Dark Aemilia by Sally O'Reilly Read Free Book Online Page A

find a patron, and a publisher.’ He leans over and begins to kiss my neck.
    ‘A bastard concubine could be a published poet?’
    ‘Why not?’ He has lifted my hair and is kissing the hidden skin beneath it.
    I push him away. ‘You’re making a mockery of me.’
    ‘As you wish. Leave this Art to those who understand it.’ He is laughing openly at me now. ‘You are such a wondrous pretty thing – no need to strive for a life of the mind.’
    I slap his face, slightly harder than I intended. ‘A woman can do anything, if she has a mind to it. The Queen writes verse.’
    He clutches his cheek in mock pain. ‘The Queen, good lady, is a prince. No, no, you are quite right. Stick to your love ditties; true Art is quite beyond you.’
    ‘What about you, the palace playwright? Everything you know, you learned at a country grammar school.’
    ‘Whereas
your
learning…’
    ‘Is of the Ancients, as you would expect.’
    ‘Oh, indeed. A little of Athens, and much of Rome.’
    ‘Much of both, sir. The trivium, of grammar, logic and rhetoric.’
    ‘Ay, like a learned blade at Oxford.’
    ‘Like the learned fellows everywhere. And also the quadrivium…’
    ‘Of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy…’ He hesitates, unsure.
    ‘And music.’
    ‘Of course – you are the lady of the virginals.’ He seems to think this is a joke of some kind, so I keep silent. ‘And this has fitted you for… rutting with an aged soldier, has it?’
    I get to my feet and walk to the river’s edge, hating him suddenly. He comes up behind me.
    ‘It has fitted me for discontent,’ I say.
    ‘You see?’ He pulls me close. ‘We are two of a kind. Would I have written plays if I had known my station? Or would I have stayed in Stratford, making gloves for the gentry?’
    I let him kiss me, but am still preoccupied. ‘I know enough to be a poet, I have read enough to know how it should be done, but I don’t know how to make my lines sing better!’ I say. ‘I can’t turn thoughts to written words! There is some magician’s trick to it.’
    Will leads me back to the grassy knoll and spreads out his cloak so that we can lie down again. ‘There is no magic,’ he says. ‘Treat words as if they were rubies.’ He unhooks the beaded hood from my hair, so that it falls around me, curled by its enclosure. ‘Choose the right one for each part of every line.’ He undoes my stomacher and lifts it away. ‘Write every line as though your life depended on it.’ He opens the front of my chemise and regards my dugs quizzically, as if deciding whether or not to buy them. ‘As if the executioner was standing by your shoulder, and thiswas the last chance to speak that you would ever know.’ With that, he pushes my chemise back, so my white shoulders are naked in the sun.
    I do not smile, nor assist him in his task. ‘That sounds like a kind of madness, I say. ‘I fear I am too sane.’
    He laughs again. The sun has browned his face. His eyes are full of sky. His lips are swollen red from reckless kissing.
    ‘Do you want me?’ he asks, very serious.
    Oh, I do. I do.
    And so we make love in the sunshine. Till at last Will calls my name, over and over. ‘Aemilia! Aemilia! Aemilia!’
     
    I need the skills of a player myself, in my dealings with Lord Hunsdon. It tears at me to lie to him, who was all in all to me for so many years. But I do so just the same, the whole summer long. And it scares me to think that, if he knew how I betrayed him, his anger would know no bounds. I once saw him kill a dog that turned. He beat the creature till it could not stand, and the ground was running with its blood. And that dog loved him, and had sighed at his feet with its great head upon its paws, watchful of his safety. If he knew how I lay with Shakespeare, and what we did, and how we cried out together in the boundless repetition of our lust, what would he do to me? I do not know.
    But what I fear is not his power to hurt me, although I know that he could