Beatrice and Benedick (27 page)

I gulped the cool air and tipped back my head to the jewelled sky, counting the useless stars that a king had rejected. I wandered the pleached alleys, shaking the hours of talk from my head and the abacus of numbers from my ears. I took long breaths as though I had spent the day underwater. I headed determinedly away from the palace, of a mind to get myself lost. I walked well beyond the manicured gardens and sought out unlit alleys, plunged into thickets of blackthorn, and unworked meadows.

But soon the melancholy magic of my own company began to work upon me. I waxed dolorous and became weighed down with pessimistic thoughts. My growing impression that none of the Spanish crows – save one – knew what they were talking about hardened about me like the amber of my afternoon metaphor. Philip was walking into the dark as much as I.

I was truly lost when I all but tripped over a figure who seemed to be crouching on the grass, his forehead pressed into the ground. ‘Hoy!' I exclaimed in shocked surprise, and dragged the fellow to his feet. It was little wonder I had not noted him,
for not only was he clad in dark robes that fell to his feet, but only his teeth and the balls of his eyes could be seen. His hair clung in crisp black curls to his head. He was a Moor.

I remembered the king's exhortation to secrecy, and as I held the struggling boy I was certain I had caught a spy. ‘What are you doing here?'

‘I work for the king.'

‘Very likely. What are you about? Tell me quick and plain, before I take you to the guards.' I spoke in Italian, he in Castilian, but he seemed to understand me well enough.

He shrugged. ‘Take me if you like, señor, for the guards know me well.'

I was still not convinced. ‘What is your business?' I felt foolish asking the question, for he could not be more than fifteen years old. ‘I told you, señor, I work for the king.'

‘I don't believe you. You are a Moor. The king would never employ your kind.'

‘He does when we know things that his own people do not.'

This seemed to me an extremely suspicious statement. I began to walk the boy towards the house, with the happy thought that the capture of a Moorish spy would be an auspicious beginning to my service for the king. The boy came along quite willingly, and my resolve faltered a little – could he be telling the truth? ‘What things do you know?'

‘How to find water,' the boy replied calmly.

‘Water?'

‘For the gardens. His Majesty has plans to build a watercourse, and a lake, and more fountains. But we have to find sources.'

I turned him about by the shoulders. He had no divining rods, no instruments.

‘What is your name?'

‘Faruq Sikkandar.'

‘Well, Faruq Sikkandar, supposing you speak the truth. How do you find the water?'

He shrugged his narrow shoulders. ‘I just know where it is. I hear it.'

‘You hear the torrents and streams below ground?'

‘No. Not that. I sense where it is. I
feel
it. It is a gift. My father Faruq had it too.'

I looked about the vast and ghostly gardens, as silver-green as an olive leaf in the moonlight. There was another Moor here? My skin began to prickle. ‘Where is your father?'

‘He's gone.' The shoulders drooped.

‘Dead?' I asked gently.

‘As good as. He was taken for the armada.'

This, I knew, was indeed a death sentence – as a sea-slave this boy's father had less chance of returning from the enterprise than any of us. It was kinder to speak of the water. ‘How long will it take you to find the sources that the king needs?'

He slid his eyes to me in a sidewards glance. ‘As long as possible without trying his patience. For when my work is done …'

I understood. He had to be of use to the king for as long as possible; for after that, he would be sent to the ships too. I no longer thought him a spy. We walked on in a strangely companionable silence. At the postern a guard shouted from his post. ‘Still here, Faruq?'

‘The water speaks louder at night, señor.'

I had the assurance I needed. Feeling foolish, I let go of the boy's shoulder and patted his robe straight where my grip had crushed it. But I felt curiously reluctant to take my leave of him. ‘When I met you, you were praying, weren't you?'

I could not see his expression, but darkness is the parent of truth. ‘Yes.'

We stopped walking and faced each other. We had come to the parting of our ways. ‘
Buona fortuna
,' I said.

‘
As-salam alaykum
,' he replied. And his teeth flashed briefly in the moonlight as he turned away.

I watched the water-diviner go. We were both in the employ of the capricious king, and our lives were as straw to him. I turned back to the palace, guided by the light of the stars. Perhaps everything would be well; perhaps Medina Sidonia, the one Spaniard who seemed to speak more sense than folly, had something of this Moorish boy's gift – perhaps he could divine a way forward without knowing it for sure. And yet, foreboding sat upon my chest like a cold stone.

My only comfort, if comfort it was, was that the Lady Beatrice was safe in the peaceful backwater that was Sicily.

Beatrice:
I woke in the middle of the night without knowing why.

I turned over in my bed, groaning gently. This was the first night since Benedick had ridden away that I had fallen asleep as soon as my head had sunk into the pillow. For four weeks now I'd twisted and tossed, and not fallen to sleep until grey dawn and cockcrow. In the daytime I had stuck to my resolution, to live and speak freely, and to scorn the company of men. But every night my treacherous mind had recalled every word and gesture of my month's acquaintance with Benedick. As if at a play I had watched, again and again in my mind's eye, every jocular exchange, every time we'd laughed, our declaration of love on the beach. I could still feel the imprint of his kiss on my lips, the weight of him on my body, pressing me into the dunes. But next on the playbill, I had to watch another drama – a tragic sequel to the comedy. His final, bitter repudiation of me. The sight of him riding down the coast road. In my dreams he turned his head. In reality, I knew he had not.

I had no one to confide in. My pride and my new resolution of independence would not allow me to admit how much I suffered; and Hero, my one remaining companion, was preoccupied with her own heartbreak at the loss of Claudio. There was another I might have confided in, but Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza had never returned. Whatever Benedick had maintained he must have fled the island with his father.

So I suffered alone, and tonight I had thought the spell broken. I had thought that at last I could close my eyes without seeing Benedick's face burned into the back of my lids, like the imprimatur of a letterpress. So it was particularly galling to be woken.

I hunched beneath the coverlet, inviting sleep again. But a sudden, unidentifiable sound made me sit bolt upright, with the absolute certainty that there was someone in the courtyard.

I padded to the window, my feet chilling on the floor slabs, taking the coverlet with me like a cloak. I peered from the window into the courtyard. There, in the middle of the mosaic, was a figure holding a flaming torch. At first I found his form familiar. My foolish heart thumped, telling me it was Benedick, returned to claim me. But the next heartbeat told me it was not.

The torch threw a warm circle around its bearer, animating the mosaics in the ring favoured by the light. The sight would have been beautiful, but fire held no comfort for me now. Flames did not speak of hearth and home any more, but of the fire that had taken Guglielma Crollalanza. I could not see the torch-bearer's face, but he stood very still and he seemed to be looking directly up at me. Suddenly I was soaked in a cold sweat. He did not move, and nor did I; only his flame wavered, a horrid reminder of the torches that once lit the faggots of faith.

As I watched the torch described an arc in the night, and touched another brand. A second flame flared to life, illuminating a second bearer, and that torch touched a third. Soon a circle of men stood in the courtyard, and all the dolphins and mermaids and sea monsters beneath their feet were lit blue, as if the brandsmen walked on water, with the great head of Medusa in the centre of all. In fact, Medusa's face was the only one in the company I could see, and her eyes, made up of tiny jetty tiles, seemed to hold a warning.

Without moving my feet, nor taking my eyes from the men below, I bent my knees, reached down and shook Hero awake
where she lay in her bed below the window. I did not want to alarm her, but I knew we must go. As she sat, grumbling, my aunt burst into the room.

‘Come!' she urged in a fierce whisper. ‘There are intruders in the court. Come at once!'

She gathered Hero up, blankets and all, as if she was still a child. My heart racing, I followed. I knew we could not quit the house, for the torchmen held the courtyard, from which radiated all the doors and gates to the outside world. ‘The rose tower,' commanded my aunt, and I followed her to the little winding stair of the pink crenellated tower.

I remembered as I climbed my father's words about the Della Scala family name.
Stairs are power. Stairs are wealth; they elevate us from the poor. Stairs keep us separate.
Now I thought:
Stairs are safety.
Those lords of San Gimignano who built a hundred spindly towers had somewhere to hide from marauders. Our own castle in Villafranca had the redstone stair for the same reason.
I am Beatrice of the Stairs,
I thought.
If I can climb to the rose tower, I will be safe.

With extraordinary strength my aunt carried Hero like a babe up the hundred stairs. The girl's dark silken hair was so long it swept the stone steps before me. We climbed high to the little bell chamber, which was bare except for an animal skin on the floorboards and a bronze bell hanging above. There was a single arched window open to the air and the wind whistled through the opening, turning the tower to a stone flute. The eerie sound did nothing to calm our spirits.

My aunt answered Hero's staccato whispers, and one question could be heard above the others:
What do they want
? ‘I do not know. But they will be gone soon, sweeting,' soothed my aunt; crooning, again, as if to a child. I leaned from the window. The wind snatched and lifted my hair, and I craned my neck to look down. The ring of torch-bearers was still there, unmoving, and the light of the firebrands made crazy spindly shadows on
the sundial below the tower's window. It was all times, and no time.

The house below me was dark, but watchful. There was a charged silence and I was convinced that every person in the place was now awake, and watching the torch-bearers from every dark casement. But no one called from the windows; no one challenged the intruders. I wondered, at every moment, why my uncle did not come out to challenge the brigands; but no arrows were let fly, no daggers dropped from the quarrels. The torchmen, strangely, seemed to hold absolute power. I wondered why, for the intruders were lobsters in a pot; my uncle's men-at-arms could fall upon them here, massacre them in the courtyard.

I saw, then, why. The palace gates were thrown open, and beyond the walls there were more of them. A broader band of torch-bearers passed a flame from one to the other. I leaned farther out to see; they were in the pleasure gardens, the fruit walks, by the fountains, in a wider circle. The circle in the courtyard was just the axis – we were enclosed by a wagon-wheel of fire.

I was suddenly terribly sure that we had made a mistake in climbing the tower.
We
were the lobsters in the pot. We were all to be immolated in this house; we all faced a death like Guglielma's. I swallowed, and thought for a terrible moment that I must choose between being cooked like meat or breaking every bone in my body as I jumped from this tower. But as I watched, the circle in the courtyard miraculously broke.

Silently, the torch-bearers began to process from the courtyard. ‘They are going,' I said, incredulous. My aunt and Hero joined me at the tiny embrasure, and we watched, silent, as the light-bearers walked through the gatehouse. Outside, the other torchmen converged from all about the house, and joined their brothers. The torches were now one conflagration.
Now
, I thought,
now they are without the walls they will cast their torches
into the courtyard, and the whole house will go up like firewood.
Unprompted, a thought burned in my brain; Benedick's image flickered there.
I will never see you again.

But the flames outside moved again and a wavering golden dragon made its way down the hill on the Via Catania in the direction of Messina.

It seemed we waited an age; I stared at the diminishing light, disbelieving, my eyes watering until the light was a wavering pinprick, was gone. Clutching each other, the three of us stumbled down the stairs and met my uncle dashing up. ‘Are you well, my lady, my daughter, Beatrice?'

Innogen cupped his cheek and kissed him, the most intimacy I had ever seen them share. ‘Quite well, my lord. And the household?' she asked in an undertone.

‘No one injured, it seems,'

‘Why did they come,
papino
?' said Hero, taking refuge in childish words.

‘Just a mummer's play,
cara mia
,' said her father, but Leonato's voice shook.

We followed him to the courtyard, could hear the household calling to each other.
Lorenzo? Here, master! Margherita? Here, Mother!
Like password and counterword, they all assured themselves of their loved ones and underlings.

I was steeped in warm relief until Hero wandered to the centre of the mosaic where the Medusa's head was rendered. At first I thought a body was sprawled across the gorgon, some servant taking his ease in relief. But as I came closer I saw the dreadful truth – three human legs, neatly severed at the hip, were arranged around the mosaic head in a perfect recreation of the Sicilian flag.