Dark Aemilia (15 page)

It is a bright September morning. Joan is mending an old smock of Henry’s, head bent over her stitching. The needle flashes in and out of the dark fabric as she works, so fast that I can hardly see it.

She doesn’t look up, but says, ‘He lost it, didn’t he?’

‘Lost what?’

‘Your money.’

I break off some bread. I am used to her strange way of knowing more than she should. Sometimes it annoys me, sometimes it alarms me. Today, I just feel tired.

‘Is
all
my business your business?’ I ask, sitting down next to her. ‘Are
all
my affairs of your concern?’

‘I live here, don’t I, mistress? Those that have eyes to see know what is all around them.’

‘Yes.’ I chew in silence for a while. ‘But some of us see more than others.’

‘Sure enough,’ says Joan, biting off the thread.

‘Joan…’

‘Mistress?’

‘I need your help.’

‘You’ve had my help these last nine years and more. And I don’t begrudge it.’

‘I know. I could not ask for a better servant.’ I swallow the last bit of crust and shake the crumbs from my skirt. ‘This art of yours… this knowledge. Of herbs and remedies and… spells. How did you come by it?’

She looks at me, her green eyes bright in her lined face. ‘I learned it. From my mother, and she learned it from hers. It’s a trade, of sorts, the business of an apothecary.’

‘And yet you know more than most, don’t you?’

‘How can I tell what’s in their minds? I only know what’s in my own.’ She returns to her stitching.

‘Could you teach it to me?’

She continues sewing, smiling as she works. ‘Teach! As if it were the cross-stitch?’

‘Could I
learn
this skill?’

Her needle stops in mid-air.

‘What for?’

‘I am afraid. We have no money – as you guessed – and Inchbald owns this house. Alfonso wastes most of his wages at the tables – we are all but on the street. And…’

‘And?’ She looks at me again.

‘The women at the Fair – there was something wrong. You said so yourself. Something evil in them.’

‘And then they gave master the trickster’s dice.’

I stare. ‘Were you listening to us?’

She gazes back, unabashed. ‘Only in my sleep.’ Putting her sewing to one side, she shrugs. ‘What I can teach you, mistress, is knowledge of herbs and simples and suchlike. Some cures and some small ways to help yourself, and others. So you can ward off harm.’

‘What about a small hex, here and there?’

She smiles. ‘Who would you hex?’

‘I don’t know. Someone who deserved it.’

‘I’ll try my best for you, mistress. But you know I would do all of this for you. There’s no need to trouble yourself with it.’

‘But I want to know myself. I want to understand.’

‘I know you do, mistress.’ She touches my arm. ‘Be wary. And be patient. Do what I tell you, and no more. In this, I am the mistress, and you are my apprentice. You are asking a great deal
from me.’ She gives me one of her narrow looks. ‘That pamphlet Forman gave you – did you read it?’

‘
The Hammer of Witches
?’ There is no point asking how she knows of this, for she seems to have a better idea of my business than I do myself.

‘You should read it. There are degrees in witchcraft, as in all things. First there is the wise woman, who knows of the lore that the Old Religion used to its own ends. Now that’s all gone, and, as the new faith takes hold, more of us will suffer, I’ve no doubt of it. The next degree is occupied by Dr Forman and his like. They think experiments will help throw light on mystery, and who’s to say – maybe they will? But the highest – and the lowest – form of witchcraft lies in wait for wise women and cunning-men alike. And that is the fatal knowledge that is possessed only by Satan and his familiars. This is a challenge to God, and will cost each man or woman who tries it their immortal soul. The spell those women put on you was of that order, in my opinion.’

I read this
Hammer
and think about this bolting-hutch of beastliness that is our world. Men hobble noble ladies with skirts and bind them with pearls. They snaffle scolds with bitch-bridles. They buy pretty maids for their bedchamber, from their fathers, or off the street. But those of us with nothing but our brains to keep us fare worst of all, as if the power to think was elvish-marked. Men will drown us and flay us; they will brand us and hang us; they will hound us from the light till we are the quintessence of dust. I read this book, and I think of this writer in his fine study, with the fire burning and his quill sharpened, his words scraping into the paper, into our souls. I think to myself, I am no man. But I can wield a pen. And I can learn to wield it well.

There are only four places in the whole of Europe that have become great cities. Venice, city of water and wonders. Constantinople, the gateway to the Orient. Paris, pride of France.
And London. In my own lifetime the City has grown, with tall new houses springing up, old ones split into different dwellings so that as many as a dozen families can live in a place designed for one. Outside the walls, and beyond the powers of City aldermen, builders and carpenters are free to do as they please. New buildings go up in unplanned confusion with no thought to how they fit in with what was there before. Haphazard houses block old thoroughfares, so there is no longer a way through. And
side-streets
shrink to rat-runs, too narrow for a full-grown man to pass. There are Roman ruins and pagan pillars; collapsed nunneries open to the sky; great mansions converted to spewing tenements; and newer, wooden houses, sprouting overnight. It is as if someone once planted the seed of a timber frame: a miller’s son, let’s say, in a fireside tale. The seed grew first to a house, and then a street, all neat and handsome, with windows well-set. But then, as trees sprout fungus, these streets gave forth their progeny. New rooms and chambers burgeoned forth. Little alleyways and cat-creeps were burrowed open, and dormer rooms grew upon the rooftops, like the sluttish baskets wove by nesting storks. (I knew a man who lived for six years in the belfry at St Margaret Lothbury. He was cast out only when they had to use the room for storing coal.) All is chaos, madness and clutter. Shouts and whistles, songs and ballads. French and Spanish, German, Russian. The accents of the Midlands, Wales, of Cornwall, York, the Norfolk flats. They are all here, filling the air. Babel is come to Albion.

How, then, shall a ‘man’ be heard? If the sound of words is drowned out, then let the people read them. Find a printing press, where each letter is placed with neat exactness in a frame, and your lines are blacked down on plain pages, like the Word of God. And if you want to see your thoughts made into books, and sold to Londoners, here, in the centre of the world, go to Paul’s Churchyard. There, the dead lie close, in their eternal silence, freshly dug or grinning in the charnel house. And the quick shall make as much noise as we can before we go.

And so I make my way to this place of print and printshops. The sky is pale and piled with cloud. Kites are swooping and woodpigeons perch on the rooftops. I take a wherry as far as Paul’s Wharf, holding a clove-stuffed orange to my nose to mask the stench of sewage and pitch. At the wharf, just by Burghley House, the scene of my undoing with Wriothesley, I pay the ferryman and go north between the Doctor’s Commons and the College of Arms. It has rained heavily in the night, and the streets are muddy and foul. My pattens slither on the scree of shit from the overflowing ditch.

I cross Carter Lane, a yelling thoroughfare of rattling coaches, lowing cows and quarrelling prentice-boys, and finally reach the churchyard of the great cathedral, a towering Ark above the clustering streets. Our Lord may have thrown the moneylenders from the Temple, but he did not evict the ale-sellers, baker’s boys, rooting pigs, pecking chickens, the football games, the beggars or the travelling players. On the left side is a row of houses: laundry flutters above the graves. And to the right, nestling close to the walls of St Paul’s, are the open-fronted bookstalls, the object of my pilgrimage.

I am known to all the booksellers. They have all turned down my wares. Some call out as I pass.

‘Good day to you, Mistress Lanyer. What is it this time, a pamphlet that says housework is a man’s domain?’

‘Mistress Lanyer, you are looking well. What do you have there, the secret of immortality?’

‘Aemilia, over here! Let’s see your fine words. I need a laugh this grey morning!’

‘Get you gone!’ I shout, over my shoulder. ‘If men are so much to be admired and so high regarded in their dominion, how come crops fail, infants die, widows starve and the mad are shouting in the streets?’ At that very moment, my eye falls on a Tom o’Bedlam, begging with his little kinchin-mort, a child of five or six years old. Her arms are withered like those of a sickly crone.

The very last stall belongs to Mr Cuthbert Tottle, who specialises in the rare and fancy. You might say he puts himself at the freak-show end of the market. The printing press itself is adapted from a wine press, among other such machines, and his folios and quartos are wine-soaked in their weird vagaries, written in the tradition of the ranting drunk. His religious tracts have the most gruesome woodcuts, such as a Jesuit hanging upside down, with two men sawing him in half between his buttocks. His polemical pamphlets have the rudest words about the Pope. And his pornography is the most salacious, with poses backwards, upside-down and sideways. His bestiaries tell tales of beasts I daresay never lived – the wild boar with a Cyclops head, the Tyger that suckled Dolphins, the mermaid that begat the Queen of Carthage and the Narwhal that swims the frozen oceans of the north, using its magic horn to cut a watery pathway through the ice. I like him for this, and he likes me (I think) for my sharp tongue, and the fact that I’m part-Venetian. His shop is always full of émigrés and refugees, and foreign words and noisy laughter.

Now I have something that I hope will appeal to Mr Tottle, with his love of the peculiar and extreme. It is the tale of Lilith, Adam’s first wife. My father used to entertain me with this story when my mother was out of hearing. (She thought that Lilith was too wayward a creature to be the subject of a bedside tale.) Lilith was made from the same mud as Adam, according to old Hebrew lore. She thought herself his equal, so of course he threw her out and God gave him someone more amenable, made from his own rib. And this was Eve, the pliant mother of all mothers, born to take the blame for human sin. What my father did not tell me was that Adam and Lilith were estranged because, when they set to fornication, she refused to lie beneath him, but claimed her right to lie on top. For this, and this alone, she lost her place in Eden, and became a demon blamed for the deaths of newborn babes. (I found all this out many
years after, from the Queen’s conjurer, John Dee.) So I feel for Lilith, though I fear her name. But will Tottle like this story? We shall see.

I take a breath and walk in. The shop is crowded, as ever, and as ever I am the only woman, save for his wife, who sits silent at the back of the shop, working on a gold-leaf illumination. Tottle himself is a big fellow, jovial and red-cheeked, fond of the
ale-house
. And yet he drives as hard a bargain as anyone. Even in the throes of boisterous laughter, his eyes are watchful.

A group of Frenchmen haggle with him over a barrel of new books. Two law students, one tall and dark, the other squat and ginger, peruse a squalid chap-book with great interest. Tottle is pouring wine for the students, while refusing to give the Frenchmen a better price for their book-barrel. But when he sees me he sets the bottle down and hurries over.

‘Mistress Lanyer!’ He glances at his wife. ‘The lady poet! Is this good news? Do you have new words for me? Something I can sell this time?’

‘I hope so,’ I say, taking his offered hand. ‘I need to keep a roof over my head.’

He laughs as though this were a very good joke. ‘Oh, you ladies! All the same! If you can’t get starch for the latest Parisian ruff, you think yourself paupers.’

‘You mistake my station, Mr Tottle. I wish that you were right.’

‘Let us see, then, what you have.’

He brings a seat for me, and pours out a glass of wine. I give him my pages, and he reads them, smiling all the while. Occasionally he gives a little chuckle, as if especially pleased by some particular word or phrase. When he has finished, he is still smiling. ‘Well, well. You certainly have a way about you.’ He looks down at my writing, and laughs again. ‘Let us see what this assembly makes of this.’

‘The Frenchmen?’

‘They speak English as well as you or I when they are not affecting Gallic ignorance of Anglo-Saxon prices.’ He calls his customers over. ‘Gentlemen, pay attention, I have a pamphlet here that you might like to hear. Wife, put your work aside. Listen to this.’

They all turn to hear.

‘The title is
The Song of Lilith, first among women.
’ He looks up and every one nods. ‘A fair title?’

The lawyers shrug. The Frenchmen raise their eyebrows. His wife’s eyes are downcast.

‘A fair title, then. We are curious, I think. Well, here is a little of the text.

Tottle lowers the pages and beams at me. ‘Oh, most fine, most fine! You have an ear for the drama, a gift for polemic.’

‘Is this a joke?’ says one of the Frenchmen.

‘Is it permitted?’ asks one of the lawyers.

Tottle smiles, and continues.