The Sonnet Lover (48 page)

“Fair,” Chihiro says. “But I’ve got a bottle of Laphroaig that says your story won’t change my mind about you and Bruno.”

“Okay,” I tell her, “as long as we open the bottle
while
I tell the story?”

So the next night we settle down in front of the electric heater with the single malt scotch and Ginevra’s poems, which I’ve divided into three stacks. “The first group of poems starts in June 1581, when she and her father left Italy and came to England.”

“Which is the same time Shakespeare disappears from Stratford for two years,” Chihiro points out.

“Right, Shakespeare would have been seventeen—just three years older than Ginevra. Stephen Greenblatt and E.A.J. Honigmann believe that Shakespeare came north to work as a tutor in the household of Alexander Hoghton—”

“Because of Hoghton’s will, right?” Chihiro asks, topping off my glass of scotch. It occurs to me that if Chihiro probes each detail of the story this thoroughly, we’ll both be unconscious by the time I reach the end of it.

“Yes,” I say, checking my notes, “Alexander Hoghton’s will, dated August third, 1581, requests that Sir Thomas Hesketh ‘be friendly unto Fulk Gyllome and William Shakeshafte now dwelling with me and either to take them unto his service or else to help them to some good master, as my trust is he will.’”

“And both Hoghton and Hesketh lived in Lancashire—not so far from here. Is there anything in Ginevra’s poems that indicate where in England she went or where her English lover came from?”

“I haven’t found any location clues yet—at least none that I’ve recognized—but it does seem likely that her lover was a tutor or teacher of some sort. She writes in a sonnet called ‘The English Lesson’ that ‘I cater to vocabulary’s Will; / When studying with thee I will not rush, / And gladly linger over final points, / That dazzle like the brightest, nearest stars.’”

“Vocabulary’s
Will
? Do you think it’s a pun on the name Will?”

“Possibly. Shakespeare certainly punned on his own name often enough, and she does it in another poem—‘Thy Will’s assaulted by the scythe of time,’ for instance, and in the last poem she wrote before leaving England, ‘This child might be the Will of crime and sin.’”

“
That
was her parting note?”

“Well, yeah, she tells her lover that she’s pregnant with another man’s child and her father demands that she go back to Italy and live as her rapist’s mistress and ‘pledge my unborn child / To custody of that unhuman man.’”

“Wow, that’s some Dear John letter! You know, if she were really Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, that send-off alone would explain why he was so harsh to her in the sonnets.”

“I’ve thought about that,” I say. “Shakespeare falls in love with this beautiful young Italian girl—he’s only seventeen himself, so she’d probably be his first love—whom he thinks is innocent, and then he finds out she was pregnant with another man’s child all along.” I pause to take a sip of the Laphroaig, thinking, not for the first time, of the parallels to my own story. How devastated I’d been to learn not just that Bruno had been unfaithful to me, but that he was going to have a child with someone else. “And then she deserts him to become that man’s mistress.”

“Ouch,” Chihiro says. “You know, Shakespeare wrote twenty-eight Dark Lady sonnets. Some critics think the number was deliberately chosen to represent his disgust with women’s menstrual cycles.”

“Well, there’s no doubt that Ginevra’s lover was angry with her. All the poems Ginevra wrote in 1593”—I point to the second stack of poems—“refer to this great betrayal in their past. She begs him to forgive her and come to Italy. I guess she hoped he would be more liberal in the warmer, more relaxed atmosphere of La Civetta. You can’t really blame her,” I say, shivering and helping myself to another glass of the scotch. Although the climate in the Lake District suits my mood, I can’t help pining for the warmth I’ve left behind, especially at night with the wind rattling the windowpanes in Chihiro’s cottage when I remember the lilac skies from my balcony at La Civetta.

“The saddest poem in this period is the one in which she tells him that her sacrifice has been twofold. She not only sacrificed him for her child, but she was also forced to sacrifice her role as mother. Her child was given to Barbagianni to replace the stillborn child of his lawful wife. She was allowed to stay in the house as Barbagianni’s mistress, but was never acknowledged as the child’s real mother. Then when Barbagianni died she had to leave the house that now belonged to Lorenzo Barbagianni’s brother and her own son. She pleaded with the poet to come to see her one last time before she consigned herself to the convent.”

“And he did?”

“According to her poems—yes. The last three poems written in 1592 recount his brief stay. One begins with the announcement of his arrival—‘How wonderful, to once again embrace, / and sample the sweet treasure of your lips.’ The next celebrates the renewal of their love. Everything sounds hunky-dory, but then there’s this one. Listen:

I understand thy angry, scathing flight

Behind an oaken screen engraved in rose,

Just like a player’s changing out of sight,

Between the scenes, as any actor knows

To do; and thy hath done, so many times.

Yet now it is no play, but warring hearts

That we perform, and I record in rhymes;

If only mercy softened anger’s art!

Let thee be moved to one more role, the kind,

Forgiving lover whose sweetness defies

Betrayal, shame, the wounds of words designed

To scathe and scorch; all bitter, venomed lies.

Let our love’s petals shimmer, scent the breeze

that blows so softly through our memories.”

“It doesn’t sound like things went so well,” Chihiro concedes. “What do you think she told him? I mean, he knew already that she left England pregnant with Barbagianni’s child. What else was there to reveal?”

“I think she told him that Fideo was his son,” I say.

Chihiro’s eyes widen, but then she nods eagerly, “Yeah—how did that other line go: ‘The child must be the
Will
of crime and sin.’”

“Exactly. And years later, in the poems she wrote in the convent, she writes to Fideo:

These words of loving kindness I bestowst

On thee are thy mother’s and not her ghost’s,

As well come from a man whose eloquence

Takes pride in you, despite your ignorance

Of an unhappy birth’s true circumstance.”

“But if Ginevra wrote the poems, why do the words come from someone else?”

“Because her English lover taught her to love poetry and to write it. In a poem called ‘The Sonnet Lover,’ she writes, ‘Since thou became my sonnet lover I / Have danced with iambs, kissed pentameter.’ It was the language of their love affair, and when the affair was over it was all she had left of him. So when she writes her sonnets she feels as if her words are his words, too—after all, she chose to continue writing in English even when she was no longer sending the poems to him.”

“So it’s the English lover who will be proud of Fideo even though—”

“He was originally ignorant of Fideo’s birth’s true circumstance, namely, that Fideo was his son. I’ve checked the dates and it makes sense. Ginevra was raped by Barbagianni on May first, 1581; she had left Florence by June first; and she wrote her first poem to her English lover on June seventeenth, 1581. Cecelia Cecchi died in childbirth in February of 1582 and Ginevra leaves England that same month. I think that when Pietro de Laura heard that Barbagianni’s wife had died in childbirth and lost the child, he wrote and told Barbagianni that Ginevra had given birth to a son. I think Ginevra was pregnant, but that she hadn’t had the baby yet, because it was her English lover’s son. The trip back to Italy could take months during the winter when the Alps were impassable. They could have stopped somewhere on the way for her to give birth and then continued on their way. Barbagianni wouldn’t have been able to tell if the child was a few months older or younger.”

“Wow,” Chihiro says, “Pietro had chutzpah. What if the baby was a girl—or died along the way?”

“If it had been a girl I’m afraid it
would
have died along the way. Imagine how frightened Ginevra must have been waiting to give birth.”

“And so,” Chihiro says, “years later, after Barbagianni is dead, she decided to tell her English lover that Fideo is his son. And when she did—”

“He didn’t take it so well that she had stolen his son away. He retreats ‘Behind an oaken screen engraved in rose, / Just like a player’s changing out of sight.’”

“Jerk,” Chihiro says, swilling the last of her scotch. “What other choice did she have?”

“Still, you can’t blame him for being angry. She betrayed him. She stole away his son—”

“This is how you think Bruno feels, isn’t it? Because Ginevra’s lover wouldn’t forgive her for stealing his son, you think Bruno will never forgive you for turning in Orlando.”

“You have to admit,” I say, holding up my now-empty glass, “there’s an eerie similarity. I can’t believe Bruno hasn’t noticed it—”

“Which doesn’t mean he’d feel obliged to act like Ginevra’s lover did. Maybe he’ll realize by reading the poems that it was foolish of Sonnet Guy to refuse to forgive Ginevra, and that it’s just as foolish for him not to forgive you.”

“Well, then, I’d have heard from him, right? So,” I say, getting up to go to bed and weaving a bit as I start up the stairs, “do I owe you a bottle of Laphroaig?”

When there’s no answer, I stop halfway up the stairs. Truthfully, this isn’t a bet I want to win. Although I’ve given up on Bruno, I’d hate to think that Chihiro, who’s always right, has. But when I turn around I see that the only reason she hasn’t answered is that she’s succumbed to the Laphroaig and fallen dead asleep.

The next morning I sleep late, and when I get up Chihiro’s already gone. In the kitchen I find Ginevra’s poems stacked under the empty bottle of Laphroaig. They’re not in the same order as I left them last night and I wonder whether Chihiro woke up later and reread them. I notice that the poem she’s left on top is the “Screen” poem. She’s underlined the lines “I understand thy angry, scathing flight / Behind an oaken screen engraved in rose” and penciled a note to me in the margin. “Asher, see page 38 Honigmann.”

My copy of
Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’
by E.A.J. Honigmann is lying on the table next to a package of Hob Nobs. I put on the kettle for tea and then turn to page 38 and read, while chewing a dry mouthful of oatcake, the paragraph that Chihiro has underlined.

“The Great Hall will particularly interest students of ‘Shakeshafte,’ since Sir Thomas Hesketh’s ‘players’ must have performed in it. While not as large as the great Banqueting Hall at Houghton Tower, which is lengthened by its minstrels’ gallery, its magnificently carved screen and other woodwork make it a most beautiful and impressive room.”

I go on to read that the moveable screen at Rufford Old Hall (Sir Thomas Hesketh’s ancestral estate) is seven feet wide, paneled on each side, and elaborately carved with quatrefoils in circles and “other late Gothic ornaments.” Might one of those ornaments be the roses mentioned in Ginevra’s poem?

The kettle whistles and I make myself a cup of PG Tips—tea so strong it cuts through the fog of my Laphroaig hangover. Or maybe it’s the direction my thoughts are taking that’s scoured clean my brain. If I can connect an image from Ginevra’s poem to a physical detail in the Lancashire house where Shakespeare is believed to have performed, then I may be on the road to proving that Ginevra de Laura
is
Shake-speare’s Dark Lady. I look up from the Honigmann book and out the kitchen window. For a change it’s not raining. The sky is a deep Alpine blue, dappled with clouds, as Shakespeare himself would say,
as white as the driven snow.
When I look back down I see that Chihiro has left the keys to her Range Rover and a map of Lancashire. My exhilaration is tempered for a moment by the thought that Chihiro is only trying to distract me from my broken heart.

On the road to Lancashire I admit to myself that I have, all this last week, allowed myself to believe what I scoffed at Chihiro for suggesting last night. How had she put it? That Bruno would realize by reading the poems that it was foolish of “Sonnet Guy” to refuse to forgive Ginevra…and that it was just as foolish for him not to forgive me. Ever since I started reading Ginevra’s poems on the train, I’ve been imagining Bruno reading the same poems and putting together the same story that I have been. Some days while I read one of Ginevra’s poems perched on a rock above a waterfall or by the side of a gloomy northern lake, I can almost feel Bruno’s presence. I would look up from Ginevra’s words and for a moment imagine him standing there—his dark hair beaded with the rain, his haunted eyes as gloomy as the deep mountain lakes. And even though I know he’ll never appear like that, the thought of him has driven me to keep reading the poems and spinning Ginevra’s story—this sense that it’s a story we are telling together.

And so I imagine him in the passenger seat of the Range Rover as I drive to Rufford Old Hall—I can hear his voice giving me the directions and admiring the scenery. I imagine him commenting on the Tudor half-timbered façade of the sixteenth-century hall as I pull up in front of it and noticing the hammer-beam roof. He’d know that the gardens we passed walking to the house are late Victorian, not Elizabethan. He might compare the topiary to the clipped hedges at La Civetta. While he paid our admission he’d tell me to look through the brochures on the rack by the entrance and pick out a place for us to have a picnic later. Since I can’t be two people, though, I pay my single admission fee to an elderly woman in a gray cardigan who looks like she could easily play Miss Marple, and leave the brochures alone. Then I ask for directions to the Great Hall.