The Dark Lady's Mask

by Mary Sharratt

  Mistress Hall met her gaze. “I know.”

  Aemilia’s hand shook so hard, she spilled the Madeira on her lap. Will had not only told Susanna about their affair but also about Odilia? If their child had lived, she would have been twenty-one this year. Susanna’s half sister. To her horror, Aemilia found she was in tears.

  “I had better take my leave.” Her hips stiff from the long ride, Aemilia levered herself up from the chair.

  “Not just yet, if you please.” Mistress Hall stood in her path. “First let’s finish this business, shall we?”

  Aemilia thought her hostess looked as miserable as she herself felt.

  Mistress Hall turned her head and waited while Aemilia dried her tears then led her up a flight of stairs. From the chatelaine at her waist, she selected a key and unlocked a door. A wave of musty air struck Aemilia’s face as they entered a dim room. Mistress Hall flung open the windows and shutters, allowing the early evening sunlight and breeze to sweep away the staleness.

  “Father’s study,” she said.

  Aemila gazed at the desk with its ink pot and quills, its foolscap and blotter, everything laid out in orderly fashion as though Will would return at any moment and sit down to write. She studied an oil painting of the Globe, which had burned to the ground three years ago, and then she shivered at the sight of a human skull. Will’s ghostly presence seemed to fill the room. She almost felt his breath stirring at her nape. With a rush of blood behind her eyes, she saw her own Salve Deus on his bookshelf, resting beside his Ovid. So had he read her work after all? Had he treasured her book enough to keep it here, in his sanctum sanctorum?

  So as not to betray her emotions, she turned to examine the map of Bermuda hanging on the wall. Beside it was an etching of a denizen of that isle arrayed in feathers and shells.

  “In his last years, Father became fascinated with the New World,” Mistress Hall said. “Had he been younger, I think he would have sailed to the West Indies.”

  Susanna’s face seemed flushed with memories of her father. But then, as if reminding herself of the task at hand, she unlocked a cabinet and hefted from it a scarred wooden box with its own lock. As she grappled with its weight, Aemilia leaned forward to help her. Together they laid it on the desk. Mistress Hall then removed the smallest key from her chatelaine and handed it to Aemilia.

  “Father wanted you to have this,” she said, looking at the box. “I was to give it directly to you in person. He swore me to the strictest secrecy, forbade me to tell even my husband.” Only now did she lift her eyes, bright with tears. “I ask you to be discreet as not to bring any dishonor on my poor mother.”

  “Mistress Hall, you have my word.” Aemilia longed to take her hand but didn’t dare. “In faith, I’m astonished you even went through with this. You could have refused.”

  Susanna Hall shook her head. “He made me promise. I think he feared he would wander forever in purgatory if he didn’t do right by you. He was so given to popish superstitions, that man.”

  Aemilia imagined Will on his deathbed entrusting his beloved daughter with his soul’s turmoil. “You were his confessor,” she said gently.

  “To listen to my father, only your pardon could wash him clean.”

  “By my troth,” Aemilia said, her own tears welling up again. “I forgave him years ago.”

  For to forgive someone is to set that person’s highest essence free. Now, in her heart, Aemilia absolved Will. Let his noblest self shine through all eternity. Not the miser who hoarded grain or the callous husband, but the poet whose tears she had touched upon a midsummer night twenty-three years ago.

  Will’s daughter, his female image, gave her a searching look. “Mistress Lanier, I wanted to hate you, but you confound me. He said he’d written poetry about you, but he wouldn’t read a word of it to me. Beyond being his mistress, I never knew who or what you were.”

  “Would you know truly?” Aemilia gazed into those hazel eyes. “I am a poet.”

  She was tempted to take her own book from the shelf and place it in Susanna Hall’s hands. But that would be taking too great a liberty. Besides, Mistress Hall seemed stunned enough as it was. In her silence, Aemilia could not keep herself from stroking one of the quills that lay on her dead lover’s desk. He held this in his hand.

  “Pray, keep it,” his daughter said, when Aemilia laid the quill back down. “I think he would have wanted it so.”

  MISTRESS HALL’S STRAPPING MAIDSERVANT agreed to haul the heavy box back to the Swan Inn. As Aemilia descended the stairs with mistress and maid, she caught a whiff of yeast and hops. Through walls and closed doors came the muffled sound of an older woman singing and her granddaughter laughing. With Doctor Hall away, Will’s house has become a house of women, Aemilia thought, almost like Cookham in the old days, with the Widow Shakespeare as its beer-brewing matriarch.

  The key to the box in her hand, Aemilia followed the maid out a rear door and through the back gardens, past the sheds and barns, and out the back gate. They proceeded down a narrow alley shadowed in overgrown hedges, cut through a snicket, and finally crossed Bridge Street to reach the Swan Inn, all the while trying to attract as little attention as possible.

  Aemilia found Henry waiting for her. He raised his eyebrows as she led the maid up to her chamber, where the girl plunked the box on a table as though it were an exceptionally heavy crate of onions.

  “My thanks to you and your good mistress.” Aemilia pressed a tuppence in the girl’s palm.

  “WE RODE A HUNDRED miles so you could claim a shabby old box,” Henry said, as he and his mother ate their supper. “Pray, what’s inside?”

  “Hush,” Aemilia murmured, aware of the others eating and drinking in the Swan Inn, no doubt eager for anything to gab about. “I haven’t opened it yet. Tomorrow, before we depart, I shall go to Holy Trinity Church and visit his grave.”

  Her son nodded as though he couldn’t wait to return to London and put this strange pilgrimage into his mother’s past behind him.

  AFTER BIDDING HENRY GOODNIGHT, Aemilia shut herself in her chamber. With the midsummer sun still blazing in the western sky, she’d no need to light a candle. Breathless, she unlocked the box and opened the lid to see a letter resting on a sheet of foolscap, which hid what lay beneath. Yet one more secret concealed inside another. When she broke the letter’s seal, she couldn’t say what she hoped to find. An apology? An explanation for his cold shunning of her? Poetry even? What message did Will have for her after these twenty-one years of separation?

  Though she still recognized his handwriting, she could tell it was a weak and ailing man who had gripped the quill. His missive consisted of four words.

  For my eternal Muse

  From the folded paper, a gold ring tumbled into her palm. She held it aloft in the shaft of sunlight streaming through the open window until her tears blurred her vision. This was the ring he had given her in Verona those many years ago and that she had returned to him after Odilia’s christening. She clasped it in both hands before setting it carefully aside, then she lifted the foolscap to see what was underneath.

  Despite the bright daylight illuminating the chamber, she did not trust her senses. The stack of papers was high and densely packed, all in Will’s handwriting. She had to take them from the box and leaf through them from top to bottom before she believed what her eyes saw. His plays, the oldest at the top and the newest toward the bottom. His histories, comedies, and tragedies. Some were flawless or near-flawless fair copies while others appeared to be working drafts with scribbled corrections and crossed-out lines. She found the early comedies that they had written together and that he had gone on to revise and make wholly his own, as if to erase her.

  Yet, as she scanned his plays and their lists of characters, she saw variations of her name in three other pieces she’d had no hand in. Here, in A Comedy of Errors, was Aemilia, the long-lost wife of Aegeon. Husband and wife had been severed from each other in a shipwreck. In the end, Aegeon finally found
his Aemilia, who had been living as an abbess.

  When the midsummer sun finally sank into the whispering trees, she lit a candle to read on. She remembered Othello’s Emilia, wife of the villainous Iago who slew her for her loose tongue. Yet as she began to reread Emilia’s lines, she discovered that Will had rewritten them since she had seen the play performed at Shoreditch those many years ago. Emilia was much more eloquent than she remembered, lamenting the injustices that women suffered:

  ’Tis not a year or two shows us a man.

  They are all but stomachs and we all but food.

  They eat us hungerly, and when they are full,

  They belch us.

  Lines that cut so close to what she had endured after Will cast her off, she might have written them herself. Had he allowed her, his banished mistress, to speak through his own heroine? This Emilia even spoke in defense of women who commit adultery.

  I do think it is their husbands’ faults

  If wives do fall . . .

  Their wives have sense like them. They see and smell

  And have their palates both for sweet and sour

  . . . And have not we affections,

  Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?

  . . . let them know

  The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.

  But it was Emilia’s devotion to her lady, Desdemona, that moved Aemilia most, for it reminded her of what she and Margaret shared. When Emilia learned the full breadth of her husband’s evil plot against Desdemona, she proclaimed his culpability to all. As Emilia declared her truth, her husband murdered her.

  I will speak as liberal as the north,

  Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,

  All, all cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.

  So come my soul to bliss as I speak true.

  So speaking as I think, alas, I die.

  Lines so passionate, they might have come from her own Salve Deus. Aemilia cradled the pages to her heart. Emilia’s speech read as though she were Will’s immortalized memory of her, Aemilia, as she truly was. Not the lascivious tigress of the sonnets but a woman who was passionate, free-spoken, intelligent, and brave. His lost love. Her own best self.

  Taking the gold ring he had returned to her, she threaded it on the silk cord around her neck so it would rest there beside Margaret’s ring.

  By candlelight, she nestled in bed and read The Winter’s Tale, probably one of his later works since she’d found it near the bottom of the stack. Here Emilia was a minor character with only a few lines, maid to the much-wronged Hermione. Leontes, Hermione’s husband, spent sixteen years repenting his cruelty to his deceased wife. He had falsely accused her of adultery, imprisoned her, even wrenched her newborn daughter from her arms and ordered the infant to be abandoned. Everything was poised for irredeemable tragedy and yet, in the final act, the lost daughter, Perdita, returned. Reunited, father and daughter stood before a statue of the dead Hermione. Faced by their grief and love, the effigy revealed itself as the living woman, Hermione restored.

  If this be magic, let it be an art

  Lawful as eating.

  Aemilia wept to imagine that The Winter’s Tale, written in the winter of Will’s life, resurrected both their love and their lost daughter. Let Odilia live again in Perdita. Had he spent the past twenty-one years rueing their estrangement?

  Before the candle burned itself out, she set to read The Tempest, which she had discovered at the very bottom of the stack—presumably the last play he had written. She expected tragedy or tragicomedy, but, no, this was an Italian comedy concerning a magician and his only daughter. Here she saw her father brought back to life with none of the viciousness of The Merchant of Venice. Ariel, his spirit-servant, even uttered the line Papa had once whispered in her ear, “Hell is empty.” All the devils roved here on earth, in plain sight, which explained the many enchantments Prospero wove to protect his treasured Miranda on their island stronghold before he set her free to explore her brave new world.

  Will’s poetry sent her heart brimming with a lifetime’s yearnings.

  Full fathom five thy father lies,

  Of his bones are coral made,

  Those are pearls that were his eyes.

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

  “Rest you gentle, my love,” she whispered to Will, who slumbered now with the rest of her beloved dead: Papa, Odilia, Henry Carey, Margaret, and Alfonse.

  We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  In the last minutes before the candle guttered out, Aemilia found Will’s letter, that single line: For my eternal Muse. Finally, she understood. He hadn’t needed to say more—the plays said it for him. Those four words were his dedication, his revelation that she had been his inspiration even after their love had turned to pain, even when he hated her and had written his tortured tragedies. This was his confession that his plays were written to her and for her long after they had ceased to be lovers.

  Let us not burden our remembrance with

  A heaviness that’s gone.

  In the depths of his heart, he had never stopped loving her, and this had been his most anguished secret, which he hadn’t been able to admit even to himself until the very last. All those years, he had held on to her ring. In death, he entrusted his life’s work to her.

  Like his plays, their intertwined lives had moved from comedy to tragedy to tragicomedy and back to comedy once more. Reconciliation transformed the tragedies of human existence into a divine comedy—what life, at its core, truly was—as she had tried to tell him in Verona all those years ago. What could touch the spirit more deeply than the triumph of love and goodness?

  To insure Will’s posterity, she must see these plays published. But she would have to keep her hand in it secret in respect to the promise she had made to Susanna Hall. If Will’s work were to be published under the auspices of the King’s Men, it would seem both natural and fitting. Ben would write the preface, his immortal tribute to his rival and friend. Once more, men would be her mask and she would be erased. Yet she was the indelible thread woven into Will’s great tapestry. Long after she was buried, future generations might read of questing girls who dressed as boys, of a Jew’s daughter, of Emilia who died speaking her truth.

  In her last letter before her death, Margaret had predicted that Aemilia would survive to a venerable age and remain in robust health until her black hair turned as white as a swan’s feathers. The ghosts of her past laid to rest, Aemilia could embrace her future with courage.

  “So speaking as I think,” she whispered to the wheeling stars outside her window, “I live, I live, I live.”

  TO THE VIRTUOUS READER:

  Historical Afterword

  THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION. There is no historical evidence to prove that Aemilia Bassano Lanier was the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The late A. L. Rowse was the first to identify Lanier as the Dark Lady; however, most academics have dismissed his theory. Lanier scholars in particular find the Dark Lady question an unwelcome detraction from Lanier’s own literary achievements. Aemilia Bassano Lanier has earned her place in history not by any alleged love affair but by becoming the first Englishwoman to aspire to earn her living as a professional, published poet, one who actively sought a community of women patrons to support her writing.

  Having established these facts, I must confess that as a novelist I could not resist the allure of the Dark Lady mythos. As Kate Chedgzoy points out in her essay “Remembering Aemilia Lanyer” in the Journal of the Northern Renaissance, this myth draws on “our continuing cultural investment in a fantasy of a female Shakespeare and reveals some of the anxieties about difference that haunt canonical Renaissance literature.” My intention was to write a novel that married the playful comedy of Marc Norman and
Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love to the gravitas of Virginia Woolf’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “sister” in her extended essay A Room of One’s Own. How many more obstacles would an educated and gifted Renaissance woman poet face compared to her ambitious male counterparts?

  I am deeply indebted to the scholarship of Susanne Woods whose books Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet and The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum proved indispensable, both for my research into the documented facts of Lanier’s life and my appreciation of her poetry. I was also hugely inspired by the work of Lanier scholars Barbara K. Lewalski and Lynette McGrath.

  Readers may wish to know that Lanier did indeed go on to run her own school in Saint Giles-in-the-Fields from 1617 to 1619. However, she faced difficulties with her landlord in a dispute over rent and repairs, and this appears to have put a premature end to her venture. Financial problems followed Lanier for the rest of her life. Her son died in 1633, leaving behind two small children. Lanier then litigated against Innocent Lanier, her brother-in-law, to whom she signed over her late husband’s hay and straw patent with the understanding that Innocent would get it extended and share the proceeds. It appears her brother-in-law did not honor his side of the bargain. Lanier presented herself as petitioning on behalf of her orphaned grandchildren, so it appears that she was supporting them.