Beatrice and Benedick

by Marina Fiorato

  Then I looked to the other ship, the San Juan de Sicilia. It looked black against the dull sky, as if it had been burned, and the shifting mists parted to show shredded sails. It was a galliass of our own class, slightly smaller than the Florencia. It looked ghostly, an impression assisted by the fact that there did not seem to be a living soul aboard. By moving my body until the ropes cut, I could just see at least one of the ship’s boats still lashed to the side; a small pinnace, such as those in which our mutineers had rowed to shore. I had a sudden notion.

  ‘Is Bartoli dead?’ I mouthed to Claudio. Unaccountably, I felt that we must whisper.

  ‘I cannot tell,’ said Claudio, low voiced too. ‘If he wakes, together we may be able to get free. But what then? We cannot get to shore. They have taken the boats.’

  ‘We can get to the other ship. They have their boats still.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘A bosun’s chair,’ said an unsteady voice. It was Bartoli, sitting upright now.

  We lost no time. With the three of us conscious we could lift the ropes; but by the movement of the pale disc of sun beyond pewter clouds it still took us above an hour to shift the first loop over our shoulders. Then it was easy; we were free in an instant, and stood unsteadily, joints creaking, broken heads pounding, limbs paining us as the blood and vital humours rushed back into deprived regions.

  Bartoli set about rigging a bosun’s chair. On our starboard side he tossed a rope on a grappling hook to the other ship, and Claudio, as the slightest, shinned across. The rope was looped round the balustrade of the San Juan and the hook tossed back, and a small stool attached to slide across on a pulley.

  Bartoli, who was more injured and elderly than we, stayed with the ship, as he had sworn. He would receive and discipline any mutineers who were minded to reboard, and operate the bosun’s chair for us if we needed it to return. Only when I was dangling over the open water with the golden chased lettering of the San Juan de Sicilia drawing ever closer did I wonder what we would find on this ship of ghosts.

  There was no one on deck, and no sign of life whatsoever. Behind the mainmast I lifted the hatch I knew must lead to the hold, for the ship was a mirror of our own; but something was wrong here. I suddenly felt, holding open the hatch, as I had felt when I saw the thousand bodies. A dread foreboding crept over my flesh, and I felt that a nameless evil was emanating from the hold.

  I dropped down into the dark, landing lightly on my feet, and held my lantern high. What I saw there reminded me of nothing so much as the fresco in the church of Santa Maria della Carmine in Padua, which I’d perused, round eyed, as a child at mass. Terrible, skeletal twisted souls, eyes open, unable to escape their fate. I could see, here and there, the livery of St James, the same colours I wore. Their saint had abandoned them. Worst of all, I saw gnawed limbs and bite marks, where men had tried to chew upon their own or others’ flesh.

  I had to pull my chemise over my mouth, for the stench was terrible. I did not fear contagion, for I thought I knew what had taken these men. It was another premonition for the men of the Florencia. They had starved.

  ‘They are all dead,’ I yelled to Claudio, my own voice a strange comfort to me. ‘That is why they did not go ashore.’

  ‘Any provisions?’

  I did not even have to look; no man would devour another while there were even the meanest victuals left. ‘No.’ I turned to go, but something caught my eye.

  In the bilge were a pile of chests with brass boundings. I put down my lantern, forced one open with my dagger and saw a dull gleam. I put my hand in the chest, and countless coins slid through my fingers. I carried one to the hatch and held up the coin. A gold real. I turned about, the bodies all but forgotten.

  Treasure.

  A hundred chests of it. Terrible, inedible treasure. Chests of gold that, at the end, any one of these men would have happily traded for a single loaf of bread. Useless, priceless ballast which slowed down their voyage so that they could not make it even this far.

  ‘Claudio!’ I called, softly now. It did not occur to me to keep the find to myself as some men would. Claudio dropped down, and recoiled from the dead men, but I led him to the corner. His eye widened. ‘How much?’

  ‘A fortune.’

  He turned to me. ‘Say the words.’

  I looked at him in confusion.

  ‘Say the words. Claim it.’

  ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘You found it alongside me.’

  ‘Dear Benedick,’ he said. ‘If I spent a bag of gold every hour from now till the day of my death, the Medici would still have chinks to spare. But this gold could be the making of you; could elevate you from gentleman to prince. If you claim it, by the laws of trove the king must give you a share. Say the words,’ he urged again. ‘For nobility can be bought as well as bred; who knows that better than I?’

  Suddenly I was back in El Escorial, that dreaming, amber afternoon. I could hear the injunction of the chancellery legislators. ‘Let each man who finds a trove lay his hands upon it and say the following form of words … His Majesty shall vouchsafe a tithe share of the treasure to the finder, and ennoble him in the rolls of Spain.’

  I put my hands on the cold, inedible treasure and spoke the words. ‘I, Benedick Minola of Padua, claim this treasure for Philip of Spain.’ By the termination of the sentence, I was rich.

  We laboriously lifted each chest to the deck, one by one, our weakened muscles protesting, our puny limbs barely able to lift the heavy caskets.

  At last we were done, but as we shifted the last chest, a figure lurched out of the dark as though the treasure had birthed him. Two white eyes peered at us, and Claudio and I recoiled as one with a cry. A blade flashed too, but I caught at the hand that held it, and disarmed the fiend as easily as if he were a child. He collapsed in my grip and began to weep like a babe.

  We dragged him to the light, but he gave me no resistance; he was all bone and skin, as light as a bird. We pulled him up on deck and he was not even as weighty as one of the chests of treasure. The drear daylight gave relief to his features but could not illuminate his skin. He was a Moor.

  I spoke to him in Italian, and Spanish. Claudio had a little English, and less French. But the Moor just rolled his eyes and waggled his tongue; that silent member was as dry as cured meat and whiter than his skin. Then I remembered the last Moor I had met, and the farewell the water-diviner had bid me in the gardens of El Escorial. ‘As-salaam alaykum.’

  As if in a dream, he replied to me. ‘Wa’ alaykum.’

  I sat, so that I could be at his level, for I did not think he could stand. Claudio stood over us, unsure of the dark creature we had found. And no wonder, for he was near as hellish a thing as the corpses below. The whites of his eyes were yellow, his orbs wept from the sudden light and I shuddered to think of how long he had been in the dark. His skin was an ashy grey, not the ebony black of the water-diviner, and hung from his bones like boiled leather. The tight wiry curls of his hair and beard had turned a powdery white, an incongruous contrast with his dusky skin.

  ‘Can you speak Catalan?’ I asked him in halting accents.

  ‘Yes, and Italian and French.’

  ‘What happened here?’ I said in my own tongue.

  ‘All starved,’ he replied in passable Tuscan.

  ‘How came the treasure to be here?’

  ‘It is the king’s.’

  ‘Did the ship capture it?’

  ‘No,’ he said, struggling with his dry tongue. He tried to sit. ‘It belongs to His Majesty King Philip II of Spain.’

  Jesu, the fellow was loyal; even after his tribulations.

  ‘Yes, and we will return it to him,’ I said patiently. I showed him my medal. ‘See, I am a knight of Saint James. I will see it done.’

  He seemed to collapse then, as if at the end of a long labour, as if his responsibilities were somehow over.

  ‘Pay chests,’ he said, sounding short of breath.

  I saw then. These were t
he wages for the victorious knights of the glorious armada.

  We left him there to recover while we loaded the chests into the ship’s boats, all the time conducting a whispered conversation about what we should do with this strange survivor.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Claudio. ‘We have no food for him.’

  I nodded to the shore. ‘And yet we have lost a score of mouths today. We might need an able seaman to replace those defectors.’

  Claudio looked at the figure hunched upon the deck. ‘If he is an able seaman. He looks like a savage.’

  ‘Well, only he can tell us. Been at sea long?’ I called to our prisoner.

  I could barely hear him. ‘Seventeen years. Since Lepanto.’

  I turned to Claudio. ‘He might be useful,’ I said.

  Now there was an urgency to our enterprise, for the ship was rocking as the tide came in. Soon the Florencia would be afloat again. We cut free the bosun’s chair, lowered the fast boats and rowed one each, with fifty chests each aboard and the Moor in my craft. By the time we’d gained the deck of the Florencia, eleven of the mutineers had returned with provisions, and were shamefacedly making themselves busy about the ship, having been promised a flogging for the morrow. But there was no sign of the other boat and we were neither willing nor inclined to wait for the remaining mutineers. At sundown the ship lifted from the shore. ‘Cut the lateen sail free!’ commanded the captain, and the men set about the ropes with their axes. The canvas and rigging of the mizzenmast swirled and darkened in the water, till they sank into the deeps.

  As we sailed away torches descended from the hills into the bay like falling stars. The crofters had returned from the fields at the end of the day, and there was just enough light left to see them cut down the remaining mutineers of the Florencia – every last man – and leave the bodies lying on the beach.

  Act IV scene xii

  The Palazzo Maffei, Verona

  Beatrice: Over the next week, I got to know Paris well.

  In the mornings we would pose for our portrait on the cassone, and I would admire the scene that sprung to life under Signor Cagliari’s talented hand. In the afternoons, after Paris had spent some hours administering his estates, we would go out, at the hour of passeggiata. Then we would mingle among the smart citizens of Verona processing along the beautiful streets in their finery. Always I was chaperoned by the young Capuletti cousins Giulietta and Rosaline.

  Paris designed brave entertainments for his womenfolk – he would take us into private houses to see a holy relic, into a secret walled garden to admire a particularly decorative fountain, or a little chapel to see a fine fresco. We were taken to a private menagerie at a villa at Sant’Ambrogio, to see a camelopard; a vast, gentle creature chequered like a harlequin, with a neck so improbably long that I wondered that he could hold up his head. On another day we were taken to see the cabinet of curiosities belonging to one of Paris’s German uncles. Peering into the wunderkammer we saw fleas dancing on a tiny stage, and fitted with an orchestra of minute instruments. So the count showed us wonders of every scale as if they were his dowry.

  Once we took a golden barge upon the river and ate our dinner under my family bridge, the Ponte Scaligeri, as musicians played from the arches and fireflies danced in time. Paris made sure I never wanted for anything – he would press delicacies upon me at every turn – succulent shrimps, fat olives, delicate little cakes. I was full to bursting constantly, and when my stomacher began to pain me I started to conceal these foods in my skirt and discreetly drop them on the street or in the river.

  And all the time, I talked. It was exhausting. I corrected the poor count relentlessly, even in the matter of works of art that he actually owned. In our tour of the city I regurgitated all that I had read in my father’s books about Verona’s history and civic politics, pre-empting Paris every time he attempted to tell us about a certain building or landmark.

  In the Castello Scaligero in Villafranca there was a dark, dank dungeon. When I was a little girl Tebaldo used to drag me down there and make me scream by showing me various instruments of torture left there to rust since barbarian times. The most dreadful thing of all to me – worse than the instruments that would pierce flesh or tear limbs – was a scold’s bridle, wrought of black iron, designed to silence a woman. Once Tebaldo managed to get the thing on me, and I ran around the castle with the bridle on my head, unable to scream, bashing my head against the walls like a fly in a bottle, until my nurse took it off. For days I could taste the metallic tang of iron and blood in my mouth, feel the corrugated metal tongue of the bridle squeezing my own.

  If I’d had such a scold’s bridle now, I would have donned it myself and strapped the buckle with my own hand. For my voice had become a rattle, and I began to appreciate, for the first time, the objections to being shackled to an unquiet woman.

  But the patient Paris bore my corrections admirably, and seemed happy to be instructed in matters of music, literature, architecture and art. I ground my teeth. My plan was not working.

  Increasingly desperate, I added to my repertoire of unquietness by always being too hot or too cold, asking for my cloak to be brought to me and taken away, asking for my fan to be fetched and then folded, sending his runners for iced sherbets or warmed wine. I was as contrary as I could be. Again, my intended husband indulged me in every particular, without a word of demurral.

  As a matter of fact, despite myself, I began to like him. And on more than one occasion I wished, most heartily, that I had met him before Benedick. For that gentleman, even in his absence, continued to be a thorn in my side, for he troubled me to make constant comparisons between himself and Paris. Paris was tall, but not as tall as Benedick. He was amusing, but nowhere near such a wit. He had fine eyes, and a pleasing countenance, but his features could not compare to that one face that I missed. The only particular in which he would be a superior husband to Benedick was that his taste in diversions and pursuits marched with mine. He loved reading, art and music, whereas Benedick never picked up a book, looked on a picture or could tolerate a tune. Paris was what they said of him; he was a man of wax, a man that appeared to be so perfectly correct in every particular that he himself should stand in a cabinet of curiosity. But he was no more than that.

  Giulietta and Rosaline were with me constantly, jealous guardians of my honour. Every night they were my bedfellows, every day they would follow a few steps behind Paris and me as we went about the city. They rarely talked, and if they did it was in a murmur so low I could barely hear them. I spoke about a thousand words for every one that they uttered. They made fine foils for my own runaway tongue, but all the same I longed for the vivacious company of my aunt or poor Guglielma Crollalanza. For Giulietta struggled daily with some secret sorrow, and Rosaline, a devout girl, was ever at her prayers. Her knees were worn from hours at the prie-dieu, and her fingers were always tangled in the beads of her rosary.

  I learned little of these young women. I canvassed, once, their opinions of marriage; Rosaline, unsurprisingly, stated her intention to enter a nunnery, and Giulietta, with a faraway look, answered dreamily that marriage was the highest estate to which a man and a woman could aspire.

  Too soon, my week in Verona was at an end, and I knew that night’s betrothal feast would be my last chance to repel my groom. The next day my father would come for the marriage ceremony, to be held on the steps of the Basilica, and under his eye I could not behave as I had been.

  As the young ladies and I readied ourselves for the revelry I was almost as silent as my handmaids, for I had much to think about. Rosaline and Giulietta, as befitted their youth and virginity, were clothed in white; Rosaline wore a girdle of olive leaves to recall Noah’s dove, and Giulietta’s gown was cunningly wrought of overlapping feathers, to resemble the plumage of a swan.

  I pulled my starlight gown from my bed chest. The young maids helped me to dress, and I was glad to note that, despite my gluttony of the past week, the gown fitted as well as it ever had. I sm
oothed down the midnight-silk bodice with its constellation of diamonds, and traced Cassiopeia’s chair with my finger. The waterfall of skirts fell to the floor, cunningly contrived of circles of fine silk in graduating colours of blue – the duck egg of midday for the underskirt, then an overskirt of afternoon, then evening blue, darkening through twilight to the bodice. Even my silent attendants exclaimed at the beauty of the gown. According to tradition, my hair would be worn loose until my wedding, and the young cousins brushed and burnished my hair till it fell in a spun gold skein to my shoulderblades. I pushed my feet into a pair of shoes with silver points, and, as if such shoes invited me to dance, I turned about until the skirts flew out in a circle.

  From the folds, along with the damask and sprigs of lavender placed there by Paris’s servants, fell the settebello card, and the sonnet that I’d written for Benedick, that day on the beach with Michelangelo Crollalanza. I put the card in my bodice, more from habit than will, but the sonnet I set aside, unread, before the others could see it. I was ashamed of it now. The thought of those words, so passionate they near burned the paper, brought crimson to my cheeks. In the looking glass I saw, with annoyance, how becoming the flush was to me – perversely, the memory of Benedick had made me more comely for Paris. I wished I could hide my blush with a mask, but Paris had decreed that his guests, though they might be inventive in the matter of attire, should be unmasked. Perhaps the man of wax thought his features too fine to be hid. Ready, I led the maids down the staircase, a falling star.

  The great hall looked as I had never seen it. In honour of the Capuletti, and in a neat play upon their family name, the solar had been given the air of a chapel. A thousand candles were lit in every niche and alcove, and, by some art, were suspended from the ceiling at differing heights, lighting the gloom of the cross-ribbed vaults with candle-flame constellations. The wax dripped upon the guests, riming them with white droppings to rival those of the kites that lived in our red-stone tower at home. There was no doubt, now, that the Capuletti were gods.