The Dark Lady's Mask (45 page)

“Not alone!” she interjected. “I have Henry.”

Through the open doorway, she saw her son in the kitchen tugging Tabitha's skirts as she reassured him, yet again, that Bathsheba would be coming with them to the new house. Aemilia had already sold her virginals and every scrap of furniture and pewter she could spare. She had pawned the last of her jewels from her time with Henry Carey. But her lute and her old mare she would keep.

“You have the boy for only a few more years,” Alfonse said, as though that was obvious to everyone but her. “At seven, he shall begin his apprenticeship.”

Of course, he was right. Jasper, too, had begun his musical apprenticeship at that age. Still, the thought choked her into silence. After all she had lost, must she also lose her son?

When Jasper and Alfonse went to see the upstairs rooms, Aemilia remained below and gazed out the smudged windows into the garden of weeds. At least the downstairs windows were glazed.

The floorboards creaked like ships' masts as Winifred trundled toward her. “Don't despair, mistress. We'll scratch by. Come spring we'll plant a kitchen garden. We'll keep chickens.”

Her maid's goodness left Aemilia racked with guilt, for her change in circumstance had reduced the servants' wages to a pittance.

“You don't have to stay with me, you know,” she told Winifred, taking her hands. “You and your sisters are free to seek your fortunes wherever you wish.”

Winifred's eyes filled. Her voice wobbled. “Mistress mine, where else have we to go?”

Aemilia and Winifred bowed their heads and stood brow to brow, hands clasped, in that cramped parlor while Alfonse and Jasper paced overhead, sending a shower of dust and plaster falling from the ceiling. Aemilia thought that fate itself was walling her in, squeezing her into a box that shrank and shrank until there would be no place left for her at all.

H
ER SOLE CONSOLATION WAS
that the new house was only a short walk from the Shoreditch playhouse. When Alfonse was away at court, she accompanied Ben to the theater. Ben insisted on paying the tuppence for her gallery seat beside his.

“It's only fitting,” he said, “that you should see our erstwhile poet's new plays. He's a wealthy man these days. Bought the second biggest house in Stratford—ten fireplaces and five gables!”

Aemilia remembered Will's old boardinghouse and then tried to envision him strolling through such a huge property. It seemed that she and Will were at opposite sides of Fortuna's turning wheel. While he seemed to ascend to ever more glorious heights, her descent seemed never ending. Yet somehow she sensed her fate was bound up with his.

For all Will's prosperity, a dark thread ran through his work. Even his new comedies had taken a bitter turn. Seated beside Ben in the gallery, she watched
The Merchant of Venice,
his cold and loveless play of a Venetian Jew and his daughter that left her shivering in rage, for she felt as though she were viewing a satire of the tales she had told Will of her father. One of his Jew-hating characters was even named Bassanio. Will played the part of Antonio, the merchant.

“Our poet apes the late Kit Marlowe,” Ben whispered in her ear. “Is this not in a similar vein to
The Jew of Malta
?”

Aemilia nodded, for she, too, saw how Shylock, the Jewish moneylender, was a character not dissimilar to Marlowe's. Played by a comedian who sported a hideous red wig and a bulbous false nose, Shylock was as grotesque a parody of a Jew as she could imagine—greedy, sly, and pitiless—who elicited both hisses and savage laughter from the audience. The Christian characters denounced him as a dog, a cur, a demon. His own servant called him “the very devil incarnation,” and Shylock seemed to embody this very evil when he insisted on taking a pound of flesh from Antonio to punish him for his late repayment of a loan.

“Oh, you
hypocrite
!” Forgetting herself, Aemilia spoke so loudly that the actors on stage gaped in confusion. His eyes stark, Will froze while the groundlings roared in laughter to hear the great actor and playwright heckled by a woman.

“Once he told me his own father was
twice
accused of lending money at exorbitant rates,” she hissed to Ben, who rocked in hilarity.

“Marry, you are an Amazon,” he wheezed, clapping her shoulder. “I think the poor man lives in terror of you.”

“If I were a man, I'd give him a taste of terror.” She imagined herself challenging Will to a duel. “How fortunate for him that I am only a woman.”

How could Will have written something so hateful, he who should have known better? To think they had once stood side by side in the Scuola Grande Tedesca in the Venetian Ghetto and listened to the brilliant philosopher-rabbi Leone da Modena. Will had been a trusted guest in Jacopo Bassano's house. Even if her former lover had turned against her, why condemn an entire people?

Will's comedy ended with Shylock's ruin, which stripped him of his daughter, his property and wealth, and his religion. Shylock, like Aemilia's own father, was forced to convert.

I
THINK THE POOR
man lives in terror of you.
Ben's words lingered with Aemilia.
Is it indeed fear that lies at the heart of Will's rancor?
she wondered. Did he view their secret arrangement to evenly divide the profits of the comedies they had written together as the pound of flesh he was forced to sacrifice lest she step out of the shadows?

Perhaps what irked Will most was that he simply couldn't banish her. His wife might be left behind in Stratford with their daughters, but he had no power over Aemilia, who could attend his plays whenever it pleased her and even yell out catcalls. And so he used his plays to purge himself of her, his gadfly, his dark Muse. In
Othello,
he even named one of his characters Emilia only to have her husband call her a villainous whore and stab her to death for her too-quick tongue. Aemilia imagined that if she had been one of Will's heroines, Alfonse would have murdered her ages ago. Instead, she remained stubbornly alive and well. Will had wanted to be rid of her, but that was impossible. As high as he rose on Fortuna's wheel, she carried on even in decline, carving out her life in the margins of his fame.

I
N
1599 A
EMILIA'S MEN
scattered like starlings. Will and the rest of the Lord Chamberlain's Men left Shoreditch for the Globe, their new theater in Southwark, that district packed with brothels and bathhouses that made it insalubrious for women like her. Had she been bold enough to wear her breeches and journey forth as Emilio, she might have gone whenever she desired. As Aemilia, she reserved her forays to the Globe for Ben's new plays, when she might use kinship as her excuse. Alfonse was happy enough to escort her, considering that his nephew, Nicholas Lanier, and his brother-in-law, Alfonso Ferrabosco, composed stage music for her cousin.

But Aemilia never saw another play of Will's. Ben, however, kept her abreast of the gossip.

“Our poet has tried to
buy
a coat of arms!” This appeared to amuse Ben to no end. “For his father, he says. And his motto?
Non sanz droict.
”

“Not without right,” Aemilia translated drily.

Ben's latest comedy,
Every Man out of His Humour,
concerned a bumpkin who paid thirty pounds for a ridiculous coat of arms and the motto Not Without Mustard. The satire was performed by actors from Will's own company. Yet Aemilia knew that Ben and Will drank together at the Mermaid Tavern. The two rival poet-playwrights had both become too prominent and prolific not to acknowledge each other so they appeared to reach an accord. Will even acted in one of Ben's plays.

A
LFONSE APPEARED HOME FROM
court unexpectedly, bursting into the parlor where Henry was playing his flute while Aemilia accompanied him on her lute.

“Papa!” Six-year-old Henry carefully set down his flute before throwing his arms around Alfonse.

“What brings you home so early?” Aemilia kissed him in greeting.

“Now is my chance! All my life I have waited for this!”

Alfonse whirled her and Henry round the little room, leaping so high she feared he would crack his skull on the sagging beams.

“What good news, my husband?” The dancing left Aemilia breathless.

Alfonse's eyes shone like scimitars. “I shall sail to Ireland with the Earl of Essex.”

Her hands dropped to her sides. “But what of the Queen's Musicke?”

He laughed. “
Chérie,
I shall not earn a knighthood by playing the flute.” He turned to Henry. “Do you want to help me pack?”

As Henry trotted up the stairs after him, the boy whooped as though he, too, were going to war. Aemilia called Tabitha before following them into the master bedchamber, where Alfonse showed off his sword and rapier, skewering imaginary enemies while Henry cheered him on.

“Henry, go with Tabitha. I must speak to your papa alone.”

Her son simmered in mutiny and clung to Alfonse's waist. She winced to see the child so close to the blades meant to kill.

“Tabby will let you ride Bathsheba,” she said.

Henry gazed up at Alfonse. “Will you come out later and watch me?”

“But of course,” Alfonse said, winking as the boy finally permitted Tabitha to lead him out of the room.

“Please don't go,” Aemilia begged her husband. “Essex's star is no longer rising. If he falls, you fall with him.”

Everyone knew of Essex's quarrel with the Queen, of his insistence on war instead of peace with Spain despite all arguments to the contrary. In her anger, Her Majesty had boxed Essex's ears in front of the entire council chamber. Then Essex had made the unforgivable move of laying his hand on his sword. Elizabeth's punishment played on the very hot-headed valor that made Essex fall from grace—she commanded him to lead her forces against the Irish rebels, a post he could not refuse and a mission from which he and his men might never return.

“You could die.” Aemilia took Alfonse's hands. “Prove your loyalty to Her Majesty by staying here and serving her in court. And think of your health.”

Her husband's disease still troubled him with bouts of fever, nausea, and swollen joints. He paid regular visits to Clerkenwell to drink and bathe in the water from the healing springs. But now his thoughts seemed leagues away from such considerations.

“I must go.” He fairly quivered with ambition. “Do you not see? This is my chance to be the Queen's champion, and to serve a great man as well.”

Aemilia read into what he did not say for fear of speaking treason. Could it be that the Queen's star, not Essex's, was falling? By taking part in this battle, Alfonse could distinguish himself in one of two ways, allying himself with the victor of this feud, whether it be the elderly Queen or Essex in all his vainglory. Essex had never had more supporters.

Her husband caressed her shoulders as if trying to instill within her the same excitement that vibrated through him. “Why, even the Earl of Southampton shall sail with us!”

Harry sharing the battlefield with her husband? Aemilia felt as though her breath had been knocked out of her lungs. She could only pray Harry would be decent and not regale Alfonse with tales of her secret forays to Southampton House in her breeches and codpiece those many years ago. It seemed a lifetime since she had last dressed as Emilio.

“Y
OU FOOLISH MAN
,” A
EMILIA
whispered in the darkness of their bed, the curtains drawn around them. “What if we lose you forever?”

“I will come back a knight,” he said, kissing her breasts. “And make you a lady.”

“Whatever you do, come back alive.”

 

S THOUGH LEADING
a triumphal parade, Henry sat tall in the saddle, riding Bathsheba through Bishopsgate into the City of London. His breeches, cloak, and doublet were new, cut from the cloth of the fine gowns Aemilia no longer had occasion to wear. Her son's breath floated like a banner in the January sky.

Aemilia walked at her mare's shoulder while behind them the Weir sisters carried her son's belongings. On this, Henry's seventh birthday, he was leaving home to live with Jasper and so begin his seven-year musical apprenticeship. How eager her son looked, how proud, riding toward his future, just as Alfonse was charging into battle somewhere across the Irish Sea. Henry looked only forward, not at his mother or at the shabby little house he had left behind.

When they turned into Camomile Street and reached Jasper's house with its tall gable and big windows, Aemilia tried not to feel betrayed by her son's gaze of adoration, as though this handsome residence were the home that was always meant to be his.

“Let me help you,” Aemilia said, reaching for Henry, but her son sprang down from the saddle on his own, landing smartly on his feet.