A Wilderness of Monkeys, Part 3
May. 16th, 2010 08:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainYeah. I finally got around to finishing the Merchant of Venice fic, probably long after everyone has forgotten about it. Parts 1 and 2 are here.
All plot points involving quarantines and such are purely invented, and probably bear no relationship whatsoever to actual practices in sixteenth-century Venice. But to the best of my knowledge, nothing in Shakespeare bears any relationship to real-life Venice either, apart from the fact that he seems to have had a vague impression that it was a hyper-modern, cosmopolitan, and extremely capitalist city.
Who Chooseth Me Must Give and Hazard All He Hath
Shylock was awakened the next morning by a pounding at his door. Portia was curled comfortably beside him, like a kitten, and he thought for a moment that he would ignore the knocking; but it grew more insistent, and at last he pulled on his gown and went down the stairs. Lancelot Gobbo, his worthless ex-servant, was standing on his threshold.
“My dear old master! Let me in, I pray you, else I have no place to lay my head.”
“Bassanio has grown weary of thy pranks, has he? Or short of money? Well, well, ‘tis all one. I told thee thou wouldst not last long in his service.”
Lancelot showed alarming signs of being about to grovel at his feet. “If you let me in, I will kiss your worship’s hand. I will –”
“I had rather thou didst not – but come in. Thou’lt wake the neighbors.” Shylock seized Lancelot by the arm and half-dragged him inside.
“They are already woken. ‘Tis past nine o’clock.” Lancelot looked at him, talking in the gown and slippers for the first time. “I say, when were you wont to lie so late, master? Are you new-married as well as new-christened? Some maid of fifteen or sixteen summers, perhaps, as befits a man of your age?”
“Never mind that. No, I am not married. What dost thou here? Where is Bassanio?”
“If I knew that, master, I would have no need to do anything here,” said Lancelot. “My master Bassanio went to the mainland at first light with Signor Antonio; they had not returned when the quarantine was proclaimed, and I locked out of the house, for Nell our kitchen-maid – a good wench, but somewhat sunburned and black in the teeth – but no matter that, I’d tumble her if she’d have me – will not let me in for fear of the smallpox.”
“Quarantine?” asked Shylock, now wide awake. “Smallpox? Tell the story properly, you fool. And leave the kitchen-maid out.”
“‘Tis she that hath left me out, I tell you. I went to the docks to learn what ships had come in – and to see if there were oysters, for my master and Antonio always have a great appetite for oysters when they are in Venice – and what do I hear, but that a ship has arrived from Illyria, and before they were here for a day, the greater part of the crew fell sick with smallpox. Venice is under quarantine. No one can go in or out of the city.”
“If this is one of thy jests, Lancelot, I will flay thee alive.”
Lancelot looked genuinely alarmed at this. “No jest, master, I swear it!”
“Well. So thou would’st return to my service.” Shylock clutched his forehead and tried to think. The last thing he needed was Lancelot bearing tales to Bassanio; but, on the other hand, if this story about a smallpox epidemic was true, he was in a world of trouble and a servant would be no bad thing to have. He would need help from some quarter, that was certain.
Unexpectedly, he thought of Tubal, who was the closest thing he had to a friend. “Be of some use,” he said to Lancelot. “Go and fetch Tubal, if they have not locked the ghetto, or find some way to bear a message to him. One moment; I will write him a letter.”
He dashed off a note to Tubal, doing his best to convey the urgency of his plight without actually committing any of the details to paper. Lancelot could not read, but it was like as not that he would lose the note or give it to the wrong person. “Take this to him, and look that you stay until he has read it and given you some answer.” He recalled that he had almost nothing to eat in the house, and handed Lancelot a ducat. “Buy some food if any of the shops are open. If not, bring this back straightaway. No idling!”
As soon as Lancelot had gone, Portia rose from the landing of the stairs. She had been crouching there, unseen; Shylock wondered how long she had been listening.
“You heard that?”
She nodded. “My husband will return to Belmont as soon as he finds that Venice is closed. Where else would he go?” She bit her lower lip.
“And you do not want him to find you gone, after all.”
“No. He would not be able to hold up his head again. I did not care, I wanted to shame him, but now – No.”
“You might have thought of that before you left for Venice,” Shylock couldn’t resist pointing out.
“I know. Would that this quarantine had happened yesterday! I half-hoped that something like it would prevent me from coming here.”
“You did?” He thought of her as he had seen her on the Rialto, eager and a little intoxicated with freedom.
“I felt like one on the brink of doing some glorious and fatal thing. It was a thing I had wanted, and long dreamt of, and could not draw back from doing – and yet, I wished for someone to stay my hand and stop me in my folly, for I could not stop by my own power. Do men feel like that when they go to war, I wonder?” She looked up at him. “Have you ever felt so?”
“Once.”
“What happened?”
“You.” He had never admitted this before, even to himself; but he remembered the knife trembling in his hands, and some part of him had been desperately grateful when she had cried, Tarry!
It took a moment for this to sink in. “Oh,” she said softly. “I had been thinking all I did was for ill.”
“No.” He sat down on the stairs beside her. “You saved a life. Two lives, most like, for I do not think the good people of Venice would have let me reach my house alive if I had killed him. That is something.”
She smiled without humor. “And now, I see I am to destroy two lives, one of them my own. I am not sure that I like the exchange.”
He took both of her hands in his. “I will help you, if I can. Let us think. You must have told some story to your servants. Where do they think you are?”
“They think I am with Nerissa and her son, visiting her old mother. She lives on the road to Treviso, about six miles from here. I meant to go to there at once if I heard my husband had left Venice; I would be there before he knew where to look for me, and I would trust Nerissa with my life. Is there any way to leave Venice during a quarantine?”
“None, unless you go unseen and at night. Tubal might have the means to help us.”
“Who is Tubal?”
Tubal was one of Shylock’s oldest friends. He had not turned his back on Shylock when he converted, but there was another cause of awkwardness between them. Since half of his goods were forfeit and he was no longer permitted to practice his trade, Shylock had taken six months to scrape together enough money to repay what Tubal had spent in searching for his daughter. Tubal had tried to refuse at first; Shylock had insisted, for it was a point of pride with him; Tubal had accepted, but refused to take a penny of interest. “You are still of my tribe,” he had said. Shylock had known that he was no such thing, by the laws of Venice as well as by his own reckoning, and had forced Tubal to take the interest to which he was legally entitled. And ever since then, the two had been as distant acquaintances.
Shylock tried to explain this history to Portia, who found it utterly baffling. “I do not understand why you are making such ado over money. Is it because you are Jews?”
“It is because we are Venetians. Money is the language we speak. If you told this story to your husband and Antonio, I assure you they would understand it well enough.”
She considered this. “Maybe you are right. I have never been able to make my husband understand that money is not everything.”
“You speak as one who has always had it, my lady. Money is love, hatred, shame, honor, a blessing, a curse, power, pain, death – How is that not everything?”
“There is more in the world,” she insisted, although she didn’t explain what. “If you were to die of smallpox tomorrow, would you not want to meet God thinking of something other than what you had, and what good you had failed to do with it?”
“I’m not going to die of smallpox tomorrow,” said Shylock in some annoyance. “I had it years ago.” But Portia was gazing off into space, not seeming to hear him, and it came to him that by you she had actually meant I. “You’re not going to die of smallpox either. You have been here less than a day, and you have not been consorting with sailors – have you?”
She smiled a little at that. “No. I think I can, as yet, confine myself to one adventure at a time.” After a moment, she added, “I am half-starved,” not seeming to notice any incongruity in this change of topic. “Have you anything for breakfast?”
Shylock looked in the cupboards. There were some vegetables he had forgotten about, in varying stages of dessication, and half a salt codfish. He was sure that Leah would have been able to make a delicious meal out of these unprepossessing ingredients. He was equally sure that neither he nor Portia knew how to do anything of the sort. “Come and look for yourself.”
Portia looked. “You have to soak codfish, do you not? I have heard the servants talk of it.”
“For at least a day.”
It was a great relief when Tubal and Lancelot returned, laden with a roast fowl, several loaves of bread, and two bottles of wine. Tubal was a big man with a big laugh, and Shylock could tell that Portia rather liked him. He hoped she wouldn’t take it into her head to convert him.
“I am sorry to be so late,” he said. “They have locked the ghetto because of the quarantine.”
“How did you come here, then?”
“Rooftops,” said Tubal. “Lancelot showed me the way.”
“What, at your age!” said Shylock, genuinely shocked.
Tubal laughed and gave Portia a sideways glance. “While you, of course, always conduct yourself with perfect maturity and dignity, and this is why you have sent me a letter saying that you are in some trouble which you cannot explain, but you need a boat so that you can break the quarantine under cover of darkness. I see.”
“Never you mind. We were not talking of me.”
“Do you mean to introduce me to your friend?”
“This is Signor Balthasar, a young lawyer of Padua.”
“Ah. Trouble that requires a lawyer. Better and better.”
“He is not here because I need his services. I will explain later. Lancelot! Go and carve the fowl for dinner.”
As soon as Lancelot had gone, Shylock looked at Portia. She considered Tubal for a moment, then nodded.
“You know Signor Bassanio? Well. Balthasar is his wife.”
Tubal burst into raucous laughter. “His wife! Ha ha! I’ve no doubt that Bassanio would take just such a wife, if the church would allow it!”
Portia glared at him, and then took off her hat and unpinned her hair. “You mistake, sir. I am a woman, and his wife.”
Tubal had the good grace to blush. “I beg your pardon, my lady. There are jests men make, when they think they are alone – Well. I spoke idly, and meant no offense.”
“You could not have given me more offense than my husband has already given,” said Portia shortly, covering her head again.
Tubal looked from Shylock to Portia, suddenly working out how Signor Bassanio’s wife had come to be in Shylock’s house, and in such a disguise. “Oh. Oh, my God. I think I understand why you wrote to me.”
Portia flushed. “Oh, is there no way to untie this knot?”
“Of course not!” Shylock snapped. “Do you think this is a comedy played on the stage?”
Tubal chuckled. “Perhaps it is a comedy played on the stage. It is certainly absurd enough.”
Shylock glared at him. “I do not find it amusing!”
“That, my friend, is because we Jews are always cast in the villain’s parts.” Tubal grew sober, and considered the situation. “You asked if I could get you a boat, the smaller and less conspicuous the better. I do not think that will be any trouble. What ho, Lancelot!”
Lancelot appeared, gnawing on a wing of the fowl.
“Go and seek out Signor Adriano,” said Tubal, and then added quickly, “No, not now, fool, after dinner is served!” as Lancelot sprang toward the door. “Dost thou hear me? Tell him I need to borrow his boat. If he says no, remind him that he owes me a thousand ducats and the bond was due two days ago.”
Obediently, Lancelot served dinner and left, helping himself to a drumstick on the way out.
Portia said at first that she would have some of the codfish instead, as it was Friday. She discovered, in short order, why it was necessary to soak salt codfish overnight, peeled a carrot instead, and sat gnawing on it resentfully. After half an hour she gave in and helped herself to what was left of the chicken. Shylock was grateful for this, as it improved her temper considerably.
Tubal refilled their wine glasses. They waited. From time to time, Portia glanced out the window; the watch, she said, was patrolling the streets, though it was broad daylight. Tubal told a complicated story about a constable of the watch, a washerwoman with loose morals, and a goat, which he swore had really happened in Mantua but which Shylock was sure he had found in a jest-book. They waited some more.
Lancelot returned late in the afternoon with Signor Adriano’s boat. Shylock told him to go out and moor it where it would not be noticed, and turned to Tubal with relief. “I have left a good horse stabled at the Elephant. You must take us there tonight, as soon as it is dark.”
“Tomorrow night,” Tubal corrected. “I cannot take you tonight. That would be breaking the Sabbath.”
“BREAKING. THE. SABBATH?!” If Tubal had been ten years younger, Shylock would gladly have hit him; as things were, he merely looked daggers at him. “Why, man, I’ve seen you break the Sabbath a hundred times!”
“And so I do, when it is needful to do so. I think that it is not needful now.”
In the past, Tubal’s definition of “needful” had encompassed pretty nearly everything from doing business with Christians to undertaking the search for Jessica. Mindful that he did owe Tubal some gratitude for the last, Shylock decided not to yell at him again. “How do you reckon that?”
“The lady’s husband left Venice this morning; so. He comes back to find it under quarantine; so. If he leaves at once, and rides post-haste to Belmont, he might come there this evening; so. He finds his wife gone, and the servants say she has gone with her waiting-gentlewoman to visit that gentlewoman’s mother, who is a very respectable widow living near Treviso. He has no reason to be alarmed, or to think she has lied about where she is going. Does a sane man turn around and ride all night? No. If he feels any need to seek her out before she comes home – and ‘tis like as not that he would stay at home and wait for her – he would not leave until the morning. Another day’s journey; so. He does not come until the next night at the soonest, and only if he has a very good reason to hurry, which he does not. There is no hurry for us, then, and no need to break the Sabbath.”
Shylock had to admit that Tubal’s logic was almost as impeccable as it was infuriating.
“Besides,” Tubal added as Lancelot came back into the room, “do you not have a great deal of business to discuss with Signor Balthasar of Padua?”
“On the contrary. I think that Signor Balthasar and I have little more to say to each other.”
“The less you think you have to say,” said Tubal enigmatically, “the more needful it is that you should say it. For my part, I am going to sleep. I am, as you were so kind as to remind me this morning, an old man.” He folded his arms and closed his eyes.
“Is he always like this?” Portia whispered.
“No,” said Shylock. “Sometimes he makes you want to murder him.”
Portia choked back a laugh, and then grew quiet. Lancelot had gone to the kitchen; they were alone. She looked a little afraid.
“Come upstairs,” said Shylock. He was not at all sure what there was left to say, but he had rather not say it anywhere they were likely to have an audience.
Portia followed him.
“I could tell Lancelot to make up the bed in the next chamber for you,” he said awkwardly. He wasn’t even sure how she had ended up in his bed on the previous night, now that he thought of it.
Portia shook her head.
“What are you thinking, girl? You have said you have changed your mind about shaming your husband!”
“He will not be shamed.” Portia leaned her head against his shoulder, and he found that he was not, after all, able to push her away. “Or if he will, what’s done is done. How should tonight make any difference?”
How should it make any difference to Bassanio, indeed? It didn’t. It did, however, strip away the last fig leaf of a pretense that she had come here with any thought of revenge.
“You have chosen him,” said Shylock, trying to be angry and not quite managing it. “You said yourself that you must go back to him.”
“So I must,” she murmured. “But not yet.”
* * *
An hour later, Shylock went down the stairs to fetch the other bottle of wine, thinking that they could both do with a drink. Tubal opened his eyes. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Do you mean to marry her?”
“Certainly not.”
“Why not? ‘Twould be good for you to marry again; you have been alone since Jessica left, and I am worried for you.”
“I have never had any mind to marry again, and still less to marry her.”
“Why? You are in love with her.”
“Absurd.”
“And she with you.”
“Impossible,” said Shylock, fearing at once that it was possible. The other, of course, was still absurd. “Besides, you have forgotten that she is married already.”
“Surely her husband would divorce her if he knew she was here with you.”
Shylock shook his head. “Christians. No divorce.”
“Sometimes even Christians agree to go their separate ways. It happens more often than you might think.”
“She will not. She means to keep her vows. After tomorrow, that is.”
Shylock himself thought this sounded absurd, but Tubal accepted it without a blink. “Ah. Bad luck. Yes, you had better take the rest of the wine. Good night.”
* * *
In the morning there were the usual noises from the street, men opening their shops for business and women gossiping. It took Shylock a moment to realize that this was not, in fact, usual at all in a time of quarantine.
He washed and dressed hastily. Portia was pinning up her hair in front of the glass, transforming herself once again into Signor Balthasar. He hesitated a moment, then went over and kissed her. They did not have enough time for any sort of pretense, least of all a pretense of indifference.
“You had better go,” she whispered when they were ready to speak again. “Find out what is happening. I will be with you in a moment.”
As Shylock went down the stairs, Tubal came in from the street. “Good news, good news! The quarantine is over, and your friend Signor Balthasar is free to leave. It seem that the sailors do not have smallpox after all, only chicken pox.”
Lancelot yelped and spat out the morsel of leftover fowl he had been eating for breakfast.
“What kind of fool of a doctor mistakes chicken pox for smallpox?” Shylock demanded, feeling unexpectedly cross with the world. He realized that he had been counting on this last day, and he began to fear that Tubal was right. He must have lost his wits.
“Who knows what doctors are thinking, most of the time? If it cannot be bled or purged away, what do they know about it? Ah, good morrow, Signor Balthasar. I trust you have slept well. How like you your entertainment here in Venice?”
Portia turned scarlet, and Shylock decided immediately that another day in the house with Tubal would not have been supportable, after all. “I do not know if you heard, but the quarantine has been lifted and you are free to travel. I will bring you part of the way, if you will.”
“Thank you. I should be glad of your company.”
* * *
At the Elephant, he helped Portia mount Lorenzo’s horse, hired another one for himself, and started down the road to Treviso. They did not speak until they were well away from Venice.
“If you should be with child –”
The swiftness of Portia’s answer startled him. “I took the precaution of making my husband drunk on the night before he left for Venice. I will do it again, for good measure.”
He had been going to give her the direction of an old woman in Venice who would induce a miscarriage for a small fee, and who was safer and more discreet than most of her kind, but he saw at once that Portia’s solution was better. Less risky, and perhaps happier, if anything about the present situation could be called happy. He remembered his first sight of her playing with Nerissa’s child, and thought, yes, all may yet be for the best.
They rode on a little way before Portia spoke again. “Think’st thou that Bassanio and I will ever be what a husband and wife ought to be to each other?”
“I do not know. Do you care for him?”
“I think that I have always cared for him.”
Shylock remembered something else from that day in the court. Antonio, I am married to a wife which is as dear to me as life itself ...
“I believe he cares for thee as well. And think of this. Antonio is twenty years older than Bassanio, at the least. He may die; or if he does not, ‘tis thy husband’s love that will die in time. Youth does not follow age as far as the brink of the grave.”
Portia flushed. “Sometimes it does!” she protested.
He was flattered by the vehemence of this declaration, but not deceived. “It does not,” he told her, as gently as he could. “It ought not. The world is as it is, not as you would re-make it if you could.”
“That is as well. If I could re-make it as I would, I would more likely mar it in the making.”
He knew without looking at her that she had that mirthless smile on her lips again, and wondered how he had ever thought her smug or self-satisfied. “Perhaps,” he said, “you have marred less than you think.”
Again they were silent for a little while. “I read in an old book that no one can be bound by a double love. Do you think that is always true?”
“No,” said Shylock at once. He did not know whether Portia was thinking of herself or of Bassanio, but he had proof enough that it was false when he thought of Leah, who had not lived to be much older than Portia was now. She had been a dark-eyed and prudent woman, wise beyond her years, so very different from the clever gambler riding beside him in boy’s clothes. He trusted that she would know him if they met in another life, and that she would forgive him this.
“Nerissa’s mother lives near here,” said Portia when they had come a little farther, “around the bend in the road. I had better go on alone.” She reined her horse and turned to look at him. “Shall we meet again, I wonder?”
“I think we will. I mean to visit my daughter. In a few months, perhaps, after the baby is born.” He paused, finding that it cost him an unexpected amount of effort to say what had to be said next. “We cannot – do what we have done – again. You know that?”
“Yes. I do know.” She had dismounted and taken one of her own gowns from the bundle she carried, pulling it on over her doublet and breeches as she spoke. “That is how I would have it.” Her head emerged from the mass of satin, and she unpinned her hair and allowed it to tumble over her shoulders. She looked slightly rumpled and overstuffed, but respectable. “It is time, I think, that you and I tried to do right. I do not know if it will come easily to me, but it will be a change.”
“For me, too.” He reached out a hand to smooth her hair, and let it linger a moment. “Farewell.”
“Farewell.”
He watched her until she had gone, and then he turned back to Venice, back to the cemetery in the Lido where Leah lay buried. For why should the living not talk to the dead? He had much to explain to his wife, and he trusted that, one way or another, she would hear.
After that he would write to Jessica, perhaps not explaining everything just yet, but trying his best to do right.
All plot points involving quarantines and such are purely invented, and probably bear no relationship whatsoever to actual practices in sixteenth-century Venice. But to the best of my knowledge, nothing in Shakespeare bears any relationship to real-life Venice either, apart from the fact that he seems to have had a vague impression that it was a hyper-modern, cosmopolitan, and extremely capitalist city.
Who Chooseth Me Must Give and Hazard All He Hath
Shylock was awakened the next morning by a pounding at his door. Portia was curled comfortably beside him, like a kitten, and he thought for a moment that he would ignore the knocking; but it grew more insistent, and at last he pulled on his gown and went down the stairs. Lancelot Gobbo, his worthless ex-servant, was standing on his threshold.
“My dear old master! Let me in, I pray you, else I have no place to lay my head.”
“Bassanio has grown weary of thy pranks, has he? Or short of money? Well, well, ‘tis all one. I told thee thou wouldst not last long in his service.”
Lancelot showed alarming signs of being about to grovel at his feet. “If you let me in, I will kiss your worship’s hand. I will –”
“I had rather thou didst not – but come in. Thou’lt wake the neighbors.” Shylock seized Lancelot by the arm and half-dragged him inside.
“They are already woken. ‘Tis past nine o’clock.” Lancelot looked at him, talking in the gown and slippers for the first time. “I say, when were you wont to lie so late, master? Are you new-married as well as new-christened? Some maid of fifteen or sixteen summers, perhaps, as befits a man of your age?”
“Never mind that. No, I am not married. What dost thou here? Where is Bassanio?”
“If I knew that, master, I would have no need to do anything here,” said Lancelot. “My master Bassanio went to the mainland at first light with Signor Antonio; they had not returned when the quarantine was proclaimed, and I locked out of the house, for Nell our kitchen-maid – a good wench, but somewhat sunburned and black in the teeth – but no matter that, I’d tumble her if she’d have me – will not let me in for fear of the smallpox.”
“Quarantine?” asked Shylock, now wide awake. “Smallpox? Tell the story properly, you fool. And leave the kitchen-maid out.”
“‘Tis she that hath left me out, I tell you. I went to the docks to learn what ships had come in – and to see if there were oysters, for my master and Antonio always have a great appetite for oysters when they are in Venice – and what do I hear, but that a ship has arrived from Illyria, and before they were here for a day, the greater part of the crew fell sick with smallpox. Venice is under quarantine. No one can go in or out of the city.”
“If this is one of thy jests, Lancelot, I will flay thee alive.”
Lancelot looked genuinely alarmed at this. “No jest, master, I swear it!”
“Well. So thou would’st return to my service.” Shylock clutched his forehead and tried to think. The last thing he needed was Lancelot bearing tales to Bassanio; but, on the other hand, if this story about a smallpox epidemic was true, he was in a world of trouble and a servant would be no bad thing to have. He would need help from some quarter, that was certain.
Unexpectedly, he thought of Tubal, who was the closest thing he had to a friend. “Be of some use,” he said to Lancelot. “Go and fetch Tubal, if they have not locked the ghetto, or find some way to bear a message to him. One moment; I will write him a letter.”
He dashed off a note to Tubal, doing his best to convey the urgency of his plight without actually committing any of the details to paper. Lancelot could not read, but it was like as not that he would lose the note or give it to the wrong person. “Take this to him, and look that you stay until he has read it and given you some answer.” He recalled that he had almost nothing to eat in the house, and handed Lancelot a ducat. “Buy some food if any of the shops are open. If not, bring this back straightaway. No idling!”
As soon as Lancelot had gone, Portia rose from the landing of the stairs. She had been crouching there, unseen; Shylock wondered how long she had been listening.
“You heard that?”
She nodded. “My husband will return to Belmont as soon as he finds that Venice is closed. Where else would he go?” She bit her lower lip.
“And you do not want him to find you gone, after all.”
“No. He would not be able to hold up his head again. I did not care, I wanted to shame him, but now – No.”
“You might have thought of that before you left for Venice,” Shylock couldn’t resist pointing out.
“I know. Would that this quarantine had happened yesterday! I half-hoped that something like it would prevent me from coming here.”
“You did?” He thought of her as he had seen her on the Rialto, eager and a little intoxicated with freedom.
“I felt like one on the brink of doing some glorious and fatal thing. It was a thing I had wanted, and long dreamt of, and could not draw back from doing – and yet, I wished for someone to stay my hand and stop me in my folly, for I could not stop by my own power. Do men feel like that when they go to war, I wonder?” She looked up at him. “Have you ever felt so?”
“Once.”
“What happened?”
“You.” He had never admitted this before, even to himself; but he remembered the knife trembling in his hands, and some part of him had been desperately grateful when she had cried, Tarry!
It took a moment for this to sink in. “Oh,” she said softly. “I had been thinking all I did was for ill.”
“No.” He sat down on the stairs beside her. “You saved a life. Two lives, most like, for I do not think the good people of Venice would have let me reach my house alive if I had killed him. That is something.”
She smiled without humor. “And now, I see I am to destroy two lives, one of them my own. I am not sure that I like the exchange.”
He took both of her hands in his. “I will help you, if I can. Let us think. You must have told some story to your servants. Where do they think you are?”
“They think I am with Nerissa and her son, visiting her old mother. She lives on the road to Treviso, about six miles from here. I meant to go to there at once if I heard my husband had left Venice; I would be there before he knew where to look for me, and I would trust Nerissa with my life. Is there any way to leave Venice during a quarantine?”
“None, unless you go unseen and at night. Tubal might have the means to help us.”
“Who is Tubal?”
Tubal was one of Shylock’s oldest friends. He had not turned his back on Shylock when he converted, but there was another cause of awkwardness between them. Since half of his goods were forfeit and he was no longer permitted to practice his trade, Shylock had taken six months to scrape together enough money to repay what Tubal had spent in searching for his daughter. Tubal had tried to refuse at first; Shylock had insisted, for it was a point of pride with him; Tubal had accepted, but refused to take a penny of interest. “You are still of my tribe,” he had said. Shylock had known that he was no such thing, by the laws of Venice as well as by his own reckoning, and had forced Tubal to take the interest to which he was legally entitled. And ever since then, the two had been as distant acquaintances.
Shylock tried to explain this history to Portia, who found it utterly baffling. “I do not understand why you are making such ado over money. Is it because you are Jews?”
“It is because we are Venetians. Money is the language we speak. If you told this story to your husband and Antonio, I assure you they would understand it well enough.”
She considered this. “Maybe you are right. I have never been able to make my husband understand that money is not everything.”
“You speak as one who has always had it, my lady. Money is love, hatred, shame, honor, a blessing, a curse, power, pain, death – How is that not everything?”
“There is more in the world,” she insisted, although she didn’t explain what. “If you were to die of smallpox tomorrow, would you not want to meet God thinking of something other than what you had, and what good you had failed to do with it?”
“I’m not going to die of smallpox tomorrow,” said Shylock in some annoyance. “I had it years ago.” But Portia was gazing off into space, not seeming to hear him, and it came to him that by you she had actually meant I. “You’re not going to die of smallpox either. You have been here less than a day, and you have not been consorting with sailors – have you?”
She smiled a little at that. “No. I think I can, as yet, confine myself to one adventure at a time.” After a moment, she added, “I am half-starved,” not seeming to notice any incongruity in this change of topic. “Have you anything for breakfast?”
Shylock looked in the cupboards. There were some vegetables he had forgotten about, in varying stages of dessication, and half a salt codfish. He was sure that Leah would have been able to make a delicious meal out of these unprepossessing ingredients. He was equally sure that neither he nor Portia knew how to do anything of the sort. “Come and look for yourself.”
Portia looked. “You have to soak codfish, do you not? I have heard the servants talk of it.”
“For at least a day.”
It was a great relief when Tubal and Lancelot returned, laden with a roast fowl, several loaves of bread, and two bottles of wine. Tubal was a big man with a big laugh, and Shylock could tell that Portia rather liked him. He hoped she wouldn’t take it into her head to convert him.
“I am sorry to be so late,” he said. “They have locked the ghetto because of the quarantine.”
“How did you come here, then?”
“Rooftops,” said Tubal. “Lancelot showed me the way.”
“What, at your age!” said Shylock, genuinely shocked.
Tubal laughed and gave Portia a sideways glance. “While you, of course, always conduct yourself with perfect maturity and dignity, and this is why you have sent me a letter saying that you are in some trouble which you cannot explain, but you need a boat so that you can break the quarantine under cover of darkness. I see.”
“Never you mind. We were not talking of me.”
“Do you mean to introduce me to your friend?”
“This is Signor Balthasar, a young lawyer of Padua.”
“Ah. Trouble that requires a lawyer. Better and better.”
“He is not here because I need his services. I will explain later. Lancelot! Go and carve the fowl for dinner.”
As soon as Lancelot had gone, Shylock looked at Portia. She considered Tubal for a moment, then nodded.
“You know Signor Bassanio? Well. Balthasar is his wife.”
Tubal burst into raucous laughter. “His wife! Ha ha! I’ve no doubt that Bassanio would take just such a wife, if the church would allow it!”
Portia glared at him, and then took off her hat and unpinned her hair. “You mistake, sir. I am a woman, and his wife.”
Tubal had the good grace to blush. “I beg your pardon, my lady. There are jests men make, when they think they are alone – Well. I spoke idly, and meant no offense.”
“You could not have given me more offense than my husband has already given,” said Portia shortly, covering her head again.
Tubal looked from Shylock to Portia, suddenly working out how Signor Bassanio’s wife had come to be in Shylock’s house, and in such a disguise. “Oh. Oh, my God. I think I understand why you wrote to me.”
Portia flushed. “Oh, is there no way to untie this knot?”
“Of course not!” Shylock snapped. “Do you think this is a comedy played on the stage?”
Tubal chuckled. “Perhaps it is a comedy played on the stage. It is certainly absurd enough.”
Shylock glared at him. “I do not find it amusing!”
“That, my friend, is because we Jews are always cast in the villain’s parts.” Tubal grew sober, and considered the situation. “You asked if I could get you a boat, the smaller and less conspicuous the better. I do not think that will be any trouble. What ho, Lancelot!”
Lancelot appeared, gnawing on a wing of the fowl.
“Go and seek out Signor Adriano,” said Tubal, and then added quickly, “No, not now, fool, after dinner is served!” as Lancelot sprang toward the door. “Dost thou hear me? Tell him I need to borrow his boat. If he says no, remind him that he owes me a thousand ducats and the bond was due two days ago.”
Obediently, Lancelot served dinner and left, helping himself to a drumstick on the way out.
Portia said at first that she would have some of the codfish instead, as it was Friday. She discovered, in short order, why it was necessary to soak salt codfish overnight, peeled a carrot instead, and sat gnawing on it resentfully. After half an hour she gave in and helped herself to what was left of the chicken. Shylock was grateful for this, as it improved her temper considerably.
Tubal refilled their wine glasses. They waited. From time to time, Portia glanced out the window; the watch, she said, was patrolling the streets, though it was broad daylight. Tubal told a complicated story about a constable of the watch, a washerwoman with loose morals, and a goat, which he swore had really happened in Mantua but which Shylock was sure he had found in a jest-book. They waited some more.
Lancelot returned late in the afternoon with Signor Adriano’s boat. Shylock told him to go out and moor it where it would not be noticed, and turned to Tubal with relief. “I have left a good horse stabled at the Elephant. You must take us there tonight, as soon as it is dark.”
“Tomorrow night,” Tubal corrected. “I cannot take you tonight. That would be breaking the Sabbath.”
“BREAKING. THE. SABBATH?!” If Tubal had been ten years younger, Shylock would gladly have hit him; as things were, he merely looked daggers at him. “Why, man, I’ve seen you break the Sabbath a hundred times!”
“And so I do, when it is needful to do so. I think that it is not needful now.”
In the past, Tubal’s definition of “needful” had encompassed pretty nearly everything from doing business with Christians to undertaking the search for Jessica. Mindful that he did owe Tubal some gratitude for the last, Shylock decided not to yell at him again. “How do you reckon that?”
“The lady’s husband left Venice this morning; so. He comes back to find it under quarantine; so. If he leaves at once, and rides post-haste to Belmont, he might come there this evening; so. He finds his wife gone, and the servants say she has gone with her waiting-gentlewoman to visit that gentlewoman’s mother, who is a very respectable widow living near Treviso. He has no reason to be alarmed, or to think she has lied about where she is going. Does a sane man turn around and ride all night? No. If he feels any need to seek her out before she comes home – and ‘tis like as not that he would stay at home and wait for her – he would not leave until the morning. Another day’s journey; so. He does not come until the next night at the soonest, and only if he has a very good reason to hurry, which he does not. There is no hurry for us, then, and no need to break the Sabbath.”
Shylock had to admit that Tubal’s logic was almost as impeccable as it was infuriating.
“Besides,” Tubal added as Lancelot came back into the room, “do you not have a great deal of business to discuss with Signor Balthasar of Padua?”
“On the contrary. I think that Signor Balthasar and I have little more to say to each other.”
“The less you think you have to say,” said Tubal enigmatically, “the more needful it is that you should say it. For my part, I am going to sleep. I am, as you were so kind as to remind me this morning, an old man.” He folded his arms and closed his eyes.
“Is he always like this?” Portia whispered.
“No,” said Shylock. “Sometimes he makes you want to murder him.”
Portia choked back a laugh, and then grew quiet. Lancelot had gone to the kitchen; they were alone. She looked a little afraid.
“Come upstairs,” said Shylock. He was not at all sure what there was left to say, but he had rather not say it anywhere they were likely to have an audience.
Portia followed him.
“I could tell Lancelot to make up the bed in the next chamber for you,” he said awkwardly. He wasn’t even sure how she had ended up in his bed on the previous night, now that he thought of it.
Portia shook her head.
“What are you thinking, girl? You have said you have changed your mind about shaming your husband!”
“He will not be shamed.” Portia leaned her head against his shoulder, and he found that he was not, after all, able to push her away. “Or if he will, what’s done is done. How should tonight make any difference?”
How should it make any difference to Bassanio, indeed? It didn’t. It did, however, strip away the last fig leaf of a pretense that she had come here with any thought of revenge.
“You have chosen him,” said Shylock, trying to be angry and not quite managing it. “You said yourself that you must go back to him.”
“So I must,” she murmured. “But not yet.”
* * *
An hour later, Shylock went down the stairs to fetch the other bottle of wine, thinking that they could both do with a drink. Tubal opened his eyes. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Do you mean to marry her?”
“Certainly not.”
“Why not? ‘Twould be good for you to marry again; you have been alone since Jessica left, and I am worried for you.”
“I have never had any mind to marry again, and still less to marry her.”
“Why? You are in love with her.”
“Absurd.”
“And she with you.”
“Impossible,” said Shylock, fearing at once that it was possible. The other, of course, was still absurd. “Besides, you have forgotten that she is married already.”
“Surely her husband would divorce her if he knew she was here with you.”
Shylock shook his head. “Christians. No divorce.”
“Sometimes even Christians agree to go their separate ways. It happens more often than you might think.”
“She will not. She means to keep her vows. After tomorrow, that is.”
Shylock himself thought this sounded absurd, but Tubal accepted it without a blink. “Ah. Bad luck. Yes, you had better take the rest of the wine. Good night.”
* * *
In the morning there were the usual noises from the street, men opening their shops for business and women gossiping. It took Shylock a moment to realize that this was not, in fact, usual at all in a time of quarantine.
He washed and dressed hastily. Portia was pinning up her hair in front of the glass, transforming herself once again into Signor Balthasar. He hesitated a moment, then went over and kissed her. They did not have enough time for any sort of pretense, least of all a pretense of indifference.
“You had better go,” she whispered when they were ready to speak again. “Find out what is happening. I will be with you in a moment.”
As Shylock went down the stairs, Tubal came in from the street. “Good news, good news! The quarantine is over, and your friend Signor Balthasar is free to leave. It seem that the sailors do not have smallpox after all, only chicken pox.”
Lancelot yelped and spat out the morsel of leftover fowl he had been eating for breakfast.
“What kind of fool of a doctor mistakes chicken pox for smallpox?” Shylock demanded, feeling unexpectedly cross with the world. He realized that he had been counting on this last day, and he began to fear that Tubal was right. He must have lost his wits.
“Who knows what doctors are thinking, most of the time? If it cannot be bled or purged away, what do they know about it? Ah, good morrow, Signor Balthasar. I trust you have slept well. How like you your entertainment here in Venice?”
Portia turned scarlet, and Shylock decided immediately that another day in the house with Tubal would not have been supportable, after all. “I do not know if you heard, but the quarantine has been lifted and you are free to travel. I will bring you part of the way, if you will.”
“Thank you. I should be glad of your company.”
* * *
At the Elephant, he helped Portia mount Lorenzo’s horse, hired another one for himself, and started down the road to Treviso. They did not speak until they were well away from Venice.
“If you should be with child –”
The swiftness of Portia’s answer startled him. “I took the precaution of making my husband drunk on the night before he left for Venice. I will do it again, for good measure.”
He had been going to give her the direction of an old woman in Venice who would induce a miscarriage for a small fee, and who was safer and more discreet than most of her kind, but he saw at once that Portia’s solution was better. Less risky, and perhaps happier, if anything about the present situation could be called happy. He remembered his first sight of her playing with Nerissa’s child, and thought, yes, all may yet be for the best.
They rode on a little way before Portia spoke again. “Think’st thou that Bassanio and I will ever be what a husband and wife ought to be to each other?”
“I do not know. Do you care for him?”
“I think that I have always cared for him.”
Shylock remembered something else from that day in the court. Antonio, I am married to a wife which is as dear to me as life itself ...
“I believe he cares for thee as well. And think of this. Antonio is twenty years older than Bassanio, at the least. He may die; or if he does not, ‘tis thy husband’s love that will die in time. Youth does not follow age as far as the brink of the grave.”
Portia flushed. “Sometimes it does!” she protested.
He was flattered by the vehemence of this declaration, but not deceived. “It does not,” he told her, as gently as he could. “It ought not. The world is as it is, not as you would re-make it if you could.”
“That is as well. If I could re-make it as I would, I would more likely mar it in the making.”
He knew without looking at her that she had that mirthless smile on her lips again, and wondered how he had ever thought her smug or self-satisfied. “Perhaps,” he said, “you have marred less than you think.”
Again they were silent for a little while. “I read in an old book that no one can be bound by a double love. Do you think that is always true?”
“No,” said Shylock at once. He did not know whether Portia was thinking of herself or of Bassanio, but he had proof enough that it was false when he thought of Leah, who had not lived to be much older than Portia was now. She had been a dark-eyed and prudent woman, wise beyond her years, so very different from the clever gambler riding beside him in boy’s clothes. He trusted that she would know him if they met in another life, and that she would forgive him this.
“Nerissa’s mother lives near here,” said Portia when they had come a little farther, “around the bend in the road. I had better go on alone.” She reined her horse and turned to look at him. “Shall we meet again, I wonder?”
“I think we will. I mean to visit my daughter. In a few months, perhaps, after the baby is born.” He paused, finding that it cost him an unexpected amount of effort to say what had to be said next. “We cannot – do what we have done – again. You know that?”
“Yes. I do know.” She had dismounted and taken one of her own gowns from the bundle she carried, pulling it on over her doublet and breeches as she spoke. “That is how I would have it.” Her head emerged from the mass of satin, and she unpinned her hair and allowed it to tumble over her shoulders. She looked slightly rumpled and overstuffed, but respectable. “It is time, I think, that you and I tried to do right. I do not know if it will come easily to me, but it will be a change.”
“For me, too.” He reached out a hand to smooth her hair, and let it linger a moment. “Farewell.”
“Farewell.”
He watched her until she had gone, and then he turned back to Venice, back to the cemetery in the Lido where Leah lay buried. For why should the living not talk to the dead? He had much to explain to his wife, and he trusted that, one way or another, she would hear.
After that he would write to Jessica, perhaps not explaining everything just yet, but trying his best to do right.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2010-05-17 02:52 am (UTC)Beautifully and believably done.
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Date: 2010-05-17 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 03:51 pm (UTC)Tubal told a complicated story about a constable of the watch, a washerwoman with loose morals, and a goat, which he swore had really happened in Mantua but which Shylock was sure he had found in a jest-book.
Hee. Tubal as a teller of bad jokes. I don't know why that works, but it really, really does.
This is such a lovely, complicated fic. I absolutely adored it.
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Date: 2010-05-17 03:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-21 08:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-21 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-25 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-21 06:36 pm (UTC)I'm so glad I was pointed in the direction of this fic! Well done!
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Date: 2010-06-29 02:24 am (UTC)