The Vizard Mask (61 page)

'Mine?'

He looked pleased with himself. 'It is not, perhaps, as beautiful as the birthday gift you awarded me, and certainly not in as good condition, being nearly five hundred years older, but it is nevertheless a present, though one which, I had hoped, would evince some other reaction than tears.' He mopped her eyes with his handkerchief.

It was called Athelzoy Priory. She tried the name on her tongue; an apple-tasting name, beautiful with an undercurrent of the comic, like the combination of dignity and exuberance that had met her in the courtyard.

Rupert strode to the fireplace. Across its top was a white stone beam inscribed with Latin. 'Quod Olim Fuit Meminisse Minime Juvat,' he read out. '"There is little joy in remembrance of the past."' He bowed to her. 'I intend to have it changed, if you will permit, my dear. I trust that for you, as for myself, there has been joy in these past years we've spent together.' He had his hat in his hand, and the colours of the last of the sun coming through the panes turned his exquisite black velvet coat into motley.

She crossed the floor of her hall and put her arms round him.

The next day they examined everything together. Rupert himself had only been here once before — to see if Athelzoy was worth buying. As it is, my dear,' he assured her, 'though I fear your grandfather and his forebears were not the men to exploit its possibilities. Gamblers all. Like your father.'

'Was my father a gambler?'

'Renowned for it throughout the regiment. We loved to play him, 1 remember; he so invariably lost. Poor fellow, poor, brave fellow.'

The manor had stood empty since her grandfather's death, he told her; he had procured the basic furnishings in London and sent them down in carts for the servants to arrange. He had chosen well, selecting plain but excellent chairs, settles, beds, presses and tables from the time of Elizabeth. Modern pieces would have looked out of place.

The servants, too, had done well. The interior was spotless and had been burnished within an inch of its life with beeswax and soap.

In the Tudor wings jars of buttercups threw yellow reflections on to the dark wood of the window-sills, pewter dishes glowed severely along the sideboard and the creaking flights of stairs to the upper floors were lethal with polishing.

The Glastonbury priors owned it from time immemorial, but it fell to the crown in the Wars of the Roses and Henry VII gave it to his henchman, d'Haut, from whom you are descended, my dear. It was modernized in 1521, and damn all done to it since.'

It was so unusual for Rupert to swear that she knew how much the manor's disrepair was upsetting him. The roof leaked in parts, there was woodworm in some of the timbers of the north wing, the drawbridge wouldn't work because its chains were rusted into their grooves, jackdaws nested in the twisted brick chimney-pots. 'And as for the sanitary arrangements . . .'

Even Penitence, who found new enchantments every way she turned, had to admit to the insanitariness of those arrangements which were a large privy built into the wall of the solar at the back of the house with a channelled drop down into the moat. The five bottom-shaped holes in its seat — two large, three small — over the drop showed that the Hoys' privy- going had been familial, though the state of it also showed their aim to have been terrible. The fact that at the same time they had allowed the springs and streams of the moat to block up caused Penitence to wonder not only at her paternal family's hygiene but also at their insensitivity to smell.

Never mind, Rupert had called in modern builders and drainage experts and brought down from Awdes a selection of close-stools with their removable pots, carved lids and padded seats. She was more concerned that the topiary of the life- sized yew chessmen in the south garden had been allowed to outgrow to the point where their shapes might be lost.

Her yew chessmen. Her timbers with their fine graining like the wrinkles in the skin of a very old woman. Her square, lead drainpipes, each one carrying the 'H' of the Hoy crest. Her White Room in the north wing with its superb plaster ceiling moulded into pendants and strapwork.

She circled the house in a saraband of disbelief, touching and stroking. Her ancient chestnut trees coming into bud. Her slit to the left of the gatehouse arch for parleying with the enemy. Her fishponds beyond the moat, her fields beyond that, her stretch of the sedgemoor turbaries, her section of the River Minnow. Her rowing boat moored against steps going down into the moat at the back of the house.

'Well?' Rupert asked her.

'Very well. Very well. Very, very, very well.' She butted her head into his chest. 'Is it really mine?'

'Completely. It is a small manor, I fear, but totally yours. Nobody can gainsay you, my dear. Not now nor when I'm gone.'

She stood back, frightened by the elegy in his voice. 'Where are you going?'

'My dear, in the nature of things . . .'

'No.' She had to stop him saying it. 'I can't do without you.'

He was pleased and roused and took her to bed.

Afterwards, triumphant, he was full of solicitous plans. 'We shall entertain my lady's neighbours.'

She protested. 'It will tire you too much; the house isn't ready.'

'I'm younger than I thought, it seems,' he said smugly. He was anxious that she be established as part of the country scene 'while I am yet here to introduce you'. He knew, as she knew, that without the protection of his name she - and more importantly, Ruperta - would find entry into Somerset society difficult if not impossible.

She rested her head on his arm and stared up at the tester, ashamed all over again at having had to simulate pleasure when Rupert deserved not only his own sexual fulfilment but hers. She'd prayed a thousand times for her love for him to be as physical as it was emotional. It would have made things easier all the way round. Damn Henry King. How could the memory of the night with him, one single night, nearly twenty years ago, still come between her and a man so much worthier?

An old complaint; she watched it entwine itself in the riot of carved oaken creatures and swirled designs that decorated the tester. They had chosen the biggest room in the north wing for their bedroom but even so it was dwarfed by this bed, a huge, shining, black, muscular edifice that sprouted carving on every surface. It was the only piece of furniture that had not been removed from the house by Penitence's grandfather's quarrelling heirs - presumably because it was too heavy to shift. Perhaps her father had been born in it.

'Don't leave me, Rupert.' She wasn't thinking of herself. For his sake she wanted this Indian summer of his to last for ever now that he had his daughter and a home life where he was looked up to and didn't have to suffer the rudeness of young men who had taken the place he should have had at the side of his fickle king. 'I can't do without you,' she said again.

She could; she could bear anything. But it would be a ruder, lonelier life without him. 'And don't let's bother with entertaining.' Not only did she not care a damn for Somerset society, there was also the risk that entering it would involve an encounter with the Viscount of Severn and Thames; already Rupert had put him at the head of the list of people to be invited to a series of dinners.

But that evening Peter was put in the carriage and sent back to Awdes with detailed instructions from Rupert to fetch more kitchen staff and pack up sufficient glassware, silver and napery.

In the meantime noblesse had to be obliged. On Sunday they walked across the drawbridge and followed the moat round to the back of the house where a track led them through orchards to the surprisingly beautiful parish church to attend a less impressive service conducted by a hurried curate for whom the souls of St Mary's, Athelzoy, formed only one of many congregations he had to lead in worship that day.

Outside in the churchyard, where sheep nibbled the graveside grasses, the congregation gathered in a respectful ring to listen to Rupert's carrying voice introduce himself and his lady. It was a small number for such a large church, forty or so adults, the majority of those elderly. Ancient bonnets on fair or greying hair, jerkins and skirts matted from too much washing, lovely complexions even among the old, the necks of the men engrained with earth, the hands of the women calloused from perpetual spinning. Some of the younger women carried a distaff resting on the belt round their waists, and spun as they listened. The children — she especially studied the children to see if this place would be a salubrious home for Ruperta and Tongs — seemed healthy enough.

She liked the young people she'd met so far: Mudge and Prue Ridge, the son and daughter of the farm that encroached on the Priory's frontage. Both seemed intelligent, were handsome and very strong. It was Prue who brought the Priory's milk each morning, carrying it from the farm in a pail balanced on her head. Once, when she'd left it in the kitchen, Penitence had surreptitiously tried to heft the pail, and failed. 'A full five gallons on her head with the same ease I wear a hat,' she told Rupert, amazed.

'Her Ladyship wishes me to hope,' finished Rupert to his audience, 'she finds you as loyal and willing as she will be your true liege lady and ever bear you in her heart and mind.'

There was a cheer. 'Do be she give us work, ull she?'

'Indeed,' said Rupert, nodding, 'I am sure my lady will be needing staff she can trust.' Loud cheer. 'And I am instructing the landlord of the Hoy Arms that anyone wishing to drink Her Ladyship's health tonight may do so at my expense.' Cheer so loud the rooks came out of the churchyard elms and circled, cawing, in the breezy blue sky.

Together she and Rupert moved away. 'They are suffering,' Rupert told her. 'Time was when every household in this area kept its own sheep, sheared its own wool and spun it for sale to the clothiers. That and harvest work kept them going. Now the clothiers have better profit from putting their spinners in something they call a "factory"'

The old ways are the best,' she teased him.

'And so quite frequently they are,' he said seriously. 'These "factories" will loosen the bond that exists between high and low on the land. Look, now, at these cottages, half of them empty. Good peasants who loved their lord and their land gone to work in a box.'

Rupert still hankered after the feudal system at its best, and tended to regard as dangerously revolutionary anybody who didn't. Penitence refrained from pointing out that only extreme hardship or strong incentive could have tempted anybody away from Athelzoy to work in a box. A stream ran down both sides of the street under flagstone bridges that led to fat, white, mud-and-plaster cottages with deep windows and even deeper thatch. Almost every back garden had a well, hazel or apple or pear trees and a vegetable plot. A morning shower had added the smell of damped dust to that of cows and spring.

Yet it was true, half the cottages were deserted. Her Priory had provided much of the employment on which this village depended and the death of its master, her grandfather, had thrown out of work the labourers who had gathered in his harvests and the servants who had manned his household.

Further down the track widened to become the nearest thing Athelzoy could boast to a village square; sheep and cattle pens encircled a cross that was quite as big and almost elaborate as the Eleanor cross in London's Charing. A thin man dressed in Puritan black suit and hat stood on its steps, intoning from a Bible.

Opposite the east side of the cross was the Hoy Arms. Built in the same style as the Priory's timbered wings, it reminded Penitence of the Ship back in Dog Yard; the same air of unwarranted jollity, the same architectural nudge in the ribs to its neighbours.

As the inn's landlord emerged from his door to greet them, wiping his hands on his apron, the man on the steps of the cross shuffled round so that he faced in their direction.

Penitence tensed and tightened her grip on Rupert's arm. She had a sudden sense of deja vu.

'Whoso loveth wisdom rejoiceth his father, but he that keepeth company with harlots spendeth his substance.'

She'd known it. The tone was the tone of Titus Oates, the Reverend Block, the sing-song that Puritan saints considered necessary to the expression of righteousness. She hated it. But it was the timbre of the voice, the long-drawn aaa put into 'harlot' that took her back to another time and another country. For a moment she was confused, then she put her whole weight on Rupert's arm to stop him as he pulled foward towards the man, waving his cane in fury. 'No!'

'I'll whip the rogue, I'll have his skin off.'

'No. Leave him. Rupert, he's not worth your attention.' He dragged her on, intent to kill. Frantically, she gestured to the landlord to come and help. Between them they turned a puffing, shouting Rupert round and, by confiscating his stick, got him through the door of the Hoy Arms where the landlady added her considerable weight to sit him on a settle.

'Excuse me a moment.' Penitence hurried outside and over to the man on the steps of the cross. He was being verbally attacked by villagers returning from church for having insulted a royal prince and source of future employment. A few were throwing handy lumps of manure as if they'd only been waiting for an excuse. Not a popular man. He wasn't trying to protect himself but had closed his eyes in martyrdom, his lips moving in prayer. The crowd encouraged her to join in the fun. 'You give un what for, Ladyship, proper paain in the bum, they old Presbyters.' Someone suggested the stocks.

'What's your name?' asked Penitence, quietly.

The man's eyes opened. He couldn't be more than sixty, though he looked older. It was uncanny to see on this face the same bitter lines as on another face she'd once known well.

'My name is everlasting,' he said.

'I'll wager it's not,' she told him, 'I wager it's Hughes.'

'He that keepeth company with harlots spendeth his substance,' he said, sulkily. 'Proverbs 29, verse 3.'

Verily the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you,' she told him. 'Matthew 21, verse 31.' And went back to the inn.

Distracted by the bad impression made on his royal visitor, the landlord and his wife were trying to mollify him with words and best ale. Rupert ignored both. Under control now, he sat upright, white with rage.