Juliet (44 page)

This time it was Romeo who had to restrain himself, testing Nino’s blade with but the slightest touch and absorbing the vibration in his hand. “The lady of whom you speak,” he pointed out, “is my wife. And she will cheer me on with cries of pleasure as I chop you into pieces.”

“Will she now?” Nino lunged forward, hoping to surprise, but missed. “As far as I know, she is no more your wife than she is my father’s. And soon”—he grinned—“she will be no one’s wife, but my little whore, pining all day for me to come and entertain her at night—”

Romeo lunged at Nino, and missed the other only by a hair as Nino had the presence of mind to parry and deflect the blade. It was enough, however, to put a halt to their conversation, and for a while there was no sound other than that of their blades crossing with hateful clangs as they entered into a circular dance of death.

While Romeo was no longer the nimble-footed fighter he had been
before his injury, his tribulations had taught him resilience, and, most important, they had filled him with a white-hot hatred that—if properly mastered—might trump any fighting skill. And so, even as Nino danced around him in a taunting manner, Romeo did not take the bait, but waited patiently for his moment of revenge … a moment he was confident the Virgin Mary would grant him.

“How very fortunate I am!” exclaimed Nino, taking Romeo’s inaction for a sign of fatigue. “I get to indulge in my two favorite sports on the same evening. Tell me, how does it feel—”

Romeo needed no more than a brief, careless imbalance in Nino’s stance to spring forward with impossible speed and drive his sword in between the other’s ribs, to penetrate his heart and pin him, briefly, to the wall.

“How it feels?” he sneered, right into Nino’s astounded face. “Did you really want to know?”

With that, he withdrew his blade in disgust and watched the lifeless body slide to the ground, leaving a trail of crimson on the wall.

From around the corner, Friar Lorenzo was shocked to witness the conclusion of the brief duel. Death had come so abruptly to Nino that the young man’s face showed nothing but surprise; the monk would have liked for Nino to realize his own defeat—even if it was only within the blink of an eye—before expiring. But Heaven had shown itself more merciful than he, and had ended the scoundrel’s sufferings before they had even begun.

Not pausing to wipe down his sword, Romeo stepped right over the dead body to turn the door handle that Nino had guarded with his life. Seeing his friend disappearing through the fateful door, Friar Lorenzo at last got up from his hiding place and hastened across the hallway—Giannozza’s men in tow—to follow Romeo into the unknown.

Stepping through the door, Friar Lorenzo paused to let his eyes adjust. There were no lights in the room save the glow from a few embers in the fireplace and the faint shine of the stars through an open window; even so, Romeo had walked straight over to the bed to wake its sleeping tenant.

“Giulietta, my love,” he urged, embracing her and showering her pale face with kisses, “wake up! We are here to save you!”

When the girl finally stirred, Friar Lorenzo saw right away that something
was wrong. He knew Giulietta well enough to grasp that she was beyond herself, and that some power stronger than Romeo was working at her to put her back to sleep.

“Romeo …” she murmured, struggling to smile and touch his face, “you found me!”

“Come,” Romeo encouraged her, trying to make her sit up, “we must go before the guards come back!”

“Romeo …” Giulietta’s eyes were closing again, her head drooping limply like the bud of a flower felled by a scythe. “I wanted to—” She would have said more, but her tongue failed her, and Romeo looked at Friar Lorenzo in desperation.

“Come and help me!” he urged his friend, “she is ill. We’ll have to carry her.” When he saw the other hesitating, Romeo followed the monk’s eyes and saw the vial and cork on the bedstand. “What is that?” he demanded, his voice hoarse with fear. “A poison?”

Friar Lorenzo leapt across the floor to inspect the vial. “It was rosewater,” he said, smelling the empty vessel, “but also something else—”

“Giulietta!” Romeo shook the girl violently. “You must wake up! What did you drink? Did they poison you?”

“Sleeping potion …” mumbled Giulietta without opening her eyes, “so you could wake me up—”

“Merciful Mother!” Friar Lorenzo helped Romeo sit her up. “Giulietta! Come to! It’s your old friend, Lorenzo!”

Giulietta frowned and managed to open her eyes. Only now, seeing the monk and all the strangers surrounding her bed did she seem to understand that she was not yet dead, not yet in Paradise. And when the truth reached her heart, she gasped, her face contorted with panic.

“Oh, no!” she whispered, clinging to Romeo with all her remaining strength. “This is not right! My dear—you are alive! You are—”

As she started coughing, violent spasms ran through her body, and Friar Lorenzo could see the pulse in her neck pounding as if the skin was about to burst. Not knowing what else to do, the two men tried to soothe her pains and calm her down, and they kept holding her, even as sweat ran from her body and she fell back on the bed in convulsions.

“Help us!” cried Romeo to the men standing around the bed. “She is suffocating!”

But Giannozza’s warriors were trained to end life, not sustain it, and
they stood uselessly around the bed as the husband and the childhood friend struggled to save the woman they loved. Although they were strangers, the men were so engrossed in the tragedy unfolding before their eyes that they did not notice the advent of the Salimbeni guards until these were at the door and escape was impossible.

It was a cry of horror from the hallway that first alerted them to the danger. Someone had clearly caught sight of young master Nino, sprawled in his own blood. Now at last, Giannozza’s men had occasion to draw their weapons as the Salimbeni guards began pouring into the room.

In a situation as desperate as theirs, a man’s only hope of survival was to have none. Knowing they were already dead, Giannozza’s men threw themselves at the Salimbeni guards with fearless frenzy, cutting them down without mercy and not even pausing to ensure that their victims were beyond suffering before moving on to the next. The only armed man who did not turn to fight was Romeo, who could not let go of Giulietta.

For a while, Giannozza’s men were able to defend their position and kill anyone who came into the room. The door was too narrow to admit more than one enemy at a time, and as soon as someone burst inside, he would be met by seven blades in the hands of men who had not spent the evening drinking themselves into a stupor. In a space as narrow as this, a few determined men were not as helpless against a hundred opponents as they would have been in an open field; as long as the hundred came to them one by one, there was no strength in numbers.

But not all Salimbeni’s guards were imbeciles; just as Giannozza’s men began to entertain a hope that they might, in fact, live through the night, they were distracted by a loud clamor from the back of the room, and spun around to see a secret door open and a stream of guards pouring through it. Now, with enemies coming at them from the front and rear at once, the men were quickly overwhelmed. One by one, Giannozza’s men fell to their knees in defeat—some dying, some already dead—as the room flooded with guards.

Even now, with all hope lost, Romeo still did not turn to fight.

“Look at me!” he urged Giulietta, too focused on reviving her lifeless body to think of defending himself. “Look at—” But a spear thrown from across the room struck him right between the shoulder blades, and he collapsed over the bed without another word, even in death unwilling to let go of Giulietta.

As his body went limp, the eagle signet ring fell from his hand, and Friar Lorenzo understood that Romeo’s last wish had been to put the ring back on his wife’s finger where it belonged. Without thinking, he grabbed the holy object from the bed—lest it be confiscated by men who would never respect its destiny—but before he could put it on Giulietta’s finger, he was pulled away from her by strong hands.

“What happened here, you blithering monk?” demanded the captain of the guards. “Who is that man, and why did he kill Monna Giulietta?”

“That man,” replied Friar Lorenzo, too numb from shock and grief to feel any real fear, “was her true husband.”

“Husband?” The captain took the monk by the hood of his cowl and shook him. “You’re a stinkin’ liar! But”—he bared his teeth in a smile—“we have ways to fix that.”

MAESTRO AMBROGIO SAW
it with his own eyes. The wagon came in from Rocca di Tentennano late at night—just as he was passing by Palazzo Salimbeni—and the Salimbeni guards did not falter in unloading their miserable cargo before the very feet of their master on the front steps of his home.

First came Friar Lorenzo—bound and blindfolded and barely able to climb off the wagon by himself. Judging by the unforgiving way in which the guards hauled him into the building, they were taking him straight to the torture chamber. Next, they proceeded to unload the bodies of Romeo, Giulietta, and Nino … all wrapped together in the same bloody sheet.

There were those who would later say that Salimbeni had looked at his son’s dead body without emotion, but the Maestro was not fooled by the man’s stony features as Salimbeni beheld his own tragedy. Here was the outcome of his wicked dealings; God had punished him by serving up his son to him like a butchered lamb, smeared in the blood of the two people he himself had sought to separate and annihilate against the will of Heaven. Surely, at that moment, Salimbeni understood that he was already in Hell, and that, wherever he went in the world and however long he lived, his demons would always follow him.

When Maestro Ambrogio returned to his workshop later that night, he knew the Salimbeni soldiers might come knocking at any moment. If
the rumors about Salimbeni’s torture methods were true, poor Friar Lorenzo was likely to blurt out everything he knew—as well as an abundance of falsehoods and exaggerations—before midnight.

But, the Maestro wondered, would they really dare come for him, too? After all, he was a famous artist with many noble patrons. Yet he could not be sure. Only one thing was certain: Running away and hiding would surely fix his guilt, and—once a runaway—there could be no return to the city he loved above any other.

And so the painter looked around his workshop for anything incriminating, such as the portrait of Giulietta and his journal, lying on the table. Pausing only to enter one last paragraph—a few jumbled sentences about what he had seen that night—he took the book and the portrait, wrapped them both in cloth, put them in an airtight box, and hid that box in a secret hollow in the wall where, surely, no one else would ever find it.

   [   VI.I   ]

…

J
ANICE HAD NOT LIED
when she said she was a good climber. For some reason, I had never put much faith in her postcards from exotic places, except when they spoke of disappointment and debauchery. I preferred to think of her lying dead drunk in a motel in Mexico rather than snorkeling around coral reefs in water so clean that you—as she had once scribbled, not to me, but to Aunt Rose—jump in like the dirty old sinner you are and come out feeling like Eve on her first morning in Paradise, before Adam shows up with newspaper and cigarettes.

Standing on my balcony, observing her efforts to climb up to me, I was struck by how much I had looked forward to my sister’s return. For after pacing up and down the floor of my room for at least an hour, I had come to the frustrating conclusion that I would never be able to make sense of the situation on my own.

It had always been like that. Whenever I would describe my problems to Aunt Rose as a child, she would fuss and fuss, but never solve anything, and in the end I would feel much worse than I had before. If a boy was bugging me at school, she would call the principal and all the teachers and demand that they call his parents. Janice, in contrast—accidentally overhearing our conversation—would merely shrug and say, “He has a crush on her. It’ll pass. What’s for dinner?” And she was always right, even though I hated to admit it.

In all likelihood, she was right now, too. It was not that I particularly liked her snarky comments about Alessandro and Eva Maria, but then,
someone had to make them, and my own mind was clearly embroiled in a conflict of interest.

Panting with the ongoing effort of staying alive, Janice readily grasped the hand I held out for her and eventually managed to swing a leg over the railing. “Climbing …” she gasped, coming down like a sack of potatoes on the other side, “is such sweet sorrow!”

“Why,” I asked, as she sat gasping on the floor of the balcony, “did you not use the stairs?”

“Very funny!” she shot back. “Considering there’s a mass murderer out there who hates my guts!”

“Come on!” I said. “If Umberto had wanted to wring our necks he would have done it a long time ago.”