The Vizard Mask (89 page)

There was much about the rigours of the voyage and the resultant looseness of his bowels, a long description of eating turtle-meat, none at all of Africa itself, but a good deal about the slaves the Bonaventura had taken aboard there. He was indignant at the condition in which they travelled 'in that so many do perish' but only because it deprived him of potential converts. Uncle Martin Hughes, it appeared, had found a new vocation; 'to bring to the Lord the poor benighted creatures so that the trade can encompass good not evil'.

His account of Jamaica covered one side of a page, mostly concerned with the number of black girls who adorned the houses of the plantation owners and managers and the sin thereof.

Not until Penitence was nearly screaming as she read did he come to it:

The law here being unobserved I did find little hindrance in discovering and after much haggling in purchasing the Scotchman we spoke of and procuring his passage on a Dutch ship which may arrive there afore this letter though his master was reluctant to let him go since he has proved trustworthy in business which is a rare occasion among so many miscreants.

For a moment, Penitence sat down and held the letter against her cheek. MacGregor. One brand out of the burning.

But there was another page of Uncle Martin's crabbed writing and, sewn into the one she was holding, a protuberance.

She read on:

After much enquiry I found no trace of thy Squakheag and no hope of it in that overseers here do despise Indian slaves for that they die too soon so I took ship for the Americas to find spiritual comfort in my brothers and sisters in the Lord and to look for thy people and mine but though at this moment I sit in the midst of mountain and plain on the edge of the river called Pocumscut there is no sign of heathen habitation nor none else except burned grass as if it caught fire and only this bead which I do send thee.

Penitence unstitched the paper where it had been sewn over at the edge and extracted a faded red and blue bead, a necklace bead, scorched on one side.

For a moment she stood where her uncle had written his letter beneath the twisted mountain of Pemawachuatuck under which the lodges of Awashonks's people had rested beside the river. Through his eyes she looked out at a smokeless, blackened ring, soundless except for the call of the circling eagle, and knew not only that her Indians were dead but that their way of life would never be seen there again.

Gently, she folded the letter around the bead and took it upstairs to put it in a silk fichu in her dressing-table drawer.

Then she went downstairs to find Tongs and tell her that her father was alive and on his way to freedom.

It was one of those periods of hiatus. In the pauses when Penitence had time to feel anything other than exhaustion it was a sense of suspension. Surprised, she discovered that her neighbours, those assured Tory men and women, were in a similar state. When they met together the topic of conversation that dominated even fatstock prices was the four Roman Catholic lords who'd been sworn into the Privy Council. Posts which Anglican churchmen could have expected to hold were going to members of the Church of Rome.

Under Charles I, Somerset royalists had faced conflict but never a divided mind. In fighting for the royal cause they had known they were upholding King and Church in one symbolic body. Now, for the first time, their grandchildren stared at the prospect of a terrible choice. King or Church? What if James made it impossible to be true to both?

'Ah tell ee' roared Sir Ostyn Edwards at her, 'he'll be loyal to the Church, iss fay.' But he was obviously shaken after a trip to London during which he'd seen friars walking its streets, openly fingering their rosaries.

Pamphlets were being sold with royal approval which purported to prove that Charles II had lived and died a Roman Catholic.

'Old Rowley whored like a Papist, we'n't deny ut,' said Sir Ostyn, stoutly, 'but we know he were a good Protestant.' His tiny, white-lashed eyes slid sideways at Penitence. 'Weren't he?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'Did you see Aphra?'

By introducing Sir Ostyn to the brief but dynamic influence of Aphra and Dorinda, Penitence had unleashed another devotee to the theatre. His yearly visits to London had become quarterly and this time he had spent four nights watching successive performances of Aphra's latest play, The Lucky Chance. 'Naughty,' he said, 'I never seen a naughty old play like ut.' He was the only person she knew who actually held his sides when he laughed.

Yes, he'd gone round to Aphra's house and she'd entertained him and given him a copy of the play to bring back for Penitence to read. 'Poor old soul now, though, with her rheumatics.'

Ostyn's conversation was combative and Penitence dismissed his remark as an attempt to provoke her. Aphra was her senior but had always retained the youth of a contemporary. Her letters were as sprightly as ever and gave her reasons for not accepting Penitence's invitations as having too many commissions to finish. Penitence, trying to keep her head and - often literally - her crops, above water, had sent back similar apologies.

She enjoyed reading The Lucky Chance, a fast-moving comedy in which penurious heroines decided to marry wealthy old men. Where most plays dealt with the rich, this one drew on Aphra's experience of being hard up. Its glory, however, was her portrait of the impotent old lechers her girls had chosen to marry — not the usual run-of-the-mill creations but endowed from Aphra's experience with a dreadful vitality. Mr Behn, thought Penitence.

With the play Sir Ostyn had also brought back some of Aphra's other work, among them her fighting defence of The Lucky Chance:

They charge it with the old never-failing scandal — that 'tis not fit for the ladies. As if the ladies were obliged to hear indecencies only from their pens. Had it been owned by a man, though the most dull, unthinking, rascally scribbler in town, it had been a most admirable play.

'Poor old soul?' demanded Penitence of Sir Ostyn. 'You tell 'em, Affie.'

There was also Aphra's long Pindaric for James and his Queen on 'The Happy Coronation of His Most Sacred Majesty' which Penitence didn't bother to read. What she did read in bed one night, what transfixed her, was Aphra's poem to John Hoyle, 'To Mr J.H.'

All Heaven is mine, I have it in my arms,

Nor can ill fortune reach me any more. Fate, I defy thee, and dull world, adieu. In love's kind fever, ever let me lie, Drunk with desire, and raving mad with joy.

Damn you, Affie. She too had held Heaven in her arms in this very room, this very bed, and let it go.

The laws against Popery were still unrepealed but the King took matters into his own hands. Without waiting for a Parliament that would repeal the Test Acts — one would never have been elected in any case — James made his own Declaration of Liberty of Conscience.

The reaction was extraordinary. One by one the Protestant Dissenting churches, groups that had faced prison for their faith, preachers who'd lost their livings by refusing to follow the Articles of the Church of England, men who'd been driven out of their homes by the Five Mile Act, all these people told James that they didn't want his permission to worship legally if it meant that Roman Catholics were to receive the same indulgence.

It made no difference. James ordered that his Declaration be read from every pulpit on successive Sundays.

Six bishops went to Whitehall carrying with them a petition signed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, assuring James of their loyalty but most courteously pointing out that he couldn't do it; the King couldn't dispense with statutes - that was the privilege of Parliament. They must therefore refuse, if the King would graciously forgive them, to allow his Declaration to be read in any Anglican church.

The King didn't forgive them: 'This is the standard of rebellion.'

On their knees the bishops swore it was not. 'Sir,' said Bishop Ken of Bath and Wells, 'I hope that you will grant to us that liberty of conscience which you grant to all mankind.'

James persisted furiously: 'This is rebellion. This is the standard of rebellion.'

'We have two duties to perform,' answered Ken. 'Our duty to God and our duty to Your Majesty. We honour you, but we fear God.'

The bishops were sent to the Tower.

And the Queen was pregnant.

The five-aisled church of St Mary Magdalene took some filling but on a Sunday in June 1688, the population of practically the entire Taunton Vale formed its congregation, including Dissenters who wouldn't have been seen dead in an Anglican church at any other time and wouldn't have been tolerated if they had. By being sent to the Tower, Bishop Ken of Bath and Wells and Bishop Trelawney of Bristol had become everybody's bishops, even anti-episcopates'.

The congregation's eyes were on the preacher as he climbed the steps to the carved pulpit. In almost all the churches in the land the eyes of the congregation concentrated on the preachers at that moment climbing into a thousand pulpits. Would he? Wouldn't he?

In St Mary Magdalene he didn't. Some two thousand Somerset men and women sat back in satisfaction to listen to the usual sermon.

In a hundred City parish churches Londoners too folded their arms and settled down to the accustomed hour's nodding and or dozing. Even in St James's Palace chapel the Anglican priest refused to read out its present royal owner's Declaration of Indulgence.

In Westminster Abbey, however, as a more obedient preacher began to read what his King commanded, his voice was drowned by the sound of his vast congregation walking out.

Outside St Mary Magdalene's, under the budding lime trees, Penitence's neighbours gathered about their carriages.

'That'll show un,' said Sir Roger Pascoe.

Sir Ostyn nodded. 'Teach un to gaol our bishops. By God, Ah've a good mind . . .'

'Can we go home now?' asked Penitence. She'd already been waiting for the half-hour since the service ended while her fellow-worshippers congratulated each other as if they had personally defeated the forces of Rome single-handed. She had her teasels to see to.

'Teach un to pass off any old Papist babby on us,' said Sir Roger.

Lady Portman and Lady Pascoe both nodded with the authority of parturient women. 'Her's too old and lost too many babbies to have un now. Smuggling the poor little mite into the bed in a warming pan, wicked.'

Penitence sighed; if they got on to the royal birth she'd never get home. At thirty Mary of Modena was younger than both Mesdames Portman and Pascoe and, as queens usually gave birth in a room filled with at least forty weighty witnesses and as those witnesses on this occasion had included the entire Privy Council, Lord Chancellor Jeffreys among them, she herself was inclined to believe that James had at last been vouchsafed his much-longed-for legitimate son and heir.

But it was an indication of how much trust his subjects had lost in James that they refused to believe it. It was an impostor baby, a lie, a Jesuit fraud, a plot to deny succession to that good Protestant, Princess Mary of Orange, and put some Papist's brat on the throne.

In fact, thought Penitence, they dare not believe it. They had been prepared to put up with James's Catholicism when it was likely to die with him but the vista of an unbroken succession of Romish kings had put the wind up the English people. And as a sign that the gods first sent mad those whom they wished to destroy, James had asked the Pope to be the baby's godfather.

From somewhere among the knots of people gathered outside the church a whistle rose above the general chatter. The tune was catchy but it was its effect on her friends that attracted Penitence's interest. They pricked up their ears like hounds at the hunting horn.

'What is that?' she asked. 'I keep hearing it.'

'King goes on like he do, you'll be hearing a danged sight more of it,' said Sir Ostyn, bundling her and the two girls into his carriage.' 'Tis called "Lillibullero". Hush now.'

On the way back across Sedgemoor he talked of Prince

William of Orange. 'Reckon that's the sort of lad as'd do us. Protestant wind to blow away Catholic muck.'

Penitence couldn't get excited about it. Only three years ago these same people, Bishops Ken and Trelawney among them, had been happy to countenance the executions of men who'd backed just such another Protestant wind to blow James away. She said so.

"Tis a very different thing,' Sir Ostyn lectured her. 'Monmouth ...' He glanced behind him to see if Ruperta and Tongs were listening. The name still had power. '... he were a bastard, like this babby they're trying to foist on us is a bastard. William, now, he's legitimate, married to legitimate Mary. He's the sort of lad as'd do us. Protestant wind.'

'I'm sick of James,' she said, 'but I'm sicker of seeing men try to get rid of him. It would mean killing. There's been enough. I'll not listen to any more.' She maintained her refusal to discuss it and so forgot to ask him what it all had to do with the song 'Lillibullero'. In the days that followed she learned that it sang of a Protestant wind:

O why does he stay so long behind?

Ho! by my soul, 'tis a Protestant wind.

Lero, lero, Lillibullero ...

The ridiculous words and skipping, cheerful rhythm tangled themselves up in the Protestants' hope of William of Orange so inextricably that the song became a signal and a defiance. The tune was heard coming from Whiggish coffee-houses, apprentices whistled it as they went about their trade, it was said that it had even been heard in Whitehall where the beleaguered Protestant Princess Anne was steadfastly defying all attempts by the Jesuits to convert her and her household to Roman Catholicism. To wear an orange favour was dangerous but, so far, royal authority had not yet grasped that opposition was consolidating in the form of a song.

On the day that Penitence took her boar across the marshes in order to oblige Lady Pascoe's sow and stayed for tea, Lady Pascoe was heard to hum the tune as she passed out the cups.