As she rose to the pyre she turned to face the assembly. Despite the crude garb she somehow looked more noble than her judges; her sackcloth more glorious than their cloth of gold, her noose more costly than their chains of office, her candle more weighty than their sceptres of power. The archbishop spoke the anathema over her, and her lips moved too in response. I knew what she said, her eyes fixed upon the archbishop. I could read her full lips. She repeated the curse that she’d spoken in the courtroom, a scourge as old as the island: Ti manciu ‘u cori. I will eat your heart.
When the prayers were done the Spanish soldiers, those noble cavaliers of St James, jeered and shouted Moorish slurs. I heard the word ‘Matamoros’ on their lips many times over.
It was then that two figures detached themselves from the crowd and rushed the ring of Spanish pikes. It was an impassioned, ill-advised rescue bid, and it did no good at all. I, perhaps alone of the crowd, knew the identities of the desperate father and son beneath the cowls.
‘Arrest them,’ said the archbishop, and before anyone could move a tall, armoured figure wearing the helm of St James took the two men in hand. Outnumbering their captor, they could have shaken him off; but he spoke rapidly to them, and besides, there was nowhere for them to go. The knight led them past the cordon, but through the numb horror I knew that they, at least, were safe. For I would know the bearing and carriage of Signor Benedick anywhere; even beneath a suit of armour.
But now there was no escape for Guglielma. I watched, dumb, as she was lashed to the stake. It seemed so cruel, so out of all proportion with common decency and sense. Was the archbishop so desperate to remove the last vestige of Moorish blood from the island? Her arms were tied tight from shoulder to elbow, and I saw, with sudden clarity, that with both her hands she had made the sign of the horns, the salute she had made to me at the tournament. She had never told me what it meant, but I thought I knew; it was not a sign of the Devil but a sign of defiance, a rejection of submission, a sign of women that confound men.
I waited for the people to rise up, for an angel to split the clouds, for a saint to ride over the volcano and slice her ropes with a fiery sword. Was there a celestial counterweight to St James Matamoros? Would St Zeno, the black saint of Verona, descend from the skies like an ebony-faced avenger and defend one of his own? But there was no intervention, earthly or heavenly. It seemed impossible, unbelievable, what was about to happen.
I don’t know what I expected – that such a dreadful end would necessarily be slow; but as soon as the faggots were lit her gown caught almost at once and she was, instantly, a pall of flame. As the flames cleared I could see that her hands were still twisted into the gesture of the horns. She burned soundlessly, and the crowd were horribly silent too. I do not know when she died, but her body itself began to make strange corporeal sounds – crackling and whistlings as the air left her charred form. Worse, the burning flesh began to smell, and I heard, about me, many a stomach rumble, as the famished civilians smelled cooking meat. I remembered what Michelangelo had said to me on the dunes – that the people were starving.
I looked accusingly at the archbishop, with his trademark tears running down his face, then back at the faces around me. They were not looking at Guglielma any more. They were looking at him. I could not help but feel that his plan, whatever it was, had somehow misfired; that despite the jeers of the Spanish the citizens of Messina were not enjoying the spectacle that had been orchestrated for their benefit.
Perhaps it was the sight of one of their own burning, an Archirafi, a Crollalanza – a Sicilian. Perhaps the hunger in their bellies awakened their rebellion too late. But the air prickled with dissent; it floated about with Guglielma’s ash, into every eye and every mouth, inescapable. I felt pressure at my back and realised that the crowd was surging forward to the cathedral. It was eerie, that wordless movement forward, the hundreds of hollow eyes, the relentless shuffling feet, moving forth in silent protest. The Knights of St James raised their pikes, shouted threats and warnings, but the crowd did not abate. It was a protest, an uprising.
The archbishop, the viceroy and my uncle rose hurriedly from their thrones and retreated back inside the cathedral, and the doors closed behind them with a hollow boom. I half expected the people to hammer the doors in, but if they did not respect the prelate himself they respected the sanctity of the church, and went no further.
The fire lost its fierceness as the sun rose, as if that burning orb had appropriated the heat of the fire. Now there was nothing but ash, the crowd began to disperse; drifting away across the square with the cinders of martyred flesh.
This, then, was the end of Guglielma’s story. And Guglielma’s play had been a tragedy, as had the entire history of the Moors in Sicily. I had thought, and Michelangelo had thought that day on the dunes, that the Vara would be the climax of the story; the iconoclasm of the Moor’s image, the chaos of the crowd. We had both been wrong. The archbishop had given the drama a climax as surely as any great impresario, a climax which plumbed the very depths of horror.
But the story had an epilogue; for in that dreadful, ashy aftermath the women came, the women who had danced with Guglielma, the women whom her courage had saved from calumny. They crept silently from every corner of the square, black clad in mourning, stealthy; spiders themselves. They knelt in the cinders and began to gather the cooled ash in their hands. Wordlessly, I joined them, sifting the ash until my hands were as black as they had been the day I first saw the Moor, when Signor Benedick had kissed my inky fingers. At length the women found their grisly trophy – a hot and blackened skull, nothingness staring from empty orbs. Impossible that those burning eyes had now been extinguished, that another light had been put out.
The women handed the skull to a tall, hooded lady who held open a velvet-lined casket. Her cowl fell back a little to reveal alabaster skin and blue-grey eyes. It was my aunt.
I went to her and rested my head for an instant on her shoulder. I said nothing. There was nothing to say. I gathered the other bones with the rest to place in the casket, and then, powdered with ash like penitents, we followed my aunt as she led us from the square.
I bowed my head as we climbed, and my guilt mounted with the altitude. It was meet that I should wear ash upon my forehead, and if I could have changed my gown for sackcloth I would have done that too. Of all these penitents, these women who had not spoken up in time, I was the worst. I had drawn Benedick to the Tarantella, and so too the Spanish. My presence there had drawn my uncle’s teeth at the trial, so he could do nothing else but convict Guglielma or expose me. That I, whose tongue would run away like a buckshee horse upon any other subject, could have stayed silent in that courtroom, restrained by my aunt’s firm hand!
I looked ahead to the tall figure who led us up the slope. Did my aunt feel the burden of guilt as heavily as I? It was little comfort to tell myself that the courtroom appeals of both Guglielma’s son and Signor Benedick had been to no avail. It was no use to assure myself that the archbishop, bent on destruction and the eradication of her race, would have convicted Guglielma even if God himself had intervened. I was as guilty as he.
We climbed the little hill from the Via Catania to a place I had heard of but never seen, the hilltop necropolis of the Cimiterio Monumentale, the family tomb of the Leonati. A small stone mausoleum crowned the hill, and a scar of dark flesh lay in the hillside. The watchman, standing beside a hillock of fresh earth with a spade in his hand, had dug a grave ready. My aunt placed the casket in the ground, and the old man dug it over as if he were burying a cur, without a thought for what he did.
We all gathered about the grave, and in the fierce heat of the sun my aunt took a scroll from her sleeve and read from it; a verse about the killing power of slanderous tongues. She placed the paper on the mound, and anchored it with a handful of earth.
The Sicilian ladies each threw a handful of earth on the paper eulogy in turn, until it was quite, quite gone, the words interred with the bones. It was
fitting that words should share her grave; for words had killed her. Witch. Devil-worshipper. Heretic. The falsehoods had gone through and through her like a blade.
One by one, the women walked slowly down the hill, a sombre black procession, back the way they had come. I sat with my aunt on a warm tombstone, watching as Orsola gathered flowers a little way off. I felt suddenly deathly tired, as if grief and horror had drawn the strength from my limbs. I could only sit, numb. I did not speak; for once I had no words in me. But my aunt did. ‘Her son wrote the eulogy,’ she said.
Her son. I thought the beautiful, dolorous words bore Michelangelo’s stamp, for no one could so well express the pain as he. I wondered what he had felt as he wrote them, knowing when they would be spoken. I wondered how I would face him, if I ever saw him more, knowing that I had brought his mother low. My aunt spoke again.
‘I saw her last night, Beatrice. Guglielma gave me the paper, and she herself asked me to perform the ritual we undertook just now. She wanted to be here so she could always see the island. Her island.’ She breathed out a long and wavering breath.
‘You saw her?’
‘Yes. They held her in the Palazzo Chiaramonte; she was alone in a big whitewashed room. She did not give up, Beatrice. She’d found some charcoal and in three days of captivity she’d covered the walls with drawings; drawings of such skill, Niece, as you never saw.’ Her blue-grey eyes looked like pebbles in a stream. ‘Even the guards had given her colours and pigments. She drew ships, flowers, angels. And women; many, many women. She sent a message to us.’
I stole a glance at her profile, strong and sure, like a ship’s figurehead. ‘Does my uncle know you saw her?’
‘No, and shall not. I was expressly forbidden to enter, even as the governor’s wife. But Friar Francis was given leave to visit Guglielma for the last rites, and he gave me leave to go in his habit and his stead.’
My own eyes prickled, and I looked out to sea, impossibly moved. In the extremis of her friend, my aunt had become the Innogen of old.
‘She was so brave, Beatrice, so brave. Her only concern was that her son and husband should get away to the north, and be safe. I went home and pleaded with your uncle, Beatrice, to lessen the sentence. I pleaded the hours around; until the sky lightened and it was time to leave for mass. He said if he intervened we would lose everything. But still I hoped, right until I saw her brought into the square.’
Her countenance crumbled, the ship now wrecked. How had I thought her strong and resolute?
‘There is a gown they wear,’ she went on, ‘the heretics. When they have been pardoned, the flames point downwards. They are called fuego repolto. I prayed, Beatrice, that after mass she would be wearing such a gown; that she would have been pardoned. But I saw the flames first. They pointed up, towards her heart.’ My aunt was dry eyed, but there was pain in every word. I thought of the archbishop’s copious, meaningless tears and compared them to my aunt’s dry but dreadful grief.
‘She had such spirit, Beatrice. Such spirit. And now it is gone.’
I looked at her then, and tried to articulate a thought that had accompanied me up the hillside. ‘Only gone if you let it go,’ I said. ‘Raise Hero like her. With courage, and freedom, and the chance to think and speak and breathe. Do not let her become the modest miss that her uncle would have her be,’ I urged. ‘Let her rather live in the image of Guglielma Crollalanza.’
My aunt said nothing, but I thought she was weighing my words.
I looked down to the shoreline again and Guglielma’s house; the Moor’s house, mindful of the dark lady’s final wish. A new urgency entered my sombre repose. I must go there, find the Crollalanzas, make sure they quit the place before they were captured.
I took leave of my aunt, pressing a tender kiss to her temple, leaving her in the arms of Orsola, and set off down the hill. The heat was fierce and I threw back my cloak. It seemed so unfair that the sun should shine that day after all. It should have hidden its face, shamed by what wrongs its cousin fire had done.
When I reached the house on the beach, the little door was open.
I ran into the study and both father and son were there, gathering up papers. They turned like a couple of guilty things; their relief palpable when they saw me, their expressions strangely alike. The father I was not acquainted with, but it was no time for introductions. He looked grey, his eyes hollow like the hot skull we had buried. I could not give tongue to my condolences, did not know what to say. ‘We sail tonight with the tide,’ said Michelangelo.
I walked over to the printing press; to the innocent letter blocks Guglielma had jumbled out of their heretical lines. I pressed my fingertip into one of them, hard, hard enough to hurt me. I studied the fleshy pad and the mark upon it.
H for heretic. The same letter that had been branded on Guglielma’s forehead.
‘This is our last chance to talk,’ I murmured, once again bereft that day.
‘Go,’ said the father to the son. ‘I will finish here.’
Michelangelo and I sat on the dunes; in the place where he’d told me about the Moor, the place where I’d embraced Benedick. I wanted to make amends somehow, yet there was no way to atone for my crime.
But he made it easy for me. He began to weep, as he could not have wept before his father. Then I knew exactly what to do; I held the poet close, as if he were a child, as his mother would never hold him again.
Still in the embrace, I saw a figure ride across the dunes in the far distance, in the direction of Leonato’s house. I recognised the horse before the rider, for it was the white royal destrier of Don Pedro.
Act III scene ix
Benedick’s chamber in Leonato’s house
Benedick: There was some sort of hurry.
The house was a ferment of preparation and packing. Horses were shod, the quartermaster dispatched to the cellars and larders, carts and haywains appropriated for our great movement. It seemed we would leave the next morning. While the lady burned at the stake, and all eyes were elsewhere, the Spanish ships had amassed, unseen, in the harbour.
It did not matter to me when they left. The sooner they quit the place the better. It seemed that the death of the last Moor had changed the people’s perception of their overlords, and the Spanish felt that their days on the island were numbered. The Archbishop of Monreale had overplayed his hand.
But the death had changed me too. Life was short, and you had only one hand to play. I would rather spend the rest of my life being insulted by Beatrice than being given sweet compliments by any other lady. I returned to my room to collect my armour and take it to the armourer – I’d worn it to convey the poet and his pamphleteer friend safely home after their ill-advised attempt to free the Moorish dame, and now I would have no further need of it.
Don Pedro was there in my chamber, sitting in the embrasure, curled up and small, somehow diminished as I had never seen him. His velvets seemed duller, his hair less shiny, his golden skin sallow. I felt no pity for my friend – between him and his conspirators he had killed an innocent lady; no glory lies behind the back of such deeds. The medal of St James dangled from his hand, winking in the sun. He did not turn as I entered, but slipped something into the cushions of the window seat.
‘You are resolute?’ He spoke to the horizon.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I must stay.’ Everything seemed stripped away, and I felt it was the time for complete candour.
He uncurled himself from the embrasure, and stood before me, somehow more of my equal than he had ever been. ‘Benedick,’ he said, ‘if you are staying to pay your court to the Lady Beatrice, do not be such a fool. For I am certain that I am in possession of some knowledge that will change your mind.’
My skin chilled. His eyes, though shadowed, were candid. ‘Hear me,’ he said. ‘I am your dearest friend, whether you know it or not, and as such, will not go about to link my dear friend to a common stale.’
I laid my hand upon the sword I had not yet given up. ‘If you
speak of the Lady Beatrice I must entreat you to retract your words. Curst she may be, but chaste she certainly is.’
He shook his head. ‘Lay not your hand upon your sword. I came here to tell you that, in short, the lady is disloyal.’
I was aghast. ‘Who, Beatrice?’
‘Even she; Leonato’s Beatrice, your Beatrice, every man’s Beatrice.’
‘Disloyal?’
He looked genuinely unhappy. ‘Go with me now, you shall see. If you love her then, tomorrow wed her; but it would better fit your honour to change your mind.’ He faced me squarely, like an adversary. ‘She has formed … an attachment, with the poet Michelangelo. I saw them, even now, embracing on the dunes, outside his house on the shore.’
Our dunes – the dunes where she had told me of her star? I would not believe it. He put a gentle hand on my shoulder in sympathy – I flung it off, and spun to the window, as if I could see her from there. ‘I will not think it.’
‘If you will follow me, I will show you enough. I will disparage her no farther till you are my witness.’
I pushed past him and down the stone stairs. He followed. We clattered down into the courtyard, where his destrier was still saddled and waiting in the hand of an ostler. Babieca, the big bay he had given me with my livery, stood beside the royal beast, waiting too, as if the prince had planned this. I mounted Babieca in one swift vault without the block.
Beatrice and Benedick Page 17