Collection 4: "Duty" by Pamela Rafael Berkman

We were sent for, my husband and I, to come to the opening of our tomb, the tomb of our family, the great yawning maw of death.

And her earlier death was a pretense, to get her to this place and away from us.

My nephew Tybalt is over there, a few feet off, green and stinking on his bier, dead three days ago.

‘Tis not only ourselves, the bereaved parents, my husband and I and his father and mother, about the tomb now.

And outside the entrance, so short a time ago closed off by the great stone, there gather peasants, working men, merchants, beggars in rags, courtesans, and prostitutes, all the city.

My daughter is pale. When she was alive I wondered if she was afflicted with the greensickness, that odd anemic draining of the blood from the face that makes girls her age often so white, with no roses in their skins.

I was, I fear, not sympathetic to their weakness, flushed and strong as I always was, their faces white as tallow.

I had not seen pale until I saw this face before me; in life she was a red rose compared with this creature drained of blood, all the blood of her body warm on these disgusting stones, running in rivulets between them, dyeing the mortar, the source of the river the sharp little dagger still in her left breast.

He does not bleed, though he is twisted about horribly, his face an ugly contortion of death, one side of his mouth high in a kind of crooked smile, his fingers held up, bent backward and stiff before his eyes, as though he wished to obscure those orbs from our sight but could not succeed before the last convulsion seized him.

He does not bleed, though he is twisted about horribly, his face an ugly contortion of death, one side of his mouth high in a kind of crooked smile, his fingers held up, bent backward and stiff before his eyes, as though he wished to obscure those orbs from our sight but could not succeed before the last convulsion seized him.

Mistress Montague—I do beg pardon, Lady Montague—is about to faint. Not I. I do not succumb to the female weakness of fear of blood, or of the dead.

He is not old. Not gray and cantankerous, like my husband.

The friar nods sagely, as though he knows something, as though he can build for us from this fleshy, deadly crypt some sense and order.

He deludes himself with his own importance.

The servant stutters, a simpleton, addressed by so great a personage, then manages, “He came with flowers to strew his lady’s grave, and bid me stand aloof, and so I did.”

How was I to know the fool had already surrendered the prize to this callow boy, this stepped-upon worm at my feet?

‘Twas his doing, all his and his men’s fancies and prides.

I see the repulsed stares turn toward me.

“You betrothed and would have married her perforce to county Paris! Then she comes to me.”

“You betrothed and would have married her perforce to county Paris! Then she comes to me.”

It is like saying one’s rosary; simply making the mouth and body move, no need to hold the thoughts in your mind as you do what you do.

Well, she has found her deserved punishment. May she revel in it. She has paid for her one night with her love, a thing I never had, a thing I was denied, denied myself, and what harm would it have done me?