Juliet (39 page)

She could hardly wait to do him such mortal harm that the bed would be covered in his blood rather than hers. But most important, she longed to drink in his reaction to his own mutilation before she plunged the blade right into his demonic heart.

After that, her plans were less defined. Because she had had no communication with Friar Lorenzo since the night after the Palio—and had found no other sympathetic ear in his absence—she knew that, in all likelihood, Romeo’s body was still lying unburied at the Tolomei sepulchre. It was conceivable that her aunt, Monna Antonia, had returned to Tebaldo’s grave the next day to pray and light a candle, but Giulietta rather suspected that, if her aunt had actually stumbled upon Romeo’s body, she—and the rest of Siena—would have heard about it, or, even more likely, witnessed the grieving mother dragging the body of her son’s
presumed murderer through the streets by the heels, strapped to her carriage.

WHEN SALIMBENI JOINED
Giulietta in the candlelit wedding chamber, she had barely finished her prayers, and had not yet found a suitable place to hide the knife. Turning to face the intruder, she was shocked to see him wearing little more than a tunic; the sight of him holding a weapon would have been less unsettling than that of his naked arms and legs.

“I believe it is custom,” she said, her voice shaking, “to allow your wife time to prepare herself—”

“Oh, I think you are quite ready!” Salimbeni closed the door and walked right up to her, taking her by the chin. He smiled. “No matter how long you make me wait, I will never be the man you want.”

Giulietta swallowed hard, nauseated by his touch and smell. “But you are my husband—” she began meekly.

“Am I now?” He looked amused, head to one side. “Then why do you not greet me more heartily, my love? Why these cold eyes?”

“I—” She struggled to get the words out. “I am not yet used to your presence.”

“You disappoint me,” he said, smiling obscurely. “They told me you would have more spirit than this.” He shook his head, feigning exasperation. “I am beginning to think you could grow to like me.”

When she did not respond, he ran a hand down to challenge the neckline of her wedding gown, seeking access to her bosom. Giulietta gasped when she felt his greedy fingers, and for a moment quite forgot her cunning plan of letting him believe he had conquered her.

“How dare you touch me, you stinking goat!” she hissed, working to pry his hands off her body. “God will not let you touch me!”

Salimbeni laughed delightedly at her sudden resistance and stuck a claw in her hair to hold her still while he kissed her. Only when she gagged with revulsion did he let go of her mouth and say, his sour breath warm against her face, “I will tell you a secret. Old God likes to watch.” With that he picked her up only to throw her down again on top of the bed. “Why else would he create such a body as yours, but leave it for me to enjoy?”

As soon as he let go of her to undo the belt around his tunic, Giulietta tried to crawl away. Unfortunately, when he pulled her back by the ankles, the knife became perfectly visible underneath her skirts, strapped to her thigh. The mere sight of it made its intended victim burst out laughing.

“A concealed weapon!” he exclaimed, pulling it free and admiring its flawless blade. “You already know how to please me.”

“You gutter pig!” Giulietta tried to take it from him and nearly cut herself. “It is mine!”

“Indeed?” He looked at her distorted face, his amusement growing. “Then go get it!” One quick throw later, the knife sat quivering in a wooden beam far out of reach, and when Giulietta tried to kick him in frustration, he pushed her right back down and pinned her against the cencio, easily evading her attempts at scratching him and spitting in his face. “Now, then,” he said, taunting her with false tenderness, “what other surprises do you have for me tonight, my dearest?”

“A curse!” she sneered, struggling to get her arms free. “A curse on everything you hold dear! You killed my parents, and you killed Romeo. You will burn in Hell all right, and I will shit on your grave!”

As she lay there helplessly, her weapon lost, looking up into the triumphant face of the man who ought, by now, to have been prostrate in a pool of blood, dismembered if not dead, Giulietta should have been despairing. And for a few ghastly moments, she was.

But then something happened. At first it was little more than a sudden warmth, penetrating her whole body from the bed below. It was a curious, prickling heat, as if she were lying on a skillet over a slow fire, and when the sensation deepened, it made her burst out laughing. For she suddenly understood that what she felt was a moment of religious ecstasy, and that the Virgin Mary was working a divine wonder through the cencio on which she was lying.

To Salimbeni, Giulietta’s maniacal laughter was far more unsettling than any insult or weapon she could possibly have hurled at him, and he slapped her across the face once, twice, even thrice, without accomplishing anything but to boost her mad amusement. Desperate to shut her up, he started tearing at the silk covering her bosom, but in his agitation was unable to solve the mystery of her apparel. Cursing the Tolomei tailors for the strength of their thread, he turned instead to her skirts, rifling through their intricate layers in search of a less fortified access point.

Giulietta did not even struggle. She just lay there, still chuckling, while Salimbeni made himself ridiculous. For she knew, with a certainty that could only come from Heaven itself, that he could not harm her tonight. No matter how determined he was to put her in her place, the Virgin Mary was by her side, sword drawn, to bar his invasion and protect the holy cencio from an act of barbarous sacrilege.

Chuckling again, she looked at her assailant with eyes full of jubilation. “Did you not hear me?” she asked, simply. “You are cursed. Can you not feel it?”

THE PEOPLE OF SIENA
knew very well that gossip is either a plague or an avenger, depending on whether you yourself are the victim. It is cunning, tenacious, and fatal; once you have been marked, it will stop at nothing to bring you down. If it cannot corner you in its present form, it will alter slightly and leap on you from aloft or below; it does not matter how far you run, or how long you crouch in silence: It will find you.

Maestro Ambrogio first heard the rumor at the butcher’s. Later that day, he heard it whispered at the baker’s. And by the time he returned home with his groceries, he knew enough to feel a need to act.

Putting aside his basket of food—all thoughts of dinner gone—he went straight into the back room of his workshop to retrieve the portrait of Giulietta Tolomei and put it back on the easel. For he had never completely finished it. Now he finally knew what she must hold in her piously folded hands; not a rosary, not a crucifix, but a five-petal rose, the rosa mistica. An ancient symbol for the Virgin Mary, this flower was thought to express the mystery of her virginity as well as her own immaculate conception, and in Maestro Ambrogio’s mind there existed no more appropriate emblem of Heaven’s patronage of innocence.

The troublesome task for the painter was always to represent this intriguing plant in a way that steered men’s thoughts towards religious doctrine, rather than distracting them with the alluring, organic symmetry of its petals. It was a challenge the Maestro embraced wholeheartedly, and as he began mixing his colors to produce the perfect shades of red, he did his best to purge his mind of anything but botany.

But he could not. The rumors he had heard around town were too marvelous—too welcome—for him not to enjoy them a little further. For
it was said that on the very eve of Salimbeni’s wedding to Giulietta Tolomei, Nemesis had paid a timely visit to the bridal chamber and had stopped, most mercifully, an act of unspeakable cruelty.

Some called it magic, others called it human nature or simple logic; whatever the cause, however, they all agreed on the effect: The groom had been unable to consummate the marriage.

The proofs of this remarkable situation, Maestro Ambrogio had been given to understand, were abundant. One had to do with Salimbeni’s movements, and it went like this: A mature man marries a lovely young girl and crowns their nuptials by joining her in the marriage bed. After three days he leaves the house and seeks a lady of the night, yet is unable to benefit from her services. When that lady kindly offers him an assortment of potions and powders, he cries out furiously that he has already tried them all, and that they are nothing but humbug. What could be concluded but that he had spent his nuptial night incapacitated, and that not even a consultation with a specialist had produced a cure?

Another proof of this presumed state of affairs came from a far more trustworthy quarter, for it had originated in Salimbeni’s own household. For as long as anyone cared to remember, it had been a tradition in that family to scrutinize the bedsheet after every wedding night to ensure that the bride had been a virgin. If there was no blood on the sheet, the girl would be returned to her parents in disgrace, and the Salimbenis would add yet another name to their long list of enemies.

On the morning after Salimbeni’s own wedding, however, no such sheet was displayed, nor was Romeo’s cencio waved around in triumph. The only one who knew of its fate was the servant who was ordered to deliver it in a box to Messer Tolomei that same afternoon, apologizing for its unjustified removal from Tebaldo’s corpse. And when finally, several days after the wedding, a piece of bloodstained linen was handed over to the chambermaid, who gave it to the housekeeper, who promptly gave it to the oldest grandmother of the house … then that old grandmother instantly dismissed it as a falsification.

The purity of a bride was so great a question of honor that it sometimes necessitated great deception, and so, all over town, grandmother was pitted against grandmother in developing and detecting the most convincing concoctions that could quickly be dabbed onto a nuptial sheet for lack of the real thing. Blood itself was not enough; it had to be
mixed with other substances, and every grandmother of every family had her own secret recipe as well as a method of detection. Like the alchemists of old, these women spoke not in mundane, but in magical terms; to them the eternal challenge was to forge the perfect combination of pleasure and pain, of male and female.

Such a woman, trained and seasoned in all but witchcraft, could never be fooled by Salimbeni’s wedding sheet, which was clearly the work of a man who had never taken a second look at his bride or his bed after their initial skirmish. Even so, nobody dared to bring up the issue with the master himself, for it was already widely known that the problem lay not with his lady, but with him.

COMPLETING THE PORTRAIT
of Giulietta Tolomei was not enough. Filled with restless energy, Maestro Ambrogio went to Palazzo Salimbeni a week after the wedding to inform its inhabitants that their frescoes needed inspection and possibly maintenance. No one dared to contradict the famous Maestro, nor did anyone feel a need to consult Salimbeni on the matter, and so, for the next many days, Maestro Ambrogio was free to come and go in the house as he pleased.

His motive, of course, was to catch a glimpse of Giulietta and, if possible, offer her his assistance. With what, exactly, he was not sure, but he knew that he could not be calm until she knew she still had friends left in this world. But no matter how long he waited—climbing around on ladders pretending to find fault with his own work—the young woman never came downstairs. Nor did anyone mention her name. It was almost as if she had ceased to exist.

One evening, when Maestro Ambrogio was stretched at the very top of a tall ladder, inspecting the same coat of arms for the third time and wondering if perhaps he ought to rethink his strategy, he accidentally came to overhear a conversation between Salimbeni and his son, Nino, taking place in the neighboring room. Clearly under the impression that they were alone, the two men had withdrawn into this remote part of the house to discuss an issue that required some discretion; little did they know that, through the gap between a side door and frame, standing very still on his ladder, Maestro Ambrogio could hear every word.

“I want you,” said Salimbeni to his son, “to take Monna Giulietta to Rocca di Tentennano and see to it that she is properly … installed.”

“So soon?” exclaimed the young man. “Do you not think people will talk?”

“People are already talking,” observed Salimbeni, apparently used to having such frank exchanges with his son, “and I do not want everything to come to a boil. Tebaldo … Romeo … all that. It would be good for you to leave town for a while. Until people forget. Too much has happened lately. The mob is stirring. It worries me.”

Nino made a sound that could only be an attempt at laughter. “Perhaps you should go instead of me. A change of air—”

“Quiet!” There was a limit to Salimbeni’s camaraderie. “You will go, and you will bring her with you. Out with her, disobedient baggage! It sickens me to have her in my house. And once you are there, I want you to stay—”

“Stay
there?”
Nino could think of nothing more odious than a sojourn in the country. “For how long?”

“Until she is pregnant.”

There was an understandable silence, during which Maestro Ambrogio had to cling to the ladder with both hands so as to not lose his balance as he coped with the shocking demand.

“Oh no—” Nino backed away from his father, finding the whole thing absurd. “Not me. Someone else. Anyone.”

His face flushed with rage, Salimbeni walked right up to his son and took him by the collar. “I do not have to tell you what is going on. Our honor is at stake. I would happily do away with her, but she is a Tolomei. So, I will do the second best, and plant her in the country where no one is looking, busy with her children and out of my way.” He finally let go of his son. “People will say I have been merciful.”

“Children?” Nino liked the plan less and less. “For how many years do you want me to sleep with my mother?”

“She is sixteen!” retorted Salimbeni, “and you will do as I say. Before this winter is over, I want everyone in Siena to know that she is pregnant with my child. Preferably a boy.”