Chapter 4

 

She tried to confine herself to the hundred duties implicit in the running of a big house. Nevertheless, the compulsion to be with the patient fretted her nerves when she wasn't, and took her back to his room at every spare moment. There was a wrangle with Peter when she proposed to watch through the night.

'I'm staying. Ain't seemly for you to spend the night here.'

Tou need your sleep, Peter. Go to bed.'

'Ain't seemly.'

'Don't be so prudish. I need no chaperone. He's my lord's friend. And if he weren't, he's in no condition to accost me.'

Peter's big lower lip was stuck out as it always was when he was being stubborn. 'I'm staying.' The implication in the flat, curiously well-spoken words was that she might do the accosting.

'It's an order.' She feared rebellion, but though the lower lip stuck out further than ever, he went. Does every damn male but Rupert think me a whore? It's my duty as hostess to nurse the man, that's all.

It wasn't all. For years she'd been recommending his death to God, and now that God seemed to be obliging, she was surprised by a desperate pity. He lay curled up like a foetus, his hands clasped over each other, his nails blue with the cold that made his teeth chatter, as if he was in an open field in winter instead of a bed piled with blankets.

She went to the fireplace and stoked it to subdue the impulse to cuddle the poor creature back to warmth as she'd cuddled Benedick in coal-less winters.

Memories which had been superimposed by his desertion began to surface. He'd sat by her sickbed once and nagged her back to life. 'I've worked hard on you,' his voice had said, 'you miserable item of humanity.' He'd called her his achievement in Gethsemane. The Rookery had been the Place of the Skull for them all then, but for him there had been the special refinement in remembering his wife's adultery. Not for him the satisfaction of calling out his rival - you couldn't challenge a king to a duel — instead, escape to the bottle and the grim reflection of his own humiliation in the most degraded part of London. All women must have seemed prostitutes to him then, so how could he have believed her anything other than a whore? But he'd meant to come back. So he said.

'Thirteen years to come back across the channel,' she told the shivering figure on the bed. 'You shouldn't rush about so. Tired you out.'

Very well, if Charles made his treaty with France in 1670 and Henry King had spent seven years incarcerated through learning of it, that left time unaccounted for. 'You'd have been too late in any case.'

Too late for what? To scatter a few pieces of gold into the grateful claws of a street wench he'd remembered to be sorry for? That he'd named a pet rat for? Ho, ho, Henry King. There was a surprise for your homecoming.

A moan of 'Cold' came from the bed.

'Serves you right,' she said.

Emotions came and went too fast to be analysed. Resentment subsided, rose again, subsided, became panic when the shivering fits gave way to fever and delirium. The back of his neck was hot against her arm as she raised his head to give him the cinchona infusion, and she had trouble getting him to drink. Glaring, he grabbed her hair and shouted: 'But that was in another country.'

The notes Rupert had sent her were not reassuring:

After the fever will come great sweating and some relief until he be taken cold again two or three or four days after. If the ague do reoccur every day then he will be so weakened that he may be collapsed and die. These rallies and relapses may so continue if it be he lack vitality.

The 'great sweating' occurred towards dawn.

She called for fresh sheets too soon and had to summon more. Watching Johannes and Herbert, two of the footmen, bundle the perspiration-soaked linen ready for the laundry, she gave a sudden start. She left them sponging the patient down with marjoram water and, leaving instructions that on no account was he to get cold, scurried off.

She found Mistress Palmer haranguing the laundry maid who was hanging out clothes in the yard. She took her into the kitchen garden.

'What, that mummer as put on the play for us that time?' Mistress Palmer was intrigued.

'Yes.'

'As lodged with old Ma Hicks?'

'Yes.'

'Him as is Benedick's—?'

'For God's sake, keep your voice down. Yes.' Mistress Palmer was the only one of her household who'd recognize Henry King — the Reverend Boreman had never met him. 'I just don't want you catching sight of the Viscount of Severn and Thames and launching into Rookery reminiscences.'

'A-course I won't,' said Mistress Palmer stoutly, 'I want to keep my position, same as you. It's nice here.'

'It's not a matter of keeping our position. I don't want him knowing about Benedick and I don't want the Prince upset.'

'Shouldn't think you do. Who wants to go back to the old Yard, and them times? Remember that night when you come crawling home covered in the sticky? And look at you now, sparklers on your fambles, fart-catchers behind your chair at dinner...'

Penitence left, feeling more a Jezebel than before.

Peter was back in the sickroom, sitting on a stool by the door with his arms folded. Her patient was awake but querulously weak. He gagged when she gave him the infusion. 'I escaped prison to get away from better stuff than this.'

'You escaped?' It was indicative of her interest that she added: When?' rather than 'How?'

'I don't know,' he said irritably. 'A year ago? Forced to take the pretty way home, via the Americas. Only ship I could get.'

Thirteen years accounted for. One layer of resentment peeled away, to be replaced by another. He could have written.

She sent down to the kitchens for invalid food and left Peter to spoon it into him while she went to rest. In the afternoon, which was overcast, she ordered the torchere lit in his room and sat near it with her embroidery while he slept. On his stool, Peter's head dropped on his chest as he dozed.

There was a shout from the bed. She dropped her frame and ran to him. He clutched at her. 'I dreamed I was back.' He was shaking, though not from cold.

Seven years. For the first time they became his years, not hers. Appalled, she got a glimpse of wasted day after wasted day dragged out under a tomb's lid which he could have had no expectation of lifting. 'There,' she said, 'there. You're safe now. You're home.'

He tucked her hands under his cheek and went to sleep on them. So as not to shift him, she knelt awkwardly on the bed- steps, not caring what Peter thought. For her those same years had been showered with applause and achievement, thanks to him. Tears were dropping down on to her arms, and, gently, she extricated one hand to wipe them away.

In the evening, after more cinchona and some broth, he became revived and spiteful. 'Did I tell you I had a pet rat in prison, Peter?'

'No, lord.'

'Pet rat. Called it Boots. Taught it tricks.'

'A clever rat, lord?'

'A very clever rat, Peter. When she came to me, all she could do was squeak. By the time I'd finished with her she could talk, what do you think of that?'

'You're joshing me, lord.'

'I'm not. She could even sing. She used to sing Bathazar's song.'

'What happened to the rat, lord?'

The Viscount lay back on his pillows. 'Oh, she went off to another's cell where the crumbs were better. You know what rats are.'

Penitence bit off her silk, jabbed her needle into her embroidery and got up. 'Good-night, my lord.'

'Going?'

'Yes.'

'Sing to me. Balthazar's song. To remind me of Boots.'

'I only sing professionally, my lord. I'll send you our lutist. That's what he's employed for.'

It was soothing to walk in the knot garden. As she paced round the tortuous pattern, the light from the terrace's flambeaux showed up the hedges as black, raised stitching against the pale background of the gravel.

He definitely thought his tuition of her had established some sort of chattels-right. What she couldn't fathom was whether he resented Rupert's possession of the chattels which were more rightfully his, or whether, as he saw it, the same chattels were proving a stumbling block between Rupert and the crown.

Like the knot garden, their relationship had a repeating pattern. Its form depended on the illness. On the third day he began shivering again and was reduced to being pitiful. In the fever that followed his mind wandered away into Grand Designs and prisons. Afterwards he was exhausted and pettish until the the cycle started once more three days later.

When the second fever, which was very bad, was at its height, he shouted out again: 'But that was in another country.'

She and Peter were fighting to hold him down. This time she finished the quotation for him. 'And besides, the wench is dead.'

He stopped struggling.

'That's his wife is dead,' said Peter, wiping his forehead with his arm. 'Fair as the moon, she was. Song of Solomon.'

'Tell me.'

He shook his head. 'The wages of sin is death.'

'Romans 6, verse 23,' she said, automatically, causing the black man to look up in surprise. 'What happened when the King took her away from him?'

Peter looked sadly at the head tossing from side to side on the pillow. 'He wailed, he gnashed his teeth. We thought he'd go mad, the Prince and me, and we kept him a-locked up in Spring Gardens in case he injured the King. Or himself. And him cast out by his pappy for a-marrying her in the first place.'

'His father had cast him out?'

'For she was a Roman. And the King said: "Don't you mind your pappy, Anthony, you and her you come live with me in Whitehall until your pappy's dead." But the King he lusted for the fair lady and she lusted for him. And the wages of sin is death.'

His white-rimmed eyes looked meaningfully at her, and although she had more questions, he would say nothing.

So he married a Catholic, and his father cast him out for it. Some of the man's history was becoming clear. With no money, and refusing to accept payment for his wife's infidelity, as had Roger Castlemaine, he'd wandered drunk and singing along an alleyway in the Rookery and rescued a girl being set upon by ruffians for her boots.

The fever left him in a depression: 'Send me a confessor. And a lawyer to draw up my will.'

'You're not dying.'

'Yes I am.' He had a discontenting thought: 'Bloody Cromwell died of malaria.'

She grinned, but as Peter was momentarily out of the room, she took the opportunity: 'Why join the theatre?'

'What?' he asked, irritably.

'When . . . when your father cast you out. Why did you choose the theatre? Why King's?'

He closed his eyes. 'Mind your business, madam.'

As his health improved, so did his manners. It was a moving away; they had been nearer the truth of what was between them when he'd been insulting. There was no reason — she faced it, there was no excuse — for an attendance on him that could be performed by servants. She visited him each morning, after the barber had shaved him, to make polite enquiries and receive polite replies, and once again in the evening. She oversaw the preparation of the food sent up to him, she stuffed a pillow with herbs to sweeten his room and quizzed Peter on his needs.

Fervently she wished for his departure — in two more weeks the boys would be home for Christmas — and struggled not to admit the knowledge that every moment since his arrival had thrummed with a significance she hadn't known since the days of life and death in the Rookery.

The only place that gave her an illusion of peace was the herb garden. It was her creation, the only place in all of Awdes' grounds that hadn't been designed by somebody else. She knew herbs; her grandmother had used them for everything from cooking to curing constipation, but the plot at the trading post had been typically utilitarian. Not until she'd begun visiting great houses with Rupert had Penitence dreamed that herbs could be grown in anything but a plain patch. Inspired, she'd read every treatise on the subject she could find and begun transforming a disused area of ground on the far side of the stableyard.

Though she said it herself, after trial and many errors, she had created something so pleasing that she and Rupert sat there to enjoy it as often as they did on the terrace over the knot garden. It ran down the length of the high stableyard wall which was of rose brick and which she had softened with apothecary roses and a quince tree. Paths of brick to match the wall were laid in chevrons and edged the formal centre where neat little grey hedges of cotton lavender made a lacy pattern filled with cushions of thyme and parsley. Mop-headed bay trees stood at the four corners, like sentries, guarding the standard honeysuckle which commanded the middle.

The bed running along the wall contained the untidy but useful plants like borage, sage and rosemary against a misty background of fennel. Rupert had given her a sundial for the garden and she'd stood it in an archway cut in the yew hedge which marked off the far end.

On the opposite side to the wall was a bank leading off under three great oaks to the enormous park and her present project was to make a small flight of grass steps in it. Dunstan, her gardener, had cut out the levels but she was laying the turves herself.

It was a cold, bright day and she'd wrapped up warm, covering her hair with a cloth. The activity of trundling back and forth, cutting and patting, absorbed her and she sang in bursts. 'Jackie boy. Master? Sing ye well? Very well. Hey-down, ho-down ...' The garden's robin watched her from the top of the spade Dunstan had left stuck by the turf pile. '.. . Derry-derry down. Among the leaves so green-oh.'

Somebody else was watching. She got up from her knees and saw the Viscount standing beautifully in the wall gateway, a cloak swung round him as it had been when she'd first set eyes on him.

He's an ornament. Like the sundial. He should stand there always. 'Why did Peter let you out? It's too cold.'

'I escaped. May I talk to you?'

As she crossed the garden she was aware of what a fright she looked in her gardening boots and enveloping, pocketed apron. She dragged the cloth from her head and shook her hair out. He watched her every move, like a man studying a stranger.

They sat down on the lichened stone bench against the wall as far away from each other as its length permitted. Her hands were grubby with soil. She always started working in gloves, but unwarily stripped them off. She stuffed her arms under her apron.

He stared straight ahead and she had to make the running: 'I wish you could see the garden in the summer. I'm vain about it then.'

He looked around at the muted greys and greens. 'It is pleasant enough now.'

The robin flew across to one of the bays and eyed them. 'He's quite tame,' she said in desperation.

'I have come to apologize,' he said, stiffly. 'I have said unpardonable things.' He addressed himself towards her half- laid steps. 'I was unsighted by illness and the past.' He waited for a response and glanced irritably down at her fingers, which were tapping on the bench, when she didn't make one. It wasn't the reaction he'd expected, but he pressed on: 'You have been not only my hostess but my nurse, and have deserved infinitely better than I have given.'

The words were handsome but delivered without emphasis, like a schoolboy made to apologize for a lapse in manners to a rich aunt. 'Prince Rupert is wiser in his generation than I in mine. After all,' he added, 'a rose is no less a rose because it was originally rooted in a dunghill.'

How to hurt him. How to hurt him badly. 'Thank you, Viscount. Do you think I should terrace the whole bank, or only that section?'

'Did you hear what I said?'

'Yes. But we mustn't sit here chattering, you in danger of catching cold, and me with work to do. Shall I see you at dinner tonight? I look forward to it.'

When he stalked off, she returned to the turves in misery. Why did they react to each other's gambits? Why use gambits at all? After all this time, why couldn't they hold converse without running through every emotion in the human experience in as many seconds?

She knew why. She'd known from the moment he'd appeared in the doorway at the theatre. She wondered if he did.

Penitence looked around the garden, towards the sundial, the oaks that made a mystery of the park beyond them. Only a week or so before she had worried because she had not earned the munificence Rupert had showered upon her.

She had to earn it now. God had stretched out His hand from that clear, cold sky and demanded settlement of her debt. It was time to pay.

They emerged into the dining-room from different doors and carefully, like tortoises testing the air. They sat at opposite ends of the table and called remarks on health, weather and gardens.

The length of the table enabled her to whisper to Peter: 'Don't keep refilling my lord's glass. It's bad for his condition.' But it was too late; the decanter was down his end, and he made sure it stayed there.

Half-way through dinner she thought how silly this was. Defiantly, she moved down to the chair on his right; she wanted to know more of his political views, and since they had already proved to be high treason, their elaboration could hardly be exchanged at a distance of twenty feet.

'I'm curious, Viscount,' she said, quietly. 'If not James to succeed, then who now? Monmouth?'

'Monmouth?' He was incredulous. 'Monmouth?'

Not Monmouth. 'Who, then?'

He shrugged. 'If Rupert won't, it must be the next legitimate heir. Mary.' He tossed back his glass and muttered, 'Monmouth', disgustedly to himself.

Into her mind came a picture of James's elder daughter as she'd seen her a year before; round-faced, ordinarily pretty, young and sobbing. It had been a large family party at Whitehall - as usual, Rupert had insisted that 'my lady' be included as family — and fifteen-year-old Mary had suddenly burst into tears at the mention of her forthcoming marriage to William of Orange.

'Can't wonder at it,' Barbara Castlemaine had murmured to Penitence as they hovered in the consoling circle around the girl. 'Married to a dull, Dutch dwarf. A Protestant dull, Dutch dwarf. What a fate.'

'My dear,' Queen Catherine had said to her niece, trying to be kind, 'at least you've met the young man. When I came to England I had not even seen the King.'

'Madam,' Mary had blubbered, 'you came into England. But I'm going out of it.'

Penitence said now: 'She's not Elizabeth Tudor.'

'She doesn't have to be. She's acquired a consort who's the next best thing.'

She smiled. She still treasured the picture of William of Orange in a skirt after the debacle at Newmarket. He and Rupert regularly exchanged a correspondence into which she slipped the occasional note and in which he included replies. Viscount, if you have your way Penitence Hurd will one day be able to say of her king that she knew him when he didn't have any breeches. It was unlikely.

'Don't underestimate him.' The Viscount filled up his glass again. 'That youth is all that stands between us and Louis. If our children are not to be speaking French and worshipping the Pope when they grow up, it'll be thanks to young William.'

That didn't seem likely either.

They wandered into Rupert's library. Peter fussed about the fire, set decanters, plumped cushions, but eventually ran out of things to do and had to leave them together, though he also left the door to the hall wide open. Penitence didn't close it.

They sat on opposite sides of the fire. Having kept to neutral ground through dinner, he was easier in her company; she felt he wasn't having to concentrate so hard in order not to insult her. For her part, she'd done a good job on bringing him back to health and it was luxury to look at him. She'd cropped his hair after the first fever to husband his strength, and the barber had fitted him with a wig which, with his elegant clothes, moulded him into the standard gentleman- about-town. She had a sudden anguish for the patched, funny man in Mistress Hicks's window. Perhaps he was there somewhere, under the lace and brocade, but neither of them could afford to call him back.

Carefully she said: 'Viscount, may I ask, what are your plans?''I thought of having some more of this excellent port, then of going to bed, and tomorrow taking my departure. Thanks to you, I'm well enough to go.'

The mask was well and truly on so she was able to incline her head to the compliment. 'You must stay as long as you wish. However, I didn't mean that. I just thought . .. you have had trouble enough. Must you get involved in more politics?'

He smiled. 'Politics have a way of involving themselves with everyone. It's inherent in the word.'

'But yours seem ... personally inspired.'

He was angling his glass, as he had on his first night, so that it gleamed like the bezel on a ring. 'If you mean do I oppose my king because he slept with my wife, then no. I admit I didn't take kindly to it. In fact, to answer another of your questions, that's why I went and joined the mummers at King's.'

'Why?' It was good of him, she thought, after her assumed indifference this morning to treat her to an explanation. He must still feel he owed her something.

'Oh, he was trying to tempt me out of the country with ambassadorships and the like so that he had a clear run to the bed of the late Lady Torrington.' He took a drink. 'And I wouldn't take them. We cuckolds have our pride. And I like the theatre — I spent time with Moliere and his troupe in my youth - and I had some puerile idea of capering in front of him, like Scaramouche, so that he'd be reminded of what he'd done. Perhaps I even thought of leaping off the stage into his box and stabbing the bastard.' He stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece, looking down at her. 'God, what fools we mortals be. Believe me, the late Lady Torrington was not worth it.'

Good.

He yawned. 'As it was, events overtook me. My grievance diminished in the face of all that death. England, I discovered, was more than courtiers dressing up as shepherds to leap in and out of each other's beds. It was poor and brave, like Ma Hicks, and MacGregor, and the girl in the window opposite mine. So when my country called me back to duty because it wanted me to keep an eye on the Dutch threat, I went.'

The Dutch threat?'

'So it was believed at the time, but when I delved deeper the threat manifested itself not as the Dutch, but as Louis XIV and England's own king. Oh no, madam, my concern is not personal, I assure you. I happen to like my country's balance. I do not wish it shaken.'

'But is Charles shaking it?' she asked. 'It seems at the moment as if it's shaking him. Accusing poor Catherine of treachery and making him arrest all those Catholic lords.'

He was dismissive. 'Ebbs and flows, mere ebbs and flows. Oates will overreach himself — men like him always do. The danger is deeper. With the pourhoires Louis is giving him, Charles may soon be in the happy position of not needing Parliament to vote him money. He can increase his standing army all by himself. And there, madam, lies the beginning of absolute rule.'

'I see.' She didn't. The state of the country was here, in Hammersmith, with its seasonal rhythm and its bucolic, unimaginative Squire Brewsters and its dairymaids and smiths and its regular attendance in the parish church to celebrate that pleasant compromise, the Anglican communion, a beautiful, unchanging and unshakeable solidity.

'I see I don't convince you. Let us hope nothing ever does.' He sat down and poured himself another glass. 'I understand you have a son.'

'We have two.' To head him off, she hurried out the first thing she could think of: 'Do you have children?' And remembered.

'Most unfortunately,' he said steadily, 'the late Lady Tor- rington died in childbirth and the baby with her. It is doubtful, in any case, that it was mine. No, I have no children.'

Once again she had a horrified glimpse through his eyes. If it hadn't been for her debt to Rupert, she would have told him then that he had a fine son, offered Benedick up as a restitution for the man's suffering. But it was time to pay. 'I'm having another baby in the spring,' she said, and in that moment saw that he'd lulled himself into believing Rupert so old that their relationship was platonic.

She thought he'd attack her. He's drunk.

'Ah, how charming,' he said. 'A small stranger, a patterer of tiny feet. Let's drink to the little bastard.' He aimed his glass into the flames and it shattered against the fireback.

Jesus, how primitive they were. Like rutting stags with their harems. He'd slept with her once and he still hated the idea that she should be impregnated by anybody else. Yet it hadn't occurred to him that the son she did have might be his.

With disdain she knew he'd return to the old theme, and he did. 'By God, Boots, you've come a long way since the Rookery.'

She flashed back: '1 have. You haven't.'

Anger always seemed to make him drunker. He put his finger to his lips. 'Naughty Viscount,' he said. 'Mustn't disturb the happy scene. Mustn't upset the cosy little nest, the rich cosy little nest. We don't want memories from our past vomiting all over our nice carpet, we've forgotten the dead in the Plague and the dead Indians, left them all behind, haven't we? Requiescat in oblivion. Boots has moved on.'

She got up to go, but stopped. 'What dead Indians?'

'Seem to remember some young whore telling me she'd been brought up American Puritan among Indians. Don't think about them, don't think about the Rookery. They're dead. All dead like Ma Hicks an' rest of unsavoury past.'

'Dead? Why are the Indians dead?'

'Massacre.' He'd taken her glass to pour himself another drink. 'Thought the Prince'd have told you. Or too busy in bed, was he?' He staggered towards her. 'A war, mistress. Between settler and Indian. Massacre. Don't concern yourself. Been over a long time.'

'Which settlers?' She hit the glass out of his hand, so that it joined the other in the fire. 'Damn you, which Indians? The Squakheag?'

He stared at her, sobering. 'Don't know. We anchored in the Connecticut estuary on my pretty way home. Things not so pretty. War was over an' the Indians were being rounded up and transported to the West Indies.'

They had been transfixed in her mind as in amber, both

Puritan and Indian; white-collared women sitting on their porches in the sun in the act of spinning; a canoe on the shining Pocumscut, its occupant with a paddle raised in a stroke that didn't come down.

The Viscount's voice came from far away. 'I'm sorry,' he was saying, 'I'm sorry. I'm a fool.'

Massacre.

She felt him hold her for a moment before he guided her to a chair and left her to call Peter to fetch her maid.

In the morning, they bade each other polite goodbyes in front of the gathered household and he rode away. She heard later that he had gone to Holland.

Rupert was obdurate. 'My dear, you must see that such a voyage at this time, in your condition, is impossible.'

'Why? Why is it? You've got ships that go over there.'

'Hudson's Bay and Rupert Land are a considerable distance from New England, and even if they were not, there is no question of your making the journey. I am astounded you should think of such a thing.'

Why didn't you tell me?'

He pulled her to him so that she was sitting on his knee. 'Since I was unaware of your connection with the Americas, there was no cause for it,' he said, reasonably. 'It seems I have been entertaining a Puritan unawares.'

She couldn't stop crying, her wet face and nose were making a mess of his velvet coat. 'Please, Rupert. I must go.'

'My dear, what could you do if you did? The war has been over two years or more. Peace has been restored. You have no family there. I cannot let you risk either your health or that of our child. If you wish I shall have enquiries made.' He fumbled in his sleeve and produced a lace-and-lawn handkerchief. 'Look at you, you are not well now. Your valiant efforts in nursing Torrington back to life have worn you out. Blow your nose. There, see, you are upsetting Royalle. He's concerned for his little mistress.'

Penitence put an arm round the poodle's curly black neck and sobbed on. 'I beg you.'

'I shall not countenance your going and there's an end of it. No.'

Rupert sent orders to his Hudson's Bay agents to discover what they could from survivors of the war in New England, white or red. In the meantime, as a result of enquiries in the home ports, a varied and bewildered stream of men began arriving at Awdes to be greeted by the awesome figure of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, conducted to a drawing-room and questioned by his pregnant mistress.

Mostly these were sea-captains who had their information second-hand and at first Penitence thought they were exaggerating the scale of the horror that had overwhelmed New England. It had ruined all trade, they reported, aggrieved, except in slaves. 'And they ain't no good for slaves, Indians,' one jolly-faced captain told her, 'most on 'em wounded or starving when I takes 'em aboard at New Haven, and half of 'em dead by the time I off-loads in Jamaica. Don't hold their price, Indians.'

All the captains referred to it as 'King Philip's War' after the Indian who, they said, had started it.

'But who is King Philip?' asked Penitence again and again. The captains didn't know the tribes. An Indian. Now a dead Indian.

Rupert procured copies of documents for her from the Duke of York, who was holding a watching brief on the New England settlement for his brother. And it was from these that she learned just how terrible the war had been. Of the region's ninety towns, fifty had been razed or destroyed, thousands of lives had been lost, and with agriculture destroyed the war debt would take fifty years to pay off.

There were complaints from the surviving settlers to the Duke of York against the peace treaty his representative, New York's governor Edmund Andros, had imposed on them and the Indians the year before; 'a patched-up thing which do leave lying, cheating, murthering savages still in possession of no little part of the country and the massacring of us unavenged.'

In one document there was an eye-witness account of what had happened at Lancaster. The Indians, it said, had swooped down on their peaceful settlements inflicting untold violence and horrible torture 'whereof some of their victims were flayed alive, or impaled on sharp stakes, or roasted over slow fires'.

Rupert came over and took the paper from her hand. 'If you distress yourself like this, my dear, I must forbid you reading.'

She stared up at him. 'My Indians wouldn't have done this. Not Awashonks's people. Rupert, what went wrong?'

The next day she received a visitor who could tell her. His name was Fitzwilliam; he was young, well-bred and highly intelligent and Rupert had prevailed on him to come to Awdes because he had been one of James's agents sent out from England to take stock of the New England situation.

He was also a flirt. 'Most honoured to meet you, ma'am. Fell in love with you when I was fifteen. Saw your Desdemona, and your Beatrice. Based me ideas of womanhood on 'em ever since.'

She was too concerned to be flattered. 'How did the war start, Master Fitzwilliam?'

'It started in 1620, ma'am, when the first pilgrim set foot on New England soil, if you'll pardon me saying so — I understand from his Royal Highness that you are Puritan-related.' There was an echo of the Viscount's 'Done well for yourself in the young man's amused look around Awdes' sitting room.

'Please,' she said. 'Just tell me.'

He shrugged. 'It don't work, ma'am. Two different peoples, civilized and savage, livin' side by side. It don't work. Now I liked the tawnee, what I saw of him, and if I'd been there with him and he'd been open to argument I'd have told him the moment the Mayflower hove over the horizon to slit his own throat. Quicker in the long run. Cut out the middle man. He was doomed, d'ye see.'

She opened her mouth to reprove his flippancy, then shut it. He was right. Even as a child, without knowing why, she'd cherished her Squakheag as one might cherish the last pieces of some wonderful, exotic fruit before being condemned to an eternal diet of bread.

'We used to understand each other. We used to live side by side,' she said, helplessly, as if by saying it she could make it true. But as Fitzwilliam talked Penitence recognized the small quarrels which she remembered between her grandfather's white neighbours and the local Indians grown into an explosive inability of two inimical cultures to coexist.

With their nomadic form of agriculture, the Indians needed sixteen or twenty times as much acreage as did settler families. With their system of agriculture, the settlers allowed their animals to roam, trampling the Indians' cornfields, and blocked with their river nets the supply of fish to the natives' traditional fishing sites.

'And the beaver hat's gone out of fashion, ma'am, you see,' Fitzwilliam told her, raising astonished eyebrows that it should ever have been in, 'so the Indian's fur trade went. Actually, the beaver's gone now, anyway. The Puritans don't need to trade with the Indian any more; they're exporting to England and the Continent. Good old pounds, shillings and pence've replaced wampum as the medium of exchange. Your Indian chiefs had begun selling off land in exchange for cloth, and axes and kettles and such. Puritan population up. Indian population down.'

More and more Indian land went under the Puritan plough, more and more protesting, trespassing natives were tried by a court they didn't recognize in a tongue they didn't understand and fined sums in sterling they had to sell more land to raise.

New white settlers flooding into Massachusetts Bay were prepared to be violent in a way the original pilgrims and their descendants had not been.

Indians began to die in incidents which Fitzwilliam put down as much to ignorance as cruelty, as when some English sailors spotted a squaw canoeing herself and her baby across Dorchester Bay and decided to test the story they'd heard that all Indian babies were bom with the ability to swim. They'd rammed the canoe with their boat and upset it, causing the baby to be thrown overboard. The anguished mother had dived in after him and eventually managed to bring up her son's body. 'Dead of course,' said Fitzwilliam, and then said with contrition: 'His Highness will horsewhip me for upsetting you. But that's the sort of thing that built up tawnee resentment, d'ye see.'

'I need to know.'

'Turned out the squaw was the wife of an important sachem and the baby was his son. Well then,' sighed Fitzwilliam, 'after that, the soldiers of the Plymouth settlement went to arrest for some infringement the sachem of the Pokanokets, a young brave they called Alexander, and marched him off at gunpoint.' He looked puzzled. 'He was taken with an inward fury at the humiliation. He died.'

Penitence nodded. Indians, capable of enduring any physical hardship, died easily from shame.

'And it turned out he was another important sachem.'

On top of all the other injustices his people had suffered, to Philip, Alexander's brother, this was one too many. He made his declaration of war: 'The English who came first to this country were but an handful of people, forlorn, poor and distressed. My father was then sachem, he relieved their distresses in the most kind and hospitable manner. He gave them land to plant and build upon .. . they flourished and increased. By various means they got possession of a great part of his territory. My elder brother became sachem ... he was seized and confined and thereby thrown into illness and died. Soon after I became sachem they disarmed all my people . .. their land was taken. But a small part of the dominion of my ancestors remains. I am determined not to live until I have no country.'

It began in local skirmishes that led to bigger attacks and counter-attacks until it encompassed all the territories of the Wampanoag, the southern federation of which the Pokanokets were a part, releasing years of repressed anger, then on to Nipmucks, the Narragansetts, spreading north along the Connecticut River to the Nowottocks and the Pocumtucks, until it set alight the entire Algonquian nation.

Springfield, where Penitence had gone to school, had burned, so had Lancaster, Sudbury, Marlborough, Mendon, Chelmsford, Warwick and many others. Little wooden towns named out of homesickness went up in flames, and with them the slashed Bibles and bodies of their men, women and children.

'I fear the savagery weren't only the Indians', 'Fitzwilliam told Penitence. 'Friendly Indian communities were slaughtered by Puritan soldiers who didn't care whether their tribe was innocent or not if it was red. Red men, women and children were rounded up, taken to the coast and sold for slaves.'

'The Squakheag? Did you hear of an Indian called Awashonks? Or Matoonas?'

He shook his head. She could see that she had disappointed him; she hadn't been actressy enough; it was eccentric of her to know individual Indians. His account of the war had been more balanced than most, but it was an historian's. He had seen the inevitable rise of the white English Christian and the decline of the red savage; he might have been remarking on the disappearance of a species of mammal.

After he'd gone, she kept up her search among the documents for names and places she knew, like a woman looking for the remains of her family among ruins, but the disaster had been too huge for mention of individual neighbours or of the lodges of Awashonks's people.

She stopped reading. The slaughter had taken place two years ago while she, with her ears shut to politics, had lived soft. The screams and war-cries and flames had quieted. The dead were long buried, and she hadn't known. She hadn't thought of New England for years.

Yet she should have. She owed little to the Puritans of her childhood, though it distressed her amazingly that their ordered society had suffered such horror, but she owed a great deal to its Indians. Apart from an affection she hadn't found among her own people, they had probably saved her life by helping her escape from the Reverend Block and his accusations of witchcraft. Not only had she never repaid them, it was likely she had done them positive harm by involving them. However innocently, she had added one more layer to the distrust between red and white along the Pocumscut River.

What can I do? What can I do?

When Rupert came in, she ran to him. We've got to see if they were sold as slaves. Help me find them, Rupert. I must go back.'

He was kind but firm: 'My dear, your most immediate debt is to the child. I shall make what enquiries I can, but with that you must be content.' She saw that he was certain they must be dead and she would never find them. All that his enquiries would uncover would be more horror; more babies dying, more mothers screaming.

In any case, as she could tell, he regarded the Indians as another species and her anguish merely as an hysteria caused by her pregnancy. Wearily, she went back to the table, folded up the documents and tied them. 'I don't want to know any more,' she said.

She was thirty-two years old now, not eighteen, and the pregnancy was difficult, made more difficult by dreams that increased her sense of guilt and betrayal. Sometimes the dream was of Henry King and she would wake up feeling disloyal to Rupert. Other dreams took her back to her New England childhood and she'd wake to find herself sobbing. In these dreams her Indians were always running, not after something nor away from anything else, just running in the unhurried ease of movement the young braves used when they travelled long distances; she'd hear the gentle thud of their moccasins along the worn, forest tracks, see the sun shining through the leaves to dapple their bodies as if they moved through water.

They'll die. If they'd been netted, put into the dry fields of slavery, they would die gasping like fish for the freedom of their element. They could only breathe if they had unlimited space in which to do it. They wouldn't survive in chains.

And what of New England now? What would it be if this wonderful dimension was for ever gone from the forests leaving them impoverished and empty? Whiteness would spread through what had been shot through with colour like a wildflower meadow as the delicate balance that had held for a thousand years gave way under Puritanism.

How could you make them slaves? You went there to escape from slavery.

After she'd had a slight haemorrhage, Rupert, with desperation overcoming his aversion, sent an invitation to Dorinda to come and stay at Awdes 'so that you may deliver your own child into healthful air and be a companion to my lady, who is in sore need of your comfort', and issued another to Aphra Behn.

The two women were just what Penitence needed - Dorinda bracing and in the same parturating boat as herself, and Aphra the only person in the world who could appreciate her horror for the plight of the Indians.

She listened carefully to the outpouring. 'I really think one is going to have to speak out against slavery.'

Penitence grabbed her hand. 'When?' If one voice — and that her friend's — was raised against the concept that any human being should own the life of another, she could be eased of some guilt at least.

But Aphra had become a realist. 'When I've got time, and when I know it can sell,' said Aphra firmly. Penitence pressed her no more; perhaps because she had failed in her bid to support herself she had an almost mystical admiration for Aphra who had succeeded.

They turned to other matters. Aphra, as usual, was a source of all news. 'The tide's turning against those fearful Whigs at last,' she said. 'Nobody believed Oates about the dear Queen planning to poison the King. And executing all those poor Catholics, well, it nearly killed His Majesty to have to sign the death warrants. Even the mob cried when poor, dear Viscount Stafford went to the block. It shouted out "God bless you, my lord, you are a murdered man.'" Her face was as near vicious as its amiability would allow as she added: 'A pity it didn't think of that months ago when it was believing everything Oates said and was howling for Papist blood. Poor, dear Neville Payne is only now out of the Tower.'

'Mob?' asked Penitence.

'Oh my dear, we have two new words invented this terrible year. "Mob" and "Sham". And now Shaftesbury and his Whigs are not only trying to exclude the poor, dear Duke of York from the succession, but their more extreme faction is trying to persuade Charles to name Monmouth as his heir, which he will not do, of course. Reading all those horrible pamphlets that are maligning poor James, one is so happy that one dedicated The Rover to him.'

Penitence realized too late that in Aphra and Dorinda she was storing gunpowder and match under her roof.

'Malign poor James, eh?' asked Dorinda. 'Ballocking crippler. Do you know what he done to MacGregor's family?'

'Where is MacGregor?' interposed Penitence quickly. She had been surprised that Dorinda had accepted Rupert's invitation so easily, leaving the Cock and Pie Press in the charge of an apprentice.

'Away,' said Dorinda curtly, and turned back to Aphra.

Aphra's stout defence, that Scotland's barbarities were committed by its government and were not the responsibility of poor, dear James, led to a quarrel that Penitence only calmed with difficulty. At last, with Dorinda puffing and Aphra exuding a stubborn sorrow, she turned the conversation to the theatre, though even here they were on dangerous ground since the playhouses had become microcosms of the political divisions outside them, and fights were breaking out between Tories and Whigs in the audiences.

After dinner they sat in her drawing-room and Aphra read them selections from her plays and poems. Penitence was startled by how good they were. Aphra had mastered her craft; she was funny, a brilliant plotter and she was pulling in the crowds. But the theme that ran through almost all her work was a plea for equality of love between the sexes. Time and again she attacked the property-marriage system, her most usual heroines battling not to be married off against their wishes.

It was a brave stance. The loose-living aristocrats of Aphra's audiences were rigidly old-fashioned when it came to trading their daughters for enhanced lands and prestige. 'The critics savage one for encouraging daughters into rebellion, but I shall attack slavery where I find it. In New England's forests. Or old England's parlours.'

'You tell 'em, Affie,' said Dorinda, invigorated.Aphra smiled over at her hostess. There is slavery for women, too, Penitence. One has to earn one's bread, and one can only fight one form of slavery at a time.'

'I'm beginning to think it's indivisible.'

The evening ended with love-poems. Outside the windows snow was falling on the knot garden, making it into white embroidery. Inside, Aphra's warble was of an erotic, Arcadian spring:

'Your body easy and all tempting lay,

Inspiring wishes which the eyes betray.'

'Give us "Amyntas led me to a grove", Affie.'

'His charming eyes no aid required,

To tell their softening tale;

On her that was already fired,

'Twas easy to prevail.

He did but kiss and clasp me round,

Whilst those his thoughts expressed:

And laid me gently on the ground.

Ah, who can guess the rest?'

In the silence, Dorinda heaved a deep sigh. 'Gawd,' she said, softly, 'I can.'

So could Penitence. She became brisk. 'It's time for bed, ladies.' Both women looked as tired as she felt. Dorinda had already confided that she was tormented by a fear that the venereal disease she had contracted in her prostitute days, though it seemed cured, might affect her child.

Aphra was drawn and thin; the indignation with which she talked of her critics she made amusing, but Penitence knew they hurt her. 'One sends off one's plays with ... "Va, mon enfant! Prends ta fortune", ... only to see the poor things stabbed like Hypatia by male pens. "A woman make a play? Bum it for immodesty!" One could almost be vexed.'

The Earl of Rochester, her adored patron, was dying a profligate's death, and her poems revealed that her love-life was unhappy. According to Dorinda, who kept up with theatre gossip, her lover John Hoyle was being unfaithful with men as well as other women.

They were all tired, she thought; three tired women worn down by the attrition of being women. Damn men. Damn them for starting wars, for their politics and plotting and most of all for making women love them.

After Aphra went back to Town, there was no less tension. Dorinda behaved herself when Rupert was around, but in Penitence's company she sneered at their richness of living. 'How many cooks? Forgotten the time when all we had was poor old Kinyans, ain't you?'

'Three cooks,' said Penitence, patiently, 'five scullions, and a lad to turn the spits. And I haven't forgotten Kinyans.'

Or: 'Nice taste in ruby earrings your Queen of ballocking Bohemia. We was in the wrong end of business, Her Ladyship and me.'

She'd finally touched a nerve. Penitence dragged her out into the herb garden where they couldn't be overheard. 'One more word,' she hissed, 'one more word implying I took up with Rupert for his jewels or his cooks or any other bloody thing, and I'll kill you.'

'What was it for then? His vibrant young body?'

Peace, good people. I'm the Protestant whore. 'Leave me alone. Leave me alone.'

Desperately, she waddled off to the stone bench where she had sat with Henry King. After a moment, Dorinda waddled after her, sat down and took her hand. 'You looked like your ma, just then.'

'I got tired' Penitence told her quietly. 'After that night, after they covered me in the dog mess, I couldn't fight any more. I took the easy way out.'

'Yeah, I know. I didn't mean it.'

'Yes, you did. And you're right. It was still whoring. But I do love him. Not like he wants me to, but I'm good for him.'

'I know. Don't take no notice of me.'

The turf steps had taken well. Dunstan had scythed them. Achingly, her robin hopped around their feet while blackbirds flew in and out of their nests in the yew hedge in the endless business of feeding their young.

Penitence rallied. 'And because you and MacGregor have turned republican, it doesn't mean that all this' — she waved her hand round the lovely garden — 'is wrong. Rupert's a very good man.'

'I know he is, Prinks. And I ain't republican neither. I don't understand what MacGregor's going on about half the time. But he's a good man and all, and he thinks if that ballocking James gets to the throne, it's England as'll be rolled in the dog turd. And I believe him.' She took in a breath of herb-scented air. 'Oops, I'm going to have to pee again.'

They helped each other up, and went back to the house, discussing the more pressing business of what late pregnancy did to the bladder.

Dorinda's was a terrible labour; after over forty-eight hours of it a panicking Penitence, two weeks away from her own, sent Boiler and a coach to St Giles-in-the-Fields to fetch Apothecary Boghurst, the only medical expert she trusted. Because he charged less than doctors, he'd attended many a difficult birth in the Rookery.

Outside the door of Dorinda's bedroom, she warned him not to mention hers or Dorinda's connection with the Cock and Pie. The little man hadn't changed one iota. 'I am no doctor, madam, but I comply to the teaching of Hippocrates.'

'Was he any good with babies?'

Dorinda's bed was surrounded by women. Besides Mistress Palmer there was Mistress Dobbs, the Hammersmith midwife, Annie the dairymaid, whose child had died and who was present in her capacity as the coming baby's wet-nurse, and three maids.

The room smelled of the butter with which the midwife had been trying to grease the baby's passage out into the world, and tangy earth.

Apothecary Boghurst sniffed. 'Hollyhock roots?'

'Yes, Doctor,' said Mistress Dobbs, 'I been pounding 'em small.'

'Have you stuffed any up her yet?'

'I was just about to, Doctor.'

'Out.'

Mistress Palmer and Penitence were allowed to stay. The midwife's complaints to her companions diminished down the hall.

Dorinda's hair was wet with sweat and she bit convulsively at the leather pulling-strap. From under the mattress knife- handles stuck out, making it look like a giant slab of meat prepared for cooking. Apothecary Boghurst drew out the knives and threw them into a comer.

'Put 'em there to cut the pain, 'pothecary,' protested Mistress Palmer.

'They haven't.'

Ashamed, Penitence put out her bruised hand once again for Dorinda's dreadful grip. Witnessing the suffering without being able to alleviate it had so demoralized her that she'd followed the midwife's lead like a sheep. Even so, she demurred when, after the examination, Boghurst put the coal tongs into the fire and then plunged them into the bowl of briony water warming near it.

'You're not going to put those in her?'

The apothecary took her to one side. 'It's the mother or the child,' he said. 'I doubt if we can save both. If I don't act now, we'll save neither. Tie her hands to the bedhead, and both take a leg each.'

Gripping Dorinda's foreleg to her chest, Penitence prayed, hopelessly, for God's mercy on her. The shrieks echoed screams from the Plague and New England. Why isn't there more kindness in the world when delivery into it is torment like this?

The cord was cut and the bloodied scrap that was the baby was taken away by Mistress Palmer while the apothecary delivered the afterbirth. The silence of the room settled like wool on their ringing ears. With her forehead still resting on Dorinda's white knee, Penitence began to doze.

There was a tiny choke and a mewl of tentative complaint.

Mistress Palmer whispered a Magnificat: 'The little bugger's alive.'

Another whisper came from the bed. 'Is it all right?' Apothecary Boghurst got up to look and nodded. Incapable of surprise, Penitence watched tears roll down his cheeks as they were rolling down hers. 'You have a brave daughter, mistress,' he told Dorinda.

When Penitence went down to send up the wet-nurse, she was crying for the baby's bravery, Dorinda's, the apothecary's, Mistress Palmer's, her own, the courage of creation in the face of insuperable odds. 'There is a God,' she sobbed to an alarmed Rupert. 'He's upstairs.'

He took her to the Awdes chapel to give thanks, and she gave it to the God who had appeared in Dorinda's bedroom, something neither male nor female but a raw, squirming, indomitable amoeba of both.

She couldn't stop sobbing. Dorinda's travail hadn't been only in her labour but in every minute of her progress from childhood to womanhood in a world organized for her obliteration. 'Make it easier for her baby,' Penitence prayed. 'Make it easier for mine.'

Dorinda named her baby Penitence, though the child was always known to her intimates as Tongs.

Penitence's daughter, born sixteen days later, was called Ruperta.