The Dark Lady's Mask (14 page)

OR SEVEN YEARS
I was the Lord Chamberlain's mistress,” Aemilia told Simon Forman, the master astrologer. She spoke with pride and nostalgia. “I bore his son.”

“Old Henry Tudor's bastard grandson, by my troth!” Warming to her story, Doctor Forman poured them each a glass of Malmsey. “But when you fell pregnant, you were barred from court, and the Lord Chamberlain married you off . . . to . . . to a
Frenchman,
” the astrologer sputtered, as though her husband's nationality were the worst slight of all. “What would you have me reveal to you?”

“Soon my husband sails for the Azores as a privateer, seeking Spanish gold,” she said, seething at the expense of it all, for Alfonse was expected to pay his own way. He would inevitably mire them both in debt. “He hopes to make his fortune or even be knighted. What shall come of this?”

“Let's cut to the chase, shall we?” The astrologer regarded her with shrewd, calculating eyes. “You wish to know if your husband shall make you a lady or no. You have fallen and you wish to rise again, like a phoenix from the ashes.”

Before Aemilia could think what to say, Doctor Forman seized her hand and tugged off her glove. Though she had asked him for her star chart, he made bold to read her palm, his fingers quivering over the lines of her life and heart.

“You shall be a lady or attain some greater dignity,” he said, leaning so close that his breath stirred her hair. “Your husband shall speed well on his voyage but shall get little substance. The time shall come when you will rise, madam, but hardly because of this man. And yet some good fortune shall befall you.”

The astrologer's eyes seemed to dance with salacious imaginings of what this good fortune might entail and what pleasures he intended to take with her as a just reward for his services. Still clasping her hand, he yanked her toward himself.

“Master Forman, the goodwives of Westminster do not lie about your reputation.” In one fluid movement, Aemilia leapt to her feet, extracted her hand, and slid her glove back on. “You are indeed a ruttish old goat.”

Winifred, her maid, hurled a bag of coins on the astrologer's desk before she and her mistress sauntered toward the door.

“Italian baggage!” Master Forman yelled out after Aemilia.

But his insults were soon drowned out by his apprentice's helpless laughter.

“W
HAT A HATEFUL MAN
!” Winifred muttered, as she and Aemilia wound their way down the teeming street. “How could you suffer his touch? In faith, I would have screamed.”

“Merely scream?” Aemilia asked her affectionately. “Winifred, you disappoint me. Marry, I think you would have toppled him and left him for dead.”

Winifred did not allow this jibing to distract her from the subject at hand. “If you don't mind my saying, you should be more careful of the company you keep. All London knows Master Forman is a slavering lecher. What if Master Lanier discovers you've called in to see him?”

In truth, Winifred often despaired of Aemilia. Though she was a grown woman, a wife and mother, her mistress was far too dreamy, prone to innumerable flights of fancy.

“Peace, Winifred. I must know my destiny. So must everyone. The Queen may rely on the great Doctor Dee to read her stars, but we lesser souls must make do with lesser men.”

Her mistress's dark eyes were distant. While Winifred basted in her own sweat and reeled at the stench of entrails from the hog-scalding houses in Pudding Lane, Aemilia seemed to glide along, lost in her secret world. When she was in such a state, her head in the clouds even as she trod the dung-strewn street, there was no telling what mischief she might fall into.

“Let's go home,” said Winifred. Like a nursemaid taking charge of a child, she gripped Aemilia's arm.

Please God, just let her get her mistress safely back to Westminster and then Winifred could give her aching feet a good soak. Zounds, this heat was enough to melt her brains.

“I'm not yet ready to go home, Winifred.” Aemilia's voice was as cold as January.

A
EMILIA COULD NOT STOMACH
the thought of returning to Longditch, where her husband awaited her. She was not prepared to stand before him like an errant child while he demanded to know where she had been.

Surely, among the minstrels deemed suitable for her, Lord Hunsdon might have found some long-lashed lover of boys who would have been content to marry her for form's sake and then leave her alone. Anyone but Alfonse.

Aemilia's mind roved back to the astrologer's prediction, that she would achieve a degree of fame and importance, though not through any help from her husband. With her education, what she might have been able to achieve had she only been born a man! Were it not for her sex, she would, at the very least, be able to join her male cousins in the Queen's Musicke. But she was a woman of stained reputation who possessed neither title nor fortune. Instead, she was saddled with a resentful and dissolute young husband.
Let Alfonse sail. Let him be gone.

“I am ill-suited for marriage,” she told Winifred. “Better had I remained unwed, even with the child. In faith, I'd rather be a nun than Lanier's wife.”

Winifred heaved in laughter, her flesh quaking as though she were a giant jelly. “You a nun, mistress? Oh, you slay me, you do! Ah ha ha!” As she roiled in her merriment, Winifred knocked down a stranger who hit the street with a smothered yelp.

“Oh, sir, I do beg your pardon!” cried Winifred.

Being so thick of girth, Winifred found it cumbersome to crouch down and inspect the man for damage. But Aemilia knelt at his side, her silken skirts fanning out in the filth. Winifred despaired at the scrubbing she would have to do to remove the stains.

“Sir, are you injured?” Aemilia wiped the man's face with her handkerchief. “Forgive us if you can. My maid is clumsy and forgets her own strength.”

The man stared up in a daze as though struggling to get the wind back in his lungs. He looked to be in his late twenties, with soft brown hair haloing his head. But it was his clouded hazel eyes that drew her in, the eyes of a dreamer, filled with yearning intensity. This, she decided, explained why Winifred chanced to floor him—he had been too lost in the realm of his thoughts to leap out of her path.

When his bewildered gaze met hers, she drew back, embarrassed, for she'd never caught herself staring so deeply into a stranger's eyes.

With a sharp intake of breath, he heaved himself up on his elbows and staggered to his feet. Aemilia watched him brush the bits of straw and manure from his breeches and doublet. Though decent, his clothes were worn thin. Fortune, it seemed, had not been kind to him. But he could afford weaponry—at his belt hung a sheathed sword. No man of any substance walked the streets unarmed, even in daylight.

“Your hat, sir.”

Aemilia handed him his flat woolen cap, which he clapped on his head with murmured thanks. He regarded her with a look of bemused inquiry, as if he didn't quite know what to make of her and her maid. But as he glanced around, as though searching for landmarks, it seemed much graver matters haunted him. The man looked so
lost
—and not just disoriented by virtue of being in an unfamiliar district. Her heart brimmed for him, an outsider like herself.

“Sir, is there something in this parish you seek?” she asked him. “That church steeple you see is Saint Botolph's Billingsgate.”

“Weren't you christened in Saint Botolph's, mistress?” Winifred asked, shading her eyes from the sun's glare.

“Not this Saint Botolph's,” Aemilia said. “But Saint Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, outside the city walls. Near Shoreditch.”

The man's face seemed to light up at the mention of Shoreditch. Perhaps he hailed from there, though he scarcely looked familiar to her as he would have if they'd grown up in the same parish.

“Saint Botolph must have done something important to have so many churches named after him,” Winifred opined. “Was he the one who was impaled on a hundred different stakes?”

“No,” the man said shortly. “He wasn't a martyr but the patron of wayfarers, which is why the churches at all four city gates bear his name.”

By his speech, Aemilia knew him to be an Englishman but no Londoner. He came from some far-flung county unknown to her.

“My, my,” said Winifred. “Well, I suppose wayfarers do need their own patron.”

“Madam,” the man said, addressing Aemilia. “I seek the Stone House.”

“Right over there, sir.” Aemilia pointed out the way he must go.

“You're not going to that astrologer, are you?” Winifred asked him. “Sir, don't waste your money on that piss-pot prophet. You should buy a lamb pie instead. I've seen sparrows with more meat on their bones than you. Why, you are so scrawny, I could knock you flat like a bowling pin!”

“My good woman, you just
did
,” the man pointed out.

“Good day to you, sir,” said Aemilia. “And please accept our apologies for your mishap.”

With a nod to them both, he turned and continued on his way. As he strode forward, a sheet of folded paper fell from his doublet.

“Sir, you dropped something!” Aemilia called after him. She snatched it off the street before it could be trampled.

“Is it a broadsheet?” Winifred asked, her face blazing in curiosity, for the most scandalous stories could be found on broadsheets distributed throughout the city. Blood-streaked comets foretold the Apocalypse. Women gave birth to two-headed devils. Dogs stood on their hind legs and uttered prophecies. “Mistress, what does it say?”

Aemilia's face was spellbound as her eyes scanned the inked squiggles that Winifred couldn't make head or tail of. “Our friend is a poet.” She began to read softly while Winifred leaned close to listen.

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour

Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you.

Nor think the bitterness of absence sour

When you have bid your servant once adieu;

Nor dare I question with my jealous thought

Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,

But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought,

Save, where you are, how happy you make those.

So true a fool is love that in your will,

Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.

The verses cascaded through Aemilia, rendering her spellbound. Oh, to write so eloquently of the turmoil of a breaking heart and unequal love. The poet's pain pierced her, as though it were her own.

“If you please, madam.”

She gave a small cry as the man, his face as red as love apples, seized back his poem. Then he turned on his heel and rushed into the entrance of the Stone House.

“Why he
is
gone to see that astrologer!” Winifred cried. “Poor sod. From the look of him, he can ill afford it.”

“Indeed,” Aemilia said, recovering her composure. “He might have saved his coins. I could have revealed his fate at no cost.”

The man's face had shown Aemilia what ailed him, just as his sonnet had spelled out his most private yearnings.

“The man is in love,” she told Winifred. “Desperately in love. He is love's fool. And his love remains unrequited.”

Winifred's eyes were huge. “I wager he begs Master Forman for a love philter. Do such potions ever work, mistress?” The maid attempted to phrase the question as innocently as possible.

Aemilia shrugged. “I've never had the opportunity to find out.”

A
EMILIA INSERTED HER KEY
into the back gate. In she and Winifred slipped, creeping like thieves. How she hated this life of tiptoeing about.

Leaving Winifred to trail behind, Aemilia picked her way through the plantings of pease and lettuce. In spring, in a fit of rare optimism, she had planted this kitchen garden, thinking that might feed them even if her husband couldn't. But she lacked her father's talent for such things. Though the servants kept the vegetable beds watered and weeded, this was nothing like Papa's lost Eden, the magical garden of her childhood home.

Aemilia stooped to pick a love apple, newly ripened, fragrant and red. Before Winifred could stop her, she devoured it, savoring every last bite, licking the sweet juice from her lips. Papa used to tell her that love apples tasted like Veneto.