Page 61 of The Two Wills

“Don’t be a nosy-rosy,” he chirps, stuffing his pages into the blotter. “You know I don’t like to show things until I’m ready.” He stands suddenly and pulls me back to the bed. “I’ll write later. Let us commence with act two of tonight’s performance.” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Perhaps I could be a choir boy this time and you be the irate choir master?”

I smile at the idea, and offer, “It’s past season but you could be singing a Yuletide carol very badly! I become enraged and beat your buttocks with holly branches?”

“Brilliant! I’ll go clean up my hooded soldier, and you prepare whatever else we might need for your fleshy assault. I shall be back in quarter of an hour, my love.” He grabs me and kisses me, filling my stomach with a nest of dancing ladybugs. I ache when I see him leave the room.

I know he loves me, his touch and the few words he speaks confirm it, but underneath I still wonder. Is he hiding some truth I have yet to know? My eyes turn to the blotter on his table. I pull out the pages. It is indeed some play, with characters named Beatrice and Benedick. I return the pages to their spot. I then recall the sonnets Hughes mentioned months ago. He claimed the Poet had written more for me. Surely, they would illuminate me. Did he not say they were secreted in the leaves of a book called Plutarch’s Lives?

I scour the room, and finally find, hidden under his bed, the leather-bound volume with the name Plutarch nearly rubbed off its binding. It is filled with dozens of loose papers shoved between its leaves. At the front of the book are sonnets written for Hughes. Far more than he had mentioned seeing. I scan several, which are filled with adoration, while simultaneously reek with torment and longing. If one has eyes, they are anything but chaste. My heart is further disquieted.

I fumble through the pages until I discover a series of sonnets that use the feminine pronoun. I am pleased. There are at least two dozen. Most are, like the ones I have already seen, full of lust, and backhanded compliments concerning my appearance and power over him. Then I come upon one that starts with the words “two loves,” so I assume it must have been written in the Autumn, when Hughes and I were still feigning our love for each other. I read it:

Two loves have I of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still;

The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.

To win me soon to hell, my female evil

Tempteth my better angel from my side …

Any joy I had at being the subject of his poetry drains from my heart. The sonnet describes me in the ugliest of terms, and even worse, describes the youth as an angelic victim of my seduction. Rather than being jealous that Hughes had possessed me, the Poet appears envious that I had possessed Hughes. Is this what the Poet truly thinks of me? That I am preying on his bastard boy, trying to corrupt him? Stealing his love from the Poet? As I read further my mood grows blacker. I have often in my life been treated as a vessel for Englishmen’s pleasure, but now, after reading how the Poet portrays me in this verse, I feel far more worthless. I crumble onto the bed and fold my arm across my damp eyes, the cruel pile of sonnets next to me as if they are the pyre upon which my body shall burn.

Minutes later the Poet returns, fresh faced with wet hair and body. He removes his shirt and unbuckles his pants. “I’m ready, Choir Master,” he says.

“Shut it!” I cry through my tears.

His face flushes with confusion until he sees the sonnets stacked next to me. “What have you done? I told you before not to read my writing when I haven’t shown you.”

I grab the offending sonnet and, while tears fill my eyes, I read aloud. “Two loves have I of comfort and despair …”

“Stop it.” He grabs for the sonnet, but I leap away off the bed.

“ ‘The better angel is a man right fair,” I continue to recite. “The worser spirit is a woman colored ill …’ Is that me perhaps?”

“Rose … please!”

Again, he reaches for the pages, but I yank them from his grasp. “Back off, poet! Let’s see what else it says … ‘My female evil / Tempteth my better angel from my side, / And would corrupt my saint to be a devil …’ You really believe it was all me? That your young man is just so innocent and pure? That he didn’t try to seduce me as well? He’s the bastard son of a whore—and a whore himself! I am the daughter of a merchant. Just because my hair is not gold, nor my skin pink—it does not mean I have no breeding.”

“Stop, please, Rose. It’s just a stupid poem. I wasn’t writing about you—”

“And this part!” A bitter laugh mixes with tears in my voice. “ ‘Yet this shall I ne’er know, but live in doubt, / Till my bad angel fire my good one out.’ All this fucking we’ve been doing for the last two months. All this …” I must swallow hard to subdue myself from completely crumbling. “It’s all been just so I would leave your beloved muse alone?”

“No … absolutely not,” he says. But his sonnets and those clear dark eyes of his reveal the truth. By spending all his time with me, he has been sacrificing himself for Hughes—to protect him from me.

What an idiot I am. The Poet has never loved me at all. I am not even the toss-away vessel of his lust as I have been for so many other Englishmen. I was the cross he had to bear to keep his precious muse safe. My skin crawls, and my stomach heaves. I must leave as quickly as possible before he and the room swallow me, and I am never able to escape.

I dress clumsily, unable to stop my raging tears. I trip on my own skirts and fall to the floor. When he tries to help me up, I claw at his face, cutting a bloody slash across his cheek.

“Get away!”

“Please, Rose, I’m sorry. I wrote that in a moment of anger. I truly do care about you deeply, so much more than you can know. It’s hard to explain—” He approaches me again, with his pleading hands.

I run to the other side of the bed, claw up a fistful of his poisonous sonnets, and run to the open window. “Fie on thee, villain! Come not nearer! Or I shall throw these slanders to the wind so all of London shall see who and what you really are!”

“Please, Rose, don’t.” There is both terror and tears in his eyes. Whether it is because I will expose his sin or he fears losing his beloved poems, I cannot know. The wind outside flaps angrily through the pages. I feign a toss, but do not release them.