O, Juliet (25 page)

“F
ather forgive me, for I have sinned.”

“What are these sins?” the archbishop of Florence asked me, sounding bored, supposing that a wellborn virginal girl would have nothing much to confess.

I was trembling, though, for I walked a thin line between truth and lying in God’s house. I leaned close to the grate and whispered the one thing that I knew to be true.

“I have impure thoughts about my husband.”

There was silence as my unexpected words were understood. It took a moment before the priest spoke.

“You will soon be married.” His tone was stern. “But even married women must never dwell in the carnal realm. There is real danger, even to the pious, of reveling in the depravity of the marriage bed.”

These last words I perceived he uttered with something akin to lasciviousness.

“Tell me what you mean, Father,” I said with feigned innocence.

But the archbishop was keen to elaborate. “Certainly you are aware of the days and times that the marriage rights may not be exercised.”

“Lent,” I answered quickly. Everyone knew that.

“And days of penitence,” he added.

“Of course.”

“And you know it is a mortal sin of the most serious kind to indulge in ... sodomy.”

“No sodomy, Father. Never sodomy.”

He cleared his throat. “And you shall engage in no unusual positions, or God will punish you severely.”

I bit my lip hard and made a sound of agreement.

“A woman must make her bedchamber a sacred refuge of piety and solitary devotion. A crucifix or an icon of the Virgin should be hung. A small altar erected. There you will find a center for your spiritual exercise.”

“Yes, Father.”

He was silent again. Then, “Tell me more about these impure thoughts.” His voice had grown thick and husky.

“Oh!” I uttered, as though mortified. “I cannot. . . . I should not. . . . Oh, Father, I’m so ashamed!” I remembered Romeo pulling my knees high to encircle his waist
.
Was this an “unusual position”? And what on earth was sodomy between a man and a woman
?

“There is no need, no need for embarrassment,” the archbishop insisted. “Just tell me. . . . Let God be your witness.”

In that moment, blasphemous as it was, I invoked blessings from the God of Love, closed my eyes, and allowed myself to gracelessly slump to the floor.

“The lady swoons!” I heard Lucrezia shout. “Bring help!”

M
y sins were piling high. Now I pretended unconsciousness to my parents.

Dear Lucrezia had seen me home, fluttering about her limp, pale friend with stories of my aching head and blurred vision before the collapse. We had quietly argued about what symptoms I should display. What illness I would be feigning and for what effect. We had decided that at all costs I must be prevented from signing the contract with Jacopo, for it was binding. We would, under the law, be as good as married, all the rest of the ceremony mere artifice.

Some couples in lower orders of society went to bed after signing, and before the giving of the rings, as if to seal the bargain and prove their mutual consent. People of the merchant class, like our family, preferred as much gaudy pomp and ritual and feasting as could be afforded.

So here the liar lay in deathlike stillness, all manner of men and women coming and going from my room—Mama, Papa, Cook, Lucrezia, and the much-feared
materfamilia
s of my betrothed’s family, Allessandra Strozzi. If my maid, Viola, came, I was unaware. I did not hear her speak a word, and I did not dare open my eyes to find her.

Several doctors were called for their opinions and treatment. There was endless checking of pulses—arms, ankles, neck, and groin. My eyelids were pulled open; my mouth was examined for signs of choking, sores, or a swollen tongue. They listened to my shallow breathing and tapped my breastbone, to which I replied with a faint moan and a furrowed brow. There were many spirited arguments about my mysterious condition. A flux or an ague. As there was no fever or swellings, it could not be the plague. No yellowing of the skin or eye whites, so it was not my liver.

Two doctors leaned over my bed whispering. They kept their voices low, for Mama was in the room, and their conjecture of a tumor in my head might alarm her. A third physician, who smelled of camphor, kept raising my arm and letting it fall limp to my side, till I wanted to shriek at him. But my resolve was strong.

Indeed, resolve was never more needed than for my bleeding, for this was the time-tested treatment for many ills, both known and unknown. I refrained from clenching my jaw to receive the cut, as the gesture might be observed. The knife they used on my forearm was dull, for it dug deep in the flesh before it poked through, and the pain was hot and vivid. Then I lay helpless as the blood dripped freely down my arm and plinked into a metal bowl they’d placed on the floor below it.

I had no relief as night fell, as Mama insisted on staying by my side. I worried that if I slept, I would lose control of my movements and might give myself away as perfectly healthy, and a malingerer of the worst order.

But the day planned for the signing of the marriage contract came and went with no mention of it, and that was worth the world.

By the next morning I was aching from the forced stillness, racked by a gnawing hunger, and much relieved when Lucrezia returned for her turn at the vigil over her sick friend.

I heard her telling my mother as she sent her off to her bed that she would be reading to me, and not to be alarmed if voices were heard.

“There is no talk of the contract,” Lucrezia said very softly, moments after the door closed behind Mama, “though Signora Strozzi seems suspicious. She heard the physicians saying they could find nothing wrong with you, though one believed your skin was rather too pink for poor health. And I do not think she believed your father when he assured her that all would go according to plan on our wedding day.”

“We don’t know what Jacopo has told his mother,” I said in low tones, grateful to have the freedom of speech once again. “She may be a villainess, as her son is. Do you think the doctors will return today?”

Lucrezia held out bits of cheese and bread for me, which I hungrily consumed. “You can be sure of it. Prepare yourself to give up more of your blood.”

“What of Viola?” I asked with even more urgency. The young servant and her new husband, Massimo, were together the key to our plan, though they were as yet unaware of it. While the girl had taken up some duties as my lady’s maid, she could not be spared from the kitchen altogether, and Lucrezia must find a way to be private with her to explain things and acquire her consent.

Our scheme required that Massimo, for a generous price, ride out of Florence to Verona, two days on a fast horse, carrying a letter to Romeo, and return quickly with a reply. We had considered a messenger hired by Lucrezia, but she had done no such thing in her life, and she, like all the wellborn girls of Florence, was watched and regulated her every waking moment. Too, we believed we could count better on Viola’s loyalty and goodwill than a courier.

After all, I had made her own marriage possible.

“I will see if your mother will allow Viola to come up and bathe you,” said my friend. “Then I can give her the letter.”

“Oh, Lucrezia, I so wanted to write him in my own hand.”

“Not possible,” she said, then, hearing voices outside in the hall, went to my desk and picked up Dante’s
Inferno
and brought it back to my bedside. She sat next to me. “My letter is simply put. And the spirit is all yours. ‘Come and take me from this place. I am waiting.’ Certainly it will require Romeo’s cunning and not a little bravery to return to the city and take you away, but I have no more fear than you that he will.”

“And did you write . . . ?”

“Juliet, I wish you could see your face. Of course I wrote that you loved him faithfully. And I begged for a swift reply.” Lucrezia smiled. “Now let me read to you for a while. It will make the time pass more quickly.”

She opened the book and gravely read: “Canto nine, flight of the demons. The Sixth Circle of Hell.”

T
o our immense frustration, Viola was not allowed to come bathe me, and Lucrezia’s note to Romeo could not be passed.

I suffered another day of bleeding at the baffled doctors’ hands, so that now I truly did feel weak and ill. I had to endure more of their poking and prodding, requiring my supreme effort to appear stuporous. Later, an apothecary came and applied a malodorous mustard poultice to my stomach.

Allessandra Strozzi looked in on me again. I could hear in her voice more irritation this day than sympathy. She repeatedly demanded to know what she was supposed to do with the wedding preparations. Papa used confident words that all would go as planned, but in the fabric of his assurances there were threads of panic.

Without this marriage, he believed, all would be lost.

But I remembered Romeo’s logic. If I eloped without my father’s permission, certainly a furor would ensue, but there remained in that scenario ways for he and Jacopo both to save face, and the partnership would, in the future, survive.

So far, however, the only reward for my pretended coma was another day gone by without having signed my marriage contract.

That night Cook was sent to sit up with me, but she fell to sleep almost instantly, allowing me the freedom to stretch my limbs and take in deep, soothing lungfuls of air. I even sat up at the side of my bed, wishing that the shutters had been open and the chamber not so tomblike. I wished to gaze up at the stars of Romeo’s birth, secure in the knowledge that in Verona he would be gazing at the same sky, thinking of mine.

I admit that in the darkest hours I allowed doubt to inhabit my mind. I remembered the last moments before my husband had left this room, and his uncertainty that we would ever meet again. Truth be told, it had been
I
that had taken the convincing tone, promising we would meet again in this life. Should it not have been Romeo who showed strength and surety of our future together? And why had I heard nothing from him since that night? He should have moved mountains to let me know he cared!

I was shaking by the time I lay back down, and it was some time before my common sense returned. Like a stern tutor, it lectured me about my ridiculousness. Romeo
had
moved mountains ... to court and marry me. On that last night—the one on which I now judged him so harshly—a friend had died in his arms. Yes, he had wept and trembled at the thought of his sins, yet he had recovered his masculine pride sufficiently to prove himself a perfect lover in this bed.

If I had not had a letter from Romeo, I decided, then its passage from Verona to Florence was certainly impossible.

My self-soothing thoughts, exhaustion, and the snoring cook put me to sleep. I thankfully woke before her at dawn and, steeling myself, returned to my deathlike pose.

The morning brought a most unwelcome visitor.

Why they had allowed Jacopo Strozzi a private audience with my helpless self I will never know. Perhaps he convinced Papa that words of encouragement from my husband-to-be would rouse me from my unnatural sleep.

In any event, I could feel Jacopo’s odious presence as he stood above me, smell his musty scent. He kept his voice low, but he bent to my ear, making sure that I heard every sinister word.

“I know what you are doing, Juliet.” The way he spoke my name made the hair on my neck rise and stiffen. “I see now how far you would go to avoid marrying me. Clever. You have managed to fool everyone but myself . . . and my mother. She is angry. Very angry. She never liked you. She believed I could do better for myself. Find a wealthier girl. I do not like to think how it will be for you living in her house now. But you
will
live in her house.You will give up this nonsense and rouse yourself. For one way or the other you will marry me. You may choose the planned wedding—that would be pleasant. Or, if you continue this pathetic ruse, I will come in here again with our marriage contract in hand, lock the door, and after I have signed your name next to mine”—he came in close and nipped the lobe of my ear with his teeth—“I will take my marital rights, here in this bed.
That
will wake you up, hmm?”

I lay frozen, struggling for even breath.

“It is your choice, Juliet. Your choice entirely.”

When I felt his rough tongue on my face, the bile rose in my throat, threatening my composure, but thankfully he pulled back. A moment later the door opened. Clicked shut.

I choked back my revulsion and tried to steady myself, for the door was opening again. I heard the rustle of skirts and went boneless with relief to inhale the sweet and familiar fragrance of Lucrezia.

I opened my eyes and propped myself on my elbows as she swung the shutters wide, then snatched Dante’s
Inferno
from my writing desk before coming to my bedside. She wore a decidedly happy expression, one so hopeful that I withheld the telling of the meeting with Jacopo and allowed her to speak first.

She sat down and finally looked at me. “Juliet, what has happened? You look ill. Has the bleeding . . . ?”

“No. Just tell me your news. I can see that you have some.”

“I found Viola alone in the kitchen.”

“And?”

Lucrezia smiled triumphantly. “She took the letter and accepted payment for her husband’s courier services. He will leave today. They are indebted to you, Juliet. She would do anything to help you.”

“Thank God!” I sat up and grabbed Lucrezia’s hand. “Is Jacopo gone?”