Juliet (17 page)

Turning abruptly down a random street, I was able to pick up movement and the shape of a man out of the corner of my eye. Unless I was very much mistaken, it was the same thug who had followed me a few days earlier, when I had left the bank in Palazzo Tolomei carrying my mother’s box. My brain had obviously filed our previous encounter under danger, and now that it recognized his shape and gait, it set off a deafening evacuation alarm that forced all rational thoughts from my head and made me pull off my shoes and—for the second time that night—start running.

   [   III.II   ]

Siena
,
A.D
. 1340

T
HE NIGHT WAS RIPE WITH MISCHIEF
.

As soon as Romeo and his cousins were out of sight of the Marescotti tower, they threw themselves around a street corner, gasping with laughter. It had been far too easy for them to escape the house this evening, for Palazzo Marescotti was bustling with family visitors from Bologna, and Romeo’s father, Comandante Marescotti, had grudgingly put on a banquet with musicians to entertain the lot. After all, what did Bologna have to offer that Siena could not deliver tenfold?

Knowing very well that they were, once again, violating the Comandante’s curfew, Romeo and his cousins paused to strap on the gaudy carnival masks they always wore on their nightly escapades. As they stood there, struggling with knots and bows, the family butcher walked by with a rack of ham for the party and an assistant carrying a torch, but he was too wise to recognize the youngsters. One day, Romeo would be the master of Palazzo Marescotti and the one who paid for its deliveries.

When the masks were finally in place, the young men put their velvet hats back on, adjusting both pieces for greatest possible concealment. Grinning at the sight of his friends, one of them picked up the lute he had been carrying and struck a few merry chords.
“Giu-hu-hu-lietta!”
he sang in a teasing falsetto.
“I would I were thy bi-hi-hird, thy little wanton bi-hi-hi-hi-hird
—”
He made a few birdlike hops, causing everyone but Romeo to gag with laughter.

“Very funny!” scowled Romeo. “Keep jesting at my scars and I’ll give you a few of your own!”

“Come on,” said someone else, champing at the bit, “if we don’t hurry, she will be in bed, and your serenade will be nothing but a lullaby.”

Measured in footsteps alone, their journey this evening was not long, barely five hundred strides. But in terms of everything else, it was an odyssey. Despite the late hour, the streets were crawling with people—locals mingling with foreigners, buyers with sellers, pilgrims with thieves—and on every corner stood a prophet with a wax candle, condemning the material world while eyeing every passing prostitute with the same stern prohibition one finds in dogs watching the movements of a long string of sausage.

Elbowing their way up the street, jumping over a gutter here, a beggar there, and ducking under deliveries and sedan chairs, the young men at length found themselves stalled on the edge of Piazza Tolomei. Stretching to see why the crowd stood still, Romeo caught a glimpse of a colorful figure bobbing to and fro in the black night air on the front steps of the church of San Cristoforo.

“Look!” said one of his cousins. “Tolomei has invited San Cristoforo to dinner. But he is not dressed up. Shame on him!”

They all watched in awe as the torch-lit procession from the church made its way across the piazza towards Palazzo Tolomei, and Romeo suddenly knew that here was his chance to enter the forbidding house through the front door rather than standing around stupidly beneath Giulietta’s presumed window. A long line of self-important people trailed behind the priests carrying the saint, and they were all wearing carnival masks. It was commonly known that Messer Tolomei held masked balls every few months in order to sneak banished allies and lawless family members into his house. Had he not, he would scarcely have been able to fill the dancing floor.

“We are clearly,” said Romeo, rallying his cousins, “suspended by the talons of Fortuna. Either that, or she is helping us along only to squash us utterly in a moment and have a good laugh. Come!”

“Wait!” said one of his cousins. “I fear—”

“You fear too early!” Romeo cut him off. “On, lusty gentlemen!”

The confusion on the front steps of the church of San Cristoforo was exactly what Romeo needed in order to steal a torch from a cresset and fall on his unsuspecting prey: an older widow with no companion in sight. “Please,” he said, offering his arm. “Messer Tolomei is anxious to ensure your comfort.”

The woman seemed not at all displeased with the promising muscularity of his arm and the bold smiles from his companions. “That would be the first time,” she said, with some dignity. “But I may say, he is certainly making amends.”

It would seem impossible to those who had not seen it with their own eyes, but upon entering their palazzo Romeo had to conclude that the Tolomeis had actually managed to out-fresco the Marescottis. Not only did every single wall tell yet another story about Tolomei triumphs in the past and Tolomei piety in the present, but even the ceilings were vessels of god-fearing self-promotion. Had Romeo been alone, he would have put his head back and gawked at the myriads of exotic creatures traversing this private Heaven. As it were, he was not alone; fully armed, liveried guards stood at attention along every wall, and the fear of detection was enough to check his audacity and ensure that he paid the widow the necessary compliments as they lined up for the opening dance.

If the widow had wondered about Romeo’s exact status before—the reassuring quality of his clothes had been somewhat compromised by the suspect manner in which he had obtained her company—at least now, poised for dancing, his bearing assured her of his noble birth.

“What luck I have tonight,” she muttered, careful that no one overheard her but he. “But tell me, did you come hither with some particular venture in mind, or are you merely here to … dance?”

“I confess,” said Romeo smoothly, promising neither too much nor too little, “I am sinfully fond of dancing. I swear, I could go on for hours without a rest.”

The woman laughed discreetly, satisfied for now. As the dance went on, she took more liberties with him than he would have liked, occasionally running her hand over his velvet exterior searching for something more solid underneath, but Romeo was too distracted to fend her off.

His one and only interest this evening was to find the young woman whose life he had saved, and whose lovely features Maestro Ambrogio had all but captured in a marvelous portrait. The Maestro had refused to
tell him her surname, but it had not taken Romeo long to sniff it out on his own. No more than a week had gone by since the girl’s arrival before the rumor was all over town that Messer Tolomei had brought a foreign beauty to mass on Sunday morning—a foreign beauty with eyes as blue as the ocean, and whose name was Giulietta.

Looking around the room once more—a cornucopia of beautiful, swirling women in garish dresses and men poised to catch them—Romeo was at a loss to understand why the girl was nowhere to be seen. Surely, a flower such as she would be going from arm to arm, never free to sit down; the only challenge would be to liberate her from all the other young men craving her attention. It was a challenge Romeo had met many times before, and a game he relished.

Patience was always his initial move, like a Greek prince before the walls of Troy, patience and endurance while all the other contenders in turn made themselves ridiculous. Then would come first contact, a teasing touch of a knowing smile, conspiring with her against them. Later, a long gaze from across the room, a dark, unsmiling stare, and, by God, the next time their hands met in the chain of the dance, her heart would be pounding so wildly in her chest that he could trace its flight up her naked neck. And there, just there, was where he would place his first kiss …

But even Romeo’s Homeric patience was taxed to oblivion as dance after dance came around, rotating everybody like celestial bodies and creating every possible constellation amongst the dancers, except the very one he was hoping for. Since all were masked he could not be completely sure, but from what was visible of their hair and smiles, the girl he had come to woo was not among them. To miss her this evening would be a disaster, for nothing other than a masked ball would offer him this clandestine admittance to Palazzo Tolomei, and he would be back to singing serenades beneath her balcony—wherever it might be—with a voice the Creator had never intended for song.

There was, of course, the danger that the rumor had misled him, and that the blue-eyed girl at mass had been someone else. If that were the case, his roostering around on Messer Tolomei’s dancing floor this evening was no more than a waste of time; the girl he had come to meet was most likely sweetly asleep in some other house in town. Romeo had almost begun to fear as much when suddenly—in the middle of a gallant
bow in the ductia—he was overtaken by a strong sensation of being watched.

Introducing a pivot where no pivot was required, Romeo let his eyes sweep the entire room. And now he finally saw it: A visage, half veiled in hair, was looking straight at him from the shades of the upstairs loggia. But no sooner had he recognized the oval form as the head of a woman than it withdrew into the shadows, as if fearing discovery.

He spun back to face his partner, flushed with excitement. Even though chance had afforded him but the faintest glimpse of the lady aloft, there was no doubt in his heart that the figure he had seen was that of the lovely Giulietta. And she had been looking at him, too, as if she somehow knew who he was and why he had come.

Another ductia took him around the room in cosmic majesty, and after that the estampia, before Romeo finally spotted a cousin in the crowd and managed to summon him with a piercing glare. “Where have you been?” he hissed. “Do you not see I am dying here?”

“You owe me thanks, not curses,” whispered the other, taking over the dance, “for this is a measly party with measly wine and measly women, and—wait!”

But Romeo was already on his way, deaf to discouraging words and blind to the widow’s reproachful gaze as he took flight. On a night like this, he knew, no doors were barred to a bold man. With all servants and guards employed on the ground floor, anything above it was to the lover what a forest pond is to the hunter: a sweet promise for the patient.

Up here, on the first floor, the dizzying fumes from the party below made the old young, the wise foolish, and the stingy generous, and as he walked through the upstairs gallery, Romeo passed by many a dark niche full of rustling silk and hushed giggles. Here and there a flash of white betrayed the strategic removal of garments, and, walking by a particularly salacious corner, he nearly stopped to stare, intrigued by the infinite flexibility of the human body.

The farther from the stairs he went, however, the more silent the corners, and when at last he entered the loggia overlooking the dancing floor, not a single person was left to be seen. Where Giulietta had stood, half concealed by a marble column, there was now only emptiness, and at the end of the loggia was a closed door that even he dared not open.

His disappointment was great. Why had he not extracted himself from the dance earlier, like a shooting star escaping the immortal boredom of the firmament? Why had he been so sure that she would still be here, waiting for him? Folly. He had told himself a story, and now was the time for its tragic end.

Just then, as he was turning to leave, the door at the end of the loggia opened, and a slender figure, hair ablaze, slipped through the doorway—like an ancient dryad through a crack in time—before it closed again with a hollow thud. For a moment there was no movement and no sound save the music downstairs, yet Romeo thought he could sense someone breathing, someone who had been startled to see him standing there, looming in the shadows, and who was now struggling to catch her breath.

Perhaps he should have spoken a word of comfort, but his excitement was too great to be harnessed with good manners. Rather than offering an apology for his intrusion, or even better, the name of the intruder himself, he merely tore off his carnival mask and stepped forward, eagerly, to draw her from the shade and finally unveil her living face.

She neither engaged him nor shrank away; instead she walked over to the edge of the balcony and looked down at the dancers. Encouraged, Romeo followed her, and when she leaned over the balustrade, he had the satisfaction of seeing her profile glowing with the lights from below. While Maestro Ambrogio might have exaggerated the lofty lines of her beauty, he had not done justice to the luminosity of her eyes, or the mystery of her smile. And the ripe softness of her breathing lips, certainly, he had left for Romeo to discover for himself.

“Surely this must be the famous court,” the girl now began, “of the king of cowards.”

Surprised by the bitterness of her voice, Romeo did not know what to answer.