island.

And the house.

From here there were only glimpses of stone and tile and chimney through the trees. As she crossed the drawbridge, the corresponding gatehouse on the far side framed a courtyard. She walked through the archway, along a drive skirted by overgrown lawn. Immediately in front of her was a crenellated rectangle of a hall in the warm oolite of Ham Hill, as plain as the gatehouses except for the stone-traced quatrefoils at the head of its three long windows.

It was an old-style hall with what had once been an undercroft where animals were kept, now a habitable ground floor with its own front door.

To make up for the hall's starkness some early Tudor adventurer had enclosed the courtyard on north and south by two wings of the then latest trend, crazily timbered, deep- tiled, gabled, lattice-windowed buildings whose upper storeys leaned over towards Penitence like tipsy revellers. The sun setting over the Levels behind them shone straight into the courtyard to make a ragbag of architectural textures into a mellifluous collage, honey-coloured stone, cream-and-mush- room timbering, tiny oaken doors, diamond-paned windows that winked reflected amber. Even the cushions of lichen on the tiles of the many-angled roof were a matching grey and gold.

Rupert was tutting with disapproval at weeds and dilapidation. Penitence didn't see them. The tilting upper storeys of the Tudor wings gave the impression of packed theatre galleries; the house was making a statement only she could hear; she wasn't just being welcomed but applauded.

A door set in a surround of worn carving opened and Peter stood in the archway looking curiously in place, as if they had gone back to the time of Crusaders and Saracen servants.

'Furniture in?' snapped Rupert.

'Yes, lord.'

Inside she was almost blinded as her eyes adjusted to the darkness of a passage formed by two screens of black oak panelling. The stone floor had been polished and gently hollowed by centuries of feet and reflected a triangle of daylight at its far end where a door stood open at the back of the house. On the left was a staircase with a newel post carved in the shape of a Saracen's head. Peter, candelabra held high, led the way up the staircase which made a dog-leg into a passage, and then stood back to allow her to go first through a door. She went into the hall.

Space and God. Those were her first impressions. It was sparsely furnished and somewhere Rupert was apologizing for not yet having procured suitable pieces for it. The hall's dimensions had managed to incorporate into themselves the cool beauty of medieval holiness. The lattice panes of the three tall windows were so old that their amber and green glass threw the sunlight on to the stone floor in the effect of a honeycomb. Over the plain and enormous rectangle that was the fireplace were carved the arms and roses of the first Tudor.

Rupert stopped talking as he glimpsed her face. Instead he smiled and came to stand formally in front of her, holding a ring on which were a set of huge keys, and a scroll hung with seals on ribbons.

'Madam, I have the honour to present to you your own home. Your good father was born here. It is fitting that now it is yours.'

'Mine?' She had guessed it to be her father's home but had expected only that they were paying a visit.

'The ownership was in dispute since your grandfather's death. Both parties were pleased to resolve the quarrel by selling outright.'