The Sweet Loathsome Honey of Love
By Kath Giblin
It started the morning after the wedding, the official one; her mother had insisted on that after it had all come out. Her father growled and cursed but she suspected that he was secretly pleased to heal the ancient grudge with his old enemy. Certainly those two were amongst the last to leave the wedding party, staggering drunkenly to bed, arms wrapped around each other’s necks, delaying the moment of parting with affectionate claps on the back and loud kisses. They had been like that all night: calling for more wine, punching one another, laughing uproariously at jokes about shriveled swords and pointedly enjoying the glares of their respective wives. It turns out they had shared the same Latin master years ago and once they’d stopped arguing over who was most sorry for the rift, they spent the entire night cocooned in a drunken mist, exchanging lewd stories from Ovid and congratulating each other on the sterling match their children had made.
Meanwhile, the happy couple themselves had retired early to bed, giggling like schoolchildren at the head of a procession of well-wishers. After shutting the door firmly on the cat calls and bawdy comments of Benvolio and the rest of them, they were finally alone. The husband looked long at his wife’s reflection in the mirror as she slowly removed her heavy necklace and then her gown. She held his gaze for a moment, then followed his eyes as they moved wistfully to the balcony window. She woke up the next morning to find herself alone, light snaking through the gap in the curtain on his side of the bed and glinting on the huge emerald ring that dominated her left hand.
It was never the same after that. He seemed different somehow. She often found him peering closely at her face, as if looking for something he’d lost. She couldn’t understand it. Hadn’t they once completed each other’s words? Completed each other? She looked at her hands palm to palm in Mass, cast furtive glances at her kneeling husband, a stone effigy at her side. He avoided her eyes.
Months or weeks went by. He had taken to rising early and meeting the other young men for the hunt. Sometimes she didn’t see him for days. Her mother didn’t understand the fuss.
The poor girl tried everything. Ordering special dishes, having her hair fixed just right, spending hours on her wardrobe. Nothing worked. She talked to the good friar about it, thought of asking if he had some baleful weeds or precious-juiced flower to induce love. He just raised his eyebrows and shook his head. He’d seen it all before.
The sonnet was the last straw. At first her heart had leapt at the sight of the beloved scrawl. The words of love, the praise of her raven hair. Raven? But hers was fine gold. She read the clues, watched him closely. His eyes as they moved with lovely Adeline’s progress across the courtyard burned with a new fire.
She hated to admit it but her mother was right. She should have married Paris.
Kath Giblin (she/her) is a writer, English teacher, and Arts Festival director, based in South Wales, UK. Her passion is writing and promoting a love of literature. She is particularly interested in how literature is transformed for each new age and her previous postgraduate research centered around this idea of adaptation in the works of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlow.