BOOK IV

Chapter 1

Charles II was struck by illness on 2 February 1685.

The only one of his numerous illegitimate children not called to gather about his bed was the Duke of Monmouth who had been forced into exile after the discovery of the Rye House Plot.

This latest plot had been in many ways the Whig version of the Popish Plot, except that in this case it was a real one. It was a Protestant plot within a plot. At its core was a plan for killing Charles and his brother James as they passed near Rye House, Hoddesdon, on their way back from Newmarket.

Unknowing that fanatics in the inner plot were contemplating regicide as a way of protecting the Church and liberties of England, Monmouth had nevertheless been on the fringes of the outer plot and keeping company with men who thought these things could only be saved by insurrection. Shocked, Charles had called his son 'a beast and a blockhead' and sent him away.

But the King, and especially James, Duke of York, profited from Rye House. Overnight popular feeling went Tory. The public's loyalty, which had been diminishing as Charles's reign became harsher, turned to him and against the Whigs. And he'd used it.

James, no longer seen as a would-be tyrant but as a victim, was brought back to court. The Whig Party that had called for his exclusion from the throne was all but destroyed. Those who had defamed him went to prison. Old enemies were executed. The Whiggish City of London had its franchises withdrawn. Other boroughs, where there were Whig officers and which regularly returned Whig members to Parliament, were remodelled to put Tories into the ascendancy.

Now, at the age of fifty-three and after a reign more like a twenty-five-year Bacchanalia, Charles was dying.

With considerable courage - one virtue the Stuarts never lacked - he endured four days of treatment by his doctors, who, it was said later, 'tortured him like an Indian at the stake', before death released him. It is certain that just before it did he was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

People wept in the streets when tolling bells announced the death of King Charles II but there was no outcry against the accession of King James II and James turned this equanimity to goodwill. Mary was already married to William of Orange. His second daughter, Princess Anne, was now married to the equally impeccably Protestant George of Denmark.

Thus, the English reasoned, however Catholic this new king proved himself to be, they could at least look forward to the throne passing into safe Protestant hands when he died. And he was fifty-one years old. And he couldn't be that bad, could he?

Standing in the high pulpit of St Mary's Church, Athelzoy, its vicar announced: 'I shall now read the accession speech of our new and beloved King James the Second.' He glanced nervously down for permission from a slim, middle-aged lady in a large hat sitting at the front of a crowded congregation . . .

His patron took Prince Rupert's time-piece from her pocket, polished it, shook it, read it and suggested in a clear, carrying voice: 'Perhaps only the relevant parts, Vicar.'

Very well, Your Ladyship.'

We could then dispense with a sermon.' Beside her, Sir Ostyn Edwards nodded a vigorous head.

Very well, Your Ladyship.'

Dorinda leaned over Tongs's head and hissed: 'Is he speaking English?' Dorinda had continual trouble with Somerset dialect.

'Yes. He's going to read King James's coronation speech.'

'Affie and me already heard it.'

'Then hear it again.' It was all very well for Aphra and Dorinda, newly arrived from London, to be blase about the speech but it had taken time for copies of it to reach Somerset's county town of Taunton, while illiterates — like most of her parishioners here — had to wait until it was read out from the hundreds of Somerset pulpits, as it was in hers today.

Penitence turned her head to estimate how many of her congregation could read and counted four: Mudge Ridge, Sir Ostyn, of course, just, Hurry Yeo, the landlord of the Hoy Arms, and Hurry Yeo's eleven-year-old daughter who went to school in Taunton and whose immortal soul was considered to be imperilled by doing so, not just because it flew in the face of Nature for girls to read but also because she was doing so at a school run by a couple of women Dissenters.

Perhaps I should found a school.

She was the most important person in Athelzoy; therefore it had become her responsibility. Her congregation, her parishioners. The Bishop of Bath and Wells might consider them his but without the wealth Penitence had brought to it the church couldn't support a vicar of its own.

The whole village had been as dormant as a bulb, potentially fertile but unable to flower until it received the requisite warmth and moisture of cash. Long before the Civil War, and certainly since the death of its only son, the Hoy family had lacked money to vitalize Athelzoy's capability to grow. Penitence, unrealizing at first, had brought the first necessary shower by employing some of the villagers as household labourers and groundsmen.

The young people who'd left their homes in search of work came flooding back, irrigating themselves and Hurry Yeo's business by patronizing the Hoy Arms, thereby forcing Hurry to employ a tapster.

Under the guidance of young Mudge Ridge, who'd only needed the capital to turn his own and the Priory's farm into profit-making concerns, Penitence's herd of dairy cattle was improved by the acquisition of a Devon bull. 'And now you'm a dairy farmer you got to have pigs,' said Mudge. Sure enough, within the year two spotted Gloucestershire sows had littered thirty-three hardy piglets which grew up into tasty - and profitable — bacon, chitterlings, puddings and sausages on the waste whey and milk.

But the biggest money-maker of all, and one fast becoming an industry, was teasel-growing.

Penitence had been dubious; she barely knew what teasels were, let alone how to grow them. Or, come to that, what to do with them when grown.

'Let me, let me, Your Ladyship,' Mudge begged. 'You got the soil, over by Sallycombe you got heavy girt clay. Ah pleaded with Old Maister but he were a stubborn old . . . gennulman . . . and couldn't see what I see.'

'I thought they grew teasels at Sallycombe already,' Penitence said. 'The Dissenters, those Hugheses' — my family — 'aren't they teasellers?'

'Piddly liddle plots,' said Mudge, scornfully. 'Could'n grow a bunyan. We, you, got fifty, sixty acre pleadin' for teasel.' Splendid young man that he was, his huge, soil-engrained hands were pumping the air. In another moment he'd shake her. 'Can't ee see what I see?'

Though she let him have his way on twenty of the acres, she couldn't. For two years she couldn't see. The teasels were sown, planted out, weeded with long-bladed, thin spades, then replanted in prepared ridged and furrowed soil, and all Penitence could see was that if it rained too much in June her teasels would be ruined for their purpose, and if she went on paying wages for such intensive labour, she would be ruined. And all for a plant that couldn't be touched with the naked hand, had no scent and reminded her of a stiff-backed, bristle- headed Dogberry.

It wasn't until the following August's harvest that she'd seen Mudge's vision — wagons taking 250,000 teasel-heads along the Sedgemoor track to the clothiers in Taunton, 250,000 teasels for raising the nap on broadcloth, 250,000 so packed on to staffs that they looked like fuzzy loofahs, thirty staffs to a pack, each pack selling at £15.

The next year she'd rented ten acres to Mudge for himself and gave the entire village of Athelzoy employment in planting fifty of her own.

The only people less than pleased with her teasel triumph were the Dissenters who rented the few acres of clay favourable to teasel-growing on Dame Alice Lisle's land. In effect, Penitence's mass production was putting her own great-uncle out of business.

And by this day in early summer, in her church, surrounded by her villagers, the sun coming in coloured dapples through the new rose window dedicated to the memory of Prince Rupert of the Rhine, Penitence didn't give a damn for her great-uncle. Serve him right.

She listened carefully to James's accession speech, giving nods of approval at its repeated reassurance that the King wanted confrontation with nobody. Yes, he affirmed, he was a Roman Catholic, but there need be no concern; on oath he would maintain the Anglican Church and the laws of England. He would not relinquish his own rights, but he would respect the rights of others. 'Just as I have already fought for my country, I shall go on supporting her liberties.'

Beside her, Sir Ostyn also nodded: 'Ah told un when ah wrote to un to go easy. Upset the liberties ah told un and upset trade.'

'I'm sure the King found your advice most valuable,' said Penitence. Sir Ostyn was an idiot. Still, I agree with him. She didn't want riot and revolution now that she was about to increase teasel production and expand her outlets, this time to clothiers in the North of England.

Here, in Athelzoy, she was in a pocket of Toryism which, like the country as a whole, was delighted with James's speech. Sir Ostyn had joined a rush of magistrates, burgesses and merchants to promise King James their loyalty and assure him they would never put up as a member to the House of Commons anyone who had voted for his exclusion.

But elsewhere Somerset's non-agricultural working population consisted for the most part of Dissenters - Baptists, Presbyterians, Puritans, Fifth Monarchists, etc. — to whom James's Papistry was anathema. Families like her grandmother's, the Hugheses, the labourers and artisans of this area, had fought hard for Parliament during the Civil War and, despite Charles's promises of magnanimity on his restoration, had suffered for it ever since. James could proffer them rights of worship until he was black in the face; as far as they were concerned he was a Catholic and therefore Beelzebub. They could cause trouble.

Vicar Lambert finished reading the King's speech in triumph at its happy message and that he'd got most of the words right. 'There, good people,' he said, 'we have now for our Church the word of a king and of a king who was never worse than his word.

Penitence raised her eyebrows; Vicar Lambert wasn't usually so felicitous in his phrases. He must have heard it from somebody else.

'That's a good un,' she heard Sir Ostyn say. 'Good watchword, that 'un.' Sir Ostyn was going to do as well out of King James's reign as he had out of King Charles's.

And Sir Ostyn wanted to marry her.

Partly it was because he lusted after her, but then, Sir Ostyn lusted after anything with a hole in it, but mostly because he wanted the Priory and her fortune. He made no bones about it and took no notice of her refusals. The only good thing about him was that he was no Charles Sedley, thank God; she could keep him at arm's length and he, in turn, kept off other suitors.

At the end of the service he tried to get out of the pew door ahead of her, but she swivelled past his bulk so that she could go down the aisle without him. Her hands gently nudged Ruperta and Tongs ahead of her, conscious that every woman in the congregation was taking note of what the three of them were wearing, and knowing it looked superb.

Out in the churchyard she and the others stood under the stiff branches of its enormous and ancient yew tree while the congregation filed past her. At a lift of Penitence's finger Mary Claymond stepped to one side and waited until Her Ladyship should be ready to talk to her.

Dorinda mimicked her, holding up a hand in papal blessing and bestowing a 'Nunc, nunc' on each one who passed. Aphra had gone into the throes of composition and was staring at the sky, swaying and muttering.

After the villagers had made their curtseys or forelock-tugs they gathered by the lych-gate until Penitence left, watching

Dorinda and Aphra with expectancy. At first they had been so floundered at the visits of Penitence's theatrical friends that they had reacted by deciding they weren't there at all. The clothes, accents, mannerisms had been too strange. When Aphra tried to stimulate a love of literature by quoting poetry at them they were forced to the conclusion that she was mad - an opinion they hadn't changed.

Dorinda they'd put down as Penitence's personal and female jester.

Penitence turned to the waiting girl: 'Mary, I wish you to tell your parents that Mudge Ridge will be calling on them at dusk tomorrow with my blessing.'

Mary gave a bob. 'What bist ee coam vur, Leddyship?'

'He's to ask for your hand, as you well know, Mary Claymond.' She gave the girl a smile. 'I'm told it's a cool hand at pastry.' In the Somerset villages that was the highest praise a girl could expect.

Mary bridled. 'Ah don't know if ah'm willing. Maister Ridge be chapel, not church.'

Penitence was instantly cross. 'It doesn't matter. Haven't you just heard the vicar telling you your king is for tolerance? Do you consider yourself better than your king? I'll have no such nonsense. Mudge is an excellent fellow and you'll be lucky to get him.'

Leaving the churchyard Penitence paused for a second beside a tiny new headstone which simply read: Royalle, ad 1671-1684. She'd had to fight the diocese to get the dog buried in the churchyard, but she'd won. Rupert would have been pleased.

As they walked Aphra said: 'One never learned Zummerzet, but do I gather that child just now isn't willing to marry Mudge?'

'Of course she is,' snapped Penitence. 'She's just playing bashful. It will be a splendid match for her. And Mudge could do with a good dairymaid for a wife.'

'No impediment for true minds there, then,' said Aphra, idly.

Penitence looked at her suspiciously. Was I overbearing with

Mary Claymond? No. It would be a good marriage for them both.

A May breeze touched the candles of the chestnut beside the duckpond, and sent a shower of tiny white and pink petals on to the water. Ruperta and Tongs, who had sustained adult dignity through the long church service, were being urged by Sir Ostyn to climb the tree after a squirrel's drey he said he'd spotted — and didn't need asking twice.

'Really, Ostyn,' said Penitence, lifting Tongs down from his back and brushing down the child's bottle-green velvet jacket, 'they'll get their clothes dirty.'

'Nothin' wrong with a peck of dirt. They don't want to grow up namby-pamby Lunnon ladies. They want to be strong, Zummerset maids. Eh, my boodies? Want to come hunting along of I?'

'Yes, please, sir,' answered Ruperta immediately, and Tongs echoed her a second or two later. Penitence looked at them with pride. Springs and summers spent in Somerset had put roses in their cheeks, and flesh on Tongs's delicate bones. Nothing namby-pamby about either. Ruperta took after her father in having no physical fear at all but Tongs was the one with courage; she had to overcome terror, and did, every time she mounted a horse.

They reached the Hoy Arms where Hurry was waiting with the tankard of ale Penitence had ordered him to have ready for Sir Ostyn before they resumed the walk back to the Priory and dinner.

Dorinda looked over towards the market square. 'That poor bugger called you a doxy again?'

Civilization had come to Athelzoy in the form of a proper pillory with its articulated yoke that fitted over neck and wrists, instead of the whipping post and rings which had adorned the village in the old days.

Today, as more often than not, the offender stuck in it was Martin Hughes. She noticed with satisfaction that the man's thin lips were compressed tight in the martyrdom of real pain. The height of the pillory was designed to put maximum strain on the spine.

'He has been sentenced for condemning the King's coronation,' she pointed out. It was partly true but Sir Ostyn's attention wouldn't have been attracted to the offence if Penitence hadn't complained of it.

Great-uncle or not, Penitence's patience with the man had run out. The fact that she was cornering the market in teasels had turned his insistence on holding her up as an example of Satan profiting from sin into persecution. Every Sunday he came to Athelzoy to preach against her.

His thin black figure haunted her, just as she had been haunted and persecuted by the Reverend Block back in Massachusetts. Three months ago, when he was preaching in Taunton's Parade, he'd glimpsed her and pointed her out to the crowd as 'that harlot actress, mistress of the dead dragon prince'.

But this time the malevolent forces of Puritanism had mistaken their prey. I'm not poor and frightened any more. This time her friends weren't Indians but powerful admirers, like Sir Ostyn Edwards, JP. This time the hare had turned round and bitten the dogs, and it was the shade of the Reverend Block whose head and hands pawed through the pillory yoke as well as Martin Hughes's.

Watching the scene from the doorway of the Hoy Arms while Sir Ostyn downed his tankard, she muttered to Aphra and Dorinda: 'That'll teach him to accuse me of wallowing in the fruits of sin.'

'Let's face it, though,' said Dorinda, 'the bastard's right. You are.'

It was meant as a you-and-I-remember-when, a reminder of war from one survivor to another, but it rumbled at the foundations of a structure Penitence had worked hard to build. Without Dorinda and without Martin Hughes Penitence could — and would — have forgotten that she'd ever been anything but a woman of good standing.

She turned away sharply to continue the walk.

She always suggested this walk to her visitors on Sundays; it took her to the village, her village, past her bean- and wheatfields to the view over the sedgemoors where her black,

Devon cattle grazed the marsh meadows and where, in the distance, hung the flat, mauve cloud that was her teasel crop.

Expecting to be shunned and not greatly caring as long as she could quietly sacrifice the rest of her life to serving Rupert's memory, she had been surprised how her neighbours' attitude changed towards her once they found that, thanks to her Hurd grandfather, she made a competent farmer and, thanks to Mudge Ridge, was earning a fortune from her teasels. English country gentry, she discovered, hated Frenchmen, Italians, Scotchmen, Irishmen, Papists, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, Quakers and Jews, but they were tolerant to a fault of their own kind.

They farted, belched, played hideous practical jokes and had much in common with the beasts in their own meadows but they were too interdependent to be scandalized by each other's naughtinesses, even if that other was a woman. Viciousness was not in them. Courtiers like Charles Sedley expended wit on the buffoonery of such rustics but they could have taught him a thing or two about group loyalty.

Not for them the luxury of who's in, who's out, not when they sought each other's permission to hunt over each other's land, not when the Levels flooded and left their manors isolated islands needing neighbourly rescue, not when their best plough broke, or a wheel came off their carriage, or the birth of their baby was proving difficult. Then they needed the help of whoever was nearest, and if whoever nearest had an undesirable past it took a back-seat to the usefulness of her present.

Graceless and bucolic, Somerset gentry yet had an oysterlike ability to smooth over irritants until they were acceptable. Finding that Penitence was not to be dislodged from the Priory by rudeness, cold-shouldering, advice, or offers of marriage, her neighbours mentally labelled her an oddity, as Lady Alice Lisle was an oddity, and absorbed her. Their labourers helped with Penitence's harvests as hers helped with theirs. When a Pascoe child died the Reverend Boreman was just in time to save its soul by baptism. Some of Rupert's cinchona preserved the life of another Pascoe baby. Sir William

Portman's contacts were enabling Penitence to sell to the northern clothiers.

It wasn't to be expected that they'd treat her with kid gloves; their heavy winks were incessant, they made rutting motions with their brawny forearms, but in the company of anyone they considered above or below their class, or with anyone who came from further away than Glastonbury, they included Penitence in their ranks — and closed them.

As for the lower classes themselves, they were brutal realists. Leddyship was vurrin and touched to boot, but she paid good wages and she paid them regular. QED she had their loyalty.

So Penitence became Lady of Athelzoy.

She would have liked not to be a vurriner, to reveal that she was a Hoy, of the same stock that had ruled the village for centuries. But to do so would inevitably revive the scandalous love story of her parents, put her midway across the class divide and link her with pestiferous, trouble-making, Dissenting Hughes.

And that she could not allow. For the first time in her life Penitence was rich, respectable and in control. It was a giddy- ing sensation. People watched her in case she was displeased. Vicar Lambert consulted her about his sermons. Tradesmen solicited her custom.

Even at the height of her fame on the stage, she had been vulnerable to the assaults and insults of the tiring-room. Now she could punish her detractors by asking her good neighbour, Sir Ostyn Edwards, JP, to put them in the pillory. She wasn't going to compromise all that by claiming blood kin with those very detractors.

As the fact that she had been a notorious mistress faded from other people's memories, so it faded from her own. At first she had desired respect because 'Rupert would have wanted it for me'. Then she desired it for its own sake, then she demanded it. The amused voice which, in her first year at Athelzoy, said 'Act the fine lady', had faded to be replaced by a sharp 'You are a fine lady.'

Dorinda kept spoiling it.

They crossed the bridge over the Minnow which rushed down to join the more sober Cary which in turn joined the River Parrett as it made its sprawling way towards Bridgwater and the Bristol Channel. Here the land fell away in the varying greens that Penitence loved, the prickled olive of her osier beds, a breeze turning willow leaves silver-green side up, the dark of rushes.

The sedgemoors called to her in a way she could not account for unless they had provided the bed for her conception — which they probably had. Unattractive in winter, treacherous with quagmire, they nevertheless had drama. Perhaps it was the sky dominating the flatness, or the way the setting sun turned the pools and meres into amber, or the fact that you were dangerously close to sea-level, a speck on a vast green solitude that rolled unhindered and empty to the Bristol Channel.

Hardly a day passed but she'd taken the opportunity to walk them or ride them on her pony, taking Barnzo, the farrier's son, with her as a guide until now she could look out at them and discern the hidden causeway that led from the track at the bottom of the rise to the Taunton road, and know where she could pick sphagnum moss and which turbary produced the best peat bricks for the Priory fires. It was said of her that she could 'ride the marshes' - the local phrase for knowing them well.

'The Levels,' she said, breathing them in.

'Lovely,' said Dorinda. 'Can we go home now? I'm breaded.'

'You'll never make a Zummerzet maid,' Sir Ostyn teased her.

'Thank Gawd for that.'

From the first Dorinda had taken against Athelzoy, and not only Athelzoy but the whole of Somerset. It was too far from London, it had too many smells, was too quiet, too lush, too dark at night, too hot in summer, too full of insects that flew, crawled and buzzed their way up from the marshes. She couldn't understand a word the ballocking cider-suppers said. Teasels did not excite her.

What kept her returning to it was the benefit and obvious enjoyment her daughter derived from sharing Ruperta's life. Tongs pined when she was anywhere else.

When Becky Marshall, on a visit, had suggested Dorinda should leave Tongs at the Priory and return with her to join the company at the Duke of York's as a dresser-cum-character- actress, Penitence had seen the gleam of footlights reflected in her friend's eyes, and encouraged her to go. At the same time she resented it on Tongs's behalf and said so to Becky: 'How can she plan to abandon that dear child?'

And Becky had said: 'I think if I may say so that she's displaying great love in leaving her behind. You're mistress of the household. It's you, not Dorinda, Tongs turns to for instruction. That dear child is more yours than hers.'

So Dorinda went, mercifully unrecognized by a new generation of theatregoers, to take Sisygambus parts first in one play then another, until she was staying longer in London each year than in Somerset.

They turned right along the deep, narrow, fern-fringed lane that connected the bottom of the village with the bottom of the Priory drive and came out between oaks on to a green which commanded the Levels on the left and the great wrought-iron gates to the right.

'Bamzo, Mother.' Ruperta was pointing at a distant horse and cart crawling over the causeway that led from Taunton to this end of Sedgemoor, bringing Athelzoy's Nonconformists from their meeting-house service.

'I asked Barnzo to call in at Tidy's and see if there was a letter from my son,' explained Penitence to Sir Ostyn. Tidy kept the post office. 'Otherwise the carrier wouldn't bring it until tomorrow.'

What malevolent spirit named the man Barnzo?' asked Aphra.

'His head's on crooked,' said Penitence, absently; quite suddenly she was struck by a fear of the horse and cart. Rationally the protuberances from its sides were fleeces being brought for Athelzoy women to spin into yarn, but they made the shape of the cart into a winged hornet swelling bigger as it crawled towards her.

There's one in every village,' Sir Ostyn was explaining to Aphra, tapping his temple. 'His yeead's on crooked. He were barnzo. Barnzo.'

'Born so,' said Penitence at Aphra's incomprehension. 'Children, escort our guests to the house and tell Johannes we're ready for dinner. I'll just wait and see if there's a letter.'

The girls put their hands into Sir Ostyn's and Aphra's, curtseyed and pulled them towards the house. Penitence, watching them go, saw Sir Ostyn's free hand goose Aphra's backside — and his jump as Aphra goosed him back.

Dorinda stayed with her. Awkwardly, without talking, the two women watched the cart, holding their fluttering hats to their heads against the strengthening breeze that mixed the smells of grass and marsh with the elusive tang of sea.

Let there be a letter. Benedick was a hopeless correspondent. Until a few weeks ago she'd received news of him every month from the faithful Dudley, but now Dudley had joined the Christian army's crusade against the Turk and his letters came in batches after long intervals. She worried about him, and about Benedick left behind in the Netherlands without his foster-brother's common sense to steady him. She hadn't heard from either for six weeks.

He's dead. They're both dead. She was having a premonition of the news, the sting of the insect as it crawled towards her, ever bigger. Having seen it as monstrous she couldn't dislodge its misshape from her eye. Barnzo's poor face and leather cap became a head with mandibles and multi-faceted eyes. Then he waved — 'Letter from Holland, Leddyship' — and reverted to a simpleton driving a cart full of people and fleeces.

She snatched the letter from his hand, and frowned her disapproval at his passengers: her own dear Mudge and Prue Ridge, Jack and Mistress Fuller, the Mackrells, the Yeo child, Jan and Betty Creech and their baby. Good people all of them, but Dissenters from the mainstream religion that Penitence was beginning to consider essential to the well-being of the country's economy.

Barnzo's ever-nodding head nodded with deliberation at her: 'King Monmouth be coming to Somerset.'

'Shshhh.' Mistress Fuller put her hand over her son's mouth, and Penitence sympathized. 'If Sir Ostyn heard you, Barnzo, you'd go to prison.' She looked at Mudge: 'What set this off?'

'Oh, there's rumours at meeting.' He was reluctant.

'There's always rumours,' she scolded. 'And people like you stupid enough to encourage them. Monmouth won't dare come. Not after the Argyll fiasco.'

The Earl of Argyll had invaded Scotland in what had been supposed to be a two-pronged attack against James's Catholic reign — the Duke of Monmouth to provide the other prong by landing somewhere in England to raise a Protestant rebellion. In view of the fact that Argyll had been captured after a month of incompetence it was not expected that Monmouth, who was known to be unable to raise sufficient men or money from his fellow-exiles in the Netherlands, would make the same mistake.

'They be arresting our friends in Taunton,' burst out Barnzo.

'They're rounding up trouble-makers all over England,' said Penitence, who'd been told so by Sir Ostyn. 'We don't want silly men making trouble, do we.' She looked squarely at Mudge: 'Do we? Not with the teasel harvest coming on.'

Mudge grinned at her. 'Won't be, Leddyship. Not from I.' There were nods from the others in the cart.

'Good.' She slapped the tired horse's rump to set it on its way towards the village and turned to her letter.

'That's mine,' said Dorinda.

Penitence stared at her, slipping her nail along the sealing wax. 'It's my letter. It's from Benedick and Dudley.' She had to hold the letter in the air to foil Dorinda's grab for it.

'It's mine. Look at the ballocking name on it.'

'You heard. It's from Holland. Of course it's for me.' To tell Dorinda she was a jealous slut was a warm and beautiful temptation she would give way to any moment.

Dorinda gave way to her own: '"Leddyship", "Leddyship",' she minced. 'Everything's for Leddyship.' Her voice dropped: 'You've got too big for your boots, you. Poncing about like the virgin of the manor just because a lot of turnip-pickers have to do what you tell 'em.'

'You're jealous,' screamed Penitence. 'Your man's left you with nothing except what I give you. You're jealous because Tongs loves me better than you.' She was back in the attic of the Cock and Pie; she felt her hands reaching for Dorinda's hair and stopped, appalled.

'Perhaps,' said Dorinda in a court accent, 'you would be good enough to regard the superscription on that there letter.'

Penitence looked down and, shamefaced, handed it over.

Dorinda turned her back to read it. MacGregor had taught her to read, but she still moved her lips. The back of her head and shoulders made the same shape as on the day she'd carried Benedick away from the window of Newgate prison.

How could I say those things to you? You, who sheltered my son for me. Penitence said, gently: 'Is it from MacGregor?'

'Yes.'

'Is he well? I didn't know he was back in the Netherlands.'

'Don't know everything, then, do you?'

When it came to MacGregor, thought Penitence, she knew nothing. Twenty years on and off she'd been acquainted with the man and all she could relate of him was that he was a radical Scotsman never radical in her presence. It was as if her interest had glissaded over him without picking anything up, as if he withdrew to make himself invisible. He must have opinions. She knew he had opinions; otherwise why did he care to publish the anti-Catholic, anti-James ravings of crackpot exiles? But he'd never expressed them to her. Dorinda had once said it was because he was afraid of her. Henry King liked him. Damn it. Who cared who Henry King liked or didn't?

Now she was sorry she hadn't taken more trouble to know the man. Obviously he was still important to Dorinda. Come to think of it, he'd been an important, or at least constant, part of Benedick's childhood, a male presence insubstantially but for ever there in the chaotic scramble that had been her efforts to feed them all.

She tried again. 'Is he coming back to England soon?'

'Mind your own business.' Dorinda's tone was not so much rude as abstracted.

If you won't, you won't. But later Penitence was always grateful to remember that she ignored the snub and edged across the distance between them to take Dorinda's hand.

Dorinda took hers away but, again, not with hostility. She folded the letter and carefully tucked it in her pocket.

Ahead of them the house and the lovely jumble of its roofs and chimneys lifted Penitence's heart as it always did. How right Rupert had been about an approach that set it off. In silence they walked towards it.

Over dinner Sir Ostyn entertained them with a hoof-by- hoof account of the twenty-six-mile pursuit of a hind by the Acland Staghounds in which he'd taken part the day before. After the meal, in the hall, when the women took the opportunity to duck beneath his sentences and exchange their own news - they hadn't met together for two months - he listened, rapt, as if to Scheherazades. That they were independent women - rare cattle in Somerset - intrigued and appalled him. But if they paused he took up the chase again, certain they would be spellbound.

As he talked, Penitence tried to keep her eyes away from the gargoyle opposite her. Don't stare at it. They'll see.

She had found the Priory's secret room. At least, she knew where it was. She just couldn't get into it.

Three years it had taken the house to yield even that much of its secret. Three years of increasingly dispirited search for that holy grail of the householder, a safe hiding-place, until, at last, she'd thrown in her hand and taken Elizabeth of Bohemia's necklace back to London in a hat-box and lodged it in the Earl of Craven's bank. Then, of course, she'd made her discovery.

It had been the night of the flood, when the Bristol Channel had broken through the coastal defences and come snaking across the moors, almost to the bottom of the Priory's drive. She had been in the hall, playing spillikins with Ruperta and Tongs, trying to keep the children's minds off the terrible sound of the wind while the rest of the household scurried from one window to another to fasten the shutters more securely.

The candles had guttered in the shrieking draught and she'd looked up and noticed for the first time that the mouth, nostrils and eyes of the gargoyle in the north-east corner of the hall were an empty black.

On hands and knees, to the girls' delight, she'd crawled until she was opposite one of the other gargoyles and glanced up into its leer. Its nostrils were grey, not black. They were stopped up.

A crawl back to the corner gargoyle. Very clever. Of the six gargoyles in the hall, this was in the deepest shadow and the one the eye shied away from. Not because it was ugly — the others were uglier — but because it pervaded unpleasantness; this was a gargoyle who wished you ill, knew your future and waited with watchful attention for it to happen.

When the girls had gone to bed, she'd fetched a stool and some tapers. Standing on tiptoe she put a taper up the gargoyle's nose and wiggled it about. The face was a mask; at the back it was hollow — she tied on another taper to the end of the first and inserted it further - very hollow.

The noise of the wind covered the scrape of the ladder as she dragged it up to the hall then searched the house for withies.

She'd approached her face to the gargoyle's with reluctance. But to be close to it was to wonder at the artistry of the stonemason who'd made so repellent a thing with a few digs of a chisel.

The mask slanted downwards at an angle of forty-five degrees to the floor of the hall, making it difficult for her to peer through its apertures. She bound two withies together with string, constructing a rod about four feet long, and fed it through the gross mouth, then added another.

It was impossible to estimate the full dimensions of the space she was investigating, but she pushed six feet of withies through without coming against any obstruction.

She tried twisting the gargoyle to see if it moved but it was all of a piece with the wall. The air from its holes smelled of stone and age, but not damp. When she put her mouth to the gargoyle's mouth and said 'Hello' she nearly fell off the ladder as she heard her voice deepen and reverberate back at her. 'Hallooo.'

She had found the room. But how to get into it?

That night and subsequent nights Penitence measured and paced. The length of the passage between the hall and the solar corresponded with the other side of the wall. So did the height. The room wasn't in the long side of the hall, then, but somewhere in the end of its rectangle, built into the north wall, perhaps between the fireplace and the corner.

But that was where it got difficult. At that end the hall dovetailed into the later wing, the Tudor north wing, where the floors were not on the same level as the hall's. Indeed, there were so many corners, cupboards, tiny flights of stairs, that it was almost impossible to spot any discrepancy which would indicate the secret room's whereabouts.

Eventually she thought she'd tracked it down to behind the south wall of her bedroom which backed on to the north-hand side of the fireplace end of the hall. If her reckonings were correct, somewhere between the two was a damn great gap. But there was no door.

She could have screamed with frustration. There was no point in being the proud possessor of a secret room if you had to employ labourers to break down a wall to get into it but all her tappings and furtive removals of suspected panels revealed nothing.

'Have you read my play, Penitence?'

She'd had to wait until spring until she could reasonably order the hall fire to be allowed to go out and she could creep into the grate to examine the right-hand side of its flue. Taking what the locals called a 'pickass' with her, she'd inflicted considerable damage to the brickwork before coming up against the infuriating solidity of more stone.

'Have you read it, Penitence? Penitence, dear, have you read The Widow Ranter?'

'I'm sorry, Affie, I was miles away. Yes, I read it. All last night. How did you think of her? It's wonderful.'

And it was. It wasn't Shakespeare, but it was marvellous entertainment and moved at a gallop. Set in Virginia during the Indian Wars, its dramatic meat was a conventionally tragic love-story between an English soldier and the native queen.

But what was new in this sort of drama was the eponymous comic heroine, Widow Ranter herself, lusty, hard-drinking, smoking, cursing, prepared to fight for and with the man she loved. In every other play such a virago ended with a submissive speech to her lover. Not the Widow Ranter. Unreformed, impenitent, she and her man went off into the sunset to a comradely happy ending.

'When is Duke's putting it on?' she asked.

Aphra sat back in her chair: 'When can you play her?'

'How'd it be if I came to one of they old mummeries of yourn one day?' asked Sir Ostyn. 'Ah ain't never seen a play.'

'They wouldn't let you in, dear,' said Aphra and turned back to Penitence, who'd been struck dumb.

'You want me for the Widow Ranter?' It was a part to murder for. It stole the play. And it could be played by an actress d'un certain age.

'Betterton's asked for you. He saw you in the old days.'

Thomas Betterton was the leading light of the new generation at the Duke of York's and Aphra must have pressed him to ask for her; her stage appearances had been few enough when Rupert was alive; since his death they had ceased altogether.

To go back. Shall I? Can I? The thought that she would never act again had been bitter, but she had laid it on the altar of Rupert's memory with a self-sacrificial: 'He wouldn't want me to.' Anyway, her role as lady of the manor had called for acting and she'd played it to the hilt. Should I? Perhaps it wasn't worthy of her present status to return to that raffish world, that seedy, degenerate, delicious world.

Those watching Penitence noticed the hauteur that had become natural to her expression relax into something wist- fuller and certainly more human. Aphra took advantage of it. 'Come back with Dorinda and me,' she said. 'Three weeks' rehearsal, six performances — you can be back here at Athelzoy before the teasels whelp, or whatever they do.'

'Not me,' said Dorinda, 'I'm staying on here for a bit.' She half-raised herself from her chair to bow at Penitence: 'With your permission, Your Ladyship.'

'Of course.' Penitence ignored the sneer; she was puzzled. But it made her decision easier to know that Dorinda would be here to help the Reverend Boreman and Annie keep an eye on the girls. 'In that case . .. Affie, yes please.'

As luck would have it, Penitence found the door to the secret room two days before she journeyed to London - or, rather, Ruperta and Tongs found it.

Because Penitence was keeping Annie busy helping her to pack, the two little girls were making their own amusement and had ventured into forbidden territory to bounce on Penitence's bed.

She heard the protesting creak of the tester's great timbers from downstairs and was hurrying to put a stop to the horseplay when a crash and cry alarmed her into a run. Two guilty pairs of eyes regarded from the bed, the blue squeezed up with pain.

'She didn't mean it.' Tongs had her thin arm round Ruperta's neck, protecting her, as usual. 'She fell over and it came off.'

'It' was the central panel of the bedhead which hung askew.

Sternly, Penitence examined her daughter's bruised leg, pronounced it fit to walk on and banished her and Tongs to the kitchens.

Left alone to examine the damage to the bed, she saw that nothing, in fact, was broken. Although it was carved to look all of a piece with the bedhead, the heavy two-and-a-half-foot- square panel was actually a separate piece of oak tongued at the top and bottom to slide aside along concealed grooves in the panels above and below it. Ruperta's fall had shoved the wood sideways and dislodged part of it out of its runners.

Penitence was so busy fitting it back that she only noticed what was behind the gap it left when it was too late. There was a click as the panel slid into place, covering up the section of wall it had exposed — in which she'd seen part of a door.

Trembling with excitement, she tried to slide the panel sideways again, but it wouldn't move. Damn. The click had been a catch dropping back into place. She pushed and tugged uselessly, she stood up on the pillows and tried reaching over the top of the bedhead to feel down the back, but the bed had been made to stand flush against the wall and she couldn't intrude more than her fingertips. Damn. Damn.

She sat down to think. She could get an axe and whack the panel open or she could get a team up from the fields and pull the bed out. And sell tickets while I'm about it. There seemed little point in a secret room that was public knowledge. No, there was an easier way to open the panel, the way its designer had intended; she just had to find it.

Penitence sat back on her heels and looked at her bedhead, its carving shining a rich black in the morning sun, like an encrusted cliff still wet from the tide. Two rows of smaller panels surrounded the one that moved — or, at present, didn't — each one a biblical story depicted by stiff-legged figures in early Tudor dress. Hunting between the panels, floppy-eared dachshunds sniffed the trail of a hare, gazehounds lolloped after stag, until the round was reversed and the stag hunted dachshunds and the hare the gazehounds. It always made her smile.

Across the top was an inscription in Welsh - 'kyffarwth aigwna harry ap:ll'. Rupert had given her a rough translation: 'An Expert was Harry ap Llewellyn who Wrought this.'

Now she knew why the Hoy who commissioned the bed brought a Welshman to carve it, doubtless sending him back to Wales when he'd done it with instructions to keep his mouth shut as to what lay behind it.

'Very well, Harry Ap:Ll,' said Penitence. 'Where do I press?'

The central panel was of Adam and Eve. Adam stood on one side of the Tree of Knowledge with his left hand coyly hiding his genitals. On the other side, a convenient tress of her long hair hid Eve's. Coiling round the Tree was a dragon-like serpent, teeth exposed in a grin as its snout pointed towards Eve's bare breast.

The apples on the Tree, or Adam's belly-button, might be the knobs that would release the panel's catch but Penitence was afraid she knew Harry Ap:Ll better than that. She extended her finger and gave a quick jab at Eve's jaunty nipple, heard the click, watched the panel slide to the left and saw the door she had been trying to find for nearly four years.

It was of carved pine and bigger than the panel, though she couldn't see by how much, and its sill corresponded with the panel's bottom rim. It was already opened a few inches into the room behind it. She thought it probable that before the north wing was built there had been another stone room where her bedroom now was and this door would have been hidden behind an arras.

And why sit here working out such things instead of going in?

She was getting fanciful in her old age. First her dread of Barnzo's cart the other day, and now this reluctance to explore a marvel. There could be treasure in there. Well, yes, but treasure wasn't the only thing they walled up.

First she locked her bedroom door. She fetched and lit a candle, then she put a pillow across the sill of the panel, not just to form a bridge for her knees to the sill of the secret room, but to block the possibility of the panel clicking back into place and her finding no mechanism at the rear by which she could open it again. The thought made the palms of her hands wet.

Holding the candle ahead of her she crawled across the pillow into the room and, because its doorsill was a foot above its floor, had to do some complicated leg-work before she could stand up inside.

It was a nasty room. There was nothing in it except a bench, but malignity had got trapped in its dimensions. It was too high and too long for its seven-foot width. There was no window in the stone walls and the only light came from the door and a collection of holes in the wall opposite against which the bench stood. She couldn't understand the room's function; it was over-large as a hiding place for jewels and the air-holes indicated it was for habitation of some kind. A priest's hole? But why? The Hoys had been Protestant since Henry VIII; there was no need for their house to have a room for the practice of forbidden Mass.It was when she examined the holes in the wall facing her that she got an inkling. They were irregular, two round ones side by side at the top, two more below, equally round but smaller and closer together, and a slit beneath the lot. All were in a concave recess and were actually tiny tunnels sloping downwards in the thickness of the wall.

She put her eyes to the recess and saw familiar colour which, for a moment, she couldn't place until she recognized the Isfahan rug that had once adorned Rupert's study at Awdes and now lay in front of the fireplace in her own hall. Of course. She'd forgotten. She was staring through the eyes of the gargoyle.

Not a priest hole, a peep-hole. A place for spying. A voyeur's room. Some old Hoy had sat here on this bench and observed his household without their knowledge. Who had he spied on? His wife? No, of course not; in the time this room was built the hall had been a priory. The prior had sat here, dirty old man, his gargoyle's eyes watching his unknowing flock, recording sins, overhearing plots, listening for things his monks did not tell him in confession.

A figure moved into her field of vision — Joan, a slow- moving daughter of Athelzoy, employed to sweep. The gargoyle's encircled view gave her interest and significance. Lazily, she brushed up the ash of the fire where it had spilled over the grate. As she carried it away in her bucket her skirt sent some of the fine, white powder blowing on to the rug. Joan paused, then rubbed it in with the thick sole of her shoe.

You and I are going to fall out, miss. Penitence pulled herself up; spy-holes had fascination as well as horror. She must resist it. With an effort she also resisted giving an eldritch screech of 'Your sins have found you out, Joan Pedder'. The shock would probably kill the slut. Instead, she held up the candle for a last look round the room, found nothing else of interest, and crawled out of it.

She supposed she was glad the room was there but she felt none of the thrill of secret possession she had expected once she found it. She could lodge such jewellery as Rupert had given to her in it, but since robbery was almost unknown in this part of the county it was probably as safe in the heavy chest where she usually locked it.

Oh well, you never knew when a hiding-place would be useful. But she wouldn't mind at all if she never went into the unpleasant place again. And she would certainly have a word or two with Joan Pedder.