Dark Aemilia (3 page)
Authors: Sally O'Reilly
‘Through application, sir,’ I say, stiffly.
‘Someone must have helped you. Someone must have given you books, and their time, and the benefit of their knowledge.’
‘When I was a little girl I used to play for the Queen, because she liked me. And this continued after my father died. One day, Lady Susan Bertie heard me playing, and talked to me, and asked my mother if I could join her household, down in Kent. My mother agreed, as long as she could come to see me. So from that time – two years after my father’s death – I lived between the Berties’ house and Court.’
‘And who taught you?’
‘Lady Susan. I would say she formed my mind, being of the unusual opinion that girls can learn as fast and as well as boys.’
‘You are fortunate.’
‘A fortunate freak.’
He is still writing, looking well pleased with our conversation.
‘So can you advise me?’ I ask.
‘What I am dealing with is the higher magic,’ says he, without looking up. He stops writing and looks at the nib of his pen. ‘Which is the study of such sciences as astrology – the prediction of men’s fate by making a study of the stars – and alchemy, in which base metal is turned into gold. Your wise woman, on the other hand, deals in what I like to call “household magic” – the stuff of life.’
‘Of love and sickness and herbal remedies and the like. Simple enough. Any fool might understand the difference.’
‘Of course, of course, it is very simple indeed, yet not all of my clients are as
knowledgeable
as you are. Let us say, to put it crudely, that the wise woman deals with magic pertaining to the body, whereas high magic is the magic of the mind.’ He taps his forehead. ‘In short, it is a wondrous thing. It is
science
.’
‘Which leaves aside the simple fact that our enquiring mind is contained within our earthly body. Like all distinctions made within your “science”, this is merely conjecture, a chosen supposition.’
‘Dear lady, I could indulge my taste for dialectic with you all day, but we must get on.’
The doctor measures and reckons and mutters and writes, and takes books down from this bookshelf and puts them back again, and considers me from between half-closed eyes and writes down some further observations.
Finally, he looks up and smiles, showing exceptionally black and fetid teeth, and says, ‘It’s done.’
‘So… what is my future?’ I ask. ‘What will become of me?’
‘Too vague. Ask me a proper question.’
‘Shall I be married?’
‘Yes.’
‘To one I love?’
‘No.’
‘Then I am doomed.’
‘But you will truly love. Your love will be…’ He looks down at his notebook. ‘Your love will be the better part of you.’
I stand up. ‘You have sat there, looking at me as if you could read every fragment of my existence like one of your queer old books, and you can’t tell me anything that’s any use at all!’
‘No use? I thought I was being most informative.’
I toss a crooked florin at him. ‘There’s your fee – I’m not parting with a penny more.’
He picks it up. ‘I wouldn’t want more. It is a pleasure doing business with a lady of such passion. But you, on the other hand, should want a great deal more than this.’
‘Of course I want more! Did I not just say so? I want to know… what will become of me.’
‘But what of art? What of that clever mind of yours – all the Plato and the Seneca that furnishes it? There is something trapped behind that siren’s face. You’ve as good as said so.’
‘Could learning be my destiny?’
‘Do you want it to be?’
I frown, uncertain. ‘Could
poetry
?’
He beams, and dips his quill once more into the pot. ‘How your eyes shone when you said that word!’
I feel a pang of hope and recognition. ‘Then… what is your prediction?’
‘You will be remembered.’
The room is getting dark. He lights a candle.
‘There is one more thing you want to ask me.’
My mind says,
Ask him! Ask him, you fool!
But I do not know how to begin. ‘I don’t have any other questions,’ I say.
‘Then why did you come?’
‘I could not settle.’
He leans forward and, to my horror, kisses me gently on the mouth. His breath is hot and sour. ‘I’d ask you to stay with me… longer. But I fear you’d break my heart.’
I push him away. ‘I’d break your head, sir, before I broke anything.’
He stands up, frowning, and fetches my cloak. As he puts it about my shoulders, he says, ‘His name is Shakespeare. William Shakespeare.’
‘Whose name?’ But I know. Of course I know.
‘The playwright you want so badly.’
‘What…?’
‘He will be your lover. At least I hope so, for if you won’t have him he’ll run as mad as Legion.’
‘Possessed by evil spirits?’
‘Driven insane by wild desire. Judging from
his
chart, that would be a national deprivation.’
I stare at him, finally astonished by his science. Forman fixes me with his weird gaze.
‘Intense sort of fellow. It doesn’t take an astrologer to see that.’
‘You know him?’
‘He was here this morning.’
‘What?’
He opens the door. ‘Be careful how you go. Those stairs are slippery.’
My servant Alice rushes into my chamber all fly-brained and affected. She is a silly girl and I can see she has recently been conversing with some man she thinks important, or handsome at the very least.
‘I have a letter, mistress,’ she says, pink in the face.
I flinch. There is not a hair’s breadth between what I most fear and what I want more than anything. Anyone who has loved two men at once knows that it’s not an abundant feeling, but mean and sweaty and undignified.
‘Give it to me,’ I say. It is a long slip of foolscap, the colour of buttercream, folded and sealed with red wax. Alice stands, smiling, at the foot of the bed, as if she is expecting to watch me break the seal. ‘Get out, you brainless creature!’ I say. ‘And…’
‘Yes, mistress?’
‘You are free for the rest of the day. Go to see your mother at Islington. The country air will do you good.’
‘But… mistress!’
‘Go on!’ I throw the letter on to the table as if I were not interested in its contents. ‘My lord is coming soon, and wants to see me alone.’
‘But I thought –’
‘Alice! Go!’
As soon as I hear the door to my apartment close I grab the letter and tear it open. It has to be from
him
. It has to be.
It is from Petruchio.
Madam,
I am writing to you on behalf of Mr W.S. on the matter of his play
The Taming of the Shrew,
which sadly failed to please you. His thoughts are these:
First, is he the only man to write a tale about the taming of a Shrew? (He is not: the tale is as ancient as old Ovid.) Second, is this the cruellest tale of woman-taming, or the crudest? (It is not: this Katherine keeps her dignity more than most of her fair sex, and speaks most ably, too.)
Further, if you recall the exact words of this tamed Shrew, you will know that she agrees to her husband’s will and rule on the understanding that he is ‘loving’ – a fair bargain, would you not say? Therefore, she is making a truce. She is no scold, dumbed by a bridle.
And lastly, as this is an entertainment, laid on for the drunkard Sly, Mr W.S. had hoped that his audience would see this for a tale enlivened by his Wit. In short, a comedy of levity as well as form. So his wish is that it might amuse a Lady, learned as you are, rather than cause Rage.
I ask you humbly, as Mr Shakespeare’s prattler, the voicer of his words, please do not judge the Poet by his Puppet.
With great respect,
Petruchio
What had I expected of this poet? Too much, it seems. He has sent this to me not out of admiration, or even lust, but only to convince me of the greatness of his Art. He does not see in me someone of fellow mind, as I had almost hoped, but as an audience member lacking in the proper perceptions, the fit response. The squibbling, shifty knave cannot even lower himself to put his right name on this letter, but must pretend his ‘puppet’ is writing in his stead! God’s blood.
I confess, though I should respond with silence, I must reply. I can’t let this letter, this preening, false-writ scrawl, be the last word in our discourse. I cannot let this ‘playwright’, some provincial chance-man, swelled with pride, put
his
words over mine. No. Katherine will speak. I write thus, with my left hand:
Petruchio,
I speak on behalf of one who was enraged to see a play so violent and ill-tempered, fuelled by cruelty and bile. If this is comedy, then take yourself to Tyburn and laugh with the mob who like jigs danced by corpses.
It would be easier to laugh at your foul ‘jokes’ if Women were not caged, and tethered, and made small. If they owned property, or goods, or their own skin. If they had gold, or land, or the respect of Men. If, unchaperoned, they could walk the streets and smell the bakemeats and the brew-shops. Or ride astride a horse, or put their plays upon the stage, or speak in Court, or choose their mate, or go abroad, upon a ship (in search of the Americas, or Oriental spice).
As for Wit, if you steal this from a woman, and make her call the moon the sun or darkness light, then she is done for. Because Wit is all she has. It’s Wit that gives us life, or we have nothing left to nourish us. It is our sole possession.
Make a joke of all this if you will, put a play within a play, and say ‘all’s false’. You still make the bully smile to see himself reflected in your person. Greedy, preening, bedsmug Petruchio.
Katherine (and never Kate)
I dispatch this letter and time goes on its way, and I live my life as I must. I dissemble. I read my Bible. I eat my milksops and
apricocks and drink my Madeira wine. I seem to have bewitched myself: this letter should never have been sent. I wonder if it found its mark. Was it lost in the Globe, where it was sent? Was it found by some other knave, and laughed around the theatre? Will it threaten my future (though nameless, and disguised)? If he read it, the Poet, did he frown or smile, or throw it on the fire? Did he turn from it without a thought, or brood on it, and go back to his pages, not so sure of them? Did he? I look inside my head, as if a picture of the world beyond these rooms was hidden there. And my life is just as it has always been: the life of a kept whore, the highest in the land. Dressed like a princess, a taffeta angel, a fairy in cloth-of-gold. But all I am is Queen of cunts.
And then. Then it comes, the answer, from the Pen. It is a different sort of letter altogether.
Katherine,
You truly own your wit, and no one can take it from you. Not this Petruchio, for certain. I would not seek to curb your headstrong humour, not in life.
Not if you were my Wife.
I do not believe there is a man in Christendom who could own you. You would put God Himself on his mettle.
Petruchio
I read this several times.
This, then, is the way he wants to play it. He will lure me with his silken little lies, to tie me up with my particularity. There is no one like me, no, therefore I need not think of my gender, nor of any woman as my equal or my sister. I can be Chosen, and set above all others. Still the false princess, decked out in Sin.
I use my right hand this time, for speed, but none who knew me would recognise my furious scrawl.
Petruchio,
You deserve no more than a blank page, a blank stare for your blank verse. Husbands abuse their wives, and tyrannise them, and they are less than their equals. In spirit, virtue, soul, and body, Man is the weakling. The woman brings forth men, so SHE is the source of all life. And the Man, with his dangling, clownish wren-cock, puffs himself up to twice his natural size. (Twice, do I say? No, tenfold!) He makes the Woman small so he can spit in her eye.
Man must sing a weak, cruel song to comfort his cold nights. You don’t fool me by saying I am different from the others of my sex. I am not different, I am the same but more so.
Katherine
There. It’s gone, and this wild feeling is all spent. I have turned longing to gall, my dusk-dreams to white rage. I can read, I can dance, I can lie with a skilful lover. I can wear my new sleeves and my embroidered gloves and I can sip from a silver cup. I can watch the sun rise and see it setting, a blaze of Heaven. I am young, and I can savour all the daily miracles of life. Something happened, nothing happened; it is the same. It is all the same. Days pass. Weeks go by. I am forgotten. He is forgotten. His eyes watch me from the glass but they are my eyes; they are a trick of the light. The years will make sense of me again; it is not possible to fall so hard for nothing, for words and a hungry look, a moment in time.
Then, just as I am beginning to believe that I might be myself again, this letter comes.
Dark Aemilia,
I will not say ‘Katherine’; but I do not know how to address you, meaning, with what form of embellishment, so
let there be none. You find me churlish and insulting, even when my wish is only to entertain.
What do I want to say? I want to be honest with you. As you know, I have a wife, and, as you may not realise, also children. So.
I have walked the streets of London these past weeks till the very cobblestones cried out for me to stop. I have seen necromancers in search of the antidote to these violent, obsessive and lunatic cravings, a cure for foolish and forbidden love. I have been drunker than I had thought possible (I am generally given to sober industry and good fellowship). I have made myself so ill with this that I felt it must be a form of penance for a sin that I have committed only in my heart.
What do I wish to ask you? Not to exist? Never to have existed? To return to my mind and stay there? For I fear I may have conjured you from my febrile imaginings. I thought that you were locked up safely in my mind. I thought that in this actual, tangible world, women were just as women are. Which is to say, loud strumpets in foul taverns; dull ladies in fine houses; vain damsels waiting on the Queen. Or serving-wenches, or dairy-maids, or worldly widows… the common run of women in their place, with the qualities that place prescribes. But what are you? A scholar or a mistress? A temptress or a wife? An angel or a witch? I cannot say. And, as I cannot, I don’t know what I want to ask.
But I do. I do know what I want to ask. But I cannot and will not ask it.
There is a fine play on at the Bel Savage Inn, off Ludgate Hill, written by my friend Kit Marlowe. The title is
Dr Faustus.
I will be there tomorrow afternoon. I expect you are engaged in some palatial busyness already. I am certain that this will be the case. If you come, come alone, and dress plainly. It’s not Whitehall Palace. It is not even as
respectable as the Rose. I will be outside at half-past one. To take the air, you understand. It will be of no matter to me if you are not there, and I do not, indeed, expect you. Nor can I quite believe that I am writing these words at all, nor that I shall seal this note and entrust it to some messenger. No, I will take the thing myself.
I am your most unworthy servant,
Will Shakespeare
I read this delirious missive in a state of trembling disbelief. Twice. Then a third time, hardly breathing. He writes to me, in my name, and he signs himself as… himself. No dissembling here, none at all. He has lost his reason. I have heard that this is sometimes the way with poets. Of course I cannot go. A royal mistress has a position to maintain, and her reputation to consider. And he is treating me like a common street-drab,
truly. But my eyes keep wandering back to the looping words
…
I fear I may have conjured you from my febrile imaginings
…
temptress
…
angel
…
witch
…
There is no question of accepting such a preposterous invitation. (To an inn, no less! To see a play! And ‘alone’ – what can he be thinking of?) If he isn’t mad he is determined to insult me. There is a class of man who would as soon humiliate a woman as lie with her, and, again, those of a poetic disposition are often afflicted with this vice. And more – he is asking me to lower myself to this station, of tavern-doxy, behind the back of my protector, the great Lord Chamberlain himself. The words blur in front of me when I think of this. The affront to Hunsdon is even greater than the insult to me. All I have to do is show this little love-note to my lord and Will Shakespeare will be shut out of London’s play-world and doubtless locked up in the Clink as well. The risk he is taking is out of all proportion to the pleasure he might gain.
I have seen necromancers in search of the antidote to these violent, obsessive and lunatic cravings, a cure for foolish and forbidden love.
Oh! He has felt it. He has felt the same. The same… There will be no other.
I sit down upon the rush-strewn floor, and command my body not to lust for something so ridiculous, command my skin to harden and my loins to… well. My mind not to summon up that profane word: ‘loins’. Am I myself? Am I? What is this ‘self’, this pretty thing I have become? Was there another way? Another Aemilia that I could have been, could still be? I still care for Lord Hunsdon, and he has treated me with respect and sweetness for six long years. He is like a father to me, as well as a loving spouse. This longed-for letter is a vile temptation and a deceiver’s snare.
And yet… I close my eyes, and see Will’s face again. So I open them, blinking. Some speak of love as fever – if this is a sort of love, it is a vicious malady indeed. (‘
And yet, who are you, to
think about adultery?
’ says the Devil standing behind me. ‘
You are no one’s wife. Hunsdon’s marriage bed is cold because of you. There is no virtue in your nature. You are just a whore – what’s to stop you now?
’) If this is love, then it should be accorded some respect. There is not much love at Court, only place-men, and
place-women
, and place-fucking. If this is love, I need it. I must have it.
Will Shakespeare’s letter has infected me with his insanity. My life depends on my destroying this unworthy note and forgetting that I ever saw it. I tear it into a hundred tiny pieces, go to the fireplace and toss the fragments on to the flames. One tiny piece of paper flutters down and falls among the ashes. On it is written ‘Faustus’.
I try to distract myself with finery. I put on a yellow silk dress, and the new sleeves, and a wonderful ruff that makes me
look like the Faerie Queene. I make a mouth at myself in the glass. Then I lean forward and kiss my reflection, blurring my own image with my hot breath. Lord, what is this yearning? Am I going mad? There must be sanity in Latin. In Plato, surely, so I call on him to help me. But another plain and lumpen English phrase comes to mock me, some words from Gower: ‘
It hath and shall be evermore, that love is master where he will
.’ My mind is a mess of twisted things, like a squiggling heap of worms.