His Dark Lady

by Victoria Lamb

  Hesitant, she straightened and laid a hand on the top of her hard belly. She felt the fluttering again.

  ‘Hush,’ she whispered. ‘Hush, little one.’

  It felt strange, talking to an invisible being who was not even in existence yet. Yet she felt sure her own mother must have done the same when Lucy herself was in the womb, for it felt like the natural thing to do.

  She looked up with a start to find Jack’s stout mother, Mistress Parker, watching her from the doorway. The woman’s face was tight with disapproval under her wife’s cap.

  Mistress Parker swept forward and folded her arms across her plain bodice, shaking her head at the cold hearth. ‘Not lit the fire yet? Am I to do everything for you? When Jack said he was bringing home a wife, I thought my work would be lessened. But you’re always sitting down and daydreaming instead of doing your chores. And now you’re talking to yourself. It seems to me you’re as much of a good-for-nothing slattern as any of the whores up at the theatre. Now, look sharp and make dough for Master Parker’s nuncheon!’

  She shoved Lucy towards the table. ‘When you’ve done that, you can help me with the washing.’

  ‘Yes, mother,’ Lucy said, docilely enough, and stood to measure out the flour, yeast and water for that day’s bread.

  As soon as Mistress Parker had bustled outside to complain loudly about her new daughter to a passing neighbour, Lucy sat down and slipped off her wooden clogs, rubbing her swollen feet and ankles. She found it hard, carrying a baby, though she knew that once the child was born she would be less unhappy. It was not that she didn’t want the child. It was just that she felt so large and cumbersome, and her new clumsiness was becoming noticeable, with chairs knocked over and bowls accidentally smashed. She was forever needing to relieve herself too, so that walking down to the marketplace was a severe trial, especially when Mistress Parker stopped every few yards to discuss her with another crowd of strangers, explaining how her son had brought home an ugly black-skinned wife with a child already heavy in her belly. ‘But what is one to do when Jack is so lusty and virile?’ she would ask, mock-piteously, barely able to conceal her delight that her son had finally proved his manhood by siring a child.

  The delighted shock and curiosity with which the Parkers’ neighbours stared at her left Lucy feeling sick, and even more like a breeding sow than ever.

  Before Mistress Parker could catch her sitting, Lucy wearily stood up and went back to rolling and kneading the day’s dough.

  It seemed like another age when she had danced before the court, so light on her feet that visiting lords and ambassadors had gasped to see her volta and gavotte, and the Queen herself had rewarded her with jewels and gifts of rich gowns for her performances.

  She was growing more rotund and slower-moving with every week that passed, anchored to the ground by the child in her belly. Though she no longer wished to dance. Indeed, she was content to sit still, for she soon became breathless when forced to climb stairs or walk to the market with her shopping basket, or even mend linen besides the Parkers’ smoky hearth in the evenings.

  And all because she had been fool enough to fall in love with Will Shakespeare.

  ‘That’s enough, you stupid girl!’ Mistress Parker exclaimed, pinching her arm so hard that Lucy yelped. ‘You’ll over-knead it if you carry on. Cover the dough with a damp muslin and put it aside now, down by the hearth. Then we’ve to wash the household linen before it walks off down the street on its own. You must make fresh soap for a washing ball, for we’ve only enough left for one more washday. Then you’re to clean the sheets and coverings, and hang them out from the windows to dry. I’ll tend to Jack’s shirts myself. They need a delicate touch.’

  Lucy swallowed her resentment and dampened a thin scrap of muslin to cover the dough while it rose. Making soap, then washing the bedsheets and other linen, those were the harder tasks, yes. But at least it would ease her thoughts of Will to be working so diligently.

  ‘Yes, mother.’

  She set about making the washing ball, an arduous process involving ash and animal fat that took several hours of mixing and boiling in a vat. Then she fetched two buckets of water from the river and began layering the household linen inside the washtub as carefully as she knew how, while Mistress Parker stood over her, arms folded, inhaling sharply through her nose.

  ‘Not so tight, not so tight,’ she muttered at one point. ‘The soap cannot reach every part if you cram them all in together like that, higgledy-piggledy, nor will the dirty water have a chance to drain away properly afterwards.’ She tutted, bending to show Lucy the correct way to lay the linen round the edges. ‘Merciful heavens, child, did your mother never teach you how to pack a washtub?’

  ‘My mother died when I was born,’ Lucy replied shortly, fetching the first bucket. ‘She taught me nothing except how to breathe.’

  Mistress Parker looked at her, shaking her head. ‘Well,’ she sniffed, turning away as Lucy poured water into the tub. ‘It will do.’

  Leaving the linen to soak near the fire, Lucy took up the twiggy broom and swept the dead leaves, soiled rushes and other debris into the street. It was a task she performed at least once a week, for Mistress Parker insisted on keeping a clean house. It was late November and the air was chill, though with the sweat on her forehead she barely felt the cold.

  Looking up with an aching back, Lucy saw a cloaked man with a feathered cap standing in the doorway of one of the houses across the street. He appeared to be watching her, his gaze intent under bushy eyebrows. Lucy stared back at him, suddenly remembering that she had passed the same man on the corner yesterday, coming back from the marketplace. Bearded and with a scar below his right eye, he had been smoking a pipe while his gaze wandered along the narrow row of houses. The house in whose doorway he was now sheltering stood empty; the occupants having left for the country a few weeks back. So what was his business there, and why was he watching the Parkers’ home?

  Unhurried, the man turned away and disappeared down the street.

  Lucy went inside and shut the door. She leaned against it for a moment, considering whether or not she had imagined the man’s particular interest in her. After all, there were few black women in London. Perhaps she had lived too long at court, where every whisper was a plot, and hostile eyes watched through each secret gap and crack. Then Mistress Parker called her to take the washing out of the tub, and for the next few hours she had nothing on her mind but the back-breaking task of rinsing and wringing out the linen, and hanging it from the windows and on racks about the fire to dry.

  ‘Hurry, girl, or they will not be dry before bedtime,’ Mistress Parker urged her from her fireside seat. ‘Then we would have to put the second-best linen out instead, and the shame would kill me if one of my neighbours should happen to see its sorry state.’

  Before Lucy had come to the Parker’s household, they had kept a young servant named Margery, but this girl had been sent away the day after Lucy arrived.

  ‘Why pay a servant’s keep when I have a daughter now?’ Mistress Parker had remarked sharply when her husband had enquired after the absent girl. Then she had taken Lucy about the house, showing her the tasks Margery had been expected to do each day, and watched with undisguised satisfaction as Lucy had laid away her old court gowns in a chest. ‘That’s it. You will not be needing such finery here.’

  Jack did not return for supper that night as he had promised; this was no longer a surprise to Lucy, for her husband rarely made his way home before midnight. At the end of their silent meal, she set his untouched trencher of spiced lamb and pulses on the hearth to keep warm, and carried the dirty pans to the sideboard to be scoured later. While Mistress Parker darned her woollen stockings by the light of the fire, Master Parker, a corpulent merchant’s clerk in his late fifties, looked over the household accounts and complained that his wife was still spending too much on meat and candles.

  ‘Be sure to take the bedlinen up when you go, Lucy,’ Mistress Parker said,
laying aside her needlework and yawning, ‘and make up our beds.’

  Exhausted, Lucy dropped a curtsy to them both and dragged herself upstairs with the guttering remains of a tallow candle stump and the stack of clean linen. She laid out and tucked in the bedsheets in a stupefied daze, then finally kicked off her clogs, and collapsed across her own bed without even unlacing her gown. A few moments later the tallow candle burned to the end of its stump, wreathing the darkness with foul smoke.

  It felt like hours later when Lucy was woken by a crash from downstairs, for her body was stiff from lying in one position for so long.

  She stumbled to the chamber door in the inky dark, sleepy and confused, and peered down the stairs. The Parkers had gone to bed, and the shadowy room below was lit only by the smouldering red ashes in the hearth.

  ‘Jack?’

  The door below was kicked shut, and she heard men’s voices. It was Jack, she thought, with some relief. A spill was lit from the hot ashes and the room brightened a little with its sullen light. Lucy tiptoed down a few stairs and watched her husband cross to the wooden settle, then pick over his congealed lamb supper with the point of his dagger. He looked drunk but in good humour.

  There was another man with him, wearing a dark hood and with his back towards the stairs, bending over the fire as though to revive it with fresh wood.

  She came down and smiled warily as Jack looked up. ‘I thought it must be you. It’s very late. You brought a friend back?’

  ‘Not a friend, no. I met this fellow at the Green Man,’ Jack told her cheerfully, slurring his words. ‘Or was it the Swan? Anyway, he was robbed in the street and his purse taken, can you believe it? The Watch are next to useless these days, they deserve to be beaten at their heels and thrown in the stocks. So my new friend here needs a bed for the night.’

  Jack grinned at her horrified expression. ‘Can you find him a blanket, dear wife? No need for you to stay up, I’ll keep him company until the cock crows or we fall asleep on the settle. That will give my mother a rousing shock when she gets up in the morning!’

  The ‘fellow’ turned to look at her, throwing back his hood to reveal a swarthy, familiar face, his eyes over-bright with drink, his mouth sneering.

  Lucy shrank away. It was Master Twist.

  ‘Well met, Lucy Morgan. Or should I call you Mistress Parker?’ Twist grasped Jack by the arm as he tried to stagger away. ‘Hold fast, my friend.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in a despairing whisper. ‘What do you want from me?’

  His voice was oddly hoarse, his words more barked than spoken. ‘I will admit, I was curious to visit you here. I wondered why Goodluck would marry you off at the first sign of a swollen belly when he could have kept you for himself. A cheap whore is such a luxury, I find. Then I made young Master Parker’s acquaintance tonight, and Goodluck’s reasoning became clear. No need for him to put up with a pregnant whore in his house, but no danger, either, of this rooster mounting his black hen.’

  To her horror, Twist was slowly drawing his dagger, his left arm still entwined with Jack’s.

  ‘A cunning man indeed, your guardian,’ he finished. ‘But he will find me a match for his wit after this night’s work.’

  ‘Jack!’ she begged her husband urgently, seeing the malice on Twist’s face. ‘Come away from that man, for pity’s sake!’

  Jack, still befuddled with drink, half-turned to look at his new friend. But he was given no chance for escape.

  Slotting the dagger neatly into Jack’s neck just above his white ruff, Master Twist stepped back as though to admire his handiwork.

  ‘And so you become a widow,’ he murmured. ‘Forgive me, my young friend. I find you in the way. And it is a quick and relatively easy death, as deaths go.’

  With a gargling, incoherent cry, Jack Parker fell to his knees, one hand trying to stem the blood spurting in great jets from the opened vein at his throat. His eyes bulged with fear and agony as he stared first at Twist, then at Lucy, his other hand flailing in her direction as though still hoping she could save him.

  As Twist had predicted, it was over quickly. Jack collapsed face-forwards on to the rush-strewn floor, where blood began to pool about his head.

  Lucy turned to run for the door, but Twist was already there, blocking her only escape route.

  ‘Trying to escape your fate, my dear Lucy?’ he asked with an unpleasant smile. He produced a kerchief and used it to wipe Jack’s blood from his dagger. ‘I fear that will not be possible. I had only intended to enjoy your body tonight. But it strikes me that if Goodluck can marry you off so easily, he will have no qualms over a simple rape. But your death, and the death of his child … That will send an even clearer message to your guardian that I am not a man he can betray with impunity.’

  ‘He betrayed you?’ she asked him as a distraction, glancing about the room for some kind of weapon. But even the rack of heavy cooking pans was several steps away. Twist would be able to catch and kill her before she could reach them.

  ‘In a manner of speaking, he betrayed us both. Do you not know the story? Around the time you turned fourteen, I went to Goodluck and asked if I could marry you. I told him I was in love with you, but was prepared to wait another year or two if he did not feel you were ready for marriage. But your guardian would have none of it. He told me never to speak to you of my feelings or he would kill me.’ Twist sneered. ‘Before I could test that arrogant resolve, Goodluck packed you off to court. He deliberately allowed you to enter that foul circus, where I knew you would soon be debauched and your pretty innocence spoilt – and all to spite me!’

  Trying not to alert Twist to her intention, Lucy took a tiny step backwards as his gaze wavered.

  If she could reach the stairs and run up them quickly enough, there was a dagger under her pillow that she could use to defend herself. Her plan was unlikely to work, and Twist would stab her in the back before she could even reach the bed. But she would not stand and be slaughtered like a sheep, as poor Jack had been.

  Lucy tried not to look down at the crumpled body in its bright-red pool of blood.

  ‘I shall enjoy watching you die more slowly than your young husband. For you to suffer pain is only right and fair, for you have injured me, as has your guardian.’ He drew down his ruff a little and showed her his throat, which was red-raw and swollen. ‘Goodluck tried to strangle me, and all because I wish to free this country from a heretic Queen. Can you imagine that?’

  She did not wait to hear more but ran for the stairs. He came easily after her, laughing. She was almost at the top when he caught her, spinning her round on the narrow stairs. Twist clamped a hand over her mouth, staring down at her malevolently.

  ‘Don’t make a sound!’ he hissed in warning. ‘Or I shall kill the old man and woman too. Is that what you want? A massacre?’

  She shook her head, and he relaxed his suffocating grip over her mouth.

  ‘Good girl,’ he murmured. His smile was horrible. ‘Now keep climbing and show me your bed. There’s no one here to protect you, Lucy.’

  She turned and took another step up towards her chamber. Her dagger was there. If she could reach it …

  But what if she could not? What if he tied her up before she had a chance to find the dagger?

  He was behind her on the dark stair, his breathing loud in the close space.

  Lucy spun and chopped him hard in the face with the side of her hand, just as Goodluck had taught her, satisfied by the ominous crack that told her she had broken his nose.

  ‘You bitch!’

  Twist’s eyes widened as he clutched his broken nose, streaming with blood, and tried to keep his balance. But it was too late. He could not save himself. As he toppled backwards, his hand snaked out to grab her wrist and he dragged her with him down the unlit stairs.

  Lucy woke to screams and the sound of running feet, a chill draught on her face from the street. She could smell smoke from lit torches, and heard voices that came and went abo
ve her head, muffled in her nightmare. She tried to move and cried out in agony. It felt as though she had been kicked in the back by a horse, and there was some warm sticky fluid under her cheek.

  ‘This one’s alive!’ a man cried.

  Someone put a hand to her neck, feeling for the beat of life. A deep, strong ripple of pain possessed her and Lucy groaned, her eyes closing.

  ‘Bring a board!’ the man’s gruff voice ordered, and she recognized it as belonging to one of the neighbours. ‘We must carry her upstairs and send for our wives to care for her.’

  I am not dead yet, Lucy thought with some astonishment, and forced her eyes open in the acrid torchlight.

  The house was full of neighbours running about or standing to gawp. Mistress Parker was kneeling beside her son’s dead body, rocking back and forth, her face hidden in her apron as she gave vent to her noisy grief. Beyond her lay John Twist, his fury finished at last, a half-smile on his lip and his head bent back at an unnatural angle. His dead eyes stared accusingly up at the stairs.

  She had killed a man.

  The neighbours came back with an old plank of wood, arguing among themselves about whose wife should sit with the black girl. Lucy screamed when they lifted her on to it, mercifully passing out.

  When she came to again, she was lying in her small bedchamber, a damp cloth pressed to her forehead and several scared-looking women clustered about the mattress. Jack’s mother was nowhere in sight. Downstairs she could hear Master Parker’s voice, raised angrily, and other men too, their arguments deep and urgent.

  Lucy stared up at the women, seeing nothing but fear and hostility on their faces. Extravagantly, a new candle had been fetched up from Mistress Parker’s store cupboard and lit, its meagre light illuminating their expressions.

  ‘What’s happening downstairs?’ she managed to ask, her throat dry.

  One of the women offered her a cup of ale. ‘Only a sip, no more. That’s it. The Watch has brought the coroner to certify the deaths and take away the bodies. The sergeant will want to talk to you, too,’ she whispered. ‘After.’