Beatrice and Benedick (47 page)

‘Never, my lord!' cried Leonato in confusion. ‘I would never serve a guest so in my house.'

‘And if you served me a rotten orange, what would you expect me to do?'

With a dreadful premonition, I suddenly knew where this catechism tended.

‘I would expect you to refuse it.'

‘Then, Leonato, I refuse your daughter.' Beatrice let out a cry, and a gasp rippled around the chapel. ‘Her skin is unblemished, I grant you.' Claudio stroked Hero's cheek in a gesture that should have been tender, was not. ‘But she is rotten to the very core – pips, pith, flesh, all are tainted.' His stroking fingers moved down and grabbed Hero by the throat. ‘And if you press your fingers to the flesh, they sink right through, and inside is contagion, as decayed as a medlar.'

For a moment, we were all frozen in wonderment; then the whole church moved. Beatrice grabbed the count's hands where they squeezed the life from her cousin. Leonato leapt for his daughter, but whether in censure or defence I did not know, for he was prevented by the bear-like embrace of his brother Antonio. Don John's reaction was perhaps the oddest of all; he
simply walked out of the church, unhurriedly, discreetly, but with purpose. Only Don Pedro, of the whole company, was still, watching the scene being acted out as if he were at the playhouse.

I sprang forward and clasped Claudio's arms from behind – I was ever stronger than he but today he seemed not of this world; he tossed me about with the strength of a leviathan. I wrenched him away and pressed him against a pillar, while Beatrice cradled her choking cousin at the opposite pillar; so that these two young people, in a dreadful perversion of the sacrament of marriage, were holding up the church. The friar, in the centre of all, bellowed for silence. ‘What is this coil?' he cried; and I recalled in that moment that he used to be a soldier.

‘Only this,' spat Claudio over my shoulder at Hero. ‘What man was it, that you talked with at your window between the hours of twelve and one last night?'

Hero, white about the face but red in the throat where Claudio's fingers had grasped her, began to shake her head and weep.

‘Aye,' said Claudio. ‘Your guilt seeps from your eyes. What villain shared your bed?'

Leonato stumbled forward. ‘My lord, you must be mistaken.'

Now Don Pedro stepped forth. ‘No, Leonato. On my honour, we saw and heard your daughter on the balcony of her chamber, talking with a man and embracing him. Upon my honour, I swear it to be true.'

Now I could not be silent. ‘What men may do,' I mocked, smiling grimly. No one knew better than I how fallible the prince could be, how little his honour meant. I knew, and Claudio did too, that Don Pedro was not there in the hold on the day of the oranges, for he was craven in his cabin. I did not know, now, why they had formed this strange alliance.

‘What do you mean, Signor Benedick?' Don Pedro's tone was a warning.

‘Why, that it is no little thing, to swear upon one's
honour
,' I said. ‘For a prince to swear so, it is as if a bondsman swears upon his
allegiance
.' We locked eyes like a couple of scrapping toms, but Leonato jumped into the fray.

‘I myself would
never
doubt your honour, Prince,' he assured. ‘But there must, at the least, be some misprision. My niece is Hero's bridemaiden, and slept with her all night. Lady Beatrice?'

My heart plummeted with dread. Our starlit tryst had condemned Hero. I had spirited Beatrice away from her duty to her cousin. I did not know whether to speak or be silent. My instinct was to speak out, but I did not want to expose Beatrice to these same slanders. But my lady stood, straight as a willow wand. ‘As it happens, Uncle, I was from the chamber last night,' she said, clearly. ‘But I have for the last week been her bedfellow.'

‘Confirmed!' said Leonato.

There was an awful silence, punctuated only by Hero's piteous sobbing.

‘We spoke of honour just now,' said the prince softly. ‘And it will be to my eternal
dishonour
that I sponsored such a match, and linked my dear friend to a common stale.' Then Don Pedro took Claudio by the arm, and marched him from the church; a dreadful inversion for he should have left with Hero.

I only realised long afterwards that it had never occurred to me to follow them. I stayed, unthinking, with Beatrice. Leonato, with an awful cry, strode across the altar and struck Hero about the face. The poor lady swooned, and it was just as well, for Leonato proceeded to castigate her lifeless form; a terrible verbal muddle about Hero being an only child, about his wife Innogen's death, about his daughter being his hope of the future, a future now gone. The dreadful epithets poured from him: stale, whore, strumpet, hobbyhorse. His brother Antonio pulled him, still shouting, from the church. The drama done,
the playgoers left too, gossiping as they went, following their master.

The doors closed behind the congregation and there were just four of us left: Beatrice and Hero upon the ground and the friar upon his knees, where he spent his life.

I leaned over the little group. Hero was so small next to my lady that she near lay in Beatrice's arms like the Pietà. They formed a little circle of devastated womanhood, with the friar and me standing outside; well meaning but excluded from this primal, female distress. Hero's eyes fluttered and opened, and Beatrice embraced her with relief.

Hero looked up at her trustingly, like a child who has woken from a nightmare. ‘Beatrice? Am I wed?'

Beatrice shook her head. ‘No, dearest.'

And then I saw – we all saw – the dreadful realisation dawning upon Hero; that her nightmare was real. She wept anew. ‘How could he say that of me?' And there was no way to know whether she spoke of Claudio or her father. Beatrice shushed her like a child, but had no answer to give. ‘How can I go back there?' Hero whispered. ‘How can I live with such shame?'

‘You need not.' It was the friar who now spoke. ‘I think it best that you stay here for a while. You are right that such shame is too great for a living woman to bear; but a dead one may bear anything. We will give it abroad that you fell lifeless upon the count's words. Meantime those who love you can right your wrongs.' He looked pointedly from Beatrice to myself, then back to Hero. ‘Come. I will take you to my celleress – she will fit you with a habit.'

Hero followed, meekly, leaning on the friar's arm.

The plaster face of St James looked down on us from the rood screen, his face lit with pride, well pleased with his chivalrous knights and their deeds today.

Beatrice:
Benedick and I were alone at the altar.

The irony was not lost upon me; we had planned to be standing exactly here, to be joined by the friar in matrimony. The prayer book was on the steps where it had fallen from the good monk's hand, his place in the marriage mass lost. Somewhere in those pages was enfolded that particular form of words that would have bound us for ever; special, binding runes that could take a man and a woman and couple them unto death. But different words had been uttered here on this altar; dark, terrible words. Accusations, slanders.

‘Words, words, words,' I said. ‘Words kill on this island.'

‘But, Beatrice.' Benedick came to me and pushed his hand into my hair. ‘Hero is not dead in truth. Her demise is but a device of the friar's.'

‘Don't you understand? She
is
dead,' I said. ‘Her honour was everything, and it is gone. In Sicily even the
suggestion
of dishonour is enough to stain a woman for life. She has been publicly denounced as a whore in church – at the
altar.
Who will take her now? She is utterly undone.' I began to shake. That barbaric test of my maidenhead that I'd endured in my father's castle, was that better or worse than this southern way? In the north, noblewomen had certain freedoms, but must endure such examinations before marriage. In the south a spotless
reputation
was all; and I would not believe that Hero had jeopardised hers
with the slightest lightness of conduct. ‘The count must have made an error,' I stated flatly.

Benedick ran a finger down the rough stone pillar. ‘He, the prince, Don John, all of them must have seen
something
.'

‘Two of them have the very bent of honour,' I said. Benedick did not reply. ‘I know nothing of the third, for he is too like an image and says nothing.'

‘And he left the church as soon as may be. Perhaps he is the root of all.'

‘Yet how could the prince and Claudio speak so?'

‘You said it yourself. The prince has the
bent
of honour only,' he said enigmatically.

I was too agitated to take his meaning. ‘If I had not this trinity of pretty villains to blame,' I said, low voiced, ‘I would make myself a fourth. I should have been in her bed.'

‘You cannot regret our meeting!' Benedick cried.

‘No. Never that. And yet …'

He came to me and took both my hands in his. ‘As for the princes, I do not know. But I feel it in my marrow that Claudio was mistaken; and there is no sin in mistaking. I will make enquiries.'

I slumped, suddenly, sitting down heavily on the stone steps. ‘It hardly matters,' I muttered. ‘The sin is not in the mistaking. The sin is in the rejoinder.'

Benedick sat beside me on the church steps, his shoulder pressed to mine. ‘Could you explain your meaning?' he asked, gently.

‘If there has been some misprision, and if we discover that Claudio was tricked, then what? He is not guiltless, whatever the case.' I sprang to my feet and pointed to the sacred steps we stood upon. ‘How could he bring her here, all the way here to the altar, and accuse her in public, to shame and dishonour her in front of not only her kin but all her household too? How could he tell everyone, from her father to the boy who cleans
her boots, that she has known the heat of a bed?' I began to pace the nave in my agitation. ‘Say he was mistaken, what then? Should my cousin take him in hand, and lead him to the altar once again? Who could forgive so much? Who could overlook such words? What woman could forget being held about the throat until the marks of his fingers are imprinted there? Or being spat upon? Or being called so many different names for whore?' I shook my head, and a little diamond star fell from my curls to the stones. I ignored it. ‘I had not known there were so many different words for the same sin. The words were worst of all, worse than the blows. The friar said it all; he exhorted us to let Claudio think she had died upon his words. Well; she did. His slanders ran her through more keenly than a blade. Hero the maid
is
dead. And now Claudio must pay.'

I walked away from Benedick for a moment, the heat of my own anger frightening me. My heart raced – but I did not swoon. I felt as a man must feel as he goes into battle. Had Benedick felt this way when he leapt from ship to ship at the armada, when he had seen combat so terrible that he would never speak of it?

I looked at the familiar statue of Mary holding her son's beating heart in her plaster hand. The heart was a ruby as big as a gull's egg, cut and faceted and red as congealed blood. I remembered one such from the Vara; the Sacred Heart. Hero had been dressed as the Virgin that day. And now her purity had been called into question. I had had enough.

I knew I had a self-serving character, had thought of little else but mine own heart for the last year. I had sat silently in the courtroom and watched a good woman be condemned for witchcraft. I had forgiven Tebaldo's killer for the sake of peace, for which mercy my other cousin Giulietta had thanked me upon her knees. But I could not let Claudio's transgression go by. I wished I could wink at his actions, marry Benedick in secret and take him back to Villafranca. But who would speak
for Hero now, if I did not? My cousin had just lost her mother, the last and only strong woman in her life. What would be left to her if I abandoned her now, dishonoured, disenfranchised, dispossessed? I knew I had reached my sticking place; that here, at last, was something more important than the joining of our two hearts. I must gamble upon Benedick's love for Hero's sake; for the sake of all my sex.

I took a deep breath. ‘They eat hearts here, you know. In Sicily.' I tried to quiet my own beating organ, to keep my voice steady. ‘They have a tradition of blood vengeance. It is swift, without drama. And threats are spoken softly and without emotion; but they are always,
always
carried out. When you say you will eat someone's heart, you are ordering someone's death.' I kept my eyes on the ruby. ‘Murder, the end of another human being. And when you speak this dire utterance, you are making a pledge; either that you will carry it out, or a kinsman will carry it out on your behalf. But it will be done.' I looked up at Mary, sorrowing, benign, untroubled by the offal in her hand. ‘Guglielma Crollalanza said it, do you remember?'

‘Who?'

‘The poet's mother, as she burned at the stake. She said it to Claudio's uncle, the Archbishop of Monreale. And now I will say it to Claudio.'

I turned and looked at Benedick. My voice was shaking, but I said the thing in the Sicilian way; quietly, no emotion. I spoke not to God, nor his mother; but to Claudio, wherever he had gone to cage his fury. ‘
Ti manciu ‘u cori, Claudio.
I would eat his heart, if I could,' I said with deliberate relish. ‘I would eat his heart, yes, in the very marketplace, so that everyone from the Governor of Messina to the boot-boy could see me do it. I would choke down every gout of flesh, every artery, and drink the attendant blood.'

Benedick put his hand over my mouth, gently, as you might treat a cursing child, to stop the terrible words pouring forth.

‘Shush, shush! Dear Beatrice, you are beside yourself. We speak of Hero, not the dark lady.'