Anne Fortier
Juliet
Copyright © 2010 by Anne Fortier
To my beloved mother,
Birgit Malling Eriksen,
whose magnanimity and herculean research
made this book possible
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things.
Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished,
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
– SHAKESPEARE
THE PROLOGUE
THEY SAY I DIED.
My heart stopped, and I was not breathing-in the eyes of the world I was really dead. Some say I was gone for three minutes, some say four; personally, I am beginning to think death is mostly a matter of opinion.
Being Juliet, I suppose I should have seen it coming. But I so wanted to believe that, this time around, it would not be the same old lamentable tragedy all over. This time, we would be together forever, Romeo and I, and our love would never again be suspended by dark centuries of banishment and death.
But you can’t fool the Bard. And so I died as I must, when my lines ran out, and fell back into the well of creation.
O happy pen. This is thy sheet.
There ink, and let me begin.
I.I
Alack, alack, what blood is this which stains
The stony entrance of this sepulchre?
IT HAS TAKEN ME A while to figure out where to start. You could argue that my story began more than six hundred years ago, with a highway robbery in medieval Tuscany. Or, more recently, with a dance and a kiss at Castello Salimbeni, when my parents met for the first time. But I would never have come to know any of this without the event that changed my life overnight and forced me to travel to Italy in search of the past. That event was the death of my great-aunt Rose.