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

her parents’ disputes raged on, providing Aemilia with a sad education. Francis Holland was a master of masks and concealment, only revealing his true face once the wedding revels had ended and his marriage to her sister was sealed. Papa discovered Master Holland was already hundreds of pounds in debt when he and Angela exchanged their vows. What money his family had given him, he had reduced to nothing, spending it on wine, fine clothes, and one failed business venture after another. Brought up in sloth, he had no head for commerce. Francis Holland shunned hard work the way Mistress Locke shunned deviltry.

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    N THE COLD M ARCH twilight, Aemilia and her father walked home from Uncle Alvise’s house in Mark Lane, Papa’s hand enclosing hers and his head bent over his feet. How it crushed her to see him like this, the fire dimming in his eyes. He had lavished such love on Angela, only to have that love rejected.
If I was older,
Aemilia thought.
If I was a boy, I’d be able to earn my own living. Papa wouldn’t have to carry this all alone.
She would be able to give Master Holland the thrashing of his life. Put the fear of God into him lest he ever dare hurt her sister or threaten her father again. But she was a girl, a millstone dragging Papa down, neither truly Italian nor truly English. She was a foreign bastard, a halfling who belonged nowhere.
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    P APA WAS BROKEN AND could take no more. Seventeen years ago, he had saved Margaret Johnson, a pregnant and abandoned wife, and had raised her daughter as his own, only for that girl to marry a conniving brute who held the entire family in his thrall. Late at night, Aemilia heard Papa praying in his forbidden language. When the willow in their neglected garden burst into tender new leaves, he collapsed and took to his bed.
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    I N A PRIL P APA’S GARDEN was a paradise of blossom, the grass filmy with speedwell, the blackbirds trilling among blooming apple boughs. But Papa lay dying. It was just before Aemilia’s eighth birthday. Her uncles gathered round his bed, weeping as openly as she did. Anne Locke had come to pay her respects while Master Vaughan, Mistress Locke’s brother, recorded Papa’s last will and testament. Mother tried to drag Aemilia from the room, but the child shook her off and huddled next to Mistress Locke. Nothing could have wrenched her from Papa’s bedside.
    â€œLet Aemilia be educated,” Papa said, extracting a promise from Mistress Locke. His voice broke in its urgency. “I beg you, good lady. Find her a place in Susan Bertie’s household.”
    Aemilia had often heard Papa and Mistress Locke speak of Susan Bertie, the young Dowager Countess of Kent. The daughter of Mistress Locke’s great friend Catherine Willoughby, Susan was a true humanist who believed that girls should receive the same education as boys.
    â€œTo Margaret Bassano alias Johnson, my reputed wife,” Papa said, “I leave this house and property and all its effects, save the virginals, which shall be Aemilia’s and kept at my brother Giacomo Bassano’s house until she comes of age. My last one hundred pounds I leave to Aemilia, to be bequeathed when she turns twenty-one or upon her wedding day, whichever comes first.”
    This was Papa’s way of keeping her inheritance—the last of his life’s savings—safe from Master Holland. For all his love and care, he hadn’t been able to save Angela, who was now pregnant, as good as manacled to Master Holland forever. Her beautiful sister was lost. Yet Papa would save Aemilia, sending her off to be educated by Susan Bertie, who lived at her mother’s estate in Grimsthorpe, Lincolnshire. As for Mother, she had possession of the house and could take in lodgers and lead a respectable life if she could only resist Master Holland’s bullying.
    Papa gazed at Aemilia as though she were the most precious thing in his world. She, the only