The Dark Lady's Mask (53 page)

“My dear friend,” Margaret said. “Will you write a poem about Cookham to preserve it in my memory?”

Aemilia looked at her through her tears. “Sweet Margaret, I will.” She bowed her head. “Anne once told me you possessed the gift of prophecy. Can you reveal anything of my future?”
How shall my life go on without you?

Margaret took Aemilia's face in her hands. “Yours is the soul of a true poet. Your words shall endure long after I am dead and forgotten.”

T
HAT NIGHT AN ARCTIC
cold descended. When Aemilia awakened, stiff and numb, she saw that outside her window the garden, hills, and trees glittered with frost.

In defiance of the chill, she and the Clifford women took their last walk up to the heights of Cookham Dean.

“We should have known our fleeting worldly joys couldn't last,” said Margaret, her voice spectral as she marched up the path.

Anne rushed off ahead of them, reminding Aemilia of a filly fighting the bit and bolting away.

“Now I must arrange her marriage,” Margaret said. “Pray God, her husband will prove kinder than her father.”

Aemilia's heart weighed on her, slowing her steps as she recalled her first stroll up this hill in May 1603, when the trees were crowned in new leaves. When wildflowers spangled the grass. When the air rang with the songs of nesting birds. Now crows perched on naked branches. The weak sun gave no comfort. It was as if the world had grown old, the frozen grass brittle with age's hoary hairs. How desolate everything appeared, each arbor, bank, and bush. Everything that had once been green withered away in cold grief, making the earth its grave.

“Nothing's free from Fortune's scorn,” Aemilia told Margaret.

“There's one small property from my jointure that George neglected to pass on to his brother,” her friend said. “In Clerkenwell Green. In faith, I think it was too humble for them to trouble themselves over.”

“I've often accompanied my husband to Clerkenwell,” Aemilia told her, “so he could drink the healing waters there.”

“Why, then, if you don't find it too lowering, I would offer it as a domicile for you and your family. You say Alfonse still struggles with debt and ill health.”

“Sweet Margaret, how can I thank you?” Moved to tears, Aemilia took her friend's hand. “Maybe one day you will visit me there.”

“God willing.”

Margaret's hand enclosing hers was the only warmth on that November day.

B
ENEATH THE GREAT OAK
tree, Anne awaited them. From the look of her red swollen eyes, the girl had been crying. When Margaret went to console her daughter, Aemilia turned to gaze out over the hills and fallow fields, the villages and valleys, the Thames mirroring the dull sky. A blast of wind swept right through her, as though she were a skeleton with no flesh to clothe her knocking bones, no heart beating inside her rib cage. But when Anne came to hug her, she held the girl and wept over her as if she were her own lost Odilia.

“I shall never forget our lessons,” Anne told her. “Every time I sing a French chanson or an Italian madrigal, I shall think of my Mistress Aemilia.”

“Godspeed, my brilliant girl.” Her breath turning to mist in the cold air obscured her view of Anne's young face. “You shall become a great lady. As magnificent as your mother.”

Aemilia and Anne turned to Margaret and caught her in the act of embracing the towering oak.

“Mother is kissing the tree,” Anne whispered in wonder, as though her mother had become a pagan before her eyes.

W
HEN MARGARET AND HER
daughter set off downhill, Aemilia remained behind. Opening her arms as wide as they would go, she pressed her body against the riveled rind of the tree trunk, allowing the rough bark to imprint its pattern on her cheek. Her lips sought out the precise spot Margaret had chosen. Closing her eyes, she stole her friend's kiss from the tree.
Why should a mere senseless oak possess so rare a favor?

Only then did she turn and head down the path where mother and daughter had stopped to wait for her. Anne took her hand before they continued on their way, three women cast out of Eden. Their idyll couldn't last. But Aemilia made a silent vow that her poetry for Margaret would endure.

This last farewell to Cookham here I give,

When I am dead thy name in this may live,

Wherein I have perform'd her noble hest,

Whose virtues lodge in my unworthy breast,

And ever shall, so long as life remains,

Tying my heart to her by those rich chains.

 

 

OU MUST TELL ME
all about Anne's wedding!” Aemilia could scarcely contain her excitement as she filled Margaret's goblet with claret and offered her another portion of Winifred's lamb pie with rosemary and wild garlic.

How her heart gloried to see her friend again for the first time in five years. They supped in the dining chamber of the modest house in Clerkenwell Green where Margaret had invited Aemilia and Alfonse to live rent free. Though Aemilia's pride smarted under living off her friend's largess, Margaret insisted it was only fitting to offer patronage to a gifted poet.

Without Margaret's help, she and Alfonse might have descended into squalor. Despite Harry's promise, the patent on the weighing of hay and straw had not yet come through and they remained deep in debt. At least Alfonse still drew his yearly forty-eight pounds from the King's Musicke even though he no longer played the flute, for his fingers had grown too swollen and stiff from the disease that devoured him from within like slow poison. Yet it hadn't dampened his yearning to advance himself by seeking out the company of high-ranking gentlemen who might champion him as Margaret had championed her. Aemilia sensed it was her husband's dearest wish to die a man of noble esteem rather than a debtor and a failure.

This very evening, Alfonse was out dining with Thomas Jones, the visiting Archbishop of Dublin, with whom he had served in Ireland. This left Aemilia free to direct her full attention on Margaret, who had come down from Westmoreland for her daughter's recent wedding at the Knole estate in Kent. Margaret was staying the night with Aemilia, the first station on her long journey back north.

Aemilia couldn't be happier for her former pupil, who had written a letter to her full of infatuated praise of her bridegroom, Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset. Knole was by all accounts one of the grandest houses in the realm and boasted its own deer park. She pictured nineteen-year-old Anne riding out in the hunt, as fleet as the goddess Diana.

“To Anne, Countess of Dorset!” Aemilia lifted her goblet.

Margaret raised her glass but not her spirits from the look of it. At first, Aemilia assumed her friend was merely weary from the long ride, but now she saw that something distressed her.

“I only hope I made the right match for her,” Margaret said. “Pray God Dorset proves a man of honor.”

“Have you any cause to doubt his honor?” Aemilia asked, as gently as she could.

“Once I counted myself blessed,” her friend said brokenly, “that God saw fit to grant me the power of prophecy. Yet, when I needed the gift most, it failed me.”

This was the closest thing to sacrilege Aemilia had ever heard her friend utter. She drank in Margaret's anguish. Having suffered such a harrowing marriage, it must have been Margaret's worst fear that her daughter might endure the same fate. And Margaret must return to Westmoreland, as far away from Knole and her daughter as she could be without leaving England. Anne had married in late February. Only now, in May, had Margaret wrenched herself away to return to her northern residence.

“I fear Dorset will use every sugared word to persuade Anne to stop fighting for her inheritance and accept the monetary settlement,” Margaret said. “So that
he
might spend it as he pleases.”

Aemilia reached across the table to take her hand. “As if any daughter of yours would abandon the battle for justice.”

With those words, a genuine happiness seemed to bloom in Margaret's face. “How good it is to see you again. If only you knew how much I've missed you.”

Aemilia basked in the warmth of their friendship. “I wish you could stay longer.”

But she knew without being told that every day Margaret remained away jeopardized her claim on Brougham Castle, which she had chosen as her residence rather than the dower house assigned to her. Brougham Castle, near Penrith, was one of the most ancient seats of the Clifford dynasty. By living there, she was claiming it for her daughter. The castle had fallen into disrepair, but Margaret was working to restore it.

“I wish you could ride north with me,” Margaret said. “The journey seems endless. If my health takes a turn for the worse, I fear I might never see the south of England again.”

Never see Anne or me again.
Aemilia tried to push away her sense of forboding.

“Pray, don't speak so,” she said. “You've all your alchemical remedies. You're a stalwart soul.”

But Margaret was forty-nine and there was no telling how long the fight for Anne's inheritance would drag on. Aemilia saw how it wore her friend down.

“Let us speak of happier things,” said Margaret. “The poem you wrote in honor of Anne's wedding was a loving tribute. I'm sure she'll treasure it always.”

“It was my pleasure, truly.”

What a luxury it was to write poetry. These days Aemilia spent her days teaching music, Italian, and French to the daughters of the gentry and aspiring middling classes that thronged in Clerkenwell.

“Will you never publish your poems?” Margaret asked her.

Aemilia flushed at the very notion. “Marry, they're too private.” Though once she had longed more than anything to see her writing in print, now she thought it would be like opening up her innermost soul to public mockery. “I'd much rather you and Anne treasure your copies.”

She had transcribed her poetry into two small quarto volumes, one for Margaret and one for Anne, with each poem penned in her finest italic handwriting. Poets, after all, published to seek patronage, but she already had her beloved patron and Muse. It seemed churlish to ask for more.

“What nobler audience could I possibly seek?” she asked Margaret.

“Your inspiration is a gift of divine grace to be shared with the world. Surely other ladies would rejoice in your verses. In ‘Eve's Apology' you defend all womankind.”

Margaret's praise enveloped Aemilia in a soft, sheltering cloak.

T
HEY SAT UP LATE
and sipped from a flask of Margaret's aqua vitae. As the liquor warmed her within and without, Aemilia could nearly believe they had been transported back to Cookham. She listened to her friend describe the harsh, wild beauty of Westmoreland, so pristine and sparsely populated, a land of wind-scoured fells and icy lakes. Aemilia told her about Henry, sixteen years old and well on his way to becoming a royal musician. Then she read from the verses she had written in honor of Anne's marriage.