As they drew closer the crowd grew quieter. I looked about me and drew Claudio nearer – there was an uneasy atmosphere once again, as the people of Messina looked upon the giants, the black man and the white lady staring forward with their varnished faces, implacable. Then someone shouted ‘Matamoros!’ I looked around – I thought I recognised the voice; it belonged to an ensign in Don Pedro’s company. Others took up the shout; all Spaniards, for the word they shouted was a Spanish word. I had heard it before; it was a name they had given as a badge of honour to their patron St James the Great. Matamoros; Kill the Moor.
From behind us the regiment began to throw missiles at the black rider. They arced over us like arrows; fallen lemons, sticks. And then stones.
‘Let’s go,’ I hissed to Claudio, and pulled him back towards the church door. The archbishop, dressed now in his chasuble and finery, stood there in the duomo’s porch watching the trouble, with eyes empty of tears and surprise. I knew in an instant he had done this. I thrust Claudio at him. ‘Take him in,’ I commanded, caring not for his rank. He nodded once and took his nephew under his arm. I waited till they all went within and barred the doors, as if they knew the storm was coming.
I dashed back to the fray with only one thought – Beatrice. Now people were screaming and running. There was an angry, seething crowd about the legs of the plaster Moor’s wooden horse and still they were screaming the word Matamoros! The horse was rocking and would soon be toppled. I looked at the Vara beyond it; the children were already jumping down to safety in the arms of their mothers. I came face to face with Beatrice.
For a moment I held her in a beautiful firm embrace, as relief flooded me, and as we parted I read the same relief on her face, to be chased away by panic. ‘Benedick,’ she said, and my own name seemed the sweetest word in the lexicon at that moment. But she pointed. ‘Hero!’
I turned; saw at once. The Vara was rocking precariously, the paper planets tumbling down as if the universe had ended. Hero, clinging to her perch, was losing her grip, her chaplet of roses awry and her cheeks streaked with tears. As if time had slowed, the painted Moor and his horse toppled over to be broken and trampled and spat upon by the Aragonese. Beatrice was still by my side but I thrust her away from me. ‘Get out of this,’ I said. ‘I will find you.’
I did not expect her to obey and nor she did, but stood and watched in the screaming chaos as Hero toppled from the right hand of Christ and dropped like a stone. The girl landed in my arms, winding me, but Beatrice was there to fetch us up. I dragged them, one on each arm, to the cathedral porch and pounded at the studded doors. Hero was safely conveyed to her uncle and aunt, and I would have pressed Beatrice within too, but she tugged my hand.
Wordlessly, we went back into the fray. Hand in hand we walked through the chaos. The Moor was shattered into dust, the black plaster chipped from his face – he was now white. In opposition, as if to redress some balance of opposing forces, the sky darkened into dusk. The fireworks burst overhead, and I wondered what there was to celebrate. The Vara contraption lay on its side, and the townsfolk were cutting the great ropes into little pieces with their wicked knives and handing the hemp around to the pullers and bowmen. This may have been a custom with them but now it just seemed of a piece with the general anarchy. I followed Beatrice out of the madness and as I left the thoroughfare I felt a crunch underfoot.
The red crystal Sacred Heart lay shattered in the archbishop’s congealed blood.
Act III scene iii
The dunes before the Moor’s house
Beatrice: I could not stop the tears from sliding down my cheeks as I stumbled down the shoreline in the direction of the Moor’s house.
I was certain that the poet and his family were in danger, that the mob I had just seen would not differentiate between past and present tenant and that the house had once been the home of the murderous Moor would be enough for them to burn the place to the ground.
I scrambled through the cacti and my dress tore a little; prickly fruits were knocked to the ground and I trod them underfoot, smelling their cloying sweet flesh. In my haste my hand had broken from Signor Benedick’s but I knew he still followed me, for now and again he called my name. The word sounded so lovely on his lips it was snatched and blown away by the jealous zephyr. I tasted salt on my lips; my tears and the sea spray were one. The field of stars overhead made the night as bright as day, shining in their thousands like the crystals of Egyptian blue.
I blinked the tears away in an effort to see the house ahead; but it was all right, only the lamp burned in the study window. Giovanni Florio Crollalanza was no doubt at his pamphlets – no torches touched the timbers, no stones broke the quarrels, no angry citizens wielded their moonlight daggers. The silver sea was calm and flat as a looking glass, the tide whispered in in intervals, and the hubbub from the town sounded no louder here than the waves.
At the dunes I collapsed into the sand where I had sat yesterday disputing with the poet. Benedick knelt before me, and touched one of the tears on my cheek. ‘Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?’
‘Yes, and I have tears enough to rival the stars in number.’
‘But your cousin is safe,’ he assured me.
Yes, and he had saved her. ‘How much might the man deserve of me that righted her!’ I clasped the finger that had touched the teardrop. I could not explain the real reason for my tears; the Moor’s horse falling, the plaster Moor, his face stoved in, blanched by violence, and let go of the finger. ‘But there are other wrongs here to be righted.’
‘Is there any way to show such friendship?’ His kneeling posture turned him supplicant. ‘May a man do it?’
I thought of the poet. ‘It is a man’s office, but not yours.’
He rose, so precipitately that sand flew into my skirts, suddenly angry. ‘Then whose? That scribbler?’
I sat under the benign stars, their light doubling and trebling through the lens of my tears. They seemed to be falling. I did not hear the danger in his voice. ‘He knew. He knew how it would be. He told me here, on this very spot, just yesterday.’
I looked at Benedick’s angry, shuttered face, the angles of it sharp in the moonlight. How could I explain that a fortnight earlier, I would have thrilled to sit here with him, back when I had wanted, so much, a Moor of my own. That the poet had been helping me to write a sonnet, for him, which expressed exactly what I wanted to say? That I had wanted to give it to him, here, tonight, on these dunes? But now it had all turned sour, for the Moor’s crime against nature had shaken the constellations, and ruptured the ordained orbit of my life too.
Yet if the poet was right this had all started well before, with the massacre of Ramiro of Asturias centuries ago, with the heavenly connivance of St James the Moor-slayer – St James Matamoros – and the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and from Sicily. Now it was ended, this whole sorry history of the Moors in Sicily – the last living Moor had gone, slain by his own hand, and even the plaster Moor Grifone, that colossus of the Ascension parade, was utterly vanquished. The play was over; and it was a tragedy, defined by its ending. Sun and day and love had turned to night and dark and murder, and I wish the planets could be turned and we could revolve once again into day, but I did not know how that might be achieved.
I thought Benedick was the answer. I had brought him here because I had thought him, somehow, the key to this celestial reversal. I had once thought him a jester or a fool, the personification of mirth, but now he looked as furious as the mob. ‘Who said these things?’ He knelt again, but in dominance this time, not submission, and laid his hands upon my shoulders. ‘You talked with a man, here, yesterday?’
I sighed – I owed him the truth, even though I knew it would anger him. ‘It was the poet. Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza. His house is there.’ I pointed to the light beyond the cacti.
He released my shoulders and turned to look at the window, as if he could not trust himself. ‘And now, you were running to him? That is t
he right of it, isn’t it?’
‘No,’ I protested. ‘I mean, yes. But not like that. I wanted to warn him.’
‘Warn him of what?’
I thought of all Michelangelo had said of the Spanish, of Benedick’s friends. ‘I cannot say.’
‘You have your secrets, then,’ he spat.
Worse and worse. ‘Do not believe me; and yet, I do not lie …’ I was babbling, but Benedick was so tied to the affair, so complicit in it all – bound to Don Pedro by those inexorable bonds of brotherhood and friendship, tied to St James the Moor-slayer by reason of the medal he still wore around his neck. What if I told him of the poet’s suspicions and he ran back to his brother-prince? I thought speedily and told a half-truth. ‘We spoke of love. What else do poets know?’
He came to me then, his eyes dark with something indefinable. I thought him angry, but then he took my hands. ‘I may not have the simpering syllables of Monsieur Love,’ he whispered fervently, ‘I can only speak like an honest man and a soldier. But I can speak of love too.’ He took a breath as if he would plunge into five fathoms. ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you.’
There it was. He had done the impossible. He had turned the world around. I was suddenly shining in the firmament with the dayspring, overflowing with joy. ‘Why, then, God forgive me!’ I exclaimed. ‘I was about to protest I loved you.’
Then suddenly his lips were on mine, our bodies pressed together. The fire in the sky was between us now, descended from the celestial to the mortal, it was burning in our hearts, twin coals. We kissed until we could not breathe, and collapsed on the sand, side by side, hands entwined. The stars glittered just for us. I blinked back at them, unable to believe such happiness; and saw then, brighter than them all, the crooked constellation that was most dear to me. I pointed. ‘There, do you see? That group of five stars, shaped like a double V?’
He followed my finger with his gaze. ‘Yes.’
‘That is Cassiopeia’s chair. And there is a sixth star, see, at the bottom.’
‘I see it,’ he said. ‘It is smaller than the rest, and brighter.’
‘That is because it is young – it is not even a score of years old.’
He leaned on his elbow, and looked at me indulgently. ‘How do you know?’
‘It is my star,’ I said. ‘It was born when I was born.’
He began to kiss my throat, small, fluttering kisses like butterflies, so sweet that they made it difficult to speak. ‘Explain.’
‘My mother bore me in her chamber, at the top of our castle’s tower. As she laboured, she looked on the stars for comfort, and she told me that at the very second of my birth, that new star danced into being, lighting up like a candle flame. I always thought it her fancy, but claimed the star for my own. It was something we shared, even when she died.’ The little kisses stopped; resumed again. ‘Then I came here, and our own Friar Francis, who is something of an astronomer, told me she spoke truly; the star was a stella nova, born on November 11th just like me.’ I sighed like the zephyr, happily now. Benedick was the first person save the friar I had told about the star. The star had been mine and my mother’s; I had not told my father, nor yet my brother. But now, at last, I had someone to tell, someone who loved me. ‘Its proper name is Tycho’s Supernova, but I prefer to think of it as a diamond set into Cassiopeia’s chair,’ I smiled at the skies, ‘a fitting ornament for the goddess who boasted of her unrivalled beauty.’
‘She has a rival now,’ said Benedick, and moved his mouth up to meet mine.
I was on the dunes, my back pressed into the giving sand, soft and hard at once, and moulding to my body. He was upon me, his lips so soft, his body hard, two states at once like the sand. Our garments, the white and blue, were twined and combined. My hands moved into his warm hair, and learned the shape of the back of his head. My eyes closed, my head twisted back and my throat arched with pleasure and fear. Then his lips moved downwards and my hands clawed and clasped the sand in my ecstasy. I felt the powder harden in my fist; then begin to slip, inevitably, out of my grasp, until I was holding nothing.
My eyes flew open. Benedick was above me, and the stars were gone. All was blackness; he had put out the light.
Put out the light.
I sat bolt upright, shoving him away with a strength I didn’t know I had, my heart thudding.
Benedick lay back on the sand, laughing, uncertain. ‘Beatrice? My love? What’s amiss?’
How could I tell him? How could I explain to Benedick that I was not thinking of my chastity, or my reputation, or my maidenhead? I was not some Pope-holy poppet who would go so far then refuse to go farther. All I could think was that all such acts of love had the same sequel. The caress that turned to the death grip, love corroding to jealousy. I had seen the darkness in Benedick’s eyes before, at the wedding at Syracuse, when he had spoken to me of the poet, and again tonight, when he thought I had run to Michelangelo Crollalanza, despite the fact that my heart had not even the smallest corner of space for him. Or if it did, only that region which held friendship, certainly not love; for all of my heart was occupied by the forces of one Knight of St James.
I looked down at Benedick beside me, breathing heavily, hoisting himself to his elbow. His hair tumbled, his clothes disarranged, he smiled tenderly but uncertainly. He had never looked more handsome, and I would have given anything to sink back down with him, and let the universe keep turning as it would. Then he reached up his hand to my throat, and I realised that my own fingers were there, squeezing, shielding. Gently he removed them, touching tenderly where I swallowed and breathed, as gently as he had kissed me there moments ago. Now his touch terrified me.
I flinched. ‘I am gone, though I am here,’ I croaked, hoarse as if I had been throttled in truth.
He laughed and put his arms about me again, to pull me down – I felt his strength, and saw again that darkness in his eyes. ‘There is no love in you,’ I hissed, ‘nay, I pray you, let me go.’ The last word was a shout.
I stumbled away through the sand, tripping and stumbling, shaking, turning and walking backward, fearful he would follow, half-hoping that he would.
‘Tarry, sweet Beatrice!’ He was half laughing, half concerned, as if I played some lover’s game. But the game was my life.
I tried to regain composure. I brushed the sand from my gown and straightened myself. ‘In faith, I will go.’ And I ran towards the house on the dunes, thinking all the time that, just as I had watched the lovers in the sand a fortnight since, we too had been observed by spying eyes.
Act III scene iv
The studiolo in the Moor’s house
Beatrice: I walked towards the light of the little window as if it were the light of the Bethlehem star.
It spelled sanctuary for me, for I knew that Benedick would look for me, and if he caught me I would acquiesce. I was not proof against him, not proof against my own feelings. I wanted nothing more than to run back into his arms, for I had not felt as safe nor as wanted since I was a child. I had felt, for one instant, the centre of the universe, the Earth in the orrery, that all the planets and heavenly bodies revolved around me. Around us. But so had the Moor’s wife felt when the sun of the Moor’s affection had shone upon her; and now she was cold in the ground.
I was at the window of the study now. I don’t know whether I expected to see Giovanni Florio Crollalanza, working at his pamphlets, or even the poet himself, taking lease of his father’s desk. But the person I saw was someone who did not, as I had once been told, look right in a room. It was Guglielma Crollalanza.
She was sitting at the desk, amid her husband’s papers, with her chin on one hand and her black ringlets obscuring her face. She held the other hand outstretched to touch the orrery on the desk. The brass rings revolved at her touch and the little planets spun about the Earth at the centre. I noticed that despite the golden colour of her skin, her hand was dark skinned on the back and her palm and fingers were white below. I realised then with a jol
t that there was one more Moor still left on the island.
She looked as if she had troubles of her own, but still I tapped on the window and saw her turn rapidly, as if expecting someone else. But she forced a smile, took her hand away from the planets and beckoned me in. I looked for a doorway and entered through the little loggia. I walked through the dark little house to the lit room. The lamp on the desk was the only light in the place.
Guglielma did not look as me as I entered the studiolo. Her white teeth chewed her mulberry lower lip. ‘Giovanni has not returned from the Vara,’ she said. ‘Michelangelo has gone to seek him.’
I recognised a larger problem than my own and began to withdraw. ‘I will go.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Stay. I need company.’ Now she looked at me, with searching eyes. ‘Were you looking for my son?’
I took the sonnet that only yesterday her son had helped me to write from my bodice. I had planned to put it in Benedick’s hand tonight. Instead I put it in hers. ‘He helped me write this,’ I said.
‘May I?’
I nodded, colouring a little, for the sentiment was raw and the construction faulty. As she unfolded the paper the settebello card, which had been nestling in my bodice with the sonnet, fell on to the leather topper of the desk, and I thought she had not noted it.
There was no sound but her breathing as she read. Her full lips moved a little as if she spoke the sonnet aloud. ‘It is very beautiful.’ She looked directly at me with her eyes black as sloes, and I blushed deeper. ‘But it is not meant for Michelangelo, I think?’
‘He is not the subject,’ I said hurriedly, ‘but he gave me the ink and the paper, and as the components are his, I am come to render them to him again.’
Beatrice and Benedick Page 13