Beatrice and Benedick by Marina Fiorato

Author:Marina Fiorato
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

Act IV scene ii

A courtyard in Leonato’s house, Messina

Beatrice: I woke in the middle of the night without knowing why.

I turned over in my bed, groaning gently. This was the first night since Benedick had ridden away that I had fallen asleep as soon as my head had sunk into the pillow. For four weeks now I’d twisted and tossed, and not fallen to sleep until grey dawn and cockcrow. In the daytime I had stuck to my resolution, to live and speak freely, and to scorn the company of men. But every night my treacherous mind had recalled every word and gesture of my month’s acquaintance with Benedick. As if at a play I had watched, again and again in my mind’s eye, every jocular exchange, every time we’d laughed, our declaration of love on the beach. I could still feel the imprint of his kiss on my lips, the weight of him on my body, pressing me into the dunes. But next on the playbill, I had to watch another drama – a tragic sequel to the comedy. His final, bitter repudiation of me. The sight of him riding down the coast road. In my dreams he turned his head. In reality, I knew he had not.

I had no one to confide in. My pride and my new resolution of independence would not allow me to admit how much I suffered; and Hero, my one remaining companion, was preoccupied with her own heartbreak at the loss of Claudio. There was another I might have confided in, but Michelangelo Florio Crollalanza had never returned. Whatever Benedick had maintained he must have fled the island with his father.

So I suffered alone, and tonight I had thought the spell broken. I had thought that at last I could close my eyes without seeing Benedick’s face burned into the back of my lids, like the imprimatur of a letterpress. So it was particularly galling to be woken.

I hunched beneath the coverlet, inviting sleep again. But a sudden, unidentifiable sound made me sit bolt upright, with the absolute certainty that there was someone in the courtyard.

I padded to the window, my feet chilling on the floor slabs, taking the coverlet with me like a cloak. I peered from the window into the courtyard. There, in the middle of the mosaic, was a figure holding a flaming torch. At first I found his form familiar. My foolish heart thumped, telling me it was Benedick, returned to claim me. But the next heartbeat told me it was not.

The torch threw a warm circle around its bearer, animating the mosaics in the ring favoured by the light. The sight would have been beautiful, but fire held no comfort for me now. Flames did not speak of hearth and home any more, but of the fire that had taken Guglielma Crollalanza. I could not see the torch-bearer’s face, but he stood very still and he seemed to be looking directly up at me. Suddenly I was soaked in a cold sweat.

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