Beatrice and Benedick (32 page)

I sank back down again, coaxing sleep, but it was no use. Long past midnight I was still awake, listening to the bells edging the time in quarter-hour increments towards dawn. I had a book by my bed – as I'd always had ever since I could read – but no light. I threw a cloak about me and padded down to the kitchens for a flame for my candle.

On my way back from the fire I was passing the great doors of the red-stone tower when I heard a knocking. Thinking my father had returned, I lifted the great iron latch without waiting for a servant.

I saw there a young man, his hair and clothes black with rain, his face pale, his shoes so soaked that water ran in at the heels and out at the toes. Behind him a dark horse danced, tethered to a ring set into the talus.

‘I am the Montecchi you seek,' he said, in a rush. ‘I took Tebaldo's life.'

If my father had been at home, those would have been the last words he uttered. Prince Escalus would, in his rage, have struck
him down there and then, and beaten him to death in the red fort. Even if Ventimiglia the major-domo had opened the door, this boy would have found himself in the dungeons, contemplating the rack and the scold's bridle and all the other outdated instruments of torture. But they had not answered the door; I had. And I could deal with this young man as I saw fit. I took him by the arm, and bore him off stealthily to the kitchens, shoving him into a chair beside the fire at which I'd just lit my candle.

There was no one there save the fool who was employed to keep the fire in. He was so simple in the head he could only say the word ‘fire' and so would not be able to repeat our conference. But just to be safe, I sent him to get Ventimiglia. ‘Fire,' he said in acquiescence, and went.

Once we were alone the young man spoke. ‘This is better treatment, lady, than I have any right to expect.'

I was impressed, once again, by how he expressed himself. This was no street-brawling hothead. I ladled him a cup of small beer from the barrel in the squarestone. ‘Do not thank me yet,' I said, ‘for I have not yet decided what to do.'

‘What to do?'

‘With you,' I said. ‘For I am the lady of the house.'

He knelt before me. ‘Then it is your forgiveness I must crave. I attacked your brother in defence of a friend whom he had slain in turn.'

I was not to be mollified by fine words. ‘I know the fable. Save your explanation for your trial.'

His cup hovered halfway to his lips. ‘If I am to be tried, I must even now enter a plea for mercy,' he said, hope flaring with the firelight in his eyes. ‘For there is a lady in Verona to whom I have pledged my affections, a maid by the name of—'

‘Shhhh.' My mind was racing. ‘Let me
think
.' Three times of late the Montecchi and Capuletti had brawled openly in the streets, and my father had decreed that anyone offering violence would be immediately put to death. But I knew there
would be no benefit in taking this young man's life. I would rather stop the bloodshed. If I sentenced this young man to death, then another Capuletti would be taken in revenge; on and on, an eye for an eye until the whole of Verona was blind. Yet if this Montecchi boy was still here in the morning, he was dead; of that there could be no doubt. I had to act tonight.

The fire-fool gambolled back into the room, and Ventimiglia followed him, bustling in his nightgown, looking less dignified than I had ever seen him. ‘My lady? Is your father returned?' He did not, at once, see the young man in the chimney-corner.

‘Not yet. But I have something to ask of you. When my brother lived, if some … business pertaining to the estate made itself known while my father was from home, what would come to pass?'

Ventimiglia looked confused. ‘Well, should such a set of circumstances arise, your lord brother would take the mantle of Escalus in your father's stead.'

‘And he could pass certain decrees, make judgements in the moot?'

‘Why, yes.'

‘And such decrees did not have to wait to be ratified by my father's seal?'

‘Well, no, my lady; in such cases, your brother's ring served well enough.'

I rose. ‘In that case, I, Princess Beatrice della Scala, in the absence of my father Prince Bartolomeo della Scala, call the moot court of the Freetown of Villafranca di Verona into session, to try the murderer of Tebaldo della Scala.' I pointed to the shadows. ‘This is the miscreant – put him in chains.'

The Montecchi boy calmly put down his cup, and rose to stand beside Ventimiglia. His dignity did him great credit. Ventimiglia looked from the young man to me.

‘But, my lady, it is impossible. Would it not be better to wait till morning, and your father's return?'

‘Ventimiglia,
I
am in command here. Find me the requisite three judges and dozen witnesses.'

‘From whence, my lady?'

‘The mayor, the priest, the aldermen – drag them from their beds if need be. We will meet in the red-stone tower at matins.'

Ventimiglia hesitated. I drew myself up to my full height and looked him dead in the eye. ‘Do it.' For the first time, I hoped that my eyes resembled my father's. They must have, for suddenly I was alone with the fool and the flames.

‘Fire,' said the simpleton.

‘Yes,' I agreed; and left him to it.

The castle was all of a clamour and I went downstairs to the chapel unnoticed. More stairs down and I was in the crypt, where Tebaldo lay on a great stone table, his candles kept burning night and day as assiduously as the fool's fire. His face was beginning to fall in, his flesh to soften, and he wore a more benign expression than he'd ever done in life. I lifted the shroud above his right hand. It was easy to slip the seal ring from his finger, as death had already nipped the flesh from his bones. I tucked him in again, as if he slept, and climbed the steps out of the underworld. The seal ring, with the little ladder blazon upon it, now rode upon my finger.

I presided over the candlelit moot court with precision but in haste, at every moment expecting the thunder of my father riding back over the drawbridge.

I heard the evidence from the Montecchi and the burghers of Villafranca, and made my judgement. I wrote the order, dripped the wax and sealed it with Tebaldo's ring; my ring.

I took the guilty man to the door myself. The Montecchi kneeled and kissed the sealstone, still warm from the wax.

‘You have a horse?' I asked him.

‘Tethered outside.'

‘Then go.' And I remembered; ‘and do not take the Verona road.'

By the time my father returned it was dawn, and the sky was the colour of his eyes. I was waiting for him, in the red-stone tower, seated in his wooden chair carved with ladders.

‘Beatrice.'

I stood, my body heavy with fatigue and dread.

‘Father, Tebaldo's murderer came here to give himself up.'

‘He's here?'

‘Not any more,' I said. ‘Tried and dispatched. By me.'

Murder flared in his eyes. ‘Dead?'

I could have lied. I so
wanted
to lie, but it would have been a futile untruth, and I would be safe from my father's wrath only for the time it took for him to hear the full story from Ventimiglia.

‘Banished. To Mantua, never to return.'

I began to explain my reasoning, but his pale eyes blazed again, his hand shot out and he struck me, backhanded, to the floor.

In the morning I had a little ladder mark from his ring upon on my cheek.

My father's anger dissipated with that blow, but now his grief remained. He was diminished and listless. He did not even send to Mantua, to petition for the return of the fugitive. I think he knew by then it would make no difference. Tebaldo would still be dead, sleeping upon that slab downstairs in our crypt, now wearing once again the ring that I'd stolen for a night.

My father's purpose in life, the role of the Della Scala, had now gone. For centuries Prince Escalus had been a mediator. It was as if the balance of the Montecchi and the Capuletti, those opposing forces, had kept him upright like two whips laying upon a top – now the balance was gone, the spinning top faltered and fell. He sat in his great wooden chair, carved with the ladders of his blazon, and would neither eat nor sleep. He did not seem inclined to take up the business of the castle, so I continued to preside over the moot. He watched me with his pale blue eyes and barely moved; and he spoke never a word.

Each night we dined together at the great table in the redstone tower, and I felt as if I was back in time. The Castello Scaligero had always seemed of another era, but now it fossilised with grief. The red stone was cold, the fires barely stayed lit. There were animal skins on the floor in place of rugs, and animal heads and antlers on the walls in place of tapestries. Musicians played discreetly from the gallery on instruments of the region that had not changed for hundreds of years, and the meats that were ranked upon the table were not butchered but complete with lights and offal and lacking only the heads that stared from the walls and the skins that lay upon the floors.

For days we dined in silence, and I had begun to forget what my father's voice was like, to forget that he even had the power of speech. So when one evening he passed a remark, it was as if one of the animals' masks upon the wall had assumed life and spoken to me.

‘Tebaldo danced with death every day. He was in love with her. He sought her out,' he said.

I nodded, acknowledging the wisdom of this remark; and having begun to talk, he did not cease.

As the weeks passed and Tebaldo's death drew farther away like a gallows by the roadside, I detected a sea-change in my father. He seemed to exert himself to be pleasant to me, and his stern demeanour was leavened by an unaccustomed good
humour. He would make conversation, talk of the matters of the day, occasionally pass comment on a fine haunch of meat that we were enjoying.

Sometimes after dinner we would even play
Scopa
together. My father did not really approve of women playing a man's game: ‘A woman should hold a fan before her face,' he'd say, ‘not a fan of cards.' He was surprised that I knew the rules; but once he'd accepted that I had some skill at the game I sensed he found it comforting, for I knew that he used to play with Tebaldo of an evening. I made sure he always won – sometimes I let him, sometimes he bested me, and sometimes he even smiled. Even touching the deck was bittersweet for me – for the cards were the exact same type as that which Benedick had given me, even down to the back-pattern and the maker's mark from Treviso. Proof positive that Benedick had bought his cards in the north, and dealt his cheat's deck to every comely woman from Bolzano to Naples.

I tried not to think of Benedick; but in truth I was hungry for news of Spain, of England, of whatever worldly enterprise had taken Benedick from me in the company of the Aragonese. But my father's interests did not even reach as far as Milan or Florence; he was bounded in his little world of the Veneto, a world that seemed no bigger than a nutshell.