The Fool's Girl (5 page)

Will looked at her, perplexed. ‘I would help you, if it is in my power to do so. But tell me, for it puzzles me mightily, why all this?’ He picked up the card again. ‘Why can’t you ask me plain?’

‘Because I thought you might refuse us, just go on your way.’

‘I’m here, am I not? While Feste cons the part, you can tell me – what do you want from me?’

Feste took the scroll and sat down cross-legged on the floor, leaning against Violetta. Maria sat opposite her, hands in her lap. She thought back, tracing her way through the crooked lanes of memory and longing to the gilded time when she was young and Illyria was the best place in the world. She looked up at Violetta. Maria would start and they would pass the story between them, backwards and forwards, as women wind wool.

.

7

‘After the last enchantment’

MARIA

It was a golden time. Beginning with the weddings. A double celebration. The city had never seen such a thing. People poured in from everywhere. The streets were lined from well before dawn as folk took their places to see the grand procession.

The day chosen was known to be auspicious. From early the bands and companies paraded through the streets to the main square. Each guild and family represented, splendid in their livery, waving and hurling banners high into the air. Young girls came dancing after them, strewing flowers, so the couples would walk over a thick, soft carpet and sweet scents would waft up with every step they took on their way to the cathedral.

Orsin and Sebastian were crowned with flowers, their white satin suits all embroidered with gold and silver and worked with precious stones so that they glittered in the sunlight like princes from fairyland. Their brides walked beside them, arm in arm, one dark, one fair. Viola in the palest rose; my lady in the soft grey-green of oleander leaves. Their bodices were all embroidered with tiny seed pearls that I’d selected and sewn myself. Their veils were so fine that they were worked with needles as thin as hairs and single threads of silk. The delicate lawn floated before their faces like breath on a frosty day.

The cathedral was packed with guests from every neighbouring state and further, from Venice and Sicily, Tunis and Tripoli, from the Sultan’s court at Constantinople, all there to celebrate this blessed day. The couples came in to fanfares of trumpets. Choirs sang as they approached the High Altar to make their vows of love and obedience before our most holy relic.

Afterwards they stood on the steps of the cathedral, smiling and blinking in the strong sunlight. The grooms kissed their brides and the people all cheered and threw their caps in the air. As the couples returned to the Duke’s palace, roses rained down from every window until their shoulders were covered in petals of scarlet and white. The feasting and celebrations went on for the rest of the day and into the night. Not just in the palace, but all over the city, in each district, tables were set up in the streets, and the squares were filled with singing and dancing.

The couples were taken separately to their marriage beds, as was the custom. The men carried shoulder high, accompanied by bawdy songs and raucous laughter, wreathed in herbs known to heat the blood and sustain performance. The women wore garlands of crane’s bill, lavender, lady’s mantle, wheat and yarrow, to awaken their passion and increase fertility. They were led to their bridal chambers by their ladies, who were hardly quieter than the men, quite as ribald and no less excited.

Once the couples were put to bed, the celebrations continued far into the night. The next day the bridal gowns were inspected, according to ancient tradition. Guns were fired to show that the marriages had been successfully consummated. The festivities went on until all but the hardiest had sunk from exhaustion. It was a wonderful time, full of song and laughter, each detail to be salted away, to be kept in the memory. The guests departed, wishing the couples health and happiness. No one bothered much about who was absent, or stopped to think what trouble they would cause in the future.

When I think of that time, it is always summer and we’re at the summer palace. Duke Orsin had it built as a wedding gift to his wife. He chose the site with such care. He loved her then. The house is on a terrace overlooking a wide, curving bay of white sand, surrounded on three sides by dense dark groves of cypress and pine. He was not the first to build there. When the workmen began to clear the ground, they found broken pillars, pieces of statues, blocks of marble. The remains of some ancient villa. The Duke sent for the very best architects, builders and craftsmen from Rome, Siena, Florence, Urbino and Ravenna, to build his own house by the sea.

The palace became a place of wonder. The Duke spared no expense. There were airy rooms with frescoed walls and mosaics set into marble floors. At the centre he made a paved courtyard shaded with orange and lemon trees, cooled by fountains. A wide terrace faced the sea, and gardens, each different from the others, descended to the shore with ruined arches and hidden secret places: little grottoes made from the fallen masonry and broken columns saved from the ancient site or dredged up from the sea.

Although Duke Orsin had built the summer palace for his new bride, he didn’t spend much time there, staying in the town even in the hottest weather. He had matters of state to attend to, he said, fleets of ships coming in and going out. When he was not attending to such matters, he was in his library, overseeing the scriptorium that he had established, working with the scholars he had gathered. On the hottest days of the year he might ride out as the day cooled to evening, to eat supper, drink wine on the terrace and listen to music made by his wife and her ladies, but the summer palace became Lady Viola’s domain. She loved to be by the sea and hated the heat and stench of the summer city.

Viola soon had her own court. She gathered ladies around her: young women from the city’s leading families, daughters of the local nobility. Lady Olivia spent all her time there, and I with her. The days went by in idleness: singing, playing music, reciting poetry. When the day grew hot, they would swim in the sea. Any man found spying would be likely to suffer the fate of Actaeon. My Lady Olivia and Viola were as close as sisters, closer. They were always together, from when they took breakfast on the balcony overlooking the sea to when they retired at night. They lived in each other’s eyes and could not bear to be separated for even a day.

When the year turned, the summer palace was shut up and Lady Viola returned to Illyria town and became the Duchessa. She charmed the court, bringing the light and laughter of summer back with her to the ducal palace. The Duke seemed lost in his admiration of her all over again, her wit and her brilliance. When she came into the room, every head turned towards her, and everyone wanted to be rewarded by the flash of her smile.

In Illyria, the winter festivities were always a time of great celebration, with feasting, dancing, plays and masques every day from Advent to Twelfth Night, but that first midwinter was especially blessed: Viola gave birth to a daughter, Olivia to a son, Stephano, born within hours of each other on the Feast of St Stephen. Outside, snow was falling. It covered the earth in a mantle as a soft and white as a christening gown.

VIOLETTA

In my earliest memories I am always at the summer palace. That was the time I was closest to my mother. She liked to walk by the shore in the early morning, and I would go with her. I would wake early, listen for her footfall and follow. It was likely to be the only time I would be alone with her that day. She would take my hand and we would cross the wide terrace and thread our way down through the gardens while the dew was still wet. As we walked, we met statues of fauns and maidens, suddenly looming out of the mist, looking secretive and furtive, as if the rising sun had surprised them in the middle of some forbidden frolic.

The garden slopes were all in shadow and the beach was pale in the dawn light, with little waves crisping along its margins, the sand cold underfoot. The sea beyond looked greyish purple, like wine spilt on pewter. Then the sun would emerge over the rim of the hills behind and touch the water, like a molten river of gold stretching out to the horizon. My mother would loose her gown and plunge in, leaving me to watch from the shore. Sometimes she would take me with her. I could swim before I could walk. Then I would take her hand and we would wander barefoot as the incoming tide sewed the sand with silver. We would pick up pebbles bright from the water, collect delicately whorled shells, fine-fingered starfish, fragile purple and green urchins. Then we would go back. She would return to Lady Olivia. I would hear them conversing in low voices and laughing while I added our finds to my collection. Stephano would come out yawning, rubbing his eyes with his fists. I would show him the things that I had collected with my mother and we would arrange them together.

Everyone said that he was as good-natured as he was handsome, with his mother’s mild grey eyes and her fair hair, his short-cropped curls as shiny in the sun as a heap of gold coins. I was older by all of an hour and thought that gave me precedence. Stephano never argued. He was happy to follow my lead in the games we played. The garden was our outdoor palace, the rocks on the beach were our fleet, the forest was our terra incognita, to be explored and conquered. Through all our adventures, Stephano was my friend and my companion and we were constantly in each other’s company.

He was sharp-eyed, good at finding things: tesserae from some long-crumbled mosaic floor, bits of pottery, coins scoured by the sand and worn smooth by the sea.

One day, when we were five or six years old, he found a gold ring on one of the terraces in the shape of a snake, with an eye made from a tiny red stone. He picked it up and took it to my mother and Lady Olivia, thinking one of the ladies might have lost it. No, the ladies shook their heads, it was none of theirs; it was his to keep.

‘Give it to the one you love,’ my mother said, thinking that he would give it to Olivia.

He turned and gave it to me. It was ancient, I could see that. The ruby eye was bright, but the finely etched scales were hardly visible, the gold worn thin on a hand long turned to bone and dust.

‘It is too big for her!’ his mother said, laughing.

Stephano looked up at her, his expression grave and solemn. ‘One day it won’t be.’ He took my hand in his. ‘Then we shall be married.’

Our mothers and their ladies rocked with laughter and then clapped their hands and cried, ‘Blessed be!’ We were meant for each other. When we grew up, we would be married. It was our destiny.

MARIA

There were things a child could not know. With Viola spending so much time at the summer palace, rumours grew. Some whispered that the Duke had lost interest, preferring his books to his young wife, and she, in turn, had lost interest in him.

They also whispered about Lord Sebastian: that he resented his sister, that he was jealous of her. He was
Count
Sebastian, but she was Duchessa. Not only that, but he had lost his wife to her. Olivia might have married him, but there was no doubt which twin she preferred. It was as though she’d made her vows to the sister, not the brother, they said as they laughed behind their hands, but no one said such things in his hearing. He had a violent temper on him and was always ready to draw steel.

Who knows what goes on in men’s minds? Who knows what causes a canker to root there and grow to bitter hatred? Lord Sebastian attracted followers, young men who found the Duke’s court as dull and boring as the dusty old books in his library. Without my lady there, her palace became more like a barracks. My Toby was supposed to keep an eye on things, but you might as well have set a sot to oversee a brew house. The men spent their days hunting in the forest, or hawking in the hills. They spent their nights getting drunk. When they weren’t out hunting, the Count’s men swaggered around town, dressed in his black-and-white livery, causing trouble. They often clashed with the Duke’s men, and over time the two groups became sworn enemies. The young men of both courts wandered the town, seeking each other out, swapping slights and insults. Fights were frequent and often bloody. What began with single fights and skirmishes ended up in pitched battles. The followers were acting out their masters’ rivalry. However much Count Sebastian might crow over siring a boy, while the Duke could only manage a girl, he bitterly resented the power that Orsin held over him.

About this time, the fortunes of our country began to decline. Illyria had always been rich and prosperous, had rarely known want, but her prosperity came from the sea. There were bad trading seasons. Ships were lost: argosies failed to return, or never arrived at their destination. The Duke took each loss upon himself. It was not the money or the goods. The sailors were men from the port, or the islands offshore, or the villages along the coast. A ship going down meant widows, fatherless children. The Duke grew thin and haggard busying himself to make sure that each family was provided for, the losses covered, and that there was enough food for his people.

Lord Sebastian was often absent abroad. It was said that he had grown bored with life in Illyria and was seeking excitement in Italy and Spain. Like his sister, he loved the sea and he loved adventure. The ills of the country began with his travels. He was seen in Venice, on the Rialto and at the Doge’s palace. His friend Antonio was banned from the city, but they were seen together in different ports. Antonio was an Uskok, a pirate, with a particular hatred for the Duke, and Venice had long been Illyria’s enemy.

None of this happened in the time it takes for night to turn to day. It takes months, years, from the day the ships leave port to when they return, or are never seen again. Life went on, much the same as ever . . .

VIOLETTA

. . . Until the year when I was ten years old and everything changed. At the end of each summer, the palace was closed up and we went back to the city. I saw less of Stephano during the winter, but that year he did not appear at the summer palace at all.

‘Sebastian has claimed him,’ Lady Olivia said. ‘Made him his page. He wants to make a man of him.’ She laughed, but there were tears in her eyes as she said it.

I missed him sorely, but I hid my sorrow in the way that children do. I always had Feste to teach me new tricks and laugh me out of my misery. He’s no child, but he can enter into a child’s world. He can be savage and kind by turns, as children are; he sees with a child’s clear and pitiless eye. He spies what lies beneath surface appearances and will punish pretension and hypocrisy with merciless mockery.