The Fool's Girl by Celia Rees Read Free Book Online Page B

smiling and blinking in the strong sunlight. The grooms kissed their brides and the people all cheered and threw their caps in the air. As the couples returned to the Duke’s palace, roses rained down from every window until their shoulders were covered in petals of scarlet and white. The feasting and celebrations went on for the rest of the day and into the night. Not just in the palace, but all over the city, in each district, tables were set up in the streets, and the squares were filled with singing and dancing.
    The couples were taken separately to their marriage beds, as was the custom. The men carried shoulder high, accompanied by bawdy songs and raucous laughter, wreathed in herbs known to heat the blood and sustain performance. The women wore garlands of crane’s bill, lavender, lady’s mantle, wheat and yarrow, to awaken their passion and increase fertility. They were led to their bridal chambers by their ladies, who were hardly quieter than the men, quite as ribald and no less excited.
    Once the couples were put to bed, the celebrations continued far into the night. The next day the bridal gowns were inspected, according to ancient tradition. Guns were fired to show that the marriages had been successfully consummated. The festivities went on until all but the hardiest had sunk from exhaustion. It was a wonderful time, full of song and laughter, each detail to be salted away, to be kept in the memory. The guests departed, wishing the couples health and happiness. No one bothered much about who was absent, or stopped to think what trouble they would cause in the future.
    When I think of that time, it is always summer and we’re at the summer palace. Duke Orsin had it built as a wedding gift to his wife. He chose the site with such care. He loved her then. The house is on a terrace overlooking a wide, curving bay of white sand, surrounded on three sides by dense dark groves of cypress and pine. He was not the first to build there. When the workmen began to clear the ground, they found broken pillars, pieces of statues, blocks of marble. The remains of some ancient villa. The Duke sent for the very best architects, builders and craftsmen from Rome, Siena, Florence, Urbino and Ravenna, to build his own house by the sea.
    The palace became a place of wonder. The Duke spared no expense. There were airy rooms with frescoed walls and mosaics set into marble floors. At the centre he made a paved courtyard shaded with orange and lemon trees, cooled by fountains. A wide terrace faced the sea, and gardens, each different from the others, descended to the shore with ruined arches and hidden secret places: little grottoes made from the fallen masonry and broken columns saved from the ancient site or dredged up from the sea.
    Although Duke Orsin had built the summer palace for his new bride, he didn’t spend much time there, staying in the town even in the hottest weather. He had matters of state to attend to, he said, fleets of ships coming in and going out. When he was not attending to such matters, he was in his library, overseeing the scriptorium that he had established, working with the scholars he had gathered. On the hottest days of the year he might ride out as the day cooled to evening, to eat supper, drink wine on the terrace and listen to music made by his wife and her ladies, but the summer palace became Lady Viola’s domain. She loved to be by the sea and hated the heat and stench of the summer city.
    Viola soon had her own court. She gathered ladies around her: young women from the city’s leading families, daughters of the local nobility. Lady Olivia spent all her time there, and I with her. The days went by in idleness: singing, playing music, reciting poetry. When the day grew hot, they would swim in the sea. Any man found spying would be likely to suffer the fate of Actaeon. My Lady Olivia and Viola were as close as sisters, closer. They were always together, from when they took breakfast on the balcony