The Dark Lady's Mask (43 page)

Beside her was a gaping emptiness, the absence of her child's father. So was this how Anne Shakespeare had felt, standing alone at Hamnet's grave, her husband having abandoned her to begin a new life in Italy? Aemilia thought for a moment that she and Anne had become kindred spirits in their suffering and loss.
Oh, don't be a fool. If Anne Shakespeare so much as laid eyes on you, she'd spit and curse the womb that bore you.

Aemilia didn't dare look at her husband. She could not stomach any more contempt than what she had already reaped.
You don't have to hate me, Alfonse. I hate myself enough for both of us.

T
HE FUNERAL DINNER WAS
steeped in a suffocating silence. Even Ben hardly ate or drank, and Annie quietly wiped the tears from her eyes. Odilia's death had made it impossible to ignore how precarious life was, how easily Death could gain the upper hand and steal away their own future children.

Before her guests departed, Aemilia placed the folded and sealed paper in Ben's hand. “Please see that Master Shakespeare gets this.” Her voice was as heavy as lead.

Her cousin nodded and pressed her hand before tucking the missive inside his doublet.

She had written two sentences.

Odilia Lanier, christened 2 December, 1594, and buried 6 March, 1595. Rosemary for remembrance.

Folded into the paper was a sprig of rosemary from her garden.

A
EMILIA FEARED HER GRIEF
might pollute poor Henry. When the weather proved fair, she sent her son out with the servants so that the boy might amuse himself by watching the boats and barges sailing down the Thames.
Let him look upon something other than his mother's misery.

Shutting herself up in the parlor, she surrendered to the sobs that broke like storm waves inside her with a violence that left her gasping. On her hands and knees, she moaned and pummeled the floor in hope of purging herself, so that when Henry returned she could at least attempt to cling to some semblance of self-possession.

At the creak of the opening door, she reeled. A man stood upon the threshold, his face in shadow. For an instant, she allowed herself the madness of believing that Will had come to mourn beside her and share this burden. They would bear the yoke between them.

When he stepped forward, she saw it was Alfonse. How could he look at her like that? Was he gloating to see her punished for her sin, to find her so helpless and undone? With the servants gone, he finally had his chance to do his worst. Her heart pounded sickly, but instead of leaping to her feet and staring him down, she covered her face, too defeated to offer resistance. Let him murder her if that was what he wanted. Let her rest beside Odilia for all eternity.

She swallowed a cry as he pulled her hands away from her face and clasped them. He knelt beside her.

“I am so sorry.” He spoke with such humility, as though not simply expressing condolences for Odilia's death, but begging her pardon for every unhappiness his own words and deeds had brought upon them both.

She gaped at him, too dazed to speak.

“Is it too late to win your regard?” he asked her. “Misfortune might still be reversed, no? I will join the Earl of Essex on his next expedition. By God's grace, I shall yet be knighted and you shall be a lady.”

As if such titles could mean anything to her now. But she had never heard him speak with such tenderness. She considered the many mistakes they both had made. She had abandoned him only to return with another man's bastard while his whoring had saddled him with the pox he would carry for the rest of what might prove to be a short life. Each in their own way, she and Alfonse were utterly broken. But they no longer had to be enemies.

“May you be knighted.” Aemilia tried to smile, but it hurt her face. “In Henry's eyes, you're already a hero.”

She thought of how Alfonse had carved the wooden flute for her son, how Henry looked up to him. Surely Alfonse offered better company to the boy than she herself had of late.

“I am teaching him to play the flute,” Alfonse said. “He's a very musical child.”

“Like his parents,” she said gently, in a stroke making Alfonse Henry's father in love if not in blood.

I
N
M
AY
, A
EMILIA DECIDED
the time had come to see her comedy performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

Before her daughter's death, she had harbored a secret dream of donning her breeches and riding Bathsheba to Shoreditch, where she would occupy the floor with the groundlings and elbow her way to the lip of the stage where she could gaze into the players' eyes as they delivered their lines. Their swinging garments might touch her face.

Instead, Winifred laced her into her best gown, and Aemilia pinned rosemary to her sleeves and hatband so all the world would see she was in mourning. Alfonse escorted her to the landing where they boarded a wherry to Billingsgate. Thanks to Jasper's intervention, her husband had taken up his old post in the Queen's Musicke while he bided his time until Essex's next voyage.

At Billingsgate they joined Ben and Annie. The four of them walked up Gracechurch Street toward Bishopsgate and on to Shoreditch, passing Saint Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, where Aemilia's parents and uncles lay buried. A balmy day, the hedges were frothy with blossoming hawthorn.

The Theater buzzed and throbbed, but Aemilia saw no playbill posted outside.

“A curious thing,” she pointed out to Ben, as they squeezed their way through the throng. “Do you know what today's performance is to be?”

“In truth, I can't say,” he replied. “Perhaps this is the debut of a new play and they didn't get the new playbill printed on time.”

Aemilia hoped it would be
As You Like It
, the romance of Orlando and the spirited cross-dressing Rosalind, whose every line she relished.

Ben led the way up to the first tier gallery where he said they would have the best view. Taking her seat between her kinsman and husband, she thought how at last she had assumed the mantle of respectability, as though she were a lady with an untarnished reputation.

“Ben's writing his own new play,” Annie said, stroking her husband's arm. “A comedy of the humors.”

“Comedy to banish melancholy.” Aemilia could feel her own humors lifting, borne up on the crowd's anticipation and excitement.

Alfonse hushed them as the minstrels on stage began to play a dirge so mournful that Aemilia gathered this was to be no comedy. An armor-clad actor marched center stage and announced the drama,
The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Good God, had she only known what this day's performance was to be. After so much anticipation, she would not, after all, watch the actors delivering the lines she had penned. Wrestling down her disappointment, she decided she'd best resign herself.
Let us see his tragedy then.
At least she could observe the new shape his writing had taken since their collaboration had ended. She guessed it to be a revenge play like
The Spanish Tragedy
by Thomas Kyd, with phantoms, gushing wounds, and heaps of dead bodies to regale those in the audience who would otherwise spend their leisure hours in the bear-baiting pits.

From her perch in the gallery, she viewed the proceedings with a critical distance. How incongruous for the dead king's ghost to appear, even as the May sunshine cast its benevolence upon the groundlings who bayed for blood and vengeance. But nothing prepared her for the jolt of seeing Will stride upon stage as Prince Hamlet.

“Is he not too
old
for the part?” Ben grumbled.

Clad entirely in black, Hamlet's every word and gesture conveyed his deep mourning. Aemilia's heart quickened to think that perhaps Will indeed shared her grief over their daughter's death. His poetry sent her pulse racing and yet each phrase reeked of pessimism. As Hamlet, Will muttered of suicide. Swinging his contempt like a mace, he denounced his mother's marriage to his uncle only two months after his father's funeral.

Will gazed into the audience, as if to envelop each one of them in Hamlet's brooding, when his eyes locked on Aemilia with the shock of recognition. All the crowd seemed to melt away and only the two of them existed. Pinned there in the gallery, in the full light of day, she couldn't hide from him. He seemed to falter, as though forgetting his part.

But he delivered his next line like a blow.

“Frailty, thy name is woman.”

She set her jaw.
That
sentiment was hardly original. Indeed, she expected better of him, but let him say what he would. Frail she was not. Frail souls didn't cross the Alps on muleback.

Queen Gertrude, played by a boy with hair as dark as hers, seemed so insipid, as though the actor were trying to embody capricious femininity as he clung to King Claudius and simpered like a Southwark doxy. Where were the strong, spirited heroines of their comedies?

The next scene introduced the second female role, played by a boy with sensuous lips and long golden curls, so beautiful that he reminded her of a younger and more vulnerable Harry. Clad in a maiden's silk gown, this was Hamlet's beloved, Ophelia. What did Will play at, using a name so similar to that of their dead daughter? Ophelia wasn't a proper name, even in Denmark.

In the second act, Ophelia's father read a poem Hamlet had written to his beloved.

Doubt thou the stars are fire,

Doubt that the sun doth move,

Doubt truth to be a liar,

But never doubt I love.

Aemilia shivered and burned at once. Such devotion that poem promised only for the poet to rip it to shreds. Just as Hamlet made Claudius and Gertrude watch a play mimicking their crimes against the dead king, Aemilia was forced to view Hamlet abusing Ophelia with the very words Will had said to her in Verona the day he announced he was leaving.

“I did love you once.”

But now he cut even deeper, raising his face to meet Aemilia's eyes again for one blinding moment.

“I loved you not.”

With a tight twist of his mouth, he swung round to confront the boy Ophelia, who cowered and appeared to weep real tears as Hamlet towered over him, belting out his derision, denouncing all women as two-faced whores who deserved to be abandoned.

“God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance.”

No longer just a grieving father turned cynical, Will's genius had turned into something vicious and vengeful. And why? Because his players had teased him about the copies of
Twelfth Night
being written in her woman's hand? Did he seek to prove his worth by demeaning all women? But it was not just women—it seemed as though he desired to lampoon her and Harry both, destroy every last trace of any love he'd shared with either of them. He wanted to kill his old self, that tender poet, and be his own man, unfettered by the heart. Love's slave no longer, he employed the illusion of the stage to unveil his most galling truth.

Don't let him intimidate you.
It's just a play, all make-believe and boys in skirts.
But Aemilia felt as though she were being flayed alive until she'd no more skin left to hide her bleeding flesh.

Ophelia entered strumming a lute and singing the heartbroken songs of a ruined and cast-off lover. Seeing such a sickly distorted portrait of herself harrowed Aemilia's soul. Clearly gone mad, Ophelia sang the words “There's rosemary for remembrance.”

Aemilia thought she would crack. She already predicted Ophelia's end. The hapless girl, like Will's love for her, his former mistress, had to die. It was no surprise when Ophelia drowned herself, the preferred suicide method of pregnant unmarried women. Throughout the play, Will had dropped hints that Ophelia was with child. “Conception is a blessing,” Hamlet had told Ophelia's father, “but not as your daughter may conceive.”

“Her clothes spread wide,” Queen Gertrude said, describing Ophelia's watery death. “And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up.”

Aemilia tried to push away the memory of her last meeting with Will, clasping his hand to her womb where Odilia swam and danced.

Then followed Ophelia's funeral, the girl buried with minimal ceremony on account of her suicide. With a raw heart, Aemilia looked on as, in a final act of degradation, Hamlet and Ophelia's brother wrestled and grappled upon her coffin.

Will could not have made his malice more obvious. It was as though he had written this play with the intention of driving her as insane as Ophelia. He wished to excise her from his life, exorcise her ghost, drown her in a sea of her own tears, then bury her and walk away, abandoning her to the worms and dust.

“U
NBLIND YOUR EYES
,” B
EN
whispered in Aemilia's ear, as they followed the tide of the departing crowd. “He wants to break your heart so that you shrink away and no longer hold him to the bargain you made. Don't think like a spurned woman, but like a man would. A man of business! No sentimentality.”

Annie regarded her with anxious eyes, as though well aware how hard it was for Aemilia to shake off her utter shock and distress. Indeed, it demanded her entire resolve to hold on to her dignity as she walked on her husband's arm.

“You look ill,” Alfonse said, examining her when she could hardly bear to look him in the eye after this debacle.

“Come with us to the Pye Inn for cakes and wine,” Annie said.

Aemilia shook her head. All the wine in the world couldn't blur her pain. The very thought of food made her heave. Letting go of Alfonse's hand, she plodded off alone. More than anything, she yearned for her male disguise, longed to gallop across the green fields and lose herself. But here she trudged, a woman dragging her good skirts in the dust.