The Dark Lady's Mask

by Mary Sharratt

  With Alfonse at court in the King’s Musicke, Aemilia now employed at Cookham, and Henry serving his apprenticeship in Jasper’s home, they had given up the rented house in Norton Folgate. Tabitha had married her wainwright and was expecting their first child. Pru had stayed behind to act as midwife.

  “Don’t you want to be there when Tabby’s baby is born?” Aemilia asked.

  “Who will look after you then?” Winifred sniffed and rubbed her eyes but stood as tall as a soldier. “A gentlewoman requires a maid.”

  “I am now a gentlewoman servant,” Aemilia pointed out.

  “Look, mistress! Here comes the cart to take us to the manor house.”

  LEAVING BEHIND THE VILLAGE, the cart carried Aemilia and Winifred past cherry orchards and meadows of lacy flowers where cattle and sheep grazed. Though this felt like the deepest countryside, they were only twenty-five miles up the Thames from London and a short distance from Windsor and Maidenhead.

  At last the ancient timber house came into view. Owned by the Crown and leased to Margaret Clifford’s brother, Cookham Manor had become the Countess’s refuge when the strain in her marriage had become intolerable.

  Before the driver could help her down, Aemilia leapt from the cart and stood face-to-face with Margaret and Anne, her new pupil. Aemilia pitched herself forward in a curtsy, but Margaret grasped her hands and held her upright.

  “Welcome, Mistress Lanier. I hope you will feel at home with us.”

  “Promise me you’ll teach me to sing in Italian,” said Anne, taking Aemilia’s arm.

  “A pity you missed Master Daniel,” the Countess said. “He was called away, but his poetry books are here should you wish to read them.”

  Mother and daughter drew Aemilia into their realm, that masterless manor with no husbands or fathers.

  A MEDIEVAL HALL, Cookham was nowhere near as opulent as Grimsthorpe, but it was all the more hospitable with its creaking oak floors and uneven walls with their faded tapestries of dancing goddesses.

  Taking her new tutor by the hand, Anne led Aemilia through the great room and up the staircase.

  “I hope you like to walk,” the girl said. “In fair weather, we walk for hours. Mother even lets me take my lessons beneath the oak tree on Cookham Dean.”

  “That sounds delightful,” Aemilia said, mindful that her best manners be on display.

  When they reached the top of the stairs, the Countess led them down a paneled hallway. With a flourish, Anne opened the door at the very end. “Here you are, Mistress Lanier!”

  Tucked under slanting eaves, the room not only contained a bed but also a writing desk with an ink pot, a goose quill, a stack of freshly cut paper, and Master Daniel’s book, The Complaint of Rosamond. A clay jar held a bouquet of bluebells.

  “This was Samuel Daniel’s room, was it not?” Aemilia asked.

  The air seemed to shimmer with poetry.

  The Countess nodded. “I hope you find it suitable.”

  “My lady, it’s more than suitable.” Aemilia paused, unable to believe her luck. “But it seems the good poet left behind his paper and books.”

  On the shelf near the desk, she saw the Geneva Bible and The Book of Common Prayer, along with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Arthur Golding’s English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  “Mistress Lanier, they’re for your use,” the Countess said. “You confessed your great love of poetry. I thought you might write some verse during your stay here.”

  The sunlight streaming through the open window struck Aemilia blind. Then she blinked and peered through that radiance at Margaret Clifford.

  “My lady, that’s generous.” Aemilia couldn’t keep herself from smiling at the Countess as though she were the very apparition of Pallas Athena.

  A WHILE LATER, WINIFRED entered the room with her mistress’s lute. In her wake followed two youths lugging Aemilia’s trunk. After setting down the lute and chasing the young men back out the door, Winifred hugged Aemilia hard enough to crack her ribs.

  “Oh, my sweet mistress, this is what I always wanted for you! A respectable home amongst honest ladies. Surely here you’ll get into no mischief at all!”

  Aemilia watched as her maid, filled with the zeal of renewed purpose, hunted through her trunk in search of something presentable for her to wear.

  “Such a pity you sacrificed your finest gowns to make clothes for Henry that he’ll only outgrow, but this will do.” Winifred seized a gown of light summer wool, the same hue as the bluebells in their jar. “Ah, but we need water for washing.”

  Beside the curtained bed was a washing stand with a pewter ewer, a cake of soap, and a white linen towel, but Winifred discovered that the ewer was empty.

  “Let me go fill this,” the maid said, letting herself out of the room.

  Aemilia stuck her head out of the ivy-draped window and breathed in the scents of the rose garden below. She caressed the leaves of paper, blank and pure. From the pocket hidden in her skirts, she drew the fustian pouch containing her tarocchi cards. Sitting at the desk—Samuel Daniel’s desk!—she laid out, one by one, the nine cards she had drawn three years ago. She hadn’t touched her deck in all that time, keeping those nine cards at the top, waiting for their promise to be fulfilled.

  Losing all sense of time, she pored over those gilded pictures of mighty women—warriors, queens, empresses, maidens who danced fearlessly at cliff’s edge.

  “What are they, Mistress Lanier?” a voice behind her asked.

  Swallowing a yelp, Aemilia turned to see Anne Clifford. Winifred must have left the door open. Yet as flustered as Aemilia was, she discovered she couldn’t lie to the girl. “They’re called tarocchi cards.”

  “Marry, they’re lovely! May I touch them?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  Without hesitation, Anne chose the card of the female knight brandishing her unsheathed sword as she charged into battle.

  “This is my card.” The girl leaned close as if to impart a secret. “When we rode to York to meet the new King, my father made bold to exercise his right as a peer of the realm to wear his sword in His Majesty’s presence. Afterward, when he unbuckled his sword belt and handed it to his servant, I took it. Before Father could stop me, I belted his sword around my waist before the King.”

  Aemilia was staggered to picture this thirteen-year-old virago standing armed before both her father and her monarch.

  “Am I not Father’s heir?” The girl seemed anxious that Aemilia should understand her reasoning. “My ancestral office, it is, to bear my father’s sword. One day I shall be mistress of his estates in Westmoreland and Yorkshire.”

  Aemilia wondered what she possibly had to teach this girl who seemed a force unto herself.

  “These are fortune-telling cards, are they not?” The girl placed the female knight beside the maiden dancing with the star in her palm. “My mother can foretell the future, but she doesn’t need cards. She has the gift of prophecy. Like Deborah in the Bible.”

  “A prophet? Truly?” Aemilia didn’t know what else to say.

  “Mother’s an alchemist, too.”

  Aemilia fell silent at the sight of Margaret Clifford standing in the doorway.

  “Mother, come and see Mistress Lanier’s tarocchi cards!”

  Aemilia stepped aside so that the Countess of Cumberland could inspect the nine cards that had foretold their meeting and Aemilia’s very presence in this house. The Countess’s eyes were riven on one card in particular, which she held up to Aemilia with a questioning look. The card of the nun wearing the papal tiara.

  Petrified, Aemilia wondered what the Countess, who was by all accounts uncommonly pious, would make of this. Would Margaret Clifford accuse her of filling her daughter’s head with papist perdition? Aemilia would be cast out of Cookham as unceremoniously as she had been booted from Grimsthorpe.

  Just then, Winifred entered with the ewer of water. Her maid looked as though she would drop it in despair as she viewed the scen
e unfolding before her.

  “La Papessa,” Aemilia said in a small voice. “The female pope.” She cleared her throat. “The cards are from Italy, my lady.”

  “As are you,” Anne said brightly.

  Up until this point, Margaret Clifford had been the portrait of solemnity and reserve, but suddenly she laughed. Her mirth filled the room like the fresh air wafting in from the garden.

  “I think we shall not have a dull summer now that Mistress Lanier has come to join us,” the Countess said.

  Smiling, she drew her daughter out of the room.

  “That was a close call!” Winifred huffed, when she and her mistress were alone.

  “Peace, Winifred.” A lightness stole over Aemilia’s heart as she placed the cards, one by one, back in their fustian pouch. “I suspect the Countess is broader minded than either of us imagined.”

  Never in her life had she thought to meet a woman alchemist. Who was this Margaret Clifford? Though only nine years older than Aemilia’s own thirty-four years, the Countess seemed so wise. Her secrets and veiled tragedy, and her fierce love for her daughter, reminded Aemilia so much of her own father. If Papa had been a magician, so was this lady.

  AT CHAPEL THE FOLLOWING morning, Aemilia almost believed she had been spirited back to Italy. Though the service itself was soberly Protestant, frescoes covered the walls and the centuries-old stained-glass windows depicted miracles and saints. Carved on the baptismal font were the Instruments of the Passion. Above the altar, dominating the entire space, was the crucified Christ, an image that Anne Locke would have denounced as idolatry and replaced with a plain wooden cross. Flanking the crucifix was a statue of the Virgin Mary as the Mother of Sorrows. Though seemingly every other church and chapel in the entire kingdom had been whitewashed, its statues destroyed, this private chapel had been spared, undoubtedly because it was owned by the Crown.

  “Mistress Lanier, I can see you are as thunderstruck as I first was,” Margaret Clifford said, after the service had ended.

  Anne and the chaplain had already gone on ahead, leaving the Countess and Aemilia alone in the chapel.

  “In truth, I’ve come to take great comfort from these images.” The Countess paused before an image of Christ, naked and bound, being scourged by the Romans. “Meditating upon this helps me endure my own sufferings as a wife.”

  “My lady,” Aemilia said, shocked to hear a woman of her rank reveal so much of herself. Then she remembered how George Clifford’s scorn of his wife had been on display for all the world to see. Perhaps the Countess had discovered that the best response was candor.

  “For who inflicted such agony upon our Lord?” Margaret Clifford asked.

  Aemilia felt bruised inside, thinking that the Countess expected her to reply that the Jews killed Christ. But the lady’s answer to her own question took Aemilia’s breath away.

  “Men,” the Countess of Cumberland said. “Men killed Christ. And yet they blame poor Eve, and all womankind, for our fall from grace.”

  Not since Aemilia was a girl and her father had whispered in her ear that hell was empty had she heard such a radical pronouncement.

  Before leaving the chapel, the Countess lingered beneath a stained-glass window showing Saint Clare in her nun’s habit.

  “If I envy the Catholics one thing, it’s that,” she said, lifting her gaze as the sun pierced the warm umber tones of Clare’s habit. “If only I had been able to marry God instead of George Clifford. The sole good to come of our marriage was Anne, and he despises her because she’s not a son.”

  “Your daughter is a magnificent young lady,” Aemilia said. “I trust you’re very proud of her.”

  The Countess took Aemilia’s arm as they walked out of the chapel. “Let her enjoy her girlhood. If it stays fine today, would you be so good as to give her her lessons outdoors? You shall teach her the lute, of course, and to sing madrigals in any language you please. And you’ll read Ovid and Spenser with her.”

  “Of course, my lady.” Aemilia remembered the books the Countess had left in her room. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

  Already she anticipated long summer afternoons discussing poetry and philosophy.

  The Countess gave her a wry look. “I think writing your own poetry would give you greater pleasure still.”

  Aemilia ducked her head, uncertain what to say.

  “I was in earnest, you know, about encouraging you to write during your time with us,” Margaret said. “Once I, too, attempted to write.”

  “You are a poet, my lady?” Aemilia thrilled at the possibility of meeting another Anne Locke.

  The Countess shook her head. “No, I began writing my autobiography—for my chaplain, you understand. The Seven Ages of Woman, I called it. Alas, I had only reached the Fifth Age when I ran out of inspiration. Better I should provide patronage for those who are truly blessed by the Muses.”

  Aemilia’s heart surged.

  “Sometimes I think a woman’s life is a dance with backward and forward movements,” Margaret said. “A pilgrimage of grief.” She fixed Aemilia with rueful eyes. “But enough of my melancholy. Come, let’s walk beneath the sun.”

  “I TOLD YOU WE would walk and walk.” Anne clasped Aemilia’s hand as she led her along the winding path up Cookham Dean. “Wait till you see it! The tallest hill in miles!”

  What a counterpoint the girl’s enthusiasm sets to her mother’s gravity, Aemilia thought. When she looked back at the Countess marching behind them, the lady’s eyes appeared lost in contemplation. In Margaret’s wake came the servants, carrying Anne’s and Aemilia’s lutes and books.

  Their uphill progress was slowed as Anne swooped to gather white harebells, purple vetch, blue forget-me-nots, and the lacy white blooms of cow parsley. Aemilia helped her tuck the wildflowers into her hat band.

  “Look!” Anne struck an allegorical pose. “I am a rustic shepherdess! And you are a dryad!”

  Laughing, Aemilia fended Anne off as the girl tried to tuck a spray of new birch leaves in her hair. Instead, she carried Anne’s offering in her hand.

  On they wandered, through cherry and apple orchards, across pastures of sheep and curious heifers, past brooks nearly spilling their green banks. The air rang with birdsong and lambs calling to their mothers. The winds and waters sang in harmony.

  When they arrived at the heights of Cookham Dean, Aemilia marveled at the view, an endless tapestry of hills and vales, towns and hamlets, groves and pastures, castle turrets and church steeples, and the Thames winding into the green distance.

  “From here,” the Countess said, “you can see into thirteen shires.”

  Margaret Clifford, Aemilia noted, was not even out of breath from the climb.

  The Countess led the way to an ancient oak. In its shade, the servants laid down a cloth for pupil and tutor to sit on.

  “What think you of my schoolroom, Mistress Lanier?” Anne asked.

  In the shade, the girl flung off her hat.

  “Why, surely this is Mount Parnassus,” said Aemilia. “The home of the nine Muses.”

  Winifred, red faced from the climb and puffing like an old donkey, handed her mistress her lute. Aemilia threw her maid an apologetic look before tuning her instrument.

  “Let us begin with music,” Aemilia said to Anne, “and finish with Ovid.”

  The Countess sat a short distance away upon a much-weathered bench built around the oak’s massive trunk.

  “She’s reading her Psalter,” Anne whispered.

  Gazing off into the green hills, Aemilia understood why the Countess allowed Anne to have her lessons here. From this summit, they might see so far in the distance. Margaret Clifford longed to give her daughter the world.

  WINIFRED NEEDN’T HAVE WORRIED about my clothes, Aemilia reflected. In this house of women, with no men to dazzle or appease, they dressed simply, without jewels or ostentation. The Countess wore sober dark gowns and even Anne’s attire was robust, allowing her to freely rove across the g
rounds.

  But on this glittering May morning, Anne was invited to the neighbor’s estate for a fete. Aemilia stood beside the Countess and waved to Anne as she rode forth. Bedecked in pearls and brocade, the girl looked as though she were a princess on procession, accompanied by two maids, two footmen, and the stable groom.

  Her mother, however, stayed behind, as though she embraced the life of a recluse.

  “Let the girl amuse herself with the other young ladies,” the Countess said. “I can’t abide those gatherings. All the local gentry who pity me.”

  Aemilia longed to take Margaret’s hand but feared that would be overstepping the boundary between them. Remember your place.

  The lady regarded Aemilia with her dark eyes that radiated quiet intelligence. “Mistress Lanier, would you like to see my laboratory?”

  NOT SINCE HER VISIT to Simon Forman’s consulting room ten years ago had Aemilia set foot in such a place, its walls bedecked with mystical diagrams. The Countess showed her the furnace and oven, the retorts and hermetically sealed fermenting vessels, and the copper distilling body with its glass head and receiver. There was a pestle and mortar, and all manner of dishes, beakers, and tubes.

  But what arrested Aemilia’s attention was the oratory in the alcove. Along with the cross on the wall, there hung a piece of virgin parchment inscribed with Hebrew letters.

  “The letters of the Hebrew name of God,” Margaret told her. “Alas, I don’t know that language—I copied it from a book. Each working begins and ends with prayer and meditation.”

  Here in the laboratory, the Countess’s air of melancholy dropped away. Aemilia sensed that this was the place where Margaret was most comfortable in her own skin, her private sanctuary, holier to her than even the chapel because it was wholly hers. None could enter without her permission. She wore the key on a silk cord at her waist.

  “Alchemy, you must understand, is nothing but the art that makes the impure into the pure through fire,” Margaret said. “Even men and women. As it is written in the Book of Isaiah, ‘When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burnt; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.’ But I don’t occupy my hours attempting to transform base metals into gold. Instead, I distill healing elixirs from plants.”