Beatrice and Benedick (35 page)

My father took up his pen again, and passed it to the surgeon, to the hand which had touched me. Baldi laid down more ink in my cause; a confirmation of my virginity. This time my father sealed the words with sand, then blew the sand away. This document had to be dried well; for the covenant of virginity was to be conveyed to Verona, and placed in the hand of my future husband. More ink to bind me. And in a week, I would follow that trail of ink, in person, to be betrothed to Count Paris.

The medical men filed out, until there was just my father and me in the room, and the kites screeching in the rafters. I clambered down, gingerly, from the table, my insides aching. I stood straight, and walked unsteadily to him.

‘What would you have done?'

My father had a trick of staring with his light blue eyes, unblinking, like a gazehound. He looked at me that way now, and stroked his long, noble nose with his forefinger.

‘What would you have done if I had not been found a maid?'

He looked at me, still unblinking. ‘Then I would have been childless.'

I took his meaning – if a woman was not chaste, she might as well be dead.

I was suddenly angry with him, furious. I was no longer afraid of him. He would not strike at my life now I was proved virtuous. But my fury was impotent. I needed a plan, an escape.

‘Tell me something of him. Of Paris.'

My father did not look up from his writing. ‘He is a man of wax.'

‘A man of wax!' I parroted back. ‘I have heard him called so all about this castle from dungeon to turret. I need more.'

Still my father wrote his record of my maidenhead.

I put my hand on the parchment, before his pen, halting the wet black thread. ‘Tell me something else of him. You
owe
me that, after what I've just endured.'

He looked up at me then, speculatively, with his pale eyes. ‘He is very learned. He likes his books.' He lifted my hand from the page, and continued his writing. There was ink on my hand, as there had been the day I'd met Benedick, and he had kissed it away. My father said no more, and did not look up again, but he had said enough. I knew what I must do.

I climbed the winding stair set in the wall of the red-stone tower, the tallest stair in the Veneto. As I climbed farther and farther from the table, and the scene of that dreadful examination, I felt more confident. I looked at the Della Scala red stone, and climbed each stair with my father's words in my ears.
Stairs divide us from the poor, stairs keep us safe,
and then, at the next turn,
He is learned, he loves his books.
I began to see a way forward, to formulate a plan.

In the library I turned around and around, perusing the books that lined the walls all the way up to the conical turret. Despite the castle's old-world aspect, my father had always been beyond reproach in the respect of his book collection. I passed by his histories of the Veneto, then thought better of it, backtracked and picked out his favourite volume. Then I selected Catullus, most famous son of Verona. Then Dante's
Vita Nuova
. Then Bandello's
Stories,
Ovid's
Ars Amoria,
Boccaccio's
Decameron.
Machiavelli's
Il Principe.
These would be a good start.

I opened the first book, the Catullus. Friendly ink. Words that were not about me, or my dowry or my maidenhead.
Pages where my name was not writ once. Ink had imprisoned me, now ink would set me free. I began to read, and on the hard library stool my poor loins still felt tender from the reach of probing fingers.

Benedick:
The sight of the thousand bodies affected the crew profoundly.

Claudio and I attempted to raise morale. The count said mass daily but his congregation dwindled. Some were too weak to attend, some too sick at heart; but some began to question, openly, a God that would so smite their enterprise to leave a thousand Spanish bodies on a beach like seaweed. I would tell jokes that barely raised a smile, as if the men had forgotten how; I carried on, regardless, but my forced humour was an irritant even to myself. Because the length of the voyage had exceeded our early expectations we had been forced to cut rations again, and our daily portions would not, now, keep a ship's rat alive. Men were dying, daily, of starvation.

Now when I sat by the masthead to navigate, a fat gull would settle on the bulwark to peer at me with his hard little agate eyes. I had not even the strength to grab at him, but if I could have, I would have eaten him whole, feathers, beak and all. I knew now that the men on the beach had not drowned, but starved.

I had left something else on that beach with those men. My good humour had gone, my eternal optimism was quashed. The tribulations of the summer, the loss of the one woman ordained by the heavens to stand up with me, seemed as nothing. Now I knew what it was to be a soldier – to see death at close hand.

In this battle I had joined I had not once drawn my sword, nor fired a shot. The two-and-fifty fancy brass guns of the
Florencia
now sat at the bottom of the English Channel, wreathed in seaweed, a playground for fishes. I recalled my conversations with Beatrice, my happy acceptance of the medal of St James, as if being a soldier was no more than wearing a uniform. I shrivelled inside to think of the night I had come to Leonato's masque dressed as a dandy soldier, the night when I'd bandied words at dinner and called a knight an empty kettle. Of the night when I'd performed in the Naumachia like a Barbary monkey. Now I knew I had left my boyhood on the beach of the thousand bodies. I knew, now, the wages of soldiery. All of the thousand men had worn a coat just like mine. Still, I gazed at Beatrice's star every night, and in my brief dreams still saw her face – I vowed that if I ever saw her again, she should know a different Benedick.

The weather matched the mood of the men. It was now, by my calculations, November, and I had never known such cold. Rain, hail and driving snow the like of which I had never seen. On one day – The Angels – our lookout fell from the crow's nest, stiff and dead. When we lifted him to drop him over the stern, his limbs remained taut and frozen, until we threw him into the leaden seas and the salt waters melted him.

It was perhaps fortunate that we had not the leisure to give rein to our doleful thoughts, for we entered a channel that was fiendishly difficult to navigate. We were beset on all sides by myriad rocky islands, a deadly archipelago which threatened at every moment to run us aground. Barely a quarter-hour passed without the dreadful sound of planking screaming against underwater crags, and our hearts would leap as we waited for the whole ship to splinter. Captain Bartoli had the thankless choice of taking down the sails to slow us down, in which case our rations would never see us back to Spain, or continuing at our current speed at the constant risk of foundering. The order
was given – all but the topsails were lowered; but what we gained in safety we lost in speed, leading to mutterings among the crew. I did not like their unhappy looks, nor the way their discontent united them. They had gone from being hangdogs to a pack of wolves.

On the morning of Trinity a shout went up. The rocky islands had opened up to a broad sound and a wide bay like a bite taken out of the coast. Small cots huddled about the edge of the shore, and smoke wreathed the little chimneys. A castle stood sentinel over the bay, and black mountains rolled away into the distance. But it was neither the mountains nor the houses that claimed our attention. For in the bay nestled a ship.

Captain Bartoli whipped out his spyglass. ‘Spanish,' he said at once, easing our troubled minds. ‘The
San Juan de Sicilia
.'

I recalled the ship from the muster; one of Duke Egeon's vessels, built at Ragusa. And I'd heard the name since; I remembered we'd seen the ship pulling away from us in the Channel, also heading ‘north about', trailing a red wake like an injured hind dragged home from hunting.

Claudio joined us at the helm. ‘Did she put in for supplies?' he wondered.

‘I do not know,' replied the captain.

The men had all left their posts and were crowding to the starboard side, all gabbling about warm fires, and food, and shelter. ‘If another ship has put in for supplies, why mayn't we?' asked the pilot. My mouth began to water involuntarily.

The captain's quarterdeck voice rose above all. ‘It is our duty to go back to Spain. Those were our orders from Medina Sidonia, and they have not been countermanded. We have no way of knowing if these northern peoples are loyal to their queen. If they are, we are all dead men.'

This gave the men pause, but the pilot, Da Sousa, spoke up again. ‘But if we stay aboard, we are dead anyway. How can we survive another week, another day?'

The captain had an answer to this. ‘But the
San Juan
has an anchor, we do not. How do you propose that we make our halt?'

‘We can cut the mizzenmast,' said Da Sousa, sensing victory for his position, ‘then the lateen sail will trail into the sea. This will create enough drag to halt us in the bay; I have seen it done, once, in the Azores. It is low tide now; we will sit on the sandbar till high tide, then refloat. Then we hoist all sails, and run for Spain.'

‘All sails, save one.' Bartoli shook his grizzled head. ‘We cannot sacrifice a sail, for the sake of provisions we may not even be able to gather. It is highly unlikely that we will reach Spain on our current ration even with full sail – without the lateen you may add a week to the journey. No, Señor da Sousa,' he said decidedly. ‘We must go by. Full sail.'

Da Sousa did not move. There was utter, utter silence on deck.

Bartoli had clearly never had to repeat an order in his life. ‘
Full sail,
I said.'

The men dispersed insolently slowly, and the captain returned to the helm. I settled myself by the mast, waiting for the well-remembered surge at my back as the sails caught the wind. At least I could look forward to some shelter, for the bellying canvas was as good as a battle tent for keeping off the rain. But something was wrong. The steady, mizzling rain fell unimpeded on my head. I looked up to see slack ratlines and naked crosstrees. The sails had not been raised.

I turned my head to call the captain, and that is when the blow fell.

Beatrice:
I travelled to Verona alone, and of this I was glad; for I could not carry forth my plan under my father's eye.

I was to sit for my wedding portrait, feast with the Capuletti, and my father was to join me in a week for the wedding on the steps of the Basilica. But I swore such a day would never come. I could not defy my father; I would take my steps in the wedding dance – but only as far as the church door. I could not refuse the Count Paris, but I could make him refuse me. I had just one short week to make it clear to him that I was not the bride for him.

My only company in the carriage was my
cassone,
my dowry chest. The thing was enormous, and left no room for even a maid for me. Its contents were so precious that two armed guards travelled beside the driver, and outriders in the Della Scala colours rode behind. The chest bumped against my feet, bruising my toes in my fancy jewelled boots. Plain and unadorned, the casket reminded me of a coffin. The
cassone
should symbolise a beginning, but it seemed an ending.

As the carriage bounced along the road the contents of the chest bumped about like a wakened body. It was our family treasure knocking to get out – priceless tapestries, garters, jewels, cloth-of-gold. Brass lamps from Byzantium, mirrors from Venice, spices from the Indies, all brought from the four corners of the world to be entombed in this casket. My dowry, my bride price. The thing made me a little afraid.

My heart speeded to keep time with the horses' hoofbeats, for we were near the city walls. I could see the grove of sycamores near the Porta Palio, and beyond the walls, the looming theatre of the Romans like a great stone ‘O'. Once we'd passed below the shadow of the gate I looked for comfort in the familiar buildings, for, as at home, the Della Scala were everywhere, writ in red stone. There was the Ponte Scaligeri, with the broadest arch of any bridge in the world. There was our family church of Santa Maria della Antica; the Scaligeri tombs, with their ornate canopies, crowded in the little courtyard. I'd used to love coming here, to hear the tales of my ancestors; Cangrande I Della Scala, known as the ‘big dog' and the first Della Scala ruler of Verona; Cansignorio Della Scala, Mastino II Della Scala. The names were music to me; they made me feel as if I owned the place. Even as a child, the notion that I would one day die and rest here did not trouble me at all. Now, with every red brick I saw, with every ladder blazon wrought in iron or stone, I was reminded of how valuable I was. What a prize. I was not the contents of the
cassone.
I was not myself. I was this city.
Verona
was my dowry. Who would not want to annex such a place? It might be harder to dissuade Paris from my hand than I realised. For as we drew into the Palazzo Erbe, with the beautiful frescoes growing on the façades like creeping vines, I realised that the Della Scala ancestral home, the red-stone Casa dei Mercanti, was cheek by jowl with the white Palazzo Maffei, Paris's home. Our union was literally set in stone.

At the gates, one of my father's men handed me down, but it took three of them to carry the
cassone
into the courtyard. The Palazzo Maffei was the last word in elegance, and seemed centuries away from the red-stone castle that was my home. It had many modern improvements made to its elegant, filigree façade; three galleries of creamy stone with an elegant balcony over each arcade, fluted semi-columns and large ornamental plaster masks between the snowy tympani. Indoors the
elegance continued; marble columns rose to frescoed ceilings, and porphyry floors were polished like glass. In the atrium a vast marble staircase rose in a helix to the upper floors, twisting in on itself like a nautilus. It made my home's rough stone and animal skins look primitive and crude.