Free O, Juliet by Robin Maxwell Page B

squarely. “So you, my dearest friend, wish for me the sad nuptial bed I will certainly share with Jacopo Strozzi? You wish me a life altogether barren of love? I will not thank you for that!”
    I was glad my litter had arrived. I flung myself and my anger into its darkness, but Lucrezia’s words had begun to smother me, smother all my bright hopes.
    No, I ordered myself, you must fight to keep them alive! Dante was right. Love’s power was insane. Suddenly there was strength flowing into me, through me. I felt my fists clenching and my spine straightening. Tears of passionate resolve flowed down my cheeks.
    “I choose madness,” I said aloud, in hopes that the God of Love was listening. “I choose madness.”

Romeo
    T he surgery was proving brutal, and the patient was unfor giving. My saw was finding resistance, and I heard the screeching of the blade on dry, brittle wood as an old man’s shrieks of pain. I had not wished to cut such a gracious limb from so majestic an olive, one of the few in our orchard that was perhaps alive when the boy Plato was still following Socrates around Athens as his student. But the large branch was dead and hung so high above the ground that it would certainly kill a worker if it suddenly gave way and fell on him.
    Discomfiting as this chore was proving, I could not help but revel at the perfection of the summer day, the joy of my homecoming from Padua to the orchard of my youth, and thoughts of Juliet, which on the one hand soothed me as did a bath in the warm mineral springs of Abano Terme, and on the other inflamed my senses like a hard ride through the hills on my beautiful Blanca.
    It had surprised me how easily I had resumed my place here and how little I missed the life of learning at university. Perhaps it was facile of me, but in my heart I believed there was more to be learned from the countryside, the Tuscan weather, the olives and the vines of my father’s farm, than from a Latin master droning on inside the airless walls of a classroom.
    I did not disdain my education. Without it I would surely have been a dolt. I would never have known Dante or tried my hand at poetry, and would, therefore, never have found the perfect way to court and win the affection of Juliet, sweet Juliet—the woman my stars had, on the day of my birth, promised me.
    I had ruminated much on that thought of late. How a scholar versed in the science of the heavens could, with his charts and numerical calculations, using the moment and place of a person’s birth and the movements of celestial bodies, foretell with such accuracy the disposition of a person’s mind, and what his life had in store for him.
    Of all the things Paolo Toscanelli had told my father of his youngest son’s nature and future, my finding “a woman of great fortitude” had intrigued me the most. As a boy who had no interest in girls save teasing his sisters, I was baffled by the prophecy. As a youth at university finding comfort in the arms of the few prostitutes I could afford, Toscanelli’s remarkable woman seemed as far away as the stars that had foretold her.
    When I’d brazenly taken myself that evening to the Palazzo Bardi to remonstrate with Don Cosimo, she was the very last thing on my mind. And yet when I first laid eyes on Juliet swooping and spinning as she danced the Virgins’ Dance, heard her laugh above all the others, thought the flick of her cymbaled wrists the most graceful and her face the most astonishingly lovely, I knew that she was my woman of great fortitude. She was the woman fated and foretold.
    She was mine.
    The making of peace between my family and the silk merchant Capelletti had at first been a mere challenge to overcome. Why my father had become a vandal was a mystery to me, and an annoyance to my soul. The quiet and gentility of our lives had been defiled by senseless violence.
    Every time I had tried to discuss the feud with Papa, he had slammed the door closed, shutting me out as if I were