O, Juliet (11 page)

Then Jacopo put his face very close to Romeo’s and spoke with the most genteel menace. “But if, while you are her courtly lover, you lay your lips or hand on other than Juliet’s hand, then you will understand the wrath and power of the Strozzi. I will kill you or, better, perhaps, castrate you and let you live on as a woman.”

Then Jacopo smiled almost happily and, with a jaunty tilt of his chin, strode after the other men.

I saw Romeo close his eyes and inhale deeply. It was difficult to discern his emotion. I longed to show myself to him but knew it too dangerous. A moment later he made for the stairs. I waited till all of them were out of hearing before I returned to the sewing room.

 

“They’ve made peace!”

“Truly?”

“Truly. I saw Romeo’s father and Papa embrace.”

Lucrezia was dumbstruck as we sat side by side in the small Palazzo Bardi salon. I’d waited for Contessina to excuse herself before bursting forth with my news.

“When has this ever happened before?” I said.

“I have never known it.” She was incredulous. “Once an enemy, forever an enemy. This is how it has always been.”

“And Romeo is the first cause of it . . . with Don Cosimo’s help of course.”

“I was wrong about him,” Lucrezia said with quiet certitude. “And I suppose if he can cause peace to break out between two warring Florentine families, then some hope remains that a marriage can be arranged.”

“Oh, Lucrezia!” I dropped my embroidery and hugged her fiercely.

“But listen to me,” she went on. “I said ‘some hope.’ We do not know how badly your father’s business depends upon Jacopo’s partnership. That will always take precedence over a love match between new friends.”

It was at that moment I might have told Lucrezia about Jacopo’s vicious threats, but I chose to stay silent. “Knowing Romeo, he will find some reason for our marriage to become
vital
to our family’s betterment,” I said instead.

She smiled indulgently. “It would be wonderful to see you happily wed.”

“I
will
be. I feel it in my bones. Ours will be the most glorious marriage in Florence . . . save yours and Piero’s,” I added with a grin.

She laughed and, picking up the shirt I’d been stitching, handed it back to me. “You’d best get control of yourself before Contessina returns.”

“I can’t stop smiling.”

“She’s coming! Bite the inside of your lip.”

I did this and was gratified to feel a modicum of restraint returning to me.

“I’ve brought us a little something to nibble on,” said Piero’s mother as she entered, carrying a small basket that she placed on the table between us.

“Oh!” I sighed so loudly that both women turned and stared wonderingly at my outburst, one that I could never in a thousand years explain.

It was a basket of figs.

“W
hy on earth would you choose, for a day in the coun try, to wear all white?” my mother demanded with a disapproving shake of her head.

“She fancies herself Beatrice,” said Marco, now being jounced on the carriage seat across from us, next to Papa.

“Beatrice who?” she said, sounding annoyed.

“ ‘Gracious lady dressed in pure white . . . ,’ ”
he recited. “It’s Dante. You may not think him an idol, Aunt, but everyone else in Florence does.”

This alarmed me, that my choice of costume was transparent even to my cousin. I tried very hard not to frown at him, and give him further grounds to suspect me.

“Don’t be silly, Marco,” I said lightly. “The dress is Papa’s newest gift to me.” I blew my father a kiss and smiled. “It’s beautiful silk. The white-on-white embroidery is the finest I’ve ever seen.”

But Papa was barely conscious of this meaningless chatter. He was stony-faced and silent, lost in his own thoughts. The invitation by Romeo’s father of our family to the Monticecco home for Sunday dinner—though of course I saw Romeo’s hand in it—disturbed my father. Ruffled his calm. He could not easily slap away the offered olive branch, knowing Don Cosimo’s spies were everywhere.

Mama, on the other hand, had been delighted with the invitation. “I am curious,” she’d said, “to see how such people live.”

“You’re just nosy,” I’d teased her.

“Call it what you like.We have no friends among the gentlemen farmers.”

“We stay close to our own kind,” Papa had snapped, annoyed at this forced visit with a man who—even for reasons that he could now comprehend—had done violence to his business. Even though the agreed-upon moneys had changed hands and the debts had been paid, a brittle crust of resentment yet hardened my father’s heart against the Monticecco.

I peered out the carriage window as we crossed the Arno on the Ponte alla Carraia, gazing at the families dotting the shore on the late-summer day. A woman laid cold meat and a round of cheese on a colorful rug. Brothers played ball in the grass. Men in a row sat with bent knees, fishing lazily. A mother called urgently to a small boy toddling toward the river’s edge.

We so infrequently crossed the Arno and took to the hills, rolling soft and verdant south of Florence. The uniqueness of the small journey set my mind aflame with its sights. From the sights sprang words. I wished fervently to be clutching an ink-dipped quill in the privacy of my thoughts, and writing them on paper.

Though lately, all I had mused upon was Romeo. I wondered how much of each day he thought about me, for I could not stop myself thinking of him. If I saw a young man of any shape or size, he became Romeo. The sight of my volume of Dante, any balcony, any tree, the moon . . . and figs, of course, drew me back to the object of my desire. This obsession was pleasurable, though, and altogether unalterable. My appetite for all-things-Romeo was insatiable. When I sewed, I sewed for him. When I sang alone in my room, I sang to him. My prayers were for our marriage, my dreams of our children.

Now before me spread a day of infinite opportunity and adventure. I was going in broad daylight to meet my love and his family. The thought made me tingle, like the feel of water rushing over my skin. It would be perfect—a blank canvas upon which two artists—Romeo and Juliet—would paint their future life. A delicious prospect, this day. With every turn of the carriage wheels and the dull clopping of horses’ hooves on the hard-packed road, rising higher into the hills, passing farms and villas quiet of workers this Sunday Sabbath, everything shone brighter, and all became unearthly clear in my vision.

When we pulled through the gates of the high stone walls, I saw stretched out on one side a vast vineyard and a small pasture, on the other a deep and wide grove of trees. Before us a handsome villa gleamed bone white in the noonday sun, its red tiled roof bleached pale pink in its glare. A graceful loggia spanned the second floor, and before the heavy carven double doors a blue and yellow tiled fountain splashed a joyful welcome.

Romeo was first out the door, followed by the man I’d seen at Palazzo Bardi, and a tall, slender woman with a mass of thick brown hair worn loose over her shoulders. She was pretty even before she broke into a smile of greeting. It was Romeo’s smile, the pearly teeth, all inherited from his mother.

The three of them helped us down from our carriage, plying us with questions as to the comfort of our journey. Introductions were made all around. Romeo bowed to me. In the commotion, no one noticed that when he took my hand to kiss it, he turned it and laid his lips softly in the middle of my palm. No one knew my knees jellied and a place deep inside my womanly center shuddered with delight.

Once I’d recovered, I saw that Mama and Romeo’s mother, whose name was Sophia, were attracted to each other like iron is drawn to a magnet. They’d not been in each other’s company a minute before they were chatting like old friends. But Mona Sophia, at closer observation, wore pain as an undergarment—well hidden but existing in the depths of her. I was sure of it.

My father’s posture spoke volumes of his discomfort, but I saw at once that Roberto Monticecco, perhaps swayed by his son’s insistence, was determined to put Papa at ease.

“Will you let me show you my vineyard?” he asked when he saw his wife leading my mother into the house. “I have some caskets of superb Sangioveto, aged for seven years.”

What Italian man could pass up such an offer? I even saw a hint of a smile playing on my father’s lips. “I’ve a brother in Abruzzo who is a vintner,” Papa said. “He claims his Brunello to be the finest in Tuscany.”

“A challenge!” Roberto cried. “Come along, then. We shall see.”

And just like that, Romeo and I were standing alone with Marco, staring silently at the splashing fountain.

“I once heard of a fountain that spouted red wine instead of water,” Marco offered, pertaining to nothing.

“Let me guess,” Romeo said. “The French court?”

“That is the kind of decadence I would like to see one day,” I said.

Both young men turned to me, astonished by my statement.

“Well, cousin Juliet, I had no idea you had such notions. Then you would travel if you could?”

“I would see the world,” I answered him. “All of it—Greece, the Holy Land, the places where Marco Polo sailed. Did you know that the last voyage your namesake made for the great Kublai Khan was to deliver the Mongol’s princess daughter to her betrothed in Ilkhanate?”

“You surprise me,” Romeo said.

“Why surprise?”

“Your boldness. Your erudition.”

I wanted to say, “I thought you knew me better.” But perhaps Romeo meant only to confuse my cousin of our intimacy.

“A want to travel is bold?” is what I did say.

“For a Florentine lady? What do you think, Marco? Is that not audacious?”

“My cousin showed all of us her mettle at the Dante symposium. After that, nothing surprises.”

By now we three faced one another.

“May I show you our olive orchard and its works?” Romeo asked as he untethered the two horses from our carriage.

“I would like that very much,” I answered, perhaps too quickly, too eagerly for a proper girl, but perfectly for an audacious one.

“In want of an elder woman,” Marco said to me, “I suppose I must become your chaperone.”

I smiled gratefully at him.

“Then we’re off,” Romeo said.

I followed as Romeo led our carriage team to the pretty fenced pasture where other horses grazed. He let them in through a gate and in the next moment made a shrill whistle. From the Monticecco animals a single white horse pricked up its ears and, separating itself from the others, came galloping toward us. At the fence the mare put down her head and demanded Romeo scratch it.

I recognized her as the one on which Romeo had made his escape from the Medici ball. I saw Marco’s face. He recognized it, too.

“Fine horse,” Marco pointedly said.

“She loves you,” I told Romeo, unable to take my eyes from him.

“Blanca.” He fixed his gaze on me. “I adore her.” He became aware of Marco’s stare and, pulling in his horns, spoke to him. “When I returned home from university, my uncles sent her to me as a gift. They wrote and said, ‘We understand you are lacking a horse of your own. Every man needs a horse, so we have sent you this fine lady.’ ” He returned his attentions to me. “Do you ride, Lady Juliet?”

“Truthfully, horses frighten me, though I’ve read with great interest of the Warrior Nuns of Bologna.”

“Can you see her in battle armor?” said Marco, suddenly teasing. He began to pretend one-sided swordplay with me with an invisible weapon. I indulged his antics for several moments before giving him a poke in the ribs. He let out a shriek and fell dramatically to the ground as though mortally wounded.

All of us laughed, and as Marco picked himself up and dusted himself off, Romeo and I started away side by side.

“I would like to ride,” I said. “Especially a horse as beautiful as yours.”

“In faraway lands?”

“With my lover,” I whispered a moment before Marco caught us up.

“In harvest season we knock the olives off the trees with sticks,” Romeo told us, “and then they’re ground in here for no more than six minutes.”

We were in the small millhouse, the two-ton round grinding stone clean and still in its giant granite bowl.

“Then the olive paste is placed between woven mats, these laid atop one another and pressed here.” He stood aside so we could see the massive wooden screw press. “The liquid produced is part oil, part water. The oil, of course, settles on top.”

I saw Marco rolling his eyes in boredom and gave him a filthy look. Our little performance was not lost on Romeo, who suppressed a smile and went on with his lecture. What else could he do, with my protective and not-a-little suspicious cousin keeping his beady eyes upon the young man he had so recently chased from the Medici ballroom?

“Come, follow me,” said Romeo with not a trace of sarcasm in his voice. “The best is yet to come.”

And indeed, when we approached the olive grove, there was something wonderful about it—something that calmed even the sharp-tongued Marco.

It was not so much an ordered orchard as a shadowed forest of trees, some of them very ancient. Their thick, gnarled trunks looked like the careworn faces of old men, their million shimmering leaves more gray than green, and the fragrance redolent of another time. Branches with unripened olives, skins purple and white, hung low and heavy near our heads.

Enchantment shone on Romeo’s face, and when he smiled at me, it might have been him making introductions to Dante and Beatrice, Boccaccio and Petrarch.
He loves these trees,
I thought.
They are his home, his family.

“The olive is a miracle of a tree,” he murmured, “surviving in the most hostile soil, rocky and dry, and yet it gives forth the blessing of its precious oil. ‘Liquid gold,’ Homer called it, a divine gift from the gods and nature. If I ever have a daughter, she will be called Olivia.” He patted the trunk of one with the flat of his hand. “This cultivar is called ‘Frantoio.’ Its flavor is more fruity than sweet.”