Chapter 2

 

The last time Penitence had been in London, Titus Oates had just emerged as the uncoverer of a Popish Plot to hand England over to the Jesuits. With some of the King's players she had gone to see him on his soapbox in Hyde Park, declaiming to listening crowds the same story that he was telling the Privy Council: there was a plot between Louis XIV, the Jesuits and English Catholics to kill the King and conquer England for France.

It had been an exceptionally hot day in an exceptionally hot summer; she'd been surprised by the size of the crowd prepared to stand crushed together to hear the man.

'Isn't he a picture?' Lacy said. 'Listen to him.'

Her view obscured by the press in front of her, to listen was all Penitence could do at first. The voice was more a wail than speech, like a bad actor depicting the throes of grief.

'Brethren,' it sobbed, 'they have burned down our city once, are we to stand by while they do it again? For they will. Oh yes, in their malignity, they will. I have heard their plans.'

She had looked at the people hemming her in, surprised that they tolerated the artificiality of the performance. London crowds weren't known for their patience towards the absurd. Not only were they not jeering, they were rapt. The crowd's composition was equally unexpected; well-dressed men and women, usually conscious of distinctions, crushed against flat-capped artisans, careless that they were literally rubbing shoulders with the working class.

'Take warning, take warning, my brethren,' the voice throbbed on. 'To my shame I know them. I have heard their plans. They scheme to rise at the Pope's signal and massacre us, their Protestant neighbours, in our beds.'

'Why is it,' said Lacy, beside her, 'that nobody ever gets massacred out of bed?'

Hart and Kynaston had burrowed a path through to the front and at last Penitence set her eyes on Titus Oates. She blinked to make sure it wasn't a trick of the light. It wasn't. The man who was mesmerizing something like three hundred people was ugly — incredibly, memorably ugly. The low forehead, tiny nose, almost invisible eyes and vast, wobbling chins were irresistibly reminiscent of a pig.

'Who is he?' she whispered to Kynaston. 'Where did he come from?'

'An ex-Jesuit,' said Kynaston, 'who's seen the error of his ways. Seen every other damn thing as well.'

'As I speak to you, my brethren,' went on Oates, 'the army of that arch-idolator, Louis, is planning to land his army in Ireland. Our King, our statesmen, our divines of England who protect our Church, all are to be put to the sword.' He dashed the spit from his lips and raised his voice to a howl: 'Beware, my friends, beware the hordes of Babylon.'

The man was a mimic's dream. The actors had stood, enchanted, moving their mouths in time to his. Hart kept humming to get the pitch right.

As they walked away, Kynaston was making notes. 'Such bliss, my dears,' he said, 'I'll do an epilogue as Titus Oates. The difficulty will be out-lampooning the lampoon.'

Becky Marshall was doubtful. 'I think you'll have to be careful, Kynny. The crowd were listening to him.'

The man's a mountebank,' said Lacy. 'You don't mean to tell me, Becky my love, that if there were all these plots, our Titus was standing behind the door each time, listening in. There aren't that many Papists in England. God damn it, there aren't that many doors'

Becky shook her head. 'No smoke without fire.'

'Blurt to that,' said Hart. 'Granted, our revered King has been a teeny bit careless in allowing so many Catholics in his court, not to mention his bed, but I can't believe they'd plot to kill him. Rid the throne of Rowley and you get James.' He shuddered. 'Even the Pope wouldn't want James. What do you think, Peg?'

Penitence had shrugged. 'I don't understand politics,' she said, 'but I wouldn't underestimate him.' She'd seen preachers like Oates in Massachusetts. 'Lying or not, those people back there believed him.'

That had been in the summer.

When she returned for the Othello at the beginning of November, Penitence entered a London that had gone mad with hysteria. Two days before, the body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a Protestant magistrate, had been found murdered on Primrose Hill. And it was to Sir Edmund that Titus Oates had just made a deposition on oath that the Queen's physician and the Duchess of York's secretary had been plotting to poison the King. The assumption was that Sir Edmund had been killed by Papists because he knew too much.

The coach was rocking. Penitence, who'd been dozing since Hammersmith, woke up as she was tipped from one side of the seat to the other. Automatically, she put her arms round her stomach to protect the child within it. She could hear Boiler, the driver, protesting: 'I tell you this is Prince Rupert's coach. It's his lady inside.'

The curtains were ripped open and she found herself staring into angry faces. 'That right?' asked one of them. The man was tapping the side of her coach. 'These Rupert's arms?'

'Yes. What's the meaning of this?'

'An' you his whore?'

A woman pressed forward and peered in. 'Yeah,' she said, showing the gaps in her teeth. 'That's Peg Hughes right enough. I seen her at the theatre. You can let her go.'

The man was unconvinced: 'Not a bloody Papist whore?'

'Nah,' said the woman. 'He's a good Protestant, Rupert.'

Penitence heard her relaying the information to the crowd as the coach jolted forward. 'That's Rupert's trollop. She's all right.'

It was getting dark, but she could see a great triple tree of a gallows with bodies still hanging on it like untidy washing outlined against the mauve sky. Tyburn. She rapped on the coach roof. The face of Geoffrey, the footman, appeared upside-down in the window. 'Sorry about that, Ladyship, but we better not stop.'

'What are we doing this far north? Who were those people?'

'Don't know, Ladyship. Papist-hunters seems like. But don't you worry now. Boiler didn't like the looks of things on the way up; came this way to avoid trouble.'

'Well, he didn't avoid it, did he? You'd better drive straight to Spring Gardens. I'll walk to Mistress Behn's from there.'

Geoffrey's face disappeared for consultation and came back. 'Boiler says he ain't letting you out 'til you're got where you're going. It ain't safe. We'll go High Holborn way and get to Mistress Behn's through the back way.'

Penitence sank back. She was still smarting. She'd forgotten she was somebody's whore. She'd heard there'd been unrest in London, but had imagined it was on the lines of the usual apprentice riots. The flares of the crowd became twinkles in the distance, and fields gave way to houses as they approached High Holborn where she'd been chased that night.

Don't remember. Don't remember. She was Rupert's whore because of That Night. Hurriedly, she checked the contents of her overnight bag to keep her mind out of reach of an abasement so absolute that she still couldn't tolerate its memory. Her body was less obedient; she felt the flesh move on her bones in revulsion.

They were stopped again at the top of Farringdon; scowling, Penitence presented herself for examination as Boiler explained that she was Prince Rupert's Protestant woman.

The streets had an atmosphere different from any she remembered. Some windows were brightly lit and crowded with people watching the activity below. In other houses they were shuttered.

The Militia was conspicuous by its absence. Groups with torches battered on Catholics' doors or clustered round some suspect asking questions. One house was burning while men held back the desperate householders. There was a businesslike sense to the violence as if the men and women committing it had fallen into routine.

At St Bride's Street, Boiler and Geoffrey wouldn't leave to return to Rupert's town-house in Spring Gardens until Aphra's door opened. 'Maister'd flay us anything happened to you.' Her temper was not improved by the temptation to go back with them; there she could have a quiet dinner brought by servants who appeared at the ring of a bell, a bath, a comfortable bed and a book, whereas Aphra's house was less comfortable and invariably full of people, often the wits whom Penitence preferred to avoid. But Aphra would be mortified if she didn't stay with her, and she didn't want her friend to think she'd become grand.

Sure enough, the room overlooking the Fleet Ditch was occupied by Nell Gwynn, who was fencing with Otway to the danger of a gentleman asleep on the rug, an actor Penitence recognized as one of the Duke of York's players; the artist, John Greenhill, sketch-book propped and paint-brush raised, who was squinting at Aphra's chair, drunkenly oblivious of the fact that his subject had gone to greet her guest; and a gibbering figure in a corner, the playwright Nathaniel Lee, who was mad.

Penitence told her tale of woe. 'What's happening for God's sake? They seemed to think I was Castlemaine or somebody.'

'It's the coat of arms, Peg,' called Gwynn. 'Same thing happened to me. They thought I was Charlie's new French bitch. They got me as I was coming past the Cross. Bloody near turned the rattler over. I told 'em. Put my head out the windy. "Peace, good people," I said, "I'm the Protestant whore."'

Removing a cat from Aphra's sagging couch, Penitence sat down. 'But I don't understand. Was it Papists who murdered this magistrate?'

'It doesn't matter who murdered him,' said the depressed actor at the other end of the couch, whose name she couldn't remember. 'It's who people think murdered him that matters. They think it was Catholics, so it's Catholics will pay. I'm expecting to get arrested any moment.' He handed a sheaf of pamphlets to Penitence: 'Look at these bloody things.'

'Nobody's going to arrest anybody,' said Aphra. 'Have some more milk punch. Penitence dear, try some of my milk punch.'

The pamphlets were varied in style but their message was uniformly and virulently anti-Catholic. One had a woodcut of a Jesuit priest under which was the legend: 'My Religion is Murder, Rapine and Rebellion.'

Another drew a word-picture of what Londoners could expect when the Papist armies joined with indigenous Catholics 'to ravish your good Protestant wives and daughters, spill out the brains of your babies against the walls of your own houses ...' etc.

Penitence squinted hard at this particular pamphlet, holding it to the light of the fire to examine it better. 'May I keep this one?'

The actor said she could keep them all. 'My death warrants.'

Aphra fed him more milk punch. 'The town's gone lunatic,' she complained to Penitence. 'One would have been tempted to get oneself a horse-pistol if one knew how to use it. I wrote some doggerel to counter all this nonsense the other day — "A pox on the factions of the City" — and, damme, if some Member of Parliament didn't accost me in the theatre and accuse me of eating baby Whigs. One had to be quite sharp with him. "One is a vegetarian," I said. "So blurt to you, sirrah.'"

The atrocity stories went on. Titus Oates had become so bold he was pointing at the Queen's physician, implying that even the Queen was in the plot to kill the King. Magistrates were advising Catholic widows to marry Protestants to confirm their patriotism. The King was helpless in the face of such rage to help those he knew were innocent.

Worst of all was the emergency's effect on the theatre. 'You'll have a sad audience for Othello, I fear, Penitence,' Aphra told her. 'Shakespeare was no Whig, and if the plays ain't Whiggish, nobody comes to see 'em.'

But the company consisted of theatre people so gradually conversation reverted to the really important topics: Killigrew's financial problems; the emergence of the new actress at the Duke of York's, Elizabeth Barry, with whom the Earl of Rochester was besotted; the raging argument over rhyme versus blank verse.

Soothed, Penitence joined in, caught up on the gossip and watched Aphra with an admiration that grew at every meeting. Tonight her hair was escaping from a turban, her wrap was torn at the hem, and the toe of one of her Turkish slippers had developed a droop. She squatted on a stool, scribbling her latest play in a notebook without missing a word of the conversation she stoked so effortlessly, her pleasure in her disparate guests stimulating an answering affection which encompassed each other.

Anybody who was anybody and in trouble repaired sooner or later to this room with its second-hand furniture and its smell of cats, to receive Aphra's milk punch and unlimited support. It was poor Nat Lee's asylum. At first Nell Gwynn had been scathing about Aphra, as she was about anyone she suspected of pretension. That was until her mother, a famous drunk, staggered into the Fleet Ditch in an alcoholic stupor and drowned. Aphra's own mother had recently died in terror of the pink snakes crawling over her death-bed and the bereaved daughters, sharing a tragedy which everybody else considered comic, had drawn together.

And Thomas Otway - even Penitence had advised Aphra not to give him a part in her first play. There were enough risks for a woman dramatist without hazarding a stage-struck, stammering amateur. 'One mustn't be ungenerous in success, Penitence dear,' Aphra had said.

Penitence was nervous for her: 'You're not a success yet.'

'I shall be.'

And, despite the total silence when Otway stared in manic stagefright at the audience, unable to remember his lines — he had to be replaced in the last act - the play had run for a phenomenal six performances. Otway had subsequently turned his genius to writing plays, and was doing well — but not as well as Aphra.

It would have distressed Aphra, had she been aware of it, that she had been the subject of the first and only quarrel between Penitence and Rupert. He'd been shocked at the idea of a woman writing at all, but after attending Aphra's second play, The Amorous Prince, he'd said to Penitence over dinner at Spring Gardens: 'It is to be hoped, my dear, that you will not be tempted to appear in any of this female's productions.'

'And why not?'

'The first act should have told you why not. It was a seduction scene. The couple just risen from the bed were not married, they weren't even affianced.' He was at his most pompous.

'Neither are we.'

'We are not on the stage.'

'Rupert, for goodness' sake, you've been to a dozen plays more scandalous than that.'

'They were not written by a woman. Your friend she may be, but she writes too loose for the modesty which should distinguish her sex. Were her work more influenced by the Matchless Orinda, I should have no objection to your appearance in them.'

Penitence got cross. 'The Matchless Orinda didn't have to earn her living, which is just as well because nobody'd want to go to a Matchless Orinda play. They turn up in hundreds for Aphra's. What do you want her to do? Go modestly into obscurity and a debtors' prison? Go modestly on to the streets?'

'She could marry, or find a protector — if anyone would have her.'

'She doesn't want to.' His imperturbability was suffocating her. 'She likes what she's doing. She's good at it. And if she ever asks me for one of her roles, I'll jump at the chance.' Even as she slammed out, she knew she wouldn't. Even as she locked the door of her bedroom that night, though Rupert had been too offended to knock on it, she knew she wouldn't. When she'd sold herself to Rupert she'd promised to protect his honour with her own, and his honour, it seemed, could not survive his whore's appearance in an Aphra Behn play. It was in the contract of sale.

By God, if it wasn't for Benedick, I'd leave him now. Live with Aphra in freedom and self-respect. She'd scrambled into bed and glared round a room in which every lovely surface, every candlestick and pot-pourri jar, every velvet curtain returned the soft sheen of the moonlight coming through the open lattice. Freedom and self-respect.

And dog-shit.

No, she wouldn't. She didn't have the courage.

Sitting opposite Aphra now, Penitence envied and pitied the woman still fighting the battle she herself had deserted. Hardly a day passed but Aphra was rolled in the verbal equivalent of excreta. Fops came deliberately to her first nights to disrupt what must be a bad play because it was a woman's. Churchmen who accepted bawdiness when it was written by a man condemned her 'immodesty' from the pulpit. Male playwrights were savagely jealous enough of each other's success; when the success was a woman's they were merciless. As it dawned on them it wasn't just novelty value that brought in her audiences, the wits went for Aphra with squibs and lampoons. Wycherley wrote a poem full of double entendre about her showing 'her parts' just to get 'a clap'. Her championing of women's right to marry whom they pleased and her plea for their sexual freedom if they were in love brought attacks on her private life by those who assumed that she took a different lover every night.

She had to struggle against publishers who were honoured to print Rochester's four-letter-worded poems but delayed Aphra's gentle erotica for fear it would be considered indecent.

The more she answered her critics back — and she did - the more publicity she got. The more publicity she got, the more she was reviled.

But Davenant at the Duke's Theatre kept putting on her plays, and her plays kept running beyond the vital third day - which was when the author took the box-office receipts. She was getting over £100 a play, besides what she earned from her poems, her editing and her panegyrics to various members of the royal family.

What she did with the money was a mystery to anybody who first encountered the shabbiness of the room over the Fleet, but Penitence suspected that most of it went to Aphra's brother and all the other lame dogs she was supporting.

'What's that? Dear Lord, what's that?' From outside came the crack of a firework, shouts and the tramp of feet.

'It's early for Guy Fawkes' Night.' Frowning, Aphra got up to go to the door, but the nervous actor stopped her: 'Don't open it. Don't open it. They've come for me.'

'Better not, Affie,' said Nell Gwynn. 'It's all right, Neville lovey' - That's his name. Neville Payne - 'it's the Pope-burning. Some of the procession'll be coming past here on its way to the City, is all.' 'All?'

Tenderly, Aphra woke up the drunk who'd been asleep on her carpet, introduced him as 'Master John Hoyle of Lincoln's Inn', and they all went upstairs to watch from the window of Aphra's bedroom, which had a view over the Fleet Bridge to Ludgate.

The procession was just a tributary from the West End on its way to join the main anti-Catholic demonstration being organized in the City, but it was impressive enough. Even Neville Payne, convinced it was directed against him, pressed forward to see the cheering crowds and the floats, some bearing mitred papal effigies surrounded by women dressed as nuns but displaying their breasts and placards which read 'The Pope's Whores'. One of the floats carried a white-faced, life- sized puppet with a sword through its middle, representing the murdered Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. Round its neck was a placard with the words 'Revenge Me'.

'Good, innit?' asked Nell Gwynn, beating time to the music of the bands.

'Will you get back, woman?' begged Neville Payne. 'You're attracting attention.'

They ain't after you, my duck,' said Gwynn. 'It's Dismal Jimmy, Duke of York, as they want the balls off.'

The procession was piling up against Ludgate's bottleneck. To pass the time one of the floats' attendants erected a scaffold and hanged one of the effigies, then set fire to it. As its straw caught fire, the sack which formed its body began to squirm and then yowl.

'Oh God, oh God,' whispered Aphra. 'They've put cats inside.'

The amiability of the crowd was shocking; the display on offer diffused the earlier physical violence with the violence of its entertainment. Traffic still jammed the city gate as a young man on a magnificent horse, accompanied by outriders with flares, rode up to it. It was difficult for the watchers in Aphra's window to distinguish features, but they could see that the long cloak which hung from his shoulders and over his horse's rump was the royal purple which only the King, the Duke of York and Prince Rupert were allowed to wear. But the young man wasn't any of these.

Delighted, the crowds shouted his name as if it were an incantation: 'Monmouth! Monmouth!'

'Gawd, it's little Prince Perkin,' said Nelly, gravely. 'My Charlie ain't going to like this. He ain't king yet.'

Neville Payne clutched at her. 'He's not going to be, is he? Tell me he isn't.'

'He'd like to be,' Nelly Gwynn told him. 'Shaftesbury and the other Whigs is spreading the tale as his ma was secretly married to Charlie. There's supposed to be a Black Box somewheres as contains the marriage papers.' She snorted. 'Black box my arse. If Charlie married Lucy Walter, I'm the Great Cham of China.'

Beside Penitence the unshaven, drink-sodden figure of John Hoyle of Lincoln's Inn spoke for the first time: 'The boy has delusions of monarchy. If I don't mistake me, he's touching for the King's Evil. A prerogative of your lover, Nelly, surely.'

A circle which had cleared around Monmouth allowed them to see figures kneeling within it and Monmouth himself laying his hands on the bowed heads in the traditional royal gesture to cure scrofula.

Nelly shook her head. 'Charlie ain't going to like it,' she said again. 'He's not a bad young limb, ain't Perkin, but Charlie's a great one for the rightful succession. He won't stand for a bastard being king, even if it is one of his own.'

'He'll be dead by then, anyway,' said Penitence. She was tired and wanted to go to bed.

Hoyle said: 'I agree. Down with all tyrants. What does it matter who's king? They're all the same. Though I fear we shall all live to see that it matters a great deal. Mistress Behn, isn't it a somewhat long interval between drinks in this establishment?'

Unlike his appearance, Hoyle's voice was beautiful and educated and the moment he addressed it to Aphra Penitence knew they were lovers, a fact confirmed when at last the streets fell quiet, the party broke up and he and Aphra retired to bed together.

In the small guest bedroom, Penitence worried more about that than the kingdom's future. Here's another one. Aphra was not a promiscuous woman, though her generosity in giving houseroom to male as well as female friends down on their luck led people to believe that she was. Her trouble lay in being attracted to men who inevitably took her money before leaving her for somebody else.

Her last lover, another young lawyer, Jeffrey Boys, was always in debt, and Penitence was present when his creditors turned up on Aphra's doorstep demanding payment for notes she had signed on his behalf.

'What can I do?' Aphra had said, when they'd received their money and gone. 'I love him.'

'Do you have to love him quite so much? He's bleeding you dry.'

What would love signify if we did not love fervently?' sighed Aphra. 'It is the one matter in which excess is a virtue.'

Obviously Jeffrey Boys had believed it was; a month later he had transferred his affections to a younger woman.

Penitence went round to comfort Aphra, who was scribbling away at the table which had a book shoved under one leg to keep it from wobbling and which served her as a desk. 'What are you writing, Aphra?' she'd asked, gently.

'It's a poem, my dear, to her.' Aphra wiped the tears from her eyes, leaving an ink-stain across her cheek. 'Warning her. She's so pretty, Penitence. One can see why she out-rivalled me. He had a right to go, of course, love must always be free, but one wouldn't want her heart broken too.'

'Oh, for God's sake, Aphra, stop being so damned generous.' But Aphra never learned, and went on loving and being betrayed.

Because none of them had been sure what a vulture looked like, the Vulture Press had been renamed the Cock and Pie Press, and, thanks to the recent legislation lifting the ban on unlicensed printers, was at last legal — and successful.

The medallions on the Cock and Pie's frontage had been freshly painted, as had its door, putting it in line with the rest of the Rookery which was coming up in the world with the influx into it of hard-working Huguenot refugees. The sign still showed a cock standing on some unlikely-looking pastry, but underneath it bore the legend: 'Printers by Royal Appointment'.

'What royal appointment?' asked Penitence as she entered.

'Well, you're a sleeping partner as is sleeping with a prince, so that's royal,' said Dorinda, 'and we're doing King's playbills and posters now, so that's royal. Want some of this new tea?'

'Tea,' said Penitence. 'My, my, we must be doing well.'

'Special occasion,' said Dorinda, nastily, 'when Prince Rupert's lady deigns to visit us poor printers', and went off to make it.

Why do I bother to come? Mostly she didn't. It was weeks since she'd last set foot in the Cock and Pie, and it was only out of a sense of guilt that she'd come this time. Rupert, who disliked coarseness in women, made it clear that, while he would not forbid the friendship, he approved of Dorinda even less than of Aphra. 'She isn't worthy of you, my dear.'

Penitence protested Dorinda's staunchness in times of adversity but she was relieved to make Rupert's disapproval a private excuse not to see the woman so often. Dorinda was undeniably common and she made too many references to a past Penitence was trying to put behind her.

The mock marriage with which the Earl of Oxford tricked Dorinda had done for her on the stage; or rather, she'd been jeered off it by wits who found her humiliation amusing. Her friends rallied round; Penitence had given her a half-share in the Cock and Pie printing business, MacGregor had taught her to read and helped her run it. Aphra, Rebecca Marshall and some of the actors sent her work.

How much she minded the loss of her theatrical career was difficult to gauge because she never spoke of it. She had become a tradeswoman with the same bravado she'd shown as a prostitute, as if she didn't expect anyone to believe it unless she acted and dressed the part. Her tongue was sharper than ever and in the spectacles she wore for reading, her hair scraped under a cap like a muffin and her figure hidden under an even more frumpish apron, she was daunting. But customers apparently expected a lady printer to be eccentric and spread the word that her printing was workmanlike and her prices low.

With MacGregor's help she'd branched out into books as well as pamphlets, so that the bank draft for Penitence's share of the profits, which MacGregor took to Awdes each Lady Day, was larger every year.

The salon was now a printing works. The press Penitence had liberated from Goat Alley stood on the spot where Francesca and Job had once formed a tableau. The couches and gilded chairs were for customers and had been pushed back against the walls to make room for setting tables among the painted pillars.

A businesslike smell of paper, lead and ink exorcized stale scent and sickness. A new skylight in the roof let in the morning sun.

To keep her eyes away from the doorway where, for her, sheeted bodies were always lying, Penitence strolled the room casually reading proofs that hung from the drying lines. She stopped being casual and read more closely. Nearly all the sheets were pamphlets and nearly all the pamphlets screamed hysterical anti-Papism with titles like The Whore of Babylon's Poxy Priest or Jesuit Assassins: the Popish Plot further demonstrated in their murderous practices, or Conspiracy for the destruction of the Protestant Religion.

A couple were downright seditious: The Growth of Knavery and Popery at Court. One was a song:

A Tudor! A Tudor!

We've had Stuarts enough,

None ever reigned like old Bess in a ruff. ..

She raised her voice: 'What the hell's all this?'

Coming back into the salon from the kitchen, Dorinda put down the tray, adjusted her spectacles from the top of her head to her eyes, and came to look. 'That's a bit of old Marvell,' she said. 'He goes well nowadays.'

'And this?' Penitence held out the sheet Neville Payne, the actor, had given her saying it was his death warrant. It looked as if it might be. Nell Gwynn had sent word round to Aphra's that he'd been accused of being involved in the Popish Plot and arrested when he'd arrived back at his lodgings.

Dorinda peered at it. She still tended to move her lips as she read. Penitence helped her out: 'It says Papist armies are coming to rape all Protestant women and dash out their babies' brains. Recognize it?'

Dorinda shook her head. 'Nah. Drink your tea.'

'For God's sake, Dorry, of course it's ours. I'd know that chipped "P" anywhere.'

'Yes, well,' grumbled Dorinda, 'we've ordered new type from Holland. MacGregor's gone to fetch it.'

'Never mind the type,' said Penitence, 'the point is what the hell are you doing printing inflammatory stuff like this? You're going to get yourself royally appointed to the Tower if you're not careful.'

'Not us, Prinks. It's ballocking Papists going to the Tower nowadays and there's nothing the King can do about it.'

'I know,' said Penitence grimly. 'A harmless Catholic, a friend of Aphra's, has just gone there, and bills like yours helped put him in it. They're whipping people into a frenzy.'

Dorinda put her spectacles back on her head: 'Aphra should choose her ballocking friends more careful, then, shouldn't she? She always was a bit on the Romish side. Drink your tea.'

'"Romish".' Penitence was scornful. 'Who's teaching you these terms? You didn't used to care if they wore rings in their noses. So who's turned you Puritan all at once? MacGregor?' She was using irony, but suddenly she caught up on what Dorinda had said. 'Holland? MacGregor's gone to Holland? Oh Jesus, that's who's commissioning this trash — you're in touch with those damned Levelling exiles.' 'Levelling exiles' was a phrase of Rupert's, who saw little difference between the Whigs' aim to exclude James from the throne and downright republicanism.

She stood up. 'Well, you can tell MacGregor that I'll not stand for the Cock and Pie Press printing sedition. I've Prince Rupert to think of.' And found herself pushed back into her chair.

'Don't you,' said Dorinda, whose face had suddenly acquired a new angularity, 'don't you dare come poncing in here first time in I-don't-know-how-long with your perfumes and parasol and tell us what to print and what not to print. Prince Rupert don't like our pamphlets, eh? Well, hoo-ballocking-rah. Rocked your and Nelly's carriages, did they? Oh, I heard. Hoo-bloody-rah again. We're going to rock more than that. We're going to rock that ballocking James right out of the succession, the bastard.' She put her hands on her hips. 'We're going to rock dear Charlie and all the rest of his stinking Papist boot-lickers into thinking a bit less of their pricks and a bit more about their country. And if you and your ballocking Prince don't like it you can stuff it up your arse.'

'How dare you!'

Dorinda waggled her shoulders in mimicry. 'How-dare-you, oh, how-dare-you? You weren't so fond of the King yourself once, not 'til you started fucking his relatives.'

'You were happy enough to fuck an earl.' They were both out of control. Penitence could hardly think of anything to shout that was bad enough. 'That's who you're getting back at, isn't it? You don't give a damn about politics. Because one of the court made you look a fool you're getting back at all of them. You're jealous. You always were.'

'Get out. Get out, you Popish ballocking whore.' Dorinda was looking around for something to throw. 'Coming in here all lady of the manor visiting the poor. Don't forget I remember you when you was spreading your legs for a bloody turnkey.'

'And I remember you when you were spreading yours for anybody and I'm going.'

Ribbons of paper clippings wound themselves round her right heel as she stalked up the salon, and she kicked them away.

Common bitch. Past the couch that had been Phoebe's deathbed. I should have cut the connection years ago. Rupert wanted me to. Past the place where they had sat together watching over the dying Her Ladyship. He said she'd try and drag me down to her level. Where Dorinda had nursed her, kept Benedick safe while she was in prison ...

She was at the doorway now where, together, they had dragged so many precious corpses. If I leave now it's ended.

She turned and said petulantly: 'I'm pregnant.'

Dorinda took in a deep breath and cupped her hands round her belly. Gruffly she said, 'Oh, come and drink your bloody tea. So'm I.'

For a moment Penitence was dumbfounded. 'Dorry, I'm glad.'

'So'm I,' said Dorinda again and burst into tears of sheer pleasure.

Penitence was taken aback by how happy for this pregnancy she was, happier even than for her own. God had at last given something to this woman whose life had been so deprived and who deserved so well of her. How could I have been so ungrateful?

God and who?

Sitting over the teacups with her partner in parturition, Penitence tried to think of a polite way of asking, and couldn't. 'Who's the father?'

'Cheeky bitch,' said Dorinda without heat. 'MacGregor, of course.'

'MacGregor?'

'And why not?'

Penitence said hastily: 'No reason. I just never thought of MacGregor.'

'He ain't as old as your Rupert,' said Dorinda, defensively.

'I'm sure not.' She'd never thought of MacGregor as being old or young, or, for that matter, having a sexual existence; merely as someone with an aptitude for printing and drink, hovering on the periphery of life.

'He's off the booze. He's respectable. We're getting married.' She cocked her head to listen to her own words: 'I'm going to be a married woman.'

Penitence said: 'Congratulations. He's a good man.' Is he a good man? To judge from what he was printing, his politics had become revolutionary. She was ashamed she knew him so little.

'He'll do, Prinks.' Dorinda was smiling wryly; they both knew they weren't talking about love. 'He's trustworthy. He'll look after us, the sprog and me. Whore like I was, I'm lucky to get him.'

'He's lucky to get you.' Penitence was working herself up into anger again. 'And you make sure he doesn't drag you into the Tower.' She nodded towards the proofs. 'Who's commissioning all this rabble-rousing?' It was too much of a coincidence that every client wanted the Cock and Pie Press to print anti-Papism. There was organization here. MacGregor was working for somebody, a group.

Dorinda nearly answered. 'It's -' She stopped. 'You just never listened to him, Prinks. He's a political little bugger, is our Donal. Comes of being Scotch. Something to do with all them "C"s.'

'Seas?'

'Letter "C". All them "C"s up in Scotland. Conventiclers, Covenanters, Clans. He's tried to explain 'em but I can't understand half what he says. All I know is, Scotch religious quarrels make ours sound like a ballocking madrigal. The government there don't just ban Dissenters, they hunt 'em down and cut their tripes out. His family's Dissenters. Some of his cousins got rounded up the other day, taken to Edinburgh and booted.'

'Booted?'

'It's a torture. They put their feet in an iron boot and hammer in wedges.' She leaned forward belligerently. 'And your ballocking Duke of York there, apparently, watching like it was entertainment.'

'He's not my Duke.'

'He's your Rupert's ballocking cousin.'

'I don't believe it. James is too stupid to be cruel.'

Dorinda sneered. 'You're too close to the treacle, Prinks. But MacGregor believes it. And I believe MacGregor. He says William ought to succeed because James ain't fit to rule and I agree with him.'

Penitence was confused. 'William?'

'The Dutcher. The prissy little bugger we met that day at Newmarket. Of Orange.'

Light began to dawn. 'Is that why MacGregor's gone to Holland? He's working for Prince William? All this is to get William on the throne?' She was too concerned now to feel angry. 'You listen to me, Dorry. He's got to stop it. MacGregor is not to use the Cock and Pie Press for this. I don't care if James lopped his mother's legs off, I won't have it. He's to leave politics alone, it's too dangerous. For me and you. We've got babies to consider. I'm not having mine born in the Tower.'

Dorinda bridled but it was obvious that she had been conscious of the risk MacGregor ran of offending the King to the point where it was dangerous. Penitence's alarm infected her into promising to tell MacGregor that they must revert to printing more normal commissions. 'But he's a stubborn little bugger, Prinks. You don't know him.'

Thinking, as she walked from the Cock and Pie to the theatre that afternoon, of the position he had put her in — owning a press which was advocating a policy which not only her lover but her king would regard as treason — Penitence had to agree that indeed she did not know MacGregor.

She'd begun to wish she never had.

By Act IV, Scene ii Rupert was still not in the theatre. She

knew it with the tiny remnant of awareness she kept for the audience. It wasn't like him to be late. The friend he was bringing must have delayed him.

'Swear thou art honest,' raved Othello.

'Heaven doth truly know it.'

'Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.'

As Aphra had predicted it was a poor house, but the play's spell had gripped it. She felt its nerves with hers. Hart pulled her to him, rocking in agony, and went into his affliction speech.

As he put his hands round her face — 'Turn thy complexion there' — she registered that Rupert was standing in the auditorium doorway, another figure behind him.

 

'By heaven, you do me wrong.'

'Are you not a strumpet?'

'No,' she told him, 'as I am a Christian:

If to preserve this vessel for my lord

From any other foul unlawful touch

Be not to be a strumpet, I am none.'

Rupert had moved towards the boxes. His companion stood where he was, his face to the stage.

 

'What! not a whore?'

'Nnnno. A-as I shall b-b-umm-bb ... as I shall b-bb-b—'

Othello grabbed her to him again so that his mouth was by her ear. 'What's the matter, Peg?'

'As I sh-shall b-b-b .. .'

'As-I-shall-be-saved,' came John Downes's prompt.

She didn't hear it. There'd been a change of pressure in her ears, a sensation resembling deafness. Somewhere there was an audience and poor Hart subsidizing Shakespeare with frenetic fill-ins of his own, but she stood outside time, opposite the figure in the doorway. Perspective was altering the distance between them as if they were being blown towards each other, like ships on a collision course.

'What!' roared Hart. 'Do I hear you say you are not a whore?' He pulled her to him once more. 'For Christ's sake, Peg, say something.'

The line was out there. Desperately, she hooked herself on to it. 'No, as I shall be saved', and heard Hart continue in relief: 'Is it possible?'

She threw back her head. 'Oh, heaven forgive us.'

As they changed in the tiring-room after the play was over, Becky Marshall said: 'I've seen you give performances, Peg, but tonight's topped them all. You were magnificent. Win a pair of gloves.'

'Two pairs,' agreed Anne. 'What happened in Act IV, Scene ii, though? I thought you were going to die. Hart nearly did.'

'I was distracted.'

'Funny thing,' said Becky, 'so was I, when I came on just after. A man in the doorway reminded me of Henry King. Do you remember Henry, Peg? No, he was before your time.'

Hart came in. 'Marvellous, my dear. Truly a performance to make the gods applaud.' He was exultant. 'Wasted on that pitiful crowd, of course, but we had them in the palm of our hand. Did I notice the teeniest lapse of concentration in Act IV, Scene ii? We nearly lost them, dear. I thought we were going to get goosed.'

'I'm sorry, Charlie.'

'Never mind, never mind. Your good Rupert has given me a benefit purse that will do much for my retirement, like the true prince he is. He asks me to tell you he awaits you in his chariot.'

Outside in Drury Lane the carriage lamps shone fuzzily through a cold drizzle. Boiler was holding open the door.

Rupert's hands grasped hers as she got in. 'My dear girl, what a performance. Always you have moved me, but tonight as never before.'

He made the introductions between Penitence and the dark figure in the corner of the carriage. 'The Viscount is an old friend. He has been abroad for many years on the King's business, and I fear his health has suffered for it. He protests he will go to an inn tonight, but I have overridden him and said Hammersmith air and my lady will make him well.' He was delighted at what he'd done: 'My stratagem surprised him. You did not know until tonight that my lady and England's finest actress were one and the same, did you, Viscount?'

'I didn't,' said the voice of Henry King.

'And what do you say to it?'

'I congratulate Mrs Hughes on her performance.'

The journey passed in Rupert's triumphantly gloomy summation of the state of England. When an answer couldn't be avoided, the Viscount of Severn and Thames gave it, shortly. His voice was tired.

Penitence didn't speak at all. In four miles she had only one coherent thought: Thank God Benedick isn't home.