The Dark Lady's Mask (44 page)

Will hadn't only dealt his death blow to their love but also to her aspirations as a playwright. Could she write without him as Aemilia Lanier? Who would read a woman's work? Even Anne Locke had contented herself with publishing translations of Calvin's sermons and kept her sonnets for her family and friends.

In the space behind her, Aemilia heard Alfonse telling Ben and Annie to go on without them.

“So that was your lover,” her husband said, when he caught up with her.

Though Alfonse had known of the affair since she had returned to England pregnant with another man's child, seeing Will on the stage seemed to have raised all her husband's buried pain.

“How could you betray me for someone so cruel?”

So it was not her betrayal itself that hurt him as much as the one she had chosen—a man who had just treated her far worse than Alfonse ever had even in the first bitter months of their marriage. And what could she say in her own defense—there were no words. Her husband's wounded face struck her dumb. What he must have suffered sitting beside her through that endless play that had laid bare her every sin. Meanwhile, she stood before him like the condemned adulteress in Jacopo Bassano's painting. Will had certainly shown every desire to stone her, and now Alfonse turned away.

“Let us go,” he said, and headed toward Bishopsgate, no doubt intent on walking back down Gracechurch Street to Billingsgate where they would board a wherry to Westminster.

But Aemilia couldn't take a single step in that direction—what if she met Will and his players in the street? Surely, like Ben and Annie, they would be heading for the Pye Inn to drink and feast and carouse. Clutching herself, she looked off into the green distance where lambs played behind blooming hedges, their bleating sounding almost like infants' cries.

“Why do you not come?” Alfonse retraced his steps and took her hand, but her flesh was so limp, there was nothing for him to grasp.

At the back of her head, she heard her father's urgent whisper.
Cara mia, instead of despairing over what you have lost, be grateful for what remains.
Was her tragedy greater than what Papa had endured? Everything had been taken from him—his home, his country, his religion—and yet he had lived on. He had been a good man and lived a good life.

“Can we not walk home over the fields?” Aemilia asked, when she had at last regained her voice.

“You wish to walk all the way to Westminster?” Alfonse gave her a doubtful look, as though fearing her senses had deserted her.

“Is it not a beautiful May?” She reached for his hand. “Will you walk with me, my husband?”

He nodded and touched her face. Together they set off across the undulating green countryside where she had once cantered Bathsheba. Passing beneath the windmills in Finsbury Fields, they headed west toward the outskirts of Saint Giles-without-Cripplegate where Aemilia had visited Will in his old boardinghouse.
What would have happened if I had not spirited him away to Italy when the plague raged through London and Westminter?
she wondered.
If I had just left him there?

He was a player, after all. Perhaps he had been deceiving her all along. She told herself she possessed nothing of his anymore. Not the ring he had given her, not even their child. Ah, but that was not quite true—she still had the
tarocchi
cards he'd bought for her in Venice.

Blackbirds trilled and swooped over meadows thick with speedwell while Alfonse told her about his childhood in Greenwich where he and his brother used to dig in the tidal mud along the Thames in search of treasure—once they found an ancient Roman coin. Aemilia sang a madrigal to tease a smile from her husband as they crossed a bridge over Fleet Ditch, where a mad girl like Ophelia might have drowned herself.

Before long, they passed Southampton House, its mullioned windows shuttered now that Harry and his bride had fled to France. She wondered what the young Earl would have made of seeing his likeness in the boy who played Ophelia. Would Harry have laughed and brushed it off as though Will's satire were no greater concern to him than a fly or would he, like her, have felt the blade cleaving flesh and bone?

At a farmhouse near Saint Giles-in-the-Fields, she and Alfonse bought a simple supper of buttermilk, coarse country bread with soft new cheese, and strawberries and cream. Then, heading south past Saint Martin-in-the-Fields, they walked in the shadow of the Royal Mews, where, as a girl, she had first met Lord Hunsdon when he was the Queen's Master of Hawks.

She remembered the first time Lord Hunsdon set a merlin falcon on her gloved arm. How she had trembled with both awe and pity to see such a glorious creature held captive by jesses and hood. Lord Hunsdon squeezed her shoulder and told her to release the bird.

With unpracticed fingers, she uncovered that beautiful head and loosed the fetters. Her entire being had exalted to see that raptor spread her wings and shoot high into the air until Aemilia could see only a tiny speck in the endless blue sky.

A lightness now spread within her, as though she were so buoyant that the wind might sweep her aloft.

“You are smiling.” Alfonse caught a tendril of her hair in his fingers.

“
Lanier
—does it not mean hunting falcon in French?”

He laughed. “You think we are birds?”

“Magnificent birds!”

Like the falcon, she had been blinded by her hood, bound by jesses. But the time had come to soar free. If Will had thought she could be so easily broken, she must disappoint him. She would endure.

Whitehall was washed pink in the evening sun and the ancient oaks in St. James's Park were lit fiery orange. She and Alfonse reached their home in Longditch as the last light faded.

W
HEN THEY SLIPPED THROUGH
the garden gate, Alfonse wrapped his arms around her.

“When I saw you as Cleopatra in the masque,” he said, taking her back to the days when she was Lord Hunsdon's mistress, the dark jewel of Elizabeth's court, “I thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”

His eyes, as dark as her own, moved over her face, and finally Aemilia understood with a shock of clarity. Alfonse had never despised her, but he had been angry and jealous because he thought she would never love him. Her heart opened in remorse to remember the many insults and slights she had hurled his way. How she wished she had uncovered the gentle lover inside her young husband early in their marriage before they had both made their irrevocable mistakes.

“Come, love,” she murmured, stroking her husband's curly hair. “Let's to bed.”

Taking his hand, she led him in the door and up the stairs to their chamber. Although they couldn't make love in the usual manner lest she risk catching the pox from him, there were other ways to share tenderness. She guided his hands to the lacings of her gown and stays. In their marriage bed, in the deep cradle of night, Aemilia held him and let herself be held.

 

 

LETTER FOR YOU, MISTRESS
,” said Winifred, entering the parlor where Aemilia played the virginals. “Is that not the Lord Hunsdon's seal?”

The maid shivered as if the missive had flown out of the man's grave. Henry Carey had died only a month ago. Aemilia's heart was still raw from the loss of him, her first paramour, her son's father. Hands frozen on the wooden keys of her virginals, she stared at the letter.

“It will be from the new Lord Hunsdon,” she told her maid.

George Carey was her dead lover's son and heir, a debauched rogue who had driven his father to despair and who dosed himself daily with mercury to treat his French pox. Like it or not, the man was now her landlord and also the new patron of the Lord Chamberlain's Men.

After Winifred withdrew from the room, Aemilia counted to eleven before breaking the wax seal. As she read, her hands began to shake. The letter floated to the floor. She stared around the parlor that was no longer hers. Her numb fingers brushed the wooden keys of the virginals, Henry Carey's gift to her, which she would have to sell.

George Carey had ended her forty pounds yearly income. Simultaneously, he was evicting her from this house.
Is it that he cannot abide his dead father's former mistress living on his property
, she wondered,
or does he claim the residence for a mistress of his own?

Now she must break the news to Alfonse and the Weir sisters. Where would they go now that they were reduced to her husband's income and what she earned with the plays? What if Alfonse's health took a turn for the worse?

Aemilia felt a drop in her stomach.
Here begins my decline.
Her face in her hands, she remembered how swiftly Papa had sunk into poverty, how misfortune had broken him.
Henry, did you know your son would cast me out into the cold?

A
LFONSE WAS WHITE LIPPED
when Aemilia read him the letter. When he finally recovered himself sufficiently to speak, she wanted to clap her hands over her ears.

“You must go live with my father and stepmother in Greenwich,” he said, “whilst I am at court.”

She could have spit blood, preferring John Knox's hell to going to live with her in-laws who had never once visited them in Westminster, who shunned her as the old Lord Hunsdon's whore.

“Greenwich is too far from my kin,” Aemilia said.

“My stepmother is your cousin!” her husband pointed out.

Aemilia gritted her teeth. “Jasper will take me in.”

B
UT
A
LFONSE REFUSED TO
demean himself by allowing his family to live off the charity of Jasper, his fellow court musician. Instead, Jasper found them a narrow, crooked house in the Liberty of Norton Folgate, not far from Aemilia's childhood home. Rents were much cheaper there. As long as Alfonse kept his income as a royal musician, they could afford to live here, albeit on diminished means.

Although Aemilia had once reaped a tidy income from her share in the Italian comedies, that revenue was reduced to a trickle now that Will had moved on to staging his own new work. He had even taken to rewriting their comedies and making them his own, excising her spirited Emelia from
The Taming of the Shrew.
If only she had been so prescient, not just desperate and pregnant, when she surrendered the fair copies of the plays to Lord Hunsdon. She was lucky she still had Ben to enforce their agreement on her receiving her share for
Twelfth Night, As You Like It,
and
Much Ado About Nothing.

Jasper, meanwhile, showed her and Alfonse around their new home. There was a kitchen and a tiny parlor, two bedchambers upstairs, and a drafty, low-ceilinged attic where Prudence, Winifred, and Tabitha would have to make do.

“In faith, it's much smaller than your old house,” her cousin told Alfonse. “But when you're away at court, Aemilia will live here alone.”