O, Juliet by Robin Maxwell Page B

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 pricked 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 massive 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, I thought. 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 gods and nature. If I ever