The Dark Lady's Mask (54 page)

That sweet Lady sprung from Clifford's race,

Of noble Bedford's blood, fair stem of Grace;

To honorable Dorset now espoused,

In whose fair breast true virtue then was housed.

She recited her poetry as if it had the power to bless Anne's marriage and keep her eternally happy.

After Margaret had retired to the guest bed, Aemilia waited up for Alfonse, who finally stumbled through the door full of wine and good cheer. Shushing him so he wouldn't awaken their guest, she steered him to bed.

W
HILE
A
LFONSE SLEPT ON
, Aemilia shared an early breakfast with Margaret before walking her to the livery stables where Margaret's groom awaited with the horses.

Flinging her arms around her friend, Aemilia could not keep herself from weeping. Margaret wept as well, even as she brushed Aemilia's tears away.

“In your lap desk you'll find a small gift,” her friend told her. “Your husband needn't know about it.”

“Margaret,” Aemilia murmured, understanding that it was money she had left. “You mustn't. I shall return it to you this instant. Wait here.”

“Nonsense,” Margaret said. “Every woman must have something that is
hers
that can't be taken away. For all I know, I'll not have another chance to offer such a gift.”

Aemilia held her so tightly, she could feel their hearts beating as one. What her friend was saying was that they might not see each other again. This could truly be their last farewell.

“This is what I told Anne when I left Knole: I am always with you in spirit, even when we are far apart. Remember, my dear, through every trial, the spirit remains free.”

With that, they kissed and Aemilia reluctantly let her go. She helped Margaret into the saddle of her dark bay mare and walked at the mare's shoulder until they reached the edge of Clerkenwell where the northern road stretched off into the green hills with their hedges of flowering hawthorn and gorse. As she stood waving, Aemilia thought of dear Bathsheba, who had died two winters ago.
If only I had a horse, I would ride after you, my friend. Ride all the way to Brougham Castle and no one would be able to stop me.

A
EMILIA RETURNED HOME TO
find the pouch heavy with coins that Margaret had hidden inside her lap desk. Her friend's generosity and her own neediness left her floundering in both humility and gratitude. Along with the improbable sum of money, Margaret had enclosed a note.

Remember, my friend, to publish is to immortalize.

C
OMING HOME AFTER GIVING
a virginals lesson to the neighbor's daughter, Aemilia brightened to hear Ben's booming voice in her parlor. She found him sitting with Alfonse. Both men appeared grave, and her cousin's face was red and shining in sweat, as though he had galloped from London. What could the matter be? She hoped there wasn't another plague outbreak. Six years ago Ben had lost a son to the pestilence.

When she rushed forward to greet her cousin, Alfonse threw her such a look of betrayal that she hadn't seen from him since the fraught early months of their marriage. Stung, she watched her husband rear away and leave the room without a word.

“He would have found out eventually,” Ben told her. “Better he hear it from me than a stranger.”

“Hear what?” she asked.

Without another word, Ben handed her a quarto volume.

Shake-speares

Sonnets

Never before Imprinted

She shook her head, still not comprehending. “What has this to do with me? Why is Alfonse so vexed?”

“It has everything to do with you. Read for yourself.” Ben opened to a page and placed the book in her hands.

My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun,

Coral is far more red than her lips' red,

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun,

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

As the shock of recognition ripped through her, Aemilia nearly dropped the volume. Her legs trembled so hard, she had to sit down.

“So he published a sonnet about me?” She seethed. This certainly explained Alfonse's reaction. Did Will fear he would lose money if a new plague outbreak closed the theaters? Maybe publishing these verses was his way of insuring his continued wealth.

“Not just one, alas. Read on, dear cousin.
Ipsa scientia potestas est.
To be fair to Will, they were published without his permission by one Thomas Thorpe, and this book might give our erstwhile poet as much grief as it does you. Imagine if his wife should lay her hands on a copy!”

“His wife can't
read
,” Aemilia said thinly, as she pored over each sonnet of lust and guilt, of disgust and blame, of bitterness and rejection, those barbed verses ripping into her flesh.

And beauty slandered with a bastard shame.

She blinked and turned the page.

When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her, though I know she lies.

“This is defamation,” she said, gazing at Ben through the red mist of her rage. She turned the page again and found no respite.

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman colored ill

To win me soon to hell, my female evil.

He compares me with Harry!
She wanted to hurl the book across the room and yet she could not tear her eyes away from the page.

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

And here he unmasked her as an adulteress.

In loving thee thou know'st I am forsworn,

But thou art twice forsworn, to me love swearing,

In act thy bed-vow broke, and new faith torn,

In vowing new hate after new love bearing.

But only when she paged backward did she find the poem that cut deepest of all, the very sonnet he had written for her during their time in Bassano, before they had become lovers. His poetry of impassioned longing, gazing at her while she played the virginals for Jacopo.

How oft, when thou, my music, music play'st

Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds

With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway'st.

Unable to read another word, she attempted to give the volume back to Ben.

“Keep it,” he said. “In faith, you have earned it.”

“This is my ruin.” Her tears scalded her.

Unlike the plays, this attack on her was not veiled, but direct and personal. Will had painted a hideous but unmistakable caricature of her, Aemilia Bassano Lanier, a dark woman with musical accomplishments, a woman of bastard birth, unfaithful to her husband, who had tempted Will into adultery. A woman who had aroused the poet's desire, driving him into a sickened frenzy. Anyone reading might guess her identity. Will's sonnets had stripped her bare for all the world. How could she live this down? Alfonse and Henry would never forgive her for heaping such shame upon them.

Abruptly, she charged out of the room.

“Where are you going?” Ben asked, his voice rising in alarm.

“To Brougham Castle in Westmoreland.”

She wondered if she still had her breeches. She'd ride forth as Emilio, gallop on until she caught up with Margaret, and never look back. But when she tried to open the bedchamber door, she discovered that Alfonse had bolted it from within.

“Come, don't be so hasty.” Ben took her hand and led her back into the parlor, where he poured her a glass of Margaret's aqua vitae. “A woman of your years can't just run away.”

“A woman
of my years
?”

Hadn't she once said something similar to Will many summers ago at Southampton House?
A man of your years has no business leaping out of windows.
Unable to contain herself, she tore open the book of sonnets again and read the love poems at the beginning of the book that were filled with the most idealized love and admiration, written not for her but for a golden-haired youth.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

“
Thy eternal summer shall not fade,
” she read aloud. “I shall give this book to the Earl of Southampton.”

Harry, here you have your proof that he truly loved you and never forgot you.

Knocking back Margaret's aqua vitae, she remembered her friend's secret message to her.
To publish is to immortalize.
Slowly an idea formed, taking shape with each breath. Her patron and friend would not want her to run away like an outcast. No, Margaret would urge her to stand her ground, defend her own honor. And Margaret had given her enough money to print her own quarto volume.

Aemilia briskly dried her eyes and faced Ben. “I have written a long narrative poem,
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.
Now I would see it printed.”

Ladies will rejoice in your work,
Margaret had told her.
In ‘Eve's Apology' you defend all womankind.
Instead of allowing Will's slanderous sonnets to define her, she would retaliate by publishing her own poetry that championed womanhood itself.

Her sudden change of tack seemed to bewilder Ben. “An anonymous work, I take it.”

“No.” She fixed her eyes beyond his head at the painted wall cloth depicting Pallas Athena with her helmet and spear. “I wish to write as Aemilia Lanier.”

“Is that wise, especially in the wake of
this
?” Ben held up Will's book of sonnets.

“Not just wise, but necessary.”

In the face of Will's defamation of her character, she must step out of the shadows and reveal her own truth. Until this moment, she had been terrified to expose her soul to the public, but with the betrayal of his sonnets, Will had ripped away her every mask. She had nothing left to hide.

“What will Alfonse think?” Ben asked her.

Aemilia quailed when she thought of her husband locked up in their bedchamber. But she lifted her chin as she gave Ben her reply. “If I write of godly things, no man may hold it against me.” Her throat was so dry, she had to swallow.

“A
LFONSE
?” A
EMILIA PLEADED WITH
him until he unbolted the bedchamber door. Entering the dim, shuttered room, she let out a shriek to see her husband gripping his sword.

“What are you doing?” she cried.

A tremor shot through Alfonse's swollen fingers. With an ugly clang, the sword fell to the floor. The look he gave her left her devastated. “I should challenge this man to a duel, but I can't even hold my own sword.”

She sobbed aloud at the thought of her husband fighting Will to defend her reputation.

“But Henry,” Alfonse said. “Henry could challenge him.”

“Henry shall do no such thing, and neither shall you.” With shaking hands, she picked the sword off the floor and guided it back into its scabbard. “If you lose, you are slain. If you win, you are hanged. Remember what nearly happened to Ben?”

Her cousin had once killed a rival actor in a duel. Ben had escaped the hangman's noose only by his knowledge of an ancient law pardoning those who could read Psalm 51.

“But your honor,” Alfonse said.

Aemilia laid the sheathed sword in his trunk then sat on the lid. “What pride hath lost, humility repairs,” she said, quoting from her own poetry. She would challenge Will herself with the quill, not the sword.

When her husband sat beside her on the trunk, she shrank before his wounded eyes. Cupping his crippled hands in hers, she kissed them then cradled his head against her breast.

A
LL MY LIFE
I have waited just for this.
At the age of forty, Aemilia would at last become a published woman of letters. She would do what even Papa had never dared—show her true face to the world. No more masks. She would trumpet her truth in the face of infamy.

Let this, her
Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,
be her riposte against Will's cruel caricature of her, her reply couched not in drama or satire but in the only thing an Englishwoman might hope to write without condemnation—devotional Protestant verse. But as a woman writing in defense of Eve, Aemilia needed a circle of lady patrons to endorse her.

One by one she laid out the
tarocchi
cards that spelled out her destiny, those nine heroic women driving chariots and brandishing swords, holding stars and imperial scepters. That august circle of women would not just materialize out of the ether. She must seek them out. Margaret and Anne Clifford had already graced her with their support. What if she called upon seven other distinguished ladies, such as Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke, whose poetry she so admired, and Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford, one of Ben's most generous patrons? This was no simple thing, seeing as Aemilia had no title or distinction and had been exiled from court more than sixteen years ago.