O, Juliet (9 page)

What in heaven’s name could the Spinster of Florence have to offer the miserable newlywed?

“I have four sisters,” she went on. “All married. They talk among themselves. Endlessly. About what goes on . . . under the sheets.” She leered so lasciviously we broke into laughter, and the unhappy spell was shattered. Constanza beckoned to us and we leaned in to the center of the table. “There is an oil they use . . . for lubrication. My eldest sister’s husband is endowed like a stallion, she tells us. This oil ‘eases the passage.’ ”

A hopeful smile played on Chaterina’s lips. “Could you get me some?” she said, then added with a conspiratorial grin, “Though I shall never have to worry about a horse-sized
cazzo
. More like a billy goat.”

Everyone roared at that, and the evening went on in much better cheer.

Later, Lucrezia and I stood outside waiting for our litters to be brought around. It was a mild evening that reminded me of another such night.

“Why are you smiling like that?” she asked me.

I hesitated before answering. “He came to my balcony.”

“Oh no . . . Juliet!”

“It was lovely, Lucrezia. He was a perfect gentleman.”

“Alone on your garden balcony in the middle of the night?”

I said nothing.

“And you would therefore have been in your shift?”

“With a robe.”

She made a huffing sound.

“It’s all right, Lucrezia.”

“It is not all right. Nothing has changed.You are soon to be betrothed to another man. The Monticecco and the Capelletti are still enemies.”

“I know that. And I know how these things are. Have always been. But suddenly it occurs to me—a strange thought perhaps—that people who love each other should marry each other. That
this
is how it should be.”

Lucrezia stared at me as though I were raving, then said, “You’re always going on about Dante and Beatrice and their great romance. But in truth, he barely spoke to her. His love was in his head. In his breast. In his verse. And that was enough.”

“It’s not enough for me!”

Lucrezia shook her head sharply. “Dear God, could you have found any young man less suitable for this . . . this . . .”

“Affair of the heart,” I finished for her.

“How can it end well?”

“End well!” I cried. “Has Chaterina’s arranged marriage ended well?” I faced Lucrezia squarely. “So you, my dearest friend, wish for me the sad nuptial bed I will certainly share with Jacopo Strozzi? You wish me a life altogether barren of love? I will not thank you for that!”

I was glad my litter had arrived. I flung myself and my anger into its darkness, but Lucrezia’s words had begun to smother me, smother all my bright hopes.

No,
I ordered myself,
you must fight to keep them alive!
Dante was right. Love’s power
was
insane. Suddenly there was strength flowing into me, through me. I felt my fists clenching and my spine straightening. Tears of passionate resolve flowed down my cheeks.

“I choose madness,” I said aloud, in hopes that the God of Love was listening. “I choose madness.”

T
he surgery was proving brutal, and the patient was unfor giving. My saw was finding resistance, and I heard the screeching of the blade on dry, brittle wood as an old man’s shrieks of pain. I had not wished to cut such a gracious limb from so majestic an olive, one of the few in our orchard that was perhaps alive when the boy Plato was still following Socrates around Athens as his student. But the large branch was dead and hung so high above the ground that it would certainly kill a worker if it suddenly gave way and fell on him.

Discomfiting as this chore was proving, I could not help but revel at the perfection of the summer day, the joy of my homecoming from Padua to the orchard of my youth, and thoughts of Juliet, which on the one hand soothed me as did a bath in the warm mineral springs of Abano Terme, and on the other inflamed my senses like a hard ride through the hills on my beautiful Blanca.

It had surprised me how easily I had resumed my place here and how little I missed the life of learning at university. Perhaps it was facile of me, but in my heart I believed there was more to be learned from the countryside, the Tuscan weather, the olives and the vines of my father’s farm, than from a Latin master droning on inside the airless walls of a classroom.

I did not disdain my education. Without it I would surely have been a dolt. I would never have known Dante or tried my hand at poetry, and would, therefore, never have found the perfect way to court and win the affection of Juliet, sweet Juliet—the woman my stars had, on the day of my birth, promised me.

I had ruminated much on that thought of late. How a scholar versed in the science of the heavens could, with his charts and numerical calculations, using the moment and place of a person’s birth and the movements of celestial bodies, foretell with such accuracy the disposition of a person’s mind, and what his life had in store for him.

Of all the things Paolo Toscanelli had told my father of his youngest son’s nature and future, my finding “a woman of great fortitude” had intrigued me the most. As a boy who had no interest in girls save teasing his sisters, I was baffled by the prophecy. As a youth at university finding comfort in the arms of the few prostitutes I could afford, Toscanelli’s remarkable woman seemed as far away as the stars that had foretold her.

When I’d brazenly taken myself that evening to the Palazzo Bardi to remonstrate with Don Cosimo, she was the very last thing on my mind. And yet when I first laid eyes on Juliet swooping and spinning as she danced the Virgins’ Dance, heard her laugh above all the others, thought the flick of her cymbaled wrists the most graceful and her face the most astonishingly lovely, I knew that she was my woman of great fortitude. She was the woman fated and foretold.

She was mine.

The making of peace between my family and the silk merchant Capelletti had at first been a mere challenge to overcome. Why my father had become a vandal was a mystery to me, and an annoyance to my soul. The quiet and gentility of our lives had been defiled by senseless violence.

Every time I had tried to discuss the feud with Papa, he had slammed the door closed, shutting me out as if I were a child. It angered me, certainly. At twenty-five I was man enough to be privy to any and all family business.

But once I met Juliet, had fallen into the deep well of those eyes, sparred playfully with her in a way that a man does only with another man . . . and learned to my horror that she was Capelletti’s daughter, that simple challenge to arrange peace between our families became as vital to my survival as the beating of my heart.

After my escape from the Medici ball I approached Papa again for an explanation, demanding to know if he’d sunk Capelletti’s cargo, and again was rebuked, this time more harshly than before. Even Mama was shocked by the virulence of his tone with me. It upset her, made her ill for a time. The pain in every joint became unbearable, and she was bedridden.

Her suffering brought Papa instantly to his senses. He cared for her lovingly, allowing no one but himself to feed and dress and bathe her. She recovered under his tender ministrations, and of late a kind of serenity had settled over our household. Only my strange inability to pen a decent verse, even when thoughts of Juliet should have caused my poetry to proliferate, had unnerved me. I wondered if I would ever write again.

This woman, this earthly angel—perhaps “Goddess” suited her more, for an angel is merely sweet and gentle, and Juliet was
fierce
—she inspired me, inflamed my senses, rearranged the thoughts in my mind; she unsettled me so the words, at least in lines of poetry, simply refused to come.

And
she
wrote poetry in her sleep!

The limb, finally sawed through, crashed past living branches and fell to the ground, breaking apart into several pieces. It was then I spotted my father at the end of the orchard standing very still, perhaps surveying this part of his estate, but appearing haunted to my eyes.

I decided in that moment to venture another attempt and descended from the ancient olive. Papa must have seen me approaching, must have sensed my purpose, for he turned and strode away toward the house.

I followed after him.

“Papa!” I called. “Wait for me. I want to talk!”

But he did not stop. My determination strengthened. We would get to the bottom of this story and we would do it today.

“Papa!”

He went in through the back door. Inside I found it cool, and dark after the brightness of the day. But down the long straight hall of the villa I saw him disappearing into the dining room.

I went in after him. Mama sat at the table struggling with some embroidery she was determined to conquer with fingers that refused to cooperate. She was staring perplexed at my father, who stood in a corner with his face to the wall. When she saw me, she shook her head.

I went and stood behind him. Found him trembling.

“Papa,” I said gently. “You must tell me what is in your heart.”

He shook his head no, and I thought then that if I could see his face, I would find him weeping.

“Please, Papa . . .”

“I am ashamed,” he finally whispered. “So ashamed.”

I looked at my mother, whose cheeks were wet with tears.
She knew.

“Husband,” she said with more steel in her voice than I’d known she possessed. “He is our only son. He left here as a boy, and perhaps you still see him that way. But Romeo is a grown man. A good man. And he loves you. He will love you even when you reveal your follies. That is what families do, Roberto.”

With that, my father turned to me. His face was lined with grief. “Forgive me, Romeo. I have treated you unfairly. Come, sit with me and your mother, and I will tell you everything you want to know.”

R
omeo had not returned to my balcony and neither had Papa allowed me to again attend the symposium, no matter how I pleaded with him. My mind wandered from my chores—sewing, candle and soap making. Nights were the worst. Urgent expectation ruled me. I tossed in my bed and rose a hundred times before dawn, throwing open the balcony door in hopes that Romeo would be standing there in the moonlight, arms outstretched to enfold me.

He did not come.

If he wrote, his letters never reached me. He would not have let my parents know of his missives, and he had no friends among the servants of my father’s house through which to secretly pass them.

I suffered dreadfully without even Lucrezia to commiserate.

I wrote to him. Letters baring my soul, sounding out my dreams. All of these I destroyed, fearful of their discovery. I made a ceremony of this before I climbed into my bed each night, lighting a fire in the brazier and dropping in the pages, watching them turn to ash and smoke.

My mind turned from love to worry. Had he forgotten me? Found someone else? Was he plagued with family troubles? Ill? God forbid, dead? I tried with all my might to close off every thought of Romeo, but nothing could be done. He had knocked down the door to my heart with words and moonlight and figs. “I believe in the senses,” he’d said. And every night as I lay helpless, twisting in my sheets and longing, longing for his touch, I believed in them, too.

Romeo!
I silently cried.
Deny all tradition and be my love!

He must have heard my call.

Sunday dinner and Jacopo Strozzi was at our table. I found him impossible to bear. Even a touch of those long tapering fingers on my sleeve made the flesh beneath it crawl.

With downcast eyes I picked at my ravioli, worried that this would be the day of announcement—our betrothal. My road to ruin. But Mama was subdued, talking very little—a state she would not have been in if a marriage agreement had been reached.

Papa looked out at the three of us as one maid removed our plates and another set down the meat course. Once they had left, he spoke. His was a portentous tone, laden with anger and suspicion.

“The day after tomorrow I have been summoned to the house of Medici. Don Cosimo has invited . . .” He paused and spoke the name with distaste. “. . . the Monticecco paterfamilias and his son, Romeo, as well.”

My breath caught in my throat. I had to force myself to breathe naturally as he went on.

“We will be urged, I understand, to make peace with each other.”

“Peace!” Jacopo cried in that nasal whine I had grown to despise. “How can Don Cosimo imagine you can make peace with a family that openly wishes for your ruination? Who has so recently destroyed a valuable cargo? This is outrageous!”

“So it is, Jacopo, so it is.”

“You must not go,” said the man who would be my father’s partner.

I was still as stone, and Mama looked very pale.

“There is no way I can say no to a summons from the Medici,” Papa said. “They rule this city. Don Cosimo”—he measured his words carefully—“is the wealthiest man in the world. He is my patron. I am in his debt. The Capelletti are of the Medici Faction, and I must therefore bow to his call.”

“How will you bear sitting at the table with such barbarians as the Monticecco?” Jacopo demanded.

A small smile played on my father’s lips. “How will
you
?” he asked.

“Me?”

“You will soon be my business partner and . . .” His eyes fell on me. “. . . and a close friend of the family. We will face our enemy together.”

“It would be my honor, Capello,” he said, eyes downcast.

Jacopo’s modesty is false,
I thought suddenly. His family’s wealth and prestige far exceeded ours.
Why is he playing such a game?

My father turned to Mama. “Have you anything you have to say or to ask?” he said.