From the HBT Originals anthology Tales from Fallen Empires, by Evelyn Marlowe. This is a free preview — Part 1 of 3 — narrated version below, with the text underneath if you’d rather read.
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The lake at Belmont held the sky without apology—flat, silver, indifferent—and Portia had been sitting at its edge long enough that the hem of her dress had taken on a darkness from the damp grass she hadn't bothered to avoid. The servants would notice. Nerissa would say nothing but would notice more acutely than anyone. Portia had grown up being noticed by people who were paid to hold their tongues, and she had learned early that this was its own particular kind of loneliness.
It was the twenty-third day since she had returned from Venice. She knew the number not because she was counting in any purposeful sense, but because the days had a way of presenting themselves to her each morning like invoices requiring settlement, and she had developed the habit—a new one, formed since the trial—of paying them reluctant attention before rising.
She had not told Bassanio. That was the fact she returned to most often, the way the tongue finds the place where a tooth has been pulled: not from masochism precisely, but from some compulsion to verify that the absence is still there, still real, still as consequential as it felt the moment it happened.
He knew, of course, in the way that all truths eventually seep beneath the sealed door of a man's self-deception. He had held the young lawyer Balthazar in high regard. He had pressed upon that lawyer his ring—her ring, the ring she had given him with such ceremony on the eve of his departure, with words about her own inadequacy that she had meant far less than they sounded and perhaps meant more than she understood. He had given her ring to her, unknowingly, as a gift to a stranger. And she had taken it. She had closed her fingers around the cool gold band in the torchlit Venetian street and felt something she still could not properly name—triumph, perhaps, or its more uncomfortable cousin.
When she had produced it at Belmont afterward, watching the color leave his face, she had played it for comedy. She had the instincts for it—her father had loved a wit, and she had been educated in performance as much as in languages and music and the management of an estate. She had watched Bassanio's embarrassment with something that performed perfectly as playful punishment and was, in its interior, more complicated than she had any occasion to examine in the general festivity.
He had wept. She hadn't expected that. Men of his particular beauty and social confidence—men accustomed to being well-received by the world—did not often weep in her experience. He had held her hands and wept and told her she was everything, and she had kissed him and allowed the subject to close over like water, and they had all gone in to supper.
She sat now and watched a heron stand motionless at the far edge of the lake with the absolute conviction of a creature that has never doubted its place in the world.
The trial itself came back to her in fragments, and always in the same order, which she found suggestive—as though her memory had decided upon a preferred narrative and kept insisting on it.
First, always, the smell: candle-wax and river-damp and the particular close heat of too many people in a room where justice was nominally being performed. She had worn the gown well. She had practiced the voice—lower, measured, the deliberate cadence of a man who has learned that authority lives in tempo as much as in argument. Doctor Bellario's letter had opened the door, and she had walked through it with a steadiness that surprised even herself, though she would not have admitted surprise to anyone.
Then Antonio: gray-faced and thin, standing with the specific stillness of a man who has already made a private peace with an outcome. She had not known Antonio personally before that afternoon—he was Bassanio's friend, a merchant, a man of consequence in a city that organized its consequence around water and trade and old agreements. But she had seen his face when she entered, and she had seen what was in it: not fear, but a kind of terrible resignation, which was harder to look at than fear. She had thought, involuntarily: he believes he is going to die. And then, more quietly: I will not let that happen.
And then Shylock.
She had studied him during the early arguments, while she was still performing the role of a young lawyer finding his footing. An old man in dark clothing, with a face that had been used extensively by experience and showed every mark of it. He had the posture of someone who has learned to occupy less space than he is entitled to and has not decided yet whether to resent this. His eyes were precise. He tracked each argument with a quality of attention that told her he was not stupid, not primitive, not the grotesque that some in the room clearly wished to see. He was a man who had been promised something in writing and intended to collect it—and who had probably spent a lifetime having promises made in writing broken in practice, which was perhaps why he clung to this particular document with a ferocity that the court read as monstrousness and Portia read, in her less comfortable moments, as comprehensible.
She had tried mercy first. That much was true and genuine. She had meant the speech—or most of it. The quality of mercy is not strained. She had believed it as she said it, had felt it move through her like something real, and had watched Shylock's face during the words and seen something there—not agreement, but recognition, perhaps. The recognition of a man hearing a beautiful argument for why he should accept less than he is owed.
He had refused.
And so she had done what she had come to do.
The technicality had been elegant. She took no particular pride in the word, but elegance was accurate: a legal solution so precise that it reversed the entire situation in a single clause, like a piece of cloth that appears to be one pattern until it is turned in the light and reveals another. Shylock could have his pound of flesh. He could not spill a drop of blood. The bond specified flesh; blood was not in the bond. The thing was, technically, undeniable.
She had delivered it in the voice she had borrowed for the day, and the room had shifted—she had felt it as a physical thing, the collective adjustment of fifty people who had arrived expecting a tragedy and were suddenly watching a different genre. Antonio's friends had begun to exhale. Gratiano had crowed in a way that made her want to look at the floor.
And Shylock had stood there. He had stood there and the precision of his face had undergone something that had no single name—defeat was too simple, grief was too sympathetic, collapse was too theatrical. He had stood there and the argument that had organized his life for months, the argument he had sharpened against every insult and every counter-argument and every candle burned late in the counting house, had simply ceased to function. Just like that. A man's purpose, removed.
Then had come the penalties. She had recited them from the statutes without flinching, which was its own kind of performance: the seizure of his estate, half to Antonio, half to the state. His life at the Duke's mercy. And then Antonio's mercy: Shylock might keep the half intended for the state, provided he converted to Christianity and left his estate in his will to Lorenzo—the young man who had run away with Shylock's daughter and what Portia had recently learned was a considerable portion of his savings as well.
The courtroom had received this as generosity. Portia sat now at the lake's edge, twenty-three days later, and attempted to locate the word for what it actually was.
She couldn't. That was the honest answer, and it disturbed her that she couldn't. She had been raised in a world with clear instruments for measuring virtue, and she had held the ruling to those instruments in the weeks since and found that the measurements kept shifting. Antonio's mercy was real—he had the power to demand death and had not demanded it. But the conversion. The estate. The condition that he must, in the law's phrase and Antonio's subsequent elaboration, "presently become a Christian." She turned these things over like stones in her palm. Were they generous? Were they ordinary? Were they the thing that sat below ordinary, in the place where cruelty sleeps in the language of the reasonable?
— End of preview. The rest of “Portia After the Verdict” continues in Tales from Fallen Empires, available now.
Get the full story (and four more) in Tales from Fallen Empires →
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