Dark Lady

by Charlene Ball

  “Will,” Kit said, “you’ve kept this charming fellow a secret. I would know him better.”

  “He’s busy and has little leisure.”

  “Do you keep him well occupied then?”

  Will frowned. “He’s a musician that’s going to play for some of our shows.”

  “Does Henslowe know him?”

  When Will said nothing, Kit shrugged. “Keep him to yourself, then.” He gave Emilia a smile, and then turned back to Will. “I hoped to run into you. I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Spill it.”

  “As you know, Will, everyone likes your King Henry plays. They’re different from anything that’s been done.”

  “So far they haven’t proved popular.”

  “They will. I want to ask your advice.”

  “A university man asking for my advice?”

  “University men don’t have the corner on good writing. Your plays are good.”

  Will inclined his head. “Thanks.”

  “I want to write a play about an English king,” said Kit. “What do you think about Edward the Second?”

  Will frowned. “The king that played the wanton with his minions, wasted the treasury, got deposed and murdered?”

  Marlowe’s face glowed with excitement. “That’s the one. Wouldn’t he make a fine character in a tragedy—flawed but great?”

  “Flawed, yes, but great?”

  “He loved greatly,” Marlowe said simply.

  Will gave Marlowe a sharp look and nodded. “I suppose he did.”

  Emilia shifted on her seat. Are they going to talk till dark?

  The wine and oysters arrived. “And spoons, as you requested, sir.” The innkeeper plunked them down.

  “Thanks,” Will said. “Here, Robin.” He handed her a spoon.

  “More claret for me.” Kit raised his cup to the innkeeper.

  Emilia picked up an oyster and chewed it. The flavor burst inside her mouth and she closed her eyes involuntarily. She took a sip of wine; another burst of flavor, crisp and dry. It reminded her of pears. She took another sip and devoted herself to her repast.

  “What I like about your Henry plays,” Kit said, “is how your characters talk. They sound like real men. I want to do that.”

  Will opened his mouth to speak.

  “And I like the way you use jests and clowns,” Kit went on. “They’re not just to keep the auditors entertained, they’re part of the story.”

  “Well—”

  “I can’t seem to manage it. My characters are so serious.”

  “Let them speak—”

  “Furthermore—”

  “Let me speak, will you!” Will burst out.

  “Oh, of course, sorry, old fellow,” Kit said. “You know how I rattle on.”

  “What I think,” Will said, “is, let your characters speak in prose, and then switch to verse at heightened moments. The audience will sit up and listen.”

  “Ah,” Kit said, nodding. “Very well, I’ll try it. But another thing: I’m at my wit’s end with Kemp, the clown. I write lines for him, but he makes up his own. Sometimes he does a routine that isn’t even in the play.”

  “That happened last week,” Will said. “He brought a dog onstage and had it do tricks.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I wrote the dog into the play. His name’s Crab. Look for him.”

  “But that’s just rewarding Kemp for his foolery!”

  “Maybe, but it’s funny as hell. I can’t control either him or the dog, so I may as well use ’em.”

  Kit shook his head. “I’ve written some scenes about King Edward. Would you take a look?” He reached into his pouch and pulled out a rolled sheaf tied with string. “These pages are rough. My chamber fellow Tom Kyd spilled ink on them.” He waved a splotched sheet aloft. “He wouldn’t copy it over, said he was too busy with copying work that pays.” He set down the rolled papers. “Can you read it by tomorrow?”

  “I’m busy this afternoon. But . . .” Will sighed. “Very well, I’ll do it.”

  Emilia threw down an oyster shell and glared at him.

  “Marvelous!” Kit swallowed the last of his claret. “See you at the Curtain tomorrow morning. Nine sharp!” He turned to Emilia. “And we’ll get acquainted soon, Master—Warbeck? A good name for pretenders, my dear. See you anon.” He whisked away.

  Emilia pushed her shell-laden plate from her. “So your afternoon is planned, I take it?”

  “Emilia, no!” Will leaned across the table and took her hand.

  She pulled it away. “You’ll go back to your room, read Marlowe’s play, get your own playbook ready for tomorrow’s rehearsal, and, oh, yes, bed your new lover in the odd spare moment.”

  “Let’s go.” Will swallowed the last of his Rhenish and paid the innkeeper. Then he took her arm and propelled her out into the street.

  A wind had started up. The sky was gray. Emilia shivered, wishing she had worn a warmer cloak. They followed one cobbled, muddy street to the next, passing St. Katherine Coleman’s, where some of the Bassanos went to church. Would any of her relatives recognize her if they passed?

  “Emilia,” he said, “I had to say yes to Kit. I’ve been trying to get the university men to notice me for over two years. This is an opportunity I couldn’t let slip.”

  “Then why am I going with you?”

  He pulled her under the shelter of an overhanging upper storey and took her shoulders. “Why d’ye think?”

  She shook her head but could not speak, for he pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard. She felt the bristles on his shaven face, smelled rosewater and sweat, tasted the wine they had both drunk. They hastened arm in arm along Threadneedle Street until it ran into Bishopsgate Street and through the arched gate, crossing the street that was Wormwood on one side and Camomile on the other. They went out the City gate, past Hounsditch and the Dolphin Inn, the wind pushing them forward. The sky was growing even grayer and filling up with billowing storm clouds.

  Just past the Vaughans’ great house, they turned onto a side street and into a doorway under a jutting-out upper storey. They climbed a narrow stair. Will turned a key in a lock and pushed open the door. He locked it behind him, went to the almost-dead fire and poked it up, and held a long candle in the flame. Light shot up from his hand, throwing shadows on his face.

  Emilia saw a table strewn with papers and parchment, an inkwell, several quills, a pen wiper, and three or four books stacked on piles of paper. A small window set into the whitewashed brick wall was covered by a wooden shutter that rattled in the wind. In the corner stood a narrow bed with thin curtains pulled back to reveal sheets, covers, pillows, bolster, and more books piled in disarray. A screen concealed a corner, and a painted cloth hung on the wall. All this she saw in the second before she turned to Will, and he reached to touch her face.

  What happened next she never quite remembered clearly—how he lifted her hat from her head and undid the tie that held back her thick curls, held her hair in his hands and inhaled it, reached his hands around her hips and lifted her and set her down on the bed, opened her doublet, pulled at the bandages that she had to help him unwind, how they laughed themselves breathless until her breasts were free, how she had no clear idea how they both became naked so quickly, how they rolled over and over and stroked one another and laughed and then stopped laughing.

  And how he whispered, “O how lovely you are,” and how his face in the dusk filled with passion, how he did something that made her feel what she had never felt before, and how she moaned and cried out loud enough to be heard in Westminster, then opened her eyes to look into his and said, “So that is why people will go through anything for this,” and he said, “You never knew that before?” and she whispered, “No, I never did.” And how he seized her and held her tight, laughing as though he had won a prize, and how she laughed too, and he made it happen again and again until she cried out, “No, please stop, that’s enough,” gasping, wiping tears from her
eyes. And they held each other, wrapped in the sheets and propped on the pillows, a book poking her behind, and he kissed the curls on her forehead and she kissed the hair growing behind his ear, and they lay quiet and warm until sleep overcame them.

  She did not go back to Westminster that night but slept close beside Will as the winds whistled outside. She woke early to see through her eyelids the glow of a candle, and opened her eyes to see him sitting at the desk, reading and occasionally writing something in the margins of the page. She watched him framed in the glow of the stubby candle as the black framed by the window turned gray and a faint sound of a burnt ember falling in half thudded from the fireplace. She envied him his absorption in writing. She watched as he scratched the last note in the margin of Marlowe’s sheaf of papers and rolled it up. Then he stretched his arms upward, reached for the quill, and started writing again on a fresh sheet of paper.

  As winter approached, the wind blew colder. Autumn had always been Emilia’s favorite season. Now she reveled in the chill and icy air, in the heavy boy’s cloak she wrapped herself in when she left her house disguised to meet Will. They met at taverns and ordinaries, where a simple meal could be enjoyed for a couple of pence; at the Exchange, where Cornhill and Threadneedle Streets met; or in the shadow of Paul’s. She wanted to invite him to her house, but she feared Hunsdon might again appear unannounced.

  When she slipped into the kitchen the morning after that first night, Min gave her a long look, hands on hips. “Best get upstairs and into your own clothes right away, Mistress.”

  “Min—”

  “I don’t need to know where you’ve been,” Min snapped. Then she said in a softer tone, “Just be careful.”

  Emilia could be with Will in the early or late afternoon, before or after performances. She feared meeting the Vaughans as they went along Bishopsgate Street—or, heaven forbid, the Bassanos. But she frequently threw caution to the winds, racing in her boy’s doublet, cloak, hat, and boots through afternoon streets, cutting through dark alleyways, slipping around corners and hiding in stairwells. She would return to Westminster by boat through morning mists and early vendors’ cries.

  One evening, he was flushed with triumph after coming from the Theater, where he had played three roles in his own Henry the Sixth, Part One and then danced frantically in the jig afterwards. Emilia had lounged in a gallery seat, cracking nuts and throwing the shells down on the players. She’d applauded and whistled, boy-like, at brave Talbot and booed Joan la Pucelle, the French sorceress. Even while booing, Emilia wondered what people would think if they knew that, like Joan, she was a girl in male disguise.

  After the play, they met in the yard and took off at a run along Bishopsgate Street, hand in hand. They reached Will’s lodging house, ducked under the overhanging second storey, and kissed frantically in the dark stairwell, pressed close, gripping each other tightly, as though their lives depended upon it. Somehow they found they were slipping their hands under each other’s clothes, and then it was too late to stop. Her points were unlaced and so were his, they were both gasping and struggling, and she bit the fabric of his doublet to keep from making a sound as they coupled there in the stairwell against the wall. When they were finished, they separated trembling, fastened their points back loosely, and continued up the stairs, holding on to one another.

  He was busier than ever, preparing new plays for the winter season. He no longer worked regularly at the bookstall. Lord Strange’s Men wanted him to play at Court for the Christmas and Twelfth Night festivities, and they needed him mornings at rehearsals. In the afternoons, he performed or held the playbook. At night he rewrote old plays and met with other playwrights at the Bear and Staff or the Mermaid.

  Once, as she stroked his thinning hair, Emilia asked, “What do you want, Will?”

  “To support my family, advance in the world, be a real poet.” He stretched, arms behind his head. “The children are growing and always need clothes. I want to get a house. Now the children and my wife are crowded in with my father, mother, brothers, and sister. My father is not doing well. He always wanted to see me become a gentleman. Since Oxford became out of the question . . .” He broke off.

  “How would you become a gentleman?”

  “By getting a coat of arms. My father applied a decade ago but was rejected. I’m going to apply as soon as I have the money.”

  “How do you plan to become a poet?”

  “By cozying up to my Muse and tickling her and blowing in her ear, and making her laugh and shriek—” He suited action to word until Emilia laughed and made other sounds and finally cried out her pleasure.

  Her days were filled with a sort of breathless haze. When she was out shopping, she drifted into daydreams, interrupted by Jenny or Marco saying, “Mistress? Which shops will we go to?”

  She thought sadly, guiltily, of Hunsdon. I am deceiving a good old man who has treated me with nothing but kindness. He still visited her, but now a sad awkwardness lay between them.

  Will’s room had become as familiar to her as her own chamber. She tried to describe it in verse: “A littl roome, a closet, nothing more / And yet Love cometh here to rest His head . . . where lovers wrestle . . .” Her face grew warm, and she scratched out the line, a flush spreading over her neck and arms. She tapped her teeth with the end of her quill. Oh, it was harder than it looked, this writing poetry! She sighed and rose, stretching. Then she sat down at the table and took up her pen again.

  It was dark and the wind was rising as Emilia left Will’s one November afternoon at four. He kissed her in the stairway and offered to walk with her to the river to get a boat, but she said she’d be fine. He had some actors’ parts to copy that night, so he did not insist.

  Once out in the street, wind whistling, shouts from behind a wall, the clop-clop of a horse bearing a cloaked rider passing close and vanishing around a corner, she drew her short boys’ cloak tighter around her, pulled her feathered hat down, and set out toward the river at a fast clip.

  She trusted her disguise was good; she looked like a middling-well-heeled boy on an errand, maybe off to meet a girl. And she had made the trip on foot before—but it had been summer then, and the days longer. Now all was pitch dark but for rushlights, torches, and lanterns carried by passersby or hung outside alehouses or tavern doors.

  As Emilia cut through a narrow lane, her elbow knocked against a boy lounging against a wall.

  “Hey, watch yerself!” he called.

  She hurried on.

  The boy ran after her, calling insults. “Watch how you tromple a workin’ man! I’ll teach ye manners!”

  Emilia began to run. Seeing a tavern sign ahead, she ducked through the door and slid onto a bench next to a couple of tradesmen, who glanced her way and continued talking. The door creaked open.

  A boyish voice shouted, “Where’s the little knave?”

  “None here,” bellowed the tavern keeper. “Be on yer way.”

  The door closed again. Emilia blew out her breath, stood, and looked around. The tavern was nearly empty. A few men sat together with their drinks. The stuffy room smelled of ale and cooking food. A diamond-paned window stood open, and she let the evening air cool her face as her pounding heart slowed.

  “Master Warbeck!”

  Her heart flew into her throat. She turned and saw Kit Marlowe approaching, pipe in hand. “What a stroke of good fortune.”

  She thought about running, but Marlowe seemed a safer choice than outside, so she took a sturdy, boyish stance and growled, “Good evening, Master Marlowe. How do you?”

  “Excellent, my fine young friend.” As Marlowe moved closer, she noticed the unshaven line of his jaw and the shadows under his eyes. His face seemed thinner, and his fingers were creased with dirt, although his collar and sleeves looked immaculate. A dagger hung at his belt, its sheath weathered and stained. When he smiled, she saw a tooth was missing. “Would you like to come and sit with me? Do say yes.”

  Emilia did not care to go ou
tside, so she said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Splendid!” Marlowe lightly steered her toward the nearest table. “We’ll have a bite to eat. I imagine you haven’t eaten since dinner?”

  She was suddenly hungry. Dinner had been hours ago.

  At the table, Marlowe seated himself on a bench, and she sat opposite. He propped his elbows on the table and gazed at her as though she were a prize he had unexpectedly won. His hands moved restlessly from his stubbled chin to his belt to his collar to scratch his neck. His eyes shot nervously about the room.

  “Master Marlowe—”

  “I asked you to call me Kit. My friends do.” That smile again. “Now, what would you like? Our choices are limited, I’m afraid. Braised mutton, roast mutton, or mutton stew. Or would you prefer the dried stockfish?”

  “Roast mutton,” she said, then regretted it. How would she pay? She had brought only enough money for a small cup of wine.

  “Splendid. Innkeeper!” He ordered wine and food for them both. “So what brings you out on this chilly evening, friend Robin—may I call you Robin?”

  “Yes, sir. I was visiting Master Shakespeare.” Tell the truth as far as I can.

  Kit raised an eyebrow. “Will Shakespeare? You’re a friend of his, aren’t you?”

  Emilia hesitated. “I am a musician, sir. He’s going to hire me to sing and play the lute.”

  “Does he do the hiring for the Theater now? I thought old Burbage did that.” His smile was challenging.

  “I know nothing about such things, sir.” It was a mistake to mention Will.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Ah, Warwickshire.”

  Kit looked amused. “So you’re from Will’s old stomping grounds. You must know his family. Tell me, my dear, is his wife a shrew, as they say?”

  Emilia shifted on the seat. “I have no acquaintance with Master Shakespeare’s family.”

  “I see I can’t get a thing out of you.”

  At that moment two goblets and a flask of wine arrived, along with two plates of roast mutton. Emilia requested a spoon and knife.

  The innkeeper snorted. “Y’ought to keep a knife about ye, boy. Never know when you’ll need it.” He returned with the implements and threw them on the table. “Leave ’em here when ye go,” he barked, stomping off.