Dark Aemilia (26 page)

I open my eyes. I cannot tell if it is morning or evening, but the room is in semi-darkness. I look around me. My head still aches, but I no longer feel confused – the fever has left me. How long have I been here? Above my head, I see a blue ocean. Azure
waves chase each other across the upside-down seascape, and whales and porpoises and swordfish leap among them. The water is every shade of blue from navy to bright turquoise. The fish are grey and green and silver, painted bright upon the foaming spray so I can see each neat scale. I lie still and look at these for a while, not knowing who or what I am.

Then I remember.

‘Henry?’ I cry out. ‘Henry?’

And I struggle up on to my elbows, and look, and there he is, lying next to me. He is quite still. His gold hair is matted against his cheeks, and he is half-turned away from me, so all I can see is one pale cheek.

‘My love!’ I scream. ‘My little one!’ I grab his body and hold him. ‘Do not go away from me! Stay with me! God help us! Help us!’ And I sob bitterly, drenching his tangled hair with my tears.

‘I
am
with you,’ says a muffled voice.

I hold him still closer, stunned and confused.

‘Mother,’ says the muffled voice again. ‘You are squeezing me to death. Why are you crying?’

If I live as long as Joan I will never know such joy again. Henry wriggles out of my grasp. He looks up at me, pale but smiling. He is Henry, exactly and completely Henry, my merry son.

‘Look!’ he cries, lifting his nightshirt. I see that the vile plague boils have shrivelled up. Some are half-healed scabs, others nothing more than faint bruises. ‘I am cured!’ he says, eyes shining. ‘I am immortal, Mother. You can let me do anything now, for God will protect me, have no doubt of it.’

‘A clever thought, Henry, but we will dispute this later,’ say I, kissing him on his cheek and hugging him again. ‘My angel boy! Oh, Henry! Praise God! Oh, praise the Lord in Heaven!’ I look at my own arms, and see that they too are clear of the inflammation. Miracle or magic, some wonder has surely taken place.

Now Henry sleeps, a deep, rosy sleep, like the first settled repose of a newborn. I lie next to him, looking at him, still dazed with shock and disbelief. Finally, I begin to drowse, but am jolted awake by Lilith’s voice. ‘
The pages
,’ she says. ‘
You must go and find your pages.
’ I sit bolt upright, eyes wide open, and look around me. I notice, for the first time since Henry’s recovery, the chalk circle on the floor. There is no sign of Lilith: it’s as if she was never there at all. I look up at the ceiling, and the plaster has flaked off in places, but there is nothing to suggest that a demon’s wing was the cause.

Then I see that the floor is covered with crumpled pages. I scramble out of bed and pick up one of the sheets. It is covered with writing – my writing. I peer at it, confused. It appears to be a record of my weird hallucinations: the castle and the lady and the fires of London. ‘
This is our bargain,’
says Lilith. ‘
Write up these notes and make a play of them. Write a play the like of which London has never seen.’

I get up early and sit at the table by the bedroom window. On the table are some sheets of clean foolscap, a quill and a glass of lamp-black, as if Will were just about to sit down and start work on his next play. My mind is at once disturbed and clear: both filled with images and memories and quite empty. I pick up the quill, and dip it into the ink. I think of the wild castle and the strange creatures who live in it, and the blood seeping across the stone floor. I write the words:
The Tragedie of Ladie Macbeth.
And below it I add:
By Aemilia Bassano Lanyer.

And then my fingers close more tightly around the quill, and I dip it again and began to scratch across the parchment. My hands move quick, as if I had written all this before. My queer dreams fill my head, the poems I have struggled to form make new and easy patterns, and the words of Holinshed whirl around me.

I write all that night, with the wind beating against the windows, till the sun comes up over the City walls and its clear light fills the room.

Henry and I live happily in Will’s house in Silver Street. The months pass quickly. In the daytime, I must teach or entertain my son. He is Henry, just as he was, hale and happy and silly and full of life. My greatest task is to keep him from the streets. He is allowed to come with me to buy food once a week, as long as he keeps close to me. I suspect he could not catch the plague twice. But I will not take the risk, so we live like hermits. I pray and pray and pray, and offer up my thanks to God.

However, when Henry sleeps at night, I return to my pages and improve them, taking out dead words and putting in live ones. It’s a candle-tale, put together bit by bit in the guttering half-light. After many changes, I see that I have indeed written something that might be called a play. It seems to have drawn on fear, and horror of the plague, as well as something of Lilith’s diabolic craft. It is plague-play, I suppose. I am so happy and so blessed that my son lives that it is strange to have written something so dark and sinister. And yet it is a celebration too, of the darkness of the human soul.

Who can say which stories will last and which will fade away? Old women crouch together round the fire, their figures humped against the flaming logs of oak and apple wood. They tell tales. Anyone can stop and listen. The servant girl carrying an empty flagon; the hunter sweating from his reckless ride; a young boy leaning against a sleeping wolfhound. Beyond the listening circle, the dark night shrouds troll caves in the mountains and forest creatures half-seen among the clustering
trees. Wolves, spirits, urchins, centaurs, satyrs, changelings and hell-waines.

This play may be one survivor. At the moment, I am its midwife and its mother. I must stay here, in this house, till London is safe again.

One breezy spring day, Henry calls out from his perch at the window. ‘Oh, look, what a sight is this?’ he cries. ‘A horseman, at full gallop!’ I can hear the sound of hoof-beats hammering on the road outside and a horse whinnying as it clatters to a standstill. ‘He has a feathered hat,’ says Henry. ‘His cloak is scarlet – Lord above! Oh! Who is it? He is at the door, Mother. He is coming in! Who can it be?’

I hear the sound of footsteps pounding up the stairs. The door flies open and Will stands there. He looks at me, and then races across the room and kisses Henry. ‘You are well, little man! You are recovered!’ he cries.

‘Unhand me, fellow!’ shouts Henry, struggling out of Will’s grasp. ‘Of course I am well.’

I send Henry to play in the solar. Will is by the fire, pulling at the feather on his hat. I realise with a jolt of some emotion that he looks just like his son. I am used to seeing the resemblance the other way, but here is a grown-up Henry, fidgeting.

‘You will ruin that feather,’ I say.

‘What if I do?’ says Will. ‘It is a feather, merely. It represents “nothingness” with such neatness that one might almost put it in a play to fill that function.’

‘What function?’

‘The representation of nothingness. Only its very neatness would preclude it. Surprise is all.’ He pauses. ‘Or… almost all. Audiences can be obtuse.’

‘What are you
talking
about?’

He looks up at me, and his gaze is so intense that I look down at my open book, jolted by memory.

‘I rode two days and two nights to get here,’ he says. ‘The rest of the party are some way behind me – as far as I could put them, making speed and almost killing my poor horse.’

‘Why did you…?’

But he has come to sit beside me. ‘We don’t have long,’ he says.

‘We?’

‘You and I. Before your husband gets here. That fool Alfonso joined the players! His consort accompanied our plays… He was carousing late into the night, not knowing if you lived or died! What kind of man is that? How can he be so ignorant of his great fortune?’

‘Alfonso has no fortune that I am aware of. Unless he has been lucky at the tables for once in his life.’

‘I mean, his great fortune in having such a wife.’

I stare at him, perplexed. ‘You have a wayward memory, William Shakespeare. I have your written words, and those in here…’ I tap my forehead. ‘The words you spat at me the day you found me with that plague-boil Wriothesley.’

‘Yes, I want to speak of this – ’

‘Love is not immutable. It can be stifled at birth, or slowly suffocated, or killed, stone-dead.’

‘No! I – ’

‘And you killed my love, in those dreadful verses, which I did not deserve, and will not forget, even if
you
have put your wicked cruelty from your mind. Perhaps it was of no account to you, but it was everything to me.’

He takes my hands in his and looks down at them. ‘It was this matter – this matter of Wriothesley that I wanted to speak to you about,’ he says.

‘I cannot think what you have left unsaid.’

‘I wanted to… I have meant to speak of this before.’

I am silent.

‘He asked to see me before the old Queen died.’

‘Oh?’

‘He said he had something to tell me.’

I nod, biting my lip.

‘So I went to see him in the Tower.’

He stands up suddenly and walks across the room. For a moment, he watches his horse drinking from a trough below the window.

‘He said that it was his fault. He said that he admired your looks, but not your manners. He wanted to get the better of you… He said that he desired and disliked you. He didn’t see why a mere concubine should be so proud, nor why an old man like Hunsdon should monopolise you. So when he saw a weakness in your situation… that you seemed to like me – ’

For a moment I forget myself. ‘
Seemed to like
! God’s teeth…’

A flash of rage crosses Will’s face: the rage I saw after he found me with Wriothelsey, all those years ago. Then he shakes his head, as if he is calming himself. ‘Just let me speak, Aemilia, for God’s sake,’ he says. He searches my face with his dark eyes. ‘Will you bear with me? It’s not a pretty story.’

I am silenced, by his seriousness and my own curiosity. ‘Very well. Say what you have to.’

‘When I saw Wriothesley, Essex had already been executed, and the headsman had done his task badly. He’d slashed poor Essex across the shoulders, ripping bone from muscle but leaving his head still set upon his neck. The scaffold was a waterfall of blood, and he was screaming in agony when the second blow fell. That, too, failed to find its mark – it was the third that sent him safe to God. Wriothesley knew of this. His normal cheerful humour was gone. He knew his charm was worth nothing.’

‘Charm! Ha!’ I say.

Will seems not to hear me, his mind fixed in the past. ‘His earldom had been stripped away and now he was plain Henry Wriothesley, his possessions confiscated, his estate set to be divided among his rivals. And he was ill: his legs were swollen, he had the ague and for many months he had been refused visitors. He was pale, and fretful, nothing like the cocksure young rake I once knew. He was very low in spirits, and still believed the Queen might have him put to death. He had been no favourite of hers, after all, while she had treated Essex like a son.’

I look down at my fingernails, thinking of my last conversation with the Queen. This is indeed a sorry tale, but I feel no pity. Wriothesley surely deserves such a fate, if any man does.

Will is staring over my shoulder as if he can see the scene before him. ‘He mentioned your name almost as soon as I arrived. I know this may be no comfort, but he truly seemed to want to do penance of some kind, make an honest confession about the… the commerce that there was between you.’

I cannot look at him. ‘Lower your voice, Will! I… these are things I never speak of. Think of the child.’

He drops his voice to a whisper but can’t seem to stop. ‘And of course, being pregnant and cast off, you were weaker still… He admitted this. He said as much.’

Outside, his horse is shaking its head and blowing water from its muzzle.

‘I could hardly think or speak,’ Will says, ‘but I managed to ask how the… the act itself had come about. And he told me that he had blackmailed you, and forced you. It could not be called a rape, he said, but it could be called a “wilful abuse of power”. Those were his words. A wilful abuse of power.’

‘I’d call that rape,’ I say. ‘But doubtless I am alone in that, as in so many other things.’

‘I realised… I realised that I never… that I… that I should have listened to you. The pain… your rejection had already made
me partly mad. When I saw what I thought I saw, I thought I was just your fool.’

I feel my face flush scarlet. ‘You saw what you saw, Will. As you have said quite plainly. I have no wish to talk of this now, with Henry close by. We are estranged – so be it.’

He searches my face, his eyes dark with feeling. ‘Do you have nothing else to say about this? Nothing at all?’

‘Only that I have tried to tell you, and you gave me no chance. And now it turns out you believe this cocksure braggart, when you would not listen to me! Do you think men are more honest than women, or that lords are more truthful than cast-off whores?’

‘Aemilia, please listen to me. I see – perhaps because I am older now – I see I was mistaken.’

‘Handsome of you, who damned my name to Hell.’

‘I see that you were trapped.’

‘Wise poet! Do you want a prize for such an insight? It was ever thus.’

‘My prize would be your forgiveness, the greatest prize I can imagine.’

‘I have lived my life trammelled in by circumstances. This is a woman’s fate.’

‘Forgive me, dear Aemilia. Forgive me for those sonnets, or that part of them which was bilious and vile. Forgive me for the things I said, when all the world seemed blackened and obscene because of what I thought you had done to me.’

‘Blackened and obscene – good words. You should put them in a poem.’

‘Please, my lady. I am sorry.’ He takes my hands.

‘You wrote as if our love itself disgusted you. Our great love!’

‘I wrote what I felt then. It is not what I feel now.’

I pull my hands from his. ‘God will forgive you, I expect.’

‘And you?’

‘I don’t know.

‘Aemilia! Please!’

‘Come a little closer,’ I say. ‘This is what you think of women, sir.’ Then I whisper these lines to him, from his own sonnets.

‘Forgive my hot words!’ says Will, twisting his arms around me at last. ‘Madam, there is no cure for our affliction! Not in this life or the next.’

I push him away. ‘Do not insult me, sir,’ I say. ‘Do not come creeping here, like a whipped dog, all sneakish and colluding, in the hope that you can fornicate with me in secret once again! Don’t speak of love, when you have mashed my heart to butcher’s pulp! Do not speak of “sorrow” when my love is cold, and spoiled and dead! What do you take me for? What do I care if an aristocrat, your mighty
patron
, cants his little secrets to you, so you want to lick his arse? Shall I lick yours, in turn? Shall I let you have me, once again, all addled and unmade, as once I was? I will speak of an affliction, sir, and my affliction is your company! Go forth, go from me, and never bother me again!’

‘What’s going on?’ says a voice I know too well. Alfonso is at the doorway. One arm is resting on his sword. Henry, goggle-eyed, is beside him.

‘Mother?’ says Henry. ‘Why are you shouting?’

Will and I spring apart, quite as guilty as if we had been naked among the rushes.

Alfonso smiles, rather coldly, but comes over and kisses me on the lips as if he has bought me at a fair. ‘Come, Aemilia,’ he says. ‘You must quit this place. The plague is over.’