Dark Aemilia (17 page)

The first sign is a giant comet which shoots across the sky soon after All Souls’ Day. Like a wounded star, spewing its own brightness, it streaks across the heavens. The streets are full of staring citizens, squinting upwards. Children perch on windowsills. The boldest scramble up to the roof-thatch and cling there while the flaming star lights up the firmament, so that night is day and the City is ablaze with heavenly light. Then the rumours start. People have seen angels and coffins far above their heads. The graves at St Bride’s Church crack open and the dead scream warnings from below. A phantom appears each night at Fetter Lane, bowing when the clocks strike twelve. The madmen at Bedlam break out and run into the streets, rending their hair and telling all who see them they must flee. ‘Death is coming!’ they shout. ‘Death will come upon us!’

Winter sets in, and the sense of foreboding grows stronger, even though some say that cold weather dulls the power of plague vapour. Then one evening, as I am walking home at dusk, I see him. It is a clear, frosty night, with a full moon. There is a figure up ahead, a tall man in grey. At first, I do not mind him; there are others passing to and fro, and he does not strike me as strange or fearful. But as I walk I draw nearer to him; although I am proceeding at a normal pace, his steps are faltering, slow. Is it the slushy ground that holds him up? It rained heavily before the freeze set in, and the multitude of footprints have turned the
path to mush. As I come closer, I think that I know him, but could not say where from. He is broad-shouldered and well-dressed, and his fur-trimmed cloak trails behind him on the ground. Then he staggers and cries out, falling to his knees. There is a note of despair in that cry which chills my blood. I stand for a second, not knowing if I should flee, but something pulls me forward and I go to him.

‘Sir?’ I say. ‘Can I…’ And then he turns his head. It is my father, as I saw him last. His eye-sockets are sightless holes; his mouth is choking forth a torrent of blood. I reach out towards him, but my hands are those of a little child.

‘What did you do, dear Father?’ I call out. ‘What did you promise? Tell me, sir, I beg you!’

Then I am alone. The shade has vanished. Above me, the moon shines, and all is silver, silent. When I get home, I pray till dawn.

It is a long, cold winter. The Thames freezes over but the ice is not strong enough to walk on. A group of children think to test this out, and dance merrily upon the frozen surface, downriver from the Bridge. They fall through into the black water, and all are drowned. A few days later, one of them is washed ashore at Deptford. A little girl, no more than three years old, in a transparent coffin of Thames ice. She still wears her little bonnet and leather shoes. Her eyes are wide open.

And then, in the darkest days of winter, comes the worst portent of all. The Queen is dying.

‘What do you mean,
dying
?’ I ask Alfonso, as he shakes out his snow-covered doublet and hangs it near the fire.

He holds out his hands to the flames. ‘What I say. She took ill, with a fever, then kept to her rooms. Now she is removed to Richmond.’

‘With the Court?’

‘Her ladies, favourites, a few physicians. She has no need of music now.’

Snow is falling against the window-panes. Outside, it has settled on the sewer ditch, making dead dogs ecclesiastic marble.

‘Dear Lord!’

‘She is old, Aemilia. She is not as you remember her. She has been low in spirits since poor Essex was executed. She weeps all day, they say.’

‘I can’t believe she’s dying.’

‘You thought that she would live forever?’

‘Perhaps I did.’

The thought of the Queen’s death makes me feel giddy, as if her presence in the world is a talisman against the Evil Eye and the worst that could befall us. This is a foolish fancy, of course. The Queen is a just a woman, now fallen into the sour humour of the aged. What’s more, her reign has had its share of adversity. We have suffered bad harvests, lean winters, persecution, defeats abroad and the fear of invasion. Even the plague itself has afflicted us many times. But although the sickness has been foul, and many have died, it has never compared to the old stories about the Black Death, when the quick became the dead without warning, the Reaper took the living as they sat at cards, whole villages died and the streets were piled with corpses. Worse could come than we have known. Before her time there was blood and madness. After she goes – who can tell?

Alfonso is at home, listless and charmless, not wanted by the dying monarch. Nor by me, the hale subject. He plays his neat tunes, or goes off curled and oiled to the gaming-house, to gamble with money he doesn’t have. While he goes about his business, Joan teaches me her craft. She takes me out walking in the fields and among the hedgerows, and tells me tales of faeries and hobgoblins, of the ways of spirits and the living demons who inhabit the air around us, and who watch us as we go about our daily round. Though I say it myself, I am a ready pupil. It reminds
me of being a child again, when I was taken in hand by Susan Bertie and taught my Greek and Latin. Winter is not the best time to gather herbs and flowers, but we walk by the water meadows and Joan tells me all about them: how no two meadows are alike, how farmers will give each of them a name, just as they name their cows; and how pits and ponds have their own spirits. And how everything in nature has a name, a place and a purpose. She talks of beard grass, cat’s tail and cock’s foot, of crowflowers and salt marsh grass, which can grow underwater for many months. What I once saw as a barren place is full of life. And London, to me a place of wonders, is to Joan a brute invasion of the ancient land.

She teaches me about her apothecary’s art: where each plant grows, the time to harvest it according to its governing planet, and when it can be pressed and stored. Nightshade grows under Mercury, and is an antidote to the power of witchcraft in men and beasts alike; cottonweed cures head-aches and infestations; while fleabane is the remedy for snake-bites and for gnats and fleas. Indeed, there is not a plant or simple growing in a single meadow in any corner of our land which is not a cure for some ailment, canker or distemper. I marvel that everything Joan knows is carried in her head, for she reads a little, but not easily, and prefers to store her knowledge in her memory.

I do not tell her about the witches: I fear to tell anyone what they said about my father. The meeting had the strange quality of nightmare, and the queer dreams I have when I walk in my sleep.

Joan’s remedies mean that a trickle of money comes into the house, and we live frugally. Each morning, when the chores are done, I work on my cross-gartering pamphlet. This is proving an arduous task, as I have no interest in it. I have written some poetry too, but guiltily, knowing it will earn us nothing.

One night, long after curfew, when the streets are dark and only watchmen and spirits walk, there is a fearsome knocking. I sit up in bed, alert and listening. Was it our door, or the next one?
Could it be carousing players, come for Tom? Alfonso, at home for once, is whiffling next to me, too drunk to snore wholesomely. There is the knocking once again. I kick him in the balls.

‘Husband, stir yourself!’

He yelps like a drowning pup and rolls away from me.

I kick his naked arse this time. ‘See who wants us down below!’

Waking with a grunt, he looks around him, oiled hair perpendicular. ‘Whassis?’

Bang, bang, bang. The whole house echoes with the sound. ‘Who’s within?’ shouts a man’s voice. ‘I have a message from the Queen.’

Alfonso leaps up then, all right, lights a candle and goes running down the stairs half in his doublet, naked from the waist down. ‘Yes, yes, yes! I come, I come.’

I follow him, shivering in my chemise, wondering who could want a drunken pipe-player at this hour. He pulls back the stiff locks and opens the door. A pale youth is standing there,
thin-faced
and blue-eyed with tiredness, wearing the Queen’s livery and carrying a flaming torch.

‘Her Majesty demands your presence,’ says the youth, bowing. ‘There is a boat on the river, ready to bring you to Richmond.’ His rasping breath clouds the frosty night.

Alfonso stands erect, proud as a soldier. ‘I will come now. Let me dress myself.’ He turns to me in triumph. ‘Aemilia, where is my best wool caster? And my mended doublet, and my…’

The messenger bows again, and begins to cough. Recovering himself, he says, ‘Forgive me, sir, but it’s
Mistress
Lanyer who is wanted by Her Majesty. Commanded to wait on her, this very night.’

Richmond! It was always the Queen’s favourite palace. While it lacks nothing of Whitehall’s grandeur, it is removed from
the hurly burly of the town, and its magnificence seems all the greater amid the surrounding woods and fields. It is the greatest palace in the kingdom, high-walled and turreted, with a thousand chimneys and dozens of Arabian minarets. There, the Queen would receive foreign guests, flirt and fool us all, and then sweep off to the hunt. I remember how I used to watch the cavalcade departing. Elizabeth was always controlled, always cunning. She laughed hard, rode fast, and would return blooded and wet. What memories. They seem more actual than the icy wind that freezes my face as I sit huddled in the cushioned barge; clearer than the sound of an ale-house brawl that comes drifting across the water. In the boat, all is darkness. The sky is black and starless beyond the torch that flickers on the prow. But in my mind it is bright day, and I am at Richmond in a fine silk gown, looking down from the battlements across a landscape that is like a vista of the afterlife. The pale heavens are infinite, and clouds trail and shift above the distant oak forests.

As the oars dip into the freezing water and the barge slips quietly along the Thames, I feel as if it is taking me back to my youth. I remember the first time I was summoned to play for the Queen. There was a long walk from room to room; the scent of ladies and candle-wax and lavender. There were faces, all twisted and polished for looking at. And then a door opened, and there she sat, a blur of red and gold. I climbed on to the seat beside the virginals, and the keys were my friends and gave me courage, so I began to play.

When I had finished, she said, ‘You are too clever, for such a little scrap of person.’ (I think I was eight, or perhaps nine.)

Not knowing what to reply, I looked over at Mother, and she nodded to me to say something. I got down from my seat and curtseyed as my mother had shown me.

‘I am not clever, Your Majesty,’ I said. ‘I work hard and…’ I broke off, not sure if I should go on.

‘Yes?’ The Queen’s smile was slightly colder. She found my hesitation irksome.

‘And I wish to know things.’

She seemed to like this.

‘Ah, child,’ she said. ‘We are the cleverest of all, those of us who have a love of study. The curious mind seeks nourishment. Our curiosity will make us wise.’

The messenger is silent, snuffling into his handkerchief. In front of us, a boatman rows, impassive. They seem no more inclined to talk to each other than they do to speak to me.

‘How does Her Majesty?’ I ask, at last.

The messenger sneezes again. ‘Badly,’ he says, seeming to do badly enough himself, since I hardly think this is a fit way to discuss the sickness of the monarch. He blows his nose. His face is ghastly in the torchlight. ‘She is like to die within the week. She has seen no one but Robert Carey, and a few favourites. She has asked for the Archbishop.’

‘Does she fear that she is dying?’

‘So it seems. Richmond is a house of rumour. Some said she died weeks ago, we had seen so little of her. She keeps to her chamber, and will do nothing but walk and walk, never sitting, as if she could outpace Death himself. She will not go to her bed, but rests on cushions, on the floor.’

‘I cannot imagine it.’

‘She cannot imagine it herself, I believe.’

There is silence for a moment. Then, in a sudden passionate rush, the messenger says, ‘Just a few weeks ago, she gave an audience to the Venetian ambassador. She was dressed in a taffeta dress of silver and gold, and a thousand gemstones. She was witty, spry, easily a match for him. Everyone said so. He came out of the throne room saying she had kept her beauty yet.’ He sneezes again. I look at his sickly face in the flickering torchlight. Then, he points. ‘Look, there – you see? They are waiting for you.’

And there is Richmond, a beacon in the darkness. I can see the windows of the state rooms dazzling bright, an earthly copy of the stars. Even the doors stand open, and I can see light inside, a gilded stairway, and darkly silhouetted soldiers, standing guard.

Inside, all is blazing light. Torches are racked on every wall, lamps flame, and glittering candelabra burn above my head. Once I took this moon-dimming brightness for granted, and the world beyond it seemed a place of shadow. Now I have returned, blinking and stumbling, from the outer darkness.

I am still blinking when we reach the Presence Chamber and Lettice Cooper sets down her sewing and comes over to me. She is done up in black velvet and seed pearls, hard-faced in the midst of this abundance.

‘Her Majesty is not well,’ she says, somewhat needlessly in my opinion.

I curtsey, in the Court style, to remind her I am not some common housewife.

‘Which circumstance requires that we do her bidding, even whilst we fear that her requests may not reflect her wishes when in her right mind.’

I curtsey again. After all, I can’t spit in her eye.

‘So I would ask that you do not take up more of her time than is needed.’ She hands me a little silver bell. ‘And you ring this when you are done.’ Then she points to its companion, a larger bell, of solid gold, it looks like. ‘Likewise, we will ring this if we fear that you outstay your term. Is that understood?’

‘Of course,’ I say, tinkling the bell, to test it.

She frowns. ‘Hush. All our nerves are a-jangle.’

Another lady looks up. It’s young Lady Guildford, who was a girl last time I saw her. ‘They are jangled indeed,’ she
says. ‘The world is upside-down. The dead speak, and the living haunt us.’

‘Hush, my dear,’ says Lettice. ‘We will not speak of this.’

But Lady Guildford takes my arm. She is a wisp of a woman, with a child’s high voice. ‘Her Majesty has been lying in her withdrawing-room these ten days,’ she says, staring intensely into my eyes as if to make sure I understand the full import of her words. ‘She is much afraid. She will not get into her bed, not even at the dead of night. She said to me, “If you were in the habit of seeing such things in your bed that I do, you would not ask me to go there.”’

‘What does she see?’

‘She did not say. But there is witchcraft afoot.’

‘Why do you say so?’

‘Yesterday, I sat with her so long, praying and thinking, that my legs were stiff and cramping, and I went out to take a little air. I came out, through this chamber, and the throne room, and the next room, and came out halfway down the Long Gallery. You know it?’ Her eyes are full of terror.

‘I remember it.’

‘Well. I walked along there, all distracted, thinking of the poor Queen and all her sufferings, when I heard a noise behind me, in the passageway, and I turned to see if someone called me back…’

She hesitates.

‘And – did they?’

‘At first, I could not see clearly. The candles were guttering, and the place was half in darkness. Then, I saw it was Her Majesty. I thought she had risen, feeling more herself. I thought she must have followed me. You can imagine my joy to see her so much improved. I went towards her, but then she vanished.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In terror, for I knew something was strange, I ran back to her room. The ladies were all as I had left them. And the Queen lay in
that same motionless slumber that I had seen before leaving her. I had seen an apparition, a spectre. Her spirit had left its place.’

Lettice frowns. ‘That is more than sufficient,’ she says. ‘We are all sorely tired. There is likely nothing in it. These are heavy, dangerous times. Let’s keep our wits about us.’

‘My wits have not deserted me,’ say I. ‘Much else has been taken from me, but my common sense remains.’

Lettice frowns again, and proceeds towards the grand door to Elizabeth’s withdrawing-room, the inner sanctum of her suite of private chambers, and beckons me to follow her. Her hand resting on the door, she speaks to me with quiet disdain.

‘You are to enter her room alone, Aemilia.’

‘Good.’

‘You are to speak calmly to her, and take care that she does not become alarmed.’

‘I shall do as you say.’

‘You will find her changed.’

‘Of course.’

‘Remember, she is still the Queen, and in one thing she is as she always was. She will not submit. She will not die until she chooses to. She commands; she does not obey.’

The Queen is propped up with velvet cushions, half-upright like a wooden doll. Her eyes are cast down, and she sucks one finger. Her face is a mask of white ceruse, with a clown-mark of vermilion on each cheek. Below her chin hangs a great wattle of loose flesh, and this too is daubed with white. And she is wearing a splendid gown, a stiff and glistering carapace, encrusted with a multitude of gem-stones.

I stand just inside the door to her bedchamber – a room I have never entered before – not sure what to do next. It is hard to believe that we are quite alone. Every time that I saw her, in all my years at Whitehall, even when she had summoned me to speak Latin
to her or play my virginals to soothe her mind, there were others present. Hunsdon, Cecil, Dudley, a clutch of ladies, a couple of ambassadors. She moved around in a throng of obsequious advisors and hopeful acolytes. Now, there is no one. Breathless, I look around the cavernous room, lit by silver sconces. After my little house I feel I am truly in the land of giants. A fire – great enough to roast an ox – crackles in the stone fireplace. The high bed, carved and gilded and hung with cloth-of-gold and silver, looms high in the centre of the room. It is as big as a stage; its closely patterned curtains remind me of the heavy drapes before the Globe’s tiring-room. The valance is cloth-of-silver, heavily fringed with gold, silver and silken threads, and decorated with the shapes of beasts. The canopy is set off with feathered plumes. Beyond it is a painted mural, showing Our Lord as a child talking to the elders, then as a grown man preaching to the crowd, and finally kneeling in the Garden of Gethsemane. And above all this is the carved ceiling, vari-coloured in the flame-light, embellished with the likenesses of deer and boar, pursued by leggy hounds among the twisting trees and leaves. It is as if all the Queen’s old joys and pastimes are here to taunt her.

Only Christ is left to her. But she is not looking at Him. She is looking at the floor, as if she made a study of the finely patterned Turkey carpet on which she lies. I stand for so long that in the end I think I must withdraw. What if these are her final moments? Or if she is already dead? I am not the right person to be present.

But just as I am about to leave the room, she speaks, though hoarsely and not in her familiar voice. ‘Is that really you, Aemilia Bassano?’

‘It is, Your Majesty. Except…’

I was never good at speaking with enough care for the Court.

‘Except?’ She takes her finger from her mouth, and looks at me.

‘I am Aemilia Lanyer now. Your Majesty.’

‘Oh, indeed. Married off for colour, with your misbegot.’ She coughs and shifts her body. ‘Come close, come closer. I want to look at you properly.’

I approach her. Her eyes, once shrewd and mocking, are faded and tired. She has a rank, rotting smell about her. Her shimmering dress with its armour of jewels seems to imprison her where she sits, in her awkward position. She is quite still. Only her eyes move, studying me. ‘Aemilia,’ she says, finally. Her hand comes out, fingers swollen now, no longer elegant, the cracked nails vermilion like her cheeks. ‘You are the most welcome sight, most welcome. And still beautiful, for all you are dressed like some village drab.’

I bow my head. ‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’

She sighs, and pushes my arm away. ‘Not “Majesty”, please, not now. Be sparing in your language. My own words tire me, but so do those of other people. There is so little time.’ She stretches out her left hand, and shows me her wedding finger. ‘Look. I am bone-thin, but my hands are swelled! They had to cut my coronation ring right off me – see? My wedding band is gone. I am divorced from Albion. I am lost.’

I can’t think what to say, so I kneel down beside her on the floor.

We sit in silence for a moment, staring at the fire.

‘Are you wondering why I have asked to see you?’ The Queen shifts slightly in her robe.

‘I – hardly thought it my place to question anything, madam. I am grateful that you have called me here.’

‘No, Aemilia, no. I don’t believe that this is true. You are always seeking to know the reason for things, and I have rarely seen you grateful. You know your own worth; I always liked that in you.’

I smile in spite of myself. ‘I thought, perhaps, you wanted to talk to me because I am better-read than your ladies, and their Latin is somewhat poor.’

She nods. ‘You understand more than most, Aemilia, and I learned from Hunsdon’s good opinion of you that you are true, and loyal, and a keeper of secrets.’

‘Thank you,’ say I, sounding unlike myself.

‘I see myself in that fire,’ she says. ‘My little person, burned by flames, but never consumed. I see myself burning in Hell.’

‘No! It cannot be so. They are waiting for you in Heaven. They will have prepared a throne right next to God Himself.’

‘I shan’t get into that great bed,’ she says. ‘Death is in there, you know. I saw him, staring round the drapes at me.’

‘A trick of the light, madam.’

‘Don’t humour me. For you, a trick of the light. For me, no. My time is near. I should know. I chose it. I have a heat inside my breasts, Aemilia, which will not go. And around my throat an iron claw. I cannot swallow. The appetites of life are past.’

‘But…’

‘But? But what? Do you question your Prince?’

‘We still need you.’

‘Ha! Carey waits on my death so he can ride off to Scotland. Even though I have yet to let them know whether my studious Scottish cousin shall succeed me.’

‘The people love you.’

Now she laughs, an odd sound, like tearing paper. ‘They are tired of me, as I am tired of life.’ Then she stops, very sudden, and stares at something past me. I look over my shoulder at the empty room, flickering and glimmering in the light of flames.

‘Do you know why I am here?’ she asks. ‘At Richmond?’

‘Because Whitehall is too cold?’

‘No. This is my warm winter box, but I would have kept at Whitehall longer, had I dared. No. John Dee told me to come here. Or rather, he told me to go from there. So off we all came, all the boatloads of us, but much difference it made.’ She glances towards the closed door as if to make sure that we aren’t overheard. ‘I want to die, you see. I want to be gone. Whether
Heaven or Hell will receive my soul, I know I am all but done with this life. But the journey out is full of pain.’

‘I am sorry for that.’

‘Don’t spend your sorrow on me. Your turn will come, and I doubt you will be lying on a Turkey rug, as I am, with a blazing fire to warm you.’

‘I doubt it too.’

‘My mind is not still; it keeps flitting hither and thither, the past is before me. And, as it flitted, it saw
you
. For all your learning, a restless spirit. Is that not so?’

‘It is.’

‘Like me. I always saw it in you.’

‘Like you! I would not presume to think so.’

‘A bastard, like myself.’

‘A bastard, yes.’

‘And mother to a bastard child.’

‘Better a bastard than the child of Captain Lanyer.’

She shakes her head, very slowly. ‘Ah, we are more like each other than you know. And you are not mellowed with the years?’

‘I am not mellowed.’

‘Good. Hunsdon would be proud of you. And how does the boy?’ I see that her eyes have filled with tears.

‘He is well. I love him dearly, too much. He is his father’s son.’

‘And who would that be, Dark Aemilia?’

I look down.

‘I always wondered if Hunsdon could really keep you to himself. And you were a wild one, mistress. Don’t imagine that it went unnoticed.’

I say nothing.

‘Nothing about
you
could go unnoticed,’ she says, quietly. ‘I used to watch you. Sometimes I thought you could be my obscure twin, a dark shadow of my own self. It has been hard enough for
me to use my mind – how must it be for poor Aemilia? If ever a woman was born out of her right place, it was you.’

I look away. In my mind’s eye I see a child’s hands spreading over ivory keys. They are ink-stained and the nails are bitten. I see a young woman in a yellow dress, glittering with jewels and borrowed pride.

‘And there are more similarities between us than you know – more links between our two fates.’ She pauses. ‘And now… wife to a recorder player.’

‘Yes, madam.’

‘Is he a proper husband to you?’

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘You hoped for more.’

‘Wedlock is a narrow business.’

She laughs her tearing laugh again. ‘Oh, Mistress Lanyer! You can still amuse me. Narrow, too narrow, you have it right. The bastards have the best of it.’

I hesitate again, not certain what to say. The Queen smiles, very thinly. ‘It is an odd thing, but as I sit here, trapped in my own crock of bones, and as the world shrinks, as it must, something else happens. Do you know what that is?’

I nod. ‘The world is far from you, so you see the pattern. I sometimes think of London the way a kite must see it. From above.’

‘Sharp Aemilia. I should have made you Chancellor. If only I could have done. Yes. I see the world from far off, so though I am lodged here in my tiny room, propped next to my great bed of death, I see my life all clear, like the most wonderful tapestry of nonsense and pity.’

I watch her clown’s face, lined with sadness.

‘My esteemed brother-in-law, Philip, King of all Spain, of the Americas, the high seas, ended in a tiny room. No different, when he died in the Escorial, than the humblest of his servants. The world stretched from that palace, a great and grand dominion.
But in the end it was no longer his. He had to leave it.’

‘And yet, it is a fine thing, to rule. You are not like other people.’

She flaps her hand, as if batting away the foolishness of this thought. She looks again into the corner of the room, and again I turn, wondering what she sees. As she speaks, her eyes are steady on this unseen presence. ‘They cut her head off while she prayed. Did you know that?