O, Juliet (28 page)

We put ourselves down on my bed.

“It is a sleep like unto death,” he said, “but not death. You will grow cold and pale. Your breath will become shallow, so shallow that no physician can detect it.”

“What will I feel? Will I dream? Or is it all blackness?”

He shook his head helplessly. “I cannot say.”

“You cannot say!”

“I would lie if I said otherwise.”

“This is a mad scheme. You tell me to drink poison and pretend to die.”

“Well, of course there is more to it.”

“You’d better tell me quickly. Where is this ‘time and place’ you promise me and Romeo?”

“Ah, that is the magic of it.”

“So I’m giving myself over to
magic
?”

“No, no. It is medicine. Just a deep sleep. Long enough to see you pronounced dead, mourned, and buried. That is the ‘time.’ ”

“Oh, Father, I do not much like the sound of this.”

“Hear me out. You will be taken to your family’s tomb.... That is the ‘place.’ ” He saw my expression. “I know, I know . . . but here is where you call upon your courage.”

“So I am to be buried alive?”

“Yes. But a courier will ride swiftly to Verona. . . .”

“No!”

“Why ‘no’ ?”

“There is no trustworthy courier. The last I sent was bribed and betrayed me.”

“This one will not betray you.” He set his face, determined.

“You?”

“Yes.”

“On a mule?”

He laughed. “No. I am a good rider. At least I was in my youth. San Marco has a fast horse. I will tell them my mother is ill.”

“Friar Bartolomo . . .” I was overcome. “You would lie to your order for Romeo and me?”

“It is not a lie. My mother has been ill for years.”

Now it was I who laughed. But a moment later I grew serious.

“Why, Father? Why would you do such a thing? And why suggest that I pretend the mortal sin of suicide?”

He looked away; his smile vanished. He fingered the crucifix at his chest, then suddenly let it drop as though it had burned his hand.

“I once knew love,” he whispered. “I was very young and she was . . .” The friar looked away, his sad shaking head the only description of the girl he could manage. “In our flights of passion, lost as we were in the pages of
Vita Nuova
, I had forgotten I was a second son.” His fist covered his mouth. “Destined for the priesthood. There was nothing could be done. I entered the church. She was betrothed to another. The prior of my order saw how deeply torn I was in my faith. So he had me marry them.”

“Oh!” My heart quaked at the still evident pain this man suffered.

“So will you do it?” he asked.

I stared at this wild cleric. Thought for a final second about the prospect of life under Allessandra Strozzi’s roof and of Jacopo’s bony fingers on my bare flesh.

“Yes.”

“Good.” Bartolomo pressed the vial into my palm. “It is bitter. They say it tastes like cold death. But you must drink it all. Then lie yourself down as if you’d gone to bed. And you mustn’t be afraid. Because Romeo and I will be there when you wake.
Before
you wake. Then he can spirit you away and take you far from here. The rest is your doing.”

“You will tell this to Lucrezia Tornabuoni?”

He nodded.

“Wait! Perhaps she should not be told. She will disapprove. She’ll fear for my life. Try to stop me.”

“Would you rather she believed you dead?”

I thought hard about this. “For now perhaps. It is better that way. She will be grieved, but later, once Romeo and I are settled, I will write to her. Through you. Will you give her my letter?”

“Of course.”

Suddenly the warm flush of this mad plan chilled me. “How do you know . . . how do I know for certain of Romeo’s accord in this?”

“You cannot know,” he said simply. “Very little is certain in this life, my lady. What I am sure of is your husband’s love for you. What you must find before you drink from that bottle is whether
you
trust in that love.” He pressed my hand. “Now I must go. I will await news of your death.” He went to the door and grinned back at me with his crooked white teeth. Then he was gone.

News of my death.
The words were strange and awful. And yet, I thought with a smile, they were the most hopeful I had ever heard.

I would die in order to live.

I laid down the quill beside the page of new verse and sat still as stone, all but my eyes. They swiveled right and I saw the moonlit garden, to the left set upon a wooden form my wedding dress in all its obscene splendor.

Freedom,
I thought,
or tyranny.
The choice was mine. Spoken thusly, it was an easy election. But choosing Romeo assumed that Romeo would come.

Friar Bartolomo, without hesitation or doubt, believed he would. Even Lucrezia presumed that her letter would find a husband ready and willing to steal back into the city of his banishment, with certain death should he be caught, to carry me away from my father’s house.

At first I had believed in his resolve. I had leapt at Lucrezia’s plan to call him back from Verona. Why had Jacopo’s sabotaging of our scheme also wounded my faith in Romeo’s steadfastness? How could a simple evil act have had such insidious power over me?

Romeo had done nothing, not a single thing, to incite my mistrust of him or his love for me. Yet I had begun to think him weak for failing to come of his own volition, or to find a way for his letter to reach my hand.

But it was I who was weak. I who was faithless. I who, having been thrown down once, refused to stand up again and face my tormentor.

Shame rose in me, flushing my face red.

Jacopo was clever and was now provoked to action by the one emotion whose strength rivaled that of love—jealousy. Should I, my resolve unnaturally weakened, give license to this despot and allow his unholy sentiment to prevail? Allow to unravel the whole precious cloth of Romeo and Juliet that the God of Love had so flawlessly woven?

All at once the courage that Friar Bartolomo reminded me I owned burst through my skin and straightened my spine. My will hardened, and joy came flooding in great waves onto the shores of my battered soul.

I went to the small wooden casket under my bed and unlocked it, pulling forth my many poems. I unfurled the sketch Romeo had given me of the God of Love. I shuddered when I saw the woman draped in red, lying in his arms, for to my eyes she looked limp and dead. I flattened the paper and, gathering it and all my writings into a single sheaf, tied it with a string. I pulled over my night-robe and gown a warm cloak and, grabbing my dagger, opened the balcony door.

I was glad for the moonlight so bright it cast shadows, for without it I might not have found the edge of the floor stone I sought near the balcony’s center. It was one I had many times felt as a small ledge under my feet, an imperfection I avoided so not to trip.

Now I knelt at it, feeling its height with my fingers. With the blade I found its weakness and began frantic digging into the mortar. It was loosening! A moment later, using all my strength, I raised it up and slid it aside. Rain in the cracks had happily softened the thick mortar beneath it, and this I carved away with the flat of the dagger, making a space the size of my sheaf.

I put it in its hiding place, replaced the stone, and bore down on it with all my weight till it was even with ones near it. With fingers gone numb I pressed the dried mortar into the spaces to hide my handiwork, then scooped up piles of remaining stone dust, heaving it over the balcony wall.

I swept the place with my hand and walked on it till it was flat and I was satisfied that it looked no different than it had before. I stood and looked up at the sky. Somewhere there was Taurus, proud bull. Romeo’s stars. Romeo’s House. The stars that had promised me to him. But this night clouds hid all sight of the stars. The constellation eluded me ... and there was no time to spare.

Inside again, I was perspiring beneath my cloak and threw it off. I removed my night-robe as well and stood at my family’s jewel box, pulling it open to reveal the gems that glittered in the torchlight.

The green glass vial was in my hand. I did not hesitate. I did not question. I drank the liquid down, hardly tasting its bitterness, for its purpose was so sweet. I pushed aside the heavy necklaces that lined the box’s bottom and found a place to set the trinket. With our family’s jewels piled atop the thing, it disappeared, nothing more than a costly emerald’s fragment to an unsuspecting eye.

I was still strong and steady on my feet as I walked to my bed. I kept as a constant vision the face of my Romeo, bright eyes, sharp-angled jaw, that mane of hair as it had been the night we’d met. But as I lay me down and drew the covers over my chest, I felt the first cold fingers of the potion in my veins. Weariness came upon me quite suddenly, and I thought,
This is not a fearful thing. It is just a long slumber at whose end I shall see the face of my beloved smiling down at me.
Then utter darkness fell, like an enveloping velvet curtain over my head. No light. No sound. No feeling.

And all at once I was gone from this world to another.

T
ime dragged, and no word back from my love was nearly my undoing. Certainly she had received my letters. Once a trusted courier, Massimo would prove one again. And the friar, my friend and adviser in love, he who had risked all manner of punishment for overseeing our clandestine marriage, would he not be sponsoring the correspondence between Juliet and myself?

Had Marco’s killing been, despite my innocence in an act of murder, too much for her to bear? Had my weakness and tears at our last meeting been repulsive to her? Had her apparent bliss in our marriage bed been no more than a kind deception
?

No! I refused to believe such perversions of our faith in each other. If I had had no word from Juliet, then some evil force was at work to prevent it.

Still I was uneasy. How could my scheme unfold without her complicity, her consent? Without knowledge of my time of arrival to rescue her, she would be forced into preparedness every moment of every day and night.

I revised my arrangements without any word from Juliet. She would know, of course, that darkness was our ally. I must assume, too, that she had procured her male disguise and would bravely come as she had on our wedding night, down the ladder from her balcony. All that was needed now was our conveyance.

My uncles Vittorio and Vincenzo must be convinced to assist me. I would ask them for the use of a wine cart and a team of two horses. When I parked beneath the Capelletti’s garden wall, Juliet would climb down and hide beneath some rugs, and I would drive the cart at full speed from the city.

But I had to move quickly. I had to move now. For the present she and I could live happily in this house, away from prying eyes. Our bed was almost finished. Then perhaps I could come to some arrangement with my father—to receive some part of my inheritance before his death. Juliet and I would need little for a happy life. Perhaps we would, as she’d always dreamed, travel to the far corners of the world.

Thus fortified with my plan, such as it was, I left the crone’s house as night descended and made my way to my uncles’ villa. As always I extinguished my torch within a hundred yards of the place, this night struggling with only the dim quarter moon for illumination.

I became alarmed at my first sight of the villa from a distance, for no lights shone at the walled gates’ lanterns, nor in the second-story windows that could be seen above the wall. I felt my stomach churn, but told myself the servants must be lazy or forgetful, though I did move stealthily as I approached, straining to hear the familiar sounds that would tell me all was well within.

But all I heard was the wind singing eerily in the pines and a single hound baying mournfully. When I found the gate ajar and no lights shining from the ground-floor windows, my worst fears gripped me with terrible force.

Then I stumbled, having tripped over something soft yet solid lying in the drive. It was my uncle Vittorio’s favorite dog, stone dead. Even in the dim moonlight I could see its belly had been slit and its bowels sprawling obscenely on the ground.

Suddenly I was paralyzed, not with fear, but with rage, for I knew with no small doubt what horrors lay within my uncles’ house, and the cause of it.

With all the fortitude I owned, I willed my legs to move and made for the front door. This, too, was half-open and upon entering, I found myself standing in a pool of gore, though no body from which it had flowed. I lit a lamp and saw at once that whoever had been savaged at the door had dragged himself away into the house. Farther on I found Francesco, who lay in a heap near the stairs, too much blood covering his torso to see where he had been stabbed.