The Dark Lady's Mask (18 page)

“Have pity, kind sir!”

When she took out her purse and gave him a penny, half a dozen other beggars crowded round while a mob of urchins closed in from behind. In her gentleman's garb, Aemilia stood out to every pickpocket. Panic rose in her throat. How easily she could be dragged down from her horse, stripped of all possessions, including the false protection of her male garments. Gripping the reins in one hand, her sword in the other, she spurred on.

Bathsheba's hooves clattered on cobblestones when at last they entered the courtyard behind the Whitecross Tavern. The boardinghouse was a crooked, half-timbered structure with unglazed windows. What a sorry place for a poet to dwell. How could Southampton let his friend live like this—didn't he pay him for his poetry? Or was the poet too proud and high-minded to accept Southampton's money?

A woman of middle years bustled out, her hands on her hips, her eyes raking Aemilia over. Aemilia froze in the saddle. Surely another woman would see straight through her masquerade, see how her hands, too small to be a man's, trembled as she clutched the reins. But to her amazement, the woman's eyes widened and she fairly simpered.

“Good day to you, sir. Marry, I haven't seen a gentleman as handsome as you in quite some time.”

The woman curtsied low enough to expose her bosom. “Nell Skinner at your service, sir.” She smiled at Aemilia through her eyelashes.

Never had Aemilia contemplated what might happen if an amorous woman took her male guise to be true. She reminded herself to keep her voice in its lowest registers. “Madam, I seek a Master Shakespeare. I understand he lodges with you.”

Mistress Skinner twinkled, as though delighted to be called madam. “Indeed, he does, sir. Though what a fine gentleman like you would want with the likes of him, I don't know. He's a fortnight behind on his rent. But never you mind. Come, rest your legs in my parlor whilst I fetch him down.”

At first Aemilia hesitated, reluctant to turn her back on Bathsheba in this district of thugs, but Mistress Skinner insisted, showing her into another courtyard with a gate that locked. A grubby boy offered Bathsheba moldy hay, which the mare disdained in favor of the green weeds shooting up from between the broken flagstones.

In the boardinghouse parlor, Mistress Skinner made a huge fuss of seating Aemilia in her best carved chair.

“I'll just let Master Shakestaff know you've come to call. Any time you want to visit, sir, you are most welcome. My door is always open to you, sir, if you know my meaning!” The landlady spun around, giggling and lifting her skirts to flash her ankles and calves before she fluttered up the darkened stairwell.

The strain of her act left Aemilia shaking, and her heart slammed to think of the proposal she was about to make to this man, this stranger. Fumbling through her satchel, she reached for her pipe and tobacco, a habit she seldom indulged in, but she needed the strong physick to settle her nerves. Lighting the pipe from the hearth embers, she took a long draw on the sweet Virginian herb before settling back into the chair, her booted legs a-splay, as though she truly were a carefree young rake.

From up the stairwell, she heard Mistress Skinner banging on a door. “Wake up, you bugbear! There's a
gentleman
to see you!”

Moments later, Aemilia heard footsteps hurtling down the stairs. His face flushed, his hands clasped to his heart, the poet appeared before her.

“Harry!” he cried, before stopping short at the sight of her.

Enthroned in his landlady's best chair, Aemilia puffed her pipe and decided to play her part with brio. To revel in her act, as though she had been born to wear these breeches and this white linen shirt.

“Your good Mistress Skinner flirts with me in vain,” she said, affecting a mimicry of Southampton's airy drawl. “For I must agree with our late, lamented Kit Marlowe. All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.”

“What are you doing here?” the poet hissed. “And what do
you
know of Kit Marlowe?”

“Why, he was a friend of my cousin's, Ben Jonson. I presume you know Master Jonson.”

“I know
of
him,” the poet said with much venom, making her wonder if Ben had actually called him a sheep-biting bumpkin to his face. “What can I say of a man whose greatest cause of distinction comes from dropping the
h
from his surname?”

“Why so grim, sir?” Aemilia reproved. “I think you should be glad to see me. The other night you fled with such haste that I had no chance to return
this.
”

Reaching into her satchel, she handed him the scrolled pages of
Venus and Adonis.
She had devoured every line of the epic and its cadences still haunted her.

As the poet seized his manuscript and clutched it to his chest, his face seemed to unclench. For the first time, she saw him smile, which transformed his entire face. He was distractingly handsome, she noted.

“I thank you for its safe return,” he said. “Has anyone else seen it?”

“Only Southampton and I.”

Had he feared that Southampton's odious guests had laid hands on it?

“Sit you down, sir,” she told him. “I asked your landlady to warm a lamb pie I brought for you. My maid was right—you are too thin. But I hope your lean times shall soon end. This poem will make your fortune.”

“No poet can survive without a patron.” He pulled up a stool. “Do you carry a message from my Lord Southampton?”

The plaintiveness in his voice made her drop her eyes. “Lord Burghley summoned him away to his country estate. He fears the boy keeps the wrong company if left to his own devices. I fear neither of us shall see Southampton for quite some time.”

The poet sagged. “No matter. My London days are over.”

She cocked her head. “Where do you intend to go?”

“Lancashire,” he said. “To seek a teaching post with a noble family. I served them once before.”

“Lancashire,” she breathed. It seemed as far away as the Americas. “Is that your home?”

He laughed bleakly and shook his head. “I hail from Warwickshire.”

“Do you not miss your family?” she asked him. “Your wife?” Southampton, she recalled, had mentioned Will's wife.

He stared at her for a moment before gazing down at the stale rushes on the floor. “They all see me as a failure. I'm nearly thirty, yet I've nothing to show for it. Only a few history plays performed by Lord Strange's Men. My wife earns more as a country maltster than I do in London for all my toil and ambition. I daren't return to her until I've made something of myself. I'm ashamed to show my face to my own son. But anything I do earn, I send home so he can attend grammar school.” Will seemed particularly keen to make this last point.

Aemilia sensed his secret relief to be offering this confession to a stranger he thought never to see again. She could nearly taste the man's dejection. As she had, this poet had lost any sense of a true home, of belonging anywhere.

“Your wife is a maltster, you say?” she asked him.

“She brews ale,” he said.

“A useful skill, indeed.” Aemilia tried to imagine life as a prosperous tradeswoman, independent of the vagaries of her husband's earnings. “Why did you attempt to leap out the window at Southampton House?”

“To avoid that bleating wastrel Robert Greene.” The poet let out a sigh. “He satirizes me in his pamphlets. Because I never attended university, he thinks me ignorant. He mocks me as a base-bred hayseed from the shires, a
Johannes factotum.
”

“Jack of all trades and master of none,” Aemilia translated.

“One night I scribe a play. The next I'm a player upon the boards. But my adventures here have ended.”

“Lamb pie, good sir!” Mistress Skinner pranced in with a tray.

Her servant girl set up a table between Will and Aemilia then the landlady set down two steaming wooden trenchers. The poet fell upon his food and devoured it. When the landlady's back was turned, Aemilia took his empty trencher and passed him her own untouched portion.

“Before you leave for Lancashire, pray hear my proposal.” She looked him in the eye without coyness or guile, as though she truly were another man. His equal. But what she said next made him choke. “I want to write plays with you, Master Shakespeare.”

He sputtered.

“My cousin, Master Jonson, says it's not uncommon for playwrights to work with collaborators. Have you never done so before?”

“But you . . . but you . . . are a—”

“An Italian!” she said brightly, with a wink to Mistress Skinner who hovered nearby, dusting everything in sight while leaning close to eavesdrop. “And that, sir, works in your advantage. Do you think Mistress Skinner would be so kind as to fetch two goblets?”

The landlady nearly fell flat delivering her curtsy. “At once, sir!”

Aemilia returned her attention to the poet. “Master Jonson says your history plays have not made much money.”

The poet's mouth twisted, as though preparing to deliver some sarcastic retort, but then he looked resigned.

“Imagine if your plays were to catch the Queen's attention.” Leaning across the table, she found herself staring into his hazel eyes. She saw the face of a country man trapped on the outskirts of a heaving city that would spit him out like a broken tooth if his luck did not improve. “Her Majesty's favorite entertainments are Italian. The masque and the madrigal. Her favorite dance is
la volta.
And she adores commedia dell'arte. We shall write comedies, you and I. It would be scandalous for me to write under my own name, so we shall do it under yours. And evenly divide the profits.”

“How shall one as lowly as I attract Her Majesty's attention?” The skepticism fairly shot from his tongue.

“Why, Southampton himself told you of my . . . my association with the Lord Chamberlain. I still have his ear. I shall persuade him to form a new theater company—the Lord Chamberlain's Men.” She could not resist smiling in triumph.

Still, his suspicions were not allayed. “If you have the Lord Chamberlain at your beck and call, then surely you don't need me. Why not collaborate with your cousin, Master Jonson?”

“Because I've read your poetry, and no one writes about love the way you do.” She had been in awe of his verses ever since she first laid eyes on the sonnet he had dropped in Thames Street. “Besides,” she added cheerfully, “you seem rather desperate.”

He shot her a cross look.

“Just imagine comedies filled with your poetry of love,” she said.

“Two goblets, sir!” Mistress Skinner swept in.

“Poets may write of love,” Will said in a low voice. “But poems are private things. Such sentiments are not for public display.”

“Don't listen to him, sir!” Mistress Skinner interjected. “What does a provincial like Master Shakestaff know? I fancy a good love story, me. A proper romance!” She cast Aemilia a smoldering glance.

Clearing her throat, Aemilia pulled the flask from her satchel and poured pale wine into the two pewter goblets. “Drink with me, if you will, to seal the bargain,” she said to the poet.

“What sort of wine is that?” Mistress Skinner asked. “Might I have a taste, sir?”

“It's nothing grand,” Aemilia told her. “Just some humble elderflower wine my servants brewed in Essex.”

“What are those odd bits floating in it?” the poet asked.

Aemilia shrugged. “Special herbs, no doubt. Each country wine has its own secret recipe.”

“Bottom's up!” Mistress Skinner seized Will's goblet and was about to knock back the pale liquid when a caterwauling in the passageway made her wrench her head round.

“Mistress!” her maid screeched. “That lying sod Mullin is flitting off with all his goods and gear!”

The landlady slammed the untasted wine down on the table.

“Satan's toenails!” Mistress Skinner bellowed, rolling up her sleeves. “I'll have his bollocks on a plate!”

Off she thundered in pursuit of the hapless Master Mullin, whom Aemilia judged to be even further behind on his rent than the poet.

“Now we have our peace,” Will said, with a smile.

They raised their goblets to each other.

“To poetry!” she cried.

“To the Muse,” he said.

“I know this must seem very strange to you.” With the landlady gone, Aemilia dropped her guard and spoke in her natural voice. “I have a humanist's education and yet I am forbidden to use it to earn my bread. So I am forced to wear a mask.”

“And that is what you want from me,” he said. “To be your mask.”

He held her gaze for a second before sipping the pale wine.

She stared into her goblet. Fragrant and light on her tongue, it was clearly weak enough in alcohol content to render it harmless and completely wholesome. A child could drink it and suffer no ill. The poet drained his goblet while she sipped and savored hers.

“We shall write comedies,” she said. “Full of love and Italian sunlight.”

As the English sun streamed through the unglazed window, the poet seemed to warm to her proposal. Collaborating with a woman in breeches might seem an eccentric arrangement, but surely it was a more inviting prospect, she reasoned, than for the man to exile himself in Lancashire where he would surely vanish into obscurity.

“Let me give you this before I go.” She passed him a small pouch of coins. “This should keep your landlady happy.”

She also offered him the rest of the elderflower wine. When he shook his head, she stoppered the flask and returned it to her satchel. Their conversation concluded, she rose from her chair and headed for the door.

“Wait,” he said.

She turned, glancing back at him over her shoulder.

“What is a
hetaira
?” His face shone in earnest entreaty.

She felt herself blush all the way down her neck. Damn Southampton for putting that word in the poet's head.