The Dark Lady's Mask

by Mary Sharratt

Before her daughter’s death, she had harbored a secret dream of donning her breeches and riding Bathsheba to Shoreditch, where she would occupy the floor with the groundlings and elbow her way to the lip of the stage where she could gaze into the players’ eyes as they delivered their lines. Their swinging garments might touch her face.

  Instead, Winifred laced her into her best gown, and Aemilia pinned rosemary to her sleeves and hatband so all the world would see she was in mourning. Alfonse escorted her to the landing where they boarded a wherry to Billingsgate. Thanks to Jasper’s intervention, her husband had taken up his old post in the Queen’s Musicke while he bided his time until Essex’s next voyage.

  At Billingsgate they joined Ben and Annie. The four of them walked up Gracechurch Street toward Bishopsgate and on to Shoreditch, passing Saint Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, where Aemilia’s parents and uncles lay buried. A balmy day, the hedges were frothy with blossoming hawthorn.

  The Theater buzzed and throbbed, but Aemilia saw no playbill posted outside.

  “A curious thing,” she pointed out to Ben, as they squeezed their way through the throng. “Do you know what today’s performance is to be?”

  “In truth, I can’t say,” he replied. “Perhaps this is the debut of a new play and they didn’t get the new playbill printed on time.”

  Aemilia hoped it would be As You Like It, the romance of Orlando and the spirited cross-dressing Rosalind, whose every line she relished.

  Ben led the way up to the first tier gallery where he said they would have the best view. Taking her seat between her kinsman and husband, she thought how at last she had assumed the mantle of respectability, as though she were a lady with an untarnished reputation.

  “Ben’s writing his own new play,” Annie said, stroking her husband’s arm. “A comedy of the humors.”

  “Comedy to banish melancholy.” Aemilia could feel her own humors lifting, borne up on the crowd’s anticipation and excitement.

  Alfonse hushed them as the minstrels on stage began to play a dirge so mournful that Aemilia gathered this was to be no comedy. An armor-clad actor marched center stage and announced the drama, The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

  Good God, had she only known what this day’s performance was to be. After so much anticipation, she would not, after all, watch the actors delivering the lines she had penned. Wrestling down her disappointment, she decided she’d best resign herself. Let us see his tragedy then. At least she could observe the new shape his writing had taken since their collaboration had ended. She guessed it to be a revenge play like The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, with phantoms, gushing wounds, and heaps of dead bodies to regale those in the audience who would otherwise spend their leisure hours in the bear-baiting pits.

  From her perch in the gallery, she viewed the proceedings with a critical distance. How incongruous for the dead king’s ghost to appear, even as the May sunshine cast its benevolence upon the groundlings who bayed for blood and vengeance. But nothing prepared her for the jolt of seeing Will stride upon stage as Prince Hamlet.

  “Is he not too old for the part?” Ben grumbled.

  Clad entirely in black, Hamlet’s every word and gesture conveyed his deep mourning. Aemilia’s heart quickened to think that perhaps Will indeed shared her grief over their daughter’s death. His poetry sent her pulse racing and yet each phrase reeked of pessimism. As Hamlet, Will muttered of suicide. Swinging his contempt like a mace, he denounced his mother’s marriage to his uncle only two months after his father’s funeral.

  Will gazed into the audience, as if to envelop each one of them in Hamlet’s brooding, when his eyes locked on Aemilia with the shock of recognition. All the crowd seemed to melt away and only the two of them existed. Pinned there in the gallery, in the full light of day, she couldn’t hide from him. He seemed to falter, as though forgetting his part.

  But he delivered his next line like a blow.

  “Frailty, thy name is woman.”

  She set her jaw. That sentiment was hardly original. Indeed, she expected better of him, but let him say what he would. Frail she was not. Frail souls didn’t cross the Alps on muleback.

  Queen Gertrude, played by a boy with hair as dark as hers, seemed so insipid, as though the actor were trying to embody capricious femininity as he clung to King Claudius and simpered like a Southwark doxy. Where were the strong, spirited heroines of their comedies?

  The next scene introduced the second female role, played by a boy with sensuous lips and long golden curls, so beautiful that he reminded her of a younger and more vulnerable Harry. Clad in a maiden’s silk gown, this was Hamlet’s beloved, Ophelia. What did Will play at, using a name so similar to that of their dead daughter? Ophelia wasn’t a proper name, even in Denmark.

  In the second act, Ophelia’s father read a poem Hamlet had written to his beloved.

  Doubt thou the stars are fire,

  Doubt that the sun doth move,

  Doubt truth to be a liar,

  But never doubt I love.

  Aemilia shivered and burned at once. Such devotion that poem promised only for the poet to rip it to shreds. Just as Hamlet made Claudius and Gertrude watch a play mimicking their crimes against the dead king, Aemilia was forced to view Hamlet abusing Ophelia with the very words Will had said to her in Verona the day he announced he was leaving.

  “I did love you once.”

  But now he cut even deeper, raising his face to meet Aemilia’s eyes again for one blinding moment.

  “I loved you not.”

  With a tight twist of his mouth, he swung round to confront the boy Ophelia, who cowered and appeared to weep real tears as Hamlet towered over him, belting out his derision, denouncing all women as two-faced whores who deserved to be abandoned.

  “God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and nickname God’s creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.”

  No longer just a grieving father turned cynical, Will’s genius had turned into something vicious and vengeful. And why? Because his players had teased him about the copies of Twelfth Night being written in her woman’s hand? Did he seek to prove his worth by demeaning all women? But it was not just women—it seemed as though he desired to lampoon her and Harry both, destroy every last trace of any love he’d shared with either of them. He wanted to kill his old self, that tender poet, and be his own man, unfettered by the heart. Love’s slave no longer, he employed the illusion of the stage to unveil his most galling truth.

  Don’t let him intimidate you. It’s just a play, all make-believe and boys in skirts. But Aemilia felt as though she were being flayed alive until she’d no more skin left to hide her bleeding flesh.

  Ophelia entered strumming a lute and singing the heartbroken songs of a ruined and cast-off lover. Seeing such a sickly distorted portrait of herself harrowed Aemilia’s soul. Clearly gone mad, Ophelia sang the words “There’s rosemary for remembrance.”

  Aemilia thought she would crack. She already predicted Ophelia’s end. The hapless girl, like Will’s love for her, his former mistress, had to die. It was no surprise when Ophelia drowned herself, the preferred suicide method of pregnant unmarried women. Throughout the play, Will had dropped hints that Ophelia was with child. “Conception is a blessing,” Hamlet had told Ophelia’s father, “but not as your daughter may conceive.”

  “Her clothes spread wide,” Queen Gertrude said, describing Ophelia’s watery death. “And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.”

  Aemilia tried to push away the memory of her last meeting with Will, clasping his hand to her womb where Odilia swam and danced.

  Then followed Ophelia’s funeral, the girl buried with minimal ceremony on account of her suicide. With a raw heart, Aemilia looked on as, in a final act of degradation, Hamlet and Ophelia’s brother wrestled and grappled upon her coffin.

  Will could not have made his malice more obvious. It was as though he had written this play with the intention of driving
her as insane as Ophelia. He wished to excise her from his life, exorcise her ghost, drown her in a sea of her own tears, then bury her and walk away, abandoning her to the worms and dust.

  “UNBLIND YOUR EYES,” BEN whispered in Aemilia’s ear, as they followed the tide of the departing crowd. “He wants to break your heart so that you shrink away and no longer hold him to the bargain you made. Don’t think like a spurned woman, but like a man would. A man of business! No sentimentality.”

  Annie regarded her with anxious eyes, as though well aware how hard it was for Aemilia to shake off her utter shock and distress. Indeed, it demanded her entire resolve to hold on to her dignity as she walked on her husband’s arm.

  “You look ill,” Alfonse said, examining her when she could hardly bear to look him in the eye after this debacle.

  “Come with us to the Pye Inn for cakes and wine,” Annie said.

  Aemilia shook her head. All the wine in the world couldn’t blur her pain. The very thought of food made her heave. Letting go of Alfonse’s hand, she plodded off alone. More than anything, she yearned for her male disguise, longed to gallop across the green fields and lose herself. But here she trudged, a woman dragging her good skirts in the dust.

  Will hadn’t only dealt his death blow to their love but also to her aspirations as a playwright. Could she write without him as Aemilia Lanier? Who would read a woman’s work? Even Anne Locke had contented herself with publishing translations of Calvin’s sermons and kept her sonnets for her family and friends.

  In the space behind her, Aemilia heard Alfonse telling Ben and Annie to go on without them.

  “So that was your lover,” her husband said, when he caught up with her.

  Though Alfonse had known of the affair since she had returned to England pregnant with another man’s child, seeing Will on the stage seemed to have raised all her husband’s buried pain.

  “How could you betray me for someone so cruel?”

  So it was not her betrayal itself that hurt him as much as the one she had chosen—a man who had just treated her far worse than Alfonse ever had even in the first bitter months of their marriage. And what could she say in her own defense—there were no words. Her husband’s wounded face struck her dumb. What he must have suffered sitting beside her through that endless play that had laid bare her every sin. Meanwhile, she stood before him like the condemned adulteress in Jacopo Bassano’s painting. Will had certainly shown every desire to stone her, and now Alfonse turned away.

  “Let us go,” he said, and headed toward Bishopsgate, no doubt intent on walking back down Gracechurch Street to Billingsgate where they would board a wherry to Westminster.

  But Aemilia couldn’t take a single step in that direction—what if she met Will and his players in the street? Surely, like Ben and Annie, they would be heading for the Pye Inn to drink and feast and carouse. Clutching herself, she looked off into the green distance where lambs played behind blooming hedges, their bleating sounding almost like infants’ cries.

  “Why do you not come?” Alfonse retraced his steps and took her hand, but her flesh was so limp, there was nothing for him to grasp.

  At the back of her head, she heard her father’s urgent whisper. Cara mia, instead of despairing over what you have lost, be grateful for what remains. Was her tragedy greater than what Papa had endured? Everything had been taken from him—his home, his country, his religion—and yet he had lived on. He had been a good man and lived a good life.

  “Can we not walk home over the fields?” Aemilia asked, when she had at last regained her voice.

  “You wish to walk all the way to Westminster?” Alfonse gave her a doubtful look, as though fearing her senses had deserted her.

  “Is it not a beautiful May?” She reached for his hand. “Will you walk with me, my husband?”

  He nodded and touched her face. Together they set off across the undulating green countryside where she had once cantered Bathsheba. Passing beneath the windmills in Finsbury Fields, they headed west toward the outskirts of Saint Giles-without-Cripplegate where Aemilia had visited Will in his old boardinghouse. What would have happened if I had not spirited him away to Italy when the plague raged through London and Westminter? she wondered. If I had just left him there?

  He was a player, after all. Perhaps he had been deceiving her all along. She told herself she possessed nothing of his anymore. Not the ring he had given her, not even their child. Ah, but that was not quite true—she still had the tarocchi cards he’d bought for her in Venice.

  Blackbirds trilled and swooped over meadows thick with speedwell while Alfonse told her about his childhood in Greenwich where he and his brother used to dig in the tidal mud along the Thames in search of treasure—once they found an ancient Roman coin. Aemilia sang a madrigal to tease a smile from her husband as they crossed a bridge over Fleet Ditch, where a mad girl like Ophelia might have drowned herself.

  Before long, they passed Southampton House, its mullioned windows shuttered now that Harry and his bride had fled to France. She wondered what the young Earl would have made of seeing his likeness in the boy who played Ophelia. Would Harry have laughed and brushed it off as though Will’s satire were no greater concern to him than a fly or would he, like her, have felt the blade cleaving flesh and bone?

  At a farmhouse near Saint Giles-in-the-Fields, she and Alfonse bought a simple supper of buttermilk, coarse country bread with soft new cheese, and strawberries and cream. Then, heading south past Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, they walked in the shadow of the Royal Mews, where, as a girl, she had first met Lord Hunsdon when he was the Queen’s Master of Hawks.

  She remembered the first time Lord Hunsdon set a merlin falcon on her gloved arm. How she had trembled with both awe and pity to see such a glorious creature held captive by jesses and hood. Lord Hunsdon squeezed her shoulder and told her to release the bird.

  With unpracticed fingers, she uncovered that beautiful head and loosed the fetters. Her entire being had exalted to see that raptor spread her wings and shoot high into the air until Aemilia could see only a tiny speck in the endless blue sky.

  A lightness now spread within her, as though she were so buoyant that the wind might sweep her aloft.

  “You are smiling.” Alfonse caught a tendril of her hair in his fingers.

  “Lanier—does it not mean hunting falcon in French?”

  He laughed. “You think we are birds?”

  “Magnificent birds!”

  Like the falcon, she had been blinded by her hood, bound by jesses. But the time had come to soar free. If Will had thought she could be so easily broken, she must disappoint him. She would endure.

  Whitehall was washed pink in the evening sun and the ancient oaks in St. James’s Park were lit fiery orange. She and Alfonse reached their home in Longditch as the last light faded.

  WHEN THEY SLIPPED THROUGH the garden gate, Alfonse wrapped his arms around her.

  “When I saw you as Cleopatra in the masque,” he said, taking her back to the days when she was Lord Hunsdon’s mistress, the dark jewel of Elizabeth’s court, “I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”

  His eyes, as dark as her own, moved over her face, and finally Aemilia understood with a shock of clarity. Alfonse had never despised her, but he had been angry and jealous because he thought she would never love him. Her heart opened in remorse to remember the many insults and slights she had hurled his way. How she wished she had uncovered the gentle lover inside her young husband early in their marriage before they had both made their irrevocable mistakes.

  “Come, love,” she murmured, stroking her husband’s curly hair. “Let’s to bed.”

  Taking his hand, she led him in the door and up the stairs to their chamber. Although they couldn’t make love in the usual manner lest she risk catching the pox from him, there were other ways to share tenderness. She guided his hands to the lacings of her gown and stays. In their marriage bed, in the deep cradle of night, Aemilia held him and l
et herself be held.

  VI

  The Arctic Star

  26

  LETTER FOR YOU, MISTRESS,” said Winifred, entering the parlor where Aemilia played the virginals. “Is that not the Lord Hunsdon’s seal?”

  The maid shivered as if the missive had flown out of the man’s grave. Henry Carey had died only a month ago. Aemilia’s heart was still raw from the loss of him, her first paramour, her son’s father. Hands frozen on the wooden keys of her virginals, she stared at the letter.

  “It will be from the new Lord Hunsdon,” she told her maid.

  George Carey was her dead lover’s son and heir, a debauched rogue who had driven his father to despair and who dosed himself daily with mercury to treat his French pox. Like it or not, the man was now her landlord and also the new patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.

  After Winifred withdrew from the room, Aemilia counted to eleven before breaking the wax seal. As she read, her hands began to shake. The letter floated to the floor. She stared around the parlor that was no longer hers. Her numb fingers brushed the wooden keys of the virginals, Henry Carey’s gift to her, which she would have to sell.

  George Carey had ended her forty pounds yearly income. Simultaneously, he was evicting her from this house. Is it that he cannot abide his dead father’s former mistress living on his property, she wondered, or does he claim the residence for a mistress of his own?

  Now she must break the news to Alfonse and the Weir sisters. Where would they go now that they were reduced to her husband’s income and what she earned with the plays? What if Alfonse’s health took a turn for the worse?

  Aemilia felt a drop in her stomach. Here begins my decline. Her face in her hands, she remembered how swiftly Papa had sunk into poverty, how misfortune had broken him. Henry, did you know your son would cast me out into the cold?