‘It’s a bad do,’ she says, throwing the water out of the door and into the street. The cat, Graymalkin, who has been sunning himself on the threshold, yowls and runs away. ‘You can see blue sky through two holes now, each as big as a man’s fist. We’ll soon have the floor rotten, and that’ll be the next expense.’
Alfonso has the recorder to his lips. He closes his eyes and blows, but no sound comes. He blows again. Nothing. He lowers his instrument once more, flushed with anger. ‘I am the head of this household, and I demand silence!’ he shouts. ‘I must have… your wifely respect, Aemilia! And Joan’s – servantly obedience.’
Pain’s hot-poker twists in my gum. ‘There is silence, husband,’ I tell him. (A London silence, at least, which is to say that through the open front door swoop the city sounds of dogs barking, hammers beating, babies crying, couples fornicating, pigs snorting, cartwheels clattering and all the other Babel noise of people and creatures and buildings and shops and stews all piled together pell-mell.) ‘At least, the only noise I hear is you. As for obedience…’
Joan lowers her eyes and coughs as she makes her way back up the stairs with the empty pail.
Alfonso looks at me, as if he is still trying, after almost ten years, to work out what he has taken on and whether he can survive it. He is a pretty man, I’ll say that for him, with his dark skin and black coiled hair. The Lanyers have French blood, and this shows in the way he has of dressing himself. Even in his plain cambric shirt he cuts an elegant figure, and his dainty fingers hold the pipe as if it was a living thing.
‘Why do you stare, Alfonso?’
‘Why do you question me, wife?’
In bed, it is easy to feel lust for Alfonso, with his hard, lean body and his soft kisses. But in this house it is my word that carries weight, not his. This is in part because he spent all my dowry in a twelvemonth, gaming and dicing and showing off. Also because his musician’s ‘duties’ – piping, gossiping and the wearing of a short mandilion – keep him at Court for long hours, overnight if there is a feast or a celebration. He comes and goes at odd times, like Graymalkin.
Yet there is more to it than that. Each time Joan reads my Tarot cards, a different pattern tells the same story – we are out of balance, my husband and I. If Henry is spoiled it is all my doing, because I decide when he is praised and when he is punished. Joan, too, listens to me, and not her master.
‘Your face is swelling up still,’ Alfonso says, as if deciding to withdraw from battle. ‘You need to see the barber surgeon and have that tooth pulled, what’s left of it. He should bleed you, too. There may be poison.’
Without replying, I go out into the bright morning bustle of Long Ditch, with its clustered wooden buildings. It is a street that does not know its place. Although it is close to the rambling sprawl of Whitehall, it is itself of no account. The dwellings were thrown up hastily, without forethought or symmetry. Some are no wider than their own front door, with four storeys piled above, seeming likely to overbalance and tumble down into the street. Others are hovel-high and no bigger than a cow-barn. And yet we are overlooked by Camm Row, and the calm and solid homes of great men like Sir Edward Hoby and the Earls of Hertford, Derby and Lincoln. Such great, commanding houses! Their casement windows glow bright with candles long after dark, and every house has a walled garden behind. Our mean dwellings are like birds’ nests in comparison. All of us cheek-by-jowl, breathing the same smoke-filled air. The red kites, wheeling above, must see us coming in and out like little dolls, shaking our linen or stepping out in our fine gowns.
I look around me, thinking how much easier it would be to know my place if my position in the world had a little more sense to it. We know that God presides at the top, followed by the Angels, with Man below. And then Woman lower yet – above the animals, but a lesser mortal than her bed-fellow. By Our Lord’s ordinance we are the weaker, lesser sex. It is a system, certainly. But where is my place in this ordered universe? I was first a bastard, then a lady (educated in Greek and Latin if you please), then a courtesan – on account of being a comely orphan. And now, a drudge. What few skills are called for to fill this station, I do not possess. Where is the divine plan there?
If I had less learning it might be easier to bear, but I am sure that few Court ladies know their Ovid as I do, could recite the Psalms in Latin or have the tales of Holinshed off by heart. In short, I have been tutored like a young lord, which is worse than useless to me now. If the aim of learning is a fitting-out to modern purpose, I say it falls far short, both for the young lords and for me. What has modern man learned from the Greeks – I mean in relation to his behaviour? Not enough, in my opinion. He is not the master of his passions. He is not wise. Men fight and tyrannise each other, and are given to extremes in blood and anguish, revelry and ribaldry. Great learning should lead to great lives – ha! Like the learned counsel at the Inns of Law, I rest my case.
So I am ill suited to being a City house-wife, married to a pile of wood and wattle-and-daub. Which pile, I must tell you, is not even my own. Within one year of our union, my dear spouse had spent my dowry, and within eighteen months he had borrowed money against my little house to pay his debts at table. So this place, fitted out with such care by my Lord Hunsdon (and in consultation with his lady wife) is no longer mine. It belongs to one Anthony Inchbald, an avaricious Dwarf and quite the greediest of landlords. I am surely married to the greatest fool in Christendom, yet I am his to ruin if he so wishes. I’m his possession: my whole mind and all its furnishings. Sometimes, I think of my mother and father. There was no ceremony to mark their union, saving only a handfasting, and yet they loved each other well. My own case is the opposite: it is a paper wedding, and all that joins me to Alfonso is expedience and the odd bout of merry fucking. (Forgive me, but I am only mortal, and the poor monkey has no other purpose I can think of.)
My mind rages, but here I stand in my drab dress, a creature half-mad with the tooth-ache. Wood smoke drifts upwards from the close-crowded chimneys of the houses opposite. The cat is still shaking his tail in angry jerks, ears flat to his head. He lifts one paw and shakes it singly, and little shining droplets of water catch the sunlight as they fall.
Widow Flood, my neighbour, comes out of her door with a full pot, and pours the foul-nosed contents into the reeking kennel that runs down the centre of the street. She is a plump woman, with a pleasant, open face, but she has an irksome weakness: knowingness. On all subjects she believes herself the expert. And she is an over-dresser, too, in keeping with this good opinion of her status. Even in the house she wears a white lawn ruff. Her face pokes out from the wired cloth like a pig’s head on a platter, and she takes care to hold the pot well away from the wide bulk of her farthingale. So grand, and yet the ferryman of her own filth. You could not tell a baronet from a bee-keeper in the streets of London.
‘Tooth still bad, Aemilia?’ She puts the pot on the ground next to her and stands back, hands on her padded hips, as if ready to enjoy the sun. Noticing a dead rat lying near, she kicks it on to the dung-pile that banks against her house. Beneath her fine skirt she is wearing wooden pattens.
‘Still bad.’
‘The barber surgeon should pull it for you.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Should bleed you, too, for safety’s sake.’
‘You should join my husband’s recorder band, since you pipe the same tune.’
She laughs. ‘Pain can make you surly, Aemilia. It’s good advice.’
Anne Flood was well-named. Good advice flows from her, and good fortune to her. Even her husband’s death has been a sort of blessing, since he was a wintry old skinflint, a haberdasher by trade, who was more than twice her age when they married. Her son Tom has just been apprenticed to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and will soon be prancing on the boards at the Globe.
But here is Joan with a bolster to shake out. ‘There is devilment behind this, Mistress Flood,’ she says, flapping it fiercely. ‘I don’t like it. The air is full of
spirits and the streets are full of demons, preying on the unwary.’ She folds the bedding against her chest and holds it tight against her.
‘Spell-making?’ Anne Flood’s eyes glint. She is curious about my clever servant, whose knowledge of witchcraft far outstrips that of the other women in the street.
‘Something wicked. And no village art, neither. Devil’s magic. It was not by chance they met her. They were waiting.’
‘Shush, Joan, don’t speak of it,’ I say. But the witches’ words have stuck in my head. ‘The plague is coming.’ And not as I have known it. ‘Not like this.’ I feel the wisdom of Joan’s words – there was some design behind our meeting, something I don’t yet understand.
Anne nods. ‘Speak of the Devil and he will appear. We should praise the good Lord, and pray for our immortal souls.’
‘Amen to that,’ says Joan, crossing herself. ‘God have mercy. Let each of us know our place. That magic which can ease our suffering and help us along our way is well enough. That which seeks to harness Evil will always do us harm.’
I put my arm about her shoulders. ‘It is a tooth-ache, my good Joan, that’s all. I broke my tooth on a plum-stone; there was no fiendishness.’ I push her gently towards the house. ‘It’s nearly twelve – go and prepare something for us to eat. Something soft that will swallow down easy. I could eat rabbit stew, on the left side. Or a little scraped cheese, with sage and sugar…’
She goes muttering into the house.
Anne is still pressing her case. ‘All that is needed is a trip to the barber. I know of a man in the Shambles who is most excellent,’ she says. ‘Pulls teeth like eels from mud – you hardly feel a thing. See?’ She grins, showing off her graveyard gaps with pride. ‘He broke my jaw once, trying to gouge out a buried wisdom tooth. Almost too much even for him. But it soon mended.’
That night, my face swells fit to fill the bedchamber. Sleep twists pain into trumpets, drum beats, the drone of an afternoon recorder. The dreams I have are dense and dazzling; my head aches with the colour and busyness of them. I see the Queen again, not as she must be now, but as I used to know her, ten years ago. She is herself, and yet not herself: a tapestry in gold and green thread, a painted face on a wood panel, a straight-backed monarch sitting on a jewelled throne. Satan might send us pain; God soothes us with insanity to make a picture of it.
The rose garden at Whitehall, enclosed on four sides by high, crenellated walls. The heads of traitors all around, dripping fat-rot on to the pathways. Rose-heads rising ever higher. The Queen appears from the privet maze, fanning herself in the summer heat, face white in spite of the sun.
‘Ay,’ she says. ‘Dark Aemilia, inspirer of our cousin’s lust. We two – freakish black, and freakish red, would you not say?’
‘Your Majesty?’
‘Both of us midnight-weird.’
I curtsey as low as I can, as if my legs were liquid.
‘For God’s sake! Is this how you behave in the presence of other mortal beings? Stand up!’
She pulls me to my feet. She is shorter than me, face withered under the layer of white powder. Her fierce blue eyes are hungry for information, but flat, with nothing behind. Like a kite, looking sideways as it scoffs its offal. She takes my arm and sweeps me along the path beside her.
‘You,’ she says. ‘Plaything of my Lord Hunsdon, yes?’
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’
I look down and my child Henry is curled inside me, unborn, though a hefty boy of almost ten.
‘Plaything, or his tormenter?’
‘I – his tormenter, madam. Or both, by turns, madam.’
‘He in charge? Or you, by any chance?’ She waves a courtier away. He is carrying a galleon in full sail, ocean waves drenching the padded sleeves of his doublet.
‘He is always in charge, madam. I am but a weak and feeble woman.’
The Queen’s face is rigid with amusement. Her ladies come tittering towards us, carrying baskets filled with fiery sugar-plums, hitching their skirts so their beaded hems sweep clear of the wet grass.
Scene III
Have I woken? Or is this still sleep? Night-time, or day? I can see only darkness, but fancy there is sunlight too, coming at me from around Alfonso’s head.
‘Aemilia! You are awake! What a fever you have run – we have barely slept.’
Joan’s face looms in front of me. She is holding a great wooden spoon, fit for a giant, which she forces into my mouth. There is some heavy, treacly substance on it, tasting of wine and hartshorn. Splinters of pain send more sunlight into my head; the morning rays seem to be breaking my skull apart. The scream which echoes from the walls might be my own noise, I suppose, listening to the sound with mild surprise. What tooth-ache is this?
‘She must see the physician,’ says Alfonso.
‘Physician! What skill will he have, to cure such a condition?’ asks Joan. ‘This is more than tooth-ache. I said so before. More like the dropsy or the sweats.’
‘The sweats! Don’t say it! Unless we do something, she will die! I never saw such a thing – all from an ailing tooth.’ His voice is breaking. ‘I shall send for him now…’
‘There is no physician on this earth that can give her the help she needs, master.’ Joan speaks so firmly to her ‘master’ that if I weren’t so ill I would smile.
‘Then the barber surgeon can pull it out. She would hear none of that, of course. If she only would have listened to me…’
‘It’s too far gone.’
If I could speak, I would tell them that some vileness is eating me from within, and the cracked tooth has been an entry point for some evil poison, just as a viper’s bite looks like a pin-prick and yet may kill a calf. I try to speak – but my whole body is frozen, although my mind is clear. My body, my limbs, my aching head – all are rigid and inert. I am like living marble, fixed upon my bed.
‘Why can’t you cure her of this, woman?’ shouts Alfonso, sounding close to tears. ‘She swears by you and all your tricks. Much use your cures and treatments are to her now!’
‘I told you, sir, there is something far beyond my remedies here. I have the skill to know that, and the wit to let another cure her who has more knowledge than I do. If you ask me, someone has put a spell on her.’
‘A spell! God’s blood, who would do such a thing? That’s nothing more than fancy.’
I feel a wet cloth soothe my head. ‘It could be belladonna,’ says Joan, as cool liquid seeps into my hair. ‘But… I can’t be sure. The antidote to that is worse than the poison…’ Thin hands smooth my cheek. ‘I need advice, that’s what I’m saying. You can see the state she’s in – look, try to move her arm. It’s like a rock.’
‘Very well, go to the apothecary.’
‘I am an apothecary. I need a cunning-man for this.’
‘Jesu!’ Alfonso’s voice fades away, as if he had walked to the window. ‘I’m not paying for some mountebank to come sliding in here, mutter some incantations and then go on his way.’
‘Then she will die.’
‘No!’ I am surprised to hear the fear in his voice. Has the fool grown to love me? But men are simple, even the clever ones. He has me where he wants and, even now he’s spent the dowry, he still has a roof over his head and a woman in his bed.
‘Forman,’ says Joan.
‘Who?’
‘Forman,’ she repeats. ‘The man we need is Simon Forman. I’ve heard her speak of him.’
‘That turd-faced lecher! Most foul and Satan-bothering necromancer! Over my dead body will she see this man!’
‘It’s her dead body we’ll have to worry about, not yours, unless we find some cure. Forman may be a lecher, and he may be a necromancer, but he is wise. They say he cured himself of plague – who else do you know who has done such a thing?’
‘You speak out of turn.’
‘Forgive me, but I am all on edge.’ Joan’s voice is soft, but furious.
I want to thrash my head about, or wave my hand as if to say
, Not that filthy little chance-man, with his tricky hands and his ready cock, God save us! But I can’t move, nor even blink my eye. And it occurs to me that if it is a choice between being entombed by my own flesh and bone, or being groped by a ginger goat, I had better choose the latter. And, with that wise thought, my mind slips into darkness.
‘Now, my dear, you can open your eyes.’
I open them, expecting pain and calamity, but nothing happens. The ceiling above my head is a familiar criss-cross of wood panelling. If this is Heaven or Hell, it looks remarkably like my own house.
‘See if you can get up,’ says a quiet voice. ‘It’s all done now.’
I struggle up so that I am propped on my elbows. My mind feels clear and sharp, more so than it has for many months. A bearded, elderly man is sitting next to the bed. Dr Forman is smiling. There is something complacent in his attitude, as if he has won a wager. And behind his chair stands Joan, all twisted with anxiety.
‘Oh, Aemilia, praise God!’ she cries. ‘You are better.’
I put my hand up to my cheek, aware of a mild soreness, but nothing like the agony and madness of the last few days. ‘My tooth?’
Dr Forman holds up a glass vial. Inside it is something bloody and rotted, tiny as a baby’s little finger. ‘I don’t know what magic these crones put on you, but really,’ he says, ‘I have never seen such vileness. I am afraid your poor husband has had to go to a tavern. He did not have the stomach for it.’
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