The Dark Lady's Mask by Mary Sharratt Read Free Book Online

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?
    â€œYou 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.”
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    F ROM 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,