Though lately, all I had mused upon was Romeo. I wondered how much of each day he thought about me, for I could not stop myself thinking of him. If I saw a young man of any shape or size, he became Romeo. The sight of my volume of Dante, any balcony, any tree, the moon . . . and figs, of course, drew me back to the object of my desire. This obsession was pleasurable, though, and altogether unalterable. My appet.i.te for all-things-Romeo was insatiable. When I sewed, I sewed for him. When I sang alone in my room, I sang to him. My prayers were for our marriage, my dreams of our children.

Now before me spread a day of infinite opportunity and adventure. I was going in broad daylight to meet my love and his family. The thought made me tingle, like the feel of water rushing over my skin. It would be perfect-a blank canvas upon which two artists-Romeo and Juliet-would paint their future life. A delicious prospect, this day. With every turn of the carriage wheels and the dull clopping of horses' hooves on the hard-packed road, rising higher into the hills, pa.s.sing farms and villas quiet of workers this Sunday Sabbath, everything shone brighter, and all became unearthly clear in my vision.

When we pulled through the gates of the high stone walls, I saw stretched out on one side a vast vineyard and a small pasture, on the other a deep and wide grove of trees. Before us a handsome villa gleamed bone white in the noonday sun, its red tiled roof bleached pale pink in its glare. A graceful loggia spanned the second floor, and before the heavy carven double doors a blue and yellow tiled fountain splashed a joyful welcome.

Romeo was first out the door, followed by the man I'd seen at Palazzo Bardi, and a tall, slender woman with a ma.s.s of thick brown hair worn loose over her shoulders. She was pretty even before she broke into a smile of greeting. It was Romeo's smile, the pearly teeth, all inherited from his mother.

The three of them helped us down from our carriage, plying us with questions as to the comfort of our journey. Introductions were made all around. Romeo bowed to me. In the commotion, no one noticed that when he took my hand to kiss it, he turned it and laid his lips softly in the middle of my palm. No one knew my knees jellied and a place deep inside my womanly center shuddered with delight.

Once I'd recovered, I saw that Mama and Romeo's mother, whose name was Sophia, were attracted to each other like iron is drawn to a magnet. They'd not been in each other's company a minute before they were chatting like old friends. But Mona Sophia, at closer observation, wore pain as an undergarment-well hidden but existing in the depths of her. I was sure of it.

My father's posture spoke volumes of his discomfort, but I saw at once that Roberto Monticecco, perhaps swayed by his son's insistence, was determined to put Papa at ease.

"Will you let me show you my vineyard?" he asked when he saw his wife leading my mother into the house. "I have some caskets of superb Sangioveto, aged for seven years."

What Italian man could pa.s.s up such an offer? I even saw a hint of a smile playing on my father's lips. "I've a brother in Abruzzo who is a vintner," Papa said. "He claims his Brunello to be the finest in Tuscany."

"A challenge!" Roberto cried. "Come along, then. We shall see."

And just like that, Romeo and I were standing alone with Marco, staring silently at the splashing fountain.

"I once heard of a fountain that spouted red wine instead of water," Marco offered, pertaining to nothing.

"Let me guess," Romeo said. "The French court?"

"That is the kind of decadence I would like to see one day," I said.

Both young men turned to me, astonished by my statement.

"Well, cousin Juliet, I had no idea you had such notions. Then you would travel if you could?"

"I would see the world," I answered him. "All of it-Greece, the Holy Land, the places where Marco Polo sailed. Did you know that the last voyage your namesake made for the great Kublai Khan was to deliver the Mongol's princess daughter to her betrothed in Ilkhanate?"

"You surprise me," Romeo said.

"Why surprise?"

"Your boldness. Your erudition."

I wanted to say, "I thought you knew me better." But perhaps Romeo meant only to confuse my cousin of our intimacy.

"A want to travel is bold?" is what I did say.

"For a Florentine lady? What do you think, Marco? Is that not audacious?"

"My cousin showed all of us her mettle at the Dante symposium. After that, nothing surprises."

By now we three faced one another.

"May I show you our olive orchard and its works?" Romeo asked as he untethered the two horses from our carriage.

"I would like that very much," I answered, perhaps too quickly, too eagerly for a proper girl, but perfectly for an audacious one.

"In want of an elder woman," Marco said to me, "I suppose I must become your chaperone."

I smiled gratefully at him.

"Then we're off," Romeo said.

I followed as Romeo led our carriage team to the pretty fenced pasture where other horses grazed. He let them in through a gate and in the next moment made a shrill whistle. From the Monticecco animals a single white horse p.r.i.c.ked up its ears and, separating itself from the others, came galloping toward us. At the fence the mare put down her head and demanded Romeo scratch it.

I recognized her as the one on which Romeo had made his escape from the Medici ball. I saw Marco's face. He recognized it, too.

"Fine horse," Marco pointedly said.

"She loves you," I told Romeo, unable to take my eyes from him.

"Blanca." He fixed his gaze on me. "I adore her." He became aware of Marco's stare and, pulling in his horns, spoke to him. "When I returned home from university, my uncles sent her to me as a gift. They wrote and said, 'We understand you are lacking a horse of your own. Every man needs a horse, so we have sent you this fine lady.' " He returned his attentions to me. "Do you ride, Lady Juliet?"

"Truthfully, horses frighten me, though I've read with great interest of the Warrior Nuns of Bologna."

"Can you see her in battle armor?" said Marco, suddenly teasing. He began to pretend one-sided swordplay with me with an invisible weapon. I indulged his antics for several moments before giving him a poke in the ribs. He let out a shriek and fell dramatically to the ground as though mortally wounded.

All of us laughed, and as Marco picked himself up and dusted himself off, Romeo and I started away side by side.

"I would like to ride," I said. "Especially a horse as beautiful as yours."

"In faraway lands?"

"With my lover," I whispered a moment before Marco caught us up.

"In harvest season we knock the olives off the trees with sticks," Romeo told us, "and then they're ground in here for no more than six minutes."

We were in the small millhouse, the two-ton round grinding stone clean and still in its giant granite bowl.

"Then the olive paste is placed between woven mats, these laid atop one another and pressed here." He stood aside so we could see the ma.s.sive wooden screw press. "The liquid produced is part oil, part water. The oil, of course, settles on top."

I saw Marco rolling his eyes in boredom and gave him a filthy look. Our little performance was not lost on Romeo, who suppressed a smile and went on with his lecture. What else could he do, with my protective and not-a-little suspicious cousin keeping his beady eyes upon the young man he had so recently chased from the Medici ballroom?

"Come, follow me," said Romeo with not a trace of sarcasm in his voice. "The best is yet to come."

And indeed, when we approached the olive grove, there was something wonderful about it-something that calmed even the sharp-tongued Marco.

It was not so much an ordered orchard as a shadowed forest of trees, some of them very ancient. Their thick, gnarled trunks looked like the careworn faces of old men, their million shimmering leaves more gray than green, and the fragrance redolent of another time. Branches with unripened olives, skins purple and white, hung low and heavy near our heads.

Enchantment shone on Romeo's face, and when he smiled at me, it might have been him making introductions to Dante and Beatrice, Boccaccio and Petrarch. He loves these trees, He loves these trees, I thought. I thought. They are his home, his family. They are his home, his family.

"The olive is a miracle of a tree," he murmured, "surviving in the most hostile soil, rocky and dry, and yet it gives forth the blessing of its precious oil. 'Liquid gold,' Homer called it, a divine gift from the G.o.ds and nature. If I ever have a daughter, she will be called Olivia." He patted the trunk of one with the flat of his hand. "This cultivar is called 'Frantoio.' Its flavor is more fruity than sweet."

We stopped at the base of a mammoth specimen, forty feet in height and too large if six of us had all joined hands to ring its trunk.

"This one begs to be climbed," Marco announced.

"That is so, my friend," said Romeo, smiling broadly. "I have done it a hundred times. Let me show you the first foothold."

They went to the other side, disappearing, their voices growing faint. Romeo returned alone and in moments Marco called down from a limb above our heads. He looked pleased with himself.

"Don't get lost!" Romeo called.

But Marco had already disappeared, the clutch of jittering leaves the only evidence of his presence a moment before.

Romeo turned to me and held me warm in his gaze. " 'This is no woman,' " " 'This is no woman,' " he said, he said, " 'but one of heaven's most beautiful angels.' " " 'but one of heaven's most beautiful angels.' "

They were Dante's words, but spoken as if from my lover's own heart.

"I've missed you," I said. "Waited every night for you to come."

"Did you think I'd forgotten you?"

"Sometimes."

His smile was self-satisfied. "Will you ever doubt me again?"

"Never." I turned and faced the tree trunk, sc.r.a.ping a bit of the bark with my fingernail. "I was there, you know."

"Where?"

"The Palazzo Bardi. The day you brought our families together. I heard you speak, bringing our fathers to terms."

"With no small help from Don Cosimo." Then incredulously, "You were there there?"

"Outside the door. Eavesdropping."

He laughed. "You never fail to amaze me."

"And you were brilliant," I said. "You achieved the impossible."

He placed a hand on my waist. "Then you heard what Jacopo Strozzi said to me."

"About becoming my courtly lover, and the life I can expect as his wife?" I said, looking back over my shoulder at him. "Oh yes."

"He did not come today," Romeo drily observed.

"He called your father's invitation 'cynical,' the gesture of peace a sham. He refused on principle, he said, and it gave my father pause. For a time, Papa considered refusing to come as well." I couldn't help smiling. "But my mother won the day. She pleaded and reminded Papa he could not risk Don Cosimo's displeasure."

"But I wonder at Jacopo," Romeo said with all seriousness. "He must not believe a chance exists that you and I . . ." He did not finish his thought.

"Would it satisfy you," I asked him carefully, "to merely become my courtly lover?"

Romeo placed his hands on my shoulders and began to answer.

"How do I get down from here?" Marco cried from above. Legs straddling a thick branch, he could clearly see Romeo touching me-possessively-I, soon to be betrothed to another. Marco seemed unperturbed.

"The 'Y' behind you-step through it," Romeo called up to him. "A series of limbs like a stairway will bring you to ten feet from the ground. Hang from the branch by your hands and the distance is halved. Then a graceful, bent-kneed drop, and you're home."

"Thank you. And unhand my cousin or I'll be pilloried for a bad chaperone." He disappeared in a profusion of rustling silver leaves.

Romeo and I parted, taking up a formal stance, one that might now fool all but Marco. But, I thought, if my features betrayed a fraction of what I felt for this man, then I would fool no one, and tempt the Fates with all manner of terrifying outcomes.

Romeo read my thoughts.

"Strength and resolve," he said.

I smiled. "Strength and resolve."

Romeo led us into the villa through a back door and down a hall pa.s.sing the kitchen, where the cooks were busily preparing our meal. He put a finger to his lips as we came upon the dining room, where our mothers sat side by side at the table with their backs to us. We paused silently, long enough to hear fragments of their conversation, more intimate and rich with compa.s.sion than their time together should have allowed.

"My sons to the plague. My daughters in childbirth," murmured Mona Sophia.

Mama nodded her head. "Mine to fever." I saw her clutch Sophia's hand. Romeo's mother turned and smiled with tears in her eyes. "We are tied to life by so slender a thread."

Now we understood how our mothers had come so quickly to tender accord. They had both lost all their children to death-all but Romeo and me.

Romeo beckoned us past the dining room to a small chamber, his father's study by the looks of it. A desk was piled high with ledgers, and some ma.n.u.scripts, and scrolls tied with leather thongs sat on wooden shelves. But on one wall was displayed an unexpected and astonishing array of weaponry-shields, swords, and daggers.

Marco came immediately alive and went straight to the wall. "May I?" he asked Romeo, and received consent to handle the arms. He took down a stiletto first and touched his finger to its tip. "This is fine workmanship," Marco said, "but very old."

"The Monticecco were not always growers," Romeo said. "For two centuries we were smiths."

Now Romeo pulled a gleaming broadsword down from the wall. I marveled at how easily he held the weighty sword, his arms more sinewy than heavily muscled.

As Marco replaced the stiletto on the wall, Romeo uttered, "Marco, attend me!" and my cousin turned with fine-toned reflex in time to receive the broadsword that Romeo had tossed him.

Marco grinned as Romeo took down from the wall another sword, and they a.s.sumed the bent-leg stance of warriors, face-to-face.

I think my mouth had dropped open, though not a sound came out of it, for who was a woman to tell two men they should not fight, even as this was sure to be a mock battle?

Marco, challenge sparkling in his eyes, struck first, but Romeo was quick with his parry and caught the blow with the side of his sword. The sound of metal on metal, so foreign to my ears, made me gasp.

Then Romeo's sword came in a wide arc, but was stopped cold by Marco's own prowess with a weapon-one I had never known he possessed.

Both were afire now, but the room was small. With a series of quick reciprocal blows Marco backed out the study door and Romeo came after. I followed, helpless and unsure whether to be amused or frightened.

Now they were fighting in the long hallway, the clanking swords making a fine racket. Mama and Mona Sophia rushed to the dining room archway and watched, clutching each other with only mild terror, for it was clear from the young men's expressions that they meant each other no harm. Still, an accidental cut, infection . . .

Playful as the fight was, and evenly matched, it was mightily spirited, and with every blow came grievous cries and guttural groans. Then Marco, with one knee bent, lunged deeply, and only Romeo's swift and graceful retreat kept the tip of the blade from meeting his chest.

With a loud, barbaric shout, Romeo swung his sword in a wide circle above his head and with a great crashing sound knocked the blade from Marco's hands. It went clattering down the hall and landed at our mothers' feet.