From the earliest age, she remembered hearing fanciful tales of women killing themselves with sleeping potion when abandoned by their lovers. Although her mother had tried to shield her daughters from that kind of gossip, there had been too many servants around the house who enjoyed the wide-eyed attention of the little girls. And so Giulietta and Giannozza had spent many afternoons in their secret ditch of daisies, taking turns being dead, while the other played out the horror of the people discovering the body and the empty bottle. Once, Giulietta had remained still and unresponsive for so long that Giannozza had, in fact, believed she was really dead.
“Giu-giu?” she had said, pulling at her arms. “Please stop! It is not funny anymore. Please!”
In the end, Giannozza had started crying, and although Giulietta had eventually sat up, laughing, Giannozza had been inconsolable. She had cried all afternoon and all evening, and had run away from dinner without eating. They had not played the game since.
During Giulietta’s imprisonment at Palazzo Salimbeni, there were days when she sat with the vial in her hands, wishing it was already full, and that she possessed the power to end her own life. But it was only on the last night before her morning departure for Val d’Orcia that the vial had finally run over, and throughout the journey she had consoled herself with thoughts of the treasure nested in a slipper in her luggage.
Now, sitting down on the bed with the vial in her hands, she felt confident that what she held would stop her heart. This, then, she thought, must have been the Virgin Mary’s plan all along; that her marriage with Romeo was to be consummated in Heaven, and not on earth. The vision was sweet enough to make her smile.
Taking out the quill and ink that was also hidden in her luggage, she settled down briefly to write a final letter to Giannozza. The inkwell Friar Lorenzo had given her when she was still at Palazzo Tolomei was by now almost empty, and the quill had been sharpened so many times that only a feeble tuft was left; even so, she took her time composing one last message to her sister before rolling up the parchment and hiding it in a crack in the wall behind the bed. “I will wait for you, my dearest,” she wrote, tears smearing the ink, “in our patch of daisies. And when you call my name, I shall wake up right away, I promise.”
ROMEO AND FRIAR LORENZO came to Rocca di Tentennano with ten horsemen trained in all manner of combat. Were it not for Maestro Ambrogio, they would never have known where to find Giulietta, and were it not for Giulietta’s sister, Giannozza, and the warriors she lent them, they would never have been able to follow words with action.
Their connection with Giannozza had been Friar Lorenzo’s doing. When they were in hiding in the monastery-Romeo still immobilized from his stomach wound-the monk had sent a letter to the only person he could think of who might sympathize with their situation. He knew Giannozza’s address only too well from having been the sisters’ secret courier for more than a year, and not two weeks had passed before he received an answer.
“Your most painful letter reached me on a good day,” she wrote to him, “for I have just buried the man who ran this house, and am now finally in charge of my own destiny. Yet I cannot express the grief I felt, dear Lorenzo, when I read about your tribulations, and about my poor sister’s fate. Please let me know what I may do to help. I have men, I have horses. They are yours.”
But even Giannozza’s capable warriors stood helpless against the massive gate of Rocca di Tentennano, and as they observed the place from afar in the twilight hour, Romeo knew he would have to resort to trickery to get inside and save his lady.
“It reminds me,” he said to the others, who had all fallen silent at the sight of the fortress, “of a giant wasp’s nest. To attack it in broad daylight would mean death to us all, but perhaps we stand a chance come nightfall, when they are all asleep but for a few sentinels.”
And so he waited until dark to pick out eight men-one of them Friar Lorenzo, who could not be left behind-and to make sure they were equipped with ropes and daggers, before taking them stealthily to the foot of the cliff on which the Salimbeni stronghold was built.
With no audience but the twinkling stars in a moonless sky, the intruders climbed the hill as quietly as possible, to eventually arrive at the very base of the great building. Once here, they crept along the bottom of the slanting wall until someone spotted a promising opening some twenty feet up and poked Romeo on the shoulder, indicating the opportunity without a word.
Allowing no one else the honor of going first, Romeo secured a rope around his waist and proceeded to take a firm, stabbing grip of two daggers before commencing his ascent by hacking the blades into the mortar between the boulders and pulling himself up, laboriously, by the arms. The wall was slanted just enough to make such a venture possible, but not enough to make it easy, and Friar Lorenzo gasped more than once as Romeo’s foot slipped from its hold and left him hanging by the arms. He would not have been so concerned if Romeo had been in perfect health, but he knew that every motion his friend made as he climbed the wall must cause him almost unbearable pain, since his abdominal wound had never properly healed.
But Romeo barely felt his old injury as he climbed up the wall, for it was drowned out by the ache in his heart at the thought of Giulietta being forced into submission by Salimbeni’s ruthless son. He remembered Nino only too well from the Palio, where he had seen him expertly stabbing Tebaldo Tolomei, and he knew that no woman would be able to bar her door to his will. Nor was Nino likely to fall prey to threats of a curse; surely the young man knew that, as far as Heaven was concerned, he was already cursed for all eternity.
The opening aloft turned out to be an arrow slit, just wide enough to let him through. As Romeo came down heavily on the floor tiles, he saw that he was in an armory, and he almost smiled at the irony. Untying the rope around his waist and securing it to a cresset on the wall, he jiggled it twice to let the men at the other end know they could safely follow.
ROCCA DI TENTENNANO was as joyless on the inside as it was on the outside. There were no frescoes to brighten the walls, no tapestries to keep out the drafts; unlike Palazzo Salimbeni, which was a display of refinement and abundance, this place was built for no other purpose than dominance, and any attempt at adornment would have been but an obstacle to the swift movements of men and arms.
As Romeo traversed the endless, winding corridors-Friar Lorenzo and the others trailing closely behind-he began to fear that finding Giulietta in this living mausoleum and escaping with her unnoticed would be a matter of luck rather than courage.
“Careful!” he hissed at one point, holding up a hand to stop the others as he caught sight of a guard. “Back up!”
To avoid the guard they had to embark upon a labyrinthine detour, and in the end they found themselves back exactly where they had been before, crouching silently in the shadows, where the wall torches did not reach.
“There are guards posted on every corner,” whispered one of Giannozza’s men, “but mostly in that direction-” He pointed ahead.
Romeo nodded gravely. “We may have to take them one at a time, but I would rather wait as long as possible.”
He did not have to explain why he wanted to postpone the clamor of weapons. They were all keenly aware of being vastly outnumbered by the guards currently asleep in the bowels of the castle, and they knew that once the fighting began, their only hope would be to run. For that purpose, Romeo had left three men outside to keep the horses ready, but he was beginning to suspect their job would merely be to return to Giannozza and tell the sorry tale of failure.
Just then, as he was despairing over their lack of progress, Friar Lorenzo poked him on the shoulder and pointed out a familiar figure carrying a torch at the other end of a hallway. The person-Nino-was walking slowly, even reluctantly, as if his was an errand that could happily be postponed. Despite the cold night he was dressed in a tunic, and yet he had a sword strapped to his belt; Romeo knew right away where he was headed.