The Vizard Mask (66 page)

Expecting to be shunned and not greatly caring as long as she could quietly sacrifice the rest of her life to serving Rupert's memory, she had been surprised how her neighbours' attitude changed towards her once they found that, thanks to her Hurd grandfather, she made a competent farmer and, thanks to Mudge Ridge, was earning a fortune from her teasels. English country gentry, she discovered, hated Frenchmen, Italians, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Papists, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Quakers and Jews, but they were tolerant to a fault of their own kind.

They farted, belched, played hideous practical jokes and had much in common with the beasts in their own meadows but they were too interdependent to be scandalized by each other's naughtinesses, even if that other was a woman. Viciousness was not in them. Courtiers like Charles Sedley expended wit on the buffoonery of such rustics but they could have taught him a thing or two about group loyalty.

Not for them the luxury of who's in, who's out, not when they sought each other's permission to hunt over each other's land, not when the Levels flooded and left their manors isolated islands needing neighbourly rescue, not when their best plough broke, or a wheel came off their carriage, or the birth of their baby was proving difficult. Then they needed the help of whoever was nearest, and if whoever nearest had an undesirable past it took a back-seat to the usefulness of her present.

Graceless and bucolic, Somerset gentry yet had an oysterlike ability to smooth over irritants until they were acceptable. Finding that Penitence was not to be dislodged from the Priory by rudeness, cold-shouldering, advice, or offers of marriage, her neighbours mentally labelled her an oddity, as Lady Alice Lisle was an oddity, and absorbed her. Their labourers helped with Penitence's harvests as hers helped with theirs. When a Pascoe child died the Reverend Boreman was just in time to save its soul by baptism. Some of Rupert's cinchona preserved the life of another Pascoe baby. Sir William

Portman's contacts were enabling Penitence to sell to the northern clothiers.

It wasn't to be expected that they'd treat her with kid gloves; their heavy winks were incessant, they made rutting motions with their brawny forearms, but in the company of anyone they considered above or below their class, or with anyone who came from further away than Glastonbury, they included Penitence in their ranks — and closed them.

As for the lower classes themselves, they were brutal realists. Leddyship was vurrin and touched to boot, but she paid good wages and she paid them regular. QED she had their loyalty.

So Penitence became Lady of Athelzoy.

She would have liked not to be a vurriner, to reveal that she was a Hoy, of the same stock that had ruled the village for centuries. But to do so would inevitably revive the scandalous love story of her parents, put her midway across the class divide and link her with pestiferous, trouble-making, Dissenting Hughes.

And that she could not allow. For the first time in her life Penitence was rich, respectable and in control. It was a giddy- ing sensation. People watched her in case she was displeased. Vicar Lambert consulted her about his sermons. Tradesmen solicited her custom.

Even at the height of her fame on the stage, she had been vulnerable to the assaults and insults of the tiring-room. Now she could punish her detractors by asking her good neighbour, Sir Ostyn Edwards, JP, to put them in the pillory. She wasn't going to compromise all that by claiming blood kin with those very detractors.

As the fact that she had been a notorious mistress faded from other people's memories, so it faded from her own. At first she had desired respect because 'Rupert would have wanted it for me'. Then she desired it for its own sake, then she demanded it. The amused voice which, in her first year at Athelzoy, said 'Act the fine lady', had faded to be replaced by a sharp 'You are a fine lady.'

Dorinda kept spoiling it.

They crossed the bridge over the Minnow which rushed down to join the more sober Cary which in turn joined the River Parrett as it made its sprawling way towards Bridgwater and the Bristol Channel. Here the land fell away in the varying greens that Penitence loved, the prickled olive of her osier beds, a breeze turning willow leaves silver-green side up, the dark of rushes.

The sedgemoors called to her in a way she could not account for unless they had provided the bed for her conception — which they probably had. Unattractive in winter, treacherous with quagmire, they nevertheless had drama. Perhaps it was the sky dominating the flatness, or the way the setting sun turned the pools and meres into amber, or the fact that you were dangerously close to sea-level, a speck on a vast green solitude that rolled unhindered and empty to the Bristol Channel.

Hardly a day passed but she'd taken the opportunity to walk them or ride them on her pony, taking Barnzo, the farrier's son, with her as a guide until now she could look out at them and discern the hidden causeway that led from the track at the bottom of the rise to the Taunton road, and know where she could pick sphagnum moss and which turbary produced the best peat bricks for the Priory fires. It was said of her that she could 'ride the marshes' - the local phrase for knowing them well.

'The Levels,' she said, breathing them in.

'Lovely,' said Dorinda. 'Can we go home now? I'm breaded.'

'You'll never make a Zummerzet maid,' Sir Ostyn teased her.

'Thank Gawd for that.'

From the first Dorinda had taken against Athelzoy, and not only Athelzoy but the whole of Somerset. It was too far from London, it had too many smells, was too quiet, too lush, too dark at night, too hot in summer, too full of insects that flew, crawled and buzzed their way up from the marshes. She couldn't understand a word the ballocking cider-suppers said. Teasels did not excite her.

What kept her returning to it was the benefit and obvious enjoyment her daughter derived from sharing Ruperta's life. Tongs pined when she was anywhere else.

When Becky Marshall, on a visit, had suggested Dorinda should leave Tongs at the Priory and return with her to join the company at the Duke of York's as a dresser-cum-character- actress, Penitence had seen the gleam of footlights reflected in her friend's eyes, and encouraged her to go. At the same time she resented it on Tongs's behalf and said so to Becky: 'How can she plan to abandon that dear child?'

And Becky had said: 'I think if I may say so that she's displaying great love in leaving her behind. You're mistress of the household. It's you, not Dorinda, Tongs turns to for instruction. That dear child is more yours than hers.'

So Dorinda went, mercifully unrecognized by a new generation of theatregoers, to take Sisygambus parts first in one play then another, until she was staying longer in London each year than in Somerset.

They turned right along the deep, narrow, fern-fringed lane that connected the bottom of the village with the bottom of the Priory drive and came out between oaks on to a green which commanded the Levels on the left and the great wrought-iron gates to the right.

'Bamzo, Mother.' Ruperta was pointing at a distant horse and cart crawling over the causeway that led from Taunton to this end of Sedgemoor, bringing Athelzoy's Nonconformists from their meeting-house service.

'I asked Barnzo to call in at Tidy's and see if there was a letter from my son,' explained Penitence to Sir Ostyn. Tidy kept the post office. 'Otherwise the carrier wouldn't bring it until tomorrow.'

What malevolent spirit named the man Barnzo?' asked Aphra.

'His head's on crooked,' said Penitence, absently; quite suddenly she was struck by a fear of the horse and cart. Rationally the protuberances from its sides were fleeces being brought for Athelzoy women to spin into yarn, but they made the shape of the cart into a winged hornet swelling bigger as it crawled towards her.

There's one in every village,' Sir Ostyn was explaining to Aphra, tapping his temple. 'His yeead's on crooked. He were barnzo. Barnzo.'

'Born so,' said Penitence at Aphra's incomprehension. 'Children, escort our guests to the house and tell Johannes we're ready for dinner. I'll just wait and see if there's a letter.'

The girls put their hands into Sir Ostyn's and Aphra's, curtseyed and pulled them towards the house. Penitence, watching them go, saw Sir Ostyn's free hand goose Aphra's backside — and his jump as Aphra goosed him back.

Dorinda stayed with her. Awkwardly, without talking, the two women watched the cart, holding their fluttering hats to their heads against the strengthening breeze that mixed the smells of grass and marsh with the elusive tang of sea.

Let there be a letter. Benedick was a hopeless correspondent. Until a few weeks ago she'd received news of him every month from the faithful Dudley, but now Dudley had joined the Christian army's crusade against the Turk and his letters came in batches after long intervals. She worried about him, and about Benedick left behind in the Netherlands without his foster-brother's common sense to steady him. She hadn't heard from either for six weeks.

He's dead. They're both dead. She was having a premonition of the news, the sting of the insect as it crawled towards her, ever bigger. Having seen it as monstrous she couldn't dislodge its misshape from her eye. Barnzo's poor face and leather cap became a head with mandibles and multi-faceted eyes. Then he waved — 'Letter from Holland, Leddyship' — and reverted to a simpleton driving a cart full of people and fleeces.

She snatched the letter from his hand, and frowned her disapproval at his passengers: her own dear Mudge and Prue Ridge, Jack and Mistress Fuller, the Mackrells, the Yeo child, Jan and Betty Creech and their baby. Good people all of them, but Dissenters from the mainstream religion that Penitence was beginning to consider essential to the well-being of the country's economy.

Barnzo's ever-nodding head nodded with deliberation at her: 'King Monmouth be coming to Somerset.'

'Shshhh.' Mistress Fuller put her hand over her son's mouth, and Penitence sympathized. 'If Sir Ostyn heard you, Barnzo, you'd go to prison.' She looked at Mudge: 'What set this off?'

'Oh, there's rumours at meeting.' He was reluctant.

'There's always rumours,' she scolded. 'And people like you stupid enough to encourage them. Monmouth won't dare come. Not after the Argyll fiasco.'

The Earl of Argyll had invaded Scotland in what had been supposed to be a two-pronged attack against James's Catholic reign — the Duke of Monmouth to provide the other prong by landing somewhere in England to raise a Protestant rebellion. In view of the fact that Argyll had been captured after a month of incompetence it was not expected that Monmouth, who was known to be unable to raise sufficient men or money from his fellow-exiles in the Netherlands, would make the same mistake.

'They be arresting our friends in Taunton,' burst out Barnzo.

'They're rounding up trouble-makers all over England,' said Penitence, who'd been told so by Sir Ostyn. 'We don't want silly men making trouble, do we.' She looked squarely at Mudge: 'Do we? Not with the teasel harvest coming on.'

Mudge grinned at her. 'Won't be, Leddyship. Not from I.' There were nods from the others in the cart.

'Good.' She slapped the tired horse's rump to set it on its way towards the village and turned to her letter.

'That's mine,' said Dorinda.

Penitence stared at her, slipping her nail along the sealing wax. 'It's my letter. It's from Benedick and Dudley.' She had to hold the letter in the air to foil Dorinda's grab for it.

'It's mine. Look at the ballocking name on it.'

'You heard. It's from Holland. Of course it's for me.' To tell Dorinda she was a jealous slut was a warm and beautiful temptation she would give way to any moment.

Dorinda gave way to her own: '"Leddyship", "Leddyship",' she minced. 'Everything's for Leddyship.' Her voice dropped: 'You've got too big for your boots, you. Poncing about like the virgin of the manor just because a lot of turnip-pickers have to do what you tell 'em.'

'You're jealous,' screamed Penitence. 'Your man's left you with nothing except what I give you. You're jealous because Tongs loves me better than you.' She was back in the attic of the Cock and Pie; she felt her hands reaching for Dorinda's hair and stopped, appalled.

'Perhaps,' said Dorinda in a court accent, 'you would be good enough to regard the superscription on that there letter.'

Penitence looked down and, shamefaced, handed it over.

Dorinda turned her back to read it. MacGregor had taught her to read, but she still moved her lips. The back of her head and shoulders made the same shape as on the day she'd carried Benedick away from the window of Newgate prison.

How could I say those things to you? You, who sheltered my son for me. Penitence said, gently: 'Is it from MacGregor?'

'Yes.'

'Is he well? I didn't know he was back in the Netherlands.'

'Don't know everything, then, do you?'

When it came to MacGregor, thought Penitence, she knew nothing. Twenty years on and off she'd been acquainted with the man and all she could relate of him was that he was a radical Scotsman never radical in her presence. It was as if her interest had glissaded over him without picking anything up, as if he withdrew to make himself invisible. He must have opinions. She knew he had opinions; otherwise why did he care to publish the anti-Catholic, anti-James ravings of crackpot exiles? But he'd never expressed them to her. Dorinda had once said it was because he was afraid of her. Henry King liked him. Damn it. Who cared who Henry King liked or didn't?

Now she was sorry she hadn't taken more trouble to know the man. Obviously he was still important to Dorinda. Come to think of it, he'd been an important, or at least constant, part of Benedick's childhood, a male presence insubstantially but for ever there in the chaotic scramble that had been her efforts to feed them all.

She tried again. 'Is he coming back to England soon?'

'Mind your own business.' Dorinda's tone was not so much rude as abstracted.

If you won't, you won't. But later Penitence was always grateful to remember that she ignored the snub and edged across the distance between them to take Dorinda's hand.