The Dark Lady's Mask

by Mary Sharratt

  More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.”

  Yet even as the mournful words left her throat, a secret joy arose in her heart. She, like the swan, could yet unleash her song. Perhaps part of her must die, that tenderhearted woman who walked into the chapel in Verona, but another Aemilia would rise phoenixlike, for such were the souls of poets.

  23

  HEN BEN JONSON BURST into her parlor with Will in tow, Aemilia was as armed as any knight. Across her lap she held the lute. The beautiful instrument that curved and swelled like a woman’s body was her shield. Her weapon was the music itself.

  Serenely, she strummed as Ben flung himself on the settle in the lordliest manner possible and Will hunched on a stool as far away from Ben as he could manage. As Aemilia played on, she thought of Orpheus, whose music enchanted even the Lord of Death. Let it disarm Will. His body was rigid, as though he had been taken prisoner. She could nearly taste his resentment to be reduced to this, dragged here by his most detested rival.

  “How good of you both to come,” Aemilia said, her voice rendered more gracious by the trilling arpeggios she played. “I trust you have been well, Master Shakespeare?”

  Though she felt like an impostor addressing him thusly, Aemilia reminded herself that she had called him here on business matters.

  “I have been well indeed.” The look Will shot her was bruised. He had lost weight and looked as pale as if he had never walked beneath an Italian sun. “How fares your husband, Mistress Lanier?”

  She nearly struck a wrong note as the heat spread over her cheeks. But her voice remained as light as her fingering on the frets. “Master Lanier is ill if you must know. How does the Earl of Southampton?” The words flew out before she could stop herself.

  Ben erupted into laughter. “Dear cousin, have you not heard the news? The Queen has banished Southampton from court and, tail between his legs, he’s legged it to France.”

  Aemilia shook her head in bewilderment. “How, pray, did he fall from Her Majesty’s favor?”

  Surely Lord Burghley couldn’t have forced Harry into exile for refusing to marry his granddaughter. Or was there some new scandal—had the young Earl been caught with a high-ranking man?

  Ben hooted. “Why, he secretly married one of the Queen’s Maids of Honor. Can you imagine the uproar?”

  Harry married? Aemilia thought her head would spin off her neck and fly out the window.

  “Full of surprises, Southampton is.” Ben slapped his thighs. “Just when I had him pegged as a sodomite, he runs off with one of the Queen’s own women.”

  Aemilia observed Will’s downcast face as he stared at his clenched hands. His last source of refuge and patronage had been taken from him. My dear man, now your only way forward is with me. He had wanted to be free of her, yet here he was. Aemilia nearly pitied him.

  “Might I ask why you summoned me, madam?” Will’s voice was chilly.

  “In faith, I have good news for you.” She plucked a sprightly galliard.

  Will’s gaze was guarded, yet beneath it, she knew there was his poet’s heart broken wide open for his dead son. He wore his grief like a hairshirt. Has he been back to Stratford? she wondered, picturing him bereft and broken at Hamnet’s grave.

  “With the Lord Chamberlain’s patronage,” she said, “the first of our plays shall be performed at Gray’s Inn on Twelfth Night.”

  Her words seemed to knock him off guard, and he nearly lost his balance on the stool.

  “And should it prove a success,” she continued, “your players shall move on to the Theater at Shoreditch in the spring.”

  “Gray’s Inn? Shoreditch?” He sounded both dubious and amazed.

  “Expedient for you, is it not?” she asked him. “Seeing as you live in Bishopsgate.”

  Before she could say anything more, Tabitha entered with a jug of wine. Ben grinned like a demon when he accepted the goblet from her hand. Will, however, refused the cup before shooting Aemilia a dark look, as if accusing her of doctoring the wine with a love philter. Losing patience with him, Aemilia nearly snorted aloud.

  “The Lord Chamberlain might wish to know I have of late written the best plays of my career.” Will’s injured pride shone like beaten metal. “The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.”

  Tragedy set in Denmark! As far a departure from their Italian comedy as Aemilia could imagine.

  “Oh, not another of your insufferable history plays!” Ben thundered. “The Lord Chamberlain doesn’t want the stage littered with dead bodies. At least not for your first performance.”

  “The empty vessel makes the loudest noise,” said Will, seething on his stool.

  Ignoring him, Ben waved his empty cup at Tabitha, who cast a covert look at her mistress. Aemilia nodded with a discreet gesture to only fill his cup half full.

  “This venture, sir,” Aemilia said, addressing Will, “is not meant to serve your vanity or mine. The play must absolutely regale your genteel audience at Gray’s Inn and so convince the Lord Chamberlain that it shall turn a tidy profit once you begin performing in Shoreditch. Master Burbage shall want his playhouse packed to the rafters.That is why I’ve chosen the comedy of Viola and Sebastian, the shipwrecked twins. Given the date of its first performance, I suggest we call it Twelfth Night. I have already written out fair copies, which you will find upon the table there.”

  Ben lunged to grab one before Will could even rise to his feet. “Such clean, unblotted copies! No one will believe you wrote it, Shakespeare.”

  Aemilia winced to hear her cousin take such pleasure in mocking Will.

  “I’ve taken the liberty of arranging music to accompany the piece,” she interjected, before Will could sling some insult back at Ben. “It’s to be the most musical of plays.”

  Closing her eyes, she began to sing.

  O, mistress mine, where are you roaming?

  O, stay and hear your true love’s coming,

  That can sing both high and low.

  Trip no further, pretty sweeting,

  Journeys end in lovers meeting.

  Every wise man’s son doth know.

  What is love? ’Tis not hereafter,

  Present mirth hath present laughter,

  What’s to come is still unsure.

  In delay there lies no plenty,

  Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  “By my troth, a good song,” said Ben.

  Aemilia turned to Will, who blinked and rubbed his eyes, for he had written those lyrics during their idyll in Verona. She had merely set his words to music.

  “Now your task, Master Shakespeare, is to gather a troupe of players and begin the rehearsals,” she told him. “Do you agree to this?”

  “It appears I have no other choice,” he said.

  She remembered their last bitter quarrel in Verona. You thought I was yours for the taking. Your creature. Did he think she was using him even now?

  “Why so dour, man?” Ben blustered. “Don’t be such a churl. You’ve gained the patronage of none other than the Lord Chamberlain. Other men would sacrifice their firstborn sons—”

  His face a mask of rage, Will sprang to his feet, knocking over his stool. For one awful moment, Aemilia feared the two men would come to blows.

  Then Will fixed Ben with an icy stare. “You are not worth another word.”

  “Leave us, please,” she told her cousin.

  Ben raised an eyebrow. “As you will.” Swiping the wine jug from Tabitha’s tray, he sauntered out of the room. Tabitha tiptoed in his wake and closed the door behind her.

  Setting aside her lute, Aemilia heaved herself out of her chair and took a step toward Will, but a sudden pain in her belly made her founder. Before she could crash to the floor, he seized her arms, raising her to her feet. They both stood paralyzed.

  “You might have sent for me without using that tedious fool to strong-arm me,” he said. “I never see his face but I thin
k upon hellfire.”

  “Master Jonson knew where to find you, and I did not.” She broke off, her eyes searching Will’s. “Did you think you could just wash your hands of me?”

  Her anger, bottled up for so long, commanded his attention in a way that sobbing or pleading could never have done.

  “Once you wrote of the marriage of true minds,” she went on. “Our intellects might still work in harmony even if we are otherwise estranged. Think of all the sweet words we wrote together. If the stars are kind, our words shall endure long after we’re both dead.”

  “It’s not our stars that hold our destiny, but ourselves,” he said. “Our collaboration has reached its end. I cannot write your comedies anymore.”

  “Your tragedy of Hamlet,” she said. “Is it named after Hamnet, your son?”

  He looked away.

  “I could help you even there,” she said. “Peregrine Willoughby, whose sister educated me, is ambassador to Denmark and has been a guest at Elsinore Castle.”

  She wondered what Perry and his brittle wife would make of her predicament. If she could not contrive to restore her fortunes, she would live the rest of her life as a disgraced woman set on a path of inevitable decline.

  “I have rewritten Giulietta and Romeo as a tragedy,” Will told her.

  “That’s no surprise.” Aemilia sighed and took his hand before he could pull away. “Don’t be so blinkered by your bitterness now that you stand at the threshold of something better. My dear man, you may yet have your tragedy if I don’t survive this birth. Then our plays and their profits shall all go to you. I only ask you to surrender my half to our child.”

  Will suddenly seemed unsure of himself, as though his knees might buckle. She clasped his hand to her womb.

  “I think it shall be a girl. She swims like a mermaid in her watery home. Can you not feel her dance?”

  He closed his eyes and bent his head as she held him there with the babe kicking against his palm.

  “Shall I send word to you when she’s born?” Aemilia could no longer keep her tears at bay. “I’m calling her Odilia after our chapel. Can you still remember?”

  He fingered her golden ring.

  “Is this the ring I gave you?” His voice had gone hoarse.

  “Do you want it back?”

  “Aemilia,” he said, brushing away her tears.

  He held her as though she might crack at any moment.

  “You are far too strong and stubborn to die,” he finally whispered, his hand resting on her burning cheek. “Besides, you must live to see your beauteous Olivia being played by some pimpled boy from Putney.”

  For the first time in weeks, she heard herself laugh. She stroked his hair, as soft as she remembered, and then his jaw, now covered in a golden-brown beard. Before he could stop her, she kissed his open mouth. Yet even so, she knew she had lost him, that she couldn’t possibly hold him to her any longer. Drawing away, she picked up the fair copies of Twelfth Night and pressed them in his hands.

  “Now go in peace,” she said.

  WILL EXITED THE ROOM as silently as a ghost. Behind him, the door closed with the quietest sigh. Sinking back onto her chair, Aemilia cradled her lute in her shaking hands. She couldn’t see for her tears.

  What if Will was right and life was but a tragedy, a cruel joke? What if all her love and suffering were for nothing, cold stars abandoning her to ill fate?

  “Zounds, dear cos! Do you truly weep for that provincial poetaster?”

  Aemilia looked up to see Ben. He knelt and took the lute from her hands.

  “Never you worry. I’ll make sure Shakescene never cheats you, at least as far as money is concerned. Don’t trouble yourself about the child either. My wife and I shall stand in as godparents. If you’re married to a fool of a Frenchman, I’d say even adultery is forgivable.”

  Merry from the wine, Ben strummed her lute and began to sing. His comically off-key voice sent her rocking in laughter.

  Sigh no more, lady, sigh no more,

  Men were deceivers ever,

  One foot in sea and one on shore

  To one thing constant never.

  Then sigh not so, but let him go,

  And be you blithe and bonny,

  Converting all your sounds of woe

  Into Hey nonny, nonny.

  Winifred came in to listen.

  “It might be a silly ditty,” the maid pronounced, “but it’s the most sense I’ve heard all day.”

  THOUGH FOREVER EXILED FROM her lover, Aemilia thought of herself as an invisible player, scribing fair copies and arranging the stage music. Why should Jasper and her other Bassano cousins not benefit from her plays and earn a lucrative side income as theater musicians? She wrote a letter to Jasper in hope that this opportunity might be her means of smoothing her way back into the family fold.

  When Jasper called in later that week, he looked as conflicted as when they had parted in Venice more than a year ago. At least his face betrayed no shock at the sight of her pregnancy. Indeed, he appeared resigned, as if he had suspected such an outcome all along.

  “I should have never left you with that interloper,” he said. “Had I only insisted that you return to England with me.”

  “I would have refused,” Aemilia told him amiably. “When, dear Jasper, have you been able to bend me to your will? Let’s hope that the theater venture might at least prove profitable for us both.”

  “Profits? Is that all you can speak of?” He stared at her in disbelief. “This man has humiliated you.”

  “Do you propose to challenge him to a duel?” She threw up her hands. “What purpose would that serve? If you would champion me, then see if you can arrange for Alfonse to join the Queen’s Musicke again—should he ever rise from his sickbed.”

  Jasper fixed her squarely in his gaze. “Aemilia, you walk a dangerous path. You weathered one scandal with the Lord Chamberlain—”

  “Fortune be praised for that,” she said. “The man has been my lifeline.”

  With a start, she realized that she had passed beyond the realm of shame.

  “And now you are pregnant by this scribbler, a married man.”

  Aemilia regarded her cousin in silence. No more tears flowed. No blush crept over her cheeks. Finally, it was Jasper who lowered his eyes.

  “Let’s hope your husband plays along and gives you cover of decency,” Jasper said.

  “At this point, I’d say he has little other choice.”

  “Two scandals,” Jasper said, as if to drive his point home. “In God’s name, you can’t afford a third.”

  “You needn’t worry. Henceforth, I am a reformed woman.” She clasped her hands in a semblance of contrition. “The penitent Magdalene.”

  Jasper stared as if trying to determine whether she spoke in earnest. Finally, he changed the subject. “Was Bassano as grand as you thought it would be? The villa with its painted façade?”

  “The villa is just a building,” she said. “But Jacopo had the biggest heart of any man I’ve met since Papa died. He was sorry not to meet you, Jasper. Do you know that he and Papa wrote letters to each other?”

  “Aemilia,” her cousin said. “Can you forgive me for abandoning you in Italy?”

  Her laughter surprised even herself. “I wouldn’t take back my time in Italy for all the world. Not one minute of it.”

  “In faith, you don’t sound particularly penitent to me.”

  “Jacopo would have said our deepest regrets are about what we didn’t do,” she said.

  Jasper bowed his head.

  “By the way,” he said quietly, “I’ve returned something that belongs to you. I left it in your garden. You’ll want to order hay and straw.”

  “Hay and straw?” She looked at him in confusion until suddenly it registered.

  Planting a kiss on her cousin’s cheek, she rushed as swiftly as her condition allowed to the kitchen and tore open the door to the garden. There, covered in shaggy winter fur and cropping winter’s gra
ss, was a chestnut mare that now threw up her head and whinnied. Bathsheba ambled toward her, inserted her pink muzzle in her mistress’s arms, and blew softly on her belly.

  24

  EMILIA PANTED AND THRASHED, in thrall to her body. Wrenching waves surged through her, building into a tempest that swept her out to sea. Even her sweat tasted of brine.

  Winifred offered her hand. “Squeeze as hard as you’re able,” she pleaded, as though yearning to take all of her mistress’s pain onto herself.

  Prudence wiped Aemilia’s face with a cool cloth and told her when it was time to bear down and push.

  But Aemilia’s thoughts soared free from the prison of her flesh. Already in character, Will and his players rehearsed Twelfth Night—she could see him as clearly as if he stood before her. He had chosen the role of Feste, that mercurial poet-jester who by his wit and wordcraft could pass effortlessly between the servants’ quarters and the duke’s court, mingling with both high and low, and yet transcending all social stations and being no man’s vassal. To think she had once aspired to such freedom, thinking it merely a matter of donning a male disguise, as though a pair of boots and breeches could erase her womanhood—and her troubles.

  “Mistress, you’re fading.” Prudence’s voice was sharp. “Stay with us. Now push.”

  The most overpowering force Aemilia could imagine seized her in its fist, the unstoppable might of her womb pushing new life into this world. She clenched Winifred’s hand so hard that even her stalwart maid grimaced. She wailed and bellowed, unleashing noises that didn’t even sound human. Some swan song this is.

  But all pain dissolved when she felt the child slip from between her thighs. She wept and laughed and trembled as she held her slippery little mermaid. Her heart swelled until she thought it was large enough to contain the earth and starry heavens.