Beatrice and Benedick (18 page)

‘She has a rival now,' said Benedick, and moved his mouth up to meet mine.

I was on the dunes, my back pressed into the giving sand, soft and hard at once, and moulding to my body. He was upon me, his lips so soft, his body hard, two states at once like the sand. Our garments, the white and blue, were twined and combined. My hands moved into his warm hair, and learned the shape of the back of his head. My eyes closed, my head twisted back and my throat arched with pleasure and fear. Then his lips moved downwards and my hands clawed and clasped the sand in my ecstasy. I felt the powder harden in my fist; then begin to slip, inevitably, out of my grasp, until I was holding nothing.

My eyes flew open. Benedick was above me, and the stars were gone. All was blackness; he had put out the light.

Put out the light.

I sat bolt upright, shoving him away with a strength I didn't know I had, my heart thudding.

Benedick lay back on the sand, laughing, uncertain. ‘Beatrice? My love? What's amiss?'

How could I tell him? How could I explain to Benedick that I was not thinking of my chastity, or my reputation, or my maidenhead? I was not some Pope-holy poppet who would go so far then refuse to go farther. All I could think was that all such acts of love had the same sequel. The caress that turned to the death grip, love corroding to jealousy. I had seen the darkness in Benedick's eyes before, at the wedding at Syracuse, when he had spoken to me of the poet, and again tonight, when he thought I had run to Michelangelo Crollalanza, despite the fact that my heart had not even the smallest corner of space for him. Or if it did, only that region which held friendship, certainly not love; for all of my heart was occupied by the forces of one Knight of St James.

I looked down at Benedick beside me, breathing heavily, hoisting himself to his elbow. His hair tumbled, his clothes disarranged, he smiled tenderly but uncertainly. He had never looked more handsome, and I would have given anything to sink back down with him, and let the universe keep turning as it would. Then he reached up his hand to my throat, and I realised that my own fingers were there, squeezing, shielding. Gently he removed them, touching tenderly where I swallowed and breathed, as gently as he had kissed me there moments ago. Now his touch terrified me.

I flinched. ‘I am gone, though I am here,' I croaked, hoarse as if I had been throttled in truth.

He laughed and put his arms about me again, to pull me down – I felt his strength, and saw again that darkness in his eyes. ‘There is no love in you,' I hissed, ‘nay, I pray you, let me
go
.' The last word was a shout.

I stumbled away through the sand, tripping and stumbling, shaking, turning and walking backward, fearful he would follow, half-hoping that he would.

‘Tarry, sweet Beatrice!' He was half laughing, half concerned, as if I played some lover's game. But the game was my life.

I tried to regain composure. I brushed the sand from my gown and straightened myself. ‘In faith, I will go.' And I ran towards the house on the dunes, thinking all the time that, just as I had watched the lovers in the sand a fortnight since, we too had been observed by spying eyes.

Beatrice:
I walked towards the light of the little window as if it were the light of the Bethlehem star.

It spelled sanctuary for me, for I knew that Benedick would look for me, and if he caught me I would acquiesce. I was not proof against him, not proof against my own feelings. I wanted nothing more than to run back into his arms, for I had not felt as safe nor as wanted since I was a child. I had felt, for one instant, the centre of the universe, the Earth in the orrery, that all the planets and heavenly bodies revolved around me. Around us. But so had the Moor's wife felt when the sun of the Moor's affection had shone upon her; and now she was cold in the ground.

I was at the window of the study now. I don't know whether I expected to see Giovanni Florio Crollalanza, working at his pamphlets, or even the poet himself, taking lease of his father's desk. But the person I saw was someone who did not, as I had once been told, look right in a room. It was Guglielma Crollalanza.

She was sitting at the desk, amid her husband's papers, with her chin on one hand and her black ringlets obscuring her face. She held the other hand outstretched to touch the orrery on the desk. The brass rings revolved at her touch and the little planets spun about the Earth at the centre. I noticed that despite the golden colour of her skin, her hand was dark skinned on the back and her palm and fingers were white
below. I realised then with a jolt that there was one more Moor still left on the island.

She looked as if she had troubles of her own, but still I tapped on the window and saw her turn rapidly, as if expecting someone else. But she forced a smile, took her hand away from the planets and beckoned me in. I looked for a doorway and entered through the little loggia. I walked through the dark little house to the lit room. The lamp on the desk was the only light in the place.

Guglielma did not look as me as I entered the
studiolo.
Her white teeth chewed her mulberry lower lip. ‘Giovanni has not returned from the Vara,' she said. ‘Michelangelo has gone to seek him.'

I recognised a larger problem than my own and began to withdraw. ‘I will go.'

‘No,' she said. ‘Stay. I need company.' Now she looked at me, with searching eyes. ‘Were you looking for my son?'

I took the sonnet that only yesterday her son had helped me to write from my bodice. I had planned to put it in Benedick's hand tonight. Instead I put it in hers. ‘He helped me write this,' I said.

‘May I?'

I nodded, colouring a little, for the sentiment was raw and the construction faulty. As she unfolded the paper the
settebello
card, which had been nestling in my bodice with the sonnet, fell on to the leather topper of the desk, and I thought she had not noted it.

There was no sound but her breathing as she read. Her full lips moved a little as if she spoke the sonnet aloud. ‘It is very beautiful.' She looked directly at me with her eyes black as sloes, and I blushed deeper. ‘But it is not meant for Michelangelo, I think?'

‘He is not the subject,' I said hurriedly, ‘but he gave me the ink and the paper, and as the components are his, I am come to render them to him again.'

‘But it is not the ink and the paper that have value. The value lies in the words, and they are yours.'

I strove to be fair. ‘Michelangelo helped me.'

‘No; I know his style. This is from
your
heart. This is your definition of love. The subject did not want these words?'

‘I did not offer them to him.'

She set down the paper and saw the playing card. ‘The
settebello
,' she said, as if she greeted an old friend. She turned it over in her pied fingers, and the seven coins on the face seemed to glitter. ‘Was this for him too?'

I was shamefaced. ‘Yes.'

‘So he is the winner. And you were to be the prize.'

‘Yes.'

‘But not now?'

I paced the room, as I sought the words. ‘I do not
want
it. I do not
want
to love him. I do not wish to be enslaved to this feeling.' I spun to face her. ‘Is it possible to fall out of love?'

‘Not for me. But in Sicily, it is, yes.'

Her answer seemed oddly worded.

She stood. ‘Watch the window,' she charged me, ‘for I am about to do something that should not be seen, and tell something that should not be overheard.'

She moved over to the device at the corner, the one I had seen from the window – was it only the previous day? – with the great iron rollers and wooden presses. She went to the wooden frame and began to pull some small iron blocks from it, disarranging them, changing one for the other, pulling some out of order entirely and throwing them in a receptacle on the floor. As I squinted in the lamplight I realised what she was doing – the thing was a printing press, one of the new-fangled machines that had put the scribes out of business, and by disarranging the blocks she was removing the evidence of the pamphlet her husband had printed.
What had it said?
I wondered. Had those
dangerous little metal blocks combined to extol his love for John Calvin? Or his hatred of the Spaniards?

I would never know, for Guglielma worked fast, and talked of other things. I watched her quick, black hands and thought: ‘She has had to do this before.' I was so mesmerised that for a moment I did not heed what she was saying. Then her musical accent broke through my thoughts. ‘The ladies of the island perform a certain ritual tomorrow, the day after Ascension Day. It is a … dance, called the Tarantella.' She rolled the word around her tongue. ‘It is named for a spider.' She held out her black hands and wiggled the fingers. ‘I have danced it every year I have lived here, and my grandmothers did it too, and their grandmothers before them; all the Archirafi women. You can do it for fun, or in earnest.' She wiped the little blocks with a coarse cloth, removing the ink and the evidence together. ‘I called the Tarantella a dance. At the least, that is what it is. At the most, it is an incantation in movement. A cure.'

‘A cure for what?'

‘For anything you want rid of. Including a man.'

‘And does it work?'

She stopped, and looked up at me, the whites of her eyes very white, the pupils as black as her fingers. ‘Oh yes.' Her deliberate destruction complete, she wiped her hands on her skirt. ‘We women spend the day together, reach the hill at sundown, and dance on the side of the mountain.'

It seemed like a harmless way to pass a day. ‘I will come,' I decided.

Guglielma said nothing at first. She began to shuffle the pamphlets together into a bundle. She took another lamp from the sconce on the wall and lit it with a taper from the first. She ushered me outside; the night was still warm, the stars back in their proper places.

‘I can help you,' she whispered, and the dune grasses whispered back. ‘But you have to be
sure
you want this. It is no little
thing. We will be calling on an ancient primal power, from the crater of the volcano and the belly of the very island itself.' She kissed my cheek quickly and I noticed that her skin had a granular quality. ‘If you are sure, come to the Via Catania outside your uncle's gate at dawn tomorrow. Tell your aunt you are pursuing a private penance to the Virgin – such things are common at the Ascension. And it is not the blackest lie – for Mary was the epitome of womanhood and it is with womanhood that we deal tomorrow.'

I was slightly shocked, for I had never heard the blessed Virgin named so, by her given name, as if she were a tiring maid or a laundress.

‘If your aunt were not wed to Leonato Leonatus,' Guglielma went on, ‘I would tell her the truth myself.' She shot me a look. ‘If she were not married to Leonato Leonatus she would be coming herself, as she did once when she was first wed.'

My eyes widened. ‘My aunt? My aunt danced the Tarantella?' I wondered, briefly, what demons my aunt had wanted rid of all those years ago. But Guglielma was looking about her as if pursued, and seemed in a hurry. She did not answer but dismissed me. ‘And now, you must go to your business before your aunt worries, and I to mine.'

I looked at the sheaf of pamphlets in her hand. And it occurred to me that loving Giovanni Florio Crollalanza might, in its own way, be as lethal as loving the Moor. And yet, Michelangelo was easily twenty, so the unlikely pair had been devoted for a score of years at least. I looked at the stars and the sea; the sky was dark but Guglielma was darker, now a silhouette against the firmament. I could not see her eyes, so I had the courage to ask, ‘Do you never wish yourself out of love?'

‘No, I do not wish myself out of love. But it would be better if I did – for Giovanni is hurrying to his grave, and will take us all with him.' I could not see her expression; she was just a voice, a voice that meant every word. ‘But I would rather die
with him than live with any other. That is
my
definition of love.' Then she set off down the hill, leaving me behind and taking the lamp, the taper and the sheaf of pamphlets to the shore. I turned and trudged to the sea road, suddenly deathly tired.

Looking back some minutes later from the stony path, I could see the light from the Moor's house had split into two; there was the square of light in the window of the study and there was a fire, on the beach, dancing merrily like a noon-day Devil.

Benedick:
I sought out Don Pedro the very next morning.

After Lady Beatrice had run from me, I had walked back to Leonato's house along the shoreline, one foot on the sand and the other in the night-black water, and by the time I had gained the palazzo I had made up my mind.

I knew what was the matter with Beatrice. It was clear as day. I knew her own heart as well as my own – I had heard it beat, pressed to mine, as her lips flowered under my kiss. There was no doubt that she wanted me – we were meant to be together, we were two sides of the same heart.

She was not at fault – she showed the right measure of maiden modesty to run from me. I was to blame, and had let my passions rule my honour. It would have been wrong indeed if I had, upon the dunes, made defeat of her virginity. She was not to be tumbled like a Trastavere tart or a Venetian vixen. She was a princess of Villafranca and Leonato's niece and however lax he might be in allowing her freedoms, I could not, should not, dishonour her. I would make her my wife. Then, once we were betrothed, she could embrace me as a husband and extenuate the forehand sin.

I would resign my commission and offer her marriage. I had no wish, now, to be a knight errant – I had been playing a part these past several days. I had no desire to draw my sword and jump from ship to ship, with no knowledge of whether I would ever return. I could not agree with that ancient combatant Don
Miguel that the soldier shows to better advantage dead in battle than alive in flight; I wanted my life, and I wanted to live it with Beatrice. We would go north, away from the fierce gaze of the southern sun, and with her fortune and my … wits, we would shift very well. I might even find another profession, when I was done with soldiery.