Sung in Shadow, page 29
When at length Cornelia ran out of floral phrases, she realized Iuletta, her tears still luminous, had fallen asleep.
With a weighted heart, Cornelia rose. How malleable were the sick. One might warm and mold them to anything, like wax. Cooling, they kept the shape, whether they would or no.
For Iuletta, asleep in sorrow and her will quiescent, her mind had already turned from love to resignation. The fever had taken from her what little rigid and pathetic faith she had had. Heaven was envious. It had seen her bliss and torn it from her grasp. She had scarcely wept, even, her tears were from lassitude more than distress. Her world had grown grey. If he had loved her, would he not have kept himself from the fight? Would he not, having fought, somehow have made provision for her—would he not have sent word to her, as before, sorcerously, by a dove, or a dream. But her dream had shown his death. Yes, he was dead to her, for he did not love her, after all. He had allowed all these things of blood and horror to step between them. Seducer, fair bankrupt, false friend. She was alone. She must fend for herself.
So, in this dreary mind, she slept. And so she woke to the same desert and the same resolve. And so, two days after the burial of her cousin she found herself, clothed first in perfumed water and then in soft garments of dark mourning darted with asphodel, her colorless face like a white candleflame between the ropes of naturally mourning hair, her eyes the blue of irises and certain stars and dusks and oceanic minerals and all fearless and poignantly and heartbreakingly blue things, awaiting the visit of her betrothed, Troian Belmorio.
The last occasion of their meeting had been at their betrothal feast (could it have been only seven nights before?) A crowd had surrounded them, quite properly. Now it was equally seemly that only one of the tiniest of Iuletta’s maids, tucked in a corner of a decorously gilded and frescoed room, should leave the rest of the space free for Belmorio. It was Lord Chenti’s courtesy (and guile), and ham-fisted as ever.
But Troian noticed nothing of that. He saw only the girl seated at the room’s center on a small velvet chair.
The red-haired young man in his cabbage-green satins paneled by cloth-of-gold, knew well enough the politics of his wedding. He had, at the beginning, been prepared to join for commerce and bed for delight elsewhere, providing the girl was not an eyesore. But the girl had been very far from an eyesore, and his blood was up for her from the first sight. Then came the feast, and then came interruptions. Verensa had been generally placid some while, her feuding confined to scraps, the dead unlucky underlings. Three men of note, the kingpins of their Houses, dead in one day—that was like the long-ago years of Woody feuding that had stripped half the towers of their heirs. Troian had been a child then. A man now, with mercantile awareness, he saw the upsurge of strife with misgiving. To exercise in a duel was one thing, to be set on and die at one’s door, another entirely. When the bloodstained name-calling had hit Chenti, threatening his marriage, Troian had been doubly aggrieved. His father was treated to a rampaging diatribe and sat amazed, unused to such tactics from his dutiful son. Then the way was smoothed, the wedding secure again, unless some Chenti fool stabbed another of the Montargos in full view of the Rocca. But from what one heard, half the Montargo Tower lay sick of plague, too reduced even to fight over leadership with its lord buried and the heir gone under sentence of the garotta.
On his way to this room Troian had barely been able to be polite, while Lord Chenti’s fussings delayed him. Entering the room, seeing Iuletta, all Troian’s rush left him and he hesitated, as if he must walk over eggshell to reach her.
She had been ill, not the Sickness, thank God, but sick enough. They said that was lamenting for her cousin. They hinted it was also her fear of losing Troian. He knew himself a little, aware of the fine figure he could cut. Flattered, yet he had quite easily believed them. Keyed up, he looked for her responsive tumult, and so interpreted her desire for him from the nervous trembling he saw in her hands and eyelids. But she was like a shadow. How ill she must have been, how exquisitely and beautifully ill. For the illness had left her behind it, fragile as a crystal shard. And when she raised her eyes to his, he saw the entreaty in them, which was genuine enough, through all their blinding color.
He dropped to one knee, prince of manners as he had trained himself, and took her hands, careful not to break the glass.
“How have I lived,” he said, “so long without you?”
At these words she began to cry, soundlessly and artistically. It seemed quite fitting. Her tears said to him: I, too, have suffered, deprived of you.
“You have not changed to me, then?” he said.
And when she lowered her eyes, took it for bashfulness: How can you doubt me?
He sat then at her feet, and talked to her, to entertain her and make her happy, of himself. His interview had been limited, for reasons of propriety, and this had been made plain to him. And so he rendered all he could, before he must go away, to stay her. He knew she listened, spellbound, and he too, as he spoke, was spellbound by her loveliness and her grace. When her eyes came to him he smiled to encourage them, and left his history to remind her of her beauty with courtly remarks. Oh, the love he saw in her eyes, the melting tenderness. And, since her weeping had ceased, he knew he had lifted her up, renovated her by his presence. And in turn her dependence upon him made his own eyes smart with sudden tears. It was in his heart to protect her all his life, and that he could never grow bored with her as with other women. And though, when at last he said to her, teasing her, hoping for her blush, “Say, then, Iuletta, that you’ll be glad to live with me. Let me hear you say it,” she did not blush, she did at least softly but unfalteringly answer: “I shall be glad.” Then she reached out and brushed his hair gently from his forehead with her hand, surprising him, for the gesture was like that of a woman much older, a woman who had known the company of men, who had borne sons.
“You know I’ll cherish you,” he said. “You’ll be a flower to me always in bloom.”
Her eyes were tender still, melting still. He saw the consistency of her look, but not its cause. He did not comprehend her eyes were full of pity.
Do this, and she was damned. But that did not matter. Do this, and she denied forever the love she had yearned for and so briefly known.
“The shoe on your foot,” he said, “the glove on your hand. Your slave, lady.”
“And I,” she said, “your grateful wife.”
* * *
• • •
Coming back from the depth of some great night, he did not know the rafters above him were rafters in Lombardhia, of a little deserted house by the wayside. Nor did he truly know that the face in the low candlelight was that of Doro, worn but smiling at him. But he drank what he was offered to drink, and feeling the spears of pain go through his body, sank back, and remembered the dream he had had, aloud.
“I thought I was dying,” Romulan Montargo murmured, “and then dead. And someone had tied me to my bier, strapped me to the slab in the tomb.”
“A necessity I regret,” said Doro, “but there’s sometimes a fit comes in the delirium. I took no chances of your lordship rolling on this dirty floor. But you’re free of straps now. The fever’s broken.”
Romulan hardly heard him.
“I was dead,” he murmured, “and thought I should never see the sky or the world again. And then the tomb was opened, and Iuletta came into it, stooping a little, I remember, under the low lintel of the vault.”
Doro sat patiently and listened, holding the partly tasted cup in his hands. The inn nearby had been good to them, putting out provisions on the ground, and a bowl of vinegar and balsamum in which to drop payment, not grudging them their refuge providing they kept alone until the infection passed.
Romulan’s eyes were almost closed. He was drowsy, as yet, and peaceful.
“But here is the strangeness. She did not mourn me. She drew my corpse into her arms as I lay there, and kissed me over and over. And I felt the warmth of her lips and her hands, and I began to breathe. Her kisses gave me back my life, for I revived, like Lazarus. Iulet,” he said, and now his eyes fell shut, his head turning on his shoulder and the black hair spreading on the straw pillow. “My love,” he said, and slept.
EIGHTEEN
Over the corpses of the dead, after all, a marriage was to be made, celebrated, consummated. The girl’s father was eager to hurry matters, lest the feud flare up and muddy the waters again. The groom was eager for the same reason. Other parties proved accommodating. A date was fixed, somewhat precipitate. There would be those who would say the betrothed pair had sinned and were wary of results. Pure in their innocence of immoral conduct, however, the bridal couple walked demurely together, had brimming cups raised to them and sweetmeats showered over them, and astrological charts drawn up for them, and sat in rose arbors as preliminary sketches were organized for a classical nuptial canvas, the usual one: Venus and Mars.
There seemed a gentleness about them, which was admired. The young man restrained and courteous in his obvious ardor. The maiden docile yet receptive. They endured together the jests, the homilies, the ribaldry. The holy instructions. The droppings of the peacocks which the artist had wished to draw in situ. It was decided that Iuletta and Troian looked well together, and would breed pretty children. He played and sang to her. They sang duets. Though always well-mannered, his hands and his lips could not keep from her. And when the long merry-makings of their families sailed like lighted boats past midnight, and propriety winked, it was perceived how the girl seemed glad enough to lean in the circle of his arm.
“Just so,” Cornelia said, cordial and gladsome, doubt broomed away. “He is a fine young Mars and no mistake. There’s no bad stroke in catching him. A handsome fish on your line, miss.” Low voiced lessons followed in the faking of virginity. “I doubt you’re breached enough after one night, even with him you had, that you cannot offer the gentleman a little proper difficulty.”
Iuletta said nothing. Her skin since she had been ill was like milk-crystal, clear enough, it seemed, to look through at the shadow of the bones. The faint pale hollowing under her eyes did not quite go away, despite herbal and cosmetic applications. Yet she was more beautiful than ever, so everyone declared. Love’s anxiety, merely, troubled her, and she would soon be wedded and free of that.
A month, a fraction more, was folded away in dust behind the tracks Leopardo’s pall bearers had made to the Basilica. The heat of summer, having reached its peak, nested there, the dove on the mountaintop, softened and loving. The season of fruits drew in, the air was scented with fast-ripening peaches, apricots, berries. The Sickness, in its turn, had died and was, in the way of dark things, not talked of any more. The nights, like the trees, ripened with fruits of silver.
And each one of those nights that she was alone, remembering his words to her: “The sky is prayer enough—so full of stars,” prayerlessly and quietly, Iuletta Chenti wept, knowing her love, her only love, had forgotten her.
Not knowing the dragging lethargy she felt so often pull her down was all his, that the fever, going from him, as often happened with the healthy ones, had left not much of him in its wake. That he must grow back upon his own bones, like a stricken tree, young enough to accomplish it, but in peril, never quite safe, except in his servant’s careful adequate nursing. She did not know that his dreams—trusting, yearning—were all of her, as hers, bitter and desolate, were all of him. Romulan her lover, and before God her husband. She thought him laughing in some tavern, blessed in his freedom from her. She had not known him long enough to be able to believe, in adversity and blindness, that he loved her still. She had known him only with heart and soul, and when they spoke to her now, telling her her grave error, she would not listen. Belmorio was her solitary hope in her abandonment. She must deny her soul and her heart. There was no other way. And she was glad of Troian’s protection, glad of the kind and fascinated hand, the caressing mouth, the strong arm to lean upon. It was all she was to have, now, of love. So the world was.
To her confessor she awarded nothing of her ultimate damning crime. For unlike Belmorio, God offered no supporting arm, and no promise of shelter. And she had ceased to credit angels.
* * *
• • •
Ten mounted Chenti guardsmen trotted at the head, in crimson flecked with gilt, spread two by two, five times. After them, the two banner bearers, carrying the armorial standard, bleeding bullion, with the leopard in gold, and Lord Chenti’s personal escutcheon. After these came five minstrels, valiantly blowing, twanging and thumping. After these came ten picked Chenti kinsmen, garlanded and red as roses, with not a hint of mourning, and ten garlanded ladies in spotless white. Behind those, two girls in apple-pink on little white mules, and then a palancina tied over with ribbons and with up-looped curtains of gold tissue. Servants in gold balanced the litter’s poles. The bride was just visible, like a bird of paradise in a cage. Directly behind rode Lord Chenti, his attendants, a horde of cousins. Another litter of darkest mulberry contained the bride’s mother. Out-rider to the litter, also wreathed in flowers and grimly smiling, rode one of Lord Chenti’s bastards, officially a nephew, got on a brother’s wife. The position, which should have been Leopardo’s, was significant, and perhaps unpleasant to the woman in the mulberry palancina, who kept her curtains closed. The procession ended with fifteen Chenti guard, three abreast, five times.
Somehow contriving to enter the Basilica square from another angle, the Belmorio procession was just a touch, tactfully yet undeniably, larger. Three banner-bearers paraded the Belmorian sigil, the personal sigil of the lord, and a glove on a damson ground for the lady, by birth a Retzi. The banner of the Ducal House came at some juncture in the display, where Chesarius rode with his attendants, the witness from the Chitadella, his cloth-of-gold barely yet just outshone by the bridegroom’s. Pages in pale green satin were already throwing candies and small money to the populace. Twenty musicians hooted and piped. The guards were thick and green as gilded grass blades.
Cherry preserve and angelica, the two colored assemblages presently drew up equidistant from each other and the Basilica steps.
The mass of people in the square applauded, as skirts and mantles stirred like wings in a partial dismounting, and the clash of the two musics thankfully ceased.
The doors of the Basilica stood wide. Approaching from the right, the groom’s party reached them first. You could notice the bridegroom from the farthest edge of the square, a figment of the sun itself in his cloth-of-gold the doublet of which had been pleated to tightness and seamed on the pleats, and these seams then sewn with green dove-tails of polished beryls. His linen remained white, but splashed by a fine spray of emeralds. Over all this, his hair was alight and blazing, with the wreath of myrtle leaves and roses lying on it as if placed there to burn. His handsome face was flushed by the early morning wine and the triumph of desire to come. He had eyes only for the bright litter and what would emerge from it. One of his two gentlemen attendants, implacably decorous, inclined his head slightly toward the other, to catch the whisper: “I think we are watching Jacob, after his fourteen years’ wait.”
The crimson party shortly reached the top of the steps. There was a flourish of satins and jewelry as the bride was put down and aided from her enclosure. Iuletta Chenti, on the arms of her father and her legal cousin of the grim smile, was lifted into the sunlight.
Observing him slyly, his own closest generative cousin, witness for the Belmorio side, saw Troian’s face had now paled. Jealously, the closest generative cousin acknowledged why.
Iuletta Chenti, outlined by noon on a lavender sky deliriously hazed with dust, was already like a painting. From her wreath of white roses a white lace veil with a telling stitchery of gold fountained down her back. Her black hair had been mingled with gold, and a heavy golden necklace of Eastern design lay on her breast. In the Eastern manner, also, the single huge drop pearl, with its unusual lilac orient, depending on her forehead. The crimson silk gown gave the impression of translucence, like wine. The camisola had nectarines done in garnets. So much, all this, and her beauty overwhelming it, her beauty so much more.
Exquisite, too lovely to see or to touch. And as she came toward him, led by her father beneath the carvings and the angels over the porch, Troian Belmorio (even he), knew a moment of doubt.
But his own father amiably nudged him. They walked, and met the Chentis at the door.
As once before, the hands of bride and groom were drawn up and linked. Given to each other, they stood looking at each other, as if surprised. While vaguely, far off, the crowd congratulated this move, as all others.
Iuletta, meeting his eyes now, had discovered his paleness, and, as their fathers placed their palms together, she had felt his hand’s dry tension, and its disbelief. She saw at last that, however selfishly or fleetingly, Troian had brought himself to love her.
