The Juliet Club

by Suzanne Harper

  “Indeed, I’m happy to say that it’s turned out to be quite popular,” she said calmly. “And I have always enjoyed your work, too, Dr. Sanderson. Although I don’t remember reading anything recently.” She took a sip of wine. “Perhaps I somehow missed your latest publication?”

  Her father did his best to stare disdainfully down his nose at her (which wasn’t easy; Professoressa Marchese was a tall woman and they stood eye-to-eye). “Actually, my next book will be published in the fall,” he boasted. “A massive work, the culmination of my career. My editor is very excited about it. In fact, she thinks it could enjoy great popular success as well.”

  “Ah yes, it’s so rewarding to have a best-seller outside academic circles.” Professoressa Marchese paused just long enough for everyone to remember that she had already accomplished that feat. Twice. “I wish you the best of luck with it,” she added kindly.

  He glanced around the room as if looking for the nearest exit, and saw Lucy, Tom, and Silvia standing nearby, listening to this exchange with varying degrees of fascination and puzzlement.

  “I’m sorry, we’re forgetting our manners!” he cried heartily. “I don’t believe everyone’s been introduced. Professoressa Marchese, this is Lucy Atwell, Tom Boone, and my daughter, Kate.”

  The fearsome witch of Kate’s childhood smiled warmly at her. “Piacere. I am so pleased to meet you.” Then she waved one graceful hand at Giacomo and added, “And I am most pleased to present to you Giacomo Marchese. My son.”

  Entr’acte

  “He’s the son of her father’s sworn enemy!” Sarah said with undisguised glee.

  “Sarah,” Annie began, a note of warning in her voice.

  “Star-crossed lovers!” Sarah snatched the paper from Annie’s hands and reread the passage with an air of triumph. “You have to admit, I’m already ahead on points.”

  “Except that they hate each other,” Annie pointed out. “Loathe each other. Despise each other.”

  “Exactly! It’s perfect!” Sarah cried. “This is the way the greatest loves in the universe always start!”

  Annie crossed her arms and stared at her friend. “You are so gullible.”

  “What?” Sarah happily bit into a cookie. “Don’t be a sore loser. “

  “Kate is made of sterner stuff than you imagine,” Annie said. “She took a vow to never fall in love, and she won’t. You’ll see.”

  But Sarah, her eyes gleaming, just took another cookie and didn’t bother to answer.

  Act I

  Scene VI

  “The villa’s main building was erected in 1682, with the two additional wings added in 1703.” Kate was pacing through the villa’s garden on gravel paths with Lucy at her side, reading from a pamphlet she had found in the library. “The intricate design of the garden is typical of the Renaissance, with separate ‘rooms’ created by box hedges and a high wall surrounding the entire garden, shielding it from public view. Even within the garden, there are many hidden spots that a visitor may stumble upon as he or she wanders through the carefully planned landscape: secret bowers and grottos, sunken pools, a fountain tucked within a small grove of lemon trees. The highlight of the garden is the large and elaborate maze, near the rear of the property, where the manicured garden becomes woodland and the sense of being lost within the labyrinthine hedges feels both delightful and slightly dangerous—”

  Kate raised her head and looked around. “I wonder how far we are from the maze. That sounds interesting.”

  “Well, let’s rest for a second before we go looking for it.” Lucy sat down on a wooden bench in the shade and fanned herself with her hand. “Lord, and I thought Mississippi was hot!”

  Kate stretched out on the grass, flopping on her back and staring up at the sky, so bright and blue that it looked enameled. “We can stop for a few minutes, I guess,” she said. “There are acres of grounds to explore, according to this brochure.” But she said it in a desultory tone. They had risen late, since it was Sunday, and had eaten a large meal with the other Shakespeare Scholars that served as both breakfast and lunch. As Lucy had said, they were an intense group: The girls tended to have fervent eyes and lank hair, while the boys went in for black-framed glasses and long-winded monologues.

  There was Winnie, a solemn Swiss girl with heavy black bangs and hair that hung straight to her shoulder, so that she looked as if she wore a helmet; Jonathan, who managed to mention that he was going to Oxford five times in five minutes (and wore a brand-new Oxford T-shirt to underscore the point); Frank, from Florida, who carried a heavily underlined copy of Romeo and Juliet everywhere he went; Erik, a brooding Danish boy who always sat hunched over, his eyes darting about as if he were expecting an assassination attempt; and Cynthia from Connecticut, who had a supercilious drawl and said things like, “Well, of course, everyone knows that Edward de Vere was a fair poet, but one only has to look at his alliteration, which one might call clumsy if one were being kind, and one would realize that the theory that he actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays is laughably ill conceived.”

  This, despite the fact that no one had even mentioned Edward de Vere.

  Kate had tried chatting with them, but every conversational gambit was met with pained smiles and pitying looks. Finally, tired of being snubbed, she gave up. Kate’s father immediately began holding court with this little group, discoursing about everything from the accuracy of the history plays to whether Shakespeare favored drinking cider or beer. They listened to him with rapt attention and completely ignored Kate, Lucy, and Tom.

  Kate frowned at a cloud drifting by. It looked like a hedgehog. Over lunch, Cynthia had lectured the table for twenty minutes about Shakespeare’s usage of the word hedgehog. It had been remarkably tedious.

  Kate made a face at the cloud and flipped through a few more pages of the pamphlet. “It says here that Professoressa Marchese commissioned statues of Shakespearean characters for the garden after she bought the villa,” she remarked idly. “It might be fun to look for them.”

  “Statues?” Lucy wrinkled her nose. “Maybe later, when it cools off.” She slid off the bench to join Kate on the ground. “I wonder where Giacomo is. You’d think he’d be at lunch, since he lives in the villa.”

  Kate shrugged. “Off doing his own thing, I suppose. He must have lots of friends in Verona.” She yawned. Everyone else had trooped upstairs for a siesta after their meal, an Italian tradition which her father had said was one more indication that this was the most civilized country on earth. Both Kate and Lucy had felt too excited to take a nap. But now, Kate felt her eyes closing. The garden was quiet except for the hum of bees going about their business and birds chirping in a nearby tree. In the distance, a church bell rang, and Kate’s happiness was complete. Nothing could disturb this sense of peace and well-being and complete contentment. . . .

  “You know, I was just thinking,” Lucy said. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a summer romance in Italy?”

  Annoyed, Kate opened her eyes and turned her head to look at Lucy, who was smiling, her eyes closed against the sun. “Rather unoriginal, though,” Kate said repressively. “And have you read the syllabus? And the reading list? We won’t have time for romance.”

  Lucy chuckled. “Oh, Kate, you are a hoot!”

  Kate sat up, no longer drowsy. She pulled up a blade of grass and began shredding it methodically.

  “And speaking of romance,” Lucy went on dreamily, “he is gorgeous, isn’t he?”

  Kate pulled up an entire handful of grass and resisted the temptation to throw it in Lucy’s face. “Who?”

  Lucy turned her head to look at Kate, her blue eyes astonished. “Giacomo, of course!”

  “Oh.” Kate’s tone was dismissive. “Him.”

  “Yes, him! Honestly, Kate!” Lucy said, exasperated.

  “Looks aren’t everything,” Kate said. “After all,” she quoted, “‘the devil hath power t’assume a pleasing shape.’”

  “Oh, he’s not the devil!” Lucy protested. />
  “No, I know, that’s not what I—”

  “Although if he was,” Lucy interrupted, “I can tell you that any girl on earth would be tempted to sell her soul.”

  “Not me!” Kate sniffed.

  “But you just admitted that he has a pleasing shape.”

  “No, no, that was Shakespeare who said—”

  “And, anyway, I don’t care what you think.” She turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes with finality. “In my opinion, a little romance is just what this seminar needs to make it absolutely perfect.”

  Kate tossed her handful of shredded grass to the ground. Why was everyone going on about love and romance, just when she had forsworn both? Lucy was almost as bad as Sarah and Annie.

  That thought reminded her that it was time to send another e-mail. She had already found the one computer in the villa with an Internet connection. It was in the library, a grand, high-ceilinged room on the ground floor, and she had managed to dash off a couple of short notes. But every time she poked her head into the library today, she had found Winnie sitting in front of the computer, scowling with concentration at the screen.

  Kate glanced at her watch. Although she would like nothing better than to take a nap in the garden, the library was sure to be empty now that everyone—even stern Winnie—was taking a siesta. It was the perfect time to write a longer, more detailed e-mail. She might even have time to browse through a few of the Shakespeare commentaries she had seen on the shelves.

  She glanced at Lucy, who had fallen asleep and was now snoring. A dainty, pretty snore, of course, but still a snore. Kate grinned, jumped to her feet, and headed inside as church bells began once again to ring in the distance.

  The last bell rang, the sound fading through the evening air. A long pause. Then, “Nel nome del Padre e del Figlio e dello Spirito Santo.” The sonorous sound of the priest’s voice echoed through the dim church.

  “Amen,” the congregation replied dutifully.

  “La grazia del Signore nostro Gesù Cristo, l’amore di Dio Padre e la comunione dello Spirito Santo sia con tutti voi,” the priest went on.

  “E con il tuo spirito.” Even though there were only two dozen people in attendance, their voices rolled through the cavernous sanctuary like waves breaking on the beach on a hot summer afternoon. It was a sound that Giacomo found soothing. In fact, he loved everything about the atmosphere at Santa Lorenzo: the dim light, the candles flickering along the walls, the warm summer breeze that floated in when a latecomer opened the door, bringing with it the ordinary sounds of dogs barking or people laughing.

  He leaned back, closed his eyes, and drifted off into his own thoughts as his grandmother sat beside him, saying the responses with the ease of decades of practice.

  Giacomo had grown up going to this church. Because his father had moved back to England after the divorce and his mother traveled frequently for her work, he was left with his grandmother, who went to church every day. As a small boy, he would trot along behind her into the church and wait as she genuflected, then slid into her favorite pew. He would mimic her actions and sit next to her as she greeted her friends, other small widows dressed in black who were always sitting nearby like a row of friendly crows. They would often trade a bit of whispered gossip before crossing themselves and settling down to the routine business of worship.

  Then he would drift off into a daydream, lulled into a hypnotic state by the priest’s monotone, often staring vaguely at the church’s frescoes and the strange, stiff people painted on the plaster walls.

  Over the course of centuries, the paint had faded, the plaster had become worn, and feet, hands, and sometimes even faces were often rubbed out completely. So when Giacomo was nine, he had begun to invent new names and identities for them. The stoop-shouldered man with the anxious expression and round, startled eyes became Saint Mordecai, the patron saint of those who had neglected their homework. The short man with a halo of fluffy white hair and a cheerful face was rechristened Saint Archibald, who helped people pick out the right gifts for special occasions. The stern woman holding up an admonitory finger earned the name Saint Gertrude, the patron saint of substitute teachers put in charge of unruly classrooms.

  But his favorite had been the young woman tucked away in a small chapel on one side of the sanctuary. She was surrounded by people clutching their heads and pointing dramatically at the sky, while she gazed calmly out of the painting, as if she couldn’t believe how worked up everyone was getting. Giacomo had named her after his friend Giancarlo’s older sister, who had been sixteen at the time and much too grand to notice the passionate devotion of a grubby little boy like himself.

  Her name, he had decided, was Saint Rosaline. The patron saint of hopeless crushes.

  “Giacomo!” His nonna nudged him in the ribs with a sharp elbow to let him know that it was time to kneel.

  He gave her an apologetic shrug and quickly did so, bowing his head over folded hands. When he was nine, he had been convinced that the saints would talk to him if he listened closely enough. Now that he was seventeen, of course, he knew they didn’t.

  Except for Rosaline, whose voice sometimes seemed to sound inside his mind, like bells chiming underwater.

  After a few moments of kneeling with his eyes shut, he decided that he had given a reasonably good impression of piety and risked a quick glance up at Saint Rosaline. She gave him a cool look in return.

  I have not seen you for some time, Giacomo. A decade, at least.

  He cast his eyes to the ceiling. Saint Rosaline could be worse than his grandmother when it came to chivvying him to church. “It has been two days.”

  She gave a slight shrug. Two days, two years, two centuries, when you’ve been stuck on a church wall for as long as I have, it’s all one and the same.

  The prayer was over. Giacomo got up from his kneeling position. Then, filled with a warm, sanctified glow, he reached down to help his grandmother up.

  She jerked her arm out of his grasp and glared at him, her black eyes snapping with outrage. “Basta, basta! Let go, leave me be!” She swatted at him irritably. “Stop being so holy!”

  “I’m just trying to help,” he hissed. “And it is a church.”

  “I’ve survived almost eighty years without your help! Or anyone else’s!” she hissed back.

  Giacomo gave an expressive shrug and slid back in his seat. “Fine.”

  “In the darkest of times!” she went on, grabbing the pew in front of her.

  “Friends were lost!” She pulled hard on the pew and it rocked back, disturbing the man at the end, who had fallen into a light nap. He woke with a snort and looked around wildly.

  “Family was lost!” She pulled again, harder. Giacomo thought he heard the wood crack.

  “I alone”—she finally heaved herself up, flashing him a look of grim triumph—“prevailed!”

  Satisfied that she had made her point, she fell back into her seat, fanning herself with her hand.

  Giacomo glanced up at Saint Rosaline, who was laughing. It’s better than a play, she said, delighted. But tell me, Giacomo, what is new in your life?

  “Nothing,” he thought.

  No new girls? Her voice was teasing. Come, come, surely there is some sort of tale to be told. What of that seminar you’ve been complaining about for weeks?

  That seminar. Giacomo felt a prickle of irritation at the thought of it. He didn’t want to talk about it, but if he tried to ignore Rosaline, she was likely to get petulant.

  Rosaline looked at him expectantly.

  “There is one girl.” The only real possibility, in fact. He gazed at the candles flickering on the altar and tried to sound enamored. “Um, let’s see. Her name is Lucy, she has hair as fine as spun gold, eyes like sapphires, a smile as bright as day—”

  Oh, how nice, Rosaline said, clearly bored. And how amazing to find one girl who manages to embody every cliché.

  He shot her a dark look.

  She smiled blandly back. No on
e else?

  “Well, Silvia will be there, of course.”

  She chuckled. She had heard a lot about Silvia over the years. Ah, that should be fun.

  “Delightful,” he said, with a touch of gloom. After a pause, he added reluctantly, “And there is one other girl—”

  Oh? There was a spark of interest in Rosaline’s voice. Giacomo hurried to snuff it out.

  “But she is a disaster.”

  Really. That sounds much more promising.

  He stole a look at the fresco. “What does that mean?”

  Only that it’s time you fell in love.

  Fall in love? Please! He would have laughed out loud if he wasn’t sitting in church. “I’ve fallen in love hundreds of times,” he pointed out. “Remember Paola? And Jocelyn? And Marte and Cecelia and Sandra and Gigi . . .”

  He could have gone on, would have gone on, but she was shaking her head with that infuriatingly patronizing look that only someone who had been around since the fifteenth century could summon.

  It’s time you experienced true love, she said. Then, as if to make her point clear, she went on. The kind that brings both rapture and despair, the kind that turns your world upside down, the kind that—

  “Yes, yes, yes.” Giacomo was getting testy. “I’ve read the poetry.”

  The members of the congregation were shifting in their pews, preparing to kneel as the service neared its end.

  You may have read the poetry, she said tartly, but you haven’t lived it. And that’s what makes the difference.

  “Hmmph.” He didn’t realize that he had made that noise out loud until an elderly lady two pews in front of him turned to give him an admonishing look and his grandmother poked him sharply in the ribs.

  This is what comes of making up conversations with frescoes, he chided himself, as he dropped to his knees and bowed his head. Nothing but trouble.