We both scrambled to get to the box first. But neither of us found what we were looking for. Only then did it occur to us what had gone missing since we left the room that afternoon. The mangy old paperback was no longer there.
JANICE HAD ALWAYS been a sound sleeper. It used to annoy me to no end that she could sleep through her alarm without even reaching out for the snooze button. After all, our rooms were right across the corridor from each other, and we always slept with our doors ajar. In her desperation, Aunt Rose went through every alarm clock in town in search of something that was monstrous enough to get my sister out of bed and off to school. She never succeeded. While I had a pink little Sleeping Beauty alarm on my bedstand until I left for college, Janice ended up with some industrial contraption-which Umberto had personally modified with a set of pliers at the kitchen counter-that sounded like an evacuation alarm from a nuclear power plant. And even so, the only one it woke up-usually with a yelp of terror-was me.
On the morning after our dinner with Maestro Lippi, I was amazed to see Janice lying awake, looking at the first golden blades of dawn as they came sliding in through the shutters.
“Bad dreams?” I asked, thinking of the nameless ghosts that had chased me around my dream castle-which looked more and more like the Siena Cathedral-all night.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she replied, turning to face me. “I’m going to drive down to Mom’s house today.”
“How? Are you renting a car?”
“I’m gonna get the bike back.” She wiggled her eyebrows, but her heart was not in it. “Peppo’s nephew runs the car pound. Wanna come?” But I could see that she already knew I wouldn’t.
When Alessandro came to pick me up at one o’clock, I was sitting on the front steps of Hotel Chiusarelli with a weekend bag at my feet, flirting with the sun through the branches of the magnolia tree. As soon as I saw his car pull up, my heart started racing; maybe because he was Romeo, maybe because he had broken into my room once or twice, or maybe simply because-as Janice would have it-I needed to get my head checked. It was tempting to blame it all on the water in Fontebranda, but then, you could argue that my madness, my pazzia, had started long, long before that. Six hundred years at least.
“What happened to your knees?” he asked, coming up the walkway and stopping right in front of me, looking anything but medieval in jeans and a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. Even Umberto would have had to agree that Alessandro looked remarkably trustworthy despite his casual attire, but then, Umberto was-at best-a rapscallion, so why should I still live under his morality code?
The thought of Umberto sent a little pang through my heart; why was it that the people I cared about-perhaps with the exception of Aunt Rose, who had been practically non-dimensional-always had a shadow-side?
Shaking my gloomy thoughts, I pulled at my skirt to cover the evidence of my marine crawl through the Bottini the day before. “I tripped over reality.”
Alessandro looked at me quizzically, but said nothing. Leaning forward, he picked up my bag, and now, for the first time, did I notice the Marescotti eagle on his forearm. To think that it had been right there all the time, literally staring me in the face when I drank from his hands at Fontebranda… but then, the world was full of birds, and I was certainly no connoisseur.
IT WAS ODD TO be back in his car, this time in the passenger seat. So much had happened since my arrival in Siena with Eva Maria-some of it charming, some anything but-thanks in part to him. As we drove out of town, one topic, and one topic only, was scalding my tongue, but I could not bring myself to raise it. Nor could I think of much else to talk about that would not, inevitably, bring us right back to the mother of all questions: Why had he not told me he was Romeo?
In all fairness, I had not told him everything either. In fact, I had told him next to nothing about my-admittedly pathetic-investigations into the golden statue, and absolutely nothing about Umberto and Janice. But at least I had told him who I was from the beginning, and it had been his own decision not to believe me. Of course… I had only told him I was Giulietta Tolomei to prevent him from finding out that I was Julie Jacobs, so it probably didn’t really count for much in the big blame game.
“You’re very quiet today,” said Alessandro, glancing at me as he drove. “I have a feeling it’s my fault.”
“You never got around to telling me about Charlemagne,” I countered, putting a lid on my conscience for now.
He laughed. “Is that it? Don’t worry, by the time we get to Val d’Orcia, you’ll know more about me and my family than you could ever want. But first, tell me what you already know, so I don’t repeat it.”
“You mean”-I tried to read his profile, but couldn’t-“what do I know about the Salimbenis?”
As always when I mentioned the Salimbenis, he smiled wryly. Now, of course, I knew why. “No. Tell me about your own family, the Tolomeis. Tell me everything you know about what happened in 1340.”
And so I did. Over the next little while I told him the story I had pieced together from Friar Lorenzo’s confession, Giulietta’s letters to Giannozza, and Maestro Ambrogio’s journal, and he did not interrupt me once. When I had come to the end of the drama at Rocca di Tentennano, I wondered briefly if I should go on to mention the Italian story about the possessed Monna Mina and Friar Lorenzo’s curse, but decided not to. It was too strange, too depressing, and besides, I didn’t want to get into the issue of the statue with the gemstone eyes again, after having flatly denied knowing anything about it that day at the police station, when he had first asked me.
“And so they died,” I concluded, “at Rocca di Tentennano. Not with a dagger and a vial of poison, but with sleeping potion and a spear in the back. Friar Lorenzo saw it all with his own eyes.”
“And how much of this,” said Alessandro teasingly, “did you make up?”
I shrugged. “A bit here and there. Just to fill in the blanks. Thought it might make the story more entertaining. It doesn’t change the essentials, though-” I looked at him only to find him grimacing. “What?”
“The essentials,” he said, “are not what most people think. In my opinion, your story-and Romeo and Juliet as well-is not about love. It is about politics, and the message is simple: When the old men fight, the young people die.”
“That,” I chuckled, “is remarkably unromantic of you.”
Alessandro shrugged. “Shakespeare didn’t see the romance either. Look at how he portrays them. Romeo is a little whiner, and Juliet is the real hero. Think about it. He drinks poison. What kind of man drinks poison? She is the one who stabs herself with his dagger. The manly way.”
I couldn’t help laughing at him. “Maybe that’s true for Shakespeare’s Romeo. But the real Romeo Marescotti was no whiner. He was tough as nails.” I glanced at him to see his reaction, and caught him smiling. “It is no mystery why Giulietta loved him.”
“How do you know she did?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” I shot back, starting to get a little miffed. “She loved him so much that-when Nino tried to seduce her-she committed suicide to remain faithful to Romeo, even though they had never actually… you know.” I looked at him, upset that he was still smiling. “I suppose you think that’s ridiculous?”
“Absolutely!” said Alessandro, as we surged forward to pass another car. “Think about it. Nino was not so bad-”
“Nino was outrageous!”
“Maybe,” he countered, “he was outrageously good in bed. Why not find out? She could always kill herself the morning after.”