Beatrice and Benedick (33 page)

So he talked to me instead of the politics of Verona, the origins of the dispute between the Montecchi and the Capuletti, and of how they were more than just warring families but political factions. He spoke of the history of the mediating princes of Escalus, and the neutral status of Villafranca as a freetown.

He was telling me things I already knew, for I had grown hearing him instruct Tebaldo at table; but then I realised that my father had not been aware of my presence on any of those nights. He'd thought, then, of nothing but Tebaldo; I might as well not have been there. Now our acquaintance was beginning again, as if I had just been born, as if my mother had just brought me down, swaddled, from that starlit chamber.

I think I knew why. I began to realise that, much as he had loved Tebaldo, he had loved him less as a person and more as an heir. My father now had no successor. Could it be that, in the past weeks, I had proved myself to him? When I had been the chatelaine of his castle and had presided over his moot court, had he recognised that I, though a woman, had the faculties to run the place once he was gone? I could be
Princess
Escalus, and keep the peace; I could claim the ring from Tebaldo's hand, and balance the sword and the scales in his stead. My heart quickened. Could
this
be my destiny? Could a woman really rule here? What would a man like Benedick matter to Princess Escalus of Villafranca?

One night I determined to raise the matter with my father but he beat me to the lists. He clasped my hand across the table; something he had never done. ‘Beatrice, I am so glad you are home. For with your brother gone, you are to assume an important new role.'

My heart warmed to him for the first time. I returned the pressure. ‘Dear father.' I smiled. ‘I grieve for the son and brother we lost in Tebaldo. But I most gladly accept the mantle you have vouchsafed me. I will be a worthy heir.'

He gave a bark of laughter. ‘A mere woman! Heir to the principality and mediator of Verona? No, my dear.'

My heart sank, but I persisted. ‘But … you have heard me. In court, in conclave.'

He shook his head. ‘I was not listening. I have not heard a word. I have been
watching
you. You have grown into a beautiful and noble woman. That summer in Sicily put colour in your cheeks and life in your eyes; you have a good figure, fine hips.' He patted my hand, then removed his. ‘You will never be my heir, but you shall
bear
my heir. Now the issue is to get you married, and get a male child in your belly as soon as may be.'

Benedick:
The Angels. All Saints. Our Lady. Jesus. Holy Ghost. Most Holy Trinity. Santiago.

The weeks went by, and we repeated the seven watchwords until we had forgotten the proper names for the days of the week. Some days we felt that we were alone on this lonely sea, trapped in a drear grey vortex, doomed to sail for ever on our ship of fools without seeing another sail. On other days we would see another ship on the horizon, and the captain would raise his spyglass and read the ensign. ‘
San Juan de Sicilia
,' he'd say, ‘from the Levantine fleet,' or: ‘
La Asuncion,
from the Castilian ships.' Sometimes the sea fog would lift to show us ten or twenty such vessels and I realised there were many more of us in misfortune's flotilla. And some were not as lucky as we – when the
San Juan
went away from us on a rogue wind, I saw she had a red wake. She was sailing wounded, and I wondered what terrible injuries had befallen the crew, that their lifeblood could dye the very seas.

The weather was dire, even though it was high summer, and I wondered how the English survived from one year's end to the next without seeing the sun. We shivered in our ragged silks, for no one had thought to don furs in July. We were battered day and night by howling winds, driving rain and even hailstones.

Water was never in shortage, for in this grim weather our rainbutts were ever full. The greatest privation was the lack of
food. I had never been hungry in my life before this week. Though my family were but gentlemen stock in Padua we always had a groaning board, and I always had a reputation as a trencherman. Tall and broad as I was, starvation took a cruel toll upon my frame. My stomach was constantly growling from hunger, my mouth dry as dust; and it was difficult to ignore my twisting innards long enough to sleep. My dreams in the first week were of Leonato's feasting table – even the strange dishes of Sicily seemed as manna to me now. In the second week I dreamed of roasting a spit of Babieca over an open fire, and of eating my faithful horse's haunches till the juices ran down my chin. In the third week I dreamed dreadful dark dreams that made me wake with shame, dreams which I would speak of to no one, dreams of tearing my fellow sailors limb from limb and eating their flesh raw.

I had my comforts. Sicily now became the place I went to in my mind. Once I had thought I never wished to go back there, that I never even wanted to hear tell of the place. But now I spent my days there. I would volunteer to guard the rations for the quartermaster, and would sit atop the trapdoor to the hold. Deprived of sleep at night, I would doze in the daytime with my back to the mainmast, huddled in sackcloth against the wind, thinking of the sun, always the sun. Now the summer in Messina assumed a golden haze to me. And dancing through those days, I saw Beatrice, always Beatrice, twirling in her starlight dress, the sun glinting in her tumbling blond curls. It seemed not to matter now that I dreamed of another man's wife. In my dreams, she was mine. These were fantasies, insubstantial reveries. No one would know how I comforted myself. It seemed likely that I would die on this ship. We would all die. My memories were all I had.

My recollections of Sicily led me to thoughts of the prince, too. I had not seen Don Pedro since the day we drowned the horses. I knew he lived, for I made sure he had double rations
each day, but I charged one of the crew to serve him; I had no wish to see him, and he did not emerge even once.

I began to think of our times in Messina. Had he always been beyond reproach? I recalled the time that he had duped me into spying on Beatrice and the lady Guglielma at the Tarantella, a ‘jape' that had led to the dark lady's death. And if he was wrong then, could he have been mistaken about Beatrice? No; for I had seen her in the poet's arms right on the very spot where she had once embraced me. Surely I could trust my own eyes? I could not lay every sin at the prince's door.

And yet, there was little doubt that, through his cutting of the anchor – an act of panic and, yes, cowardice – he had put our lives in very great peril. He was not the prince I had thought him. He was a puppet, just as I had seen in Sicily, all shiny armour and wind and roar, but no substance. I thought then of the strange Spanish knight who had prepared us for the Naumachia. He had tried to tell me that true honour did not live in the outward show. And yet I had tied my banner to an empty kettle. Such thoughts kept me wakeful as much as my hunger.

At night I now escaped my tortured bed and I began to sit out on deck in the very same place that I spent my days. I would wrap myself in sackcloth and look at the skies. The moon was untrustworthy, shifting every night, waxing and waning, serving only to tell me of the passage of time, of the rations that were fast running out. It was Santiago today; by next Santiago we would have even less to eat. Would we then turn on each other, as savages did in the Africas, as we had in my nightmare, and devour the flesh from each other's limbs?

I looked at my fellow sailors, who were using those very limbs to play a desultory game of
Scopa
on the moonlit deck. I had not the heart to join in. I could not hold the
settebello
in my hand – the card would burn me. I had given my best card to one woman, and one woman alone – I could not hand it to a scruffy
sailor. I missed Beatrice with a dreadful pang at that moment, and decided to look for her in the stars.

I sought the constellation she had shown me, that wonderful, terrible night on the dunes. I tilted my head back to rest on the mainmast. I stared up at the stars studding the night until my eyes watered. I had thought, before this night, that the stars were uniform, regular diamonds sprinkled across the heavens. That night I learned that some twinkled and glimmered, some did not. Some were diamonds indeed, but some were yellow, some red, some green. The sky was a treasure house.

At last among the gems I found Cassiopeia's chair just above the fighting top upon the mast. I remembered the story of the vain queen seated in her silver throne, who was enamoured of her own beauty. By the foot of the chair sparkled Beatrice's star, the
stella nova
that had appeared at the hour of her birth. It seemed to shine bright and constant. But if the moon was tricky, unfaithful, were the stars to be trusted? Could I rely on Beatrice's star?

I went back to the cabin and gathered writing materials. I had expected to use these instruments to write blithe letters home, or even to Beatrice, to tell her of my magnificent exploits. Now I took them on deck with a hurricane lamp and by its light I wrote our course, the watchword of the day, and a picture of Cassiopeia's constellation riding directly above the mast. I annotated my charts with our speed and wind direction. If the heavens
were
fixed, perhaps, this way, the constant stars could guide us home. ‘
Constant stars …
' I scribbled,
‘in them I read such art…'
I scribbled till the small hours, but somehow in the darkest part of the night, when the stars were brightest and biggest, somewhere in my scribblings science turned to poetry and my sextant to a sestet. Before I knew it, in the marginalia of my almanac were the beginnings of a sonnet. I woke at dawn, stiff in the sacking, and read over my words in the grey dawnlight; my writings seemed to be more about Beatrice than the stars,
and I could see where the pen had trailed away and I had finally slept. But at least I
had
slept, untroubled by hunger-fuelled nightmares.

But on that next morning of The Angels, we found another man dead. Hunger had already taken a dozen of the crew, and this one, like them, was thrown from the bows without even a prayer to follow him into the water. We were too weak to even observe his passing.

We who were left were a sorry collection of knights. Our hair and beards grew long and unkempt, and we could not wash our persons or our clothes unless we wished to clamber into the icy sea. This was a perilous undertaking, for it was necessary to cling on to the ropes, for which we had no strength. And if the waves did not take you, you would almost certainly catch a chill; shivering through the night in wet attire. Disease was rife aboard ship, and we had had to cast as many corpses overboard in the last month from the fever as from starvation. Our ship's surgeon, with little regard for his obligations, was one of the first to die; and those that lived suffered greatly – weeping sores, hacking coughs and buckled limbs were commonplace. It was not unusual to see a tooth lying upon the deck where it had fallen from diseased gums. It was as if, having no food to chew upon, our incisors had become redundant.

As we neared Scotland there was no more leisure to daydream. Because of the poor quality of our charts we were compelled to hug the coasts, so there was the constant fear of running aground. The Scottish shoreline seemed an infinity of the same sooty cliffs, the same rocky beaches, the same alien seabirds which mocked us with their screeching cries day and night but never stooped low enough for us to catch them for food. Sometimes strange peoples, savages in fur and plaid, would wade into the sea and hurl missiles at us. Fortunately no one in Scotland seemed to own an arquebus or a cannon, so we were never in any real danger; but although the missiles never reached
us the force of their hatred did, and I was forced for the first time to question Philip's conception of the loyalties in the north.

Claudio, the captain and I had discussed, many times, the notion of appealing for supplies in Scotland, for the king had maintained that in those lands the natives were more loyal to the true religion than the red-haired queen. But these fire-eyed savages were openly hostile, and looked as if they were more likely to worship a tree or a rock than the Catholic God. And yet; I wondered how we looked to them, almost as savage, I'd warrant. I myself had not prayed since I asked God to shift us from the fire ships. And the crew were a godless lot; the chaplain had followed the surgeon into a briny grave in short order, and thus our souls as well as our bodies were forfeit. I had not heard mass said once upon the ship. I wondered whether the Spanish were really any more godly than the inhabitants of this beleaguered island.

Claudio was the one devout on this heretic ship. I often caught him at prayer when I knocked at his cabin, and he would always finish his devotions unashamedly and cross himself before he rose to greet me. As the men became less observant he became more so; and, perhaps as a reaction to the savages and the dark and hellish crags, he began to say mass on deck every morning and night with the zeal of a missionary. Some men came along to hear him and prayed fervently, eyes squeezed tight shut, as they asked God and Santiago for deliverance. Some came along for the familiarity of the words – the balm of acquaintance took them, for that brief half-hour, home again to their village church or their family chapel. Some came along, as I did myself, to make a landmark in their day; to relieve the unknowable tedium of those hours on a cold grey sea, to differentiate between the hour that had gone before and the hour that was to come. Claudio cut a noble figure – he was as bearded and as long haired as the rest of us; but on him the state of keen hunger gave new planes to his face, and he
assumed the air of a religious ascetic. He officiated well, and I remembered with a jolt he was the nephew of an archbishop.

Claudio and I took to meeting each night, now that it was too cold to go upon deck, in his cabin or mine. We invited the captain but each time he demurred until we stopped asking him. I suspected that, with his strict adherence to rank, Bartoli thought that he should not mix with officers. I thought that we had sailed past such conventions; besides, Claudio and I were not so noble. I was of a gentleman's family, and Claudio was a count of commerce, ennobled by trade and moneylending, a baron of the banknote. But the captain clung to the chain of command as if it were a rescue rope that would save him from the deeps. I wondered whether it had become his comfort, as Sicily and Beatrice were mine; if he let it go, he would be lost.