Chapter 5

Penitence was sworn in as one of His Majesty's Servants on a fine non-performance day at the beginning of June at the Lord Chamberlain's house in Whitehall. She was dressed in latest 'shepherdess' fashion: a straw hat as big as a coachwheel with blue satin ribbons tied under her chin matching the bows on her silver-kid shoes, a dress of sprigged cream muslin over silk petticoats and a hidden whalebone bodice which cupped her bosom into globes. An inch of lace saved her nipples from exposure — as long as she didn't bend too far forwards.

She copied Knipp and Marshall in using a walking-cane more as an accessory than an aid, arm extended, fingers quirked, but whereas Knipp's and Marshall's were the usual mock-ivory affairs smuggled out of the property cupboard, hers was gilded and carved in the shape of a shepherd's crook, a token of esteem from the Drury Lane butchers.

The ceremony, like the Lord Chamberlain himself, was dignified and short. Hart, Kynaston and Lacy stood beside her in the scarlet and gold livery of royal players; Penitence was disappointed to find that the King's actresses weren't presented with a suit of clothes when they were sworn in, only a gold medallion with Charles's head on it.

As they stepped out into the sunshine and St James's Park, Hart said: 'How do you feel now, young Peg?'

'Official.' It was a delicious sensation, as if she'd been a thing of two dimensions and, pop, expanded into three.

Two pubescent girls spied her from under the limes and came rushing up, dragging their father with them. 'Oh Mrs Hughes, we saw you ... indeed, we did, but yesterday. In The Great Favourite.'

Their father swept off his hat: 'These chits of mine try to say, ma'am, that at last we have seen nobility tread England's boards again. We thank you.'

Penitence bowed.

'Bribed,' said Lacy as they walked on. The others nodded sadly.

Penitence examined her fingernails. 'Nobility,' she sighed. 'What a shame more of us don't have it.'

Kynaston stared around him: 'And this whippersnapper, this ungrateful weanling, this serpent's tooth, now expects us to treat her.'

'Let's go to Potiphar's for one,' said Becky Marshall.

'Let's stay in the park,' said Lacy, careful with his money, 'I'll stand her a milk.'

'Let's go to Gwynn's house,' said Knipp, 'and the King can stand us all a wine.'

It was a little early. As Lacy pointed out: 'Better not catch him with his breeches down.'

It was no hardship to saunter along the lake edge and watch the ducks and pelicans. Penitence had a moment of guilt that she was not spending this free time with Benedick - she was kept so hard at it nowadays learning scripts for productions which frequently only lasted a night before being replaced by another that the words she most often addressed to him were 'Run away and play, darling. Mother's busy.' As for the others at the Cock and Pie, virtually her only intercourse with them took place if they came backstage after the performance and walked her home.

Why shouldn't I have some pleasure? This had become another standard phrase. For all its work and tensions, King's was like some marvellous pantry to which she had been given the freedom after a lifetime of starvation. Moments like this, relaxed in lovely surroundings among peers whose creativity she respected as they respected hers, whose shop talk was of consuming interest, were addictive candied cherries.

They were in their playground. In the City, among nouveau riche financiers and merchants, they were less inclined to display themselves, especially the actors when identifiable in livery. There the old Puritan ethic was still in evidence and they could be subject to abuse from citizens who objected to the more risque plays, or even the occasional handful of horse manure thrown by a prudish apprentice. Here, among the parks, palaces and gardens of the old money, they were surrounded by their audience.

Though even here, she noticed, her companions were keeping a look-out and not just in order to acknowledge the salutes of their adorers. They were still vulnerable to the fury of a wronged husband or wife, or even some rake who had been pilloried by one of the wits' plays or prologues, and who blamed the actor who spoke the offence rather than the author. Last week Hart had been nearly run through by an inflamed fop who'd recognized his own posturing in a prologue written by Howard.

They wandered on to where the milkmaid was calling as her cows grazed around her. 'Ah,' Lacy said to her, 'sweet child, whose breath is your own and scents all year long of June, like a new-mown haycock.'

'Just tell us how many you want,' said the milkmaid, wearily.

'Seven,' said Lacy.

They sat down on a bench while the maid squatted, put her large, red hands round an udder's teats and squirted them towards the pail.

'I'm sorry the King didn't attend the inauguration, Peg,' said Kynaston. 'He was there for mine.'

'Ah,' said Becky Marshall, 'but you didn't refuse the King's invitation to bed beforehand.'

'He never asked.' Kynaston fluttered his eyelashes, and turned on Penitence. 'You didn't. Did you?'

'She cocking well did,' said Knipp. 'Chiffinch came into the green room yesterday and put it to her.'

'I didn't know who he was,' explained Penitence. At first he'd been just another among the hot-eyed, well-dressed men who crowded into the actresses' tiring-room after a performance. 'I didn't know he was the King's pimp. It was so ... oblique.' Her voice became lofty: 'His Majesty had enjoyed my interpretation, and should I wish to avail myself of the Privy Stair at any time, His Majesty would be graciously pleased.'

'Stupid colonial, she didn't know what the Privy Stair was,' crowed Anne Marshall, kicking her legs in the air at her amusement. 'She thought she was being given the freedom of the royal water closet next time she was in Whitehall.'

Kynaston clapped his hands over his mouth.

'What did you say?' breathed Hart.

Penitence grimaced. 'I said, thank you, but I usually went before I left home.'

Amid whoops of joy, the milkmaid shoved a tray holding seven beakers at Lacy. 'Tenpence ha'penny,' she said. 'And I ain't got change.'

Wiping his eyes, Lacy counted out the coins. 'Whatever became of the Arcadian spirit?' he asked.

'Never touch it,' said the milkmaid, and whacked the leader of her herd on its rump to discourage its interest in Knipp's flowered hat.

'Will Old Rowley be cross?' asked Penitence. It worried her slightly. She was making a good story out of the incident, but she'd quickly realized who Chiffinch was that evening, and what he was asking. Appearing to misunderstand had seemed the best way of avoiding a situation she had no intention of getting into. She wanted to make a career from acting, not whoring.

'Nah,' said Knipp. 'He's been turned down before. Frances Stewart insisted on keeping her cherry and turned him down in public.'

'I don't know, Peg,' said Lacy, 'he's my king and I love him and-he-died-and-then-she-died, but odd things happen when he's insulted. Look at poor Coventry's nose.'

A shudder ran round the group; mutilation of their looks was the players' nightmare. Coventry's had come about from a debate in the House of Commons when a member, trying to avert a tax on playhouses, had pointed out what pleasure the King derived from the theatre. 'From the actors? Or the actresses?' Sir John Coventry had asked. Next day, walking in the park, he'd been waylaid by ruffians and had his nose slit.

'Come along, my little republican,' said Kynaston. Wiping off their milky moustaches, the King's servants strolled on, twitting Penitence for her lack of patriotism. 'Would you have gone up the Privy Stair?' she enquired of Becky Marshall.

'I wasn't asked.'

'But would you have?' She didn't regret turning down the King's offer — she'd have felt more of a whore in the King's bed than on the blankets of Newgate's condemned cell or even than she did on Killigrew's couch - but until Chiffinch had bowed and gone she hadn't realized the enormity of what she'd done and its possible consequences. And though the actors were teasing, she sensed surprise that she priced her tarnished virtue so high.

'No,' said Marshall.'Why?' Penitence was comforted but curious. Unlike her sister, Becky had gravitas. While Anne took lovers, all of them rich and generous, the younger Marshall accepted gifts without giving more than her company at dinner in return and made it clear that only those prepared to make an honourable offer need apply.

Marshall slowed her walk so that the two of them fell behind. 'Like you, 1 don't believe in absolute monarchy — in bed or out.' She dropped her voice. 'One doesn't bruit it about, but Stephen Marshall was our father's cousin.'

'Presbyterian Stephen Marshall?' Penitence was impressed. In Massachusetts the Reverend Marshall's reputation for saintli- ness was high. Under the Commonwealth his bones had been interred with honour in Westminster Abbey. They'd been thrown out after Charles's restoration. It was strange to discover an actress related to such a Nonconformist divine.

Stranger still, Becky said: 'My father followed him into the Presbyterian Church, but, of course, the Conventicles Act has stopped him preaching.' She smiled. 'He has no high regard for his daughters' honour, but he might be comforted to hear we both draw the line at sleeping with a Papist like Rowley.'

'Is the King a Papist?' The word still vibrated with Puritan abhorrence.

'Oh yes,' said Becky Marshall, calmly. She nodded to the others ahead. 'Though you wouldn't get our friends there to believe it.'

They were walking along a narrow path edged by the canal on one side and pollarded willows on the other. A little way beyond the trees a coach had drawn up. As they passed it they saw its driver's seat was empty and its curtains drawn. Marshall was saying how dangerous it was to leave horses unattended when the coach door opened and two men jumped down. Penitence just had time to recognize Sir Hugh Middle- ton before both men grabbed her and began dragging her towards the coach where a third man was holding open the door. She screamed.

Marshall was running after them, shouting for help. One of the captors had to release his hold to fend her off, and Penitence managed to get her arm round a tree trunk. Her face scraped against bark as they pulled her away, wrenching her arm, but the delay had given the players time to reach her. She had a confused impression of the actors, swords drawn, in approved fencing positions encircling her and Middleton, who was clutching the back of her dress, shouting: The slut's mine. I adore her.'

'Let her go.'

The other man released her and ran back to the coach. Penitence kicked backwards, connecting her brand-new high heel with Middleton's shin. His hand tore her dress as he let it go and began hopping, rubbing his leg. 'She's mine. I want her.'

Lacy, recognizing farce when he saw it, sheathed his sword. 'Get back in the coach, Sir Hugh, there's a good lad.'

Middleton's face crumpled and he dithered his hands, like a frustrated baby. 'But I want her.'

'Not today.' Kynaston and Hart marched him back to his coach, watched it pull away, then bowed gracefully to a crowd that had hurried up to watch.

It had turned into a performance and Penitence, shaking, responded to it by bewailing her torn dress and ruined hat as if they were her grievance. In a way they were; she still owed dressmaker and milliner £20. But the true shock was not so much the assault as the words Middleton had been hissing at her as he'd dragged her away, protesting his adoration with vituperation so violent it had been like the snarls of a predator with a rabbit in its jaws. Knipp had been right. We are prey.

Knipp and Anne Marshall exclaimed over her grazed face. It was Becky who insisted that something be done. She was furious. 'What are we? Animals?' she raved. 'All we do is try to earn a living, and they think they can snatch us up like stray dogs. This isn't the first time. And what about that fop who nearly raped Knipp in the tiring-room the other night? Where's the King? I'm going to give him a piece of my mind.'

'It's not his fault Middleton's a lunatic,' said Kynaston, reasonably.

We're under his protection, he can damned well protect us. Where is he?'

It was easy enough to find him; Charles II was the most accessible of kings. The first person they asked directed them to Pall Mall. A crowd hid him, but as they came up it emitted an admiring 'ooh' at a ball which curved into the air above its heads and through one of the loops hanging from the gibbetlike poles along the course that was out of the actors' view. Suddenly it scattered as a less well-directed ball went skywards. Determinedly, Marshall led her force into the gap.

Penitence held back; reaction was making her feel sick. She could hear Marshall's voice expostulating and the news being passed around the spectators. Becky meant well, but she wished she wouldn't fuss. She didn't want to be drawn to the King's attention.

A very tall shadow blocked out the sun. 'Mrs Hughes. Allow me.' A hand under her elbow led her to the shade of an oak tree. The figure beside her took off its coat, folded it neatly and put it on the ground. Gratefully, Penitence sank on to it.

'You're hurt, ma'am. Allow me to fetch a doctor.'

The voice was deep and prim. The face high above her was unmistakably a Stuart's, the same swarthiness, same jawline, cleft chin and dark eyes. Only the mouth was distinctive, being thinner and less sensuous than the King's and more intelligent than James's. Below the hairline of his periwig an old scar formed an ugly dent of puckered skin. This man was even taller than the royal brothers, about six foot four, had seen more years and, from the look of him, had liked them less, but at the moment he was registering an almost nervous concern. 'A restorative, ma'am. At least permit me to fetch a restorative.'

'Thank you, sir. It's nothing.'

'It was a foul assault so I have just heard. But give the word, ma'am, and I'll horsewhip the varlet into the next country.' It was said with an energy which sent a thrush in the branches above his head flying to a quieter perch.

'You are kind, sir.' She smiled in real appreciation. 'But I think His Majesty is being asked to take action. I'm one of his players.'

'Indeed. I had the privilege to see your Desdemona but last week.'

That's who he was. It had been an occasion when the house was exceptionally well ordered and Hart had explained: 'Prince Rupert's in the audience. The stinkards daren't misbehave while Rupert's around.' The romance still attached to the name of Charles I's great cavalry general had sent twitters of expectation round the tiring-room, but the Prince had disappointed them by merely sending his compliments. Penitence, too, had been curious to see the commander who'd written the news of her father's death to her mother with such courtesy.

Now here he was, an ageing, embittered-looking hawk of a man and, at the moment, ill-at-ease. There was a silence.

'I prefer Shakespeare to the taradiddle they put on nowadays,' said Prince Rupert.

'We're performing Hamlet next week,' she told him.

'With yourself as Ophelia?'

'Yes.'

'I shall be in attendance.'

There was another silence and they both studied a herd of deer grazing nearby. It was a relief when the crowd by the pell-mell course opened to let a group of courtiers, led by the King, walk in her direction.

Prince Rupert assisted Penitence to her feet and bowed. 'I shall instruct the troopers to keep back the rabble. Farewell, ma'am.'

'Thank you, Your Highness.'

Sedley and Rochester had been among those pell-melling with the King and all three were in their waistcoats. Charles II expressed a lazy concern as Penitence raised herself from her curtsey. He cupped her under her chin: 'Oddsfish, did the villain scrape this peach? He shall die, what do you say, Rochester?' His eyes were amused and gently malicious.

Did he set Middleton on? She dismissed the thought as unworthy. But he's not displeased that it happened.

The Earl of Rochester said: 'Chop his head off, sire. We need a new pell ball.'

'More than one,' said Sir Charles Sedley. 'Let's detach him from another part of his anatomy.'

Poor Becky Marshall was still trying to instil some of her outrage into the royal ears but she had been wrong-footed and merely sounded shrill.

There was a piercing whistle from the wall which marked the garden end of the houses flanking the pell-mell court and where, to the delight of the crowd, Nell Gwynn had climbed up from the far side of hers and was leaning over to find out what had happened.

Some two hundred people now pressed against the restraining troopers to listen to their king explain the situation to his mistress.

"You all right, Peg?'

'Yes, thank you, Nelly.'

'Now you listen to me, Charlie,' said Gwynn. Your Majesty, I mean. There's too much of it. We get it all the time, in the tiring-room, outside. You got to put a stop to it.'

'Get what, Mrs Gwynn?' asked Rochester, slyly.

'Too much of you. Treating us like we was common as hedges,' said Gwynn. She flirted as she scolded, playing the jester-mistress. The crowd was loving it.

Charles staggered back in mock surrender. 'Pax, O fair one. It shall be done. Laws shall be passed. Edicts issued.'

This game was obviously going to go on for some time. Penitence wondered if she could go home.

The only one paying her attention was Sir Charles Sedley. She felt his shirt-sleeved arm slip under hers. 'I told you you'd need a protector,' he said.

In the end nothing came of it. A sulky Sir Hugh was reprimanded by the Lord Chamberlain. The King ordered members of the audience banned from the actresses' tiring-room, but nobody took any notice.

Neither did Prince Rupert attend the performance of Hamlet. On that same day, 10 June, the Dutch fleet appeared at the mouth of the Medway and bombarded the fort commanding it into surrender before sailing upriver, burning three of the biggest vessels in the Royal Navy and towing off its flagship as a prize.

The news reached Whitehall the next morning.

Charles and James reacted with the energy they had shown during the Great Fire and immediately took horse to supervise personally the sinking of ships in the Thames so that the enemy should be blocked from further advance. The militia was called out in every county and a large field army raised with commendable speed. But although they limited the harm, this time they got no praise. This time, the reverberation of cannon that travelled up the Thames to the ears of Londoners came only from enemy guns.

The Royal Navy had been caught napping, and the greatest damage was political.

Penitence heard the news in Dog Yard as she set out for the theatre. Even in the Rookery, usually unconcerned with anything happening outside a half-mile radius, angry knots of people gathered in Dog Yard to ask the pleasant June air what things were coming to. By Holborn the knots had become crowds. Drury Lane was almost impassable. She detected little panic, only rage. The country had suffered the worst humiliation in its naval history and the howl wasn't directed so much against the Dutch who'd committed the offence, as at those who should have prevented it. She struggled through crowds surrounding upturned tubs on which furious men ranted against the government, Lord Chancellor Clarendon, even against Charles II.

On one tub a man with clerical tippets on his ragged collar was whipping up the anti-Catholicism that seethed just under the surface of any English Protestant crowd. 'Punish the Papists who wind their heresies around our king and make him weak. The Whore of Babylon is loose in the court.' One of his listeners took the opportunity to shout: 'She ain't the only one.'

Further on another tub-thumper was calling up an equally powerful genie: 'And what I say is: Where's our taxes gone? Eh? What they doing with our money if they ain't spending it on our defence. Eh?' He was supplied with the answer he wanted. 'On the back of that Papist bitch, Castlemaine.' The jewels and palaces with which the King had loaded Barbara Villiers, now the Duchess of Cleveland, for keeping his bed warm were resented by the Drury Laners in a way that his conspicuous spending on the latest favourite, Nell Gwynn, was not. Nelly was one of their own and a good Protestant; Castlemaine was haughty and a Roman Catholic and a useful scapegoat.

Passing the butchers' stalls, Penitence was called over to a Dogberry surrounded by fellow-traders, flies and hanging halves of beef. 'She'll know,' he said. 'Here, Pen, is it right last night while the Dutch was attacking, the King was careering around with his women hunting a bloody moth?'

She was glad to dissociate herself from the doings of the court. 'I'm just a poor actress, William. I'm not in that circle.'

'It's bad though, Pen. Iffen you see him, you tell him. We didn't survive the bloody Plague so's we could be murdered in our beds. It wouldn't have happened in good Queen Bess's time. Nor Cromwell's neither.'

It was the first time since arriving in England she'd heard the late Lord Protector's name mentioned with approbation. It seemed that King Charles II's honeymoon with his common people was over.

Her fellow-players were gloomily gathered on stage for rehearsal. She made her apologies for being late. 'Everybody's blaming the King more than the Dutch. They don't seem to be blaming the Dutch at all.'

'Well, it shouldn't have happened, Peg,' said Lacy. 'The Medway fort was only half built, ran out of money. And they say the navy's sinking for lack of supplies.'

'He'll have to treat with the Dutch now,' said Kynaston, 'The war's ruining us.'

"We should never have fought them in the first place.' Becky Marshall was betraying her Presbyterian sympathies. 'I don't mind the Dutch. It's the French who worry me.'

John Downes called Penitence to the wings. 'Letter for you.'

She broke the seal and read neat, but hurried, writing.

 

I go to plant cannon at Woolwich and down the Medway. Pities be that 1 was not allowed to do so before, as I urged, and that I shall not have the pleasure in watching perform the lady whom I regard as England's noblest actress. May you be in God's keeping and excuse your devoted servant, Rupert.

'Interesting?' asked John.

'From Prince Rupert,' she told him, 'he's gone to war.'

'God love him. He was on our wing at Edgehill, the mad sod. Pity there aren't more like him nowadays.'

Hart's complaint reached them: 'No doubt our audience today, if we have one at all, will be meagre, but do you think it might just possibly notice if Ophelia isn't in it...?'

The audience that afternoon was meagre indeed; for once there were more 'vizards', as the players called the pit prostitutes, than customers, and even they kept clustering in irritating groups to whisper the latest news of the blockade. Hart did his best, but as the four captains bearing Hamlet offstage reached the wings, the corpse was heard to remark: 'Bugger Shakespeare. We're doing Dryden from here on.'

Penitence didn't like Dryden's heroic drama. His rhyming couplets were more difficult to speak than Shakespeare's blank verse - good as far as rhyming couplets went, sometimes even sublime, but needing a lot of work if they weren't to sound banal — and she found his female characters flat; for all their bravura speeches on love and sacrifice, they were empty of humanity.

She didn't like Dryden much either. The genius was there and the poet's country-dumpling head was packed with more learning than any head had a right to be, but she found him curiously lacking in conviction. He had a chameleon quality, a theatre man when among actors, a watchful rake when among rakes, the complete courtier in the presence of the King.

One day, when he was rehearsing them for The Rival Ladies, she placed him. There'd been a quarrel between Anne Marshall and Knipp over who was upstaging whom and Dryden had to separate them. 'Come, come, ladies, a theatre is as it were a little commonwealth, by the good government whereof God's glory may be advanced.'

'A Puritan,' exclaimed Penitence, recognizing a misquotation from the book of management that had dictated her childhood, ' "an household is as it were a little commonwealth" ... how do you know Dod and Cleaver, Master Dryden?'

She was taken aback by his fury: 'And how do you know it, madam? Were you of the Levelling rabble?'

'Neither Levellers nor rabble,' she said. She didn't let insults pass nowadays. 'But people who used their tongues with courtesy.'

Later he sought her out and apologized. 'Though it does no good, Mrs Hughes, to insist on an upbringing hateful both to us and our royal master.'

She shrugged. 'I neither insist on it nor conceal it.'

Discussing the incident with Aphra, she said: 'He's a trimmer. He wrote fulsome praise of Cromwell during the Protectorate. Now he's the complete royalist. I hate trimmers.'

'You're not a playwright dependent on patronage,' said Aphra, who was still unsuccessfully hawking her writing around town. 'But you're happy enough to speak the words he writes. I don't blame the poor man. I'd praise the Devil if I thought he'd put my play on.'

Chastened, Penitence had to admit that Dryden knew what the public wanted. England's pride had been hurt; its people had to look backwards to find heroism and principle, aware their own age had none.

Dryden provided both qualities with grandeur. He also provided spectacle. Killigrew groaned at the expense of exotic costumes, the dancers, the equipment to enable gods and goddesses to descend from the heavens in cars and spirits to rise from the underworld, the storms, the dungeons, the magical effects. But audiences loved it. Crowds flocked in. The carriage trade blocked Drury Lane in both directions.

And it was Peg Hughes it saw. Her blonde hair and height advantage over the other actresses, nearly all of whom were shorter and dark, the stateliness of her walk, thanks to John Downes's training, and the careful diction with which she still had to control her stutter made her Dryden's ideal heroine. 'The perfect Englishwoman,' he said.

That she played an Inca maiden in The Indian Queen and a Spanish girl dressed as a boy in The Rival Ladies didn't matter; Englishness set in exotic climes was what Dryden gave them.

And rant.

'Die, sorceress, die! And all my wrongs die with thee,' shrieked Penitence as she plunged home a stage dagger during the first performance of The Rival Ladies, wondering whether the audience would laugh, and instead hearing it drag in its breath with horror.

She became expert at tortuous lines:

Oh, my dear father! Oh, why may not I,

Since you gave life to me, for you now die?

 

and made them, if not natural, at least thrilling.

 

O Lust! O horror! O perfidy!

 

It seemed to her she emitted more 'O's' than verse. But Dryden's O's were turning her from a promising actress into the toast of London.

What she said became less important than the way she said it. She was gaining power in more ways than one. It only needed her name to figure in large type on a Dryden playbill for the Theatre Royal to be so packed as to be dangerous. Wits, rakes, fops no longer dared interrupt a Hughes—Dryden play for fear of being lynched by the pit. In any case, Penitence could now quell their hesitant jeers with a single 'O!'

Power. She knew what it was on the day Killigrew called her into his office before another performance of The Rival Ladies.

He was sitting on his couch, and patting it. 'Well, my dear girl,' he said, 'it's been a long time.'

She smiled at him and didn't move from the doorway. 'It has indeed, Sir Tom.'

He continued to pat. 'I knew,' he said, tilting his head at her, 'I knew when you were just a little walker you'd have London at your feet one day, and now you have.'

'Yes, Sir Tom.'

'All due to me, you know.'

'Thank you, Sir Tom.'

'Come and give us a kiss then.'

She planted one of her feet on the chair by his desk - she was in boy's costume. 'Davenant sent me round a note of congratulation the other day, Sir Tom. After he'd come to see The Indian Emperor.'

Killigrew had been confidently lounging. Now he sat up. 'Don't believe it. Whatever that street-juggling coxcomb promised you, don't you believe it.'

'I believe,' said Penitence, 'that he thinks I'm even better than Mrs Sanderson. I believe he pays Mrs Sanderson thirty-five shillings a week.'

'Nonsense. There's no actress in the world worth thirty-five shillings a week. Hart only gets two pounds a week. And don't you start blackmailing me, Miss Majesty. For one thing, the King wouldn't let you go.'

'I believe,' said Penitence, 'that Davenant will persuade the Duke to play his brother at cards for me. If I give the word. I believe that the King's been losing heavily lately.'

Sir Tom stood up, took off his wig and flung it to the floor. 'God damn all women. This is my reward for employing the bitches. I should have listened to the Puritans. I should have stuck to boys. I could have trained orang-utans better and cheaper, but no, in the goodness of my heart, I take a gaggle of bare-arsed geese out of the stews, turn them into swans and what happens?' He thrust his face close to Penitence's. 'Eh? They bite the bloody hand that feeds them.'

Penitence forced herself not to recoil. 'But is it going to feed me thirty-five shillings a week?'

Sir Tom jerked his chair from under her foot. 'You've got too big for your boots, madam.'

She looked down at her boots, a pair of gilded kid, cast-offs from one of Castlemaine's young royal bastards; they fitted perfectly. 'It's nearly curtain-up time,' she said. 'Do 1 go on today or don't I?' Even with the door closed, they could hear the subdued roar of a packed house coming from the auditorium. 'What?' Sir Tom had mumbled something.

'I said,' he said nastily, 'I suppose you'll have to go on. And don't blame me if the whole company goes bankrupt.'

'There's just one more thing,' she said. Might as well go the whole hog. 'I should like Dorinda to become a walker.'

'Who the hell's Dorinda?'

'The orange-girl.' Doesn't he remember anybody he leches?

'That Dorinda.' Sir Tom became reflective. 'Amazing girl. Twat like a corkscrew. Certainly, certainly.' He sighed. 'What's another harlot? Anything else, madam? No husband you want a dukedom for?'

'No thank you, Sir Tom. I have no husband.'

'That's a mercy for some poor devil. Now get out on that stage. And I tell you this, madam, I'm regretting the day—'

'There is one last thing. I wish you would reconsider Aphra Behn's play.'

Killigrew got up, pushed past her, opened the door and pointed. 'Out. It's bad enough being blackmailed by sluts of actresses, but ruin myself with some female's scribble I shall not. Out.'

Penitence outed. Becky Marshall, also in boy's costume, was waiting for her in the corridor. 'Did it work?'

Penitence took her hands and swung her round. 'It worked. I avoided the couch and I got a rise.'

Her ambition leaped like a mountain goat into higher, greener pasture. It was true Hart received only a £2 a week salary, but as a shareholder in the company he also got £1,000 a year. Why shouldn't a woman become a shareholder?

Telling Dorinda that she had procured her at least a start in the theatre was another ferocious joy. As they walked home together that night, their plans ran into fantasy.

'I'll put Benedick's name down for Westminster School.'

'We can do up the Cock and Pie.'

'We could leave the Rookery altogether. We could move into Westminster.'

'Pity about Aphra's play.'

'We'll put it on ourselves. We'll have our own theatre.'

Drury Laners stared at them as they twirled along, their voices calling out into the summer evening.

At the entrance to Dog Yard Dorinda, at least, calmed down. 'I'll lease out the orange business. Can't afford to lose them profits.'

'Oranges,' scoffed Penitence. 'We won't need them for long. We're professional women now.'

'I always was,' said Dorinda.

'A real profession. Respectable. Well, respectable-ish. Oh, Dorry, we're independent. We can survive. We don't have to sleep with any man ever again.'

They stood in the middle of the Yard so long, transfixed by the thought, that Footloose came trundling over to see what was the matter. From the window of Mother Hubbard's where a new generation of girls had taken over from the old, a voice asked a passer-by: 'Want some fickytoodle, dearie?'

Penitence snatched Footloose's cap from his head and threw it in the air. 'We don't have to sleep with anybody ever again.'

'Lessen we want to,' said Dorinda, catching the cap and kissing the scabby head before replacing its covering.

Hearing their voices, Benedick came toddling out of the Cock and Pie's door. Penitence ran up the steps and lifted him before he fell down them. She put him on her shoulder and turned so that he could survey the empires of the earth.

Dog Yard was in the shadow cast by the tall wooden frame of Mother Hubbard's, but the sunset was gilding the tattered rooftops and the view beyond. 'We're rising, my son,' she said.

As Penitence rose so did the City of London. In place of the destroyed ancient forest of buildings sprang up an elegant plantation.

It wasn't as elegant as it might have been; Christopher Wren's visionary plan as Surveyor-General which would, if built, have rivalled Rome or the Paris redesigned by Henri IV, was rejected as too expensive. Obstruction, procrastination and corruption inevitably took the fine edge off even the compromise.

But if Wren wasn't allowed to design Utopia, he designed practically everything else. Under his supervision fifty-one churches began to raise their differing and beautiful steeples into the empty sky, some like pagodas, some tiered, or with columns, consoles and obelisks, some Flemish, others Gothic.

The labour to rebuild houses and shops, big or small, went on every day and sometimes into the night by the light of flares. Timber was brought not only from all over the country but from as far away as Norway. Brick kilns ringed the city with smoke, the one at Moorgate alone turning out over a million bricks a year.

Anguish for the past was replaced by pride in the new as a modern, wider-thoroughfared city of brick, stone and tile emerged from the ruins.

Yet for all the growth, there was a sense of incompleteness. Londoners up to their elbows in plaster would pause as they looked towards the uncrowned rise on which had floated the great whale to which their homes and churches had been the accompanying school of porpoises. It would take years, perhaps they would never live to see it; until St Paul's was resurrected London could not be London.

But up on the hill, a foundation stone was being laid without ceremony. 'Here,' Christopher Wren said. 'We'll start here. Get a flat stone and put it here.'

His workmen looked around the scree of fire-scarred rubble. 'Which one?'

'Any one.'

The nearest and flattest was part of an old gravestone; as they tipped it down on to the spot that Wren indicated they saw what word was on it.

'Resurgam.'

Entering his mother's bedroom for a morning kiss, Benedick took one look and yelled. Mistress Palmer came running. 'Gawdelpus, what you wearing that bloody thing for? You look like the Devil crapped hisself flying.'

Penitence was struggling to undo the mask strings that had got tied up with her back hair. 'I slept in it. It's got ... blast the thing, don't fret, darling, it's only Mama ... cream on the inside. It's to feed the skin. There, now give us a kiss.'

'You got bloody gloves on an' all.'

'Same thing. And I wish you'd watch your language in front of the boy.'

'I don't fright him shitless, that's one thing', and muttering that in her day they used soap and water, Mrs Palmer took herself off.

'We'll have to get you a tutor,' Penitence told her son.

'Don't want a tutor. You said MacGregor was my tutor. He's learning me—'

'Teaching.'

'—teaching me ever so well. You ain't heard me read my new horn book.' Benedick's small forefinger traced a 'B' in the grease on his mother's face. 'Will I read it to you now?'

'I've got to get up and make pretty.'

Benedick bounced up and down on her stomach. 'Why? Why do you? You said you was resting today. You said we'd go to the park.'

He was a dark-haired child with fine, sallow skin. As he glowered at Penitence just then she saw his father and shut her eyes to get rid of the image. So far the boy hadn't questioned his one-parent state — so many of his contemporaries in the Rookery lacked a father that it seemed a natural condition to him.

She was prepared for when he did. 'Your father is dead, Benedick.' She wanted Henry King dead. Every day she wanted him deader. The nights were a different matter, but by day she obliterated the man's personality. Each year increased her resentment at the ease with which he'd gone away and stayed away, until her memory of the man deliberately diminished him into the caricature of a seducer. She'd forbidden Dorinda and MacGregor to mention him.

The first time she heard his name at the theatre, when Hart and Lacy were discussing the possibility of putting on a translation of Tartuffe, it was a shock. 'I wish Henry

King were still with us,' Hart said. 'He was the Moliere expert.'

'Ah, Henry,' sighed Knipp, 'I miss him.'

It was like hearing that a centaur, some mythical creature, had once dropped in for tea. It was against her pride to seek more information, though she would have welcomed it unsought. There were other mentions, but none seemed to know where he had come from or gone to and, typical players that they were, concerned themselves with him only as he had affected their theatrical lives.

The momentary resemblance hardened her heart against the boy. 'I must shop for when I go to the races with the King,' she told him. 'You want Mama to look nice, don't you?'

'I wish he'd fight battles, then I could go. I want to go to war.'

She rinsed her face and began sorting through the silver-gilt boxes, tweezers and bowls that Sir Hugh Middleton had given her as a peace offering. 'Your Auntie Aphra should never have taken you to see Henry the Fifth.'

'Wasn't it grand when they killed all those Frenchies?'

'It wasn't very grand when the Frenchies killed the little boys in the baggage train.' Lemon juice on Spanish wool cleared the last of the grease from her face. A little cochineal went on the cheekbone as her son dispatched the nobility of France with her long-handled powder-puff.

'I wish I had a sword.'

You should have. We had to sell it. 'Sir Charles says he'll give you one he had as a boy.'

'Will he?' His face went sullen. 'Don't like Sir Charles Sedley-pedley-wedley. Why do you like him? He makes fun of me.'

'He makes fun of everybody. Powder-puff please.'

'Can't we go to the park?'

'Come here.' As he stood between her knees they looked at each other with mutual incomprehension. They spent so little time together that she was self-conscious when she talked to him. 'Benedick, you know when we went to Auntie Knipp's house?'

He nodded.

'And there wasn't much furniture in it?'

'It was cold.'

'It was cold. That's because she doesn't earn as much money as I do and can't buy coal. And that's because her husband doesn't let her go out and make friends. And if you don't make friends you don't get good parts to play and people don't give you presents.'

'Auntie Dorry's got lots of friends. She gets very good parts. Wasn't she bloody funny yesterday?'

'Very funny. I've told you not to swear.' Dorinda had now adopted the stage-name Roxolana she'd once suggested for Penitence, and her success on the boards had taken Penitence aback; having taught her friend everything she knew, it had been disconcerting to discover that, as far as comic timing went, Dorinda had a thing or two to teach her. 'But you do see, Benedick, that if you're to leam Latin and Greek and how to use a sword and—'

'And he died and then she died.'

She couldn't help grinning; he'd picked up theatre slang quickly. 'But you do see. We've got to have money if you're to go to school. And so I've got to go out and about.'

He'd lost concentration. 'I've got a lot of friends, haven't I? I've got the Tippins and—'

'Exactly' she said grimly. 'Now then. Shall I put a patch here? Or here?'

She gave the day's instructions to MacGregor and Mistress Palmer and stepped out into Dog Yard, the scent of 'Hughes' chypre which Charles Lillie of Lillie's-in-the-Strand had created especially for her battling against the Yard's stinks, and losing.

She kept to the terrace past the Ship in order to avoid the mud and ordure below the steps. Here I am — she always glissaded into this thought at this point — most popular actress in England and still living in this hell-hole.

"Morning, Pen.'

'Good morning, Sam.'

From the pawnbroker's across the way, Mistress Fulker, who was carrying on her dead husband's business, yelled: 'Time's up on that ticker, Pen. You going to redeem it or not?'

Everywhere else they treat me with respect. Should she redeem the watch or sell it? It was gold, a tribute from an unknown admirer. Unlikely that Mistress Fulker would pay anything near its true value. 'I'll speak to you tomorrow.' Damned if she was going to haggle in public.

She had to back away as a young Tippin ran up and seemed about to clutch her skirt. 'Here, Pen, can Benny come out to play?'

'No,' she told him, coldly. 'Benedick is at his lessons.'

I've got to get us out of here. Merely to emerge out of the Rookery with one's shoes and petticoat unstained was a problem. She had to refuse Sedley's offers to send a carriage for her because she dared not let his servants see the sort of place she lived in. She certainly couldn't afford a carriage of her own. Yet to rent a house in an area which sported pavements or even duckboards would take up too much of the money she was saving for Benedick's education.

She was less worried about the boy's health than she had been — anybody who could survive babyhood in the Rookery usually survived the rest. But unless she made a move soon, his language, let alone the bad habits he was picking up from the Tippins and their ilk, would debar him from a school like Westminster.

She'd thought a salary of £91 a year plus the money from her benefit performances plus the gifts, most of which she turned into cash, would be enough to maintain a decent lifestyle and, more importantly, her independence.

She'd reckoned without the necessity of appearing affluent. This was Restoration England. You were what you wore and how you wore it. She'd told Benedick the stark truth; Knipp was getting fewer and fewer parts, not because she was a bad actress, but because she had a jealous husband who suspected every present and who refused to allow her to make the social round of the coffee-shops where the playwrights — and it was playwrights who did the casting - hung out, or to appear in the park where the public appetite was whetted by the sight of its heroines. Knipp was disappearing.

If Peg Hughes was to stay visible, she had to buy silk stockings at 15s, scented gloves at 12s a pair, have her mantuas made in Italy, her shoes at St James's and her cosmetics in the Strand. The lace adorning her handkerchief alone cost 5s a yard. By rights she should have employed a personal hairdresser, but had managed to come to an arrangement with Nell Gwynn's, who moonlighted.

Holding her skirts high and lurching from one clean piece of ground to another she reached Holborn where the traffic had left so much manure that she had to pause and make a calculation, not only whether she should sacrifice a florin and hire a hackney to take her to the Royal Exchange but whether, by doing so, she would commit that gravest of social sins and arrive on time. 'Always keep 'em waiting,' Gwynn had advised her in a tutorial on how to treat men. Easy enough for Nelly, who never rose before midday, but an effort for Penitence, who had punctuality engraved on her soul. In the interest of her shoes, however, she hailed a hackney which, luckily, was delayed by the usual jam at the Poultry.

She loved the new Exchange. The grandeur of its piazza was made friendly by the arcades of shops around it. It was like standing at the ancient crossroad of the world watching the caravans go by to see the foreign merchants, Russians in furs, robed Arabs, Jews in their gaberdines, bargaining over sables, tea, coffee, tobacco, spices in this international Babel.

She posed herself in the great doorway and waited for attention, knowing she was worthy of it. Unable to afford the fashionable dressmakers, she employed one of the Huguenot women who'd settled in exile in the Rookery as seamstress. Her costume today was designed to wrong-foot the fripperiness that was getting out of hand. It was plain, dark blue broadcloth cut close-fitting to the waist and flowing out into a divided skirt, relieved only by white lawn collar and cuffs. Her hat, of the same dark blue, was like a cavalier's curled round by a white ostrich feather. The severity of the outfit would, she hoped, make a virtue of her lack of jewellery. Judging by the admiration she was attracting, it did.

She saw Rochester and Sedley start to cross the floor, then veer away as the six foot, four inches of Prince Rupert cut them off: 'Well met, Mrs Hughes. Will you take chocolate with me? One of my ships has brought in some particularly fine beans.'

Thank you, sir. Unfortunately, I am committed elsewhere.' She curtseyed. 'I hope you are pleased with the use I've made of the feather you gave me.'

He regarded her hat gravely. 'Even the ostrich would approve.' For Rupert that was a joke. She smiled as they stood together in one of their silences.

Abruptly he said: 'Will you do me the goodness of dining with me next Saturday? The invitation, of course, extends to your chaperone.'

Bless him. Only Rupert could think that modern society demanded chaperones. 'Thank you, sir, I shall be honoured.' The King had teased her: 'Take care that my besotted cousin doesn't storm your citadel as he stormed Lichfield, Mrs Hughes. He wasn't known as Hot Rupert for nothing.' But she'd be as safe with him as she was with MacGregor. His letters to her were a combination of studied, old-fashioned compliments and military communiques. She hoped very much that they could be friends, and nothing more.

The rakes came up, mocking, when he left her. 'What, Mrs Hughes?' asked Sedley, adopting a deep voice and a limp. 'You've never been drowned? You haven't lived. Do me the goodness to sail with me in my yacht. Coxswain, wheel to the right.'

Rochester limped on her left. 'Why you young whippersnapper, you should have been with us when we ate all Cromwell's babies in '42. That'd have made a man of you.'

'You're jealous,' said Penitence. They were even nastier about Rupert than about their female conquests once they'd slept with them, and with the same touch of self-disgust. It ate at them that they had never tempered their courage in war like Rupert and were reduced to showing it in idiotic duels. They were destroying themselves with debauchery because they couldn't die gloriously in battle.

'And you're late' said Sedley, proffering his arm. 'We're meeting the King and Nelly for dinner at the Bear later. His Majesty is pleased to be coming in disguise.'

'Which means everybody will recognize him,' said Rochester, 'but the bill will be presented to us. Shops?'

'Shops,' said Penitence.

'It's like watching an apothecary attempting to keep the flies off his treacle,' said Sir Charles, as she agonized over the price of ribbon.

'What is?'

Watching a pretty actress trying to keep her independence.'

'I'm going to, Charles,' she said, warningly. She was keeping him at arm's length, refusing his blandishments and his elaborate presents; he persisted with the assurance of one who knew she'd given in eventually. He alarmed her; she was frightened he might be right.

'Of course you are, of course you are. But pray permit me to buy the ribbon. It's nearly the blue of your eyes.'

"No, thank you.'

'My dear, this particular fly doesn't think a few shillings is the admission price to your honey pot. It merely gives him consequence to wear such a pretty creature on his arm.'

Rochester nuzzled her neck. 'Don't listen to him. He's a flesh-loving insect. He'll lay such a maggot in your cunt as all the medicine in the kingdom won't keep your reputation from stinking.'

She jerked away from him. Every so often the game they played turned into verbal violence. When they saw they'd perturbed her they'd woo her back with a line of verse that sang. She was being tenderized, bashed like a piece of meat to make her fit for their palate. They used their sophistication like a weapon. Already they'd beaten her into being more afraid of looking 'virtuous' - they made it a dirty word - than of protesting. She coped with them by appearing lazily un- shockable. 'Be easy, my lord,' she said, 'my price comes higher than a few yards of ribbon.'

But Sedley bought them anyway. And later on in the morning, as they turned into Will's Coffee-House, he tucked them into the front of her costume and, because the dress she was planning to wear at the races really needed ribbon, she pretended not to notice and left them there.

Dryden was in his usual place by the fire, celebrating his new status as Poet Laureate with his fellow-writers, and was put out by losing the attention of his audience to Penitence.

'Mrs Hughes, Mrs Hughes, have you read my play?'

'Mrs Hughes, I've a part for you will make your mouth water.'

'Mrs Hughes,' said Dryden, 'like the percipient artist she is, will concern herself only with plays that adhere to the unities.'

But Penitence had spotted an outlandishly dressed figure across the room and was running to it. 'Aphra. What are you doing here?'

They hugged. Though they lived in the same house, Penitence's hours and Aphra Behn's no longer coincided. It had been weeks since they'd had time to do more than greet each other on the stairs.

Aphra tipped her barbarously coloured cap to the back of her head. 'One has done it. I heard today.'

'Heard what?'

'Davenant's taking my play.'

'Oh, Aphra.' It was impossible. It was joyous. She had to blink back tears. 'I'm so glad. Which one?'

They dragged two stools to the back of the room and sat down to chat. 'The Forced Marriage.' Aphra's mouth gave a moue of pretended disapproval. 'Not one's best, but it's a start.'

'It'll run for a week. I'm so proud of you.'

'How ironic it will be at Duke's. I so wanted you for the lead.'

'My dear girl,' Penitence jerked her head towards the fireplace where Dryden still pontificated, 'unless it preserved the unities I couldn't possibly. What are the unities?'

'Lunacies,' said Aphra promptly. 'As if one could write to rule. But, my dear' — she took Penitence's hand - 'should it be a success, well, my brother has found us a little house . ..'

'You're not leaving the Cock and Pie?'

'We cannot batten on you for ever.'

'You haven't battened, you haven't.' Penitence's alarm lifted her voice so that Sedley, always aware of her, turned round to look. 'Don't go, Aphra.' It would be a relief to see the back of Mrs Johnson, but Aphra had brought poetry and intellectual enquiry into the Cock and Pie. 'What will Benedick do without you?' MacGregor had taught her son to read, but it was Aphra who'd taught him to love reading.

'He will visit his honorary aunt every day. As will you. But we are the new women, my dear, and must try for independence.'

Penitence shook her head. 'It's hard. You'll find it so hard.'

Sedley's scent enveloped them as he leaned over, rolling his eyes. 'Whose is hard? Don't quarrel over it, ladies. I can be hard enough for both of you.'

'Oh, shut up,' said Penitence wearily.

Immediately he became vitriolic, turning on Aphra. 'I hear you've been brought to bed of a play, mistress. Surely the infant is not all your own. Who is the father?'

God protect her. Penitence blew a kiss to Aphra and ushered him out, frightened for her friend. Spying for the King and a debtors' prison had been ease and comfort compared with what faced a woman who was preparing to compete in a world in which every wit and half-wit fancied himself a playwright. God, protect her.