The Dark Lady's Mask

by Mary Sharratt

  His fingers, calloused from riding and archery, traced her cheek. She quivered, her belly softening.

  “You left the country,” he said, “taking my son with you without asking my leave.”

  “Fleeing the plague,” she told him. “Keeping your child safe from harm. I traveled on family business with my cousin, Jasper Bassano.”

  “And returned an expectant mother.”

  “The father is an Englishman,” she hastened to say. This, she knew, mattered to him.

  They both turned abruptly as Tabitha entered with little Henry in her arms. Winifred followed, bearing a tray of wine and sweetmeats.

  The lad froze when his natural father lifted him in his arms for the very first time. Lord Hunsdon smiled at their son, bouncing him in his arms until the child laughed and tugged at his beard. Lord Hunsdon gently tossed the boy in the air, eliciting shrieks of glee that Aemilia hadn’t heard since the days when Will used to play with him. She wondered if her twenty-one-month-old son remembered Will, remembered calling him papa.

  “My namesake,” Lord Hunsdon murmured, stroking the lad’s dark hair. “He’s the very picture of his beautiful mother.”

  She flushed. “Look you closely, my lord. He has your jaw and brow. Your nose. And he’s big for his age. I think he shall grow to be as tall as you.”

  Lord Hunsdon gave their son a kiss and a cuddle before returning him to Tabitha.

  “You’re a good mother. You’ve kept him in the best of health.”

  “Thank you, my lord.” Aemilia lifted her eyes to her former lover as the servants swept out, closing the door behind them.

  “So tell me why you summoned me.” Lord Hunsdon sauntered around the sparsely furnished parlor. “I see your lute and virginals are gone.”

  “I’ve had to sell them, my lord.” Humiliation thickened in her voice. How she hated having to grovel.

  “The forty pounds a year I give you is not enough?” he asked, cold and stern.

  She forced herself to hold his gaze. “The man you chose for me gambled and whored most of it away. Now I fear I must support him, for he is too ill to earn a living. And what, pray, will happen to me and our son when you’re no longer in this world, my lord? Will your heir even permit us to remain in this house?”

  Aemilia’s voice shook as she spoke. Would Lord Hunsdon despise her for her boldness? Pensioned-off mistresses were meant to be supported by their husbands, but Lord Hunsdon hadn’t reckoned that Alfonse would fail at every turn and contract the pox in the bargain.

  To her surprise, Lord Hunsdon bowed his head and sat on the settle. “In faith, I have but a few years left, by the grace of God. I shan’t live to see our son grown. But what of your new lover? Is he of no help to you?”

  “My lord, he’s a penniless poet.” She didn’t dare confess that her poet had spurned her.

  Lord Hunsdon laughed. “My lovely Aemilia, I thought you had more sense than to take up with a pauper. If you are to be an adulteress, at least be more discerning. How I prized you for your wit.”

  “My wit, you say?” She clenched her hands. This was her chance. “Then, pray, hear my proposal, for I would use my wit and education to earn a respectable living.”

  “Well, speak then, my dear.” He inclined his head, inviting her to sit beside him on the settle.

  First, she poured him a goblet of wine, then she opened her lap desk and pulled out a stack of pages.

  “Whilst in Veneto, I have written comedies, my lord. Such comedies as have never appeared on the stage in this kingdom. With your help, I might see them performed and so secure an income.”

  He shook his head. “The theater is no respectable place for a woman. I won’t have your name sullied.”

  “My lord, in Italy there are women players and playwrights. The great Isabella Andreini, whose patrons are the Medicis—”

  He raised his palm to cut her off. “Papist countries might breed such spectacle, but this is England. The Queen won’t tolerate women on the public stage or suffer any lady tainting her reputation with the theater.”

  The Queen, Aemilia wondered, or the men who claim to speak her will?

  “With the Puritans in the Privy Council,” he continued, “we’re fortunate to have theater permitted at all.”

  “If the plays were not associated with my name,” she said, speaking quickly to hide her desperation. “If a man was to act as my play broker—”

  She broke off when she saw the skepticism settling on Lord Hunsdon’s face, as though he were about to lose patience and march out of the room. As Lord Chamberlain, he was a busy man, and she was fortunate that he’d granted her even an hour of his time.

  “My lord.” She grasped his hand. “Will you not read just one page? If you think it doggerel, I swear I’ll never trouble you again.”

  She handed him the comedy, Giulietta and Romeo, that she had finished since leaving Verona. In the final scene, the happy lovers were united for all eternity as their warring families reconciled and laid down their enmity. Everyone must bow in the face of true love.

  With a sigh, Lord Hunsdon perused the first page as if to indulge a tiresome petitioner. Aemilia’s legs shook beneath her skirts while she waited. When he reached the bottom of the first page, she braced herself, expecting him to fling the play aside and declare he needed to be on his way. But he turned the page and continued reading.

  The room was so utterly silent, she could hear her racing heart. She stole glances at him as the minutes passed and ran together. Surely now he must stop and say he’s seen enough. Outside, the sky began to darken. Tabitha tiptoed in to light the lamps and draw the curtains, and still he sat there reading Giulietta and Romeo. Aemilia stared into her wineglass, not daring to hope. She could not breathe for her astonishment when she saw him read to the very end. Then she was so nervous of his verdict, she hardly possessed the courage to look at him.

  “Aemilia, my Hypatia.” Lord Hunsdon turned to her with the glistening green eyes she remembered from when he was first enamored of her, his gaze drinking her in as though she were Venus descended to earth.

  “Such poetry,” he murmured. “Such passion. You wrote this?”

  “I did, along with a collaborator.” She struggled to steady her voice. “A man who will stand in as its sole author to avoid any hint of scandal.”

  “So I suspected,” he said, with a nod to her belly. “Your penniless poet whose child you carry.”

  She could neither move nor speak. Her entire fate hung from a thread.

  “Ah, my lovely lady,” he said at last, kissing her brow. “You gave me such pleasure. How can I begrudge you claiming pleasures of your own?” He took her face in his hands and stared at her so intensely, as if to commit her to his memory so that her image might burn in his mind’s eye forever, a secret portrait. “I hope your poet loves you as you deserve to be loved.”

  Aemilia bent her burning face to kiss his hand so he wouldn’t see her tears. “Henry, you are good to me.”

  “Does your poet have a name?”

  “William Shakespeare, my lord.”

  Lord Hunsdon scratched his jaw. “Ah, now I recall. That fellow who wrote those history plays.” He laughed under his breath before caressing her hair. “But that was before he had you as his sweet Muse.”

  His breath was as hot as a kiln as he clasped her in his arms and kissed her. She kissed him back, allowing herself this comfort. Her first lover still cherished her even if Will had deserted her, he whose career she had just secured. How easy it would be to allow Lord Hunsdon to heal her pain, yielding to him completely. But his grip on her loosened when her pregnant belly jutted between them. He released her and kissed the crown of her head.

  “Your poet may stage your plays under my patronage,” he said. “Let the troupe call themselves the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. I shall arrange for them to put on their play at Gray’s Inn during the winter,” he said, referring to one of the ancient Inns of Court. “If it proves a success they may perform at
the Theater in Shoreditch come spring.”

  “Yes, my lord.” The Shoreditch playhouse! Her heart thrilled at the very thought of her plays being acted out at the first theater she had ever visited, stealing in with Jasper to see Papa on stage.

  Lord Hunsdon’s hand on her shoulder brought Aemilia back to earth. “But you must remain in the shadows, my dear. No one must know this venture has aught to do with a mistress of mine.”

  Aemilia kissed his lips to seal the bargain.

  AFTER LORD HUNSDON HAD left, Aemilia paced the parlor, her mind turning cartwheels. Though she had the plays in her possession, she couldn’t proceed without Will, but she had no clue where to find him. She presumed that he had returned to London by now, but in her condition, she could hardly comb the boardinghouses of Saint Giles-without-Cripplegate to seek him out. For this task, she needed a man. If anyone in her acquaintance knew Will’s whereabouts, it would be her maternal cousin, Ben Jonson, who also haunted the playhouses.

  Opening her lap desk, Aemilia sat down to write yet another imploring letter.

  “YES, DEAR COUSIN, I know where he lives,” said Ben, when he visited Aemilia three days later. “Above an apothecary near Saint Helen’s in Bishopsgate, if you please. But why you should wish to know is another question.”

  He glanced at Aemilia’s belly and looked as though he were trying very hard not to smirk as he drank down his coddled ale. Her cousin was one of the few who knew Will had disappeared in Aemilia’s wake the previous year.

  Ben had turned up at her door drenched from the driving rain. Now he splayed on the settle before the fire. With his ruddy face and the steam rising off his sodden hair and breeches, Aemilia thought he looked like Lucifer.

  Though three years younger than she was, Ben seemed older, his body bent and scarred, for his early life had been a vicious struggle. His father, a clergyman, died before Ben was born, then his mother had married a brute of a bricklayer who dragged Ben out of Westminster School, where he had been learning Latin and Greek from the great William Camden, and forced him into a backbreaking apprenticeship building walls and laying foundations. Heavy labor at so young an age had left her cousin’s body bent and squat. His only escape had been to run away to the battlefields of Flanders.

  Even as he sought to earn his bread with his quill, Ben remained no less a fighting man than he’d been in his soldiering days. His tongue and pen were as razor keen as his sword and rapier. Only an idiot with a death wish would pick a fight with Ben Jonson.

  “Do you know that I am to marry in November?” Ben seemed infinitely pleased with himself. “I would happily invite you, dear Aemilia, but I think you wouldn’t like all the Johnsons gawping at you and muttering. One day I must bring Annie so you can meet her. I reckon the pair of you shall be thick as thieves, for she’s an honest shrew after your own heart.”

  “Felicitations.” Aemilia hoped her cousin’s intended wife was indeed strong enough to hold her own against the sheer force of Ben’s character. “I wish you every happiness.”

  He was so loud and volatile, her cousin, the settle creaking beneath his weight, his wet boots squelching against the floorboards, that Aemilia decided she had better not offer him any more ale.

  “Now that I have answered your most mysterious query as to the whereabouts of our Warwickshire bumpkin, would you have me do anything more?” Ben asked, his eyes sparking, as though he found her summons both scandalous and darkly amusing.

  “Pray, bring Master Shakespeare to me,” she said, eyes lowered. “Tomorrow if you can. I must speak to him on matters most urgent.”

  Her cousin barked out an irreverent laugh. “On the matter of your belly, gentle kinswoman?”

  Aemilia glowered at him until he blinked. “On the matter of these.” She opened her lap desk to show him the plays.

  “Are those his works?” Ben spoke contemptuously even as he craned his neck to read the first page of Giulietta and Romeo. “His plays always put me to sleep. For a provincial with poor Latin and less Greek, he is far too self-important.”

  A great lover and praiser of himself was Ben Jonson, and a great condemner and scorner of others.

  “In truth, these are our works,” Aemilia said. “He and I wrote them together.”

  “When you ran off to Italy with him whilst your clodpole husband was at sea?” Ben quaked with laughter, his huge arms folded across his chest.

  Aemilia cringed and raised her eyes to the ceiling. She feared that Alfonse, still ailing in the chamber above, could hear every word. Speaking quietly, she informed Ben of the agreement she and Will had made, once upon a time, when they were mere acquaintances.

  “I have the patronage of the Lord Chamberlain, but I need Master Shakespeare to stand in as the sole author of our work. I also need to hold him true to our original agreement. That is, to evenly divide the profits between us.”

  Leaning back in the settle, Ben appeared to consider this. “And if he won’t? He’s already had what he wanted from you. What’s to stop him from basking in the glory and hoarding every last ha’penny for himself? Sure, you can plead your belly, but hasn’t he a wife and three brats already?”

  “Two,” she said brokenly. “His son died.”

  “God’s blood,” Ben muttered, hanging his head as though stunned.

  But Ben’s words had hit their mark. Would Will indeed grab everything for himself? Would this all turn ugly and vindictive?

  “If he seeks to renege on our agreement, why then I must unmask him,” Aemilia said. “Make it public that a woman collaborated on the plays.”

  “And if no one believes you?” Ben’s heavy-lidded eyes flashed his cynical distrust of nearly everyone. “Who would believe you? What woman has ever written a play for the public stage?”

  Aemilia was about to mention Isabella Andreini when a scorching heat rose from her belly. For one awful moment, she feared her waters would burst in front of Ben Jonson. But when she found her voice, it sounded cool.

  “Because you, cousin, won’t let him abuse me. If you were to announce that the plays were cowritten by a woman, you’d make him the greatest fool in London. He wouldn’t be able to live down the shame.”

  Ben sat bolt upright. “Dear Aemilia, you make me a party to blackmail!” He sounded delighted.

  She tried her best to smile. “He would not dare cross you.”

  “He had better not.” A ferocious grin spread across her cousin’s face.

  Has Ben agreed to this plan out of family loyalty, she wondered, or because it so thrills him to be holding this secret over a rival playwright’s head?

  “But for now,” Aemilia said, “pray just bring him to me in peace and goodwill.”

  “Why did you pick him of all people to be your secret collaborator?” Ben asked, cocking his head like a pigeon eyeing a morsel. “Why not me? Would it not have been more prudent to keep this sort of thing in the family? And you could have avoided your current predicament.”

  Now came her turn to laugh. “Because you, Ben Jonson, are far too vain to collaborate with a woman.”

  “Ah, you know me too well, dear cousin. But in your case, I think I could amend my opinion.” He leaned forward to take her hand. “Though a woman born, you are a manly and most learned soul.”

  One hand on her belly, Aemilia inclined her head. She had never felt less manly in all her life.

  AFTER BEN LEFT WITH the promise to return with Will, Aemilia could not sit still. Neither could she stand. She could not seem to rest in any one position for longer than a few seconds, for the child was so unsettled, leaping like a dolphin in the briny sea of her womb. How could she face Will in her current state, an object of ridicule and shame? Her own cousin had laughed at her. She couldn’t even walk with dignity—her swaying bulk forced her to waddle.

  And what if Will refused to come? What need did he have of her, a brilliant poet like him? He didn’t even need their plays—he could write new ones. What was to stop him from truly being rid of her? A cold f
orboding seized her chest. All this worry and fear could literally prove the death of her. When she tried to envision her life after giving birth, of cradling her infant in her arms, she only saw her own grave.

  A knock on the front door sent Aemilia’s heart banging. She froze, her ears pricked to the muffled voices in the corridor. Winifred and Tabitha entered with two packages.

  “Gifts from Lord Hunsdon, mistress.” Winifred sounded pleasantly surprised.

  Aemilia let out a long shaky breath. Sinking onto the settle, she unwrapped the first package with both eagerness and care, for she knew it to be a lute from its shape. A warm flush crept over her cheeks just to touch the satiny soundboard, the graceful neck, the strings of gut and wire.

  The second package contained a ream of paper along with a message written in Henry Carey’s own hand:

  My musical lady must have music. My gentle Muse would also wish to know that I have arranged for your poet to stage his first play on Twelfth Night in the Hall at Gray’s Inn for an august audience of barristers and nobility. I therefore require a comedy befitting this most auspicious date for jests, japes, and wonders. Now it is your task, my beautiful Hypatia, to choose the play and write out fair copies for the players.

  Fondly, H. C.

  Before Winifred’s ever-watchful eyes, Aemilia kissed the letter. At least copying out the plays would provide some welcome distraction. With reverence, she leafed through the creamy paper, each leaf bearing the watermark of a swan, the most iconic symbol of the poet, the mute bird that shattered a lifetime’s silence to sing most exquisitely before it died.

  After tuning the lute, she began to play and sing.

  The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note,

  when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.

  Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,

  thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:

  “Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!