Beatrice and Benedick Read Online Free PDF Page B

when I have stomach, sleep when I am drowsy and laugh when I am merry. In short, I am quite happy to wear out my youth with shapeless idleness.’
    I realised that the room had quietened, and those near to us were listening closely. She heard me in silence, a little smile playing about her damned, beautiful mouth. She had won and she knew it. I lowered my voice to a hiss.
    â€˜But next time there is a muster, I will give up
your
name for a knight.’
    I would have said more, but there was a little commotion as the prince began to rise. The hour was late and the little lady of the house wished to retire, and Claudio was holding her chair for her. My lady Beatrice rose gracefully to accompany her; clumsily, too late, I scrambled to my feet to pull out her chair with an ugly scrape. She turned to murmur her parting shot in my ear.
    â€˜If I am the knight, then I thank you for my gage.’ She favoured me with a soldier’s grin. ‘But now our joust is at an end, and I am the victor, I have the honour to return it.’ She nodded to my plate as she turned to go, and spoke her parting riposte over her shoulder. ‘If you have no more stomach,
Lady
, you had better turn your trencher. Farewell.’
    Disconcerted, I turned over my trencher, as was the custom when the meal was done.
    And there was the seven of coins, the
settebello,
looking up at me.

Act II scene i
A square before a church in Monreale
    Benedick: Having delivered Claudio to his uncle in the cathedral of Monreale, I kicked my heels in the cloister while I waited for him.
    I had assumed that I would be required to attend mass and had prepared myself to yawn through the liturgy for a couple of hours. But the good archbishop, clothed in gold and sitting in his throne beneath a giant mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, wept and smiled to see his nephew, then turned dry eyes upon me. He thanked me most graciously for conveying Claudio to him safely, and bid me come back at noon. I looked in his closed face, and the eyes as almond and inscrutable as the eyes of the Christ that floated above him upon the golden walls, and felt, with certainty, that he had some secrets to speak to his nephew. And so I turned myself out of his holy doors, and wandered into the cloister.
    The cloister was more like a garden than a holy place, a vast space planted with glossy-leaved orange, olive and almond trees. The quadrangle was laid with pale stone paths and intersected with tiny dark green hedges cut into intricate patterns and lopped at shin level, just the right height to trip a man. In the centre, picking at the hedges with their orange bills, half-a-dozen snow-white geese wandered, honking importantly. No doubt they were sacred or something, but the very sight of them made my stomach growl. I had eaten little more than bread and mustard at dinner, and drunk overmuch. No doubtthe apothecaries would say my grumbling stomach was contributing to my morning melancholy.
    I walked beneath the shady loggias, striding from one arched shadow to the next, dodging the climbing sun. On the long ride to Monreale, I had not been merry company for Claudio, brooding instead on what Lady Beatrice had said to me the night before, and I fingered the
settebello
card, where it sat in my baldric, a hard little rectangle just over my heart.
    In that huge place, with everyone inside for mass, I could hear the soaring notes of the choir, and I suddenly felt very alone. Strangely, when the choir began their motet, even the geese had suddenly hushed their honking and disappeared. I was not accustomed to my own company, and I did not like myself as a friend. When I was alone my thoughts clamoured loudly into the silence. But I did not want to hear my own thoughts, did not want to peer into my own heart and did not enjoy searching my soul.
    But however hard I tried to concentrate on the music of the mass, unwanted thoughts began to creep into my mind.
    What is your occupation?
    Since boyhood I