by David Hewson
‘No lid, Friar,’ she pleaded but they fetched it anyway and stood there, grim faces all, ready to put the final piece in place. ‘No nails. For pity’s sake… no nails.’
In a loud, firm voice Laurence said, ‘No nails.’
As if he’d heard, and she’d no idea whether that was dream or real. Or somewhere in between.
Still they lifted her, then gently let her down. The light vanished. She heard them grunt, felt the coffin move upon their shoulders and, through the dark and the timber, she heard the low, sad sound of her mother weeping.
Yet, she thought. I live. For now.
* * *
Balthazar had been in the service of the Montagues since his father placed him there when he was ten years old. He’d grown up with Romeo, as much a friend as a servant in all those years. On occasion they’d fish together on the Adige. Sometimes ride in the low mountains. There was nothing the baker’s boy wouldn’t do for Andrea Montague’s son. That morning he’d left his house at eight, crossed through the sentry post on the Roman bridge, got a nod from the guards who knew him, then stationed himself close to the Capulet estate to wait for orders.
The daughter would send a message, Romeo said. How or when Balthazar had no idea. So he got himself an apple and mooched around the street near the palazzo gate. He’d taken care to remove the blue feather from his cap and silently prayed that the Capulet thug who’d bitten his thumb at him in the Piazza Erbe the previous Monday wouldn’t show his face. At least Tybalt, the vilest one of all, was dead.
The busy traffic – butchers, flower sellers, carts with fruit and vegetables – going to and from the palace seemed to suggest something was afoot. Daring to get nearer he approached a fishmonger who was pushing a cart bearing baskets full of wriggling Garda eels.
‘What is all this business, sir? Such commotion I have never seen in my friend Capulets’ place.’
The man scowled at him. He was a surly sort, stinking of fish and with an undercurrent of hard spirit on his breath. ‘A scruff like you knows this lot of toffs?’
‘I’ve friends in service. Looks like there might be a wedding on the way. That right?’
The fishmonger laughed unpleasantly. ‘Or maybe a funeral. Not much fond of either. Both end up with misery.’
‘But–’
‘Look, lad. I came here like everyone else from the market. We heard there was a sudden marriage coming up. Next thing I see is a Franciscan friar and a bunch of nuns marching in there looking like the world was coming to an end. ’
‘What happened?’
‘Oh lord. Do I know? Do I care. You want some eels?’
‘Sorry…’
‘This bloody town.’
With that he pushed his cart down the lane. Balthazar went back to lurking in the shadows. More people turned up, some nuns with them. It felt odd loitering round the Capulet place. Guilty almost, as if he were a nosy spectator who’d come across an accident. Or a hanging.
The tower bell was striking noon when finally something happened. A cortege came out, a coffin on it. No doubting that. He knew, too, there was only one question to ask.
Balthazar set up a jog trying to keep up with the men pushing the bier along the cobbled street, down to the cemetery death house he reckoned. The obvious destination.
‘Where does this sad party go, friend? Who do they lament?’ he asked one of the people at the back.
A face turned and stared at him malevolently. He caught his breath. It was the fat lad from the previous Monday, the one who’d been making noises about sticking someone. There was no scarlet feather in his black cap. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.
‘Who wants to know?’
The boy was either too stupid to recognise him, or too distraught.
‘A friend of mine who was dear to poor Tybalt. It seems the Capulets get naught but misery. Unless I’m mistaken. I’d rather grim news came straight from my lips than find its way through rank gossip off the street.’
‘Juliet,’ Gregory muttered. ‘That lovely daughter of theirs. Pretty as a flower and sweet with every one of us. Lord knows I cannot believe that precious young thing is gone. Truly. The mistress weeps, the master rages and swears all around the palazzo. Our house feels cursed. Perhaps it is.’
They were getting close to the Porta Leoni. The coffin was bouncing up and down on the wooden bier, rocked by the rough cobbles. He squinted at Balthazar. A hint of recognition in his piggy eyes.
‘This friend of yours?’
‘Someone who loved her,’ Balthazar whispered. ‘Or so I think.’
He doffed his cap and walked briskly back to the Ponte Pietra, passed the familiar guards there with a nod. His father’s horse was behind the bakery, well-watered and ready for the road. Then he saddled up and set off for the lane by the river that led south, outside the city walls, straight to the road to Mantua.
From the old amphitheatre he heard a familiar angry, puzzled voice behind him. Balthazar didn’t need to look. It was his father calling for the horse.
‘I need him, Dad. Busy,’ he murmured. ‘Sorry.’
Mantua was a place he’d never been. Three hours ride there he guessed. Three hours back. Grim news to take his master.
‘Giddy up,’ he said, and lightly spurred his steed.
* * *
The physician came to the inn sometime in the early afternoon, his white, beaked mask slung over his shoulder as if it wasn’t needed. Friar John spoke to him through a gap he’d made in the planking. It wasn’t a long conversation. The man was from Vicenza and had been making the rounds of all the properties the soldiers had closed and daubed with scarlet crosses. There was a plague here of a kind, he said. An infectious one, too. But the diseases it carried were panic and ignorance, not pestilence and death.
‘Chickenpox,’ John said through the gap in the window. There were soldiers behind the physician, no masks now, shuffling on their big feet looking embarrassed. ‘That’s all this lady’s got. I swear it. I gave her a lotion our apothecary makes. The spots are going down. She has no fever. This isn’t what they think.’
‘Wrong,’ the doctor said. ‘It’s the same malady we’ve had everywhere. A plague of panic and ignorance. Men! Get these boards down. Let these people out.’
A few minutes later the young friar stood outside, the girl with him. Her man had turned up looking a little shame-faced. She tried to hug him, not that he was ready for that.
‘I want them red crosses off my place,’ he said. ‘We won’t be finding business with them on. I got good food coming soon too. Local speciality.’ He licked his lips and rubbed his hands. ‘Mule stew. Don’t suppose you lads want some? I can give you a special price.’
John looked around and asked, ‘Where did you find the mule?’
‘Some fool left the poor old thing tethered up here. Lame as anything. I took her out back and did her a favour. Give me my butcher’s knives and a couple of hours in the kitchen–’
‘Mine. She was mine.’
The girl glared at him. ‘If the thing was knackered and tied up in our yard he wasn’t to know, was he?’
‘So how am I to get home?’
‘You’re a Franciscan, aren’t you?’ the man replied. ‘Do like your saint did. Pick up your things and get walking.’
The soldiers laughed at that. John started down the lane. After five minutes he’d reached the road, fifteen miles back to Verona one way, ten the other to Mantua.
A liar and a deceiver to the left. A murderer to the right.
‘The liar it must be then,’ John muttered, and set off down the dry and dusty track.
* * *
The Marangona bell struck one. Then two and three and four. In the palazzo of the Capulets the hours scarcely mattered. Grief and anger reigned, as wide as the oceans, as fierce and relentless as the burning July sun.
By mid-afternoon Luca Capulet was dead drunk, roaring around the palace teary-eyed bellowing at cowering servants, full of fury and despair in eq
ual measure. His wife had retired to Juliet’s quarters, to sit in a chair by the bed where they’d found her, listening to the muted sounds of men clearing away the tables in the garden, removing the half-cooked hogs, the gazebos and rose garlands. The musicians had gone, after much wrangling over their money. Not a single serious note they’d played. Still no birds sang. Bianca Capulet wondered if they ever would again.
Count Paris had returned to his mansion near the Duomo feeling robbed of the most cherished transaction he’d sought in years. There, with a more modest reserve of chilled wine than Capulet, he brooded in the dark of his study.
When a kitchen servant came through with food he demanded, ‘News, boy. Have they buried her?’
‘Tomorrow, Count,’ the cowering youth replied. ‘So the friars say. In the cemetery where her cousin got laid to rest yesterday.’
Paris grunted at that. ‘And now?’
‘Now she’s in the Franciscan’s charnel house, where the dead wait on their funeral.’
‘You’re from this damned city. May one visit?’
It was all the boy could do not to shiver. ‘I doubt that. Not unless you’re family.’
‘I would have been,’ Paris growled.
‘Who’d want to look at a sorry sight like that? Besides it’s nearly night and they lock the place up then. Robbers. Don’t want robbers round there, do you?’
‘Not stealing what is mine by right. Fetch me those two Roman cut-throats I used when we had that little argument in Milan. You know the ones?’
The servant gulped. ‘That pair live down in Sottoriva now. Alongside all those dubious ladies. What should I tell them?’
‘That tonight they’ll do my bidding. Be off then!’
At that roared order the lad vanished. Paris supped, lost in festering dark thoughts. The ring was still in his pocket. He took it out and ran his fingers over the soft, worn gold. It felt much as it had that night he’d worked it from his mother’s cold hand. Once again he read the faint lettering inscribed inside. A promised bond. A vow to be honoured.
‘What god ordained,’ he murmured, ‘I will obtain.’ He drank. ‘I will…’
* * *
Across the city, in the subterranean crypt of the cemetery chapel, on a chill marble slab where centuries of corpses had awaited interment, Juliet lay in her shroud sleeping, a hair’s breadth from death itself, dreaming of a creaking rose window, a distant lover and the moment she’d wake and see his face.
Not that misery belonged to the privileged alone. In her tiny room along the corridor from Juliet’s quarters Donata Perotti, who no longer thought of herself as Nurse, nor would answer to that name again, wept and wept and wept. Cursing her own stupidity. Her rash willingness to go along with the secret marriage to Romeo. And now her cowardice to speak of it to anyone, even Friar Laurence, the man who surely bore as much blame as she.
Yet they weren’t alone. The Montague boy had sought her out. Juliet, sweet Juliet, had beckoned him with arms so welcoming only a fool would refuse entry into that sweet harbour from the bitter world beyond.
Seated on her narrow bed, staring at the little room where she’d lived for nearly seventeen years, the woman muttered, ‘I should have said no to her more often. It’s no good giving them a taste of freedom when all that happens is someone steals it from you later. Like they always do.’
She screwed up her eyes, trying to stop the tears. This dark day had changed them all. There’d be no going back. They didn’t deserve it.
With a shrug she found a sackcloth bag and stuffed it with sufficient belongings as she thought she might be able to carry. Money, clothes, the jewels from Juliet’s room and a single bracelet that had become too small for the girl a while back. That she’d taken secretly. Not stolen, just… kept. It was a memento, a marker of the way the girl was changing, from sparky, argumentative child, to bright and questioning young woman. Her own daughter, had she lived, would never have gone that way. She wouldn’t have been so clever for one thing. And Donata Perotti wouldn’t have allowed it. Her kind had to know their place.
Towards the end of the afternoon she tried to creak open the door as quietly as possible. Without success. Bianca Capulet heard and came out from Juliet’s room, pink-eyed, outraged when she saw the bag.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To find somewhere that needs me, Mistress.’ She could see beyond into the room, the bed, the painting on the wall, that bright-eyed girl, face not quite right, hair a different colour, the charcoal drawing held up with such pride. ‘You’ve no use for a stupid old woman any more.’
Juliet’s mother walked out into the corridor and came to face her. ‘How do you know? If you don’t ask?’
‘I don’t need to ask. I let her down. You, too.’
‘In what way?’
Such a big question. One that seemed pointless. It annoyed her.
‘By not tempering my love for her with firm counsel. Allowing her charm to rule my head. As she did with everyone.’
There was a fixed, hard look in Bianca Capulet’s eyes. ‘Firm counsel was for her parents. Not her servant.’
‘Aye. I believe that’s true. Not that she got it there either.’
It came so quickly the blow seemed to surprise them both. Her mistress’s thin arm came out, a bony hand slapped Donata Perotti’s flabby cheek, hard enough to leave a red weal rising on the skin.
Silence then. After a while she said, ‘I deserved that, Madam. Probably deserved a lot more over the years. I… I…’ The tears were coming again and they were nothing to do with being struck. ‘I so wish I could have talked to her. Just once last night and…’
The same skinny arms came and embraced her then. The two women clutched at one other in desperate grief.
‘I am so sorry,’ her mother whispered. ‘I never meant… It was the fury and the anguish… nothing else. Lord knows that I should take it out on a gentle soul like you.’
She released the large woman from her grip and peered into her bleary eyes.
‘You were a better mother to her than I ever was–’
‘Do not say that, Lady! She loved you. And her dad in her own way, like he loved her. She adored this place. For the life of me I do not understand how she could leave it in… in such a fashion.’
The tears came again, for both of them.
‘Oh, loyal Nurse,’ Bianca Capulet sighed. ‘Don’t blame yourself. Or anyone. There’s a gulf between us, young and old. As if we were… different creatures. They’ve no notion of what it’s like to be us, weighed down by duty, worn away by worldliness and age. And we’ve forgotten how it was to be them. Fired with life and spirit and hope, never knowing that one day all those bright flames will be extinguished. Too soon. Too soon.’
This moment of intimacy felt awkward on both parts. Neither met the other’s eye.
‘We could find you work in the kitchen, Donata.’
She laughed at hearing her name. ‘Thank you. But I burn things. And them I miss always come out underdone.’
‘Somewhere in this house… there’s a place for you. I’ll make one.’
Donata picked up her simple bag. ‘A place in someone’s heart is all you need. I’m happy if I have that.’
‘Stay till the gates are open. The plague…’
‘There was no plague. Didn’t you hear? It’s all about the streets. Someone went down with a rash out near Vicenza. The rest of them panicked the way men do. Nothing more than chickenpox. A little illness for kiddies. That’s all. The restrictions are gone till next time. I can be in Garda by nightfall if I find a farmer going back home who’ll take me.’
‘No plague?’
‘Only the usual ones. Life and death.’
They walked down the long winding stairs to the hall. This was the last time she would descend those familiar steps into this grand interior of stucco and gilt, velvet and glass. Another world beckoned. Peschiera. A decent village cottage of her own. Pike from the lake, cheap coarse wine from the
hills. Family again. They had to be there somewhere.
Bianca Capulet insisted on giving her money for the journey. She took it. With the gifts of recent days, all carefully secreted inside her sackcloth bag, she’d be a woman of substance once she got home.
Would that help?
Probably not. The shining, living image she had of Juliet in her head would not leave easily. More likely the memories would follow her all her days. That sweet, infuriating child who seemed so full of life, and left it with one final mystery Donata Perotti felt would always be beyond her comprehension.
The bell was tolling five when she walked out of the palazzo courtyard. No looking back. That way lay misery.
* * *
It was late afternoon by the time Balthazar reached Mantua. The address Romeo had given him was for the apothecary’s shop in the rotonda. Nico was there, berating his African neighbour for the dusty objects he’d placed on show to attract trade. A stuffed alligator, skins of lizards and fish, cakes of rose petals, dried bunches of wild garlic.
‘If you want a quack, there’s your man,’ the apothecary announced as Balthazar climbed the stairs.
The African threw up his arms in mock outrage. ‘I never had any complaints, Nico.’
‘Probably because they’re all dead. An alligator? I ask you…’
‘I’m from Verona. I seek Romeo.’
Nico took him into the shadows of the shop. The smell of exotic spices was so overwhelming the young servant felt dizzy. ‘I’m the brother of Friar Laurence. Did he send you?’
‘No,’ Balthazar said with care. ‘Though I heard the friar this morning. In circumstances…’
‘What circumstances?’
‘I must see Romeo. This is for his ears first. If afterwards…’
‘Very well,’ the apothecary declared. ‘Then I’ll shutter my shop once more. God, my brother will ruin me before this escapade is done, I swear it…’
Five minutes later the little store was locked up. The African smiled and saluted as a grumpy Nico stormed off down the rotonda stairs, Balthazar at his heels.
Outside, Mantua was busy. An odd and fanciful town it seemed to the young man from Verona. Almost like a painting, or a backdrop from one of the plays travelling troops performed in the Piazza Erbe from time to time.
