O, Juliet

by Robin Maxwell

“Welcome back, Massimo.”

  “I’m so glad to see you well again, signorina.”

  “I was never ill. I was sure you knew that.”

  “Right. I’d forgotten.” The young man was nervous, unsmiling.

  “May I have the letter, please?”

  “Letter? I gave . . .” He swallowed hard. “I gave your letter—Signorina Tornabuoni’s letter—to Romeo. In Verona.”

  “Yes, of course you did. And he must have given you one back . . . for me.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Massimo looked like a cornered animal. The skin under his nose had begun to perspire.

  “Romeo read my letter and did not reply?”

  The butcher’s son shrugged and averted his gaze from mine.

  “That is not possible,” I said.

  I turned to see Viola standing in the doorway looking stunned.

  “I tell you there is no letter!” Massimo shouted unexpectedly. He was desperate now. His face crumbled. “There is no letter.” This was said quietly with an air of defeat.

  “Did you even see my husband in Verona?”

  “No.”

  I looked at Viola, whose face was a mask of horror and fury. She went to Massimo and beat both fists on his chest. “What have you done!” she cried. “Where is the letter we put into your keeping?”

  Massimo looked down at his feet. “He paid me triple.”

  “Who?” Viola demanded, and pummeled him again.

  “Jacopo Strozzi,” I answered for him. “Isn’t that right, Massimo?”

  He nodded miserably.

  “No!” Viola moaned, then turned to me. “Oh, my lady, forgive me. Forgive us!”

  I could not speak. Not a single word. Instead I turned, leaving Massimo to his wife’s wrath, and walked like a haunted spirit through my father’s house. I must have climbed the stairs, though I cannot remember the act. Next I knew I was at my balcony rail, staring blindly out at the walled garden.

  Two days were left till the wedding. Romeo was in Verona. Don Cosimo had not yet returned from Rome. I had been a fool, putting my whole trust in Massimo. Perhaps I deserved this fate. A fool’s fate. Bitterness rose in me like a fouled spring, catching in my throat. Choking me.

  I am wholly abandoned, I thought in self-pity, by God in heaven, by the God of Love . . . and Romeo.

  All that was left was for me to face my dismal future.

  Later that day, Jacopo Strozzi came. Mama herself brought me down the stairs, where he waited with Papa, the marriage contract in hand. Silently I signed it, feeling the sin in my heart.

  I was a bigamist.

  By Jacopo’s request my parents happily removed themselves, arm in arm, leaving me alone with my new husband. I turned to face him and managed somehow to hold his eye. He did not smile evilly as I thought he might. Indeed, his eyes were filled with loathing for me. No one knew of my attempted betrayal, or his triumph over me. No one except, perhaps, his mother.Yet in his even stare I saw humiliation.

  For the rest of our lives together he must endure the truth of my revulsion for him as a man, and I his crime of murdering my cousin.

  Perhaps, I thought, I should write an additional canto for Dante’s Inferno—“The Tenth Circle of Hell.” Still I could not find the words to speak to Jacopo. My only satisfaction was that this smug villain could think of no words to gloat over me.

  I lifted my shoulders and set my lips. I left him standing there alone, as he would be for all the days of our married life. It was a very small comfort.

  Chapter Thirty

  I told my mother I would not leave my room till my wedding day. I could bear to see no one, not my father, not my mother, not Viola. I suspected that even if Lucrezia had come, I would not have had the stomach for a visit.

  I said I wanted to spend my last days in prayers and quiet contemplation, and no one questioned that.

  On the morning of the last day before the marriage there came a knock at my door. Mama peeked in and with the shy look of a girl said I had a visitor. She moved aside to admit him.

  Friar Bartolomo.

  A moment later we were alone. I should have fallen at his feet then and asked God’s forgiveness, but so many hours of silent solitude and despair left me mute.

  Instead he came to me. He spoke gently.

  “What have you done, my lady? Unless I am misinformed, you have signed a marriage contract with Jacopo Strozzi.”

  “I have no excuses, Father. I have failed to prevent this marriage despite my best-laid plans. My letter to Romeo asking him to come and fetch me away went astray.” I could not hide the bitterness in my voice. “And he—my true husband—has made no attempt to write me. Neither has he come for me of his own volition.” I fixed the friar with my eyes. “Why has he not come?”

  “I cannot say,” he replied slowly. “But listen to me, Juliet. I know in my heart that he wishes to come.”

  “In your heart?”

  “When Romeo came to beg me to marry you two in secret, I met a man so consumed with love, so undone with his passion for you, with joyous hopes for a future family, with”—the friar struggled for the words—“the highest regard for the woman he would make his wife, I was overcome. He spoke, not only of your beauty—though he waxed ecstatic at the perfection of your features and the way every sight of you made him weak—but he made much of your thoughts, which he believed profound.”

  “My thoughts?”

  “Yes. And poetry. He admitted ashamedly, but proudly, that yours was superior to his own. He loved the sound of your voice. Your philosophies, your many virtues that, while strange for a woman, were virtues nonetheless. He felt a better man in your presence.”

  “He told you all this?”

  “Oh, much more. And I can say with all certainty that Romeo was sincere. These were not the ravings of a love-addled boy. He believed he had found in you his personal angel, much as his father had found in his beloved mother.”

  I turned away from the friar, angry tears stinging my eyes. “Why are you telling me this? There’s nothing to be done.” I wheeled on him. “Hear my confession, Father, and then you should go.”

  “Perhaps there is . . . something . . . that can be done.”

  I shook my head, baffled.

  “I need to know if you have faith in Romeo’s love.”

  I stared at him. “I told you, I have some doubt of it.” “And what of that which I have told you today?”

  I pressed my lips tight to keep from sobbing.

  “Do you not believe me?”

  “Actions speak louder than words,” I said, more harshly than I intended.

  Now the friar spoke gently, as he might have done to a small child. “Might you give your true husband benefit of the doubt? Allow that something—I know not what—has prevented him from a heroic rescue thus far?”

  “And what if I did?”

  Bartolomo’s face lit and flared like a torch in a dark chamber. “If you did, I would give you a secret place and time to meet again.”

  I stared at him uncomprehendingly. “Tell me.” My voice was hard and demanding.

  “Lady Juliet . . . this plan is fraught with danger.”

  “What could be more dangerous than married life with Jacopo Strozzi?”

  Friar Bartolomo smiled crookedly. His teeth were white, but crossed one over the other, top and bottom.

  “Romeo told me you were brave. He saw as much in your coming out in the middle of the night with him in a boy’s disguise. And I must agree. No other ladies I know would carry themselves to the top of the cathedral’s dome.”

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  With one final hesitation he drew from the pocket of his robe a small green glass vial—something that would have looked at home on the apothecary shelf of his cell.

  He held it between our faces but did not speak. He closed his eyes, trying to find the words.

  I felt my mouth go dry, for despite his silence I knew—if not th
e name of this potion—its terrible nature.

  “If you drink this tonight, you will not wake up on your wedding morning.”

  “You wish me to take my own life?”

  “No, no, my lady. Quite the contrary. This will allow you to live your life . . . with Romeo. Come, let us sit. My knees are shaking.”

  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.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Romeo, O Romeo, shall I place my faith in you?

  Mover of mountains, Lord of the River’s flow.

  We had lived, one heart between us,

  that gift sweet Heaven bestowed.

  Can I place my faith in you

  when only silence comes from yonder hills?

  No sight, no sound at my door,

  no tap at my windowsill.

  O Romeo, send the smallest sign

  from Verona you’ll come.

  Take me home to your heart,

  make a place on your throne.

  Your stars, shape of the mighty bull,

  elude me tonight, oh why?

  They would give me strength, I know,

  the strength I need to die.

  But here am I, green vial in hand,

  choice of deathlike slumber or life like death

  in a harridan’s house, the

  Beast’s icy fingers on my breast.

  God of Love, hear the prayers

  of a faithless child, faithful wife.

  Overwatch our stumbling trials,

  let us never come to grief.

  I close my eyes and there he stands,

  bright spirit in my room,

  figs in hand, hands of blood.

  Will he come to my tomb?

  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 smal
l 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.