Beatrice and Benedick

 

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Beatrice – a princess of Villafranca

Benedick – a gentleman of Padua

Don Pedro – a prince of Aragon

Claudio – a count of Florence

Leonato – the Governor of Messina

Innogen – his wife, aunt to Beatrice

Hero – their daughter and heir, cousin to Beatrice

Orsola – waiting woman to Hero

Margherita – her daughter

Friar Francis – Leonato's priest

Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza – a Sicilian poet

Giovanni Florio Crollalanza – his father

Guglielma Crollalanza – his mother

Ludovico de Torres – Archbishop of Monreale, uncle to Claudio

Diego Enrique de Guzman – Spanish Viceroy of Sicily

Philip II of Spain – a great king

Faruq Sikkander – a Moorish seaman

Faruq Sikkander – a water-diviner, his son of the same name

Borachio – a servant to Don Pedro

Conrad – the same

ACT ONE

Sicily: Summer 1588

Beatrice:
I did not want to open my eyes. Not yet.

I sat with the sun gilding my lids, just listening to Sicily. The ebb and flow of the tide, the temperate winds breathing in and out. The scamels singing from the oleanders, and the crickets answering from the dunes. And underlying all, the beat of my own heart.

A bee bumbled into my cheek, singing his somnolent song, startling me. I opened my eyes and for a moment the brightness blinded me. But then the view assailed me at last. From my seat, high on the dunes, the isle was spread about me like the skirt of my gown.

To the south, in Taormina, the old honeyed stones of the theatre built by the Greeks. To the north lay the glittering seaport of Messina. In the harbour, a single Argosy slid into the bay, the sail flap-dragoned by the southerly wind. Away up the hill to the east, the sunlit courts of my uncle Leonato's summer palace, its stone walls as rosy as coral. And in the west, the blue slopes of a volcano, the mountain they call Etna, gently smoking with an ever-present threat. Above all, the sky; a hot high arc of stinging azure, reaching to the vault of heaven, blue as the Madonna's cloak. Sicily was beautiful. But it was alien to me, and I felt horribly alone.

My eyes began to water. It was the brightness, no doubt. Even the sun was strange here; here it was not the friendly planet which had shone upon me for nineteen summers, but a
fiery orb that could pull strange spiny plants from the earth and ignite mountains. I blinked the unwelcome tears away; the sky was never so bright in the north, in Villafranca di Verona, my home. I
missed
it so. This sun was foreign, and the bright southern sea led to more foreign lands with stranger's names – Tripoli, Tunis, Oran.

My homesick gaze was drawn northward like a lodestone, and I turned to where the gradient of blue darkened to the north. Beyond the sapphire bay lay the perilous straits of Messina, with the rocks of Scylla hugging the mainland and the whirlpool of Charybdis nearer the isle. This legendary pair of troublemakers had been wrecking ships since ancient times. I had to sail between the two to get here, and I realised I was still between them now. Now I was in Sicily, more the fool I. When I was at home, I was in a better place.

I felt a pressure upon my boot, and looked down; an urchin was crawling over my toe. His coat was as spiny as the cactus plants that grew everywhere here. He snuffled his spiny nose at my sole, so I kicked him gently away and got to my feet, brushing the sand from my skirts. It was then that I saw two figures emerge from a little house farther down the yellow sands. They were a man and a woman, and they walked in my direction, holding hands.

I could have run, for I had time; but instead I dropped to the sand and crouched down guiltily. Had they been an ordinary couple I would have trespassed no longer and left them to their promenade, but what held me were their different colours. For the man was as black as his lady was lily white.

A Moor.

I watched, prone on the sand, my eyes peeping over a knoll, my hands parting the brittle grasses that hid me from view. I could see them clearly below me. They sank down in the powdery white sand between the hillocks only feet away and began to kiss.

My pulses thumped in my ears. I had seen a Moor before, of course. Moors walked about the streets of Padua or Bologna, as students, as merchants, as travellers, and no one troubled them. In Verona even the patron saint of our city was black; St Zeno, who was rendered in polished ebony in our basilica. But the Moors I had seen kept to their own; I had never seen a Moor with a white woman before.

The pair were dressed the same, in loose white cambric robes, as if they had only just risen from their bed to make a new one here in the dunes. Now they were kissing hungrily; him on top, her beneath. He seemed to be almost devouring her. He paused once, to look upon her tenderly and stroke her face as if he could not believe she was real. I noticed his fingertips and palms were white, and her cheeks stained with a blush, as if his colour had transferred to her. She was a beautiful creature, with hair so fair it was almost white, and eyes as pale as a dawn sky. But it was his beauty that held me transfixed; his skin was as burnished as St Zeno's ebony, his teeth pearl. His eyes were dark and fathomless, his lips thick and pliant as they mouthed at her, hungry as a babe. His hair was close cut, almost shaven, and I could see the bones of his skull. Her white fingers clutched the back of it, and one of them wore a gold ring. A man's ring.
His
ring.

They looked like two urgent angels, one black, one white in their flowing robes. As I watched he moved his body over hers, and he raised her robe higher. I could see the shadow of hair at her groin, and her bone-white curves revealed. She raised his robe likewise, bunching his shift above his waist. I saw his ebony back and rump and averted my gaze, only to see a black hand close on her white breast. His hand wore a ring too, the twin of hers; and I thought for the first time –
they are wed.
She arched her back as his lips replaced the hand, and she clawed and clasped a handful of sand in her transported state, the pale powder flowing away through her fingers as the Moor became
one with her. Then they began to move together like a bark riding the waves, higher and higher. At the pinnacle of their passion she turned her head in ecstasy and opened her eyes, and I was shot through with her blue gaze as her eyes met mine.

I scrambled down from my perch, blushing scarlet, my flesh afire. I crouched, frozen and listening, for them to rise and shout. But no, their passion spent, murmurs and soft laughter replaced it, sounds somehow even more intimate than before. They would not have seen me even had I stood above them, blocking the alien sun.

I scrambled down to the shore and hurried back in the direction of Leonato's house. In my sleeve I carried the horn of ink I had been sent to fetch from Messina, ready for a day of my cousin Hero's schooling. My flight had dislodged it and as I drew out the little bottle the ink stained my pale hand. Black on white; the Moor and his wife.

I had to walk, to still the roiling tempest of my humours. I strode along the frill of the ebbing tide, one foot in sea and one on shore, hardly noticing that one leather slipper became soaked in the brine. At length my heart slowed, my cheeks cooled, but my spirits were still in turmoil. I wanted to laugh and cry. I felt excited but desolate, suddenly even more alone, excluded by that union. I looked out to the limitless sea, my mind tossing on the ocean.

I had been in Messina for a month, sent to summer here as a companion to my young cousin Hero. My father, Prince Escalus of Villafranca di Verona, had sent me from the city to my uncle – Lord Leonato Leonatus, Governor of Messina – for reason of my safety. Verona, in recent weeks, had become a seething cauldron of feuding and violence. Some trivial quarrel had woken the age-old enmities of two rival Veronese clans and the sleeping lions had become scrapping cats. When I was actually trapped in our carriage, caught amidst a brawl in the very street, my father had me packed and shipped and speeded to the safety of Sicily.