Dark Aemilia (25 page)

‘Witch’s blood,’ calls the crowd. ‘Witch’s blood! Bleed the witch and save yourself from her sin!’ A boy runs forward – he is no older than Henry – and slashes at her face with a knife. She makes no sound, just looks from face to face without hope or fear. A stone hurtles towards her, smashing her on the temple. Another follows, then another, and suddenly the sky is filled with missiles and the crowd roars with blood lust. Joan grunts as she falls to the ground. The crowd closes in.

‘Joan!’ I scream again. I force my way forward. The crowd is dancing now, in a fashion, stamping in unison, first with the left foot and then with the right, and clapping out a slow rhythm. It has become one creature, one deliberate, remorseless behemoth. ‘My God! Help me! Joan!’

The mob yells with one voice, ‘Kill the witch! Kill the witch!’

Another boy throws a rope over an oak tree. Turtle doves fly from it, and he makes a noose and puts it round Joan’s neck. Her eyes meet mine, and, although I long to, I can neither move nor speak. I open my mouth to call her name, but something is holding me back. And a voice speaks inside my head. ‘
Aemilia. I told you. Go now, in God’s name.’

The noose around her neck is pulled tight, and she grasps at it, her eyes bulging. They drag her towards the tree. With a ‘heave ho’ and shrieks of laughter they lug her upwards, so she stands on tiptoe. A heavy stone is flung towards her, smashing her mouth into a bloody hole of broken teeth. Then a burly man runs forward, and slashes her across the belly with his knife, and she grunts again, and all her guts spill out of her. Inside my head, I hear such a scream as the damned must scream, and I pray hard, hard, asking God to take her. I remember how Charles Blount and
his men had pulled at Southwell’s legs when he dangled from the gibbet and how they broke his neck and saved him from his final torture, and I long to do the same, but am still spellbound. There is another banshee scream. And then the voice again, from inside that dreadful sound. ‘
Go, Aemilia! Go from here! God speed. My service is finished.’
Joan’s voice is stern and powerful.

The crowd laughs and whoops to see the blood, and the pale girl holds her nose, making fun of the stench of Joan’s snaking innards. I squeeze my eyes shut, willing her to die. They pull her up higher, and her arms flail and her bare feet kick thin air as she dances her life out. I think of those clever hands, that saved my son, of her good sense and acid tongue, that have preserved my sanity a thousand times.
God help her
, I pray.
God help us all.

Then, suddenly, everything stops. All is silence, and Joan is still. The crowd falls back. I cannot bear to look at her dead face. Her cloak is lying on the ground. I pick it up, then turn and flee.

Silver Street is a good road, wide and well-kept, off Cheapside, in sight of St Paul’s and west of the low arch of Cripplegate in the City walls. Like the rest of London, it is filled with a strange quiet, a plague-quiet. As we make our way inside, the silence rings in my ears after the noise of the crowd. I keep my gaze fixed on my son’s face, and do not weep for Joan’s sacrifice, but determine to make it worthwhile.

Heminge carries Henry to an upper chamber, and gently lays him on a four-poster bed. ‘This is Will’s room,’ he says. ‘He is praying for you, Aemilia. So are we all.’

I don’t like the way he looks at Henry, as if all hope has gone. ‘Thanks, Mr Heminge, for all your pains, and your great patience. Now you can be on your way,’ I say. My calm voice sounds false to my own ears.

He takes my hand and bows, very grave. ‘I wish you luck, and God’s blessing.’ Tom is watching with tears on his face.

When they have gone, I lock the street door behind them, and tend to Henry as best as I can. His whole body is raised and black with plague-sores, and they smell most horrible. It is the scent, I suppose, of poisoned blood. The nails of his hands and feet are of the same colour, as if he has rubbed them with dark river mud. Each breath sounds like a knife scraping on a skillet, and his chest trembles with the effort. Though sweat rolls from his body, his limbs are freezing to the touch.

I am swim-headed. The room swerves and shifts around me. I feel that I am flying through the air. Here I am, in Forman’s little cell once more. I am on the floor, and looking up at the good doctor working at his bench. He lifts a cloth from a tube of glass. There, lying peacefully inside, is a little man. Not an infant, but an adult, full-formed male, well-made and (for his scale) well-hung. Naked as Adam in the Garden of Eden. His limbs are as pale as the moon, the little muscles of his body all most perfectly aligned. He is sound asleep, his head resting on the crook of one arm for a pillow. Then his eyes open, and he gazes at me. And he looks down at his naked dangling parts, and covers them with his hands, as I’ve seen Henry do when he was bathing and fancied Joan could see him. Lord God! I could not save him.

And then I pray – some words come to me at last – hoping God might yet turn his face in my child’s direction, even though I am hell-bound myself: ‘
O God, the Father of heaven, have mercy upon us miserable sinners. Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers; neither take thou vengeance of our sins: spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy most precious blood, and be not angry with us
…’

I turn to look at him, weary and empty. Henry’s eyes are half-open. But I know he can see nothing, not the carved bed-roof, decorated with bright, leaping porpoises, nor my face as I bend over him.

‘Henry?’ I put my hand against his cheek. ‘Can you hear me, little one?’

His breath comes in a rasping sigh. I know that sound. When Death is near, the watchers wait in the eternity between each breath. In the end, they witness the final rattle as the soul departs. The waiting is over, and the mourning begins. That rasping sound has the rattle of death in it.
My little boy, my precious one. Henry Lanyer, my only child. All my world, in this small frame. What will I be without you? How shall I live? What shall I do?

But no. He is not ready. I am not ready. His life still lies before him. I will not serve. God has deserted us. It is time. Time to set myself apart from wise women and cunning-men. Time to see how far magic will take me. If a witch must call on demons, then so be it. If demons are in the service of Beelzebub, then I am willing to take the consequences.

I pick up the grimoire. My hands are stiff and trembling. I fumble with the pages, not certain what I’m looking for. A sign? A clue? There are demons hidden here, in these queer hieroglyphics and tables, figures like amulets instead of letters, pictures of chariots and scrotums, serpents and priestesses, the sage hierophant and inverted Hanged Man. How can I unlock a spirit from these strange inscriptions? I close my eyes and think of Joan, hanging from the tree. I see her eyes, fixed on mine.

When I open my eyes, the room is writhing and spinning. I can see Henry, but he seems far away, on a shore I can’t reach. Black mists drift between us. I stretch out my hand to touch him. Pustules like bilberries cover my arm from wrist to elbow.
Holy God. Holy God. He has the plague and now I have it too.
I close my eyes again, but this time I see Joan’s face close to, angry and accusing. It seems as if she wants to speak to me. But I don’t know what she wants to say. What does she want to tell me? How can she help me now?

I grasp the bed-post and haul myself upright. Nausea and pain flood my body. I stagger backwards, then notice a tumble of darkness on the floor. I touch it – rough wool, coarse against my fingers. But there is something else – the slightest tremor, like a living creature. An animal would be warm – but this fabric cools my hot fingers. It is Joan’s black cloak.

I put it on, and it falls around me in deep, whispering folds. I pull the hood over my head and the whispering continues, like the wind in the bulrushes, like the beating of a raven’s wing. I can
hear Joan’s voice, as if it is coming from a long, long way away. I can hear words – what is she saying?
I am a penitent witch. I am a penitent witch.
I see her putting a newborn child into my arms. I hear her words:
You’ll keep it
.

Then I hear her voice say, ‘
Draw a circle.’

I hesitate, not knowing if I have the strength.

She repeats, ‘
Draw a circle.’

I find a lump of white chalk in the pocket of the cloak. Falling to my knees, I scrabble on the floor, pushing back the rushes with feverish hands. Then, breathing hard, I draw a great circle, nine feet across.
‘Very good,’
says Joan. ‘
The space you have made is outside creation. Demons and spirits may enter it. You must stay on the outside. Do not cross the line. Do not listen if the demon tempts you.’

I pick up the grimoire once more. My head is hot and heavy and I want to lay it down, to lie upon the frozen Thames in winter and become as one with that white cold.

‘Open the book.’

I do so, and the mist slowly parts. First, I see only:

But then the signs begin to wriggle and squirm, and I see that they are turning into words, the very words I needed to find.

This, then, is what I was after! What verse, though, what simple verse could unmake plague? I search back and forth through the incense-scented pages. Then I read these words aloud:

Is it snowing, or summer, now? My head is hot, but my hands have turned cold. I look down at them: they seem far away from me. I pull the cloak tighter around me, and feel a sick languor overwhelm me as I read the second verse:

A Creature comes forth from the darkness, forming itself in the circle, so that shrouds and filaments of shadow are
woven into a formless shape. There is a wind around me, and a terrible stench, of rotting flesh and plague. There are sounds, like twisted weeping and the screams of babes. Yet unlike, too. The stench and the sounds are relations of what I can recognise, but not their copy. A band of pain wraps itself around my head, tighter and tighter and tighter. I clutch my forehead, but I stay in my place, holding some inner part of myself quite still. I have summoned Evil, there is no doubt of that, and it is growing and twisting in the circle, burgeoning out of itself, deforming as it grows. I listen for Joan, but I can’t hear her. The sound of rushing air and weeping fills my ears, my mind, my body. I lower my arms and lift my head and look directly forward, at the Creature in the circle. For it has formed now, and is folded and hunched within its allocated space, and it has fixed me with its yellow eyes.

Thunder and lightning. The light shrieks over a blasted heath. Rocks are piled like plague skulls; the ground is running with rain and stones. A figure, bent double against the gale, walks towards me, a blacker shape against the dark sky. I turn to run, but my feet are broken tree-stumps, rooted in the frozen earth. The shape comes closer and I open my mouth to scream; my cry is noiseless and the creature grabs my hand. Its hood falls back.

‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair,’ speaks a bloody hole of broken teeth. Two horsemen are galloping towards us, two soldiers, bloodied with the battle.

‘All hail, Macbeth,’ shouts a young virgin selling sugar-plums. ‘Hail to thee, Thane of Glamis.’

‘All hail, Macbeth. Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor,’ says the beak of a raven.

‘All hail, Macbeth, that shall be King hereafter,’ I cry.

The men have fallen to the ground; their faces look up at us, the faces of children.

Knock
, knock! Simon Forman shuffles to the door, a great gate the size of St Paul’s. He shudders and shakes, aping frailty. ‘Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were Porter of Hell-Gate, he should have Old Nick turning the key. Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, in the name of Beelzebub? Oh, come in, equivocator! Knock, knock. Never at quiet! What are you? But this place is too cold for Hell. I’ll devil-porter it no longer: I had thought to let in some of the professions, that take the primrose way to th’everlasting bonfire… Anon, anon!’

Over the battlements, the wind rips my hair from my shoulders. The castle is stone and sky. I watch and wait for my Lord Macbeth. I have the spells and potions set around me. Poisoned entrails, toad-venom, dog-tongue and blind-worm’s sting. The finger of a birth-strangled babe, ditch delivered by a drab. A charm of fell-gruel, hell-broth – wolf-tooth and hemlock digged in the dark. ‘Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be what thou art promised.’

For I can conjure what God will not; if Fate is tardy, I am always to the clock. The child lies in the dark room; the curtains are drawn around him; I tear them back. His face is black; they are calling him. The merry devils dancing in the fire and snow. The sepulchre is opening by his bed; all it needs is a little tumble – so – and there he goes! Down, down, to the place we all must end. Heaven and Hell are pulpit words; our station is in the ground, where the worms are, where the bee sucks.

‘Hail to thee, Macbeth! Thou would’st be great, art not without ambition, but without the illness that should attend it. Would’st not play false, and yet would wrongly win.’

Here are the daggers. I would have killed the King myself, if he had not resembled sweet Bassano as he slept.

His hand is warm in mine. He towers above me. The tunes are angel voices, curling and rising in the air. His tales open out the seas
and
skies; I float over the Grand Canal and see high-tailed boats decked out with cloth-of-gold, and masked princesses, their pale hands trailing in the water. Blood curdles the still reflections; their scarlet fingernails make the green one red. They come behind us, silent. I hear nothing, only feel the wind of their bodies as they rush at us, and we are falling, falling. His hand is torn from mine; his scream is pig-like. Fly from here! His dear body, riven with blood, the stench of it, on my hands, my face. Here’s the smell of the blood still. Father! If I could call him back – would I? He would be a dead thing, then, the bloody and disfigured spectre of himself. If charnel-houses and our graves must send those that we bury back, our monument must be the belly of a crow. Dare I?

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor, and shalt be what thou art promised. Then screw thy courage to the sticking point, and we’ll not fail.

I run along the battlements. London is on the one side: the plague-carts rattle, the ale-houses are singing, there are flames on the horizon and there, far off, I can see the King and all his courtiers, watching
Twelfth Night.
See the boys upon the stage! Graceful Viola, with Tom’s fine leg. Safe from me, from my contagion. But this is Scotland: see how the Viking sea rolls and storms, see the mountains and the mist and there is Scone, where they will crown you, my lord. Far away.

The witch has black hair and the wings of a gryphon and the body of a serpent, twined around a tree. She is angry, and her forked tongue is made of fire. They strung Joan up; I could not save her. I held my hand out to her. I called her name, but no one heard me. She died for us. I will smirch their faces with the King’s blood, if it helps this cause. There is no stopping-place for me, for there can be no punishment that is worse than this. Look – my hands are your colour, but I would scorn to wear a heart so white. What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?

The
witch holds me with her woman’s arms, and presses me to her breast. Her heart is beating, and her wings tear at the sky. The wind blows harder as she carries me higher, and I see it all below me, and it is a perfect pattern; I understand everything. I am GOD.

The Creature shifts and settles, malevolent and silent. It is a Winged Serpent, green and glittering, with the face and torso of a woman, white and cold. Is it female? I think it is. Her head is covered with black hair, which curls and coils to the ground. Her skin is bone-white and her arms are corpse-thin with narrow, spindle-fingered hands. Her yellow eyes have no pupils, merely snake-slits. There is no mercy in them. The great wings are folded; they are bone and gristle and cloud. They press against the ceiling and shift against the plasterwork as if the room cramps them. Fragments of white dust fall from above, and speckle the restless emerald tail.

‘Who are you?’ I ask.

‘I am Lilith, Wife of Adam and the slayer of his children.’

Of all the demons of the air, I have called this one. Removed from Eden, she set out to kill one hundred babes a day. Of all the demons of the air, I have called the cruellest Serpent Queen of witchcraft. But she is in my circle, and I have the spell-book, and I must control her.

‘I want you to save my son,’ say I. ‘You cannot have this child. He’s mine.’

Her tail lashes towards the perimeter of the circle. ‘He is dying,’ she hisses, unblinking. ‘He is at our gates.’

‘You can have my soul instead of his.’

‘The soul that’s owed?’

‘Yes. I will die for him, and gladly.’

‘And burn in Hades? Until the Day of Judgement?’

‘I will do anything.’

Lilith looks at me, full of poison to the brim. ‘There is another way,’ she says. ‘There is a service you can do us, and keep your petty life.’

A cauldron forms from the air, and Lilith fills it with smoke-vapour and a vial of ruby liquid. She catches the light from the room in her fingers and presses it into her palms, forming it into a tiny orb, so the room is dark and the orb its candle. Then she drops it into the cauldron, and all is black.

‘Do we have a bargain?’ she says, in the darkness.

And I say, ‘We have a bargain.’

‘Go into the plague-pit,’ she says, ‘and bring me the head of a child.’

I see it is there before me – the pit and the stench and the human stew. Lilith gives me a stinking knife, smirched with gouts of blood. So I climb down into the plague-pit – down a flight of steps, carved out of the earth, smelling of soil and the ends of roots – and I find a homunculus lying in his glass, but he is a little boy. I carve his head off; the blade cracks through bone and sinew, and his eyes open to stare at me.

Across the rooftops I run, over the blasted spire of St Paul’s, here I come, to Cripplegate, to my little one. Ah, my pretty boy! I have given suck, and know what it is to love the babe that milked me. And I am he, the dying child, and through my closed lids I can see infinity. I will lay my hand on my own forehead, so. I will call my own spirit back into itself. I am all things, and all people, all deaths and all life. Henry Lanyer, return to this place. Lord God, it is not his time. Restore him, Lord, restore him!