The Dark Lady's Mask (37 page)

W
HEN THEY REACHED THE
back gate of the house Aemilia thought she had left behind forever, it was unlocked. With a sharp inhalation, she entered her neglected wasteland of a garden that was overrun by weeds. The wisteria-clad vineyard villa shimmered in her memory to taunt her with everything she had lost.

“Look, mistress.” Winifred pointed at the thin sputter of smoke rising from the chimney. “The master must be home.”

Aemilia passed Henry to Tabitha before she moved forward. What could she possibly tell Alfonse? The two of them had barely managed to restrain themselves from murdering each other even before she had run away to Italy. How could they possibly live under the same roof now that she was pregnant with her second bastard?

She wrenched open the door and stumbled into her kitchen only to find a doxy with carmine-smeared cheeks straddling a fat, bald man. The man was not Alfonse. His eyes lit on Aemilia and the Weir sisters.

“Hey ho, what sport!” he cried. “More wenches come to join in!”

Aemilia covered her son's eyes and prepared to flee, but Winifred charged past her with a bucket of cold rain water from the garden. With a bellow that split the air, Winifred doused the rutting couple. Doxy and swain fell apart, sprawling ingloriously on the filthy rushes. Their curses flew like arrows.

“I'll show you sport, I will,” Winifred said, looming over the man who groped to hide his now piteously shriveled member. She aimed her booted foot at his privates. “Out of my mistress's kitchen before I geld you, sirrah!”

Gibbering, he scrambled to his feet and scarpered out the door as if his feet were on fire.

“What about my payment?” the doxy screamed after him. “You promised me five shillings!”

“Five shillings? For the likes of you?” Winifred threw back her head and roared.

Smiling thinly, the doxy took her time lacing up her bodice. “And who might you lot be?”

Aemilia stepped forward. “I am Mistress Lanier.” She attempted to speak with some semblance of authority. “This is my house. You aren't welcome here. Now go.”

“Ooh, so it's Mistress Laa-nee-yay,” the doxy said, drawing out the syllables in a singsong. “So you decided to return to your miserable waste of a husband after all. You're welcome to that French dunghill, you are, madam.” She minced her way smartly across the littered floor to gather up various baskets containing her belongings—she had clearly been staying for a while. “Good riddance to the both of you. Frankly speaking,” she said, snorting at the sight of Aemilia's pregnant belly, “I'd say you deserve each other.”

Grabbing her cloak from the hook by the door, she turned to Winifred.

“See you in hell, fat sow!” the doxy spat, dashing away before Winifred could clout her.

“Just look at our kitchen!” Tabitha wailed, kicking at the gnawed bones and soiled rags strewn among the rushes.

Winifred grabbed a broom and started sweeping the foul rushes into the fire. “Some work it will take to get this house in order.”

“Bless me, my herbs are still here!” Prudence smiled up at the dried leaves and flowers hanging from the beams.

Before Aemilia could shut the door, the old gray cat burst in and launched itself at Prudence, rubbing its head into her skirts and purring.

“Graymalkin!” Pru reached down to stroke it.

Then, from above the herb-hung beams, Aemilia heard a drawn-out groan.
Alfonse?
She and Winifred locked eyes. Aemilia led the way up the stairs followed by Winifred and Prudence while Tabitha stayed in the kitchen with little Henry.

Aemila's heart thudded sickly as she forced herself down the corridor. The bedchamber door was ajar, but even before she reached it, the stench broadsided her. The sight awaiting her was even worse than the smell.

There, in her marriage bed, tangled in a piss-stinking blanket, lay Alfonse, his eyes glazed in fever, his emaciated body so full of boils that he couldn't stir from the bed. Lesions and crusts covered his face, his palms, and his soles. Her heart split to see him lying naked in his own excrement as though he were an animal left to die all alone. A skeleton coated in pustules, he resembled some creature from Anne Locke's most horrific vision of hell.

Her husband gazed up at her as though she were an apparition. As though he were already halfway down that passage between life and death.

“Dear God,” Aemilia said. “Just look at you.”

She couldn't keep herself from weeping as she reached to take his hand, but Prudence grabbed her wrists. “You mustn't touch him, mistress, or you'll infect yourself and the baby.”

Aemilia shook her head in bewilderment. “I see no buboes.”

“Mistress, it's the great pox,” said Pru. “That strumpet—or one like her—gave him the disease.”

Aemilia stared at her husband in disbelief. As though racked in shame, Alfonse raised his arms to hide his face.

“But we can't just leave him to lie in his own filth.” Aemilia ached to comfort him even as Prudence and Winifred held her back. “Is there nothing we can do?”

“We'll make him as comfortable as we can,” said Prudence. “I can't cure his pox, but I can try to break the fever. He'll need broth and clean linens. We'll have to burn these bedclothes and the mattress as well.”

“When was the last time that disgusting creature fed you?” Aemilia asked her husband.

Uncovering his eyes, Alfonse seemed to regard her in a state of shock, as though not trusting his senses. “Have you truly returned?”

“Aye, and I'll look after you and nurse you as best I can,” she said. “But, by God, don't ever ask me to share your bed.”

A
EMILIA SANK ON THE
kitchen bench and held her head in her hands. Now, besides having a son to feed and another child on the way, she had a husband with the great pox. At least they'd had a reconciliation of sorts. In the haze of his illness, Alfonse seemed to have not even noticed her pregnancy.

Prudence had taken his care upon herself, not letting Aemilia or her sisters near him. If, through Prudence's potions and poultices, Alfonse recovered from his fever and crippling pains, if the boils themselves shrank and healed, would he be able to work again or would Aemilia have to turn to his family in Greenwich for help? Alfonse's stepmother, Aemilia's own cousin, Lucrezia Bassano, would probably accuse
her
of infecting her husband. Aemilia's head throbbed.

Even the plays were no use to her until she had the funds to rent a playhouse and pay the actors. Only one person could help her. Though she was huge with child, she would have to squeeze herself into her best gown and swallow her pride.

She rummaged through the boxes until she found her lap desk. After cutting a fresh quill, she set ink to paper and wrote her beseeching letter. When the ink had dried, she sealed the missive with wax and pressed it into Winifred's huge hand.

“Deliver this to Somerset House, if you please.”

Somerset House, Lord Hunsdon's palace on the Strand.

W
ITH
P
RUDENCE UPSTAIRS TENDING
Alfonse, Aemilia helped Tabitha and Winifred turn the house upside down, scouring away any traces of the cursed doxy and her men. Winifred lifted the floorboards, revealing where the Weir sisters had safely stowed the pewter, iron cooking pots, and rolled-up wall hangings before their exodus to Italy.

“Our Pru had an inkling we'd be back,” Winifred said smugly, as she shook out the rolls of painted cloth and hung them back up in the scrubbed-down parlor.

When the house was in order, they laundered Aemilia's best gown then let out the seams and sewed in new panels to accommodate her belly. By this time, a fortnight had passed and Aemilia had still heard no word from Lord Hunsdon. Just as she began to fear he wouldn't deign to reply at all, a letter arrived saying he would visit the following day.

“I'
M AS HUGE AS
a whalefish,” Aemilia lamented, while Winifred laced her into her gown.

“At least you finally have some cleavage,” Winifred commented, while arranging her mistress's freshly washed hair.

Tabitha handed Aemilia the near-empty vial of attar of roses so that she might perfume her breasts and neck. She hung Aemilia's pearls around her throat.

Tabby and Winifred stepped back to appraise her.

“From the bosom up, you do look a picture,” said Winifred, pinching Aemilia's cheeks for good measure. “Try to smile. Act blithe and bonny for Lord Hunsdon.”

Aemilia thought of the screaming doxy and wondered if she were any less the whore, having to preen like this to seek the favor of her former lover. What would Lord Hunsdon do when confronted with her pregnancy? This very house was his property. If she fell from his good graces, he had the power to turn her out on the street.

A
EMILIA PACED THE PARLOR
, her heart pounding out a
saltarello.
She clasped her trembling hands.

“My Lord Hunsdon,” she heard herself say when Winifred showed her former lover into the room.

Not daring at first to meet his eyes, she dropped in a deep curtsy.

“Mistress Lanier.” He bent to kiss her hand. “How curious to receive your invitation after all this time. I see that at long last you have returned to our fair isle, and in a different state than when you left if I'm not mistaken.”

So tall that his head nearly scraped the beams, Lord Hunsdon studied her with the expertise of a man whose wife had borne him no fewer than sixteen children.

“You're carrying so high and close to your heart, I'll wager it's a girl.”

Aemilia burned under his scrutiny. There was no point in dissembling or trying to pass off the baby as Alfonse's, for the entire court knew Alfonse was at sea with the Earl of Essex's expedition when the child was conceived.

“Motherhood is a woman's great joy,” she told Lord Hunsdon. “The solace of a woman unhappily wed.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You sought solace in adultery, you mean.”

Aemilia closed her eyes. The only way forward was to speak with courage. “My lord, you married me off to a dissolute fool. Alfonse returned from his voyage penniless and full of the French pox. He lies bedridden upstairs if you wish to see for yourself. You can be assured he didn't catch the disease from me.”

While Lord Hunsdon stared at her, Aemilia studied him in turn. How he had aged since she'd seen him last, nearly two years ago. He had always been a vigorous man, young for his years, hunting and hawking, outriding men forty years his junior. But now she noted a vulnerability in him, a creeping frailty that hadn't been there before, the skin around his piercing eyes gone as thin and transparent as wet paper. His hair and beard, which had remained the palest red gold until the day he had ended their affair, had gone stark white. Before her she saw a seventy-year-old man who recognized the inevitability of his own death.

“No,” he said decisively. “Lanier didn't catch the pox from you. I see you are in the full bloom of health. My dark rose.”

His fingers, calloused from riding and archery, traced her cheek. She quivered, her belly softening.

“You left the country,” he said, “taking my son with you without asking my leave.”

“Fleeing the plague,” she told him. “Keeping your child safe from harm. I traveled on family business with my cousin, Jasper Bassano.”

“And returned an expectant mother.”

“The father is an Englishman,” she hastened to say. This, she knew, mattered to him.

They both turned abruptly as Tabitha entered with little Henry in her arms. Winifred followed, bearing a tray of wine and sweetmeats.

The lad froze when his natural father lifted him in his arms for the very first time. Lord Hunsdon smiled at their son, bouncing him in his arms until the child laughed and tugged at his beard. Lord Hunsdon gently tossed the boy in the air, eliciting shrieks of glee that Aemilia hadn't heard since the days when Will used to play with him. She wondered if her twenty-one-month-old son remembered Will, remembered calling him papa.

“My namesake,” Lord Hunsdon murmured, stroking the lad's dark hair. “He's the very picture of his beautiful mother.”

She flushed. “Look you closely, my lord. He has your jaw and brow. Your nose. And he's big for his age. I think he shall grow to be as tall as you.”

Lord Hunsdon gave their son a kiss and a cuddle before returning him to Tabitha.

“You're a good mother. You've kept him in the best of health.”

“Thank you, my lord.” Aemilia lifted her eyes to her former lover as the servants swept out, closing the door behind them.

“So tell me why you summoned me.” Lord Hunsdon sauntered around the sparsely furnished parlor. “I see your lute and virginals are gone.”

“I've had to sell them, my lord.” Humiliation thickened in her voice. How she hated having to grovel.

“The forty pounds a year I give you is not enough?” he asked, cold and stern.

She forced herself to hold his gaze. “The man you chose for me gambled and whored most of it away. Now I fear I must support
him,
for he is too ill to earn a living. And what, pray, will happen to me and our son when you're no longer in this world, my lord? Will your heir even permit us to remain in this house?”

Aemilia's voice shook as she spoke. Would Lord Hunsdon despise her for her boldness? Pensioned-off mistresses were meant to be supported by their husbands, but Lord Hunsdon hadn't reckoned that Alfonse would fail at every turn and contract the pox in the bargain.

To her surprise, Lord Hunsdon bowed his head and sat on the settle. “In faith, I have but a few years left, by the grace of God. I shan't live to see our son grown. But what of your new lover? Is he of no help to you?”

“My lord, he's a penniless poet.” She didn't dare confess that her poet had spurned her.