The Dark Lady's Mask (39 page)

“Gifts from Lord Hunsdon, mistress.” Winifred sounded pleasantly surprised.

Aemilia let out a long shaky breath. Sinking onto the settle, she unwrapped the first package with both eagerness and care, for she knew it to be a lute from its shape. A warm flush crept over her cheeks just to touch the satiny soundboard, the graceful neck, the strings of gut and wire.

The second package contained a ream of paper along with a message written in Henry Carey's own hand:

My musical lady must have music. My gentle Muse would also wish to know that I have arranged for your poet to stage his first play on Twelfth Night in the Hall at Gray's Inn for an august audience of barristers and nobility. I therefore require a comedy befitting this most auspicious date for jests, japes, and wonders. Now it is your task, my beautiful Hypatia, to choose the play and write out fair copies for the players.

Fondly, H. C.

Before Winifred's ever-watchful eyes, Aemilia kissed the letter. At least copying out the plays would provide some welcome distraction. With reverence, she leafed through the creamy paper, each leaf bearing the watermark of a swan, the most iconic symbol of the poet, the mute bird that shattered a lifetime's silence to sing most exquisitely before it died.

After tuning the lute, she began to play and sing.

The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note,

when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat.

Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore,

thus sang her first and last, and sang no more:

“Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes!

More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.”

Yet even as the mournful words left her throat, a secret joy arose in her heart. She, like the swan, could yet unleash her song. Perhaps part of her must die, that tenderhearted woman who walked into the chapel in Verona, but another Aemilia would rise phoenixlike, for such were the souls of poets.

 

HEN
B
EN
J
ONSON BURST
into her parlor with Will in tow, Aemilia was as armed as any knight. Across her lap she held the lute. The beautiful instrument that curved and swelled like a woman's body was her shield. Her weapon was the music itself.

Serenely, she strummed as Ben flung himself on the settle in the lordliest manner possible and Will hunched on a stool as far away from Ben as he could manage. As Aemilia played on, she thought of Orpheus, whose music enchanted even the Lord of Death. Let it disarm Will. His body was rigid, as though he had been taken prisoner. She could nearly taste his resentment to be reduced to this, dragged here by his most detested rival.

“How good of you both to come,” Aemilia said, her voice rendered more gracious by the trilling arpeggios she played. “I trust you have been well, Master Shakespeare?”

Though she felt like an impostor addressing him thusly, Aemilia reminded herself that she had called him here on business matters.

“I have been well indeed.” The look Will shot her was bruised. He had lost weight and looked as pale as if he had never walked beneath an Italian sun. “How fares your husband, Mistress Lanier?”

She nearly struck a wrong note as the heat spread over her cheeks. But her voice remained as light as her fingering on the frets. “Master Lanier is ill if you must know. How does the Earl of Southampton?” The words flew out before she could stop herself.

Ben erupted into laughter. “Dear cousin, have you not heard the news? The Queen has banished Southampton from court and, tail between his legs, he's legged it to France.”

Aemilia shook her head in bewilderment. “How, pray, did he fall from Her Majesty's favor?”

Surely Lord Burghley couldn't have forced Harry into exile for refusing to marry his granddaughter. Or was there some new scandal—had the young Earl been caught with a high-ranking man?

Ben hooted. “Why, he secretly married one of the Queen's Maids of Honor. Can you imagine the uproar?”

Harry
married
? Aemilia thought her head would spin off her neck and fly out the window.

“Full of surprises, Southampton is.” Ben slapped his thighs. “Just when I had him pegged as a sodomite, he runs off with one of the Queen's own women.”

Aemilia observed Will's downcast face as he stared at his clenched hands. His last source of refuge and patronage had been taken from him.
My dear man, now your only way forward is with me.
He had wanted to be free of her, yet here he was. Aemilia nearly pitied him.

“Might I ask why you summoned me, madam?” Will's voice was chilly.

“In faith, I have good news for you.” She plucked a sprightly galliard.

Will's gaze was guarded, yet beneath it, she knew there was his poet's heart broken wide open for his dead son. He wore his grief like a hairshirt.
Has he been back to Stratford?
she wondered, picturing him bereft and broken at Hamnet's grave.

“With the Lord Chamberlain's patronage,” she said, “the first of our plays shall be performed at Gray's Inn on Twelfth Night.”

Her words seemed to knock him off guard, and he nearly lost his balance on the stool.

“And should it prove a success,” she continued, “your players shall move on to the Theater at Shoreditch in the spring.”

“Gray's Inn? Shoreditch?” He sounded both dubious and amazed.

“Expedient for you, is it not?” she asked him. “Seeing as you live in Bishopsgate.”

Before she could say anything more, Tabitha entered with a jug of wine. Ben grinned like a demon when he accepted the goblet from her hand. Will, however, refused the cup before shooting Aemilia a dark look, as if accusing her of doctoring the wine with a love philter. Losing patience with him, Aemilia nearly snorted aloud.

“The Lord Chamberlain might wish to know I have of late written the best plays of my career.” Will's injured pride shone like beaten metal. “
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
”

Tragedy set in Denmark! As far a departure from their Italian comedy as Aemilia could imagine.

“Oh, not another of your insufferable history plays!” Ben thundered. “The Lord Chamberlain doesn't want the stage littered with dead bodies. At least not for your first performance.”

“The empty vessel makes the loudest noise,” said Will, seething on his stool.

Ignoring him, Ben waved his empty cup at Tabitha, who cast a covert look at her mistress. Aemilia nodded with a discreet gesture to only fill his cup half full.

“This venture, sir,” Aemilia said, addressing Will, “is not meant to serve your vanity or mine. The play must absolutely regale your genteel audience at Gray's Inn and so convince the Lord Chamberlain that it shall turn a tidy profit once you begin performing in Shoreditch. Master Burbage shall want his playhouse packed to the rafters.That is why I've chosen the comedy of Viola and Sebastian, the shipwrecked twins. Given the date of its first performance, I suggest we call it
Twelfth Night.
I have already written out fair copies, which you will find upon the table there.”

Ben lunged to grab one before Will could even rise to his feet. “Such clean, unblotted copies! No one will believe
you
wrote it, Shakespeare.”

Aemilia winced to hear her cousin take such pleasure in mocking Will.

“I've taken the liberty of arranging music to accompany the piece,” she interjected, before Will could sling some insult back at Ben. “It's to be the most musical of plays.”

Closing her eyes, she began to sing.

O, mistress mine, where are you roaming?

O, stay and hear your true love's coming,

That can sing both high and low.

Trip no further, pretty sweeting,

Journeys end in lovers meeting.

Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love? 'Tis not hereafter,

Present mirth hath present laughter,

What's to come is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

“By my troth, a good song,” said Ben.

Aemilia turned to Will, who blinked and rubbed his eyes, for he had written those lyrics during their idyll in Verona. She had merely set his words to music.

“Now your task, Master Shakespeare, is to gather a troupe of players and begin the rehearsals,” she told him. “Do you agree to this?”

“It appears I have no other choice,” he said.

She remembered their last bitter quarrel in Verona.
You thought I was yours for the taking. Your creature.
Did he think she was using him even now?

“Why so dour, man?” Ben blustered. “Don't be such a churl. You've gained the patronage of none other than the Lord Chamberlain. Other men would sacrifice their firstborn sons—”

His face a mask of rage, Will sprang to his feet, knocking over his stool. For one awful moment, Aemilia feared the two men would come to blows.

Then Will fixed Ben with an icy stare. “You are not worth another word.”

“Leave us, please,” she told her cousin.

Ben raised an eyebrow. “As you will.” Swiping the wine jug from Tabitha's tray, he sauntered out of the room. Tabitha tiptoed in his wake and closed the door behind her.

Setting aside her lute, Aemilia heaved herself out of her chair and took a step toward Will, but a sudden pain in her belly made her founder. Before she could crash to the floor, he seized her arms, raising her to her feet. They both stood paralyzed.

“You might have sent for me without using that tedious fool to strong-arm me,” he said. “I never see his face but I think upon hellfire.”

“Master Jonson knew where to find you, and I did not.” She broke off, her eyes searching Will's. “Did you think you could just wash your hands of me?”

Her anger, bottled up for so long, commanded his attention in a way that sobbing or pleading could never have done.

“Once you wrote of the marriage of true minds,” she went on. “Our intellects might still work in harmony even if we are otherwise estranged. Think of all the sweet words we wrote together. If the stars are kind, our words shall endure long after we're both dead.”

“It's not our stars that hold our destiny, but ourselves,” he said. “Our collaboration has reached its end. I cannot write your comedies anymore.”

“Your tragedy of Hamlet,” she said. “Is it named after Hamnet, your son?”

He looked away.

“I could help you even there,” she said. “Peregrine Willoughby, whose sister educated me, is ambassador to Denmark and has been a guest at Elsinore Castle.”

She wondered what Perry and his brittle wife would make of her predicament. If she could not contrive to restore her fortunes, she would live the rest of her life as a disgraced woman set on a path of inevitable decline.

“I have rewritten
Giulietta and Romeo
as a tragedy,” Will told her.

“
That's
no surprise.” Aemilia sighed and took his hand before he could pull away. “Don't be so blinkered by your bitterness now that you stand at the threshold of something better. My dear man, you may yet have your tragedy if I don't survive this birth. Then our plays and their profits shall all go to you. I only ask you to surrender my half to our child.”

Will suddenly seemed unsure of himself, as though his knees might buckle. She clasped his hand to her womb.

“I think it shall be a girl. She swims like a mermaid in her watery home. Can you not feel her dance?”

He closed his eyes and bent his head as she held him there with the babe kicking against his palm.

“Shall I send word to you when she's born?” Aemilia could no longer keep her tears at bay. “I'm calling her Odilia after our chapel. Can you still remember?”

He fingered her golden ring.

“Is this the ring I gave you?” His voice had gone hoarse.

“Do you want it back?”

“Aemilia,” he said, brushing away her tears.

He held her as though she might crack at any moment.

“You are far too strong and stubborn to die,” he finally whispered, his hand resting on her burning cheek. “Besides, you must live to see your beauteous Olivia being played by some pimpled boy from Putney.”

For the first time in weeks, she heard herself laugh. She stroked his hair, as soft as she remembered, and then his jaw, now covered in a golden-brown beard. Before he could stop her, she kissed his open mouth. Yet even so, she knew she had lost him, that she couldn't possibly hold him to her any longer. Drawing away, she picked up the fair copies of
Twelfth Night
and pressed them in his hands.