Leon Garfield's Shakespeare Stories

by Leon Garfield

  “Now, sister, what’s the comfort?” asked the young man eagerly, after embracing her, as best he could, through the bars. Sadly, she shook her head . . .

  The Duke leaned forward. Though, as he had assured Friar Peter, his bosom was not to be pierced by the dribbling dart of love, he, like all who saw her, was struck by Isabella’s beauty . . .

  “Is there no remedy?” asked Claudio, and managed a pitiful smile.

  Isabella hesitated. She turned away. Plainly she was in great distress. “Yes, brother, you may live,” she confessed most miserably; and revealed the price that was to be paid to Lord Angelo to save his life. “If I would yield to him my virginity thou might’st be freed!”

  “O heavens, it cannot be!” cried Claudio in outrage and in horror.

  “Yes, he would give’t thee. This night’s the time that I should do what I abhor to name, or else thou diest tomorrow.”

  “Thou shalt not do’t!” declared the young man valiantly, and to Isabella’s vast relief.

  “O, were it but my life,” she sighed, tenderly stroking his pale moist brow, “I’d throw it down for your deliverance as frankly as a pin!”

  “Thanks, dear Isabel,” said he, striving to sound grateful; then, a demon of hope rising within him, he murmured, “Sure it is no sin, or of the deadly seven it is the least . . . ?”

  She drew back. She stared at him. “What says my brother?”

  “Death is a fearful thing.”

  “And shamed life a hateful!”

  “Ay, but to die and go we know not where, to lie in cold obstruction and to rot!” cried Claudio. With the faint prospect of clinging onto life, however dishonourably, all the friar’s philosophy was blown to the winds. In frantic desperation, Claudio poured out his naked human terror of dying. “Sweet sister, let me live!” he begged; and falling to his knees, clutched her holy gown. “What sin you do to save a brother’s life, nature dispenses with the deed so far that it becomes a virtue!”

  The very argument of Angelo! With a cry of loathing she snatched her gown from her brother’s grasp and turned on him like a blazing Fury! “O dishonest wretch! Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice? Take my defiance, die, perish! I’ll pray a thousand prayers for thy death, no word to save thee!”

  “Nay hear me, Isabel!”

  “Thy sin’s not accidental, but a trade! ’Tis best that thou diest quickly!”

  “O hear me, Isabella!”

  But she had gone, leaving her brother sunk in misery and remorse.

  The watchers came out of their concealment. The Duke was filled with anger at Angelo’s monstrous betrayal of trust. Leaving the provost to comfort the prisoner, he hastened after Isabella. “Vouchsafe a word, young sister,” he called to the hurrying, black-robed figure ahead, “but one word!”

  She turned; and seeing that it was a holy father who had addressed her, she paused. “What is your will?” she asked, as the hooded friar approached.

  He beckoned her aside. “I have no superfluous leisure,” she protested. She longed to return to the holy quiet of the convent, and shut herself away for ever from the hateful dangers of the world.

  “The assault that Angelo hath made to you, fortune hath conveyed to my understanding,” confided the friar. At once, Isabella felt a great relief that her terrible situation was known. She listened eagerly, and with mounting excitement, as the holy father unfolded a strange and wonderful plan that would bring the corrupt deputy to justice.

  There was a young woman, by name of Mariana, he told her, who lived in a moated grange not far from the city. Once, she was to have been married to Angelo, but unluckily her dowry was lost at sea, so Angelo had turned his back upon her—

  “Can this be so? Did Angelo so leave her?”

  “Left her in her tears,” said the holy father; and went on to tell how the lady, still loving the cold Angelo, was sighing away her life in self-imposed seclusion. It was her love, made frantic by Angelo’s denial, that was now to resolve everything.

  “Go you to Angelo,” the friar instructed Isabella, “agree with his demands, only refer yourself to this advantage: first, that your stay with him may not be long; that the place may have all shadow and silence in it . . .” Then he revealed that it would not be Isabella, but Mariana, silent and cloaked in darkness, who would go to Angelo’s bed! “And here, by this,” concluded the friar, “is your brother saved, your honour untainted, the poor Mariana advantaged and the corrupt deputy scaled! What think you of it?”

  Isabella’s eyes shone with wonderment and gratitude. The mysterious friar who had appeared to her out of the darkness of the prison, seemed like the intervention of a kindly Providence. With all her heart, she thanked him; and hastened away to Angelo, to do the friar’s bidding.

  For some moments, the Duke gazed after her, his admiration divided between her passionate purity, and the grace and lightness of her step. Then he, too, departed, to seek out Mariana in her moated grange, and prepare her for the part she was to play.

  The deepest time of the night, moonless, starless . . . Within its encircling wall of brick, crouched Angelo’s garden-house, black, silent, waiting . . . A faint noise broke the heavy quiet: a key turning in a lock. A door opened in the wall. A vague shape slipped within, drifted uncertainly to and fro, as if driven by conflicting winds, then approached the blackness ahead. With a quick sigh, it was swallowed up. There was no outcry. Silence and contentment. Angelo had been deceived.

  In the prison, preparations were afoot for the execution of Claudio. The block was ready, the axe was sharpened, and the provost, seated at his table with the lantern light streaming over him, awaited the striking of the terrible hour with a heavy heart.

  A shadow fell across the papers before him. He looked up. The ghostly father had returned. “Have you no countermand for Claudio yet,” he inquired, “but he must die tomorrow?”

  “None, sir, none,” sighed the provost. “It is a bitter deputy.”

  “As near the dawning, provost, as it is, you shall hear more ere morning,” promised the Duke, confident of the success of his plan.

  Scarcely had he spoken than a messenger arrived. He came with a letter from Lord Angelo. Eagerly the Duke waited while the provost, having dismissed the messenger, read the letter. “Now, sir, what news?” he asked impatiently.

  The provost stared at him; then he read from the letter. “Whatsoever you may hear to the contrary, let Claudio be executed by four of the clock, and in the afternoon, Barnardine. For my better satisfaction, let me have Claudio’s head sent me by five . . .”

  Sharply the Duke drew in his breath. This he had not counted upon, that Angelo’s villainy could be so complete!

  “What say you to this, sir?” muttered the provost, blinking unhappily at the flame within his lantern that, with the approach of its death in the coming dawn, had begun to burn as pale as the poor prisoner in his cell.

  “What is that Barnardine who is to be executed in th’afternoon?” asked the Duke thoughtfully. “Hath he borne himself penitently in prison?”

  The provost shook his head. Barnardine had been a prisoner for nine long cursing drunken years . . . “A man,” he said, as if to remind the friar of his wise words to Claudio, “that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep.”

  “He wants advice,” said the Duke abruptly; and then confided his plan. Barnardine was to be executed directly and his head sent to Angelo in place of Claudio’s—

  “Angelo hath seen them both,” objected the provost, “and will discover the favour.”

  “O, death’s a great disguiser,” the Duke assured him; but the provost remained unconvinced; so the Duke set his mind at rest. He explained he was carrying letters telling of the Duke’s immediate return. In proof of this, he showed a letter in the Duke’s own hand, and sealed with the Duke’s own seal.

  The provost examined the seal and writing, and nodded. “Call your executioner, and off with Barnardine’s head!” commanded the Duke briskly; and t
hen, recollecting that he was a holy father in the business of divine forgiveness, added that he would prepare Barnardine to meet with God.

  Barnardine, summoned to his instant death, came forth from his cell, cursing and clanking his chains. More beast than man, with matted beard and half his bed of filthy straw still clinging to his ragged garments, he swore at the executioner for waking him. Then he saw the hooded friar approaching, like the grim figure of Death itself. He rubbed his sleep-encrusted eyes, hiccuped and spat.

  “I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you,” said the holy one, nimbly avoiding the sudden shower.

  “Friar, not I,” grunted the drink-sodden wretch, swaying on his feet and putting out a dazed hand for support from an imaginary wall. “I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me. I will not consent to die this day, that’s certain.”

  “O, sir, you must!” insisted the Duke.

  “I swear I will not die today for any man’s persuasion.”

  “But hear you—”

  “Not a word,” said Barnardine, with a look of sovereign contempt. “If you have anything to say to me, come to my ward, for thence will not I today.” With that, he turned on his heel and trudged, clanking, back to the comforts of his cell.

  “Unfit to live or die!” cried the Duke, enraged by the brutish unwillingness of Barnardine to oblige him by dying. “After him, fellows!” he commanded the executioner and his assistant. “Bring him to the block!”

  He stood, breathing deeply, when the provost appeared and gently inquired, “Now, sir, how do you find the prisoner?”

  “A creature unprepared, unmeet for death,” confessed the Duke, already repenting of his unpriestly anger, “and to transport him, in the mind he is, were damnable.”

  The provost smiled; and then revealed that Providence had come to the aid of the friar’s plot, and had supplied another death. That very morning, one Ragozine, a notorious pirate, had died of a strange fever. “A man of Claudio’s years, his beard and head just off his colour . . .”

  “O, ’tis an accident that heaven provides!” cried the Duke, overjoyed by this stroke of good fortune. “Quick, dispatch, and send the head to Angelo!”

  The juggling with heads done with, away went the provost, thankfully, to cut off the dead man’s, leaving the Duke alone to plot, plan and contrive the public downfall of Angelo—

  “Peace, hoa, be here!” A woman’s voice broke in upon his thoughts. It was Isabella. “Hath yet the deputy sent my brother’s pardon?” she asked.

  The Duke turned away. “He hath released him, Isabel, from the world,” he told her quietly: “his head is off, and sent to Angelo.”

  He heard her cry out in disbelief, and then give way to wretchedness and despair. “O, I will to him and pluck out his eyes!” she wept, frantic for revenge. “Most damned Angelo!”

  The Duke shook his head. “You shall not be admitted to his sight,” he said; and comforted her as much as he dared by promising that the Duke was coming home directly, and that justice would be done. “Nay, dry your eyes,” he begged her; and, putting his arm about her trembling shoulders, softly instructed her in what she was to do . . . Still weeping for her murdered brother, she nodded; but before she could escape from the hated prison, another visitor appeared.

  It was Lucio. His face was long, his step was solemn: he had been told of Claudio’s death. “O pretty Isabella,” he cried, hastening forward to comfort her, “I am pale at mine heart to see thine eyes so red: thou must be patient. By my troth, Isabel, I loved thy brother,” he called out as she departed; then confided to the friar, “If the old fantastical Duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived.”

  “Sir,” said the Duke indignantly, “the Duke is marvellous little beholding to your reports.”

  “Friar, thou knowest not the Duke so well as I do,” said Lucio, his natural high spirits overcoming his grief. “Ere he would have hanged a man for the getting a hundred bastards, he would have paid for the nursing a thousand. He had some feeling of the sport, he knew the service—”

  “You do him wrong, surely!” said the Duke, his anger increasing.

  “Sir, I know him and I love him. I was once before him for getting a wench with child,” boasted Lucio happily; and went on to relate how he had perjured himself to escape being married to “the rotten medlar”.

  Vainly the Duke tried to rid himself of the impudent young man, but Lucio, who delighted in polishing his wit by blackening names, like shoes, continued to slander the Duke, and would not be shaken off. “Nay, friar,” he said as they left the prison, “I am a kind of burr, I shall stick.”

  They walked together to the lane’s end, where they parted, Lucio with a careless smile, the Duke with a grim one.

  Letters had been received informing the council of Vienna that the Duke was returning. They were commanded to meet him at the city gates and there deliver up the authority that they had held in his absence. Nor was this all. Lord Angelo, looking up from the paper before him, frowned. “And why,” he asked old Lord Escalus, “should we proclaim it in an hour before his entering, that if any crave redress of injustice, they should exhibit their petitions in the street?” Uneasily, he shook his head; but nonetheless bade old Escalus carry out the Duke’s command.

  Once alone, Angelo sank back in his chair. He clasped his burning head in his icy hands. He had satisfied his lust, but far from being content, he was filled with horror and remorse. At four o’clock that morning, his order had been carried out. Claudio had been executed and his head had been brought to him, wrapped in a bloody cloth. He had waved it away, not daring to look the murdered man in the face.

  Yet the execution had been necessary. If Claudio had been allowed to live, he would have demanded revenge for his dishonoured sister. “Would yet he had lived!” whispered Angelo hopelessly. “Alack, when once our grace we have forgot, nothing goes right: we would, and we would not.”

  In a single night, he had fallen from the highest virtue into the blackest pit of sin.

  The morning sun stared down upon the city of Vienna as if in bright astonishment to find it still standing after so long a night. Foremost among the great crowd that had assembled at the city gates, stood the two judges, Lord Angelo and Lord Escalus, with a light breeze ruffling their hair.

  Suddenly, trumpets announced the coming of the Duke. At once, there was a murmuring and a stirring and a jostling as the crowd pressed forward for a better view. Then, with a thunder of hoofs, the Duke’s golden coach appeared, like a fiery chariot come down from heaven in a cloud of dust.

  The coach halted, the door opened, and the tall, dignified figure of the Duke, in his long furred travelling coat and deep velvet hat, stepped out into the sun. The people cheered, and the two judges moved forward to greet their royal master.

  The sun was warm and Angelo was smiling; but it was with a tremendous effort. Indeed, everything seemed an effort to him, even breathing. Only yesterday, when he’d walked, the old gentleman at his side had had to hobble to keep up with him; now he could scarcely keep pace with Escalus: his feet were like lead.

  The Duke was gracious. He held out his hands in greeting to his judges, and thanked them warmly for having upheld his laws in his absence; and when Angelo offered up his chain of office, the Duke waved it aside, and invited his judges to walk with him on either side as he entered through the gates.

  They had not gone above a dozen paces, when there was a disturbance in the crowd. The Duke halted, gazed curiously in the direction of the disturbance. Angelo longed to hurry him on; but he was powerless and could only stand in inward terror as two figures stumbled out of the crowd and into the Duke’s path. One was old Friar Peter; the other was Isabella! What he had dreaded had come to pass.

  “Justice, O royal Duke!” she cried, kneeling before him. “Justice, justice, justice!”

  Angelo swayed and would surely have fallen, had not the Duke taken him by the arm and urged him forward. “H
ere is Lord Angelo shall give you justice,” he said.

  She stared at him, her eyes blazing with hatred. Then she turned to the Duke. “O worthy Duke,” she said, “you bid me seek redemption of the devil!”

  Angelo tried to brush her aside—to silence her—to prepare the Duke—“My lord,” he said rapidly, “her wits I fear me are not firm; she hath been a suitor to me for her brother, cut off by course of justice . . . She will speak most bitterly and strange.”

  “Most strange, but yet most truly will I speak!” She had risen to her feet. She was pointing at Angelo. “That Angelo’s foresworn, is it not strange? That Angelo’s a murderer, is’t not strange? That Angelo is an adulterous thief, an hypocrite, a virgin-violater, is it not strange, and strange?”

  Then out it came! In a terrible voice, she shouted his foul and hateful crime to all the world!

  There was silence. She had finished. She was breathing deeply. He could hear her. The Duke was watching him. Old Escalus was frowning. He felt bitterly cold, as if he had been stripped naked—

  “By heaven, fond wretch, thou know’st not what thou speak’st!”

  It was the Duke! He had not believed her! He was angry! Angelo’s eyes began to fill with tears of huge relief. His reputation had saved him, even against the word of a holy sister! ‘Who would believe thee, Isabel?’ he had told her; and it was true!

  “To prison with her!” commanded the Duke, outraged that his deputy should have been so vilely slandered. An officer came forward to arrest her. She bowed her head. “Who knew of your intent and coming hither?” the Duke asked her. She looked up and answered that it had been a certain friar by the name of Lodowick.

  “Blessed be your royal Grace!” Old Friar Peter had come forward. He had something to say. Angelo looked at him uneasily. But all was well. Friar Peter had come forward in support of him.

  “I have heard your royal ear abused,” he said. “First hath this woman most wrongfully accused your substitute, who is as free from touch or soil with her as she from one ungot.”