The Vizard Mask (93 page)

Once Aphra got her hero to Surinam the descriptions of place and people became sharp. The white men who ran the country, she wrote, were worse than transported criminals. It was the native Indians who lived in the first state of innocence. 'Religion here would but destroy the tranquillity they possess by ignorance; and laws would but teach them to know offences of which they have no notion.'

There was the feel of authenticity in the details she gave of the slave trade's organization in Surinam: the quayside sales, the overseers of plantations, the auctions and the shame of it.

Oroonoko harangued his fellow-slaves. 'An ass, or dog, or horse, having done his duty, could lie down in retreat, and rise to work again, and while he did his duty, endure no stripes', Aphra made him say:

But men, villainous, senseless men, such as they, toiled on all the tedious week 'till black Friday; and then

whether they worked or not, whether they were faulty or meriting, they, promiscuously, the innocent with the guilty, suffered the infamous whip.

Of course, Oroonoko's love, Imoinda, arrived in Surinam a slave and the couple were reunited, revolted against their masters, suffered terrible fates. Then she died and then he died, thought Penitence. It was stirring, crowd-pleasing stuff.

It wasn't the tract Penitence had hoped for. It was more: a good story, a blast against the moral savagery of slavery and it was Aphra's testimony against the concept of human beings as property. Oroonoko's subject was a black man, but he was an extension of everything Aphra had ever written about the human soul, male and female: it was about freedom. The first blast of the trumpet.

It will do, Affie. It will do very well.

Attached to the final page of the manuscript was a verse from a poem Aphra had written to the laurel tree:

And after monarchs, poets claim a share As the next worthy thy prized wreaths to wear. Among that number do not me disdain, Me, the most humble of that glorious train.

As a sop, Dean Sprat had a grave dug for Aphra in his Abbey's east cloister. Chloe was prepared to opt for that. 'She's the first female commoner to get into the Abbey on her own merit, Penitence.'

'It's not good enough.' Penitence was angry. Angry at Aphra, for Aphra, with Aphra; she could feel anger lapping against her sanity, fed by the thousand insults thrown at her friend, at all her friends, at herself, all the women who'd made a break for freedom and been brought down by the dogs of male hatred and rolled in their dirt. 'She's to go in Poets' Corner.' It all depended on that. If she could see Aphra resting where she belonged this slopping, rising fury inside her might subside enough not to burst the mental restraint only just holding it back. 'She wrote Oroonoko.'

Then, on the day of the funeral as mourners gathered in Aphra's room, an Abbey messenger knocked at the front door and handed Chloe a letter. It said that Aphra couldn't be buried in the Abbey at all.

In the absence of the Dean, and in the presence of his deputy, we, the Prebendaries of the Chapter, are in agreement that the interment of Mistress Behn in the Abbey is not suitable. Therefore we have sent to her parish church of St Bride's and received back word from its priest that her obsequies may take place there this afternoon.

Penitence tore up the letter, dragged the weeping Chloe off the open coffin, told Betterton to screw down the lid, and when he'd done, plonked Aphra's pen and inkwell on it. 'All right,' she said, 'who's carrying the damn thing to the Abbey?'

Benedick, Betterton, Neville Payne and young Thomas Creech, a promising poet whom Aphra had befriended, heaved the coffin down the steps to the crepe-clad cart drawn by black-plumed, black-caparisoned horses. Chloe, who had chosen to wear the most peculiar of Aphra's peculiar caps, took her place behind it as chief mourner. The driver assumed a mournful expression, the drummer began beating his muffled skins and they set off.

It was a windy day with occasional scurries of rain. Orange flags and decorations still hanging from some of the balconies flapped sideways and paper rosettes rolled along the streets, making the horses shy, jerking the coffin so that the pen and inkwell fell off and Penitence had to carry them.

While the blowing detritus lodged itself in conduits, the funeral procession picked up the eccentric pieces of humanity that had loved Aphra Behn.

Jacob Tonson, her publisher, emerged from his bookshop, suitably clad in black — he always was. As they passed along the Strand they were joined by a gaggle of actresses who'd been rehearsing at Duke's. Holding on to their hats, skirts lifting, ribbons whipping their faces, they pulled a hobbling John Downes along with them. The proprietor of Will's

Coffee-House standing at his door, wiping his hands on his apron, said: 'Aphra?' and fell in beside Betterton. Sam Bryskett and Dogberry with some of his theatregoing butchers came in from Covent Garden; so did two flower-sellers and a stationer. John Hoyle, coat-collar up, hat down, sneering, lurched into the ranks from the Red Lion, and Rebecca Marshall ran up from her house near Charing Cross, bringing her grocer with her.

Just before Whitehall a small crowd that had gathered round a tree to stare up into its branches fell back as a figure swung down and ran towards the coffin, making the horses swerve. Dressed in a nightshirt, his head wrapped in brown paper tied with string, Aphra's fellow-playwright, Nat Lee, had come from Bedlam. Penitence had visited him in it. He smiled beautifully at her. 'I escaped.' He was shaking with excitement and cold and there were scars on his wrists. 'I've brought Nero for her.'

'Nero?' said Dogberry, nervously. 'That bugger's not coming too, is he?'

'It's his play,' explained Penitence. 'He wants to put a copy in Aphra's grave. I said he could.'

Benedick put his cloak round the madman and the cortege moved off again. Penitence held Nat's hand as he trotted beside her on bare feet. 'I loved her,' he said. 'But I never told her.'

'She knows now.'

At the avenue to Whitehall the gravel became too much for Nat's feet so they perched him on the end of the funeral cart. The crowd at the Holbein Gate gaped as they went through. Windows opened and some of the Palace servants, thinking they were mummers, sent up a cheer. 'Not far wrong, either,' said Betterton, waving his hat.

By the time the procession reached the Great West Door of the Abbey it had grown fifty-odd strong. A Yeoman of the Guard, who was throwing dice in the porch with a tomb- guide, swore when he saw it. 'They never told me there was a burying today. They tell you, Charlie?'

Well there is,' Betterton said in his best grand manner. 'Open the doors, my man.'

'Once we've got her in the hole, they can't shift her,' Becky Marshall was explaining to Sam Bryskett. 'Penitence read the rules that she got from the Dean.'

'They shifted Cromwell,' said Sam.

They watched the Yeoman of the Guard unhook his keys from his belt. He was sorting through them. He was putting one in the enormous lock.

And then a prebendary came round the comer from the entrance to the Cloisters and asked them what they thought they were doing. Within minutes the Yeoman of the Guard had his pike levelled at them, the tomb-guide had been sent running to fetch the rest of the Abbey guard and prebendaries were pouring through the Cloister door, having celebrated the ending of Chapter with a large meal at the house of the Archdeacon who'd partaken freely of his own port.

Benedick put his hand over his mother's mouth and held her arms so that the argument could be left to Thomas Betterton: 'Why may she not, Venerable Sir? The Dean gave his permission.'

'Dean's absent,' said the Archdeacon, flapping his hand in a direction which indicated that the Dean was in the Thames. 'Chapter's decision. No actresses in the Abbey.'

'Mistress Behn was a playwright.'

'Same thing,' said the Archdeacon. 'All whores and topers.'

A soberer prebendary stepped in front of him. 'With respect, Archdeacon.' He turned to Betterton. 'My good sir, you must understand our position as keepers of this most holy place. Mistress Behn was an enterprising woman but hardly an ornament to her sex and it was felt she would lie more comfortably in some other resting place.'

The Archdeacon wagged his finger. 'Won't have her in. Put her in St Bride's with other scribblers. Good enough for her.'

'Such playwrights as we honour here,' went on the soberer prebendary, shaking his head at the Abbey's indulgence in giving any of them houseroom, 'wrote to the glory of God, in sacred language, Shakespeare and, um, Chaucer.'

'Have you read the "Wife of Bath" lately?' shouted Becky Marshall.

'Didn't have her in either,' shouted back the Archdeacon, sure of his ground.

The Abbey guard was filing into the space between the funeral party and the West Door, most of them old soldiers who came cheap. Penitence's eyes pleaded with her son and he took his hand off her mouth. 'Keep everybody here,' she told him. 'I'll be back.' She gave him her purse. 'Buy them wine. And get some food for Nat Lee.'

'Where are you going?'

'To see the King.'

She began to run. Apart from the ranks of agitated men round the Abbey door it was surprisingly quiet; over towards the river neither House of Parliament was sitting, and only a few lawyers and their clerks were pausing to stare on their way in and out of Westminster Hall; the whole place was resting after the efforts for the Coronation. It had stopped raining. It was getting dark and the carved, square gatehouse leading to the bridge over the Tyburn ditch had a wet sheen that reflected back the torches in their holders on either side of its passageway.

Then she was out of the Middle Ages and running towards Whitehall. From the suffocation of the Church she ran into the suffocation of Government; she saw it rolling towards her like fog, ready to muffle her in its obfuscation as it had so many petitioners before her. Some sanity returned. They'll never let me near the King; it'll take days. She advanced through the murk towards the light of the Holbein Gate where a gentleman was wearily dismounting from a horse. As he turned he saw her and stopped in mid-stretch. It was the Viscount of Severn and Thames.

After a moment she said: 'I want you to take me to the King.'

And he said: 'They don't usually let you in with a weapon.'

She looked down and saw she was holding Aphra's pen like a dagger. 'I'm burying Aphra in Poets' Corner, you see,' she said reasonably. 'They won't let me, and the King's got to make them.'

He nodded. 'The Buttery first, I think.'

'I want to see the King.'

Carefully, he took the pen away from her. 'You shall have it back later,' he said as she snatched for it. 'And you shall see the King. But the Buttery first.'

They served excellent ale in the Palace Buttery and he made her sit down at one of the tables and drink a frothing pint of it. In between gulps he fed her with morsels of equally excellent bread and cheese. 'When did you last eat?'

She tried to think. 'What day is it?'

'That's what I thought.'

'I must see the King.'

'Finish your ale. He's waiting for us; at least, he's waiting for me. For the Scottish report.'

Some form of normality was returning as she ate, but with it came a lassitude. In a while she'd have to return to the fight and Aphra's unburied coffin and leave this man for the last time.

With Aphra dead, Dorinda dead, her stage career over, her energy gone, there would be no occasion for her to visit London again; she would stay in her backwater, subsumed by its minutiae. One day, perhaps, she would hear that this man had married a young heiress and produced healthy tributaries for the viscountcy of Severn and Thames.

I shall wither. The thought of hearing it withered her now. She hadn't fully realized the fortitude necessary to face life without him, the pressure every minute imposed because he wasn't sharing it with her.

Do I love you that much? She did. Had. Would. They had known each other for, what, twenty-five years? A generation. Literally, a generation of love seeded into them both the moment they'd met. Given the greatest gift life had to offer, greater than talent, greater than pride, certainly greater than wealth, they had left it untended. And that — she saw it now — was true sin. She was a sinner not because she had whored to stay alive but because she hadn't pursued her lover — how beautiful that word was and how dirty they had made it — and not only forced him to see her as she was but open his eyes to the fact that he loved her as much as she loved him. Because you do.

Such waste it had been.

She felt a tear drip down the side of her nose and rubbed it, pretending it was an itch. 'How's MacGregor?' she asked.

'He had to stay on. I think he's arranging to give you Scotland. Tell me about Aphra.'

She told him and anger for Aphra re-energized her in the telling. 'Why shouldn't she be commemorated with all the other poets? They've got somebody called Casaubon in there and who was he, I ask you? Did he write for freedom from slavery like Affie did? And Michael Drayton who only wrote one line worth saying, and Thomas Triplet. Who the hell's ever heard of Thomas Triplet? I'll wager those p-p-pprebendar- ies don't know.'

'Let me get this clear. You're trying to bury Aphra Behn in the Abbey's Poets' Corner?'

'Yes. But the prebendaries are trying to stop me.'

He leaned back, fingering his chin. 'Have you tried fucking 'em?'

'Ah.' She shouldn't have lowered her guard. John Downes used to tell her time after time when she was learning to fence. She sighed and stood up. 'Not yet. But it's a thought. Shall we go?'

He took off his cloak and wrapped it around her to protect her from the damp of the courtyards. She could feel desperation emanating out of his flesh into hers. I can't help you, my dear, dear man. Only he could transcend the rules men made for themselves and choose the greater maturity of love.

You have to realize for yourself. It has to matter more than anything else.

The Palace was still in disorder from James's flight; every Dutchman they saw was gloomy and every English servant resentful of the Dutch. The usher taking them to the Royal Apartments complained to Henry as to a fellow-sufferer. 'Won't have his hand kissed, if you believe it. Won't even let us kneel. Won't touch for the King's Evil, just wishes 'em better health and less superstition. And she's everywhere, taking gruel to the poor and checking the accounts. Checking the accounts.'