Dark Aemilia (36 page)

‘Yet all were saved!’

‘So Burbage told me. He came running up, with his shirt all soot-stained and his face as red as the flames. “We are all safe, praise God!” he shouted, tears pouring down his cheeks. “All safe, Will, every man!” But, as I looked at him, a thought came to me. I had been working on a play.’

‘Was that so strange?’

He coughs again, and I can hear him struggling to find a clear way for his breath. ‘That morning, I had brought it with me, to the tiring-room, because I wanted to get it done. Then I went off to see a printer at Paul’s Churchyard, and I had left it behind, upon my table.’

He hesitates, and I wait. ‘I have told no one of this but you, Aemilia. This play was to be the master-work that all my other writing led to – the play to end all plays. Such a piece that would always be remembered. Five hundred years – a thousand years
from now. The others might fade from memory, but this play… this one would last.’

‘And so you ran into the fire.’

‘Ah, you are the only one who understands insanity. Yes, I ran, shaking Dick off as I went. I hurtled through the entrance, into the pit. The lintel was burning red – I could see that it would fall at any moment. The pit itself was clear of fire, though the rushes were black and shrivelled and glowed beneath my feet. I ran over them, and up on to the stage. The canopy was flame; the Heavens were Hell. I felt my clothes begin to char and burn my skin. But still I went – into the tiring-room, where all the costumes burned like Catholics – and there was my table. And – lo! – the pages were still there. I praised God – then, as I ran forward, I looked up and the flaming roof timbers were falling down. I snatched the pages, and fled the room as it roared and crackled around me. Ran back across the pit, and into the open air. My clothes, my hair, my skin itself – all of this was flame. By some miracle, I got outside, and it was Dick who saved me. He wrapped a cloak around me and quenched the fire. I fell to the ground, clutching my papers, my breath coming like sword-shafts.’

‘Dear God! But you saved your pages?’

The chair creaks.

‘What of your pages? What of your great play?’

‘All dust,’ he says. ‘All charred to nothing.’

He is making a strange sound. He is laughing again, after a wheezy fashion.

‘Nothing left at all?’

‘All that was left was one charred scrap of paper, with the title wrote upon it.’

‘And… what was the title?’

‘It was
Dark Aemilia.
The story of a great lady, and her fall.’

‘Oh!’

‘It was a fable, concerning love, and poetry and fame. But mostly love.’

I wipe my eyes. ‘This was to be your great work?’

‘I wanted to summon the spirit of our time together. Its passion and its madness and its joy.’

‘Oh, my lord,’ say I. ‘My sweet, beloved Will.’

‘My love,’ he says, his voice weak and indistinct. ‘We shall remember, shan’t we? We have it still.’

After a moment, he says, ‘Listen, I cannot speak for very much longer. I have three gifts for you. The first, most people might think was next to worthless, but I believe that you will see its value. As you are a poet.’

‘I am overcome.’

I can hear him smile again. ‘Wait till you hear what it is: you may think it a strange present. My foul pages. With all my crossings out and alterations.’

‘Heminge said your pages are never blurred nor blotted.’

‘That is because I keep my first draft to myself. Until now, that is. Now they are yours. You will be heartened by my shortcomings, and perhaps you can learn from my mistakes.’

‘Will… I… how can I thank you – ?’

‘And also… also my bed.’

‘Your
bed
?’

‘Not the bed I sleep in now, which is of little value. No, the one where we last… went at it. Lord, what a night that was. It’s still there – I could not bear to bring it back to Stratford, nor did I want to pay the fee the carrier wanted.’

I remember it well – the fug of love inside its curtains and its roof patterned with leaping porpoises.

‘Aemilia?’

‘Yes?’

‘Still there – good.’

‘Still here? I cannot bear to leave!’

‘There is one final gift.’

‘I don’t need anything more. You have been kind enough.’

‘I will put your name upon the play. Upon
Macbeth
. For, as
sure as anything, the meat of that strange piece is yours.’

‘Thank you. But – no. It would be wrong.’

He sighs. A long, rattling sigh.

‘Aemilia, you are many things. You are a troublesome, noisy, cock-teasing, cock-tiring, wild-tongued termagant…’ He stops, as if to gather his strength. ‘But you are not evil.’

‘I
am
evil. Tom died because of me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘You were there! You saw it! He fell down upon the stage. The spirit cursed him, and the crane fell.’

‘Yes, the crane killed him. We don’t know why it fell, but it was the crane that brought about his death. Burbage and I built it, and it was me who pushed to have it. But I haven’t spent all these years believing that I am evil! It was an accident. All life brings risk.’

‘Is that what you believe?’

‘Of course. You are no more guilty of his death than I am. Nor are you the evil strumpet of those sonnets. You are Aemilia. And I loved you better than myself.’

‘Loved?’

‘Love. I still love you. Nothing has changed that.’

‘No. Nothing has changed it.’ The tears pour out of me.

‘Shall we forgive each other?’ he asks. His voice is weaker still.

‘Oh, Will!’ I sob. ‘If we forgive each other, then we are all done.’

‘My love, we
are
all done,’ says Will. ‘Open the shutters.’

His face is dark from the sun. His eyes are full of sky. His lips are swollen red from reckless kissing. ‘Let’s not quarrel,’ he says. ‘Let’s make love, and I’ll teach you poetry that way.’

I smooth the hair back from his forehead.

‘Am I your mistress, then? Am I all the things you wanted?
’

‘You are indeed, and I am your obedient slave.’

I look at him, eye to eye, to see if I can peer inside his head.

‘Do you want me?’ he asks, very serious.

Oh, I do. I do.

Afterwards, we lie together, sticky and naked in the long grass. ‘Be silent with me now, my love,’ he whispers.

She sits me in the hall downstairs, beside a smouldering log fire, and hands me a cup of wine. Quite kindly, compared to what has gone before.

‘I am sorry that you had to see him so,’ she says.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘No one is allowed to speak of it.’

‘I understand.’

‘He ran back into the Globe. When it was burning. They tried to stop him, but he struggled free.’

‘A brave act.’

‘Brave indeed. He wanted to be sure that no one had been left inside.’

‘Did he tell you that?’

‘Why else would he have entered an inferno, if not to save a human life? He is a good man.’

I cannot say that he is more than good, and less. I sip my tear-thinned wine in silence.

‘Poor Will! What an ending!’ I say at last.

‘The doublet and the rapier are beside you,’ she says, nodding to an iron-bound box. ‘And his foul papers with them. Take care of those in particular. They are the workings of his mind.’

‘I’ll put them in safe-keeping.’

‘Safe! Where in London’s pit of malice and foul-doing do you call “safe”?’

‘It is safe enough, madam, I can assure you. I have a little house at Aldgate, though I am soon to move to Pudding Lane.’

Mistress Shakespeare looks at me blankly. I realise that London names mean nothing to her. ‘I make a habit of reading the Scriptures when I can,’ she says. ‘I put my trust in God and his angels now.’ She picks up the Bible that is lying next to her on the oak settle.

‘So must we all.’

Opening the book, she reads for a moment, but she is crying. ‘I wanted him to come back so much. I prayed for it,’ she says, without looking up. ‘And now these prayers have been most cruelly answered.’

I shake my head sadly.

‘It won’t be long before Will is with God,’ she says ‘I try to see that. I try to bear it.’

The past is twisting in my mind, the greedy and illiterate country wife transformed into Patient Griselda. I try to think of words to comfort her – and me. But everything is muddled.

‘I would like to ask one thing of you,’ she says. ‘Do not remember him as you just saw him. Remember him as he was.’ She swallows and looks at me sharply. ‘When you knew him. When he was young.’

‘I shall.’

‘He is a poet,’ she says. ‘And a magician. He is also my husband, but that is of less importance. I have learned to understand that, though I don’t expect others to see it as I do.’ Then, she closes her eyes. Is she about to pray? But no – she quotes these lines…

The words are so clear and bright that my neck pricks at their sound, and I sit there with my box of foul papers and stare at the sorcerer’s wife in frank amazement.

I want to speak, of Prospero and love and endings. I want to say – our love was insubstantial, but magical. Like Ariel. But I can’t. So I say, ‘You had the best of him. A family, and a life here, and a home together.’

She stares at me. ‘The best of him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What can you know of that? How can you presume to look into the minds or lives of others?’

‘I don’t presume to know anything, Mistress Shakespeare; you quite mistake me.’

‘No, Mistress Lanyer,
you
mistake
me
. Of your own life you may be the witness, though no one knows when you are true and when you play false.’

‘I am indeed the witness to it, mistress.’

‘Of the rest of us, you can know next to nothing. Don’t load us with your study, or your supposition. Do you
hear
me? Do you
understand
?’

We sit in silence. I watch a log glow red then crumble to a spume of fine grey ash. After a while, it falls to pieces in a rain of crackling stars.

Springtime, and the sky is streaked with fragile cloud. The meadows are white with lady smock and tender violets peer out from the hedgerow shade. Larks sing, cuckoos call, and a soft wind shakes the oaks which stand hard by the new-built Globe. The theatre is a splendid copy of its former self. But its roof is made from slate instead of thatch. God willing, this theatre will last longer than the old one.

‘It’s a fine thing,’ says Henry, squeezing my arm. ‘His work is born again.’

I cannot speak, but squeeze his arm in return. I have not set foot in the theatre since the day that Tom Flood died. Yesterday Ann Shakespeare sent me word that Will is dead too. He breathed his last while he was sleeping.

I am dressed in black. For Will would have his way, and this is his third present to me – a fine dress of ebony-coloured velvet. It was sent to me after I left Stratford, together with a caul of seed pearls. A single piece of paper was pinned to it, burned and charred so that at first the writing on it seemed illegible. Then I managed to make out two words: ‘Dark Aemilia’. Now, I am wearing it on a bright spring day in a world in which he does not exist.

Henry persuaded me to come, full of pride for his dead father. He is wearing the Spanish doublet and the rapier is at his side. He is tall, and well-made, with thoughtful, shadowed eyes and a musician’s ear for poetry. I could not bear a tragedy, or a
Roman rant, but the players are putting on
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
which I have never seen. A comedy for springtime, and for love, so Henry tells me, and the white flag that flutters over the theatre’s cupola confirms that there will be no blood today.

We pass under the entrance, painted in myriad colours like the gateway to an ancient palace. Every detail of the old gate has been reproduced, even the likeness of Hercules with the world upon his shoulders. The world beyond the walls of the theatre is mutable and beyond our grasp. The world within is shaped and patterned for our understanding and diversion. We sit down in the gallery and Henry takes my hand. I look around at the pageant which surrounds me. The new pit is full to overflowing, and every seat on every tier of the gallery is taken. Those in the pit will find it hard to follow all the action, there is such a crowd of gallants seated upon the stage. The courtiers are rosetted and bombasted to the death, flaunting their warlike beards and girlish love-locks. The lesser folk are just as vivid in their cheaper finery, swarming together in a brawl of colour and vulgar show: yellow farthingales crushed by apple-women, stack-heels sinking in the mud. I wonder if the play-goers are wearing their finest clothing in Will’s honour, just as I have put on my widow’s gown.

The seething crowd is chatting, munching, singing, dicing, gaming, smoking, and swigging small beer. There are law students, strumpets, apprentices and oyster-sellers. Choirboys, pickpockets, servant girls and foists. I see a blur of movement; but also a multitude of London faces, looming and vanishing in the mob. A pretty Romeo and his pale Juliet, arms twined together. A handsome Moor and his whispering, rat-faced Iago. A stout and jocular Falstaff, drinking from an ale-pot, while a young blade laughs at his side. A student, in a black cloak, frowning deep as Hamlet as he reads his book. The sun shimmers on every button and scarlet pustule, every scar and cross-stitched codpiece, every tooth-stump and curling smile. So that the scene is as vibrant as a palace portrait, preserved in oils and distemper.

Here is Thomas Dekker, writing on his sleeve, head cocked to one side as if listening to the throng. Here is Moll Cutpurse, strumming her lute and singing out, full-throated. And see, there is my landlord Anthony Inchbald, propped high on one of the best seats, dressed in scarlet. Dogs run between the legs of the play-goers, snatching up the fallen chicken bones. The scent of tobacco smoke wafts into the balmy air. On the balcony above the stage, the musicians are playing. A nut-seller shouts for custom; a baby squeals; a drunk’s song rages and stops.

And then I see them. A white-haired woman, overdressed in a tawny gown with a lace ruff. There is a younger woman next to her, with two little girls. They have black hair, wild and curly. The children are sitting side by side, so tight that they might be made of one flesh. I look closer. They
are
one flesh. It is Anne Flood, and Marie, and Anne’s grandchildren, the joined twins. Anne leans close to Marie and whispers something to her, and Marie throws her head back and laughs.

I spring up, wanting to call to them, but Henry pulls me back into my seat. ‘Mother! Sit down, sit down…’

Three trumpet calls blast out, to summon any latecomers. The musicians strike up a stately tune. Out comes Dick Burbage. He is head-to-toe in black: the only mortal here dressed as funereally as I am. His velvet cloak ripples behind him in the breeze. Behind him come two players. Oberon, in purple and cloth-of-gold, and his fair Titania in a gown of taffeta and
toile d’atour.
Their faces are painted white, their lips are scarlet, and the ostrich feathers in their jewelled crowns waft gently above their heads.

The audience is silent. Kites wheel to and fro in the blue sky, wing-beats rapid, then still as they soar upon the breeze. A bear screams from the pit next door, and the sound of cheering follows. Henry is smiling with tears upon his cheeks.

Burbage steps forward.