The Dark Lady's Mask (31 page)

“
Cara,
will you ever forgive a meddling old fool for causing you such grief? I—”

He fell silent when he saw Will behind her. In an instant the old man's face transformed, as though he could barely contain his glee.

“Now I can face your father in eternity,” he exulted. “He will thank me at least for this. Just look at your beautiful young face! I've never seen you so happy.”

Jacopo released her hand to beckon to Will. “I expect you to be loving and true, and a good father to her son.”

Like a true Italian, Will kissed Jacopo on both cheeks. “
Signore,
you have my vow.”

Jacopo folded his hands, his eyes gleaming. “May I trouble you, Aemilia, for a nocturne before I sleep?”

She sat at the virginals and began to play, each note reverberating in her heart.

Will leaned close and whispered in her ear, “If music be the food of love, play on.”

 

EMILIA FROZE IN HER
tracks as she and Will approached the Cappella di Sancta Odilia in the hills above Verona. Her eyes searched his. Did they dare?

He never wavered, only kissed her. “Courage, my love. Be bold.”

Head ringing, she stepped forward, past the blossoming almond trees, past the beds of blooming woodruff and Easter lilies, through the low arched door into the chapel where sunlight poured through stained glass in brilliant jewel-colored shafts. Casting a look back over her shoulder, she saw the Weir sisters following them, Tabitha carrying Enrico.

Will squeezed Aemilia's arm as the friar approached them, his hands clasped.

“
Benedicite,
” the man said. “Frate Lorenzo at your service. What brings you fair strangers to my chapel?”

Aemilia cast a desperate look at Will, but it appeared that he was hunting for words as frantically as she was.

“Good friar,” she stammered, “we are lately come from England. I am kinswoman to the great Jacopo Bassano, so sadly deceased.”

Her voice broke in grief at the memory of Jacopo's funeral, only a fortnight ago, the way he had sighed his last breath with an expression of such yearning on his face. At Olivia's bidding, a priest had come to give him the last sacraments. At least Papa had had his brothers to sing their secret songs to send him into the world beyond. If Aemilia had known even a word of those Hebrew prayers, she would have offered them for Jacopo.

“Jacopo Bassano, the master painter!” Friar Lorenzo bowed his head in reverence. “Ah, you must be the kinswoman who inherited the vineyard.”

Aemilia could still not get over her good fortune. Sometimes it pricked her conscience along with everything else. If Jacopo had not left the property to her, would it have gone instead to Giulietta as part of her dowry? Had she unwittingly robbed the girl of her inheritance?

“Indeed I am,” she told the friar, gathering her wits. “And this . . . this is my betrothed.” Her face feverish, she clasped Will's arm. “We are in love, Frate Lorenzo, and wish to live an honest life together.”

She scarcely believed her own words, their temerity. She and Will were breaking every law.

“You see,” she rattled on, “it's too close to the funeral for a big family wedding feast. And yet we wish to avoid the disgrace of living in sin.”

The blood pounded in her ears as she remembered her own parents and their common-law arrangement, how Papa had made a life with another man's wife. But that was England and this was Italy. Would the friar even believe her outlandish tale? Yet what else could they do if they desired to live together and not be pariahs? As long as she and Will had dwelled in the Casa dal Corno, their love had remained unconsummated out of respect to Olivia and her family. Here in Verona their new life together would begin. And so she found herself negotiating with a friar, and she wasn't even Catholic—this was but one more mask. She glanced at Will, who reached for Enrico. The little boy was crying but quietened as soon as Will held him close.

Friar Lorenzo, observing this exchange, burst out laughing. “
Signora,
you ask me to marry you to this gentleman right here and now with no preparation or warning?”

He raised his palms and then, amid the beams of colored light streaming from the stained glass, a strand of gossamer from a spider's web came floating down. The friar caught it on his finger and studied it as though it were a sign sent from heaven.

“True lovers,” he said, “as I see you are, can walk upon gossamer as fine as this and yet not fall, so buoyant are their hearts. And so you two can walk into my chapel, already a family with a beautiful son, and ask me to marry you, and what can I do but bow before your love and do as I am told, for the child's sake if for no other reason.” He smiled. “In faith, I rarely see a love like yours. But before I can marry you, I must first shrive you of your sins.”

Tongue-tied in panic, Aemilia turned to Will.

“Goodness me,” she heard Winifred mutter in English. “If she's to confess all her sins, we'll be here past midnight.”

“So be it, good friar.” Will handed Enrico back to Tabitha. “Let me be first.”

In a daze, Aemilia watched Will kneel at the shriving bench and fold his hands in prayer.

“Forgive me, Father, I have sinned,” he told the friar. “I've yielded to temptation of the flesh, and so begat a child without benefit of holy wedlock.”

She trembled to hear the contrition in his voice, as though he had been longing for years to receive absolution for getting Anne Hathaway with child and so binding them both in an unhappy marriage. Yet he was ingenious enough to speak the truth of his past in such a way as to lead the friar to believe he was speaking about Aemilia and fathering her child.

When it was her turn, Aemilia followed Will's lead and knelt at the shriving bench. “Forgive me, Father. Without benefit of wedlock, I too have succumbed to wicked temptation and so gave birth to my son, the fruit of my sin.”

“This man?” The friar's mild eyes met hers. “Do you truly love him?”

“Yes.” She felt such a welling up of relief to speak the truth without subterfuge. “I love him with all my heart, Frate Lorenzo.”

As the friar uttered the words of absolution, Aemilia's head spun. Here she was, a Jew's daughter, educated by high-minded Puritans, participating in this papist rite in order to seal a doubly bigamous marriage. She could almost see dead Anne Locke rise from her grave to look on in horror. What Catholic hell would she and Will burn in for this deception of theirs, and would that be more gruesome than the fire and brimstone Anne Locke had described when translating Calvin's sermons? She imagined Jacopo shaking his head at her in wry admiration.

As the friar went to fetch his missal, Will raised her to her feet.

“
Fiat,
” he whispered, kissing her.

When the friar returned, Will took her hand.

“My good women,” Frate Lorenzo said, addressing the Weir sisters, “I presume there is no reason why this man and woman may not be lawfully wed?”

Aemilia glanced back at them, her heart in her throat. Prudence's face was inscrutable. Winifred looked as though she had swallowed a gargoyle. But Tabitha, who spoke the best Italian, lifted her gaze to the friar.

“Good Father, there is no reason why they should not marry with every blessing!” With the child in her arms, Tabitha looked as beautiful and innocent as the painted Madonna on the wall.

“Very well,” said the friar. “We shall proceed.”

Aemilia distinctly thought she heard Prudence whisper to her sisters, “The spell is full wound.” But when she looked back, Prudence only smiled.

A
EMILIA'S KNEES WERE STILL
knocking when Will led her back into the daylight. The path undulating between the vineyard and olive groves, now her property, led to their new home, a crumbling old villa covered in blooming wisteria. It glimmered like a dream and yet it was real.

“What if the friar had refused us?” she whispered, still not believing they had got away with such a liberty.

He laughed and hugged her close. “Why, then we would have had to live together as two gentlemen, of course. Do you not miss your breeches?”

“L
OVE IS A SMOKE
raised with a fume of sighs,” Will said, his voice throaty as she straddled his lean body. Beneath her closed eyelids, stars exploded.

“Being purged,” he gasped, “a fire sparking in lover's eyes.”

She threw back her head, flame igniting her loins. She thought her naked flesh must glow like a lamp lit from within.
Now I know.
Know what it meant to be truly in love, abandoning all restraint to surrender to a passion that left her breathless.

“A madness most discreet,” she murmured, while together they rocked and churned until at last they cried out in one voice, “I die! I die!”

Seized by ecstasy, her soul lifted out of her body to entwine with his. When she collapsed panting at his side, he raised himself on one elbow to trace her flesh bathed golden in the afternoon sun.

“My beautiful love,” he said. “The sun never saw her match since the world first began.”

“You turn everything into a poem.” She nestled against him.

“Because I am a poet in love.”

His heart pounded against her ear when he reached for her hand and played with the golden ring he had given her, turning it round and round on her finger. They were criminals—bigamists!—who had broken every rule, as star-crossed lovers will do. But love must triumph—the friar had said so himself. Eros was their god who would redeem their every sin. And how were they harming their spouses who, as sure as spring rain, would be happier without them? The old Will and Aemilia had died to be reborn as lovers in this villa in the hills above Verona, their past wiped clean, as though no vows had ever bound them to Alfonse Lanier or Anne Hathaway.

“You are my true husband,” she whispered. “Had I only met you before I met Lord Hunsdon. And had you only met me before Anne.”

“Then you would have been young indeed for I married at eighteen,” he said. “That would make you as young as Giulietta, a maid of thirteen.”

“If I could only be a girl again. Turn back time.”

“Our love
shall
turn back time. You are my first true love.” His hand cupped her belly. “I want to have a child with you.”

“A daughter,” she said, her eyes moistening to imagine his babe quickening in her womb. “A sister for Enrico.”

“We'll name her Odilia after the chapel where we plighted our troth,” he said. “Odilia, the patroness of good eyesight. Our daughter shall never be shortsighted!”

Aemilia laughed and reached for her shift while Will reached for his shirt, but instead of dressing and rising from bed, they settled back against the bolster, shared a cup of wine, and plotted their next play.

“It will make Giulietta happy if we write the romance of Giuletta of Verona,” she said. “The tale of the two famous lovers.”

Luigi da Porto's tale,
Giulietta e Romeo,
was drawn from two ill-fated young lovers who had lived in fourteenth-century Verona, children of rival families, the Capuleti and Montecchi.

“You wish to turn from comedy to tragedy?” Will asked her. “You know how the tale ends. He poisons himself. She kills herself with his dagger.”

“We shall make the tale our own,” she said. “We shall give them their happy ending.”

“Can we truly?”

“Two poets in love.” She kissed him fervently. “We might do anything.”

Will summed up the story in a sentence. “Star-crossed lovers fight cruel time to make their love last forever.”

“And so shall they succeed! For true lovers may stride upon gossamer and yet not fall.”

W
ITH
P
AOLO, THE WINE
grower, and Antonio, his son, looking after the vineyard and olive groves, the warm spring days passed in bliss, the new play growing and flourishing like the young grapes. Most of the writing transpired in bed, in their chamber overlooking the green vines and the chapel where they had exchanged vows. Lying atop the coverlet, the sun warm on their bare tangled limbs,
tarocchi
cards scattered around them, they penned scene after scene filled with their poetry.

How Aemilia delighted in their creation, this testament of their love. Here were the youthful
innamorati,
here the masked ball where Giulietta and Romeo fell in love at first sight, plunging straight into their passion without the tedious formalities of courtship. Here was the sympathetic friar who married them in secret, and here was cynical Mercutio, possessive of Romeo and as mercurial as his name—a sly portrait of Southampton. Mercutio viewed love as a feat of conquest. Only Giulietta and Romeo understood the true sacred mystery of love, unstained and eternal.

As Aemilia read the lines of thirteen-year-old Giulietta, the burden of her own twenty-five years fell away, rendering her as pure as that virginal girl on the tender cusp of womanhood.