The Dark Lady's Mask (15 page)

“One day you'll poison yourself,” her maid tutted.

A jolt ripped through Aemilia at the sound of her five-month-old son crying inside the house. Picking up her skirts, she raced to the kitchen door, only to collide with Winifred's sister Prudence, the cook.

“The master—” Prudence began.

Before Aemilia could do or say a thing, in sprang Alfonse, as though in hope of catching her in the arms of an illicit lover.

“Where were you?” he spat, her husband of eight months, as he looked her up and down. “Your skirts they are filthy. Were you rolling in the streets?”

Despite being brought up in Greenwich, Alfonse had a French accent.

“How can you call yourself a wife?” he went on, working himself up in a froth of rage. “You go wherever you please, any hour of day or night!”

Aemilia attempted to speak, but the words wouldn't come. She could only clench her fists and bite her tongue. When she looked at her husband, she felt an aversion that gripped her down to her viscera.

Why couldn't he just leave her in peace? Hadn't he already got what he wanted from this marriage—her money? She had expected a man willing to wed another man's pregnant mistress for fortune's sake to at least be worldly enough to go his own way and allow her to go hers. Why did he have to act like such an insufferable little lordling, ruled by his petty jealousies? She blamed his father and stepmother, who kept goading him to put an end to his wife's willful, wanton ways lest she make him an even bigger fool and cuckold than he already was.

Still, seeing as she was married to the boy, Aemilia supposed she might try harder to reach some accord with him. If only he could be satisfied with his lot as a royal musician instead of wasting her money on his expedition to the Azores, not to mention the way he indulged his taste for fine clothing, gambling, drinking, and—she suspected—whoring. He had already sold her lute and virginals to fund his extravagance. If he didn't begin to earn as much as he liked to spend, he would soon ruin them both.

“My good mistress took pity on a poor man who collapsed in the street, Master Lanier, sir.” Winifred inserted her ample form between husband and wife. She stood with her feet splayed, her hands on her hips, taking up as much space as possible. Alfonse couldn't so much as scowl at Aemilia with Winifred towering over him. “A regular good Samaritan your wife is, sir.”

Leaving Alfonse behind the bulwark that was Winifred, Aemilia darted upstairs to the bedchamber where her son still wailed, his face dark red, his little fists beating the air. She swept him from the arms of Tabitha, his wet nurse. Aemilia cooed in his ear as she paced the creaking floorboards. Her babe stopped crying at once and rested his sweet weight against her.

“Always an angel for you, he is, mistress,” Tabitha said.

Aemilia smiled at the young wet nurse and thanked her stars yet again that Lord Hunsdon had seen fit to pay for her. Aemilia's own milk had dried up soon after giving birth. If not for Tabitha, her son could have died. The girl had also brought her two older sisters, Winifred and Prudence, into Aemilia's service, and now Aemilia could scarcely imagine her household without them.

Crooning in Italian, she gazed into her baby's eyes, as dark as the olives she had once tasted as a girl. She'd named him Henry after his father, but called him Enrico. Everything she did, her every scheme and forbidden act, was for him. To insure that he had a future. Sometimes she dreamed of disappearing with him into the clear blue, vanishing like smoke. But where?

“So you think to avoid me.” Having somehow escaped Winifred, Alfonse strode into the bedchamber.

Tabitha exchanged glances with her mistress while Aemilia held fast to the babe. If only Alfonse would smile at her son, she might like him, but his worst flaw, even worse than his bullying and his spendthrift ways, was that he was jealous of an infant. How could she love a man who hated her baby?

“Tell me where you have gone,” he said.

“To Thames Street to consult an astrologer on your voyage to the Azores.” She gazed at him levely. Lord Hunsdon had once taught her how to shoot arrows. She imagined drawing the bow, keeping her eyes on the target, keeping her aim true.

“And what mischief will you get up to when I sail away?” His voice seemed to rise an octave. For a moment, Aemilia pictured him singing falsetto. She didn't know whether to laugh or scream in his face.

The floorboards shuddered as Winifred marched in. Winifred, her arms as thick as Alfonse's legs. Before Alfonse could interrogate Aemilia further, Winifred snatched the bolster off the bed and gave it a good bashing.

“You are a common bawd,” Alfonse told Winifred, before he narrowed his eyes at Aemilia. “But she . . . she is a subtle whore.”

Like flames scorching the inside of a chimney, Aemilia's temper surged. She handed Enrico to Winifred's safekeeping before sidling up to her husband, staring him down, eye to eye.

“Oh, you are sick of self-love! You knew what I was when you married me. No one forced you, sir. No one held a blade to your throat when you said your vows.”

Her skin was on fire, her muscles twitching, her blood beating a war dance. She felt no fear, only the fury filling her, fueling the flame that blazed in her breast.

“If you are so displeased with me, I am sure Lord Hunsdon can arrange for you to sail to Virginia instead of the Azores. Or perhaps he'll send you to fight for the Queen in the next Irish uprising. Would that please you?
Husband?
”

“Shrew!” he cried. “Witch! I shall cut out your tongue.”

“No matter,” she said boldly, her hands on her hips. “I shall speak as much wit as you afterward.”

Her words were arrows that struck their mark. Out of the room he stormed. Downstairs a door slammed. She heard his curses as he skulked off down the street.
C'est le bordel! Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde!

He would be gone for days, for he had a habit of disappearing after their quarrels, of returning to his family in Greenwich where he would lament his fate to be wed to such a faithless and hard-hearted woman.

My stars shine darkly over me.
They were damned, she and Alfonse. A curse hung over their heads.

Letting out a long breath, Aemilia collapsed on the bed. The mattress heaved like the sea as Winifred flopped down beside her and gently placed Enrico in her arms. Closing her eyes, Aemilia kissed his downy head. What would she do when Lord Hunsdon died and she could no longer invoke his protection or beg his money after Alfonse went through everything she owned?
I must escape. I must.
By ingenuity or by guile, she must find a way, some other patronage, some independent income that Alfonse couldn't touch. How else could she support her son until he was old enough to support himself?

Let Alfonse call her a whore or whatever vile names he could conjure. Come nightfall, she would take matters into her own hands.

 

IGHT WAS
A
EMILIA'S FAVORITE
time, when the cage that contained her by day sprang apart. In blessed darkness, she soared free, as in the ancient tales of village wives who left behind their sleeping husbands and flew away on the backs of beasts to some lofty mountaintop, where they cavorted like heathens until sunrise.

Clad as a young man, she galloped out of Longditch astride Bathsheba, one of her few keepsakes from her days at Grimsthorpe Castle when she was a maid as stainless as any, translating Plutarch. At twenty, the mare was a venerable age. Alfonse said the old nag was worthless and that it cost too much to feed her, but Aemilia would sooner beg in the streets than part ways with her mare. Her booted legs clung to Bathsheba's flanks as they passed the church of Saint Martin-in-the-Fields and fared forth into the pristine countryside between Westminster and London where the gentry dwelled. With the night wind singing in her ears, she was no longer Mistress Lanier but an entirely different person, her heart opening as wide as the starry sky. The full moon shone bright enough to cast skittering shadows, which sent Bathsheba leaping and snorting.

Sometimes Aemilia dreamt of remaining in this guise permanently, of making her way in the great world as a man. Let Aemilia die. Become Emilio. Such a thrill it gave her to swagger in boots and breeches instead of mincing along under heavy skirts. To boldly shoulder past the men who would otherwise leer at her.

Cattle lowed beyond hedgerows fragrant with honeysuckle and elderflower. She breathed in the scent of freshly mown hay. Her many burdens seemed to lift as she skirted the slumbering village of Saint Giles-in-the-Fields. When she arrived at the great iron gates of Southampton House, the gatekeeper let her in at once.

“Lovely evening, Master Emilio, sir. The Earl is expecting you.”

Aemilia's heart thrilled, as it always did when her male guise passed muster. She swung down from the saddle and stood for a moment in the moonlight, aware that the gatekeeper was admiring the sword and rapier hanging from her belt. Pray God she looked every inch the daring young blade—a person with whom one would not wish to meddle.

Interloper though she was, she strode through the gardens with their gushing fountains and stone nymphs. The scent of night-blooming jasmine intoxicated her as she gazed at the mullioned windows radiant with candlelight. Entering the house, she caught sight of herself in a long oval looking glass. Though small of stature, she cut a dashing figure with her slender legs, well muscled from riding, and her slanting cheekbones. She appeared as a youth of seventeen summers, wavy dark hair spilling from beneath her cap.

Her host awaited her in the great parlor, its every window open to the moon-drenched garden. Huge bouquets of roses and larkspur—all the beauty this midsummer's night could offer—adorned each table.

Nineteen years old, Henry Wriothesley, the third Earl of Southampton, was as pretty as a girl, his face framed in flowing golden hair. He was arrayed with a collar of the most exquisite Venetian lace money could buy and an elaborate double earring with a pendant pearl. The color was high in his face, as if she had barged in at an inopportune moment, though she could not see anyone else in the room.

“Aemilia-Emilio,” he said, stooping to kiss her hand. “How now, my master-mistress?” His blue eyes locked with hers. “The most exquisite creature in all Middlesex.”

She and the Earl had befriended each other during her time at court when they had performed together in the masques. As different from her husband as a peacock was from a pigeon, Harry was as frivolous as only the wealthy could be. She had to remind herself to look behind his mask. His childhood had been wretched. His father had cast out his mother, accusing her of adultery with a commoner. Then his father died, leaving Harry with a disgraced mother—not just a presumed adulteress but also Catholic. So Lord Burghley, Master of the Court of Wards and Lord High Treasurer, had taken charge. His eye on the boy's family fortune, Burghley had arranged for Harry to marry his own staunchly Protestant granddaughter, Elizabeth de Vere, when Harry turned twenty-one.

Except, in a fit of pique, the boy declared he would never wed, that he disdained the institution of marriage, that he despised the entire female sex. But if Harry disobeyed Lord Burghley and refused to marry his granddaughter, he would have to pay Burghley the unheard-of fine of five thousand pounds. The stakes couldn't be higher. Aemilia certainly did not envy Harry the prospect of marrying into the de Vere clan.

In his rebellion against Burghley's rule, Harry had invited Aemilia to secretly visit him by night and play the virginals on the condition that she appear in breeches so no one could accuse him of giving up his hatred for her sex. For her part, Aemilia didn't care for Southampton in a romantic sense and therefore he had no power to break her heart, but she was happy enough to take his gold. Being paid to dress as a young man and visit the Earl in his mansion seemed a harmless enough way to keep herself from penury, though if Alfonse discovered that she rode out by night, he would probably have her publically flogged for adultery, never mind that the greatest liberty Harry had taken was kissing her hand.

“I hope you brought me some poetry,” the Earl said, his voice both affectionate and imperious.

Bless the boy—he actually paid her for her poems. But she had been too busy of late to write any new verses for him. Humbly, she bowed her head.

“No poetry this time, my lord.” As befitting their masquerade, she kept her voice in its lowest registers so that she would sound like a young man. “Instead, I bring you a song.”

Then she began to sing in her natural soprano.

Over hill, over dale,

Through bush, through briar,

Over park, over pale,

Through flood, through fire,

I do wander everywhere,