And in time even Harry became a shadow. Yet, there was a time when I did think him almost immortal. He seemed to stop the sand in the glass, the sun in the sky, the sickle as it bit yearly into the grass that was our sick flesh. That golden time between us was truly wonderful, passing the love of women, and our delight in one another unmixed with baser matter and incapable of corruption.
Or so I liked to think.
But how wrong I was, Francis, how wrong, how wrong, how wrong.
41
Do you smell a woman? Do you smell her coming? Do you have her in the nose? If you do, you’re wrong. This is no woman, waiting to come on – this is a fiend of hell, this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. And half of London’s too. But you could smell her coming, long before you stuck it in. You could smell her off-stage, clothed with her aura, the stench of sex exuding from her before she even entered the room. And the whiff of foreign sperm in your nostrils. She was the bay where all men ride. The world dropped anchor there. Chaste as a cat and crazy as a cow in June. The heat was never off her – she itched for it, the bitch. God, Lucy Negro was the abbess of abstinence compared to this all-fornicating whore whose whole course and motive was the consumption of the male member. She was like that truckle-bed, always available, ready for use. Her petticoats went up and down like the moon and she went at it like a rabbit.
‘Like the small gilded fly, Will, that lechers in your sight?’
No, she was no fly, not this one, no. I was the fly, and she was the spider, and the web was her sex. Look and see – how many came there. Closer, closer, come nearer, into the core, see the struggles of just another fly. This is where I died, Francis. And for years to come only the husk of me was left.
‘Bring her on stage, then. Let her present her part.’
Her part was all of her – and she presented it to all. Francis, I give you Emilia Bassano, born six years after me, daughter of Margaret Johnson and Baptist Bassano, one of her Majesty’s Italian musicians. Her mother gave her the ivory complexion but she took the blackness of her hair from her father. But by the time Burbage built the Theatre her father was dead and buried in Bishopsgate, and only days after I came up to London for the first time her mother followed him. I must have passed their corpses under the daisies on my way to Shoreditch.
‘Fatherless at six and orphaned at seventeen? She warranted compassion, Will.’
I warrant you, music and sex ran in her blood, a witch on the virginals, on which she practised hard, attracting the attention of the virgin queen, also a virginalist of note. Unlike the queen she practised hard in bed too – you hadn’t been fucked unless you’d been to bed with Emilia Bassano. It was official. And every young man wants his will.
‘And every old man too, eh, Will?’
No one older than old Hunsdon, Anne Boleyn’s nephew, Henry Carey, the Lord Chamberlain himself. He had half a century on her, but she became his mistress and he set her up lavishly in her own apartments and pounded her nightly. With one strict caveat. That if his ancient penis proved fruitful in her belly, she would have to abandon all and be married off. It was up to her to take good care of the Chamberlain’s sperm. And if she didn’t, and his old arrows hit the target, the unintended accuracy would be all her fault.
It lasted five years – miraculous, according to her maids, who rumoured it abroad that old Hunsdon could copulate till the third cock crew and any normal man’s would have dropped off long before dawn, not to mention all those she lay with in between times, when his busy creaking back was turned. Finally she conceived, and had to be married off ‘for colour’, as the old fucker politely put it.
She thought little enough of the choice: William Lanier, a royal musician. Or, as she much less subtly put it herself, a fucking strummer – how she could swear! – a menial minstrel! She was back where she’d started, among the court lowlies, little better than the wife of a tradesman as she saw it, compared with what she’d known. By the time she wed she was already big-bellied and a sad laughing stock, in pod with Hunsdon’s bastard and married to a player – sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.
‘And that’s when you fell for her – when she was brought low?’
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes. And not only fell for her but felt for her.
‘And good old lust?’
Lechery, by this hand.
It started at court, late one winter’s afternoon, in one of the corridors of state. I was by my Harry’s side, his hand familiar on my shoulder (that lightness of touch!) as we strolled idly past the portraits of the tight-lipped Tudors, having come from a conference with their current representative and incumbent of the dynastic chair.
As we ambled along, one another’s best, my attention was arrested by something that struck me quite dead in my tracks. It was the sound of music, that’s all. But what music! O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and giving odour! Somebody was playing on the virginals. And that somebody knew how to play, by Jesus! The melody was wafting from some distant room, but seemed to emanate from heaven, so sweet and subtle was the strain. It was just some old ballad – but I’d never heard it rendered with such delicacy of touch, as if it were the finest needlework. I imagined some angel with golden hair, barely touching the keys, with fingers of liquid air. Harry laughed as he tweaked me by the nose, plucked at my beard, and knocked my hat askew.
‘Come on, Will, it’ll be dark soon, you’re keeping our horses waiting.’
‘No, wait a moment, Hal, what is it?’
‘What do you mean, what is it? It’s Walsingham, isn’t it? Even hoarier than Greensleeves.’
‘No, I don’t mean the tune, you idiot. Who’s playing?’
‘How the fuck do I know who’s playing? Let’s go.’
‘No, Hal, sorry my boy, but I’ve got to see the source of this.’
‘Jesu!’
And perhaps if I hadn’t insisted that day, that particular day, who knows? The fall of a sparrow, the wreck of a poet, the ruin of a man. So Harry suffered himself to be led by me along the echoing corridors, past frowning Tudors, dead but deadly, till we reached the open door of the room where she – it had to be a woman – was playing. And I looked in and saw – that my golden-haired angel was as black as a devil.
The instrument was placed in the middle of the room and the player was seated facing the door, but the coal-black wave of her hair washed over her face, obscuring it, as she bent to the melody. Behind her the low sun glowed an angry scarlet, silhouetting her in a sort of lurid last-day glare. The lady’s gown was low-cut and the breasts were bare and bulging, benefiting from the fashion of the upward thrust appropriate to unmarried virgins, ill-suited to her case, but did I care? Even from where I stood I could see the tracery of veins, bright-blue, circling the ivory orbs. At the white pit of her throat there grew a large black mole, like one of Luce Morgan’s nipples brazenly shifted, to give Satan suck – so old Granny Arden would have said. The torch flared in the testicles and spread rapidly – I was on fire.
‘Who is she?’
I was reduced to a croak.
‘Ah, now that is something you don’t want to know, old fellow, I can assure you of that. She needs no Lad’s Love laid under her pillow – it’s rue she requires at the rate she mates.’
And my friend tugged gently at my elbow.
‘But why, Hal, tell me why? Why wouldn’t I want to know?’
He brought his lips up close and breathed the words like Sanskrit into my ear.
‘Because, sweet Will, the strumpet on the virginals is no less a lady than old Hunsdon’s cast-off – and she casts them off for anybody, don’t you know? Drops them all over London.’
I made as if to speak, turning my head towards the dark lady, but Harry took my chin in his hand and gently compelling me, turned my head so that I was looking into his eyes.
‘And one last item of information for your sweeter understanding, sir – she useth sodom
y!’
I turned my head to her again and again he twitched me by the chin, insistently returning me to meet his earnest eyes.
‘Open-arse Emilia, as known in the trade, so unless you want to be a poperin-pear to her medlar tree, don’t meddle with her, old boy! You have been warned.’
At that point the virginal-strumpet reached the end of her piece. Her head came up, the hair swept backwards, and a pair of black eyes opened wide on me from a milk-white face. That was my first sight of Emilia Lanier, née Bassano.
‘Don’t stop,’ I whispered loudly, my voice almost gone.
She looked back at me.
‘That’s for me to say, isn’t it?’
A bold woman. A lickerish grin. A cunning whore of Venice.
‘If music be the food of love, play on.’
Harry groaned.
‘Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die.’
She half bowed her head in acquiescence, turning it to the side with the mock modesty of the courtesan, and played again the last bars of Walsingham.
‘That strain again! It had a dying fall.’
A dying fall? It was prophetic. I was a dead man. And I entered the room like one bewitched, pulled to the source of infection as if by the Pontic Sea. No ebb tide in the world could draw me away. This was not love but lust – not the pure lust of Lucy Negro’s place but something dark and dirty. I knew already it would lead to madness and despair, but I had drunk the potion and was past cure. It had the spider in it. Standing by a virginal on a winter afternoon, all I wanted was that long black mane falling over me like a cloak and brushing my belly as she came down on me with her mouth.
Without warning she went straight into Greensleeves at a roistering pace, singing along as she played. Alas, my love, ye do me wrong. The jacks leapt up to kiss the white insides of the nimbly flying fingers and under the barbaric black shock of hair her ivory cheeks flushed in the flickering light. The room darkened around us as she rattled through the entire eighteen verses – but at the last verse she slowed dramatically and drew it out with a plaintiveness that was remarkable considering her shortness of breath.
Greensleeves, now farewell! adieu!
God I pray to prosper thee,
For I am still thy lover true –
Come once again and love me.
And with these last words playing on her bright red lips, she gazed sadly, soulfully into my eyes. What an actress – and what a dupe. I knew it was show. And her voice had witchcraft in it. O, she would sing the savageness out of a bear! After that she rounded it off with the final refrain, delivered at the mad pace that had taken her through the piece in under five minutes. The hands rebounded from the keys with an exaggerated flourish and she sat back in her chair laughing and panting, the black eyes flashing.
Harry affected his aloof look.
‘Don’t happen to dance too, do you?’
He was still leaning in the open doorway and the irony matched the bored yawn. The candlelit echoes of the last chords were still trembling in the smoky air. Untroubled by the apparent disdain she leapt to her feet and went hopping and skipping round the room some forty paces, her arms in the air, hands and fingers twirling. And having lost her breath she spoke and panted, and with such excess of energy that she did make defect perfection, and, breathless, power breathe forth…
‘I can dance any man round the clock, sirs!’
‘If he’s as old as Hunsdon, you mean?’ Harry sneered.
That he wanted her was obvious and this irked and alarmed me.
‘Or as young as you, boy!’
The earl ignored the insult to his immaturity and to his rank and retorted simply, ‘To vouchsafe this is no proof.’
And with deliberate discourtesy, as if she wasn’t there, he addressed me across the room in an exaggerated whisper.
‘She made old Carey lay his sword to bed, you know – he ploughed her and she cropped.’
‘And since then –’ Her wit was whiplash accurate in its quick return.
‘And since then I’ve worn out younger ploughs than yours, young sir – in a single night.’
A snort from Harry.
‘Why don’t you show us what you’ve got, then? Bush and furrow!’
‘Not now, ploughboy, I’m practising to play before the Queen tonight.’
‘Did you think I meant country matters?’ quipped Harry.
Her cheeks were still glowing in the glimmering candlelight.
‘It doesn’t matter what I think, my Lord, the court must come before the cunt.’
Harry smiled but I stood and stared. So devoid of innuendo. The actor in me came to the rescue.
‘Lady, shall I lie in your lap?’
‘What are you thinking of, Master Shakespeare?’
‘Nothing.’
That’s a fair thought to lie between a maid’s legs.
‘O!’ Harry broke in, sniggering, and exaggerating the effect of the vowel. ‘O! she knows you, Will – and before you’ve even known her!’
‘That’s because I’m a know-all, gentlemen.’
‘Then lady, I desire to know you better.’
But Harry had had enough of word games.
‘An apt enough player, madam, but a nimble-fingered whore. Come on, Will, let’s leave virginals to virgins and drabs to jacks!’
And he pulled me roughly from the room.
She was still standing there, her hands on her hips, head thrown back, face flushed, and laughing breathlessly. I could hear it echoing through the corridors of my mind long after we’d left Whitehall.
42
It was darker than desire, it was crueller than love. There was something evil about it. Lust? She useth sodomy. This was the dram, the leprous distilment that poisoned me, poured in the porches of my ears. As I rode off with Harry into the dark that night my whole being was bent now to one tortured quest. The plague had struck at last in its most virulent form. This was the black death.
I begged Harry to use his rank to write to her on my behalf which he did without a thought, to favour his friend. A rustic nobody and scribbler of scripts yearned for an hour with a high-class whore, to plume up his will. And why not? I’d have her, take my turn, withdraw, pleased with my triumph, and we’d get on with our friendship. That’s how Harry saw it.
But he teased me mercilessly.
‘O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified! Poor Will, smitten by a brace of breasts, stabbed with a white wench’s black eye, shot through the ear with a love-song! Death by a dozen quatrains to the tune of Walsingham, hung by a garter and drawn and quartered by Greensleeves, alas, alas! Who would have thought it? A blushing strumpet with the breath of a sparrow, one of the sluttish spoils of opportunity, a whitely wanton with a velvet brow, two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes, yes, by heaven, and one that would do the deed for sixpence and a song. A very good whore. And you to sigh for her! to watch for her!’
‘Thy lips rot off, sweet Hal!’
‘No, old fellow, but yours will – if she but once offers you her bluest veins to kiss. Why man, she’s followed the sugared game long before you, as young as she is, she’s melted down the lightfoot lads in different beds of lust, and has brought down rose-cheeked youth to the tub-fast and the diet!’
‘Harry Hyperbole, come to court?’
‘Believe what you care to, friend, and call me what you like, I tell you her activities spell the end of all fit members. A jigging fille-de-joie. A lisping loose fish. An ambling tart who loves it up the arse!’
‘Peace, gentle friend!’
‘Piece? Aye, you’ll need to hold your piece with her, sir, but it will anger Hunsdon and husband too if you dare raise a spirit in her circle, sir, even if you let it stand there at the back door till she lays it down for you.’
‘Enough, no more!’
‘No more? That’s but the text. You haven’t heard the sermon yet.’
‘I prithee, gentle Hal…’
‘An
d it shall come to pass that instead of sweet smell there shall be stink. And we know where that comes from, don’t we, Will?’
Harry was unstoppable.
‘And in that day the Lord shall discover her secret parts. Therefore I conjure you, Will, by Lanier’s bright eyes, by her high forehead and her scarlet lip, by her fine foot, straight leg and quivering thigh –’
‘Have you done?’
‘And the demesnes that there adjacent lie –’
‘Eat your sock, Hal!’
‘Make it a buskin, old man – and hung be the heavens with black. The stage is set for tragedy…!’
But he wrote the letter and the thing began.
The thing, the courtship – if that is what it can be called – proved successful, if that is the word to denote so dark a triumph. I sent her sonnets, naturally, though not letting her see the half of those I penned. How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st… My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun… In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes… And she sent me back word. ‘Stuff this stuff, sir sonneteer – write me something juicy!’ She wanted bawdiness, not beauty. So I wrote about our two wills, and especially, about hers, and its capacity – to accommodate Will Lanier and Will Shakespeare and the wills of all the world.
Wilt thou whose will is large and spacious not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
This whetted her desire and my suit was accepted.
Harry was the pandar, his letters providing the bridge prescribed by protocol even for the extra-marital fucking of a Jewish-Italian whore. Bridge? It was an archway over the abyss, but nothing in the world would keep me from it, blind as I was.
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