The Vizard Mask (94 page)

The Grooms of the Bedchamber were hanging about in the vestibule outside and apologized in advance for the lack of ceremony. 'He says would you suffer him to receive you deshabille, Marquis. He has the cough.'

One of them muttered: 'When ain't he?' They showed no interest in Penitence.

Marquis. Oh well, good luck to him.

King William III of England was crouched over the Bedchamber's fireplace, coughing. He was in his slippers with a shawl round his shoulders. Like the great bed, the red and gold room had been stripped of its hangings and faded marks on the walls showed where they'd been taken down. The windows were open.

'Anthony.' He stretched out a hand but as Henry took it, said quickly: 'No need to kiss it. How was Scotland?'

'Chaos, Your Majesty. But first, may I take the liberty of introducing Mrs Peg Hughes, an old acquaintance of mine? She asks a boon.'

The King turned away from the fire and looked at Penitence. Then he crossed the floor and kissed her hand. 'An old acquaintance of mine as well,' he said slowly. 'I am deeply in her debt. You look well, Mrs Hughes.'

'So do you, Your Majesty.' She hoped she was the only one to be lying. He looked ghastly; she hadn't remembered him as so small. How old was he? Thirty-eight?

'Better than the last time we met.' They still understood each other. A second's worth of amusement touched the pinched, white face and went again. Holding her hand he took her to the window — 'I can't breathe in your London' — leaving the Marquis staring. He gasped some air into his concave little chest. 'Perhaps the Marquis would not understand that then it was also in a bedroom.'

She whispered back. 'I don't think he would. He's not an understanding man.'

Together they looked out on the Thames; the tide was in and to both of them the lap and smell of water brought longings for other waters; she for the streams and rhines of Somerset, he for his canals. 'I would give ten thousand pounds to be in Holland now.'

'You were homesick then.'

'I shall always be homesick. And now I cannot go home.' He'd got the stoop of a pedlar, as if England made a heavy pack.

They stood nodding at each other before he had a fit of coughing and hurried her to the fire, indicating that the Marquis could join them. 'You once did me great service, Mrs Hughes,' he said formally. 'In what may I serve you?'

She explained.

'Aphra Behn?' He connected the name with something disgraceful. 'One of my good Uncle Charles's favourites?'

'Not in that sense. He liked her plays.'

'The woman playwright.' He'd remembered. 'I hear she was bawdy.'

It will be her epitaph. Penitence was overcome by hopelessness. Well, if she couldn't get Aphra buried in the bloody Abbey on Aphra's merits, perhaps she could get her there through her own. 'I want her in Poets' Corner. That's the boon I beg.'

'Poets' Corner?'

'The South Transept. In Westminster Abbey.'

'Ach, Westminster Abbey.' The King turned to the Marquis. 'You missed a comedy there, Anthony. The Coronation was virtually a Popish ceremony. In my shirt to the waist, kneeling I was. It was very draughty. And too much music.'

'Sire,' said Penitence, sharply, 'my friend lies unburied outside the West Door. Give me permission to inter her in the South Transept.'

'Ask me for something else.'

'What?' She'd rescued this little Dutchman from ignominy. Damn it, she'd held his head while he was sick.

'Ask me for anything else. Ask me for Devonshire. Ask me for a duchy. Ask me for jewels, for the hand of this Marquis in marriage. You shall have them all.'

'But I don't want any of these things. I want the little bit of earth my friend has deserved.'

'No, you don't.' He sat back down in his chair. His face had become impassive. 'Mrs Hughes, you are asking me to interfere with the Church of England. My uncle lost his throne for that and I will not follow him. I told you once that the overriding principle of my life is to oppose the advance of France, and that I cannot do if I am fighting the Church of my own realm. No.'

'Thank you, Your Majesty.' She swept him her best theatre curtsey and turned to go, but the Marquis's hand reached out and gripped her arm.

'Your Majesty,' he said, 'the Abbey is a Royal Peculiar.'

William Ill's face remained expressionless. Penitence didn't like it any more. 'It is peculiar certainly. In what way Royal?'

'It means that it is under the jurisdiction of no bishop nor archbishop, only the King's. It is the sovereign's free chapel and exempt from any ecclesiastical jurisdiction but the sovereign's.'

'Therefore?'

The Marquis turned to Penitence. The grave's dug?'

'Yes.'

'And you think that once the coffin's in they won't move it?'

'Yes.'

'Therefore, Your Majesty, you have the right to give permission for a subject ...' He raised an eyebrow at Penitence. '... fifty subjects to enter your own Abbey. What they do when they get there is something else again.'

'It will cause trouble, Anthony.'

William, you must get used to trouble. You're in England now.'

Coughing, the King went to his table, scribbled some lines on a piece of paper, came back and gave it to Penitence. 'There.'

She didn't say thank you. The paper wasn't that big.

'Show Mrs Hughes out, if you would be so good, Marquis. Then return. We have to deal with Scotland.'

She went out frontwards and without a word. In the vestibule the Marquis handed her Aphra's pen from where he'd put it on a table.

She was numbed by the ingratitude of kings. 'I should have left him without his breeches.'

'Good God, not him as well!'

'Oh, Henry,' she said. 'When are you going to let yourself off the hook?' and left him staring after her.

Penitence had a stitch in her side by the time she reached Westminster and paused to catch her breath. Across the square the coffin lay surrounded by flares on the green in front of the Abbey. Nat Lee was sitting on it; beside him was a hogshead of wine from which he was refilling beakers with a ladle. With their capacity for enjoying any occasion, the players had turned the cortege into a party. The funeral cart and horses had gone, but the drummer had stayed and been joined by a fiddler and some of the mourners were dancing, Benedick with one of the actresses — it looked like Elizabeth Barry — Dogberry with Becky Marshall, Payne with Chloe. Passers-by, mostly beggars and street-walkers, had come up to sample Nat's generosity.

Further off the prebendaries had gathered by the entrance to the Cloisters in a watchful, disapproving group, though Penitence glimpsed a leather bottle doing the rounds there as well. The Archdeacon, who was showing a tendency to lie down, had been propped against a mounting block.

The only people who weren't enjoying themselves were the string of Abbey Yeomen disconsolately guarding the West Door.

Penitence was relieved; no soldiers or constables had been called in; the City of Westminster was administered by the Abbey and the Dean and Chapter were careful to guard its rights without outside help.

In that moment the scene resembled a beach, the invader's camp lit by flickering lights, the defenders standing with their backs against the towering cliff of the West Front covered with the barnacles and roots of its elaborate carving. The battle-lines were drawn, old enemies, the Arts versus the Church.

Such solid ranks against her, so untroubled by doubt or amusement, so certain of others' sin.

Such a rag-tag army, her side. Tipsy entertainers, beggars, writers, a gibbering escapee from Bedlam, publicans, whores.

Aphra would have approved.

So, now she came to think of it, had Jesus.

It went out of control, like wars do - unexpectedly. A ghostly line of small white surplices issued from round the comer on invisible feet, snaking towards the West Door. It was time for Evening Service. Automatically, one of the Yeomen of the Guard unlocked the door and opened it to allow the choir entrance, showing the candle-illuminated interior of the nave.

Penitence began to cross the road.

Nat Lee stood up on Aphra's coffin, shrieking and pointing at the light. Somebody's trained voice shouted 'Decus et Dolor!' and Aphra's army went into the attack.

By the time Penitence had got to the green, the coffin had gone, borne up like a battering ram on many shoulders; she thought she saw her son's among them.

'Decus et Dolor!' Elizabeth Barry was beating back a Yeoman trying to bar its way with her heavily loaded pocket, two more actresses and Chloe, Aphra's cap over one ear, had jumped on another and were clinging round his neck.

Penitence ran to join the battle. So did the prebendaries, two of them trying to restrain Nat Lee who was hammering a third of the group with its own bottle.

The coffin's rush had got it through the door, but the pallbearers had been forced to put it down and Betterton, Creech and Payne had their backs to it, swords out, defending its position against a contingent of guards.

It was amazing how many weapons the Abbey held. Such prebendaries as weren't armed already were wrenching halberds from the fists of statuary warriors and throwing funerary vases. But the armoury was open to all; Rebecca Marshall was standing on the bent back of a street-walker and reaching up for a lance holding regimental colours. Dogberry had grabbed a candle-holder from the Chapel of St George and was wielding it like a pike.

The noise went up a hundred feet to the vaulted roof, whipped across tombs to echo back off the gilded figures of saints. Grimacing faces ducked and shouted behind the calm of marble effigies.

All masks were off. Penitence had expected the hatred of the Church, but what amazed her was the ferocity of her friends, as if Aphra was just a rallying point for a hundred years of condemnation. Some pent-up element was loose in the Abbey,- licence against censure, restriction against liberty, the acceptable against the possible, both sides were released in the pagan joy of hitting. The original cause of the fight was forgotten.

The choir, escaped from the Master, had relapsed into boys who were joining in with yells in high trebles. One had butted Sam Bryskett's stomach and another was impartially biting a prebendary's leg. She jumped on to the coffin and heard her own voice ridiculously shouting: 'On, on, you noblest English. To Poets' Corner.'

There was an answering roar and she was tipped off as beggars and Betterton, yelling more Shakespearean war-cries, swept Aphra towards the choir. But the forces of the Church rallied half-way up the nave and, with the gates of the Henry VII Chapel forming a backdrop, pressed the coffin back to the side door to the Cloisters.

Penitence's head had hit a pillar and she'd lost interest for a moment, until she heard the rasp of a sword and saw the soberer prebendary advancing on her, glaring. 'On guard, whore.'

The man's mad. But so was she. She crouched in the position John Downes had taught her with her left hand quirked out and Aphra's pen upraised. The soberer prebendary lunged and his sword-tip slashed her sleeve, scratching her arm as she parried with half a pen. 'God damn it,' she shouted, 'you're not supposed to do that.'

No appreciation of theatre, this man, a killer. Oh my God, he is. The man's eyes gleamed. There was froth at his mouth. He wasn't going to stop when the curtain came down. She dodged behind a sarcophagus. After all she'd been through she was going to die in a farce. There was blood on her hand as she raised it to protect herself. He was about to lunge for her chest.

Another figure stepped in front of her. 'That's not very nice' said a voice to her opponent. It had said the same thing to her other opponents.

She collapsed on to the sarcophagus. The soberer prebendary didn't like the change but was out of control and didn't mind who he killed. 'Whoremonger,' he screamed.

'Oh, really,' said the Marquis of Severn and Thames, crossly, 'I haven't got time for this.' He pressed the man back between the pillars of the triforium into the shadows. She heard a clang and they came out again, the Marquis clutching the soberer prebendary by the collar, pulling him towards Penitence. 'Mrs Mahomet, I presume?'

Tears were falling down her face as her gratitude for the man streamed upwards in prayer. He'd come when, if his jealousy had been stronger than his care for her, he would have stayed away. His presence was an acknowledgement. He'd let himself off the hook.

He looked down at her. 'Have you ever thought of taking up a quiet pursuit? The army? Gun-running? Something contemplative?'

She shook her head and closed her eyes for a moment. 'I love you, Henry,' she said.

'That's all very well, but every time I have to come and rescue you I offend some king or another. William was put out that I cut him short to come and get you out of trouble — yet again. We're running out of kings.'

'Never mind,' she said. 'This time you get to keep me.'

'Do I?'

'Yes,' she said, 'you do.' She looked into his face. What had done it she didn't know but something in him had won a battle over something else; his love had overcome the whatever-it-was — jealousy, masculine pride — that had kept him from surrendering to it until now. He was amused but rueful. After all, if one thing wins another is defeated. She knew it was the better part of him that had gained the victory but he had yet to be persuaded. Well, she had the rest of her life in which to persuade him. It was a nice thought.

He said, peering at her arm, then at the tomb, 'Do you know you're bleeding over Lady Jane Clifford?' He helped her to her feet and supported her as they went towards the noise that had transferred itself to beyond the Cloister door which stood open amid a litter of broken urns.

As they made their way towards it, the Archdeacon staggered in from the western end holding his head. The wreckage of his abbey sobered him. 'Sacrilege!'

Henry bowed and introduced himself without letting go of the prebendary's collar. 'This lady is entrusted with a letter from His Majesty, who has now sent me to express his disquiet at this business. Show him, Boots.' He regarded the paper Penitence produced from her sleeve. It was indecipherable with blood. 'Ah. Well. Perhaps you would permit me to tell you what it says.'