Juliet & Romeo Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword by Richard Armitage

  Preface

  Part One: To Borrow Cupid’s Wings

  Part Two: A Paradise for Fools

  Part Three: Such Sweet Sorrow

  Part Four: Violent Delights, Violent Ends

  Acknowledgements

  Author’s note

  Copyright

  Juliet & Romeo

  David Hewson

  Foreword by Richard Armitage

  This is a story about a woman who is bound by her time. Juliet and Romeo are at odds with life, at odds with their parents. They recognise that in each other and enjoy that about each other. Ultimately it becomes yet another thread that pulls them together and enables their love.

  I love that this version takes the essence of Shakespeare’s words and creates modern dialogue that makes such an incredible character out of Juliet. You can understand her perspective within a family that is at odds with one another. Her sensibilities are very much those of a modern woman though the people in this story very much reference the era in which is set. There is a powerful atmosphere of the Renaissance, the time of Leonardo da Vinci, and the discovery of the New World that gives you a sense of that burning desire of opportunity as they are about to step into the 1500s. It’s one of the most familiar stories we have, but this retelling makes it read as something fresh and new.

  Richard Armitage

  Preface

  It was Monday, July the tenth in the year 1499. A restless moment in a restless world. Rodrigo Borgia reigned as Pope Alexander the Sixth, a pontiff as fond of corruption and debauchery as he was of pomp and ritual. In Florence a brief republic was struggling to emerge from the ruins left by the rule of the apocalyptic priest Savonarola, hanged and burned in front of the Signoria the year before.

  The din of war rang over the rival city states of Italy. A mighty French force had invaded Lombardy. To the east an Ottoman fleet of almost a hundred galleons had embarked for the Adriatic from Constantinople to do battle with Venice.

  Nowhere did mankind seem still, settled… or in the least incurious. Seven years before, Columbus had discovered a new world for his Spanish masters, turning the eyes of Europe from east to west in search of riches and fresh territory to colonise. Fearful of the coming French, Leonardo Da Vinci had fled Milan for Venice to design new military emplacements that might save the city from the impending Turkish storm. Michelangelo had returned to Florence after Savonarola’s fall and was slowly working on the slab of Carrara marble that would become the statue of David. While in Rome a young cleric named Nicolaus Copernicus spent his evenings stargazing, quietly becoming convinced of the heretical notion that the sun and not the earth lay at the centre of the universe.

  Four hundred years later, hindsight would dub this era the beginning of the Renaissance. But the sweep of history is invisible to those who live through it. For the actors on this restive, panoramic stage there was no name for the state of their particular world, only a shared sense that it stood on the brink of fateful change, as full of peril as it was opportunity.

  Tense times without were mirrored by tense times within. The walled city that was Verona, an outpost of the threatened Venetian Republic, possessed a violent enmity of its own, one generated by nothing more than a breed of grape.

  Luca Capulet owned the monopoly of production for the variety known as Garganega, grown throughout the flat lands towards Venice. Andrea Montague, maintaining estates to the west, had inherited the licence for the rival Trebbiano vine. So Montague and Capulet had become enemies, bitter ones, when it came to shipping barrels to the great houses that desired them. A vendetta was in a place, one so deep-rooted few recalled the argument that had started it nor cared much to question this small war’s origins.

  A feud was a feud, one that of late had increasingly brought violence and bloodshed to the streets of fair Verona.

  On the other side of Italy, in the corridors of the Signoria in Florence, a thirty-one-year-old clerk named Niccolò Machiavelli was beginning to believe this bold new world required a handbook, a set of rules through which it might be well and ruthlessly governed. It would take another fourteen years for his ideas to emerge with the publication of The Prince. But for those who led this fragile, edgy realm, Machiavelli’s lessons were old news. They’d learned early: a stable state required a tame and subdued populace. Riots, dissent and civil commotion only served to aid the enemy. They were to be put down in every instance, with all the force required.

  Then summer came, with all its fiery heat, and met head on the unpredictable, random spirit called human nature.

  Part One: To Borrow Cupid’s Wings

  The Marangona bell in the Torre dei Lamberti had just sounded the hour. Nine of a busy Monday morning in what was once Verona’s imperial Roman forum, now its marketplace, the Piazza Erbe. The square thronged with shoppers bargaining at stalls selling meat and fish, cheese and fruit and vegetables, cheap wine and cheaper beer. In the shadows of the colonnades two youths lurked, Samson and Gregory, both servants of the Capulets. The first a skinny seventeen-year-old kitchen boy, the second a priest’s bastard from Padua, a tall and hefty stable hand shuffling on his big feet as he caught the glint of metal in Samson’s grubby hand.

  They wore the clothes of their class – rough wool jerkins, baggy britches, sandals held together by thread and nails. This poverty extended to the weaponry they took with them on to the streets. The sons of fine families were in the habit of carrying daggers and rapiers forged in Florence and Milan. The lower orders snatched at anything they could lay their hands on, sharp or blunt. They fought with fists and boots and punches to the balls. Died that way, too.

  A crude swagger stick sat on a piece of rope round Gregory’s fat stomach, a mallet handle with a spiked iron ball on the end. The blade Samson owned was nothing more than a paring knife stolen from the kitchen, the edge honed carefully until it gleamed. He held it now, low by his side so that only his companion might see.

  ‘There’s that fat Montague pig Abraham with his mate. Time to put that stick of yours to some use, Gregory. Go over and wallop him. He wants it.’

  Across the piazza, just visible beyond the stalls, two figures moved through the market. Much the same age as the two Capulets. Much the same size: one short and lean, one tubby and daydreaming. Samson and Gregory wore a scarlet feather in their caps. The Montagues a blue one. Not that any of these were flesh and blood of the Montague or Capulet lines. Just servants, sharing the same borrowed hatred and never asking why.

  Gregory kicked a fish head and stuck his fists deep into the pockets of his britches.

  ‘I don’t know. We’re getting hard looks from those blokes on the stalls. They don’t like trouble when they’re trying to sell stuff.’

  ‘I reckon it was them Montague lads who had that kitchen girl of ours last week.’

  Lucia. An orphan who worked the ovens. She’d gone out for a walk by the river. Came back in tears and rags, telling tales the soldiers of Escalus, the city’s current military master, didn’t want to hear.

  ‘That hare-brained lass should have been in the kitchen stirring the pots, not hanging round down them dark alleys in Sottoriva. Could have been anyone had his way with her. Besides the watchmen reckoned she was up for it. Plenty been there with that daft cow. You for one.’

  ‘Scared are you?’

  ‘Just thinking it through.’ The Montague pair had spotted them but they hadn’t moved their way. ‘I don’t see you in a rush either.’

  Fights were fine so long as the numbers were on your side. And you had the right comrades. Samson liked to whine. It was his principal pastime. Action always came last.

  ‘It’s only fair. They had on
e of ours. A bit of gravy on their chops and then we leg it.’

  Gregory pulled a stick of dried sausage out of his pocket, bit off a chunk and waited.

  ‘Master sent us out to buy grub for his ball tonight. He won’t be happy if we come back empty-handed.’

  ‘We whack them round the head a bit. Then go hunting round the back of their palazzo. First girl that comes out of the kitchen’s mine. Unless she’s hideous – then you can have her.’ Samson had a sly and cruel face and it was turned on Gregory. ‘With a bit of luck we might get a virgin if the Montagues have got any left. You all right with that?’

  ‘I’m all right with the girls. Escalus ain’t so bothered about them. It’s the walloping bit–’

  ‘They got to know who’s boss. You with me or not?’

  Gregory patted his pocket. He had a stable knife with him as well as the swagger stick. Short, a bit blunt. But he was strong enough to hold a struggling stallion when he had to. The thing would do.

  ‘I hate the buggers, too, you know. But like I say. Escalus has got that one wicked eye on lads like us. Same way his bosses in Venice have got their eyes on him. The Marshal hates riots. They get him in trouble too. I don’t fancy jail or worse just for giving one of them scummy Montagues a few bruises and a sore head.’

  ‘Then let’s get clever. Make them start the scrap. I’ll look at them funny. Get ’em going. That way we’re just… defending ourselves. Which is every man’s right, and Escalus is bound to uphold us in that.’ Samson grinned, displaying a remarkable absence of teeth. ‘As to the kitchen girls… well… everyone knows what they’re like. I want first go though. This’ll do it.’

  Samson winked, grinned and bit his thumb. The oldest, stupidest gesture any of them knew. Someone said the Romans used to do it when they fancied a brawl.

  ‘Go on then,’ said Gregory and didn’t move.

  Samson looked up at him. ‘You first.’

  ‘When we get around to the girl, you mean?’

  ‘No. The fight. You’re the big one. You lead. I’ll follow.’

  Gregory slapped him hard on the shoulder.

  ‘Ow,’ Samson whined. ‘That hurt.’

  ‘Oh sorry, friend. We’re supposed to be buying stuff for the evening ball. There’ll be trouble if that goes wrong. Capulet will do the walloping himself and we both know what he’s like with that whip of his.’

  Samson went quiet. He’d had enough of Capulet’s beatings.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Gregory. ‘We’ll skip the girl. Next week. When we’ve got more time. And…’

  A shape they recognised was moving through the crowds, a tall youth around their own age. But he was an aristocrat; it showed in his clothes, his manner, the haughty way he held his head above the swarms of common folk around him as if he couldn’t stand the stink of them.

  ‘Well, well,’ Samson murmured, gleeful all of a sudden. ‘If it isn’t our master’s well-loved nephew. Just the chap you’d want at a time like this.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Gregory agreed, though the sight of the young man across the Piazza Erbe gave him pause. ‘I heard the noble Tybalt crippled a clerk who’d done nothing more than bump into him in the street a month or so ago.’

  ‘Dead right he did. I was there and he paid me well to keep quiet. Back last winter he ran a cheeky cart boy right through down by the brothels in Sottoriva.’

  Gregory didn’t like those dark and dangerous colonnades by the river. ‘Our Tybalt got caught hanging round the tarts down there?’

  ‘The only kind of girl that one beds are the sort you pay for. Expensive business. The old man had to dig deep to keep him out of Escalus’s clutches after he murdered the poor little bugger.’

  Tybalt was bloodthirsty, vicious and short tempered, always armed with the latest weapons, forever spoiling for a quarrel and a chance to use them.

  ‘Nothing stopping our Tybalt,’ Samson added. ‘’Specially when there are Montagues around.’ He clapped his grubby hands. ‘This will be fun.’

  * * *

  Juliet was the only child of Luca and Bianca Capulet, sixteen years old, bright and forthright, a catch the locals said, the prettiest girl in town. Her straight blonde hair ran loose to her shoulders, framing an alert and intelligent face that switched easily from angelic to mischievous in a moment.

  ‘When can we go to Florence?’ she asked, as her mother fussed over the state of her bedroom.

  Verona sat in a sharp bend of land enclosed by the broad, grey waters of the Adige which rose high in the German Alps and ran two hundred and fifty miles south to the Adriatic. It was a place of fortalices: compact residential castles built behind martial barbicans, with towers and battlements ready for conflict against distant enemies and neighbours alike.

  The palazzo of the Capulets occupied a sizeable estate to the east of the government buildings in the Piazza dei Signoria. High stone walls stood on all four sides, three facing narrow streets, the last against the grassy bare bank of the river, all of them composed of hefty rusticated blocks. On top sat lines of brick merlons, like inverted swallows’ tails, a few with military arrow slits. The palace occupied the centre, with a courtyard to the front, a long garden and an orchard running to the Adige at the rear. Like all good Verona fortalices, the Capulets’ was surmounted by a tower, in this case the fourth highest in the city. The third tallest belonged to the Montagues. It was Luca Capulet’s intention to do something about that one day.

  ‘Did you hear?’ Juliet demanded.

  Her mother sighed. ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘“We’ll see” usually means no.’

  ‘This room…’ Their daughter had her own apartment overlooking the gardens at the back, with a view of the river from the balcony. Her parents occupied the top floor on the opposite side of the palazzo. Bianca Capulet sometimes wondered if they couldn’t find somewhere a little further away. ‘This room is evidence of a deeply disordered mind.’

  ‘Florence.’

  ‘We’re only three days back from Venice! These books we bought you. Everywhere.’

  From the door to the window they lay like fallen leaves. Pocket-size octavos from the Venetian press of Aldus Manutius, some closed, some open, a few already marked with scrawls of ink. These recent inventions were cheaper, more easily carried than the big volumes of old. In Venice the booksellers couldn’t find enough of them. Reading was all the rage, especially among the educated young.

  ‘You must tidy them up, Juliet. I can scarcely cross the room without treading on an old Greek philosopher or some dubious Roman historian.’

  ‘It may look a bit chaotic but it’s not. The books are like this for a reason. I know where everything is.’

  ‘Really?’ Her mother put her foot over the nearest title. ‘In that case what’s this?’

  A quick glance and then, ‘The Letters of Pliny the Younger. You should read the bit about the eruption of Vesuvius. Very exciting. Flames shooting up into the sky. Terror and death everywhere. His uncle perished. Probably gobbled up by molten lava.’ She shuddered. ‘What a way to go. Quick though.’

  Bianca Capulet removed her foot and looked at the title page. The girl was right. As usual.

  ‘Florence. There are these frescoes I’ve been reading about. Adam and Eve. The Brancacci Chapel. Everyone’s been to see them and they say they’re wonderful. You see the pair before the Fall. Then after, entering the world we know–’

  ‘One thing at a time. Have you thought about the paintings we took you to see in Venice?’

  They’d hardly left her head. Her father had busied himself with commercial discussions in the great palace of the Doge by the Piazza San Marco. While he sold wine and all the other goods the Capulets handled, a local guide had led Juliet and her mother through the streets of Castello to a scuola dedicated to Saint Ursula. It was housed in a large, airy and impressive building, and was not a school as Juliet had expected but a charitable brotherhood, one of many in the city competing in their patronage of the arts.
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  The artist Carpaccio had decorated the walls of its main chamber with nine canvases depicting the tale of their chosen saint, executed with such a colourful and vivid imagination Juliet felt she’d witnessed a piece of theatre performed by real people, not stared at stationary paint. Ursula was said to have been a Christian princess from Britain, betrothed to a pagan lord from France for the benefit of her father’s politics. The panoramic canvases covered the diplomatic missions before the marriage, a visit to the Pope in Rome, the eventual meeting of the couple and a fateful dream in which an angel came to the sleeping girl and gave her a palm branch, a symbol of her coming martyrdom. Then, in a final scene so graphic Juliet could scarcely thrust it from her imagination, Ursula and her followers were massacred in a forest by savage, though often rather handsome, heathen warriors.

  ‘I think they were very striking. But to be honest the whole thing doesn’t make a lot of sense.’

  ‘It’s a love story–’

  ‘Not quite. More a story about love. Which is rather different, don’t you think?’

  Bianca Capulet stepped daintily through the sea of books, took her daughter’s hand and led her to the balcony. There’d been good rain the previous winter. The garden had never looked more beautiful. Roses and lilies bloomed in the manicured borders. The scent of orange blossom came to them on a breath of wind along with the buzz of happy bees and the chatter of song thrushes flitting through the orchard.

  ‘As I think I’ve mentioned… I’d like to teach Nurse to read,’ Juliet said.

  ‘And as I’ve said already… for pity’s sake, why?’

  ‘Because everyone should be able to. What’s the point of books if only a few like us can benefit from them?’

  ‘Nurse wants nothing to do with books. She told me so herself. Stop pestering her.’

  ‘We could begin today. It may take a while. I doubt she’ll be… quick.’

  ‘Daughter!’ Seventeen in a few months. A quiet, shy child when she was small. An awkward, inquisitive adolescent, forever arguing but always with charm, wit, good humour and a smile that could disarm the fiercest fury. It had never been hard to love her, even when she was at her most exasperating. ‘Stop trying to avoid the subject. You know why we took you to Venice. Don’t pretend otherwise.’