The Dark Lady's Mask

by Mary Sharratt

  Giulietta led the way out of the town gate and down the hill that led into the vineyards, left bare after the harvest, and the autumn forest of green pine and yellow larch. The fallow fields rested as though wrapped in a dream. But the beauty of the landscape was not all that met the eye. Aemilia understood at once why Olivia had forbidden her daughter to walk out unchaperoned—amorous couples were everywhere. Young men embraced their sweethearts with an ardor that left nothing to the imagination. Young women drew their lovers into the shadowy woods.

  “Is it wise to walk here?” she asked Giulietta. “Perhaps we’d best turn back.”

  Will raised his eyebrows while the girl seemed to pretend not to hear.

  “If you are writing a romance,” Giulietta said, “you must go to Verona. I’ve heard a most romantic tale of a boy and girl there who died for their love of each other.” Her eyes shone as though she were that enraptured heroine.

  Aemilia shook her head. “It’s not a comedy if the lovers die.”

  She looked at Will, expecting him to weigh in, but he was staring at the lovers with something like hunger in his eyes. The muscles in his throat twitched and he turned to gaze at her as though stricken. Her face burning, Aemilia blinked and felt a deep ache inside her.

  Then, mindful of Giulietta’s presence, she forced a laugh, took Enrico from Will’s arms, and said they had better go back before her son caught a chill.

  IN JACOPO’S CHAMBER, a fire crackled in the hearth. Outside the windows, snowflakes drifted down. Propped against his pillows, the old man watched Enrico play with a carved wooden horse. Though Jacopo grew feebler, he seemed to draw renewed vitality from doting on the little boy, now the youngest resident in the Casa dal Corno.

  “He looks just like my son Francesco at that age,” Jacopo said, smiling at Aemilia who played Giulietta’s virginals.

  Aemilia and Enrico were the only ones left with Jacopo on this Sunday morning with the rest of household gone to Mass. She wondered whether Jacopo longed for them all to return, this man who seemed to relish being engulfed by the noisy bustle of his family, or if he was savoring this rare moment of stillness with just her and the child to keep him company.

  “Play something cheerful,” he said, when she struck a minor chord. “There will be time enough for dirges when I’m dead.”

  She obliged, playing the swift and lively notes of the coronto, a running dance that sent her fingers leaping across the wooden jacks while her body swayed. The old man nodded his head in time. Enrico giggled and made his toy horse prance along with the music.

  “Have you forgiven me?” Jacopo asked her, after the vibrations of the last note faded into silence. “For usurping your father’s home?”

  She turned to him, silenced by the haunted look on his face.

  “You see, they’d already fled,” he said, “and I thought it better that I take the house than a stranger. I always prayed they would return and I would be the one to welcome them home. But I never saw them again.”

  The old man’s face crumpled.

  Aemilia sat by his bed and took his hand. “I’m sure Papa understood you never acted out of malice. When faced with hardship, we must all make bitter choices.”

  “I’ve made provisions for you after I’m gone,” Jacopo said, his face serene once more. “There is a house in the hills above Verona I shall leave to you, along with a small vineyard. You and Enrico should have a decent income from the winery. Enough to lead a comfortable if modest life.”

  She felt like weeping all over the old man in gratitude, for now she knew she could stay in Italy forever and never return to England. Never face Alfonse again.

  “You are so kind to me, Jacopo.” She kissed his cheeks.

  “You will love Verona,” he said. “It’s a beautiful city and its winters are far kinder than Bassano’s. Yet you will not be too far away from your family in the Casa dal Corno. When Enrico turns twelve, he’s more than welcome to join our workshop as an apprentice painter. So you see, cara, you’ve no need to worry about your future. My family shall look after you always and you’ll have your own house and vineyard.”

  “Thank you.” Her heart was too full to think of any other words.

  “Will you take some advice from an interfering old man?” he asked, with a sly sideways glance. “You should think of marrying again. You’re too young and beautiful to live like a nun for the rest of your life.”

  “Such things take their own time,” she told him. “By my troth, there’s no man I care for in that way, and no man who cares for me.”

  Jacopo’s eyes pierced her. “What about your English poet? He adores you.”

  “My good Jacopo, you are mistaken there,” she said with more vehemence than intended. “He’s like a brother to me.”

  Or he had been like a brother, she thought sadly, until we arrived at the Casa dal Corno and I stopped being Emilio.

  Jacopo regarded her with an indulgent smile. “First you lied to me, presenting yourself as a young man. Now you lie to yourself, Aemilia.”

  He had turned the tables, leaving her stunned.

  “I’m a man and I know what it means when a man gazes at a woman the way Will gazes at you.” The old man grinned. “He is in love. And I see the way you look at him. Do you truly have no feelings for him, cara? I suspect you, too, are in love.”

  She could no longer look Jacopo in the eye, couldn’t do anything but take her seat at the virginals once more and pound out a saltarello, playing so fast she thought her fingers might snap off. Anything to silence the ringing in her head.

  “True love is precious and rare.” Jacopo raised his voice to be heard over the music. “Never turn your back on love.”

  But this could never be. Her collaboration with Will had hinged on her assumption that they would never desire each other, that their friendship would remain lighthearted and uncomplicated, free from the base lusts that had been her undoing as a young girl.

  “Surely you can see how tender he is with Enrico,” Jacopo said. “Doesn’t your son deserve a loving papa?”

  The old man’s words left her in tears. She, who after the humiliation of being put aside by Lord Hunsdon and then forced into a hateful marriage, had commanded herself to be impervious to romance, her heart a fortress. She was a woman of wit and reason, not some soft creature like Angela. Will was the one who had steeped himself in love. She would never forget his face when he stared at Harry upon that midsummer night, his yearning writ large, not just in his sonnets but also in the burning in his eyes.

  Being your slave, what should I do but tend

  Upon the hours and times of your desire?

  She would be no man’s slave.

  “Aemilia, don’t weep,” said the old man. “There’s no shame in love.”

  Does he guess my other secret? she wondered. Guess I am no widow? And yet, as he beckoned her close, she sensed he would have given her his blessing regardless. This dying man was calling on her to embrace life, to allow herself to love a man who was already deeply in love with her, who would match her devotion measure for measure. A small voice inside her whispered, Even you deserve to know true love.

  Downstairs the door burst open. Footsteps clattered up the stairs and down the corridors, accompanied by happy conversation. Muttering her apology to Jacopo, Aemilia grabbed Enrico and darted from the chamber. She could not allow anyone, certainly not Will, to see her so undone.

  THE ONE ROOM WHERE she could hope to find privacy, at least on a Sunday, was the storeroom where Francesco and Leandro kept the rolls of canvas still waiting to be cut and stretched on frames and the pigments from which they mixed their paints.

  Enrico seemed to find the narrow chamber as amusing as any, especially when she gave him a broken piece of chalk and let him draw upon an old slate tile. Seated on a wooden box, she opened her lap desk and leafed through the pages of the new play she and Will were writing. Viola, a shipwrecked maiden washed up on a strange shore, elected to pass as a young man for
both expedience and adventure. Under her new guise as Cesario, she used her considerable intelligence and ingenuity to seek her fortune and so became the most favored servant of Duke Orsino. The duke, a romantic soul in love with love itself—Aemilia imagined him as beautiful, lazy, and vain as Southampton—sent “Cesario” to woo the beautiful Olivia on his behalf.

  What, Aemilia wondered, would the good Olivia make of her namesake in the play? In truth, Olivia was a perfect anagram of I, Viola. They were two halves of the same woman, for even as Viola pretended to be Cesario, Olivia hid behind her veil of mourning for her dead brother. The scenes between the two heroines, with Viola courting Olivia for her master only to have Olivia fall deeply in love with her, were the most poignant in the play. Poor Olivia was enamored of an illusion while Viola was caught in a hopeless double bind, which was resolved only by the reappearance of her twin brother whom she had presumed dead. Of course, this fabulous contrivance was Will’s doing. Was he not himself the father of a twin son and daughter?

  The manuscript pages fell from her hands. How could she continue working with him if she could no longer face him? Damn these weak tears. Perhaps she could finish the play on her own and allow him to put his name on it just the same. Had that not been her original aim, to use him as her mask? Except the brilliance of the play emerged from the alchemy of their two minds in collaboration.

  Aemilia willed herself to be dispassionate, to think only of the written word on the page. Reaching to the bottom of her lap desk, she pulled out a quarto-sized sheet, thinking it would be as blank and innocent as fallen snow. Instead, she saw his elegant hand, his letters with their flourishes. So he had written a new sonnet.

  How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st

  Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds

  With thy sweet fingers when thou gently sway’st

  The wiry concord that mine ear confounds,

  Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap

  To kiss the tender inward of thy hand

  Whilst my poor lips, which should that harvest reap,

  At the wood’s boldness by thee blushing stand!

  To be so tickled, they would change their state

  And situation with those dancing chips

  O’er whom thy fingers walk with gentle gait,

  Making the dead wood more blest than living lips.

  Since saucy jacks so happy are in this,

  Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.

  His words left her quivering, as if she were the virginals frame resonant with sound. Had he written this while watching her play for Jacopo?

  A thought came unbidden, plunging her into a pit of longing: Here you are, twenty-four years old, and the only man you ever allowed to love you was old enough to be your grandsire. The power of her desire, held at bay for so long, shook her with the force of an earthquake. Her hands clutching her face, she pictured the lovers she’d seen at the forest’s edge and then the look Will had given her in the bedchamber they thought they would have to share. She imagined twining her arms around his neck and pulling his muscled body against hers. Breathing in the piney scent of his skin.

  Little wonder Jasper had been so worried about leaving her alone with Will. Had she truly traveled to the far side of Europe to seek her freedom only to plunge into some doomed dalliance with a married man, a father of three? This is madness.

  From down the hall, Giulietta and Olivia were calling for her. Soon they would serve the Sunday feast in the frescoed parlor that looked out on her father’s childhood garden. What would Papa make of her predicament?

  Enough of this sneaking and shrinking! A grown woman had no business hiding in a storeroom. Briskly, Aemilia dried her eyes and smoothed her hair. She couldn’t hide from Will forever.

  YET, SEATED AT THE dining table, Aemilia couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Such absurd torment, the buzzing in her head would not be silenced. Her hands betrayed her, shaking as she skewered a piece of roast pheasant on her knife and attempted to raise it to her mouth.

  “You’re so pale,” said Giulietta, as guileless as she was young. “Will, too. Are you both struck by the same malady?”

  “Hush, child,” Olivia said to her daughter, before bowing her head close to Aemilia’s and speaking softly so that no one else would hear. “If something burdens your heart, you must never be afraid to confide in me, cara.”

  Aemilia ducked her head and stared at her plate.

  AFTER HANDING ENRICO OVER to Tabitha’s care, Aemilia donned her cloak and set off into the drifting snow. If she could no longer ride out alone to flee her troubles, as she’d done in England, she could at least walk, never mind that a respectable woman needed an escort. Yanking her hood over her head, she dared any denizen of Bassano to stand in her way.

  But as she charged out of the city gate, she heard flying footfalls behind her. Swinging around, her fists balled, she found herself face to face with Will. Snowflakes starred his soft brown hair.

  “Don’t you dare creep up behind me!” she snapped. “You gave me such a fright.”

  “Forgive me,” he said. “But I must speak to you.”

  “Then speak.” She looked not at him but at the white mountains and the snow-dusted forest. The cold wind braced her so that she stood stiff and unbending, as though covered in armor.

  “I must bid you farewell.” His voice rang distant and strange. “After all, you’re safe with your family and have no more need of me.”

  She felt a chasm open up inside her as she imagined her life without him in it, without his wit and their shared laughter, without his poetry and the thrill of their collaboration. Then again, how could she have been so naïve? Of course, their ways must eventually part. It was only that this had come much sooner than she had expected.

  “You’re returning to England? To your wife and children?” She tried to smile, to be glad for him. That was where he belonged, in the bosom of his family in his native land.

  “In truth, I know not where.” He sounded defeated.

  She turned to him. “But where would you go if not back to England?” She cursed the plaintiveness in her voice.

  Will gazed at her levelly. “I vowed not to return to Stratford until I had accomplished something in this world. How can I stand before my children as a failure?”

  “To me, you are most accomplished,” she said.

  Allowing him to believe himself a failure was the worst thing she could do, something for which she could never forgive herself. At the very least, she had to reveal her awe of his writing.

  “You have a rare gift,” she said, “that will one day bring you riches and fame. As I said when we first met, no one writes of love as you do.”

  His face reddened like a boy’s. “Did you finally discover my sonnet? I was wondering how long it would take you to happen upon it. Or if you had already read it and kept your silence because you hated it.”

  So Will had left that sonnet as a trap for her, and she’d fallen into it, as gullible as thirteen-year-old Giulietta. Did he think she would surrender to him for the price of a poem? Worse yet, had he nearly succeeded? Twisting away from him, she darted off, tugging her hood forward to hide her tears. But he matched her stride and kept pace with her, as speechless as she, until they reached the forest where black squirrels darted up the snow-laden boughs.

  “Why did you marry in the first place if you’ll not live with your wife?” Her voice was raw, ripping out of her throat with a force that hurt.

  “Because I was eighteen and she was pregnant by me. What else was I to do? Why did you marry Lanier?”

  She exploded with bitter laughter. “Because I was pregnant with the Lord Chamberlain’s bastard and he arranged the marriage to cover my shame.”

  “Does this not make us evenly matched?” Will’s voice rose like the mountain wind. Then he spoke softly. “Once I wrote a sonnet for Harry praising the marriage of true minds. In faith, it should have been written for you, for I was never
better matched by any mind such as yours, Aemilia.”

  It was so rare that he said her name, but when he did, it sounded like a caress. She clapped her hand to her mouth and sobbed. The truth was laid bare and she could no longer deceive herself. She had loved him from the moment she first read the sonnet that had fallen from his doublet in front of Simon Forman’s astrology practice in Thames Street. She had desired him ever since that midsummer night she had touched his tears. Jacopo’s husky voice whispered in the snowy air, There’s no shame in love.

  The wind blew down her hood and his fingers brushed away her tears.

  “Tell me,” he pleaded, “one way or the other. I cannot bear to stay here and not love you.”

  She seized his hand and kissed his palm. Snowflakes tumbled from his hair to land on her face as he pulled her close and kissed her lips, his warmth pouring into her until she thought the snow around them would melt. She kissed him with a hunger that left her gasping.

  They drew apart and stared at each other, their breath turning the air between them into smoke.

  “There’s so much about me you don’t know,” she said.

  As he cradled her face to his chest, she told him about her father’s secret and her sister’s ruin.

  “I knew you were a woman of many mysteries,” he said, cupping her face in his hands. “Yet I never imagined such revelations as these. Your poor sister! Ah, that is why you painted our Petruchio as such a brute, starving his bride. And your father! I’ve never heard such a wrenching tale. No wonder you wept in the synagogue.”

  She made herself speak plainly. “Now that you know the truth about me, will you bid me farewell? I won’t hold it against you.”

  She warded her heart with her last line of defense. He’s not mine for the taking. He belongs to another.