Dark Aemilia (4 page)

I reason thus. I may lose everything. I may gain everything. Life is a fleeting shadow. Death is eternal, and there is no fervid fornication in the charnel house. I have not known this thing before. I do not know what this thing is. I am not afraid.

I am not afraid.

Spring has forgotten us this year. Eddies of snow flurry from the cold grey clouds. My cloak is too thin, and my horse’s hooves slip and slither on the hard ground. I am pretending to be more respectable than I am. I am used to that, at least. As he trots along Fleet Street, I shiver in the icy chill. Yet as the wind numbs my body I am grateful – for this distracts my mind. All I can think is how much I wish to sit before a roaring fire. If there is a poet there, so be it. If he is William Shakespeare, what of it? Or so I nearly think, as I crosss the bridge over Fleet River. The Bel Savage is, I know, close by. I have been there to see a new play with my lord. When I came before, I was borne upon a barge along the river, then taken in a private carriage from Blackfriars Stairs. This time I have only Frey to carry me, and, when I see the squat shape of the Inn and the clustering stables around it, I falter, and pull him to a walk. Even from this distance I can hear shouts and laughter, and the sound of an old ballad being belted out in chorus.

I am minded to turn Frey’s head and ride back to Whitehall when I see a man, walking towards me along the road.
Broad-shouldered
,
and with a countryman’s gait, easy and
long-limbed
. It is strange to see the playwright in the open air. In my mind’s eye he is always cooped up with his pages, or
cheek-by
-jowl with others of his sort, in some crowded City tavern.

He stops, and holds the bridle, and we look at each other for a moment, then swiftly look away.

‘Is it really you, Aemilia?’ he says.

‘So it would seem.’

‘The fevered champion of shrews and vixens? I can scarce believe it.’

‘I am still their champion,’ say I, ‘fevered or otherwise.’ But then realise I am addressing myself to my horse’s yellowed mane. I wriggle my feet free of the stirrups and Will helps me down, and I feel the hardness of his arms through his thick sleeves. I dare not look at him, and sense that he dares not look at me. We must seem like two gaping fools, staring this way and that, as if the white sky and the cold street fill us with astonished wonder. My skin burns and my heart is pounding and I want to turn and run.

‘I didn’t think you’d come,’ says he, patting Frey’s nose. ‘You seemed so angry with me.’

‘Nor did I,’ I say. ‘Nor should I have.’

‘Your letters were –’

‘They were from Katherine. I have never written to you.’

He laughs. ‘Katherine writes well.’

‘I wish I could say the same for Petruchio.’

‘He is a lost soul, my lady.’

‘Lost?’

He shakes his head. ‘Look, madam… I have a room…’

‘Indeed! What do you take me for?’ I turn away, ready to mount Frey again. ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake, I’m not myself.’

Will turns me to face him. ‘Aemilia – madam – please. It’s my mistake… it’s me who is not… myself. Please. I meant to say – a room where we can see the play. In private. Away from the crowd.’

I collect myself. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘This meeting must indeed be private. That is thoughtful of you.’

We stand in silence for a moment. I have had dreams less dreamlike.

‘I have a mask,’ I say. I pull my vizard down, foolishly, so that my blushing face is hidden. In some mad part of my mind I wish I were Katherine, the True Shrew.

Will takes my hand most formally, and kisses the tips of my gloved fingers as if I were the Queen herself. I see that his own hands are ungloved. They are long, fine-boned and marked with lamp-black. Our eyes jolt together, and I feel something swoop and fall inside me.

‘Come. Come inside… out of the cold.’ A groom takes my horse, and Will leads me to the inn, my hand held firm in his. But he makes no other move to touch me, at which I feel a strange ache, the like of which I have not known before. It is the infection again, that disease that was carried in his letter.

Inside, the blistering March cold is soon forgotten. There is a warm buzz of talk and the glass windows twinkle in the firelight. The press of people gives off its own heat. There are young and old, men and women, drunk and sober, sitting in snug wooden booths, or gathered round the fire, house-dogs snoring at their feet. Will leads me up a narrow staircase, till we come to a small, oak-panelled room.

He closes the door and leads me to a table. Next to it is a curtained window. Drawing back the curtain, he nods to me and I see that it looks out into the inn-yard. Two hay carts have been backed together at one end, to form a makeshift stage. This is shrouded all in black, with a carved wooden chair and oak table at one end. A group of men are hammering nails into a trapdoor that has been constructed in the floor of one of the carts, and which seems not be to working as it should. Another man stands apart, dressed in black like the stage hangings, with a giant cross around his neck.

‘Ned Alleyn,’ says Will, opening the window.

‘He is Faustus?’

‘He is, and most excellent in the part.’ He beckons me over, and I stand a few inches from him, not daring to go nearer. ‘
Too
excellent, one might almost say. Some of the players believe he wears that cross for good reason.’

I see that Alleyn’s face is drawn and pale in the afternoon light. He looks anxious, and bends down to look at the trapdoor and consult with the carpenters. A cold draught comes from the open window, and the sound of hammering echoes in the frosty air.

‘What do you mean?’

‘When he summons Mephastophilis, the agent of Satan, he uses true magic. He uses words that good Christians would never utter, for fear of losing their immortal souls. The trap-door in the cart looks like a simple piece of stage-work now, but when the play begins it seems to have a different function, as if it can truly link the men upon the stage with the hidden fires of Hell.’

‘Why draw upon such evil?’

‘To make a wonder of it. To shock and amaze the crowd, so that they will speak of nothing else. To go beyond where tame and tedious playmaking has gone before.’

‘Plays like yours?’

He laughs, his eyes hard. ‘It’s true. He has gone beyond what passed as “good enough” before. Romance, comedy, low-brow tragedy – only one step beyond a mystery play – each written with a paucity of pain and passion. We’ve settled for too little.’

‘Or you have.’

He stares at me. ‘Or I have, yes. But I am quick to learn.’

Ned Alleyn’s posturing Faustus is a fool, but his descent is terrifying enough to grip me. He prowls and leers upon the boards like a staked bear at the pit, growling and griping against
his mortal prison, and who but an idiot could not see where that would end? Mephastophilis, summoned by real magic or no, is just a tall player with a head slightly too large for his frame. Will is close beside me as I lean out into the cold air to get a better view. Then, suddenly, his breath is soft in my ear. ‘Are you surprised that I set out to charm you with Marlowe’s evil play?’

I turn and my lips accidentally brush his cheek. His skin is cold beneath the stubble. Something is sticking in my throat, and I have to press my legs close together beneath my skirts to halt their quivering.

‘To charm me? Or tempt me?’

He steps backwards, raising his arms as if in innocence. ‘Tempt you, Katherine? I wouldn’t dare.’

‘Perhaps you want to quell me. Scare me, with this diabolic stuff. Then I will fall…’

‘Fall where?’

‘To Hell, perhaps, or Limbo…’

‘There is no Limbo now, my lady; it is forbidden.’

‘Oh, this is Limbo, Petruchio, do not doubt it. I am caught between reality and poetry – and between…’ I hesitate, not able to go on.

‘Between what?’

He is closer now. How did he come closer? I am vapour, liquid, longing. I want to say,
Between two men
. Or even,
Between two lovers
. But they would have to crush me beneath a stone-piled door before I’d spit the words out.

‘Why are you so cautious?’ he asks.

‘Why would I be otherwise?’

He pulls me round and looks into my eyes. ‘I wanted you to see this. I knew you would understand it.’

‘What do you mean?’ The voice that comes from my stopped throat sounds sane enough, not strange. And this is most peculiar, for I could not say what’s stage and what’s sky, or my whole name, or any part of Plato.

The Seven Deadly Sins are on the stage, each a conjured demon brought forth by Faustus. One by one he names and dismisses them. First comes Pride, then Covetousness, then Wrath, Envy, Gluttony and Sloth. Then:

Lechery is the last sin, so why is there another demon, as yet uncounted? I stare hard, but I cannot see it clearly: the other devils are in the way, their bodies shift and shuffle around it so. I can make out a hooded figure, taller than the others, and motionless. Its face is shadow but from its outline rises up the faintest pall of vapour. The players around it falter. The demon lifts its head, and the cowl falls back.

I strain to look, yet cannot see it.

I hear a woman scream. ‘God’s death, the Devil himself is on the stage!’

Cries and shouting spread across the courtyard. ‘Heaven help us, Judgement Day has come!’ There is a terrible roaring and shrieking, and the next thing I see is a prentice-boy run on to the stage wielding a flaming torch, bellowing more horribly than a bowelled man, and the stage is alight and the players are running this way and that way, and the crowd has erupted and people are banging on the closed doors of the courtyard to get out. Through the smoke I think I can see the still figure of the demon, but the shadows flicker and I cannot be certain.

‘What’s this?’ gasps Will. The shouts of terror grow louder, the flames higher… I cannot see… I crane forward. The courtyard is in shadow, the stage obscured by smoke. I blink, sure that my eyes are tricking me, and, when I look again, sure enough the figure has gone. But the awful screams and wails continue, and I
see the prentice-boy convulsing on the ground before the stage, his legs kicking and his arms flailing. He has gone stark mad.

Will grabs my arm. ‘Aemilia, let’s go, let’s find a place to –’

I pull away from him, and run.

I am halfway back down Fleet Street before I stop, remembering my horse, and then I double up, my chest heaving. I cannot think; I cannot breathe. The dreadful sound of the prentice-boy is trapped inside my head, and I can still see the weird jerking of his limbs. The gloomy, freezing afternoon seems haunted with floating spectres. Even my steaming breath is ghost-like.

A hand falls on my shoulder and I scream.

‘Aemilia! Aemilia, it’s me.’ Will pulls me towards him and holds me tightly, trembling almost as much as I am.

‘What
was
that?’ I ask. ‘Did Marlowe summon Satan? Is he
mad
?’

Will’s head is buried in my shoulder. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what he is about. Something has possessed him, some desire he hardly seems to understand. But that is his weird fancy, not ours.’ He straightens up and looks down at me. ‘Come with me,’ he says. ‘There is somewhere we can speak, alone.’

My body still shakes with cold and terror. He wraps his cloak around my shoulders. We make our way off the road and along a muddy track. At the end of it, I see a ruined abbey, surrounded by a coppice of naked winter trees. Some of the buildings are half-dismantled, the stone doubtless purloined to build new homes for wealthy men. But the abbey house is intact. We follow an overgrown pathway that leads to a side door. Will opens it with a key hanging upon a hook. Inside, he lights a torch, and locks the door behind us. The house reeks of damp, and I can hear water dripping. He takes me up a flight of creaking wooden stairs till we come to a solar on the upper floor. It is still furnished, and someone has prepared it for us. I see that Will
has been bold enough to hope that he might bring me here, and has laid it out accordingly. There is a bed in one corner, made up freshly with black silk bolsters and a white counterpane. And even logs in the fireplace. Will lights these, and his hands steady as he holds them to the flames.

‘It was a stage trick,’ he says, as he watches the fire grow higher. He seems to be returning to himself, making a pattern of what seemed unfathomable. ‘Kit is ambitious. What better way to make his name?’

‘What about that poor prentice-boy? What about the fire?’

‘The boy could have conspired with him. What you see is not always the truth.’

‘What else can you depend on?’

‘It’s not Satan that frightens me,’ he says. ‘It’s Kit.’

He comes towards me, and helps me out of the cloak. ‘I don’t want to talk about this any longer,’ he says, softly. ‘One day, I will write a greater play than that. I wanted you to see it.’

‘Why? If you are going to be greater?’

‘Because I want you to know me.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I want
you
.’

I hold him at arm’s length. I feel as if I have stepped into another world, as if this secret room is an enchanted place. What I do here is separate and different from every other part of my life. Time, too, seems twisted out of shape. And as for virtue… well.

‘I want you,’ he repeats. ‘If you can forgive me for abusing Katherine.’

He has small white teeth. There is a blue vein snaking from his left eye to his hairline. His eyelashes are thick and black and make his eye-whites seem paler. There is a scar at the base of his neck, like a dagger-nick, in the same place that I have a black mole. If we lay together, they would fit quite neat together. He looks more Spanish than English. He looks more Jewish than Gentile. He looks like me.