Dark Aemilia (10 page)

At first the pain is a hot, tender spot in my mouth, nothing more. My tongue keeps searching for it, poking into the fiery hole which had once been filled with tooth. All about it, my gum is raw and swollen. At breakfast time, I soak my bread in weak ale and suck down the brownish porridge like an infant. In the evenings, even though it is summertime, I sit on a stool near the fire, warming my naked feet as if soothing one part of my body would bring relief to another. It does nothing of the kind, of course. I force myself to think about something else. There is no shortage of subjects to think about, after all. Money, motherhood, the uncertain future, and the business of being married to a flimsy and improvident musician. And that isn’t all. As well as the throbbing hole in my mouth, my day at the Fair has left me with a feeling of unease and dread, like a drunk’s dawn gloom.

So I try to distract myself with reading. I once knew the great libraries of England: it is from these places that I have furnished the small library in my own head. And I have a few books still. I love to smell them and feel their pages beneath my fingers. They are kept in different parts of the house, so they come easily to hand when I have a moment to myself. I read with so much intensity that my head reels, for learning is there, and facts and a treasure chest of oddments of the world, trapped in ink. In the solar there is Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs
, of course, and in the kitchen I keep Job Hortop’s
Travels
next to the simples cupboard, being the tale of an old man who was press-ganged and sent on the Guinea voyage of 1567 and saw two of his company slain and eaten by sea-horses.
And his ship captured a most monstrous Alligator, which had a hog’s head and a serpent’s body but was scaled in every part, each scale the size of a saucer, and with a long and knotted tail and they baited it with a dog and caught it with their ropes.

As I stir the pot in the kitchen I feast my mind upon Hortop’s wild tales, of how he and his companions fell among the Indians and were cruelly treated, but then discovered good Christian Indians (for such a thing is possible, it seems), and later found a sea creature who was half-man, half-fish, and his upper body brown as a mulatto. Then he went from there to Spain, where he was put to torture by the Inquisition (for good Christian Spaniards conduct themselves like savages) and two of his shipmates were burned, but he was sent to the galleys, which he rowed for ten years.

What I believe is that such a rollicking life of colour and calamity is the only kind a man should have, this life being a brief slit between two measureless eternities, and by ‘man’ I mean man and woman, for there would be no man alive today without the fairer sex and men are not half as clever as they think themselves and we are more than twice as strong as we let on.

Oh, and in my bedroom, to distract me from Alfonso’s curtainlectures about his great importance at Court, I keep Harington’s translation of
Orlando Furioso
. Which tells the story of a man who – his wife being false – ranges over the whole of Europe looking for a good woman yet finds not one. This story so annoyed the Queen that she called Harington – who was her godson – to her Presence Chamber and gave him her harsh opinion. Of course, I agreed with Her Majesty that such stories are vile bawdy and not for Court ladies, yet, being no longer one of their number, I can both laugh at these naughty women and share a little of their forbidden lust, remembering my own misdoings and those little secret come-cries that we fist-muffle when we must. Such memories I will take as close to the graveside as I dare, and offer them up in exchange for Eternal Redemption at the moment of my last breath.

Some of my books have been wrote by women, too. I wish I could say these are the best of them, but this is not so. Compared to Hortop’s terrifying journeys, reading the Countess of Pembroke’s
Ivychurch
and
Emanuel
(translations from Mr Tasso) is like walking with a prelate in a country garden. Though her hexameters are handsome and there is no such thing as a book which is worthless. I have read her works with close attention, schoolboylike, and they are all excellently rhymed.

I pick up the
Martyrs
, and then Hortop, but cannot lose myself in them as is my usual custom. I am on the outside, and the worlds inside their covers are locked in. And I can’t evict the memory of Lettice Cooper from my mind. Her talk of the poet and his sonnets disturbs me. My old lover has remade the form. He sent me a bundle of verses, written out in his own hand, full of bile and hatred for me and everything that we’d done. My only comfort is that they have not been printed. I have never thanked him for his poisoned gift, and prefer to think him dead. I should have burned them, but could not. In any case, each one has lodged itself in my mind, which keeps them stored neatly and for all time. I am the victim of my fine memory. All of them retain the power to hurt me, but there is one which is stuck fast, and goes round and round my head, day after day.

Stuck it is, stuck as a pig in dung. I sit in my room, and my head is full of it. The casement window has a high view of Long Ditch, and Camm Row beyond.

This is the present moment, respectable. Actual. To the east, I can see the towers of Whitehall Palace; beyond that is Charing Cross, where Cockspur meets the Strand.

‘No sooner had’! Oh, you had me, sir, right enough; you had me for a harlot and a fool. To the north are the fields of Haymarket and St Martin’s, to the west, open country.

‘And, proved, a very woe’. That’s me, the proven woe, the peerless whore, only enticing when unfucked; once fucked, I’m beastly, loathsome, ugly. A sly witch in a tale. You cannot see the river from this chamber, but if you stick your head out of the window you can hear the shouts of the wherrymen touting for business at the water’s edge.

You had me, Will, and you had no pity for me, and you have me still.

It is two days since my accident with the sugar-plum. Alfonso is standing in the downstairs hall, practising his monotonous tunes. His lips are pursed and his childish pipe trills out its familiar fluting patterns. The highest notes bore inside my jawbone.

‘Alfonso?’ Against my cheek I hold a linen bag, filled with burned and powdered rosemary wood. It has been prepared with great care by Joan, our old serving woman.

My husband lowers the recorder, a patient expression on his face. ‘What, dear Aemilia?’

‘When are you going to give me some money?’

‘Quite soon, my love.’ Off he goes again.

‘How soon?’

An even more forgiving expression, worthy of St Peter. ‘I’m a musician, not an alchemist, sweet chuck…’

‘I don’t expect you to make gold from base metal; I expect you to earn it.’

‘When the concert is over.’

‘Which concert?’

‘The concert for the Queen’s birthday. We get five shillings extra, apiece.’

‘So till then we starve.’

He starts again, the notes in beautiful order, his life a mess of debt and deceit.

Joan is making her slow way down the staircase with a pail of rainwater. She is a narrow scrawn of a woman, and as she grows older it seems the years are scraping the flesh from her bones. Now Joan is a common name in London, but this is the very same Joan Daunt who owned the apothecary’s shop in Bucklersbury. It was burned down by a mob the night that I summoned her to help at Henry’s birth. And all its precious contents went up with it: the jars and vials and herbs and potions, the tinctures and the spices and rare ingredients from Turkey, China and beyond. Henry was a breech-baby. Born backwards, and would have died if it had not been for Joan.

‘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.)