by David Hewson
He raised his cup again. ‘Well, here’s a toast: let the men steer well clear of ladies’ boudoirs!’ Another wink. ‘Until it’s bedtime and our services are needed.’ She laughed and he realised he hadn’t heard that sweet sound in a while. ‘Send that mouthy woman of hers to wake her, love. We won’t be needing her around the place after today.’
‘I’ll put her in the kitchen–’
‘Put her in the street for all I care. I’ve only taken her impertinence for Juliet’s sake. When she’s gone…’
Raised voices disturbed them from the hall behind. Capulet turned and squinted. His eyesight was no longer good. ‘Who’s that making a racket on a day like this? Who dares?’
There was a figure in a grey habit, arguing with two of the servants.
‘I think it’s the Franciscan. Friar Laurence,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘He seems… perturbed.’
* * *
Nurse was in her room, getting bored and restless, when she heard the chimes of the Torre dei Lamberti and thought to herself: enough’s enough. The girl was never good at rising. But staying in bed on her wedding morning was too much to take. Donata Perotti couldn’t wait to dress her, comb her long blonde hair, find the right jewels, coax her slim frame into the wedding dress and with it a calm and amenable mood. There was a lover to be forgotten amidst all the rush. That thought had hung over her all night even as she dreamt of Garda, her sister and fresh fish simmering in a pot above the coals.
Determined, she got up and hammered on Juliet’s door. There was no answer. It wasn’t the first time. Gingerly, she walked into the room saying, in a loud voice she’d been using ever since the girl was barely off her breast, ‘Mistress! Mistress! Oh, what is this, little Juliet? I swear you’re a slug-a-bed again, snoring beneath your sheets on such a day as this.’
The windows were closed, the curtains, too. The room had a stuffy, close air about it. She glanced at the shape hidden beneath the bedclothes, never stirring. Juliet was always an awkward one. No reason to think today would be any different.
‘Why, love, I say. Sweet girl! A bride you’ll be and soon!’
She swept aside the curtains and threw open the windows. The fresh air of the garden greeted her and then the rich aroma of roasting hog.
Looking at the bright horizon and the gulls circling over the river she said, ‘And not a word from you, lass? Not a peek from beneath your pillow?’
Juliet hadn’t moved an inch, just stayed locked in that awkward shape the young loved, knees drawn up, arms tucked in, face side on, half hidden. Not the slightest sign of stirring.
‘Just as well you get your sleep. That young man Paris won’t be giving you much rest tonight. Oh, God, give me patience.’ Her voice rose. ‘Juliet. Juliet. You want me to send up that count and let him take you in this bed of yours?’
On the wall the painting of Juliet, young and bright-eyed with the charcoal drawing, stared at them.
‘Lord, he’d give you a good fright if you let him. How you sleep!’ She went to the bed, rocked the frame then drew back the sheets. ‘Still in yesterday’s clothes, child?’ the nurse said, quietly now. ‘What game is this? What–?’ Her heart began to beat too quickly. She bent down and shook Juliet as gently as she could. ‘I must wake you, girl.’
She gripped her shoulder harder. ‘I must–’
Under the pressure of the nurse’s strong arm, Juliet moved. Her mouth fell open. No sound from her throat. No blink of an eye. Just a couple of drops of dark liquid leaking from her blackened lips onto the bleached white linen sheet.
‘Oh girl…’ the woman whispered. ‘My beautiful, darling girl.’
Reaching out, she touched her arm. Cold skin. Cold and clammy. A small black bottle rolled out from under the delicate fingers of the girl’s left hand, fell to the tiles and shattered there with a quick, sharp crack.
* * *
The noises from the house were getting louder. Capulet threw his cup to the grass and doddered up the steps. There the cause of the argument became clear. An anxious Friar Laurence was asking to see Juliet. Paris, as her suitor, was demanding to know why. The two servant boys, Samson and Gregory, were not of a mind to let anyone do anything until someone else turned up and told them to.
The friar saw Capulet approach and asked, ‘May we speak privately?’
Laurence had an odd and shifty air about him.
‘Say what you have to say in front of all of us. Then leave my home. This is a happy day and a hectic one. I do not appreciate disturbances. The marriage of my daughter and the count here–’
‘There may be no marriage!’ Laurence cried. Out of the deep pockets of his habit he pulled a small black bottle, a skull upon its side. The sight of it silenced them all. ‘Your daughter came to me last night. She said you sent her for a tonic to cheer her mood.’
‘We thought it best,’ her mother said.
‘I gave her such a remedy. Good advice, too.’ He nodded at Paris. ‘And to her groom. Or so I thought.’
As did we, Capulet muttered, remembering her sudden cheerful mood when she returned, and how she’d knelt before him.
Laurence brandished the black bottle. ‘This morning I found one of these was missing. My back was turned a while. I had to fetch her the tonic. I fear…’
‘Fear what?’ her mother whispered.
‘I fear she stole a vial of poison. It pains me sore to wonder why. I must see her…’
The scream that broke their wrangling was loud and so full of agony it chilled them even in the relentless morning heat. The Franciscan pushed Paris to one side and soon was flying up the marble steps, his grey habit flapping round him like a cloak.
A door opened somewhere. Through it the shrieking came, powerful enough to hurt the ears.
Capulet had lived with that voice since a month after Juliet’s birth: the nurse, not that she’d ever sounded like this.
One line only she yelled, over and over.
‘Oh lady, lady, lady. Not dead. Say not dead…’
* * *
In the boarded-up inn fifteen miles south of Verona fortune’s wheel had turned. The tavern girl now sat in the kitchen wearing a grubby grey shift, wolfing down spelt porridge Friar John had made, swigging at wine and water.
During the night, after he’d calmed her and given her something to drink, he’d taken a closer look at her spotty face. Then he’d gone to his saddle bag and found, among the medicines, a thick milky lotion Laurence had made from camomile, bees wax, rosewater, almond essence and beef lard. He’d persuaded the girl to dab it on her spots with a little fluff of cotton. The itching had ceased soon after and when he’d washed her a little, ignoring her squawks, he’d found more candles and a mirror in another room, brought them back and told her to look.
‘Plague,’ she’d whispered.
‘It’s not plague.’
John had been orphaned when he was six. The years when he lived with his solitary father were still in his memory. Their village was a tight little community sharing everything, including common sicknesses when they arrived.
‘It’s varicella. Chickenpox. You’ve never had it? Not when you were tiny?’
She hadn’t answered, just kept dabbing at her spots and, after a while, when he’d persisted in his questions, gone straight to sleep.
Now, in the kitchen, he asked again. She looked at him, a spoonful of porridge halfway to her open mouth, squinted with two bleary eyes, and said, ‘What?’
‘Most children get it. When I was small and it came to our village they made us all sit in the same house to catch the sickness once and get it out of the way.’
‘You’re sure it’s not the plague?’
‘I’m certain.’
The spoon went in and, through a half-full mouth, she said, ‘You think I’ll live then?’
The story she’d told him as he’d cleaned her up, getting better by the minute, was depressing. Her man, the landlord, had taken one look at her face and panicked, grabbing all t
heir money and the one horse they owned.
‘Those spots won’t kill you. What are you going to do now? Without him?’
The spoon went down. He felt as if he’d uttered the most idiotic question she’d ever heard.
‘Wait for him to come back, of course? What else am I supposed to do?’
She was the pretty girl he remembered. It was clear now even in the meagre morning light that made its way through the boarded-up windows.
‘He abandoned you.’
‘He thought I had the plague. If it had been the other way round I’d have hopped it, too. Not bloody daft, are we?’
John got up and started banging on the boards they’d hammered round the windows.
‘Anyhow,’ she went on. ‘You were ready to leg it as soon as you saw me. What’s the difference?’
The planks were hammered in. But with a little effort he thought he might shift them. There wasn’t a sound from outside. Not even a whinny from the mule.
‘The difference is… I didn’t know you.’
‘No. The difference is… you’re a man of the church. Supposed to look after us all. On behalf of God, your master. That’s your job, isn’t it?’
He got a chair and jabbed the leg against the loosest plank. It came free. When he pushed again he saw a chink of bright daylight and through it an empty yard.
‘Among others,’ he agreed, thinking of the mule and the long journey to Mantua. He was more than halfway there he reckoned.
‘You…’ Her voice was loud and coarse. ‘Are meant to take care of us, body and soul.’
‘We are. I’m sorry. Do you have any tools? Hammers? Mallets?’
She was scraping out the last of the porridge. ‘Maybe. But you can’t have ’em.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because!’
All the warm feelings he’d held towards this girl in his memory were fast fading.
‘Because of what?’
‘Because there’s red crosses all over this house and that means plague! If we break out of here and start wandering round they’ll kill us anyway. Then chuck our carcasses in a lime pit. Don’t they teach you nothing in that monastery of yours, Mister Monk?’
‘Friar,’ he murmured.
‘Same difference.’
‘It isn’t.’
‘It is to me.’
But she was right. No one went beyond the red cross. You were dead the moment you passed it. All they could do was wait, for her faithless lover or the physician the Plague Doctor had spoken of the night before.
The errand to Mantua seemed lost. He went to the bag and retrieved the two sealed letters Laurence had given him, one for the apothecary named Nico, the second for the murderer Romeo. There seemed no reason not to open them now.
The brother’s letter was in impenetrable Greek. The second had given him pause from the outset. Friar John didn’t understand why he was carrying a missive to a banished felon who was lucky to escape Verona with his life. It had occurred to him during the night that perhaps these letters were the true purpose of his mission, not carrying potions from one apothecary in Verona to another twenty-five miles away.
So he broke the seal on Romeo’s letter and read it, telling himself the pressures of these changed circumstances breached any promises he’d made.
The girl made more food, frying fat bacon, cooking a couple of eggs alongside. Not that she offered him any.
After a while she said, ‘That’s not very nice language for a man of the cloth. Swearing oaths like you’re a common sailor. I must say I’m shocked. Even my man don’t use words like what you’re muttering under your breath.’ She jabbed a fork into an egg on the hob and sent bright yellow yolk splatting everywhere. ‘I’m shocked. Honestly.’
The friars of San Francesco had given him many things. A home. Food. Friendship. Direction. Most of all, though, they’d given him faith and trust, in himself and others.
‘Shocked I am.’
‘So you said.’
‘How long do you think it’ll be before someone comes?’
Now, reading the lies and deceit implicit in Laurence’s letter to the murderer Romeo, he felt cheated and used. If Laurence’s scheme had gone to plan, the Montague villain would have returned to Verona in his own cloak, using his papers. A murderer in a habit, while John lingered with Laurence’s brother awaiting instructions.
He wouldn’t be going to Mantua to deliver it, even if someone arrived to remove the red crosses and the boards within the hour.
‘I said…’ the girl went on.
‘I heard you. I don’t know.’ He walked to the stove and pushed both letters, Nico’s and Romeo’s, into the fire beneath the pan. Then broke a couple of eggs into the lard for himself. ‘In truth… I don’t know anything at all.’
* * *
This was sleep but not sleep. Life yet not quite life. She couldn’t lift a finger or even raise an eyebrow. But something of this old familiar room and the people bustling, weeping, shrieking around her came to Juliet in this thick and swimming slumber.
Then her inward eye blinked and opened and she found herself back outside San Zeno on the scorching piazza cobbles, wearing the white dress her mother had picked for the wedding. A mahogany coffin was entering by the bronze doors beneath the turning rose window and the Wheel of Fortune. The whole basilica seemed to squeal and screech as it shifted to an unseen mechanism.
‘Not my coffin,’ she said as she watched the shiny wooden box vanish into the dark belly of the church, towards the red-robed corpse of the saint deep in the crypt.
‘No.’ It was her father, grey-faced before her. Long velvet jacket the deathly colour of his skin, white britches, black leather riding boots, a whip in his right hand. He cracked the crop on his heavy thigh. ‘Mine, child. You put me there.’
‘Not true…’ she whispered and found herself crouching on the hard cobbles, white dress getting grubby from the dust blown around by the baking day.
‘All this…’ His roar was as loud as the universe, his face bigger than the façade of San Zeno going slowly round and round, good to bad and back again, behind him. ‘All this is your doing. The bitter fruit of your vile and disobedient soul.’
A low repetitive chant filled her mouth, her head. ‘I am me and only me. I am me and…’
The whip came out and switched her face, just as it had once when she’d gone riding with him out in the countryside and tried to race off when he’d told her to stay.
There was no pain. This was a dream.
‘Leave the child,’ her mother cried. Bianca Capulet stood beside her husband, his face wreathed in anger, hers wracked with pain. ‘We did this. Not her. Never.’
Luca Capulet brushed her aside, swatting her with the crop. ‘She stole that potion and thrust a dagger in my heart. Then lied to me about her acquiescence. Killed herself beneath my roof–’
‘It wasn’t like that, Father.’ Her voice had the calm and patient tone she knew annoyed him. ‘I am me and only me. I am me and…’
‘This selfish child,’ he snapped and again the switch flew at her. ‘Death is my son-in-law now. Death my heir. Death it was she wedded. By God I should have whipped that child, time and time and time and…’
She squeezed her dream eyes shut against the flying scourge. His angry tones faded, only to be replaced by a different voice, musical and clear, like that of an angel calling out her name.
When she looked up a young woman was where her parents had stood. She had long fair hair, a gold circlet round it, a blue dress that seemed to hang on the skeletal frame beneath. Her face was bloodless and too perfect, as if from a painting or a fresco in a church. It took a moment to place this vision.
‘Child. Look at me.’
Ursula, Carpaccio’s martyr from Venice stood before her.
‘You are not real,’ the dream Juliet whispered.
The apparition had eyes like deep pools of inky glass. Like the liquid Laurence had given her.
‘Besides…
’ This was so obvious she failed to understand why it hadn’t occurred to her till now. ‘We all die. So each of us is a martyr in that sense.’
‘Look at yourself then.’
The dream saint held up her hand. In it was a mirror, circular and shiny, gold round the rim, just like the one in her room. Behind her the stones of San Zeno moved again, more quickly. Their moans were loud enough to be an earthquake or the tremors of a volcano, like Vesuvius exploding in a book of old stories a young girl had read, in another world, a different life.
Juliet gazed into the convex mirror and saw herself reflected there, still as a corpse, just like the mythical Ursula in Carpaccio’s painting of her dream, though this was her bedroom in the palazzo of the Capulets, her sheets, her window, her balcony. Her lifeless body, head on a hard white pillow, eyes tight shut. Instead of the painting of her younger self, a small rose window hung against the wall, San Zeno’s in miniature, marble circle moving round and round, tiny figures set in its circumference, writhing from pain to joy with each rotation.
No shining angel in armour at the foot of her bed either. There was Romeo, clothes bloodied, dagger in hand. Too fearful to come near her sleeping form.
‘My love…’
Ursula’s black eyes bore down on her. The deathly saint snapped her fingers. He was gone and Juliet’s dream cry of loss and agony went with him. The familiar door opened. A line of sad-eyed nuns entered, all in black. They came to her, undressed her, washed her body, took out a shroud and wrapped it round her thin cold form. Then, when she was decent, Laurence returned, men with him carrying a pale wood coffin.
‘Do not let me see this…’
‘How can you not?’ It was her father’s voice again. ‘You brought it on yourself. On us.’
‘I am me and only me. I am me and…’
He shouted something then and in that bellicose, wordless yell there was such anger, grief and hatred she felt dream tears start in dead dream eyes.
When she looked again he was gone. Just the mirror now, as big as the room, the world itself. In the glass her shrouded body lay in the hands of quiet, serious friars lifting her into the coffin, Laurence watching, his eyes boring into hers.