Fair Rosaline: A Novel

by Natasha Solomons

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

The most exciting historical retelling of 2023: a subversive, powerful untelling of Romeo and Juliet by New York Times bestselling author Natasha Solomons

Was the greatest ever love story a lie?

The first time Romeo Montague sees young Rosaline Capulet he falls instantly in love. Rosaline, headstrong and independent, is unsure of Romeo's attentions but with her father determined that she join a convent, this handsome and charming stranger offers her the chance of a different life.

Soon though, Rosaline begins to doubt all that Romeo has told her. She breaks off the match, only for Romeo's gaze to turn towards her cousin, thirteen-year-old Juliet. Gradually Rosaline realizes that it is not only Juliet's reputation at stake, but her life .With only hours remaining before she will be banished behind the nunnery walls, will Rosaline save Juliet from her Romeo? Or can this story only ever end one way?

Shattering everything we thought we knew about Romeo and Juliet, Fair Rosaline is the spellbinding prequel to Shakespeare's best known tale, which exposes Romeo as a predator with a long history of pursuing much younger girls. Bold, lyrical, and chillingly relevant, Fair Rosaline reveals the dark subtext of the timeless story of star-crossed lovers: it's a feminist revision that will enthrall readers of bestselling literary retellings such as Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell and Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese.

"Irresistible. An excellent spin on a timeless classic." —Jennifer Saint, Sunday Times bestselling author of Ariadne

"I have not been able to stop thinking about this book . . . Fair Rosaline is a gripping, spellbinding and wonderfully immersive book - and one that truly makes you think. I would be very surprised if everyone is not talking about it.." —Elodie Harper, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Wolf Den

 "A brilliant, feminist re-imagining of Romeo and Juliet, Fair Rosaline is a gorgeously written version of Verona from Juliet's cousin, Rosaline's, point of view. What does Romeo truly look like through the eyes of a woman on the periphery of the original story? Natasha Solomons skillfully shows us another version of the star-crossed lovers - and the Romeo --we all think we know. I absolutely devoured this thought-provoking, female-centric take on Shakespeare." — Jillian Cantor, USA Today bestselling author of Beautiful Little Fools

 

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Release date: September 12, 2023

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Print pages: 328

Sample

Where the infectious pestilence did reign

The funeral was held at dawn and little more than an hour after Madonna Emelia Capulet passed out of this world. Rosaline trailed behind the bier, disconsolate with loss. Several times, she had to be chided by her father and brother to stay farther back as the corpse—her beloved mother—was pestilent.

The only porters they’d found who were willing to pull the bier were filthy and reeking fellows, not much better than beggars, and even they had to be bribed prodigiously. Rosaline had been forbidden from washing the body. A priest had come, clutching a nosegay of herbs to his mouth, and tossed holy water upon the dead woman’s face before scuttling out again. There had been no time to find a golden or purple gravecloth to wrap her in. No one wailed the lament. No relatives gathered at the house or followed the family to the tomb. The mourning party was pitiful, the other Capulets and their neighbors cowering behind locked doors, sniffing posies and oranges studded with cloves to ward off the plague or offering up frantic prayers and hasty confessions. Instead, there was only Rosaline; her father, who wept openly, leaning heavily on Rosaline’s arm; and her brother, Valentio.

“You deserved more,” she murmured to her mother.

One of the porters stopped abruptly to scratch at the fleas in his groin, fumbling and dropping the handle of the bier.

“You oaf! You wretch!” roared Masetto Capulet, who would have kicked out at him if he hadn’t feared that the man would drop the body entirely.

Rosaline hid a smile. Her mother would have found it funny; she’d delighted in the wicked. Two stray dogs had started to follow their pathetic little troop, perhaps in hope of scraps. She’d count them too. Made the numbers almost respectable, even if the congregants themselves were peculiar. She would not mind the absent neighbors: hypocrites and liars, all. Mama had sent them birthing gifts, and wiped their tears and their arses when they were babes, but she had not loved them. She loved me. And I am here. At this thought, Rosaline bit her lip hard to stop from crying and tasted blood.

---

The service in the family tomb was brief. The friar appeared terrified, eyeing the coffin continually, and rushed through the prayers, stumbling over his words in his haste. Rosaline observed the slick of sweat trapped in the sausages of his neck fat, despite the chill of the tomb. There had been no time to purchase wax candles befitting Madonna Emelia Capulet’s status, and the chamber was smothered in shadows. A vault in the wall had been pried open in readiness for the coffin, and a rising stink of death and rot, compostable and foul, joined the decaying smell of other bones long sealed up. In the gloom, the waiting hole yawned black, a stairway leading all the way down to the underworld. Rosaline wanted to scream out, to cling onto her mother, much as she had clutched her skirts as a child—how could Emelia Capulet be lowered into that darkness? She would drown among those poisonous vapors, in that black well she could not see. She would be afraid. She must have a candle, but when it stuttered into darkness, what then? In truth Rosaline knew that fear, pain, and love were all beyond her mother now. She belonged here, among the ghosts of other long-departed Capulets.

Rosaline became conscious of her father weeping and tugging at her arm, and felt a nag of resentment as she stroked his head to comfort him as he rested it on her shoulder. He was neither kind nor tenderhearted, and yet she had to surrender her grief to his. He usually had no use for her at all, but now, when she wished to be left alone to her sorrow, he demanded that she attend him.

Her parents had been as a pair of candlesticks purchased together, twinned on either side of the mantle perfect in their polished symmetry. Now only her father was left, and alone, he looked wrong, skinny and lost. She grasped his hand, feeling the fragility of the bones beneath skin transparent as vellum, and he squeezed her fingers, kissing her knuckles. He tried to speak but only a sob came forth.

“Hush,” said Rosaline, soothing him like she would a child, conscious that their roles had been momentarily reversed.

Despite his faults—and for once Rosaline resisted listing them—her father had loved her mother. Their marriage had been blessed with joy, and his pain was real and heart-stricken. For that she pitied him.

The friar fidgeted from foot to foot as though he needed to urinate. The family stared at him, puzzled and adrift in misery. Then, Valentio reached into his purse and pulled out several coins. The friar pocketed them, mumbling a hasty blessing.

“My apologies. I have yet more unfortunate souls to bury.”

Not souls, thought Rosaline. Merely their broken and rotting shells. Their souls have fled this charnel house.

---

When the dismal party returned to the house, the officers of the watch were waiting for them at the front gate, the red cross of pestilence already daubed across the door. The chief of them nodded to Masetto but stood well back, his face muffled by a nosegay, and declared: “A member of this household has been infected, so you are all to be shut up for twenty days. Warders are here appointed to prevent you from breaking this decree. May the Lord have mercy upon you.”

Rosaline saw her father shrug, defeated. There was no use in argument. They could only wait and hope. As she withdrew into the passage, Rosaline heard the hammering of nails as into a coffin lid.

Each day following she watched from her window as the doors along the street became slashed with red crosses, the plague spreading through the city. In the afternoons a procession of holy relics was trailed through the streets to drive out the infection, the friars chanting prayers and wafting incense, the citizens throwing open their windows and standing out on their balconies to join the song, beseeching heaven.

She watched her father drift through the house in his yellowing nightshirt, a daylight ghost, as he muttered prayers for his dead wife. He stumbled as he walked, and in the darkness, she saw him pacing the halls clutching a nightstick, sleepless. And yet, she could not bring herself to send a word of consolation. If it wasn’t for him, Emelia would not be dead. Rosaline’s sympathy was jumbled with anger and shot through with her own grief.

Soon she felt her life contract to her small room and the endless ringing of the basilica bells. Seven times each day for twenty days it tolled, instructing her to pray. She did not.

On the twentieth day, the watch returned, bringing searchers with them to inspect all the members of the household for signs of pestilence.

A woman came into Rosaline’s chamber and bade her strip naked. “Your skin is blacker than your brother’s and your father’s,” said the woman.

“I am my mother’s child,” replied Rosaline, who was weary of such remarks.

“And a pretty blossom whatever your complexion, although dark beauty ’tis not the fashion.”

Rosaline bristled with irritation. Her mother would not have listened to such talk. “Nay, I will not have it. ’Twas in the old ages that dark was not counted fair. My mother’s beauty turned the fashion of the day.”

Rosaline had the same golden skin as her mother that in summer tanned to a rich terra-cotta. Her brother was more like her father: two veal calves. Rosaline was glad to take after Emelia—this was a part of her mother that could not be taken away from her.

The woman crouched down and peered up at her most private parts. “I see nothing. Not on your back or groin or underneath the arm or breast. There are no marks upon your neck either. You are free from contagion.”

“Is Caterina safe?”

The woman balked. “You ask about the maid before your father!”

Rosaline shrugged.

“All are clean,” added the searcher. “The household can be opened.”

Rosaline smiled for the first time in twenty days.

---

“We shall not stay in Verona,” said Masetto Capulet. “There is nothing for us here now. We will retreat to the hills above the city until this cursed scourge has gone.”

A needle of anger, jewel-bright and sharp, pierced Rosaline’s heart. Emelia had pleaded with and cajoled her husband to leave the city for cleaner air, to escape from the enemy that they could neither see nor fight. All the other grand houses lay empty, save for a servant or two, and even they deserted their posts daily as more bodies were carried out and abandoned in the streets. Yet this branch of the Capulets had remained in Verona, for Masetto had not desired to leave his business.

If they had departed earlier, two months before, as her mother had asked, then she would not be in her tomb.

“Yes,” agreed Valentio. “You should leave. It is an excellent suggestion.”

Valentio’s own family had fled to the protection of the hills many weeks ago, cossetted in a villa amid a sea of swaying wheat fields, far from calamity. Yet he had not taken his mother and sister’s part against his father, no matter how they’d pleaded. His own precious jewels, his own loves were safe. The rage inside Rosaline was a tinder, and she bowed her gaze, unable to look upon father or brother.

Somehow Masetto mistook her down-turned eye as modesty and a signal of compliance, traits not well-known in his daughter. With a sigh, he petted her shoulder, and she longed to cast him off.

“Yes,” said Masetto, warming to his theme. “Emelia would have wished it. We’ll go to the country and mourn for her there. Pack only what’s essential. We leave at once.”

My mother was essential, thought Rosaline bitterly. She understood that many were orphaned younger than she, at not yet sixteen. And she did consider herself an orphan. Her father’s shoulders were weighted by this new mantle of sorrow. He looked about him unseeing, his only thoughts were of his wife, and when his gaze eventually fell upon Rosaline, it was with bewilderment and irritation.

Rosaline balled her hands into fists, digging her nails into the pale flesh of her palms. The pain reminded her that she was still present, that she had not faded from view—even if her father now wished she would.

---

Rosaline sat in a corner of her bedchamber with her knees tucked under her chin. She placed at the bottom of a trunk a copy of Dante, another of Petrarch and Boccaccio, and her most precious book, a tattered volume of Ovid’s stories, as well as her lute, and declared her packing complete.

Caterina was less convinced. “Where are your stockings? Gowns? A shawl?”

Rosaline shrugged. “If I have books and music, I’m satisfied.”

“Music? You cannot think to play. Not while in mourning. There are limits, my lady, even for you.”

Rosaline slipped into the trunk a spare length of catgut, should any of her lute strings snap. “I’ll make certain that no one hears me.”

“Fie, you pretty wretch.” Caterina continued to fret, grumbling to herself as she tossed items into the trunk with haste. Rosaline retrieved the Dante and sat on the floor, rereading his visions of the afterlife. She wondered where her mother was and felt a prickling unease along her skin, as if she’d emerged from a river bath on a summer’s day only to find the sun had vanished. She found Dante’s descriptions of heaven lacking radiance. An eternity in such company threatened tedium. The alternative was fascinating torment among sinners or the chill and oblivion of purgatory.

“You shouldn’t read. It brings on the agues in women. Everyone knows.”

Rosaline kissed her maid, pinching her plump, well-loved cheek.

---

They sat in the wagon as it jolted along the road and onto the track, leaving the city behind. Rosaline watched the swaying velvet haunches of the two horses as they hauled the cart, smelling of sweat and hay dust, their harnesses clattering and clinking. Caterina followed behind, her face glossy from the exertion. Lines of cypresses thumbed a brilliant lapis sky. Yet the plague had written itself upon the land: fields lay untilled, woven by weeds; a vineyard tilted at the sun with tiny nubs of gray suckling grapes. Rosaline noticed two women balefully trying to repair fallen posts and scrape back bindweed from choking the vines. There were no men left to help with the heavy work.

The cart wheels bruised the meadowsweet and larkspur as they passed by, releasing their scent into the air. Everyone desires a poultice against this pestilence, decided Rosaline. Even nature herself.

Valentio steered the wagon, driving a stick across the muscled shoulders of the horses if he felt they dawdled. Her father sat beside her, his shoulders trembling every now and again as he broke out in sobs.

Rosaline did not cry. The pebble of rage, hard and dry, lodged inside her, had burned up all her tears.

Valentio maneuvered the cart around a thin bullock riding a bored-looking cow in the middle of a ragged field, still chewing the cud. Rosaline surveyed the coupling with interest. After much pleading and pestering, her mother had promised to talk to her about the physical act between a man and his wife. Two days before she’d fallen sick, they’d watched two dogs rutting in the street: the whimpering and grunting of the bitch, the frantic shuffling of the dog; and then afterwards the animals locked together, whining and hobbling in the gutter as passersby kicked out at them. Rosaline had wanted to know whether men and women were fixed in such a doleful and degrading state after consummation. Emelia assured her that no, people were not locked together like dogs and bitches, and that one day soon she would tell Rosaline what she needed to know. Soon never came, for Emelia had sickened and died. Rosaline wondered whether anyone would furnish her with the details now.

Masetto reached into his jacket and handed her a gold chain, warmed from his skin. “Your mother wanted you to have this.”

Rosaline took it. Her mother had worn the chain and pendant every day. It had seemed a part of her, like her finger or brown eyes or chipped front tooth. A fat green emerald, like the effervescence of a dragonfly wing, gleamed at the center, sealed in shining gold. She inhaled the pendant, hoping it might still contain the scent of her mother—rose hips, pressed sage—but it smelled only of the fleshy leather of Masetto’s jacket and his unwashed, sour skin. She looped it around her neck.

“And she left you a letter.” Again, he fumbled in his jerkin and produced this time a folded piece of parchment.

Rosaline looked at it for a moment. Her mother could neither read nor write. The letter must have been dictated to her father. He already knew what it said. He licked his lips, the darting tongue of a serpent.

“What does it say?”

“You should read it.”

His tears had dried and he was looking furtive, like a dog caught thieving chickens who would not meet its master’s eye.

Snatching the letter, she read with creeping horror. “She tells me that I’m to go to a nunnery. This is a lie! She did not want this! You do. You wish to save my dowry!”

A stinging pain rang out in Rosaline’s ear, and it took a moment for her to realize that her father had hit her.

“You forget you are mine to dispose of as I choose. But no. This was truly your mother’s wish.”

Rosaline stared at Masetto, tasting the tang of blood in her mouth. He stared back at her, taken aback at his own sudden violence.

It was clear to Rosaline that even if this had been her mother’s wish, Emelia’s choice did not displease him. Dowries were expensive. Placing daughters in nunneries cost money—more if one desired them to live well with plentiful food and pleasantly furnished cells—but it was a pittance compared to the ruinous expense of a dowry.

Rubbing her stinging ear, Rosaline stared at the letter. It was full of protestations of love, but all transcribed in her father’s hand. What had it cost him to record such scraps of tenderness, the last leavings from a dying woman’s table? Rosaline consumed them hungrily—there would be no more. He has taken every piece of you, thought Rosaline. Even your last message can only be glimpsed through him. It was like staring at a vision of Emelia through a choke of bonfire. Had he merely transcribed the messages of affection to make it appear that the order to enter the convent had truly come from her mother? Yet there was a bleaker thought lapping at the edge of Rosaline’s mind like a cold spring tide.

What if Masetto Capulet told the truth? What if her adored mother wanted her only daughter to be sequestered in a nunnery?

Tears needled her eyes. She was damned, if not to hell, then to purgatory.

---

When they arrived at the villa in the hills above Verona, Rosaline retreated immediately to her bedroom. She lay on her low wooden cot and studied the silvered ceiling beams. A mouse scuttled along one of the beams and hesitated above her head, watchful. The chamber smelled as it always had, of nestling damp and old fires, and the wind tickled the eaves, the rafters creaking like a ship on the water. Outside in the yard, Caterina pumped water from the well, a hiss and squirt as it hit the bucket. Everything was the same and nothing was the same.

Rosaline considered the convent in Mantua that was to be her fate. The building perched on top of the hill like an ill-fitting hat, aloof from the town. Its walls were hewn from purple-gray sandstone mined from the Alps, three feet thick. It was a fortress for the soul. At night, no citizen ventured near. It was whispered that in distant times the nuns from the order could fly and conjure spirits, not always holy ones.

She remembered being taken as a child to visit her mother’s sisters at the convent. Rosaline had to be cajoled into the parlatorio; this visiting chamber had grated iron bars that kept the nuns safely insulated from the fleshy perils of the world. Visitors pressed their faces up against the cold metal, poking fingers through the grill, desperate to caress their beloved daughters and sisters surrendered to God. While Rosaline wept in misery and fear, her mother had parcelled her up in a blanket and stuffed her into the barrelled ruota,spinning it so that she could be quietly plucked out by the nuns on the other side and secreted into the womb of the convent; her aunts smuggled her inside, soothed her tears with embraces, spoiled her with sweets and treats of every kind. The ruota was designed for goods like eggs or cakes or biscuits rather than nieces, but it was often used for illicit cargo, and after that first visit, Rosaline had frequently been sneaked into the convent to be doted upon, her infant cheeks like freshly risen dough, ready to be dimpled with kisses.

When Rosaline thought of those visits, she recalled no prayers or penance—that was all hidden from her. Instead, her mother’s sisters saved everything they thought would interest or divert her: newly born kittens, fur still birth-slick and eyes blind shut; a baby sparrow that had fallen from its nest in the cloisters, in a box being fed with worms until it was strong enough to fly. Her mother had seized upon each detail of these visits, needing them repeated again and again until Rosaline wearied of their repetition, although now she realized that the rehearsing of them had set them fast in her mind like the livid colors in Murano glass.

The visits had continued for several years. Rosaline had not known at first that they all risked their very souls and excommunication for smuggling her inside and violating the immaculate sanctity of the nunnery; although she was certain that, if asked, her aunts would have answered without hesitation that any price, soul and all, would have been worth it for those chubby, pitted elbows and round, mucky knees.

On her final visit, she had grown too big. She’d become wedged in the ruota and stuck fast on the way back for a full half hour until they pried her loose. She’d never touched or embraced her aunts again.

She understood why her father wanted a convent life for her. He was a man without warmth. At gatherings, people delighted in telling her how astonished they had been when he married her mother, a woman of unfashionable looks with a small dowry, for love. The surprise of their union had not lessened even after twenty years.

Unfortunately for Rosaline, Masetto’s store of affection had run dry with his wife. He was gratified by his son, but he had no use for her. The beauty that in Emelia enchanted him irked him in Rosaline—he admonished her not to sit too long in the sun, lest her cheeks darken further still, although Rosaline did not heed him.

Rosaline knew that he believed the adage: A woman should have a husband or a convent wall. But until now, she did not know that her mother had believed it too. Why had she not spoken to her? Was it cowardice or lack of time? Had she intended to confide her intentions to Rosaline but been cheated by the quickness of death? They had been resolute in refusing Rosaline entry to the sickroom out of fear of fetid vapors.

With a sigh, Rosaline realized that it did not matter that she was ignorant of the details of the marital bed, its terrors or its joy. She was never going to experience it herself.

Sitting up in bed, she saw that the sun was sinking, slung low in the yard, swollen and red like a boil ready to be lanced. Her throat was snuff dry, aching. She picked up a stalk of lavender, gathered last year, from a jar on the dresser. It held the scent of happier times. Bitterly, she rubbed it to dust between her fingers.

Fury with the dead was a hopeless, desiccated thing. Rosaline picked up the jar and hurled it into the grate, where it smashed among the hoary feathers of ash. For the first time in weeks, she gave in to grief and howled. Her face was hot and her ribs ached as though she had been kicked. But there was no release to be found in crying, no comfort to be had.

Growing calmer, she listened as the mice scratched in the rafters and, outside, a barn owl whooped at the moon. She walked across to the open window. All the farmhouses were bathed in darkness now, and she surveyed the spangled canopy of stars, the breeze a balm on her cheek. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, she noticed that a lamp burned in the Montague place on the hill. If it had belonged to any other household, the lick of yellow light may have offered some solace, the companionable thought that another unhappy soul was awake at this irreverent, ghoulish hour. As she stared, the lamp blinked into blackness.

For a moment it seemed to Rosaline that no light could ever come again. She felt an invisible chain coil tight around her chest and supposed it to feel much like the rope the Inquisition used upon heretics, and she wondered if she might die. She did not want to be hidden behind a wall. She wanted the world, all its glories and its sorrows and rottenness. How dare they take it from her?

She would not let them. Until the moment came and she was sealed away, she’d delight in every pleasure possible. She spat upon the floor, sealing an oath to herself.

---

At dawn the sun rose again and Rosaline with it. The dew was fresh upon the grass, laundering it clean and bright and luridly indifferent to her misfortune. Bees diligently pursued dangling lobes of jasmine for pollen, and a woodpecker rapped for breakfast. Caterina carried a tray to Rosaline’s room and persuaded her to eat a little bread and drink some milk. She said nothing about her swollen face and purpled lids and, after she was dressed, tied black ribbons around her wrists, a dark mourning cloak about her shoulders.

Putting her hands over her ears to muffle Caterina’s protestations at her leaving the house, Rosaline hurried across the fields to call upon Livia, her brother’s wife, who was anticipating her seventh lying-in.

When she arrived, Livia was in bed in an upstairs chamber, already jostling with a nurse and her three surviving children. He

face shone with delight on seeing Rosaline, but then, remembering the tragedy, it contorted with sorrow.

Struggling to sit upright, Livia reached for her hand. “O, my dearest Rosaline. May Emelia’s soul rest in heaven with the Virgin and all the saints and a thousand prayers. She was too good for this earth. And,” she continued, “she made the best almond tarts.”

Rosaline nodded dumbly, unwilling to speak in case she should cry again.

Livia squeezed her hand. Her skin was papered thinly across her bones, but her grip was surprisingly strong. “I have lost my mother, all my sisters, and three children. The pain will not lessen, but you will grow used to the burden.”

Rosaline draped her arms around her neck and kissed the pallid cheek, inhaling a sickly smell of unwashed sheets and oil of roses. The swell of the next child sat bulbous and snug beneath Livia’s shirt. Her inflated bosom already looked painfully round, the blue veins a confluence of rivers. There were scooped hollows beneath her eyes.

“Do you eat enough?” asked Rosaline, relieved to be thinking of someone else’s suffering.

Livia smiled. “Your brother presses endless delicacies upon me. ..