The Dark Lady's Mask

by Mary Sharratt

  “Where’s Angela?” Aemilia demanded. Why had he come without her?

  Her brother-in-law only brushed her away while Mother blustered past to fuss over him, opening their last flask of Canary wine in his honor.

  “How is our Angela?” Mother only presumed to ask this after Master Holland was seated in their best chair with the carved armrests.

  “Oh, she is fine,” he said. “But for one thing.”

  Aemilia and her mother froze.

  “Might I trouble you for one small favor, Mistress Bassano? Could you lend us a few sovereigns? I’m afraid I’m in need of it. Business matters,” he said ruefully. “Of course, I shall pay you back promptly. I ask for Angela’s sake.”

  Though Aemilia glared fixedly at his face, his entire attention was on Mother who turned bright pink.

  “Oh, sir! My husband is out and we haven’t that much money in the house.”

  Rising from his chair, Master Holland loomed over Mother, who seemed to shrink inside his shadow. “Are you quite certain? I thought Master Bassano was in the habit of hiding away a few coins here and there. Is he not doing well these days, working in the theater, so I hear?”

  The idea of Master Holland prying behind panels in search of Papa’s hard-won savings made Aemilia seethe.

  “Papa gave you one hundred pounds,” she told him.

  Mother’s face darkened as she ordered her from the room, yet it was the glint of fury in Master Holland’s eyes that frightened Aemilia. Her heart thumped in panic, but she refused to leave until she’d had the last word.

  “Ten thousand mischiefs in your guts!” she screamed in her brother-in-law’s face before she darted away.

  HOURS LATER, WHEN PAPA returned home, her parents quarreled. Huddled in the bed she’d once shared with her sister, Aemilia couldn’t have closed her ears to their shouting if she had tried.

  “You promised him the virginals?” Papa’s voice rang out in disbelief. “You had no right. That’s for Aemilia.”

  “Aemilia’s just a child. Angela’s a married woman. She and Master Holland need—”

  “He’s already gone through her dowry, the wastrel. I should have forbidden the match.”

  “I promised him!” Mother was weeping.

  Papa was silent. Aemilia could picture his face—he was too outraged to even speak.

  “Can we not pawn anything?” Mother was like a dog with her teeth in meat. She would not give it up. “Surely we can give them something.”

  “There’s nearly nothing left of our savings as it is! Would you let him bankrupt us? Let him ruin us? You think I will live forever and always be here to provide?”

  Hearing her father’s voice break, Aemilia began to sob. Her heart beat in terror of a world that didn’t have Papa in it.

  THE NEXT MORNING MASTER Holland appeared at their door, hoping perhaps to find Mother alone again. Instead Papa confronted him with a face like thunder.

  “Do you think to wheedle more money from my wife?” he demanded. “I see she already gave you her housekeeping money.”

  Holland’s mouth twisted in a sour smile. Out from behind him stepped Angela, as though emerging from her husband’s shadow. She stood trembling on the threshold.

  Aemilia threw herself at Angela, burying her head in her skirts. Through the worn fabric, she could feel her sister’s bony hips. Angela had grown so thin, as though she hadn’t eaten a morsel since her wedding feast three weeks ago. Had her sister been ill? Angela didn’t hug her back but only stood there, stiff as a fence post.

  “Cara mia.” Papa embraced her, tears in his eyes.

  But Angela’s eyes were empty. This is no longer my sister, Aemilia thought. Mother came barreling out, exclaiming how thin and pitiful Angela looked.

  Aemilia scowled at Master Holland, who looked perfectly healthy and well fed while her sister was as gaunt as a starveling. No one could have mistaken her for a gentleman’s wife. The only thing of quality to be found on her person was the golden ring her husband had given her, now sliding loose on her finger. Had Master Holland starved her on purpose? Aemilia’s spine crawled when she remembered Lord Hunsdon telling her that his merlin falcon ate only at his command. Yet it was not Lord Hunsdon who had turned her sister into a skeleton, but her lawful husband. Papa was wrong. Angela was wrong. She would have been happier with Lord Hunsdon. He would have made her a lady. Aemilia imagined her mother would beat her silly if she even guessed she was thinking such thoughts.

  “Let’s get you some food, love.” Mother held Angela as though she’d never let her go. “There’s fresh baked bread. And pottage on the hob. If I’d known you were coming, I would have made you lamb-and-fennel pie.”

  Angela only wriggled out of her grasp and delivered her line as though she were a player at the Theater in Shoreditch.

  “Poor Francis is having a dreadful time with his creditors. Papa, could you lend us anything at all?”

  Papa sagged. “If your husband cannot provide, you must come back home, Angelina. We’ll look after you. We always have.”

  “Yes!” Aemilia cried, hugging her again.

  Her sister, she hoped, would sleep in their old bed again. Angela would tell her stories at night and everything would be as it was before, the house ringing with her madrigals.

  “Go with your mother into the kitchen,” Papa told Angela. “Let her feed you before you blow away.”

  Angela only stood there looking lost and miserable, as though she could no longer take a step on her own without her husband’s permission. What had he done to her? Aemilia glared at Master Holland with pure hatred. But he ignored her the way he would a yapping dog.

  “It’s my grave misfortune,” the man drawled, “that my creditors are as mean as Jews.”

  Master Holland cast a pointed stare at Papa, who went as pale as wax. Panic rose inside Aemilia’s chest—why did her brother-in-law’s words leave Papa so stricken?

  “I’ve heard dark rumors indeed,” said Holland, “of a secret cabal of Jews in the Liberty of Norton Folgate who convene by night in secret underground chambers.”

  Her heart quickened. So this was Papa’s secret, what he hid from her, although Mother and Angela knew. Her father and his brothers were Jews, like the patriarchs in the Old Testament.

  “What might our Queen do,” Holland went on, “if she knew there were such ungodly men in her midst?”

  Papa’s face hardened into stone. “Get out of my house.”

  Aemilia trembled as her father’s anger and helplessness ripped through her. If Holland betrayed him, Papa could be imprisoned or even slain. How had her brother-in-law, of all people, uncovered Papa’s secret? He could have only learned this from Angela. Aemilia gaped at her sister, who looked straight ahead with blank eyes.

  “Angelina,” Papa said, his face softening again. “This is your home. You are welcome here always. But not that man.”

  Holland stood his ground, revealing his teeth with an icy smile. “Fine words coming from a Jew dog who loves his gold more than his daughter. But then Angela’s not your daughter, is she? I wouldn’t have sullied myself with her if she was.”

  Aemilia watched her father’s temper rise like a storm, but Mother threw herself between the two men and shoved Master Holland out the door with such force that she knocked him backward over the threshold. He would have fallen had not Angela grabbed his arm and pulled him up again.

  Aemilia gazed at her sister through her tears. How could Angela betray Papa who adored her, and all for the sake of a husband who treated her as if she were a boot scrape?

  Papa and Angela exchanged one last look until Angela at last turned her back on him. Master Holland, appearing outraged for the humiliation he had suffered—bowled over by a woman!—hauled her off down the street.

  “I’ll flog him all the way back to Bristol,” Papa said.

  But Aemilia knew he was too tender to crush a fly.

  “Cara mia,” he said, taking Mother’s face in his hands, “promise me you
’ll never let him set foot inside this house again.”

  Mother’s eyes flooded with tears and she made no promise at all. She looked as though she were torn apart, as though Papa and Angela each claimed half of her. If driving Master Holland out of their lives meant losing Angela, Mother would keep opening the door to him whenever Papa was out.

  “She’ll leave him.” He gripped the back of a chair as though he might collapse without it. “We can send her away. To Italy.”

  Mother shook her head. “She’s wed to him. She’s his now.”

  AFTER HER PARENTS HAD sent her to bed, Aemilia crept to her chamber window and saw Papa wandering like a ghost in the moon-drenched garden. Slipping on her cloak, she stole down the stairs and out the back door. She found him sitting beneath his grape arbor, his head in his hands.

  “Papa,” she whispered, sidling up to him, pressing her shivering self into his warmth.

  When he spoke, he sounded so undone. “Go back to bed, Little Mischief, before you catch your death in this cold.”

  But she clung to him with all her stubborn love until he hugged her back, wrapping her inside his cloak.

  “Is that why you had to leave Italy?” she whispered in his ear. “Because you’re a Jew? Uncle Alvise, Giacomo, Antonio, and Giovanni, too?”

  Papa clamped his mouth shut. At first, she feared he would tell her nothing. Then he seemed to reconsider.

  “It’s better you should hear it from me,” he said at last, “and not some hateful scoundrel like your brother-in-law.”

  Holding her close, speaking in a voice so soft she struggled to hear, he told her his story. The tapestry of a man forced to flee his country, to abandon any sense of belonging anywhere.

  Papa and his brothers were driven from their home when the town of Bassano purged itself of its Jews. Her father was only nine years old. They fled to Venice, where they assumed the guise of Catholic conversos and sought protection under the Doge. Their music saved them. The Bassano brothers were considered the finest musicians and instrument makers in Venice, virtuosos of the cornett, crumhorn, flute, lute, recorder, shawm, sackbut, and viol. But were they truly safe there—what if the Doge proved fickle?

  What was more, they were trapped in a hopeless double bind. If they lived openly as Jews, they would be forced to live within the cramped Ghetto, where the tenements were stacked eight stories tall to house all the inmates. Worse, they would no longer be allowed to earn their living as professional musicians and instrument makers. Jews, by law, were only allowed to work as moneylenders, to run pawnshops, to sell used clothing, to practice medicine, or to work the Hebrew printing press. Not very long before the Bassanos’ arrival, no Jew had the legal right to reside within Venice at all, yet already people were complaining that there were too many of them for the Ghetto to contain.

  But to live outside the Ghetto as a converso was to risk being unmasked as a Jew. At any moment they might be banished or sentenced to toil as galley slaves for twenty years or more. Any slip might give away their true religious loyalties—dressing too fine on a Saturday or refusing to eat pork. Papa and his brothers knew they lived in Venice on sufferance, their very survival hanging upon a thread.

  Deliverance came in the person of Thomas Seymour, brother of Jane Seymour, that short-lived Queen. Italian musicians were the height of fashion, and Old King Henry coveted what he did not possess. So Sir Thomas took Aemilia’s father and uncles back to England to play in the King’s Musicke. On this cold island, so far from their home, her kinsmen adopted the mask of Protestants, changing their colors as deftly as any chameleon. In the early years, King Henry offered them accommodation in a former Carthusian monastery he had sacked. His Majesty loved nothing better than to float down the Thames upon his royal barge while his Italian minstrels serenaded him. Here in England, the brothers Bassano thought they could keep their secret, in this country where there had officially been no Jews since King Edward I expelled them in 1290.

  Their saga of exile stretched back even further into history. Before Bassano, Papa’s people had dwelled in Sicily, where they earned their bread as silk weavers until they had to flee. The mulberry tree and silk moths still graced the Bassano family coat of arms. Centuries before they arrived in Sicily, their ancestors made their home in Portugal.

  Aemilia clasped his hands. “Am I a Jew then, too?”

  Now that she knew, could she join Papa and her uncles in their secret prayers?

  “You must stay true to the Queen’s religion.” He gripped her shoulders. “That’s the only way to stay safe. Don’t you understand, Aemilia? I came all this way so you could live in peace.”

  FROM THAT NIGHT ONWARD, Aemilia knew there was no pretending she was an English girl like any other, not with Papa’s blood running in her veins. Like him, she would remain an outsider, heir to everything her father and his people had endured, yet she was forbidden to share in it or even to speak his religion’s name.

  To think Papa had left his home and traversed the continent of Europe seeking safety and refuge only to have Master Holland threaten to ruin him. Aemilia’s uncles stopped visiting on Friday evenings. No more did the sound of secret singing rise from beneath the floorboards. With Holland’s threat of blackmail hanging over their heads, her home became a battlefield.

  Late at night, her parents’ disputes raged on, providing Aemilia with a sad education. Francis Holland was a master of masks and concealment, only revealing his true face once the wedding revels had ended and his marriage to her sister was sealed. Papa discovered Master Holland was already hundreds of pounds in debt when he and Angela exchanged their vows. What money his family had given him, he had reduced to nothing, spending it on wine, fine clothes, and one failed business venture after another. Brought up in sloth, he had no head for commerce. Francis Holland shunned hard work the way Mistress Locke shunned deviltry.

  4

  N THE COLD MARCH twilight, Aemilia and her father walked home from Uncle Alvise’s house in Mark Lane, Papa’s hand enclosing hers and his head bent over his feet. How it crushed her to see him like this, the fire dimming in his eyes. He had lavished such love on Angela, only to have that love rejected. If I was older, Aemilia thought. If I was a boy, I’d be able to earn my own living. Papa wouldn’t have to carry this all alone. She would be able to give Master Holland the thrashing of his life. Put the fear of God into him lest he ever dare hurt her sister or threaten her father again. But she was a girl, a millstone dragging Papa down, neither truly Italian nor truly English. She was a foreign bastard, a halfling who belonged nowhere.

  PAPA WAS BROKEN AND could take no more. Seventeen years ago, he had saved Margaret Johnson, a pregnant and abandoned wife, and had raised her daughter as his own, only for that girl to marry a conniving brute who held the entire family in his thrall. Late at night, Aemilia heard Papa praying in his forbidden language. When the willow in their neglected garden burst into tender new leaves, he collapsed and took to his bed.

  IN APRIL PAPA’S GARDEN was a paradise of blossom, the grass filmy with speedwell, the blackbirds trilling among blooming apple boughs. But Papa lay dying. It was just before Aemilia’s eighth birthday. Her uncles gathered round his bed, weeping as openly as she did. Anne Locke had come to pay her respects while Master Vaughan, Mistress Locke’s brother, recorded Papa’s last will and testament. Mother tried to drag Aemilia from the room, but the child shook her off and huddled next to Mistress Locke. Nothing could have wrenched her from Papa’s bedside.

  “Let Aemilia be educated,” Papa said, extracting a promise from Mistress Locke. His voice broke in its urgency. “I beg you, good lady. Find her a place in Susan Bertie’s household.”

  Aemilia had often heard Papa and Mistress Locke speak of Susan Bertie, the young Dowager Countess of Kent. The daughter of Mistress Locke’s great friend Catherine Willoughby, Susan was a true humanist who believed that girls should receive the same education as boys.

  “To Margaret Bassano alias Johnson, my reputed wife,” P
apa said, “I leave this house and property and all its effects, save the virginals, which shall be Aemilia’s and kept at my brother Giacomo Bassano’s house until she comes of age. My last one hundred pounds I leave to Aemilia, to be bequeathed when she turns twenty-one or upon her wedding day, whichever comes first.”

  This was Papa’s way of keeping her inheritance—the last of his life’s savings—safe from Master Holland. For all his love and care, he hadn’t been able to save Angela, who was now pregnant, as good as manacled to Master Holland forever. Her beautiful sister was lost. Yet Papa would save Aemilia, sending her off to be educated by Susan Bertie, who lived at her mother’s estate in Grimsthorpe, Lincolnshire. As for Mother, she had possession of the house and could take in lodgers and lead a respectable life if she could only resist Master Holland’s bullying.

  Papa gazed at Aemilia as though she were the most precious thing in his world. She, the only child of his blood.

  PAPA MADE A SWANLIKE end, fading in music. Within his locked bedchamber, his brothers sang their prayers while Aemilia knelt outside the bolted door. Her face washed in tears, she listened as her uncles’ chanting ushered Papa out of this world into the next, where his spirit rose on pure white wings, soaring in a blaze of light straight into the presence of his secret God.

  5

  EMILIA’S WORLD HAD BEEN a crystal globe reflecting Papa’s loving intelligence. Now that orb slipped from her grasp and shattered.

  At the burial, her uncles hunched together and drooped, those old men whose time might also come soon. Though it was April, the cold and damp crept up Aemilia’s calves as she watched Papa’s coffin lowered into the gaping earth.

  She pressed her numb face against Mistress Locke’s cape as the rain fell, drenching them in heaven’s tears. Her soul shrank to a small black point. The last rites had only just ended when she heard Mother speak the words that turned her heart to ice.