Beatrice and Benedick

by Marina Fiorato

  And then, as I watched, I did see someone.

  There, on the rocky coast, was a body; emaciated, wearing what had once been a Spanish sailor’s livery and very, very dead. Next to him lay another. And another.

  My legs as lead-heavy as my heart, I quietly fetched the captain and Claudio, and pointed to the graveyard upon the shingle.

  ‘Can we distract the men somehow? Get them below?’ For I knew what this sight would do to morale.

  ‘I will batten down all hands, all but the watch-standers,’ agreed the captain, but before he could send for the drummer, Claudio said, ‘Too late.’ He nodded aft, to where the men were shouting and gathering.

  There was nothing to do but watch, together, as we made our slow progress past the scores of bodies.

  ‘We should count them,’ said Claudio with great presence of mind, and got out his tables.

  I do not know what had befallen these men on the beach, but they were tangled together anyhow, limbs interwoven in a terrible casual embrace. Blank eyes stared at the skies and reflected the blue. There was not a wound among them, nor a drop of blood to be seen. Had they starved? Drowned? Or just given up and lain down together?

  ‘One thousand souls, or thereabouts,’ said Claudio, once we’d passed the next cove and the grisly view was out of our sight. As I settled back in place under the mainmast I could not help thinking that, by some awful prescience, we had seen our own deaths; that the men on the beach were the crew of the Florencia.

  Act IV scene viii

  The Castello Scaligero, Villafranca di Verona

  Beatrice: I stood behind my father’s great chair and watched him write my name on the impalmamento, the marriage contract.

  The slick black ink dried under his hand, sealing my fate. I was trapped by those words; those black spidery lines were threads fit to bind me like Ariadne. The name of the gentleman hardly mattered, but I watched my father inscribe it below mine. PARIS.

  My father told me little of this man, this word on a contract who was now to be my future. Paris was a young count of Verona; he had a good fortune and much land, not just in Italy but in the Germanic Habsburg lands, where his bloodline had originated. But what marked him out in eligibility was that he was related to the Capuletti, and staunchly of that party. Now my father had abandoned his impartiality, he would move against the Montecchi with swift decisiveness.

  My father had been away from the castle for a brace of days, as he had travelled to Verona to meet with my intended for the sponsalia, a meeting of the male members of the marrying families. No women were admitted to such conventions, not even the bride. I had never been acquainted with Paris, despite being raised in the very best of Veronese society, for he had been at the university when I had lived at home. So I was reduced to finding out snippets about my future husband from the servants who had accompanied my father. But all I ever heard tell of the gentleman, in the kitchens and courts, was that he was a ‘man of wax’; so perfect a specimen of a man, in form and person, that he might have been fashioned of tallow. I tried to console myself that, however little I knew about him, he was reputed so; but in truth I did not like the sound of a waxen husband. Wax was changeable, wax could wane, wax could melt and be broken like a seal. But I had no say whatsoever in the matter. I was trapped, so I did not know why my father had summoned me from my chamber to watch him write. He signed the impalmamento with a flourish, daubed wax by his name and made his imprimatur with his seal ring. The ladder of the Della Scala congealed within the wax, trapped too.

  ‘Signed and sealed.’ I sneered, with the barely veiled insolence I had employed since I’d heard my fate. I’d pleaded, cajoled and scolded at first, but my father was implacable. I was to be married, and that was that, so now I’d settled upon scorn. ‘May I go now?’

  ‘No.’ My father set the parchment by to dry.

  ‘But that is all? The business is complete?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  He pointed his quill to the studded door. As if bidden by the gesture the door opened, and eight figures filed in. They were robed in scarlet, and all wore white gloves. All except one – the fellow that led them wore a surgeon’s cap, and his hands were bare.

  My skin chilled. ‘Who are they?’

  My father was silent.

  ‘Father, who are these gentlemen?’

  ‘You were in Sicily for the summer. We have to make sure that some knave did not take your maidenhead.’

  I laughed, hollowly, and the sound rolled around the keep. I thought he was jesting. Then I thought of Benedick, of the night in the dunes, of how close I came. ‘Is my word not enough?’

  He looked at me then, his light eyes veiled. ‘The Count Paris is a powerful man. The union of our lands will vanquish the Montecchi for ever. We cannot give him,’ he said precisely, ‘a rotten orange.’

  ‘But I am a princess of Villafranca,’ I protested. But the red figures encircled me. Red had always been a colour of comfort, red meant our pennant, red stone meant the Della Scala castle. Now it was the colour of fear. ‘No,’ I cried in a panic, as the figures grew closer. ‘Please, Father. Don’t let them.’

  My father waved his long fingers at the fellow in the close cap, the fellow without the gloves. ‘Baldi is a surgeon, and these others are men of medicine; the seven requisite witnesses to your virginity. Lie down.’

  ‘But Father …’

  ‘Lie down.’ He did not shout – my father never shouted. Even at the death of Tebaldo I had never heard him cry out. But his quiet voice cut like a blade, and I was afraid of him. The kites screeched from the rafters, as if they mocked me.

  Hopelessly, I lay down on the great table where we ate our dinner every night. Baldi, the surgeon, carefully turned up my skirts from the knee; once, twice, as if he made a bed.

  I had expected the shame, but I had not expected it to hurt so much. His hands were cold, hard. He touched me where no one had ever touched, where I had not even touched.

  I looked fixedly at the rafters of the red-stone tower, and saw the shadows of the kites flitting from their conical nests. I took my mind away, to Sicily, to Syracuse, where a sparrow had fallen dead at the feet of the Archbishop of Monreale. Anything to take my mind away from the dreadful probing.

  Silent tears ran from my eyes and into my ears. The dreadful irony was not lost on me – in order to ensure that I was untouched by a man’s hand, this man, this stranger, could prod and probe in my most intimate woman’s parts. After an age the terrible fingers withdrew, out of me, away from me, and the skirts were folded down again.

  ‘She is intacta.’

  The others nodded in corroboration. I was innocent. But they were wrong – I was not, not any more. Not after this. And forever more, this man, Baldi, sometime surgeon of Prince Escalus, would be the first man to touch me intimately. Whatever the future held, whomever I married, he would be the first. I did not even know his given name.

  My father took up his pen again, and passed it to the surgeon, to the hand which had touched me. Baldi laid down more ink in my cause; a confirmation of my virginity. This time my father sealed the words with sand, then blew the sand away. This document had to be dried well; for the covenant of virginity was to be conveyed to Verona, and placed in the hand of my future husband. More ink to bind me. And in a week, I would follow that trail of ink, in person, to be betrothed to Count Paris.

  The medical men filed out, until there was just my father and me in the room, and the kites screeching in the rafters. I clambered down, gingerly, from the table, my insides aching. I stood straight, and walked unsteadily to him.

  ‘What would you have done?’

  My father had a trick of staring with his light blue eyes, unblinking, like a gazehound. He looked at me that way now, and stroked his long, noble nose with his forefinger.

  ‘What would you have done if I had not been found a maid?’

  He looked at me, still unblinking. ‘Then I would have been childless.’

  I took
his meaning – if a woman was not chaste, she might as well be dead.

  I was suddenly angry with him, furious. I was no longer afraid of him. He would not strike at my life now I was proved virtuous. But my fury was impotent. I needed a plan, an escape.

  ‘Tell me something of him. Of Paris.’

  My father did not look up from his writing. ‘He is a man of wax.’

  ‘A man of wax!’ I parroted back. ‘I have heard him called so all about this castle from dungeon to turret. I need more.’

  Still my father wrote his record of my maidenhead.

  I put my hand on the parchment, before his pen, halting the wet black thread. ‘Tell me something else of him. You owe me that, after what I’ve just endured.’

  He looked up at me then, speculatively, with his pale eyes. ‘He is very learned. He likes his books.’ He lifted my hand from the page, and continued his writing. There was ink on my hand, as there had been the day I’d met Benedick, and he had kissed it away. My father said no more, and did not look up again, but he had said enough. I knew what I must do.

  I climbed the winding stair set in the wall of the red-stone tower, the tallest stair in the Veneto. As I climbed farther and farther from the table, and the scene of that dreadful examination, I felt more confident. I looked at the Della Scala red stone, and climbed each stair with my father’s words in my ears. Stairs divide us from the poor, stairs keep us safe, and then, at the next turn, He is learned, he loves his books. I began to see a way forward, to formulate a plan.

  In the library I turned around and around, perusing the books that lined the walls all the way up to the conical turret. Despite the castle’s old-world aspect, my father had always been beyond reproach in the respect of his book collection. I passed by his histories of the Veneto, then thought better of it, backtracked and picked out his favourite volume. Then I selected Catullus, most famous son of Verona. Then Dante’s Vita Nuova. Then Bandello’s Stories, Ovid’s Ars Amoria, Boccaccio’s Decameron. Machiavelli’s Il Principe. These would be a good start.

  I opened the first book, the Catullus. Friendly ink. Words that were not about me, or my dowry or my maidenhead. Pages where my name was not writ once. Ink had imprisoned me, now ink would set me free. I began to read, and on the hard library stool my poor loins still felt tender from the reach of probing fingers.

  Act IV scene ix

  The Florencia, open sea

  Benedick: The sight of the thousand bodies affected the crew profoundly.

  Claudio and I attempted to raise morale. The count said mass daily but his congregation dwindled. Some were too weak to attend, some too sick at heart; but some began to question, openly, a God that would so smite their enterprise to leave a thousand Spanish bodies on a beach like seaweed. I would tell jokes that barely raised a smile, as if the men had forgotten how; I carried on, regardless, but my forced humour was an irritant even to myself. Because the length of the voyage had exceeded our early expectations we had been forced to cut rations again, and our daily portions would not, now, keep a ship’s rat alive. Men were dying, daily, of starvation.

  Now when I sat by the masthead to navigate, a fat gull would settle on the bulwark to peer at me with his hard little agate eyes. I had not even the strength to grab at him, but if I could have, I would have eaten him whole, feathers, beak and all. I knew now that the men on the beach had not drowned, but starved.

  I had left something else on that beach with those men. My good humour had gone, my eternal optimism was quashed. The tribulations of the summer, the loss of the one woman ordained by the heavens to stand up with me, seemed as nothing. Now I knew what it was to be a soldier – to see death at close hand.

  In this battle I had joined I had not once drawn my sword, nor fired a shot. The two-and-fifty fancy brass guns of the Florencia now sat at the bottom of the English Channel, wreathed in seaweed, a playground for fishes. I recalled my conversations with Beatrice, my happy acceptance of the medal of St James, as if being a soldier was no more than wearing a uniform. I shrivelled inside to think of the night I had come to Leonato’s masque dressed as a dandy soldier, the night when I’d bandied words at dinner and called a knight an empty kettle. Of the night when I’d performed in the Naumachia like a Barbary monkey. Now I knew I had left my boyhood on the beach of the thousand bodies. I knew, now, the wages of soldiery. All of the thousand men had worn a coat just like mine. Still, I gazed at Beatrice’s star every night, and in my brief dreams still saw her face – I vowed that if I ever saw her again, she should know a different Benedick.

  The weather matched the mood of the men. It was now, by my calculations, November, and I had never known such cold. Rain, hail and driving snow the like of which I had never seen. On one day – The Angels – our lookout fell from the crow’s nest, stiff and dead. When we lifted him to drop him over the stern, his limbs remained taut and frozen, until we threw him into the leaden seas and the salt waters melted him.

  It was perhaps fortunate that we had not the leisure to give rein to our doleful thoughts, for we entered a channel that was fiendishly difficult to navigate. We were beset on all sides by myriad rocky islands, a deadly archipelago which threatened at every moment to run us aground. Barely a quarter-hour passed without the dreadful sound of planking screaming against underwater crags, and our hearts would leap as we waited for the whole ship to splinter. Captain Bartoli had the thankless choice of taking down the sails to slow us down, in which case our rations would never see us back to Spain, or continuing at our current speed at the constant risk of foundering. The order was given – all but the topsails were lowered; but what we gained in safety we lost in speed, leading to mutterings among the crew. I did not like their unhappy looks, nor the way their discontent united them. They had gone from being hangdogs to a pack of wolves.

  On the morning of Trinity a shout went up. The rocky islands had opened up to a broad sound and a wide bay like a bite taken out of the coast. Small cots huddled about the edge of the shore, and smoke wreathed the little chimneys. A castle stood sentinel over the bay, and black mountains rolled away into the distance. But it was neither the mountains nor the houses that claimed our attention. For in the bay nestled a ship.

  Captain Bartoli whipped out his spyglass. ‘Spanish,’ he said at once, easing our troubled minds. ‘The San Juan de Sicilia.’

  I recalled the ship from the muster; one of Duke Egeon’s vessels, built at Ragusa. And I’d heard the name since; I remembered we’d seen the ship pulling away from us in the Channel, also heading ‘north about’, trailing a red wake like an injured hind dragged home from hunting.

  Claudio joined us at the helm. ‘Did she put in for supplies?’ he wondered.

  ‘I do not know,’ replied the captain.

  The men had all left their posts and were crowding to the starboard side, all gabbling about warm fires, and food, and shelter. ‘If another ship has put in for supplies, why mayn’t we?’ asked the pilot. My mouth began to water involuntarily.

  The captain’s quarterdeck voice rose above all. ‘It is our duty to go back to Spain. Those were our orders from Medina Sidonia, and they have not been countermanded. We have no way of knowing if these northern peoples are loyal to their queen. If they are, we are all dead men.’

  This gave the men pause, but the pilot, Da Sousa, spoke up again. ‘But if we stay aboard, we are dead anyway. How can we survive another week, another day?’

  The captain had an answer to this. ‘But the San Juan has an anchor, we do not. How do you propose that we make our halt?’

  ‘We can cut the mizzenmast,’ said Da Sousa, sensing victory for his position, ‘then the lateen sail will trail into the sea. This will create enough drag to halt us in the bay; I have seen it done, once, in the Azores. It is low tide now; we will sit on the sandbar till high tide, then refloat. Then we hoist all sails, and run for Spain.’

  ‘All sails, save one.’ Bartoli shook his grizzled head. ‘We cannot sacrifice a sail, for the sake of provisions w
e may not even be able to gather. It is highly unlikely that we will reach Spain on our current ration even with full sail – without the lateen you may add a week to the journey. No, Señor da Sousa,’ he said decidedly. ‘We must go by. Full sail.’

  Da Sousa did not move. There was utter, utter silence on deck.

  Bartoli had clearly never had to repeat an order in his life. ‘Full sail, I said.’

  The men dispersed insolently slowly, and the captain returned to the helm. I settled myself by the mast, waiting for the well-remembered surge at my back as the sails caught the wind. At least I could look forward to some shelter, for the bellying canvas was as good as a battle tent for keeping off the rain. But something was wrong. The steady, mizzling rain fell unimpeded on my head. I looked up to see slack ratlines and naked crosstrees. The sails had not been raised.

  I turned my head to call the captain, and that is when the blow fell.

  Act IV scene x

  The Palazzo Maffei, Verona

  Beatrice: I travelled to Verona alone, and of this I was glad; for I could not carry forth my plan under my father’s eye.

  I was to sit for my wedding portrait, feast with the Capuletti, and my father was to join me in a week for the wedding on the steps of the Basilica. But I swore such a day would never come. I could not defy my father; I would take my steps in the wedding dance – but only as far as the church door. I could not refuse the Count Paris, but I could make him refuse me. I had just one short week to make it clear to him that I was not the bride for him.