Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (29 page)

No dogs bark as we alight, and no servants rush out to greet or repel us. With the baby in my arms and the goat in Will's, we find a wobbly purchase on the rotting dock, then trudge up the weedy, graveled path to the main house.

There are crumbling steps before the portico; these we climb, passing under a classical frieze of gods and goddesses, nymphs and shepherds, heavenly hounds and harts. We are astonished to find that the door is not locked, but stands ajar. We enter, goat and all.

The central hall of the villa shows signs of a hasty departure—though when this departure occurred, it is not possible to say. Muddy boots are flung about the floor, dead leaves, clumps of earth, dropped weapons, a torn cloak. A sudden tumult of wings alarms us and we look up to see, in the vaulted ceiling painted like the zodiac in the night sky, a horned owl madly flapping.

“Is it an omen?” asks Will. “And if it is, then of what?”

The owl zooms down perilously close to the baby's face as if it meant him harm, then wings its way into another chamber, seeming to lead us there.

“Chase it, Will!” I cry. “Chase it out of the house!” For I remember folk tales of owls come to carry away babies, and suddenly am in terror that this is no ordinary bird, but an evil spirit come to take my child.

Will seizes the torn cape from the floor and runs after the owl with it, flinging dusty windows open and trying to shoo the bird out into the wood beyond. It flaps and swoops, soars into the eaves, dives down, and seems to taunt us. This monster bird means us ill—of that I am sure. Will feints at it with the cloak, now like a bullfighter, now like a maddened housemaid with a dust mop. The owl still flaps, forcing us to chase it through many chambers, chambers full of unmade, hastily abandoned beds, chambers with abandoned trays of rotting food, chambers with ball gowns hastily cast off and discarded coats and breeches.

At last it leads us into what seems an alchemist's laboratory with limbecks and retorts, braziers and bottles, dusty books full of secret formulae. There it alights upon a limbeck full of some glistening substance that seems to gleam with all the colors of the rainbow. The bird appears to indicate this elixir with its beak, then soars to the ceiling again, flapping and calling. (Or does it cackle?—I swear it seems to cackle.)

“Open the window, Will!” I cry. And as he does, the owl dives down again, alights for one terrifying moment upon the baby's back, causing him to scream in terror, then flies out the window into the wood. Clutching my little lion, I follow with my eyes to the very edge of the greenwood, where the bird pauses for a moment, then in the wink of an eye seems to metamorphose into the bent figure of an old woman in blue and silver skirts. She turns and winks at me, cackling, and I see—or think I see—Arlecchina's glittering eyes.

“Did you see her?” I ask Will, but he is not even looking out the window. Instead, he is holding the rainbow-colored limbeck in his hands and contemplating it.

“To drink or not to drink?” he asks. “Perhaps this elixir contains all future poesy and knowledge of our fates—or perhaps it contains death. What say you, Jessica?”

“I say put it down. That bird was sent for evil not for good, and if
she
indicated that elixir, then surely it will poison you. There is danger aplenty in the world without elixirs.”

“Oh, what creatures women are!” says Will, staring at the limbeck as if hypnotized. “All of life and death may be in this glass, yet you would not taste it. See how it catches the rainbow in its rounded bowl.” He raises the limbeck to his lips. “See how it glints, promising knowledge.” He tips it at the edge of his mouth. “See how Christ's blood streams in the firmament…One drop would save my life—nay, half a drop.” He is about to receive the rainbow sacrament upon his tongue…Whereupon I knock the devilish limbeck out of his hand and smash it to the floor. But not before some drops sprinkle on his hand, and Will—that wayfarer in hell, in heaven, that poet seeking a holy vision—hastily laps them up.

His eyes burn as if he sees another world. Time seems to stop for him. The rainbow fluid flows about our feet. A gust of chill wind rushes in via the open window through which the owl departed. Will stands transfixed. Then the babe starts to whimper, waking him back to this world.

“What did you see?” I ask Will as his eyes seem to focus on the room again.

“Ask rather what did I not see. I saw things too wonderful and terrible to comprehend…My Hamnet dead; my lord condemned to die; the mortal moon, my queen, eclipsed; my father dead with a gentleman's escutcheon on his tomb; my elder daughter made a doctor's bride; my younger a vile seducer's; battles and loves too awesome to behold; tragedies and comedies full-blown, needing only my pen's transcription…I even saw Kit Marlowe dead and damned! Jessica, lick this hand that is full of the wisdom of the spheres. Perhaps some drop remains…Humor me, my love. It will not hurt you—that I swear.”

On a mad, possibly suicidal, impulse, I lick his hand, but either Will has imagined the effects of the elixir or no drops remain—for I cannot see such wonders as he swears he sees. Yet in my mind there does spring full-blown the vision of a theater, made like the Old Globe that stood in Southwark once, and bearing my grandfather's name. Antonia and I are acting on the stage. She plays Juliet, and I her nurse. Where this theater stands or who has built it I do not know, but it seems as solid as the stones of the villa in which we find ourselves.

“Have you seen the future?” asks Will.

I shake my head.

“The future has seen me,” I say. “But what it means to do with me, I cannot tell.”

We are tired. The babe is tired. And so, without further ado, we find the abandoned bedchamber that most suits us and prepare for sleep.

When the babe is fed and rocked and lies sleeping in my arms, Will looks about the bedchamber with a shudder and says, “This strange, abandoned villa puts me in mind of the plague that rages still in London—for there, all those who can, forsake the plaguey city for their country seats, leaving fine houses abandoned in the town.”

“And what of the poor?”

“The poor?” says Will. “In times of plague they toss on their straw pallets rattling their last, and stinking like corpses even as they live. Sometimes whole families perish all alone, or else those who come to nurse them steal their goods and chattels, making away with whatever they can. I think of my kin in Stratford and I quake with fear…What horrid visions that rainbow fluid conjured—horrid and beauteous at once! I fear for my Hamnet and my daughters…”

“Sleep, gentle poet,” say I, “for you will need your strength if we are to row our way back to Venice.”

He curls himself next to me and the babe on the great four-postered bed and begins to drift, thinking of plague and parenthood, plague and poverty. He whimpers and draws close to me. I have two babies now, I think. Nay, three.

I think of his plight and somehow it lightens my own. He with his kin in plaguey England; he in thrall to a noble lord who values him as if a poet were a plaything; he not knowing he is destined for great deeds, but only feeling his mortal chains—his wife, his children, his unworthiness—and not yet having the certainty that he will soar into the empyrean on the wings of his verse.

Lying back with the baby and thinking of my daughter, a new feeling rises in me: a feeling of my power to change my life. Oh, I have often felt my power on the stage; but off the stage, in the world of men, I have felt curiously castrated, reduced to little girlhood, even babyhood, and buffeted about by the big people. Now, I begin to sense that the power I command on the stage can also be mine in life. It is as though slowly, inexorably, my strength has been growing in me and I now know without a doubt that I will go home and claim both my child and my inheritance. The thought comes to me that a woman whose child has been taken from her—whether in a custody suit or because she gave it up for adoption after a star-crossed pregnancy of youth—walks the world like a ghost. She feels almost transparent, as if she lives in a curious double exposure with the shapes of shadowy streets and buildings showing through her skin, as in some old movie with ectoplasmic protagonists. I have known women who lost the fruit of teenage pregnancies to adoption in the days before legalized abortion, and they have walked the world this way, feeling like specters until somehow they established contact once again with these lost children. For a child once made, borne—and born—is part of one's soul, the bond severed at one's peril, the peril of becoming a walking ghost.

Will sleeps. I put the babe beside him in the bed, leave my two sleeping boys, and rise to undress. I am uneasy, unquiet, as if I know somehow that this idyll cannot last and we are to be wrenched apart. But oh, if only I could stay with him and also have my life, my daughter, my little son, Will's poems, his plays…Impossible. He must go back to England with his lord and write the poems and plays. I must retrieve Antonia somehow and build that theater bearing the Bostwicke name…

My ears prick: someone has entered the villa. I am certain of it. Can it be Arlecchina? Or, worse, Bassanio and Gratiano? Or worse still, Southampton with Shalach by his side?

The sound of boots along a hallway. I stand frozen for a moment, waiting to meet my fate—then creep out into the hall to meet it fearlessly. I wish I had a dagger or, at the least, a club. I hold my breath and pray. And then around the corner comes a very tattered Brighella with no one by his side.

“Good evening, Madam,” says he, bowing low. I have been so convinced he rode with my father that I am surprised not to see Shalach there as well.

“Where are the others?” I ask.

“Ah, thereby lies a tale,” says the Earl of S. “Bassanio and Gratiano are dead—which is not such a pity considering that our dear, impecunious Will owed them a thousand ducats. We have made a nice profit, have we not, out of their mutual murder—for the fact is that they killed each other at Montebello. May they rest in peace. And your father, Lady, is not such a swift horseman as am I. Now I comprehend why Venetians are famed for their ineptitude on horseback—for 'tis an old jest to say ‘He rides like a Venetian,' meaning he cannot ride—but I, Lady, can ride you. And not like a Venetian, but like an Englishman!”

Whereupon he grabs me by the arm, whips a silken kerchief from his coat, and binds my mouth with it. Then, with a red cord, he binds my hands—and shoves me, kicks me, prods me, to another chamber.

What he means to do with me I know. What I do not know is how I shall respond when this tattered commedia dell'arte villain, my love's lover, throws me upon another tossed and crumpled bed, strips me of my boatman's clothes, and presses his mouth to my neck, my breasts, my navel, my quim. Against my will, my blood begins to heat. Against my will, I desire him. This brigand of the road covers me with his sweaty body, grazes my cheeks with his rough beard, forces himself into my steaming, almost liquid center. “Can you doubt that I love you, Lady?” he inquires into my ear, pouring his words there as he will pour his seed into that other place.

This is a dream, a nightmare, every woman's most desired—and feared—debauch: the forbidden lover. (Is he my brother, Pip? Is he one of my mother's motley husbands? Is he—heaven forbid—my own sweet father?) I open like a torn flower. I scream more in pleasure than in protest. The tattoo of blood builds to its crescendo, and as it builds I see, in my mind's eye, that I am mastered not just by Brighella and Southampton but also by my brother, all my stepfathers, my own father, and my grandfather! Thus every woman makes love to a dozen men each time she opens her legs—and when she comes, it is with all the phantom lovers of her childhood.

Footsteps down the hall, then double footsteps. Will appears, the baby in his arms, followed by Shalach, muddy from the road. Both stand open-mouthed for a moment, watching this display of purloined lust. Whereupon Shalach groans like a beast and tears his hair.

“My own flesh and blood to rebel!” he groans.

But, instead of falling upon my attacker or upon Will, who holds the baby, he tears me away from the Earl of Southampton and bids me clothe myself.

Now he seizes the babe, grabs me by the shoulder roughly, and drags me—half naked, clutching for my clothes—out of the bedchamber, down the halls of the villa, and outside where two horses await.

Will and his patron follow as far as the portico, making no move to stop us. They stand transfixed like figures in a play. Are they no more than spear carriers, members of the chorus? Who can tell? Is it here that our two worlds fracture and break apart?

As in a delirium, I mount the horse, strap the babe once again to my bosom, and ride, ride, ride with old Shalach riding behind me flinging curses into the wind. “I will have my bond!” he screams. Or is it “I will have my babe”?

We ride as in a nightmare. The landscape of the Veneto flies past us—apparitional, blurred, dreamlike. I struggle for breath but can hardly catch it; I grasp my baby and I ride.

Where is Shalach taking me? Why has Will made no move to stop us? Why has Southampton let us go? These questions torment me as we ride up hill, down dale, fleeing our fates.

All sorts of terrifying visions fill my head. If we take this babe back to the ghetto, how will we, or it, be safe? Whole communities of Jews have been put to the sword for less than one purloined Christian baby. I know we are in danger—and now, with Montebello gone, how do we know the hysteria of the anti-Semitic mob has not spread to Venice and the crowded confines of the ghetto itself?

We ride, we ride. Shalach is indeed a poor rider, like most Venetians, and there are many moments when I feel sure I could outride him and elude his grasp. But I do not. Why? Because I know not where to go. With Montebello gone and no sure way to get home to my own time, I feel compelled to stay within sight of my stage father. It is all I know as an actress. If one world does not claim me, then another must. If the quotidian life of the twentieth century cannot hold me, then Shalach and his sixteenth century must.