Juliet. Anne Fortier

      

      Juliet

      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

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

       Epigraph

The Prologue

I.I

I.II

I.III

II.I

II.II

II.III

III.I

III.II

       III.III

       III.IV

       IV.I

       IV.II

       IV.III

       IV.IV

       IV.V

       V.I

       V.II

       V.III

       V. IV

       V. V

       VI.I

       VI.II

       VII.I

       VII.II

       VIII.I

       VIII.II

       VIII.III

       IX.I

       IX.II

       IX.III

       X

       Author’s Note

       About the Type

       About the Author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       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. 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 stainsThe stony entrance of this sepulchre?

      It has taken me a while to decide where to start. You could argue that my story began more than six hundred years ago, with a highway robbery in mediaeval 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.

      It took Umberto three days to find me and tell me the sad news. Considering my virtuosity in the art of disappearing, I am amazed he succeeded at all. But then, Umberto always had an uncanny ability to read my mind and predict my movements, and besides, there were only so many Shakespeare summer camps in Virginia.

      How long he stood there, watching the theatre performance from the back of the room, I do not know. I was backstage as always, too absorbed in the kids, their lines and props, to notice anything else around me until the curtain fell. After the dress rehearsal that afternoon, someone had misplaced the vial of poison, and for lack of anything better, Romeo would have to commit suicide by eating Tic Tacs.

      ‘But they give me heartburn!’ the boy had complained, with all the accusatory anxiety of a fourteen-year-old.

      ‘Excellent!’ I had said,