Juliet

by Anne Fortier

  “But there’s nothing written in the margin—” I started flipping through the notebook, and now, for the first time, we both noticed all the numbers that were jotted down—seemingly randomly—on the edges of the pages. “Oh my—you’re right! Why didn’t we see this before?”

  “’Cause we weren’t looking,” said Janice, taking the book from me. “If these numbers do not refer to pages and lines, you can call me Ishmael.”

  “But the pages and lines of what?” I asked.

  The truth hit us both at the same time. If the notebook was her volume, then the paperback edition of Romeo and Juliet—the only other book in the box—would have to be our volume. And the page and line numbers would have to refer to select passages in Shakespeare’s play. How very appropriate.

  We both scrambled to get to the box first. But neither of us found what we were looking for. Only then did it occur to us what had gone missing since we left the room that afternoon. The mangy old paperback was no longer there.

  JANICE HAD ALWAYS been a sound sleeper. It used to annoy me to no end that she could sleep through her alarm without even reaching out for the snooze button. After all, our rooms were right across the corridor from each other, and we always slept with our doors ajar. In her desperation, Aunt Rose went through every alarm clock in town in search of something that was monstrous enough to get my sister out of bed and off to school. She never succeeded. While I had a pink little Sleeping Beauty alarm on my bedstand until I left for college, Janice ended up with some industrial contraption—which Umberto had personally modified with a set of pliers at the kitchen counter—that sounded like an evacuation alarm from a nuclear power plant. And even so, the only one it woke up—usually with a yelp of terror—was me.

  On the morning after our dinner with Maestro Lippi, I was amazed to see Janice lying awake, looking at the first golden blades of dawn as they came sliding in through the shutters.

  “Bad dreams?” I asked, thinking of the nameless ghosts that had chased me around my dream castle—which looked more and more like the Siena Cathedral—all night.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she replied, turning to face me. “I’m going to drive down to Mom’s house today.”

  “How? Are you renting a car?”

  “I’m gonna get the bike back.” She wiggled her eyebrows, but her heart was not in it. “Peppo’s nephew runs the car pound. Wanna come?” But I could see that she already knew I wouldn’t.

  When Alessandro came to pick me up at one o’clock, I was sitting on the front steps of Hotel Chiusarelli with a weekend bag at my feet, flirting with the sun through the branches of the magnolia tree. As soon as I saw his car pull up, my heart started racing; maybe because he was Romeo, maybe because he had broken into my room once or twice, or maybe simply because—as Janice would have it—I needed to get my head checked. It was tempting to blame it all on the water in Fontebranda, but then, you could argue that my madness, my pazzia, had started long, long before that. Six hundred years at least.

  “What happened to your knees?” he asked, coming up the walkway and stopping right in front of me, looking anything but medieval in jeans and a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Even Umberto would have had to agree that Alessandro looked remarkably trustworthy despite his casual attire, but then, Umberto was—at best—a rapscallion, so why should I still live under his morality code?

  The thought of Umberto sent a little pang through my heart; why was it that the people I cared about—perhaps with the exception of Aunt Rose, who had been practically non-dimensional—always had a shadow-side?

  Shaking my gloomy thoughts, I pulled at my skirt to cover the evidence of my marine crawl through the Bottini the day before. “I tripped over reality.”

  Alessandro looked at me quizzically, but said nothing. Leaning forward, he picked up my bag, and now, for the first time, did I notice the Marescotti eagle on his forearm. To think that it had been right there all the time, literally staring me in the face when I drank from his hands at Fontebranda … but then, the world was full of birds, and I was certainly no connoisseur.

  IT WAS ODD TO be back in his car, this time in the passenger seat. So much had happened since my arrival in Siena with Eva Maria—some of it charming, some anything but—thanks in part to him. As we drove out of town, one topic, and one topic only, was scalding my tongue, but I could not bring myself to raise it. Nor could I think of much else to talk about that would not, inevitably, bring us right back to the mother of all questions: Why had he not told me he was Romeo?

  In all fairness, I had not told him everything either. In fact, I had told him next to nothing about my—admittedly pathetic—investigations into the golden statue, and absolutely nothing about Umberto and Janice. But at least I had told him who I was from the beginning, and it had been his own decision not to believe me. Of course … I had only told him I was Giulietta Tolomei to prevent him from finding out that I was Julie Jacobs, so it probably didn’t really count for much in the big blame game.

  “You’re very quiet today,” said Alessandro, glancing at me as he drove. “I have a feeling it’s my fault.”

  “You never got around to telling me about Charlemagne,” I countered, putting a lid on my conscience for now.

  He laughed. “Is that it? Don’t worry, by the time we get to Val d’Orcia, you’ll know more about me and my family than you could ever want. But first, tell me what you already know, so I don’t repeat it.”

  “You mean”—I tried to read his profile, but couldn’t—“what do I know about the Salimbenis?”

  As always when I mentioned the Salimbenis, he smiled wryly. Now, of course, I knew why. “No. Tell me about your own family, the Tolomeis. Tell me everything you know about what happened in 1340.”

  And so I did. Over the next little while I told him the story I had pieced together from Friar Lorenzo’s confession, Giulietta’s letters to Giannozza, and Maestro Ambrogio’s journal, and he did not interrupt me once. When I had come to the end of the drama at Rocca di Tentennano, I wondered briefly if I should go on to mention the Italian story about the possessed Monna Mina and Friar Lorenzo’s curse, but decided not to. It was too strange, too depressing, and besides, I didn’t want to get into the issue of the statue with the gemstone eyes again, after having flatly denied knowing anything about it that day at the police station, when he had first asked me.

  “And so they died,” I concluded, “at Rocca di Tentennano. Not with a dagger and a vial of poison, but with sleeping potion and a spear in the back. Friar Lorenzo saw it all with his own eyes.”

  “And how much of this,” said Alessandro teasingly, “did you make up?”

  I shrugged. “A bit here and there. Just to fill in the blanks. Thought it might make the story more entertaining. It doesn’t change the essentials, though—” I looked at him only to find him grimacing. “What?”

  “The essentials,” he said, “are not what most people think. In my opinion, your story—and Romeo and Juliet as well—is not about love. It is about politics, and the message is simple: When the old men fight, the young people die.”

  “That,” I chuckled, “is remarkably unromantic of you.”

  Alessandro shrugged. “Shakespeare didn’t see the romance either. Look at how he portrays them. Romeo is a little whiner, and Juliet is the real hero. Think about it. He drinks poison. What kind of man drinks poison? She is the one who stabs herself with his dagger. The manly way.”

  I couldn’t help laughing at him. “Maybe that’s true for Shakespeare’s Romeo. But the real Romeo Marescotti was no whiner. He was tough as nails.” I glanced at him to see his reaction, and caught him smiling. “It is no mystery why Giulietta loved him.”

  “How do you know she did?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I shot back, starting to get a little miffed. “She loved him so much that—when Nino tried to seduce her—she committed suicide to remain faithful to Romeo, even though they had never actually … you know.” I looked at him, upset that he was s
till smiling. “I suppose you think that’s ridiculous?”

  “Absolutely!” said Alessandro, as we surged forward to pass another car. “Think about it. Nino was not so bad—”

  “Nino was outrageous!”

  “Maybe,” he countered, “he was outrageously good in bed. Why not find out? She could always kill herself the morning after.”

  “How can you say that?” I protested, genuinely upset. “I don’t believe you actually mean it! If you were Romeo, you would not want Juliet to … test-drive Paris!”

  He laughed out loud. “Come on! You were the one who told me I was Paris! Rich, handsome, and evil. Of course I want Juliet to test-drive me.” He looked over and grinned, enjoying my scowl. “What kind of Paris would I be if I didn’t?”

  I pulled at my skirt once more. “And when exactly did you plan on that to happen?”

  “How about,” said Alessandro, gearing down, “right now?”

  I had been too absorbed in our conversation to pay attention to the drive, but now I saw that we had long since turned off the highway and were crawling along a deserted gravel road flanked by scruffy cedars. It ended blindly at the foot of a tall hill, but instead of turning around, Alessandro pulled into an empty parking lot and stopped the car.

  “Is this where Eva Maria lives?” I croaked, unable to spot a house anywhere near.

  “No,” he replied, getting out of the car and grabbing a bottle and two glasses from the trunk, “this is Rocca di Tentennano. Or … what’s left of it.”

  …

  WE WALKED ALL THE way up the hill until we were at the very base of the ruined fortress. I knew from Maestro Ambrogio’s description that the building had been colossal in its day; he had called it “a forbidding crag with a giant nest of fearsome predators, those man-eating birds of old.” It was not hard to imagine what it had once looked like, for part of the massive tower was still standing, and even in its decay it seemed to loom over us, reminding us of the power that once had been.

  “Impressive,” I said, touching the wall. The brick felt warm under my hand—much different, I was sure, than it would have felt to Romeo and Friar Lorenzo on that fateful winter evening in 1340. In fact, the contrast between the past and the present was never more striking than here. Back in the Middle Ages, this hilltop had been buzzing with human activity; now it was so quiet you could hear the happy hum of the tiniest insects. Yet around us in the grass lay the odd piece of freshly crumbled brick, as if somehow the ancient building—left for dead many, many years ago—was still quietly heaving, like the chest of a sleeping giant.

  “They used to call it ‘the island,’” explained Alessandro, strolling on. “L’Isola. It is usually windy here, but not today. We are lucky.”

  I followed him along a small, rocky path, and only now did I notice the spectacular view of Val d’Orcia dressed in the bold palette of summer. Bright yellow fields and green vineyards stretched all around us, and here and there was a patch of blue or red, where flowers had taken over a verdant meadow. Tall cypresses lined the roads that snaked through the landscape, and at the end of every road sat a farmhouse. It was the kind of view that made me wish I had not dropped out of art class in eleventh grade, just because Janice had threatened to sign up.

  “No hiding from the Salimbenis,” I observed, holding up a hand against the sun. “They sure knew how to pick their spots.”

  “It has great strategic importance,” nodded Alessandro. “From here, you can rule the world.”

  “Or at least some of it.”

  He shrugged. “The part worth ruling.”

  Walking ahead of me, Alessandro looked surprisingly at home in this semi–state of nature with the glasses and a bottle of Prosecco, apparently in no hurry to pop the cork. When he finally stopped, it was in a little hollow grown over with grass and wild spices, and as he turned to face me—smiling with boyish pride—I felt my throat tighten.

  “Let me guess,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself although there was barely a breeze, “this is where you bring all your dates? Mind you, it didn’t work too well for Nino.”

  He actually looked hurt. “No! I haven’t—my uncle took me up here when I was a boy.” He made a sweeping gesture at the shrubs and scattered boulders. “We had a sword fight right here … me and my cousin, Malèna. She—” Perhaps realizing that his big secret might begin to unravel from the wrong end if he went on, he stopped abruptly and said instead, “Ever since, I always wanted to come back.”

  “Took you a long time,” I pointed out, only too aware that it was my nerves speaking, not me, and that I was doing neither of us a favor by being so skittish. “But … I’m not complaining. It’s beautiful here. A perfect place for a celebration.” When he still didn’t speak, I pulled off my shoes and walked forward a few steps, barefoot. “So, what are we celebrating?”

  Frowning, Alessandro turned to look at the view, and I could see him wrestling with the words he knew he had to say. When he finally turned to face me, all the playful mischief I had come to know so well had disappeared from his face and, instead, he looked at me with tortured apprehension. “I thought,” he said slowly, “it was time to celebrate a new beginning.”

  “A new beginning for who?”

  Now at last, he put the bottle and glasses down in the tall grass and walked over to where I stood. “Giulietta,” he said, his voice low, “I didn’t take you up here to play Nino. Or Paris. I took you up here because this is where it ended.” He reached out and touched my face with reverence, like an archaeologist who finally finds that precious artifact he has spent his whole life digging for. “And I thought it would be a good place to start over.” Not quite able to interpret my expression, he added, anxiously, “I am sorry I didn’t tell you the truth before. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. You kept asking about Romeo and what he was really like. I was hoping that”—he smiled wistfully—“you would recognize me.”

  Although I already knew what he was trying to tell me, his solemnity and the tension of the moment struck me unexpectedly, right in the heart, and I could not have been more shocked had I arrived at Rocca di Tentennano—and heard his confession—knowing absolutely nothing.

  “Giulietta—” He tried to catch my eye, but I didn’t let him. I had been desperate for this conversation ever since discovering who he really was, and now that it was finally happening, I wanted him to say the words over and over. But at the same time, I had been running an emotional gauntlet for the last couple of days, and although, obviously, he couldn’t know the details, I needed him to feel my pain.

  “You lied to me.”

  Instead of backing up, he came closer. “I never lied to you about Romeo. I told you he was not the man you thought.”

  “And you told me to stay away from him,” I went on. “You said I would be better off with Paris.”

  He smiled at my accusatory frown. “You were the one who told me I was Paris—”

  “And you let me believe it!”

  “Yes, I did.” He touched my chin gently, as if wondering why I would not allow myself to smile. “Because it was what you wanted me to be. You wanted me to be the enemy. That was the only way you could relate to me.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but realized he was right.

  “All this time,” Alessandro went on, aware that he was winning me over, “I was waiting for my moment. And I thought—after yesterday, at Fontebranda, I thought you would be happy.” His thumb paused at the corner of my mouth. “I thought you … liked me.”

  In the silence that followed, his eyes confirmed everything he had said and begged me to reply. But rather than speaking right away I reached up to put a hand on his chest, and when I felt his warm heartbeat against my palm, an irrational, ecstatic joy bubbled up inside me from a place I had never known was there, to find its way to the surface at last. “I do.”

  How long our kiss lasted, I will never know. It was one of those moments that no scientist can ever reduce to numbers, try as she might. Bu
t when the world eventually came whirling back, from somewhere pleasantly far away, everything was brighter, more worthwhile, than ever before. It was as if the entire cosmos had undergone some exorbitant renovation since the last time I looked … or maybe I had just never looked properly before.

  “I am so glad you are Romeo,” I whispered, my forehead against his, “but even if you were not, I would still—”

  “You would still what?”

  I looked down in embarrassment. “I would still be happy.”

  He chuckled, knowing full well that I had been about to say something far more revealing. “Come …” He pulled me down in the grass beside him. “You make me forget my promise. You are very good at that!”

  I looked at him as he sat there, so determined to collect his thoughts. “What promise?”

  “To tell you about my family,” he replied, helplessly. “I want you to know everything—”

  “Oh, but I don’t want to know everything,” I cut him off, straddling his lap. “Not right now.”

  “Wait!” He tried in vain to stop my misbehaving hands. “First, I have to tell you about …”

  “Shh!” I put my fingers over his mouth. “First, you want to kiss me again.”

  “… Charlemagne—”

  “… can wait.” I removed my fingers and touched my lips to his in a lingering kiss that left no room for contradictions. “Wouldn’t you say?”

  He looked at me with the expression of a lone defender facing a barbarian invasion. “But I want you to know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry,” I whispered, “I think I know what I’m getting myself into—”

  After struggling for three noble seconds, his resolve finally caved in, and he pulled me as close as Italian fashion permitted. “Are you sure?” The next thing I knew I was lying on my back in a bed of wild thyme, giggling with surprise. “Well, Giulietta …” Alessandro looked at me sternly, “I hope you’re not expecting a rhyming couplet.”