In that seventh chamber of the house of Lucy Negro a shadow prowls back and forth without ceasing. It is the shade of one denied the power to find himself outside these walls. It is the shadow of the late William Shakespeare. There he is who was my friend. A damned soul, madam? He would not have said so, and no more do I. Mr Shakespeare is on the other side of Lucy Negro's seventh door, that's all.
Never elsewhere have I seen such obscene furniture. She keeps two dildoes, crossed, on the wall of her jakes. She is no common doxy, dell, or bawdy-basket. Some say her mother was Lilith, and that Lilith is the devil. Her cunt is like an oyster with soft teeth.
Lucy Negro called herself a KINCHIN-MORT. These words I cannot find in my father's dictionary. But when I played Pickleherring for the Germans I learnt that there a child is called a kindchen, and in the Netherlands the name for a brothel is a mot-huys. Possibly, though, that MORT is from amourette, being French for a passing love affair. Barbarous and beautiful, there was something Babylonian about the woman. She had her own argot. It was the language of a perfect blackness. 'Master Shag-beard, I am your kinchin-mort.'
Call her up now as she appeared to me then, at the Gray's Inn Revels, that year at Christmas. Her pins, her little head, her crown of silver and of lace, her eyes between two shining silver candlesticks, each lifting a trembling flame to worship her, her skin that seems to be listening as she stands there on tiptoe, her mouth with that frozen line of irony on her lips, her swaying haunch that speaks of snake-like copulations, her wayward hair, the velvety slope of her breasts - these things are the merest echoes of her presence. Her body is only the perfume of her soul. She laughs and then she is gone. She is melted into air, into thin air.
Poor Shakespeare! Lucy Negro was his punishment. It is a demon's arms that hold him now. Listen, down the maze of the corridors, through the seven airless, perfumed rooms, the music of her playing on the virginals. Will the door of that seventh sable chamber ever open again? Will the music of those virginals never end? The sound of the music is like the wash of waves on a far-off shore of sleep. You can scarcely hear it playing. Yet once heard you can hear nothing else. Her fingers play the music of your blood.
They say when she first came to the house in St John Street she called herself Lucy Parker. But always she was known as Lucy Negro. The name came from the colour of her skin. She was a mulatto or quadroon from the West Indies. There was African blood a-coursing through her veins.
Dusky-skinned, with eyes as black and shining as the wings of a raven, her breasts were dun, and her hair was like black wires - it was thick and twisting, curly in the extreme. By no means conventionally beautiful, she was on my oath a woman of rare beauty. Summoned, if she could be said to be summonable, amid candles and mirrors that could not hold her reflection, through flame-shaken gloom, answering to such titles as Black Luce, or (in later years) Old Lucilla, she was in great demand with the young gentlemen of the Inns of Court. For them she wore green gowns, or fragile sheaths of crimson. These were her natural colours. Also the white of shrouds. What colour she wore for Shakespeare I do not know. I never saw them together. I know that he worshipped her.
At the Gray's Inn Revels, at that masquerade, homage was paid to her. She sat on a throne, and she wore Queen Elizabeth's white gown. Her raven hair was down about her shoulders, her skin gleaming like ebony where she showed her thighs and breasts to her adorers. Lucy Negro came among them with a whip.
It was said that Lucy Negro liked whipping best of all things. She would whip men's buttocks until they were in a frenzy. It is said that men would walk miles with their pricks erect to have her whip them.
Lucy Negro called all pricks WILLS.
'Get out your will,' she would order her servants, 'and let's see what you're made of.'
Or: 'Come here with your will, little man, and let your mother see if you are willing.'
She would wear a will herself, when in the mood. 'Where there's a will, there's a way,' she used to say then. (I wonder why Mr Shakespeare never used that for one of his titles, when he was making up one of those last-minute names which told you he was tired of the whole damned play.) The word WILL occurs twenty times in twenty-eight lines in sonnets 135 and 136, which pun furiously on Lucy Negro's usage, among others.
Lucy Negro was a spirit who sold her body to earn her living. She was a mystery, she was also a common whore. When Rizley came her way, she deserted Mr Shakespeare. She was after the highest game that was available. WS, besotted, forgave them both, though perhaps the forgiveness should not be attributed to the besottedness. To Rizley he wrote:
That thou hast her it is not all my grief,
And yet it may be said I lov'd her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:
Thou dost love her because thou know'st I love her;
And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,
Suff'ring my friend for my sake to approve her.
If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,
And losing her, my friend hath found that loss;
Both find each other, and I lose both twain,
And both for my sake, lay on me this cross.
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one;
Sweet flattery! then she loves but me alone.
I must admit that I do not find this very convincing. It strikes me that Mr Shakespeare was trying to cheer himself up.
The sonnet addressed to Lucy Negro is more truthful. From it, I have sometimes surmised that Shakespeare wanted the three of them in bed together. It would not much surprise me. Lucy Negro's bed was wide. And it is said that when done whipping she liked to have two men pleasure her at the same time, one at the front door, one at the back:
Two loves I have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me stilclass="underline"
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ilclass="underline"
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me, both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's helclass="underline"
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
This, then, was William Shakespeare's true Dark Lady. Lucy Negro, mistress of the enchanted house in St John Street, the Abbess of Clerkenwell, was his 'woman colour'd ill', and his living exemplar of the fact that as he says in sonnet 127, 'In the old age black was not counted fair'. That is the first sonnet which is addressed to the Dark Lady. Mark well that it uses the word BLACK three times in its fourteen lines. Not 'dark', sir. BLACK.
Never despise the obvious, my friends. When Shakespeare goes on in these sonnets about the blackness of his mistress, he means just what he says. It should be readily discernible that from the outset it is not merely a matter of the lady having dark hair. It is her total blackness that obsesses and fascinates and torments him. Her hair is black, her eyes are black, her skin is black. No doubt, since he called her his 'female evil', and again characterised her cunt as a 'hell' in the last line of sonnet 129, Mr Shakespeare would have said that Lucy Negro's heart was black as well. And yet, as I insist, he worshipped her, which is to say that he went on loving her through hate and out the other side. He may still be imprisoned in her seventh room, but the sonnets are not.