EMILIA, 1581
By the age of twelve, Emilia Bassano knew that most people saw only what they expected to see. She thought about this as she lay on her belly, her skirts bunched up beneath her, her chin on one fist. With her free hand, she was building a faerie house. The whitest pebbles from the front drive of Willoughby House ringed a carpet of moss. On it, she had crafted a tiny home of twigs, laced together with long shoots of grass and capped with a roof made of birchbark. Dog-rose blossoms served as windows; twined columbine and kingcup lined the entrance. She added a spotted red toadstool she’d found in the woods, a perfect throne.
She’d filched a polished obsidian king from Peregrine Bertie’s chess set. Also known as the Baron Willoughby, he was the brother of Emilia’s guardian—Susan Bertie, the Countess of Kent. It was their quarrel that had made Emilia flee outside to escape. She placed the chess piece close to the toadstool. I’ll call him Oberon, Emilia thought, naming him after the king of the elves in the French poem Huon de Bordeaux, which she’d studied last week with the Countess. “Your Majesty,” Emilia said, “here’s your lady wife.” She reached for a second piece she’d taken from the chess set, a smooth ivory queen.
If Oberon had a wife in the poem, she wasn’t important enough to mention.
Emilia needed a name that made her unforgettable. A faerie queen who’s larger than life, she mused. “Titania,” she pronounced.
Finally, she set down the third chess piece between the king and queen. A small, dark pawn.
She could still hear the argument between the Baron and the Countess, as clear as day.
I can’t bring Emilia with me, the Countess had said, when Emilia hadn’t even known she was going somewhere.
Nor I, Susan, her brother argued. I must leave for Denmark soon.
Take her, the Countess replied. She’s a girl, not gunpowder.
Now Emilia stroked the pawn with a fingertip and reimagined the story. The pawn was a child. An orphan. The king and queen both want you, she mused. They cannot stop fighting over who gets to keep you. They love you so much that it will tear the whole world apart.
“There you are!” With a rustle of skirts, the Countess sank down beside her. She didn’t scold Emilia for disappearing or tell her that there would be grass stains on the silk of her dress, and for this, if for nothing else, Emilia adored her. The Countess was only in her twenties, and had already been widowed. For most women that would spell freedom—no longer owned by their fathers or husbands—but she’d been summoned back to court by Queen Elizabeth. Sometimes the Countess made Emilia think of a wolf willing to chew off a limb to escape a golden trap.
It was not extraordinary for a girl of limited means to be trained up into service in an aristocratic household. Emilia’s family were court musicians and had emigrated from Italy at the request of King Henry VIII, after he heard them play their recorders. Emilia’s own father had taught Queen Elizabeth, then a princess, how to play the lute and speak Italian. However, although Emilia’s family now played for the entertainment of the Queen, they never would be nobility.
Emilia had been sent to the Countess at age seven, when her father had died and her mother had left London in service to another aristocratic family. Her parents had not been married, but they lived together while her father was alive. Emilia did not remember her mother very well, except for the fact that she was young, much younger than her father, and so lost in her own daydreams that, even as a child, Emilia knew not to rely on her. Baptista Bassano, her father, had the same olive skin as Emilia, and called her passerotta—little sparrow. She remembered the melodies he played on his recorder, some haunting, some jaunty; how the notes curled through her. She remembered her mother saying, almost regretfully, that her father’s music could coax the stars from the sky. Those were the only bits she had left of her parents now. Emilia took the memories out regularly, like silver that had to be polished, lest you become unable to see the intricacies of its pattern.
“What have we here?” the Countess asked, as if it were perfectly normal to play in the dirt under the shrubbery. “A faerie house?”
“Another world,” Emilia confirmed. She considered asking the Countess where she was going and begging to come along.
The Countess’s mouth tipped at one corner. “What a pity we live in this world, where it’s time for lessons.” She extricated herself from the hedge more gracefully than Emilia did, but not before she gathered up the chess pieces. “If the Baron finds these missing, he’ll become a bear.”
Emilia pictured a wild beast dressed in the Baron’s doublet and breeches, a stiff lace ruff beneath its bristled snout.
“Cheer your heart, child,” the Countess said, chucking Emilia under the chin. “Once we’re gone, perhaps the real faeries will come live in the house you’ve built them.”
Emilia fell into step behind the Countess. She wondered if it were that simple; if anything became possible when no one was watching.
Emilia sat in the great hall, which was the room in the Baron’s home where the family gathered. In their Lincolnshire country home, Grimsthorpe, there was a separate room for tutoring, but in London the library was used by the Baron. Emilia studied languages, reading, writing, and dancing (music had been dropped after it became clear that Emilia could have taught her tutor more than he could teach her). Because the Countess herself had been educated—which was far from the norm for a woman—she oversaw Emilia’s reading. The Bible, of course, but also tracts on decorum and Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies. Today, the Countess had Emilia translating Marie de France’s lai “Bisclavret.” It was about a baron whose wife worried about his repeated disappearances. To Emilia’s delight, the husband confessed: at times he transformed into a werewolf, and only donning his human clothes allowed him to turn back into a man. The wife, disgusted, promised to give her love and her body to a knight who’d been flirting with her if he stole Bisclavret’s clothes—ensuring that the baron would not return. But when the werewolf pledged his fealty to the king, the wife’s plan was thwarted.
“This cannot be right,” Emilia said, doubting her own translation. “More than one woman of that family / Was born without a nose to blow, and lived denosed.”
The Countess laughed. “Oui, parfait,” she said. “And what is the message of this poem?”
“Men are beasts,” Emilia said flatly. She imagined, again, the Baron with the face of a bear.
“No, my dear. This is a poem about loyalty,” the Countess said. “The wife turns on Bisclavret, and is punished for it. Bisclavret is loyal to his king, and is rewarded for it.”
“So they’re both beasts,” Emilia answered.
“Should the wife be forced to stay married to a werewolf? And if not, what tools does she have to extract herself from that bond? Teeth and claws are weapons . . . but so are a woman’s body and her love.” She shrugged. “You can’t blame Bisclavret for being cursed as a werewolf. Yet nor can you blame a woman cursed by her sex.”
“But she loses her nose,” Emilia pointed out.
“Life as a woman is not without risks,” the Countess said. She covered Emilia’s hand with her own. “Which is why,” she added softly, “I am to wed Sir John.”
Emilia had met the man when he visited.
The Countess cupped her cheek. “Afterward, he will take me to Holland. I shall write,” she promised.
Emilia felt her eyes burn. She thought of the little dark pawn on the chessboard, being moved around at the whims of whoever was playing the game. Yet she had learned to show people what they wanted to see, so she smiled until a dimple appeared in her cheek. “I wish you all joy,” she said.
The first thing you noticed about London was the stench—body odor, feces, and vomit, mingling with the smells of woodsmoke and cooked meat. The streets knotted and tangled as if they had been mapped by a child. Sellers hawked their wares, from feathers to jugs of milk to rush lights, their voices competing with the clatter of hooves and the rattle of carriage wheels. Emilia darted out of the way of conveyances and the occasional diving bird, the kites scavenging a moldy crust or a scrap of thread for their nests. Her leather boots slid on cobblestones that were slick with mud and refuse. Beggars with rags wrapped around their oozing limbs sat on the thresholds of doorways, hands plucking at Emilia’s skirts. She passed a cockfight ringed with men shouting out their bets; and when a brawl between two skinny boys spilled into the street, she ducked into an alley. There, a light-skirt was making a quick coin, her skirts pulled up to her waist. She stared blankly over the shoulder of the man rutting into her, as Emilia hurried by.
When in London, Emilia visited her cousin Jeronimo’s family for Friday supper. Although she’d grown up outside the city gates, in Spitalfields, with her mother and father, the rest of her cousins now lived on Mark Lane, in the Italian community.
Mark Lane was jammed with two-story wooden homes that listed drunkenly, like a smile made of uneven teeth. Before Emilia had even turned the corner, she could hear music spilling from various houses. She could play almost any instrument, but she would never be as fluent as her cousins. They effortlessly strung together notes the way she entwined words—spinning a melody so perfect you couldn’t imagine that a moment before it had not existed in the world.
The red belly of the sun was scraping the roof of her cousin’s home when Emilia finally stepped inside. Jeronimo’s sons, Edward and Scipio, barreled into her legs in greeting. Their mother, Alma, laughed. “Piccolini, let her breathe.”
From the corner of the room closer to the hearth, her cousin looked up from the lute he was stringing and smiled. “How is the world of the nobility?” he teased.
“The same as it was yesterday when you were at court,” Emilia said.
Jeronimo made a noncommittal sound. She knew, as did he, that the Bassanos’ reign as Queen Elizabeth’s musicians would last only as long as her favor—and that it could be revoked at any time. Then what would come of them?
Emilia swung one of her small second cousins onto her hip and glanced around the little home. Her relatives were not as wealthy as the Countess and the Baron, of course, but thanks to their roles at court, they were still gentry. They had carved wooden chests brought from Italy and curtains instead of plain wooden shutters. But they also had only a single loft bed, in which they slept with the children. Even if she asked her cousin to take her in after the Countess wed, there was not space for her. She was a shadow caught between two worlds, like the faeries.
“Tell us a story, Emilia,” the smaller boy said, reaching for the braided rope of Emilia’s hair. When she came to Mark Lane she dressed as a commoner, with her hair down and a plain kirtle over her chemise.
Emilia sat on the hearth with the boy in her lap, letting his brother settle beside her. “Do you know who I met today?” she said. “A faerie queen.”
“Was she beautiful?” one boy asked. “Like you?”
Beauty, Emilia knew, was relative. Her olive coloring was far from the fashionable pale skin on display at court; her hair was darker than night; her eyes a ghostly silver. Taken separately, her features were arresting, odd. But combined, they drew attention—men’s glances, their wives’ narrowed eyes.
“Prettier even than Queen Elizabeth,” Emilia said, and she heard her cousin muffle a snort.
Alma winked at her, opening a cupboard to retrieve a folded square of linen embroidered at the edges. It was probably the finest item in the household.
“The faerie queen had promised to care for a friend’s orphaned babe, but her husband the faerie king wanted to take it away from her.”
“Why?” one of the boys asked.
Emilia considered this. She could not remember being as young as her little second cousins, and certain that nothing on God’s earth could separate a child from their parent.
“Because the faerie king feared that the queen would love the babe so much, she would forget him.”
The boys leaned toward her, rapt. “What happened?”
“The king . . . wanted to teach the queen a lesson. So he told his faerie servant to find a purple flower that would make someone fall in love with the very first thing they saw. And he brushed that flower over the queen’s brow as she slept.”
Alma smoothed the embroidered linen over the scarred wooden table in the center of the room. “Emilia, cara,” she said, “the shutters?”
Emilia slid away from the children and stood, dusting off her skirts as she crossed to the open window that lacked the leaded glass panes the Baron had. “But who did she fall in love with?” asked one boy.
A donkey cart rattled past outside. “Why . . . an ass!” Emilia said, and the children fizzed with giggles.
“That’s enough,” Alma chided. “Jeronimo?”
The sun had slipped below the horizon. Emilia’s cousin made sure the shutters were closed and then wriggled a loose stone from the fireplace. Behind it was a small safehole, from which he drew a parcel wrapped in muslin, and another piece of folded linen. He unwound the muslin like he was peeling an apple, revealing two brass candlesticks that he set on the table. Alma added tallow candles and then reached for the linen to drape over her head. Emilia took her little cousins’ hands and led them to the table, bowing her head. “Baruch atah Adonai,” Alma sang, lighting the candles with tinder from the hearth. “Eloheinu melech ha-olam asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu l’hadlik neir shel Shabbat.”
Amen, the rest replied, in perfect harmony.
A secret prayer, for a forbidden religion. Like the other converso Jews who had come from Spain and Italy, the Bassanos were Christians now in the eyes of the world, attending church and praying to the Virgin and her Blessed Son.
People saw what they wanted to see.
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Excerpted from By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult Copyright © 2024 by Jodi Picoult. Used by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
