Merchant of Venice fic, "A Wilderness of Monkeys," Part 1

[a_t_rain]

I, um, have no good explanation for this, and I think ticklethepear is probably right that this is the Shakespeare fandom equivalent of Hagrid / Giant Squid. It just happened.

Those who prefer their Shakespearean-comedy fic to be a little more respectful of the canon should definitely check out lareinenoire's A Truth Universally Acknowledged, which is a wonderful series of missing scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Title: A Wilderness of Monkeys
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Shylock / Portia (!), implied Antonio / Bassanio
Summary: Shylock travels to Belmont looking for revenge. He finds something more complicated.



A Wilderness of Monkeys

Who Chooseth Me Shall Gain What Many Men Desire

Dusk was already falling, but Shylock found the chatelaine of Belmont in the gardens, her golden hair loose. She was romping with a child, a little boy upwards of a year old, and for a moment Shylock thought he had misjudged the situation. Then he saw that there was a second woman present – a woman who looked rather like a lawyer’s clerk that he had seen once – and it was this woman who gathered up the child and carried him indoors as mothers do, and the laughter in Portia’s eyes faded and gave way to something like hunger. No. He had not misjudged.

“Good evening, Daniel,” he said softly, so that only she could hear.

She turned, startled.

“Or Balthasar, if you will.”

“I do not know you,” she said. It was an unconvincing lie, but he thought he would let it pass for the moment.

“It has been two years since we met. My name is Shylock. Shylock the Christian.” By now he had acquired a habit of flinging out this last phrase as one might fling offal to a dog. He saw that she caught the full measure of bitterness in his voice, and that it unsettled her.

“I have nothing to give you,” she said.

“I did not come here to beg anything of you.”

“Why did you come, then?” She had looked him over by now. He was not poor, except by comparison to his former substance, but he had worn his most threadbare garments, believing that the sight of them would shake her out of her complacency.

“I would have you look upon your handiwork,” he said.

She said nothing for a moment. What does a woman say to a man she has done her best to destroy? “How did you know it was I?” she asked at last.

So her first instinct was detachment, logic, curiosity. Shylock filed this information away for future reference and decided to tell her the truth. He had, after all, a grudging respect for her intellect. “I knew that you were no man from the moment I saw you. And I had heard Bassanio was lately married to the cousin of Signor Bellario of Padua; it was not so hard to reason it out.”

“Then you must have known that I came to save his friend. Why did you not expose me?”

He had not expected her to reach the point so soon, but he welcomed the question. “It seemed to me that you might change sides when you knew all.”

It was too dark to see whether she was blushing. “I know not what you mean,” she said after a short pause.

“Madam, I think you do.”

He could remember Antonio’s exact words, the same way he remembered everything about the day that had seen his ruin. Say how I loved you, speak me fair in death; and when the tale is told, bid her be judge whether Bassanio had not once a love. And Bassanio’s reply: My wife and all the world are not with me esteemed above thy life. I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all here to this devil to deliver you. He remembered the supposed doctor’s face at that moment. Oh yes, she had understood.

“I had thought you might be inclined to seek revenge.”

“You know nothing of us,” Portia said angrily. “I am a Christian!”

“Why, so am I!” said Shylock. “If I had any illusions that Christians are better than other men and women – I do not say I ever did, look you, but if I did, they are gone now. You will revenge yourselves as swiftly, and as bloodily, as any other people.”

“I would not.”

“No? I wonder ... If you were in that court again, today, knowing all that you know, what would you do?”

She was silent for a moment. Calculating, Shylock thought. If Antonio had been removed from the world then, with her husband in his first flush of love for his rich bride – if she had returned home in time to comfort him in his grief – what might have been? Might not the scales have balanced, if only one side had been lighter by a pound of flesh?

“Go away,” she said, and the harshness in her voice told him that his words had shown her a side of herself she wished to banish. “I did not bid thee come.”

“Quite so. Sometimes I come unlooked-for; it is so with the instruments of our just revenges. They come to hand, and find us.”

“I do not understand.”

“You need not understand. Look for me in the summerhouse tomorrow night, if you will. If you will not, so.” He turned and walked away.

* * *

After that, it was easy to cuckold Bassanio.

Not that he had any deep grudge against the prodigal. No, cuckolding him was a sort of side benefit. He had come, rather, to try Bassanio’s lady’s virtue and show her to be made of flesh and blood, to take the smug air of saintliness from her – and that proved to be easy.

She came the next night, moving through the darkness without a lamp or candle. “Speak not,” she said, her voice low and rough. He wondered how it was that a creature with all other womanly beauties had not been given a beautiful voice.

Her mouth found his; he felt her draw back a little at the roughness of his beard, and then push forward, her hands about his neck. Instinctively, he reached upward to remove them – he had not forgotten who she was and why she had come, and he would not leave his throat unguarded – but she had already taken her hands away and begun to remove his shirt...

For a moment, he was afraid that he might not be able to do what she had come to do. He was past fifty, and he had not been with a woman since Leah died, except for that one time with Jessica’s nurse, and that had been a futile attempt to replace something that could not be replaced. And then she slid downward, and good God, where did these Christian women learn to do such things with their tongues? – he found that he was not so old, after all – did she do that with Bassanio? – trying to make him forget who she was, or who she was not?

He did not ask her. They coupled as animals do, urgently, without words and without joy, and they did not speak afterward. She had told him not to speak. He found it harder to obey than he would have expected.

They lay on the floor of the summerhouse for some few minutes. Lay separately, because neither of them made a move toward the other; neither did they turn away and reach at once for their clothes. He knew what one did with a woman one loved, and what one did after making a very awkward mistake; what did one do when one hated?

The night was growing cold. Portia rolled over, sat up, and began to pull on her gown. He had a brief, inexplicable impulse to help her with the buttons, but that would be absurd. He dressed. Still neither of them spoke.

“Wait a quarter of an hour before you go,” she said, and he watched from the summerhouse as she half-ran toward Belmont. There were candles in the windows even at this late hour, and they seemed to throw their light very far, far enough for anyone to pick out the small, furtive figure of the great house’s mistress. She knew not how to move stealthily, Shylock thought; she had always lived too much in the light.

He waited a quarter of an hour, or perhaps longer, and slipped away in the opposite direction. He knew how to blend with the night. But as it happened, he was the one who ended up being caught.

* * *

Shylock froze, blinded as a lantern shone into his eyes. The person carrying the lantern froze, too. A dog yipped – one of those absurd little lap dogs – and the person shushed it. It was a woman. He knew her voice.

“Father?”

“I have no children. Go home.”

“I’m Jessica.”

“I know who you are. You are as one dead to me.”

Jessica took a step backward, but her voice was steady as she answered him. “I did not know you were given to talking with the dead.”

“Why, I am as one dead, too. Why should the dead not talk to the dead? Who else will keep them company?” This wasn’t what he had meant to say, but now that he was face to face with his daughter, he found that he could not stop himself. “What were you thinking, child? Did you think there would be no price to pay for what you did?”

“No,” said Jessica. “I knew I would have to pay the price.”

“You thought you were the one to pay? Is that what you thought? What of the price I paid?” He found himself enumerating his losses, although the jewels weren’t the point, not at all. “A diamond, worth two thousand ducats; a casket of rubies and sapphires, five thousand ducats in all; two sealed bags of gold in double ducats –”

“I thought of it in the light of a dowry.” She was trying to be flippant and not succeeding; it was a way of speaking that had exasperated him when he was her father.

“So. You thought that if I would not give you my blessing, you would steal it. Is that what you thought?”

“You are shouting. You will wake my husband.”

For the first time, he thought to wonder what Jessica was doing out of doors at midnight. It occurred to him that she might be pursuing an illicit affair of her own, but when the dog began to yap again, he dismissed the idea. Even his daughter could not possibly be foolish enough to take that creature with her.

“I take Blanche out walking sometimes when I cannot sleep,” said Jessica, a little defensively, as if she were reading his thoughts.

“And why can you not sleep, hmm?”

“Never you mind,” said Jessica. “You have said you are not my father.” She stooped to pick up the dog and took a step toward the threshold of the house behind her. “For God’s sake come indoors and sit you down. It is very late.”

Shylock was on the point of refusing, but he found that he felt too exhausted and too cold to demur. He was too old to go around fornicating with heiresses, particularly outdoors on a chilly night. He would warm himself at her fire for a few minutes, he thought, and then go. It would mean nothing.

Jessica opened the door of the house and moved into the light, and he saw two things that surprised him and made him wonder if he had been wrong to show her so much anger. His daughter was wearing a turquoise ring on her left hand. And she was pregnant.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but she looked very like her mother.

Leah would not have worn a gown like that, of course, with bare shoulders and half her bosom showing. And she certainly would not have made herself ridiculous by kissing a Maltese dog on the nose, as Jessica was doing, or wasted her time braiding ribbons into its hair. No, he had been quite right to be angry with her.

Jessica took two cups from a cupboard and filled them from a pot that stood on the hearth. He recognized the liquid as coffee, a fashionable – and expensive – beverage in Venice. Paid for with his money, he supposed. Well. That meant he might as well enjoy it.

“So. When did you mean to tell me about my grandchild?”

She shrugged. “There would have been time enough. You never wrote or sent word to us, not even to ask how we were.”

He wanted to take her by the shoulders and say, There is not time enough, we have so, so little time. Leah had died of childbed fever when Jessica was not a week old.

He said, “There is better coffee in Venice. How much did you pay for this?”

“You need not drink it if you disapprove!”

“I did not say that. Look you, how you take everything I say amiss!”

“Good night, Father. I’ll put new linen on the bed in the spare chamber.”

Shylock pulled his chair closer to the fire and sipped at his coffee, trying to warm something inside of him that refused to thaw.

* * *

He slept late the following morning, and woke at the sound of voices.

“Your father, sweet? Why has he come here?”

“I know not. I suppose he missed us.”

“Perhaps.” Lorenzo sounded doubtful, but he did not pursue the subject, much to Shylock’s relief. He did not intend to explain to anyone that his business was with the heiress of Belmont.

Shylock dressed hastily and joined his daughter and son-in-law in the kitchen. Lorenzo said good morrow, rather coolly, and a servant girl offered him cold meat and bread, all the while looking sideways at him as if he were a strange beast in a menagerie. He wondered how on earth he would go about making conversation with these people, and how soon he could return to Venice without drawing attention to his odd behavior.

A welcome diversion arrived after breakfast, in the form of a young man who burst into the house and collapsed dramatically against the wall.

“Lorenzo, my good friend, lend me thirty ducats or else I die the death.”

Lorenzo did not seem particularly alarmed at this unorthodox greeting. “What death are you talking about, Gratiano?”

“No less a death than that of Agamemnon.”

“Agamemnon?”

“Nerissa will kill me if she learns I lost so much at dice. I think she would not stoop at stabbing me in the bath. Come, Lorenzo, there’s a good man. I’ll pay thee back o’ Tuesday.”

“After you double them at dice, I suppose?” Jessica asked sarcastically. “What happens if you lose again?”

“I’ll not lose again. They were false dice, I swear. I ought never to have played with the man who brought them. He had the look of a Jew.”

“Shhhhhh!” said Lorenzo.

“What?” Gratiano looked around for the first time. “Oh.” He turned to Shylock, swept off his hat, and bowed deeply. “The fair Jessica’s father, I presume. You are welcome, sir, for her sake.”

“I am welcome, am I? I did not know that this was your house.”

Jessica made a sound that might have been a snort. Possibly, Shylock thought, he might acknowledge her as his daughter after all.

“My house? No, no, Nerissa and I live in the other cottage. You must come and dine with us tonight. We’re having a small farewell dinner, just a few friends, you know, in honor of Antonio. He leaves for Venice tomorrow.” Gratiano realized, belatedly, that Jessica and Lorenzo were staring at him in open-mouthed astonishment. “Oh. I had forgot about you and Antonio. Well, what’s past is past, all friends now, eh?” He clapped Shylock on the shoulder, pocketed the thirty ducats, and strode off.

“You had better make a memorandum of his debt,” said Jessica to Lorenzo.

“What is that young man thinking?” Shylock demanded, as soon as he had recovered his powers of speech.

“He does not think, most of the time,” said Jessica. “But there’s no harm in him.”

“The last time I saw him, he was calling for me to be hanged. Do you not call that harm?”

“He has forgotten.” Jessica glanced at Lorenzo, who was busy trying to make sense of his account book. “They are forgetful people,” she added in a quieter voice. “I do not always understand them. But it is a – a generous forgetfulness. I have ofttimes been glad of it.”

“‘They?’ You do not count yourself one of them?”

“Sometimes I do,” she said, and then shook her head. “No. I am always a stranger here.”

“You might come back to Venice,” he said. “I could say you are a widow, and you could keep house for me; I cannot get a servant to stay since Lancelot left me.”

For some reason, Jessica did not jump at this offer. “Were we not called strangers in Venice? Where are we not strangers?”

Shylock did not answer. There had been a time, he thought sadly, when they had had their own community in Venice, and he had not felt himself to be a foreigner there. That time was gone.

“We have become Christians,” Jessica added bitterly. “Is that not enough?”

“No. It is too much already.” Again he felt that dull edge of anger. What did his daughter mean by “we”? It had taken all the Duke’s power and the threat of death to force him to convert, and she had renounced her heritage casually, voluntarily. What right had she to regret her choice now, if indeed she was regretting it?

“What did you say, love?” Lorenzo interrupted. “Come here and help me with these accounts; I cannot make head or tail of them.”

Jessica came to the window and looked at the book. Shylock put on his spectacles and looked, too.

“You know not how to keep an account-book,” he informed his son-in-law. “This is all haphazard, and very ill writ; I wonder you can make any use of it at all.”

Lorenzo glared at him. “You write it, then!”

“I think I will,” said Shylock. “That is my money you are hazarding.”

* * *

He spent most of the day putting Lorenzo and Jessica’s accounts in order. He was not quite sure why he was taking so many pains on their behalf, but it was easier than trying to converse with his son-in-law, and he rather enjoyed the work.

“You are not so far in debt as I had thought,” he informed Lorenzo at the end of the day. “If you would not spend so much on wine and candles, you might live well enough within your means. You must stop lending money to Gratiano, though, or at the least charge him usance.”

“He is my friend!” said Lorenzo. “I would not take interest from a friend, even if God did not forbid it.”

“As you will. But God doth not command you to lend money to a friend who repays it but one time in ten.”

“I told you Gratiano never pays what he owes,” said Jessica.

Lorenzo shrugged. “He will give us a good dinner.”

“He had better,” said Shylock.

* * *

Shylock accompanied his daughter and son-in-law to Gratiano’s house for dinner. He could not think of a suitable excuse, and besides, he rather enjoyed the idea of turning up at Antonio’s farewell dinner and discomfiting the rest of the company. Lorenzo was clearly embarrassed by his presence, and the other guests looked gratifyingly uneasy, but nobody alluded to the past except Bassanio’s incorrigible servant Lancelot, who insisted on setting all of the places except Shylock’s with a very long spoon.

Dinner turned out to be roast pork and a dish of artichokes cooked with ham. Shylock was not sure whether this menu signified malice or thoughtlessness on Gratiano’s part, but he ate heartily. Why not? He was a Christian, after all. He could have wished that they had offered something else for Jessica’s sake; his daughter took nothing but bread. Gratiano’s wife noticed this, too, and offered her olives and fruit. Shylock decided that he did not mind Gratiano’s wife. The rest of them could all go to hell.

Portia greeted him politely when he first arrived, giving no sign that she had ever met him before. A particularly alert observer might have noticed that she neither looked at him nor spoke to him after that, even though she kept up a flood of witty chatter with all of the other guests. Luckily none of the other people at the table was such an observer. They drank a great deal of wine, especially the men, and still more after dinner as they toasted Antonio. It seemed that business would detain him in Venice for some time, and Bassanio was becoming positively maudlin at the thought of his absence.

“Come to Venice when thou canst. I’ll see thee well lodged,” Antonio promised, with barely a hint of innuendo on the last few words.

“With all my heart,” said Bassanio. “Thou knowest Belmont is as a prison to me without thy presence.”

Shylock glanced at Portia. She did not show any outward sign of displeasure, but her lips shaped the words In the summerhouse. Midnight. He nodded.

* * *

Shylock had left most of his own clothes in the village inn; staying with Lorenzo and Jessica had not been part of the plan. He borrowed Lorenzo’s heaviest cloak and the blanket from the spare-room bed before he crept out of the house. He was no young lover, warmed by the heat of his blood, and as revenges went, this one was neither clever nor destructive enough to be worth dying of an ague.

Portia was there before him. She unpinned his cloak and spread it on the floor of the summerhouse. Again, they came together hastily and did not speak. Only afterwards did Shylock discover that cloaks and blankets changed matters; they made it tempting to huddle together, pulling the covers tightly over their bodies, rather than dressing quickly in the cold night air.

Portia murmured something that he did not catch, and he asked her to speak up.

“I said, why are you here?”

“The same reason you are here. I hate your husband, and I saw an opportunity.”

“You have more reason to hate me.” She was a clever woman, that was certain, and one not given to illusions. “That is your real reason. You hated me and wanted to see me soiled, stained, an adulteress.”

That had, indeed, been his real reason. But it came to him now that something had changed, probably around the same time he had entered his daughter’s house. He would not have come to the summerhouse this second time if Portia had not summoned him, and now that he was here, he could have wished himself almost anywhere else.

“And what of your part in this?” he said. “Why are you here? Do you also hate yourself?”

“I do not know. Sometimes. Yes.”

She was very young, he realized. Perhaps two or three years older than Jessica, at the most. Would that he had not come.

“It is as well that this has happened. My husband has some cause to spend his nights in Venice now. Before – I had given him none.”

“Why did you marry him?” Shylock asked after a moment. It was not that he cared about Portia’s marriage, but he was curious. It had been a strange match: a young prodigal with nothing to recommend him but his face and manners, and a woman who had wealth, beauty, and wit.

“I had no choice. My father left a strange will –”

“I had heard. ‘Twould be stranger if you had not followed your own will. Young women generally do.”

“You are right,” said Portia after a moment. “I cheated at the casket-game. I do not know whether he would have had the wit to choose rightly if I had not helped him.”

“You do not know?” It seemed a curious thing for a clever woman not to know her husband’s nature after two years.

“Hazarding comes naturally to him. He might have chosen the right casket for that reason alone. But he might have been easily led by appearances, as the others were, if I had not instructed my servants to play a song warning against such vanity.” She began to sing, under her breath.

It is engendered in the eyes;
With gazing fed, and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies –

She broke off. “You see that I did not enchant him with my singing voice. Were I a Siren, Ulysses had no need to tie himself to the mast.” And, in a few words, the vulnerable girl who had huddled next to him was the lady of Belmont again, witty and poised, and the time was past for confessions. The quickness of the transformation startled Shylock. He handed her her cloak almost instinctively; one did such services for great ladies.

They did not speak again until they had dressed. “My husband will leave for Venice within these three days,” she said. “If you are still here – and if you will – you might come to the house. It is warmer there.”

“I may. If I am still here.” Even as he spoke, he thought that he must be mad. A sane man would start for Venice tonight, or would never have come in the first place.

The last thing she said was under her breath; he did not think he was meant to hear. “Gold without and dry bones within. Perhaps he has the thing he would have chosen.”