Juliet & Romeo

by David Hewson

  Her mother’s voice veered from soft and kindly to harsh and dictatorial so easily sometimes. A crow squawked in the garden. A horse neighed from the lane by the river. There was no avoiding this conversation.

  ‘I don’t want to get married. To anyone. I don’t think Ursula did either. Hardly surprising given she ended up in bits and pieces scattered across some foreign forest.’

  Bianca took her daughter’s slender fingers. ‘We all find husbands. A girl as pretty as you… Well, I can’t imagine you in a nunnery.’

  ‘That’s a relief I must say.’

  ‘Please–’

  ‘Parents are just a little version of God, aren’t they? He furnishes us with the faculty to form questions then slaps us down if we have the nerve to ask for a few answers in return. While you give us life, then, when we want to own that life, you say… oh, no. It’s ours. You belong to us. We made you.’

  Do not argue, Bianca told herself. That never ends well.

  ‘There’s a count called Paris. A rich and well-connected aristocrat with properties here, in Florence, everywhere. He’s seen you from afar and I think will soon declare his love and fond devotion–’

  ‘He hasn’t met me! What’s he found to love?’

  ‘Your beauty. Your innocence.’

  Juliet removed her hands and stabbed a finger at her breast. ‘None of those things are me! I’m not some imaginary saint in a painting. I’m flesh and blood. My flesh and blood.’

  Bianca Capulet struggled to contain her temper. ‘This is the way of the world, child. Round and round it goes. Twenty years from now you’ll be sitting in a room like this somewhere, having the same conversation with your own daughter. If it pleases God you’ll find me in the corner listening. I’ll give you a wry wink then. Just a reminder–’

  ‘They say there’s plague in Vicenza. I could be dead before the week is out.’

  Juliet’s young voice was usually so light and pleasant. At that moment it had taken on a gloomy and sullen tone her mother hadn’t heard before.

  ‘And why would a plague in Vicenza choose you?‘

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re young. You’ve everything ahead of you.’

  There was a bleak look in the girl’s eyes at that instant. Fear. Or resignation. Or both. ‘You mean the young don’t die? ’

  A sudden breeze rustled the drapes. Juliet looked around her at the room. The books. The bed, a four-poster too big for a girl in truth. The desk where she worked. The quills were there and the lead inkwell in the shape of a frog they’d bought her as a little girl, encouraging her to write. The silly portrait her father had commissioned. All familiar things. Part of a childhood that was safe and happy in a way. Yet a whiff of the river lay behind the orange blossom on the air. Stagnant water and decay.

  ‘Juliet–’

  ‘While we sit here time eats at us. Every moment. Every breath we take brings us closer to… what? A robber on the highway, too quick with his knife? The plague? Some horror in childbirth?’ She closed her eyes. ‘If we could silence every bell in Italy. Every clock in every campanile…’ She scowled. ‘But still the sun would rise. And set. And rise. And set–’

  ‘Stop it…’

  Bianca took her daughter in her arms, the way she’d done on the rare occasion – following a graze, a fight, the death of a beloved pet – they’d found her crying as a child. Juliet had inherited her German grandmother’s hair, straight and blonde. Bianca Capulet was plainer in face, the lines of age marking the passing difficult years. All the beauty the Capulets possessed seemed to find itself in their only living child. Perhaps, as a mother, she should have suspected this came with a price. They were close. They were distant. They were the same blood. But separate too. Before Juliet had blessed their lives they’d lost a son who never reached the age of one. That still cast a shadow over everything, especially for her husband.

  ‘Every day…’ Juliet murmured.

  ‘Hush! We all have dark thoughts from time to time. I never realised…’ This sudden outburst had shocked her. That their only child harboured such black and secret fears seemed so out of character. ‘You should have told me. I had grim thoughts when I was your age too. We all do.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Night terrors. Monsters coming for me in the dark. While I was alone in bed.’

  There was a long pause. Then the girl pulled away and there was a bright smile back on her face.

  ‘And so you married. It happened, didn’t it?’

  ‘I beg your pardon!’

  ‘A joke. Nothing more.’

  From charming to infuriating then back again in an instant. That was Juliet through and through.

  ‘Your father may have a temper from time to time. But he’s not a monster. There’s much worse out there.’

  ‘It’s not my fault I’m not a boy.’

  This was a refrain they hadn’t heard for a week or two.

  ‘Don’t start that again. He loves you. But a father’s love for a daughter is different from that he might feel for a son. He’s bound to have more… limited expectations. That’s all.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mother. You’re right. They’re just silly dreams. Let me hug you.’

  They embraced. They kissed. Bianca Capulet wiped away a tear from her daughter’s clear blue eyes.

  ‘This is an imperfect world. But it’s the only one we have.’

  Juliet raised her finger and said, ‘Which is why I must teach Nurse to read. To make it better one step at a time.’

  Her mother laughed. She could always win her over in the end. But that was the charm of a child. It couldn’t last.

  ‘My poor precocious daughter. You think too much.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘It is. Now… I promised your father I’d accompany him to the market.’

  There was shopping to be done, and a fateful meeting later, not that she had any intention of mentioning that.

  She picked up a book, found the page she wanted and handed the volume to her daughter. ‘Tidy up the rest, please. And find something nice to wear for the banquet this evening. Silk. White in there somewhere. A scoop neck but not too low. Leave your hair loose the way a maid should. The silver diadem we bought you. I never see that and it was expensive.’

  ‘It’s uncomfortable.’

  ‘Good jewellery often is.’

  ‘I still don’t know why we’re having a banquet. Has Tybalt killed someone or is it something else? Are we celebrating?’

  ‘Leave your cousin out of this. Does there need to be a reason?’

  ‘Usually.’

  ‘Well, there isn’t. Now. You know what you have to do.’

  * * *

  Her mother left. Juliet closed her eyes and listened. The palazzo was made almost entirely of stone, floors and walls, scarcely a tapestry anywhere to deaden the sound of footsteps. She’d grown up in this place, could picture who was walking where just from the noise they made.

  ‘Courtyard,’ she murmured and dashed from the apartment to the staircase window at the front. There she hid behind the wooden shutter and peered out. Her parents were at the fountain and deep in serious conversation. Her mother shook her head, unhappy. Her father was florid-faced, wagging his index finger the way he loved. When she was small they’d been closer. He’d taught her how to ride out in the vineyards. Together they’d fly around the hills of the lower Alps on their mounts. But he didn’t take to his horse any more. Too old, he said. Too busy. Now angry voices rose through the hot summer morning, too faint for her to hear the words.

  ‘My life,’ Juliet whispered. ‘Not yours.’

  She tiptoed back into her rooms, through the piles of books on the floor, and went to sit on the balcony with the title her mother had suggested.

  It was the one volume her parents had chosen for her in Venice, the last Juliet would have picked. TheGolden Legend by Varazze, a collection of strange and fantastic fairy tales about saints she suspected never even exi
sted.

  The page was open at the chapter on the doomed Saint Ursula, the inspiration for Carpaccio’s spectacular cycle of paintings. Varazze was bleating about the saint’s obedience to her father and how she would happily submit to marriage for the betterment of the nation without a single thought for herself.

  That’s the beginning of the story. Not the end.

  Three pages on she found the place she wanted and read the passage out loud, her index finger following every word.

  ‘When all ten thousand virgins were beheaded in the forest the heathen warriors came to the blessed Ursula. There the prince of them, seeing her marvellous beauty as on her knees she prayed, was ashamed of his slaughter and sought to comfort her for the deaths of her companions.’

  Juliet hesitated over the next paragraph then spoke it anyway, in a firm, determined voice.

  From the courtyard came the angry, bellowing voice of her father, shouting, ‘That’s enough, woman. She’ll do as I say. As shall you.’

  Juliet waited a moment then continued.

  ‘At which the warrior prince vowed to take her as his wife. Yet Ursula refused this chance to save her life, declaring boldly she despised the villain and everything he stood for. Furious, at close quarters, he drew his bow and, with his arrow, pierced her through the heart. So the blessed Ursula accomplished her martyrdom.’

  The Marangona bell in the Torre dei Lamberti began to toll. She dropped the book and placed her hands tight over her ears.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said in a whisper so soft it mingled with the morning chimes and the bird song in the trees.

  * * *

  ‘Oi,’ a hard, cold voice bellowed as the two youths from the Capulet house crossed the square. ‘You. Yes, you pair. I want a word.’

  Close to the colonnades a muscular and hairy arm reached out to stop Samson and Gregory in their tracks. He was an ugly man, blood all over his loose white shirt and leather apron. Cleaver in one hand, the half-skinned body of a young kid in the other.

  ‘Don’t like goat,’ Samson said straight away. ‘But thanks for the offer.’

  The butcher threw the scraggy carcass on to his stall and folded his arms, the gory blade of the cleaver resting against his cheek.

  ‘Three weeks running we’ve had you toe rags coming here and causing trouble. This is a public market. Where decent men and women come to do business. Buying. Selling. Things that make the world go round. Having a smelly bunch of scallywags beating and stabbing each other in the middle of it all don’t help me put food on my family’s table.’

  Samson looked ready for an argument. So Gregory stepped in, trying to smooth matters.

  ‘Sir, sir. Nothing could be further from our thoughts. We’re just Capulet’s servants out hunting vittles for his banquet tonight.’ He nodded at the goat. ‘I’ll ask the cook if she fancies some of yours. How about that, eh?’

  The butcher didn’t look convinced. All the same he stood aside and waved them through. ‘Start trouble, you get trouble. That’s a promise. If you want my meat best hurry. I’ll be clean out of it in an hour. Business is good right now. Better stay that way.’

  Gregory promised to tell the kitchen. Samson tipped his cap and winked.

  On they walked beneath the columns. Tybalt, Capulet’s nephew, had spotted them already. He was dressed to the nines today in a rich, red-chestnut jacket and matching britches, a round scarlet felt hat without a rim, a dagger on his left hip, a long, expensive rapier sheathed on the right. Most of the Capulets were fair, Juliet especially so. Tybalt had jet black hair, dark, twitching eyes and a surly, pock-marked face that rarely smiled. He never seemed interested in much except collecting monies due to the Capulet businesses, at knife point if need be. Mostly his uncle indulged him with fencing lessons, cash for clothes and all the latest weapons. In turn he was the family’s soldier, an enforcer for anyone they dealt with. A handy if unpredictable fellow to have around.

  The Montague servant Abraham was with another youth they recognised, Balthazar. Tybalt spotted him, saw his own lads too, nodded at Samson, a sign, unmistakable. Like the servant he was, Samson doffed his cap towards his master, marched towards the Montague pair then stopped and very theatrically bit his thumb.

  Abraham was ready for it. One cheap dagger by his side. Same for his mate.

  ‘Are you biting your thumb at us?’ he asked.

  Gregory shuffled up, folded his arms, leaned against a pillar grinning and watched.

  ‘What?’ asked Samson cockily.

  Abraham laughed. ‘Always the little one who has a mouth on him, isn’t it? While his big friend stands back and watches. You heard. Are you biting your thumb at us?’

  Samson did it again, grinned and nodded his head. People were starting to watch, the butcher of goats among them. Tybalt stayed half-hidden, beady eyes gleaming in the shadows. The red hat, tipped to one side the way a gentleman liked, made him look like a minor cardinal. There was another one from the monied classes around too. A Montague, Benvolio, cousin to their son Romeo. Not a bad fellow some said, training to be a doctor. He didn’t wear the blue feather, didn’t like fights. Nothing like Tybalt at all.

  ‘Very observant of you to notice, friend,’ Samson said. ‘I do indeed bite my thumb. At you? I don’t think so. But look.’ Again he did it. ‘I do bite it, though, certainly.’

  Abraham and Balthazar didn’t move.

  ‘Best do what your sort are good at,’ Gregory muttered and took a step forward. He was half a head taller than them, and broader too.

  ‘And what’s that?’ Balthazar wondered.

  The big youth laughed. ‘Taking your scrawny arses out of here with your little tails between your little legs.’

  Still they stayed where they were. Abraham said, ‘My master Montague asked us to take a walk around the market to see how well our wine prospers against the inferior material sold by others. We didn’t come here for a quarrel.’

  Samson balled a fist. ‘Your drink’s not Garganega. It’s that Trebbiano rubbish. Everyone knows that. We two are Capulets. Work for the big man in town. Boss of ’em all.’

  Abraham came closer, reached out with a jabbing finger, poked at Samson, but didn’t quite touch him. ‘More than one big man in this town, friend. Our lord’s as good as yours. Maybe better if you only knew it.’

  Gregory cocked his head. ‘Better?’ He tapped Samson’s shoulder. ‘Did I hear right? Did he say better?’

  ‘Aye,’ Samson agreed. ‘He did. So he’s a liar, ain’t he? Along with all the rest.’

  The people around had pulled back. There was just Tybalt close, picking at his teeth with the point of his dagger. And Benvolio striding through the colonnades looking worried.

  Gregory’s determination to make the Capulet pair start the fight was waning. He wanted it anyway. So he stuck out his finger and jabbed Abraham in the chest.

  ‘A skinny little flabby-faced liar. Like all the bloody Montagues and their ilk.’

  ‘All right!’ Abraham yelled. ‘Let’s have you.’

  Crude knives out now, all four of them, they circled beneath the colonnades at the edge of the Piazza Erbe, grinning, fearful, ready.

  * * *

  Juliet wasn’t the only one with her head in a book. In a thick and leafy grove of plane trees outside the city walls by the broad and energetic Adige, watched with puzzlement by ducks and cormorants and the odd passing barge, Romeo of the Montagues wandered idly along the path, stopping from time to time to curse his own predicament, then turning to his own octavo from Manutius to search for comfort there. In vain.

  He was eighteen, a tall, thoughtful, handsome youth with straight dark hair cut in a sharp line just above the collar. At the end of the summer he would go to read law at the university in Bologna, or so his mother had determined. The Houses of Montague and Capulet were mirror images of one another, not that they would ever see matters this way. The Capulets derived their wealth from interests in the east and Venice. The Montagues originated from Mila
n and, though they had been in the Veneto for more than a century, continued to retain strong commercial links with relatives in Lombardy.

  Each regretted the fact they possessed just a single child. That theirs was male proved of only passing comfort to the Montagues since Romeo, though masterly at fencing lessons, showed no interest in military matters or commerce. Left to his own devices, their son would prefer to seek a future in a diversion his mother, the dominant force in the family, deemed pointless, riddled with practitioners of dubious moral fibre and leading to poverty. The youth craved to be a writer. Whether a poet or teller of narrative tales, he couldn’t quite work out. Not that it mattered, since the law – a profession which relied upon words, as his father had brightly tried to point out when the boy protested – was where his parents had decided fate would lead him. Very soon indeed.

  To make matters worse, at the start of the summer he had decided that he was afflicted by a persistent and debilitating ailment and, upon inspection of the poetry books he owned, that it could only be diagnosed as love. The object of his passion was Rosaline, daughter of an ambitious horse merchant who lived beyond the city walls, in the newer quarters of the city across the elegant arched Roman bridge of the Ponte Pietra.

  He’d first seen her at an outdoor song recital in the spring and was immediately captivated by her looks. She was tall with an enigmatic, understated smile and eyes of a colour he hadn’t yet managed to determine since, on the occasions he’d tried to speak to her, he’d been too nervous to notice and she so embarrassed by his attentions she’d quickly rushed away. The first attempt occurred after he’d heard her sing as sweetly as a nightingale at a daytime concert in the grandly ruined surroundings of the arena, the imperial-era stadium that stood to the south of the city. Three times since – in church, at the market and, lastly, when they met by accident in the street – Romeo had tried to engage her in conversation, only to find himself tongue-tied and Rosaline either so bashful or bemused by his interest that she only waited a moment then vanished.