Beatrice and Benedick (50 page)

‘Is he here?'

‘Gone,' he said. ‘But there might have been another death today; he was out for the prince's blood.'

‘Don Pedro?'

‘Yes. In the name of his mother.'

So Michelangelo had come for the prince's heart – a true Sicilian. ‘And you dissuaded him?'

‘For now.' He would not explain further, but changed his tack. ‘Besides, there are matchings to achieve, before any dispatchings.'

I took his hand, for there was something that must be said before we left the subject of the prince. ‘Don Pedro proposed to me too,' I said. ‘That morning in the gardens when he told me of your mistaking, and the
Scopa
cards.'

Benedick clenched his hand around mine, hurting me. ‘I should have let the poet dispatch him,' he hissed through his teeth. ‘I should have lifted the latch and let him in – I should have folded back his princely ruff and guided the very blade into his throat.'

I prised his fingers loose, gently. ‘Shush, my love. Does not his confession of the wrongs he did us mitigate the forehand sin?'

He stood, agitated, and began to pace. ‘Sin! His sins are many! So numerous I could not recount …' He checked himself; turned and sat, breathing hard as if he had been running.

‘What is it? Tell me?'

He pressed his lips together and shook his head. ‘I may not. I have withdrawn my service from him, but I once gave him my word, and I cannot withdraw that, though other men may do so. Only death may release a vow. Or …' He stopped suddenly, and took my hand again.

‘Or?'

‘If the person you promised releases you.' He reached into his doublet, and drew out the
settebello.
He put it in my palm, and we both looked at the seven colourful coins on the face. I knew what the gesture meant before he spoke.

‘Beatrice, I cannot kill Claudio. He made a mistake. I made one once, and spent my worst words upon you. Would you have had me die for my slanders?'

‘No,' I whispered.

‘Would you have Claudio die?'

Now my anger had diminished, I knew I did not want the count's life. I had no appetite for his heart. I tucked the
settebello
into my bodice, next to mine. ‘No. I would not have him die. But,' I said, holding up a hand to pre-empt his embrace, ‘he must repent. Does Hero's father know the truth of the matter?'

‘The Watch made their report, but they are such haphazards that I had to make another, before he was fully furnished with the facts. I told Leonato all, and that Hero was alive and well. He is even now on his way here, to comfort his dear daughter.'

I caught the irony in his tone, and wondered how to face my uncle. I had avoided him since the wedding mass, for if anything his conduct had been worse than Claudio's. He had believed, upon the instant, the slanders of the two gentlemen, and struck Hero to the ground without once asking for her testimony. He had taken the word of a brace of nobles with whom he had been acquainted for a summer's lease, against a daughter he had known for seventeen years. He had wished Hero dead, and, which was worse, had wished her never born. A morsel of me did wonder how he would bring her back into his grace without loss of face, now the error was proven.

As if in answer to my question Leonato burst through the door, his cloak and sleeves trailing, swept past Benedick and myself, and clattered down the stone stairs to the crypt. By tacit agreement we followed, and reached the doorway in time to see Leonato scoop Hero from her bed, and clasp her to his breast. ‘My Hero!' he said, choking. ‘My innocent child; I knew all along that you were belied!'

His bearded brother Antonio, who had followed wheezing behind, sniffed happily, a tear rheuming his eye. ‘Wondrous!' he spluttered.

‘Yes,' I said heavily from the doorway. ‘Most affecting.'

‘And you will still marry the count?' My uncle's first question
to his resurrected daughter did not surprise me one jot. ‘He was innocent in this, as was the prince; the fault of it all lies with Don John the Bastard, who is fled to Aragon.'

It was time for me to intervene. I walked forward. ‘Not without repentance, Uncle.'

My uncle looked up, bemused. ‘But she made no real error – a few Hail Marys upon her knees shall meet the case.'

The friar entered the cell at this instant, and Leonato appealed to him. ‘Brother Friar, my daughter would make confession before her wedding. Are you at leisure for a shrift?'

‘Not
Hero
,' I said with biting emphasis. ‘It is the
count
who must repent.'

‘Claudio?' My uncle was all amazement. ‘But he and the prince were themselves mightily abused by John the Bastard. He made an honest mistake.'

‘Mistake it may have been, but there was no honesty in it. He spoke words to your daughter that should have you reaching for your sword, not your wedding suit.'

Leonato looked, for a moment, shamefaced – recalling, I hope, that his own words at the altar had matched Claudio's for venom. ‘Then, Niece, what do you suggest?'

I walked to the bed, and some instinct made me speak low. ‘Let us preserve, for now, the fiction that Hero is dead. Let us tell Claudio he is to marry another – but he can neither see her nor speak to her before he takes her in hand.'

‘Yes!' said Leonato. ‘We shall tell him he is to marry my brother's child, heir to both our fortunes. Brother Antonio, will you serve?'

‘No, Uncle.' I sensed that Leonato's guilt gave me a little more latitude with him than usual. ‘He is
not
to be offered an heiress, nor a beauty. He was offered before a flawless maid with a fortune and a fair face and he rejected her most cruelly. Let us offer him a woman he does not know at all. No fortune, no chastity, no loveliness, no nobility. He must take a woman,
just. Any vice of our sex may lurk beneath the veils, and he must accept us for all that we are. Then, and only then, may he claim the prize he lost.'

‘What will this serve?'

‘He wants beauty and money – let us see how how he shifts when he is offered neither. Let us measure how sorry he is. And before all this, he must mourn she who is gone.'

‘But Cousin, I am here!' Hero was bright cheeked and merry eyed again, quite different from the grey little spectre I had nursed a quarter of the bells ago.

‘And so you are. But
Claudio
does not know that you live.' I cupped her face; her newly radiant beauty was framed in the wimple like the bevel of a looking glass –
sans
hair,
sans
ornament, the delicately modelled features of her face were more striking than ever. ‘What man would lose such a prize, and marry another the next day, unmoved? No, he must visit your tomb tonight, do obeisance to your bones, and mourn –
truly
mourn – from evening until dawn. And then, on the morrow, he must make his judgement of three veiled ladies; I will make one, Margherita – for her sins – another, and you, Cousin, will be the prize.'

Benedick stepped from the shadows. ‘I will do any modest office to help the lady Hero to live again.'

The friar stepped forth. ‘And I.'

I looked pointedly at my uncle, where he sat with his arms wreathed around Hero. He shrugged and sighed all at once. ‘And I.'

‘One thing more,' I said. ‘
All
of Messina must know she is innocent. They all saw her belied at the wedding, now all must see her redeemed at her funeral. We should invite the general populace to the wake, and Claudio must admit his mistake, for all to hear. I myself will devise diverse words for him to proclaim.'

‘Niece,' wheedled my uncle, ‘is it necessary to shame the count so?'

I turned on him. ‘Shame?' I cried. ‘What of Hero's shame? Shall her slander live, and walk around, increasing richly with every whisper and shred of gossip, while her chaste memory dwindles in the grave? No, Uncle. The truth must have its day.'

Leonato, as I'd known he would, agreed to my device. Benedick went to tell Claudio of his reprieve and the conditions of his penance, and I went back into the nave to say a private word to Mary.

For there would be prayers said this night not just for Hero, but for a woman whose ashes
did
lie in the monument, a woman who
had
been slain by slander, and rendered into dust by the fires of faith. I looked up at the plaster Virgin, who'd been patiently holding on to her son's offal all this time. I touched the ruby heart, and it was quite, quite cold.

Benedick:
The procession of torches reached as far as the eye could see, a golden serpent winding high up the hill until the flames nearly merged with the stars.

The night was warm, but Claudio wore a full cope of black, as velvet as the dark. Below the hood his face was as pale as glass.

We trudged dolefully up the mount, with the lutenists singing their melancholy songs, and I marvelled at how this piece of theatre that we had constructed could act upon the spirits. Beatrice, also in black, walked beside Leonato, whose old eyes were rheumy with tears. For this night alone, for all of us, Hero was dead. Something had gone from us – an innocence perhaps.

At length we reached the
Cimiterio Monumentale,
with the glittering bay laid out below us. All colours were muted as if the very pigments themselves mourned for Hero. The trees were agate, the sky indigo, the volcano ochre, their shades leaching into the sea and land; libations of grief.

We stopped beside the little tomb of milky stone. The curlicued iron gates had so recently been opened to admit Hero's mother, and dead flowers for Innogen still clung to the wrought metal. Inside the tomb votive candles burned in a false wake for Hero.

Claudio passed his torch to me and I took it, stern faced. In the days that had passed since I had given him his reprieve we had reverted to our relationship not of shipboard but of last
summer. He was now a green boy again, and I his elder, so among the things to mourn tonight was the loss of our brotherhood.

But in exchange I had found something infinitely more dear. Claudio went to my lady now, and Beatrice, her face shrouded by her cowl, handed him a scroll. Claudio knelt before the gates and broke the seal on the scrip, unrolled the parchment, and read the words aloud, his voice constricted with unshed tears.

He speared the paper on one of the iron curlicues on the gate, so that the words could remain there until the weather took them. I looked from these runes of grief to Don Pedro, directly, accusingly; as if drawn, his eyes met mine, but he dropped his gaze first.

‘
Hang thou there upon the tomb
,' finished Claudio. ‘
Praising her when I am dumb
.'

The last syllable choked him completely; his voice cracked and he could speak no more. He nodded to the friar, who raised his reedy voice in a solemn hymn. And then his features seemed to collapse, and the count wept. His breath, the very breath that had killed Hero, was expelled from him in great, racking sobs. I wondered whether he had cried like that when his mother left – I would warrant that he certainly had not cried like that since. It was passing strange, for there was nothing unmanly in his grief; I thought more, not less, of him for this manifestation.

I looked to Beatrice. I wanted to know whether she saw what I saw. Her hood had slipped back a little, her face golden in the light of her torch. Claudio, though he did not know it, was soon
to be her cousin, and I hoped she could someday forgive him for his transgressions. Her eyes met mine; of all the changed colours I had seen that night, only her eyes retained their profound blue, true as summer skies. She nodded, very slightly, clearly moved. She recognised real grief, real remorse. Claudio had taken only the first steps along the path to penance, but he was on the way to being forgiven.

I thought then:
Hero should have been here.
Not many of us get the opportunity to attend our own funeral, but she would have seen something in Claudio's remorse that would have touched her closely. And yet, we could not have risked her presence, for if she had been seen, our scheme would have been undone.

The friar's hymn ended with a heavy refrain, the mourners turned and the golden serpent wound away down the hill. I thought that the prince, who had looked shamefaced throughout the ceremony, would insist upon staying for the vigil. But he was one of the first to leave, his eyes darting quickly from side to side. He drew his hood closely about his face and shuffled himself into the pack of mourners. He looked hunted.

Claudio and I were alone that night. On that dark hillside, with the glittering bay below as though the stars had fallen, I had the time and space to think. In the many long dark hours that followed I thought of death, of mine and Beatrice's.

She had told me once of the tombs in her father's city, tombs she used to pass as a child, knowing she would one day rest there. And although I thought this southern monument was no bad place to lie, with the bay below and the smoking mountain above, I knew that, in truth, the only place I wanted to spend eternity was at Beatrice's side, rotting in the northern soils of Verona until our bones combined.

I watched, and dozed, while Claudio prayed. He prayed all night like a true penitent; his head bent, his hands clasped so tight that his knuckles showed white, his lips ever moving. And then at last the sky paled, and with the dawn everything
resumed its proper colour, painted in by the busy sun. All the grey, and the black, and the thoughts of death were chased away by the colour. My spirits lifted. It was Claudio's wedding day, and mine too.