"It doesn't matter how old they are," DI Poole seethed as he stomped into the station in Honoré, dripping wet from the latest Saint-Marie Sun/Shower Special, "Seventeen years, sixteen, ten or three and three-quarters! The point is, we are charged with tracking and discovering the whereabouts of two young idiots who have defied the wishes of their legal guardians and run off with the intent to commit matrimony!"
He paused to strip off the jacket and drop it over the back of his chair, glaring at the brolly huddled bashfully in its corner behind the filing cabinet, as if the state of his suit could be somehow its fault.
Richard Poole and his team had been trailing all over the island today, following one dead-end lead after another in pursuit of the scions of the two most prestigious – and contentious – families on the island, and Poole's temper was running high as a result. There were too many people on Saint-Marie with cause to twit either family by sheltering their runaways, or by evading direct questions as to their whereabouts. Commissioner Patterson may fuss all he liked about how important it was for his people to show up well to the local moneybags, but there was a limit.
Especially when Poole's chief assistant, DS Camille Bordey, seemed to be so singularly unmotivated in the chase. If Poole didn't know better, he'd swear she had set out to be more hindrance than help that morning.
Dwayne Myers simply shook the rain off his cap and took his place at his desk without comment. Fidel Best followed likewise, more discretely. Camille was whisking out the towel she kept secreted in her desk to dry off her hair, scowling at her boss as she did so. "And what will you do with Alfric and Elaine once we find them, hm? Arrest them? And charge them with, what, unlawful affection?"
Poole glared back at her. "Detective Sergeant, it is simply not the place of the Royal Saint-Marie Police to aid and abet flouting the societal norms and conventions, just because two silly adolescents have decided to throw a fit of pique! We have a duty to the community –"
"And suppose this 'fit of pique' is true love?" Camille demanded, flapping out the towel preparatory to wringing out her glossy locks.
"Ah! And there it is." Poole threw his hands out to the sides, palms up. "The Romeo and Juliet Syndrome."
Camille dropped the towel. "Syndrome?!" she gasped, not without some incredulous hissing of the word.
Poole made a superior face and took his seat at his desk, preparatory to completing the paperwork on this last dead end. "Syndrome, Sergeant: a characteristic combination of opinions, emotions, or behavior which results in absurdities such as that which we've been trying to trace today."
With that he snatched up a pen and plunged into his work, abandoning any further comment. The mood his sergeant was in, that towel might just as easily be snapped at some unprotected part of his own anatomy.
Besides, he had it narrowed down. The police blundering around blindly so far had done nothing but stir up sympathy for the fugitives. The whole affair was now a cause célèbre all over the island, and yet there was no sign of a trail in Honoré itself, nor any leading up into the foothills. They had not absconded by ferry or the mail plane, so that left only the beachfront . . .
"Oh, I see!" Camille was furious. She flipped the towel across her desk, leaving her hair to sort itself out in her indignation. "Love at first sight is 'absurd' because you have never known it, therefore it cannot exist?"
Poole paused for a fraction of a second, hrumphed away the memories of times when he had known it in fact, and continued on writing.
"'He laughs at scars, he who has never received an injury'," Camille declaimed at him, needling. "That is your attitude, is it?"
"Presc – it, um, ah . . ." Poole stumbled to a halt. "What?"
Dwayne glanced at Fidel and eased back into his chair, watching the scene before him with the discernment of a connoisseur. Fidel shrugged and slipped out his phone to call Juliet. He suspected that his wife would want to hear this.
Meanwhile, the extra helping of neural pathways in Richard Poole's mind were lit up like Blackpool on an Illumination night, frantic to discover the nature of the speed bump of recognition he had just hit. Why was that phrase familiar and wrong at the same time? Where had he heard it before? It literally took seconds before images of dim theater sets and obviously fake vines trailing from balconies possessed him, until memories of the evenings he had stolen from his studies to creep into Cambridge Footlights fixed a muted spot on the answer.
"I said," Camille was going on, as if to a stunted mentality, "'He laughs –'"
"Jests," said Poole, coming back into focus. "'He jests at scars that never felt a wound.'"
"That is what I said," she gave back, smug.
"It's not, you know." Richard Poole the precise scholar, the logician, the unerringly accurate Englishman, was back.
"It's your Shakespeare," Camille told him haughtily.
"It is nothing of the kind!" he huffed in return. "Where did you get that atrocious mis-rendering of the Bard?"
Fidel finished murmuring into his mobile and set it gently on his desk so the tiny microphone was tilted somewhat toward the center of the station where the drama was. Dwayne silently fitted one ankle over the other on the corner of his desktop and relaxed, just taking it all in.
As for Camille, her heart was soaring, albeit she hid it so carefully. While in his quieter modes, working away so diligently and meticulously at his desk, Richard Poole was tasty. He became absolutely irresistible when he was being bullish. But island life was telling on him, and he was bullish so seldom now that it was becoming vital to his sergeant's morale to tease him into bullishness now and then.
She flopped the towel to one side, took her seat at her desk and called up the document she had been hiding for a while now in the folder with her standard arrest forms. Recently, Camille had discovered the work of Irène St Bonaventure de Bataut (1801-1864), noted professeur and scholar of English, a woman after her own inclinations.
Camille had of course seen videos of this particular play in English, but la Française naturally being the superior language, she had taken to whiling away the long hours not spent doing paperwork in feeding her feminine imagination on the learned dame's effusions as to the romantic works of the Bard across the Channel – pardon, la Manche. Particularly that most effusive of the Swan of Avon's works, Roméo et Juliette.
"'But gently!'" she crooned, translating the most relevant lines from the open file on her computer screen. "'What suddenly shines through this window?'"
Poole's astonished face quickly curdled into a grimace. "'What suddenly shines' . . .?" he mouthed, as if tasting vinegar and gall combined.
"'This is the east, and Juliet is the sun'," Camille declaimed softly.
"'But soft!'" Poole put in, unable to stop himself from correcting this blatant desecration. "'What light through yonder window breaks?'"
"'Arise, oh sun of beauty, kill the jealous moon –'"
"'Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,'" Poole blustered.
"'Already sick and pale with pain from what you, his servant –'"
"'From what you'?" Poole was livid. "Shakespeare never wrote anything that awkward in his life! 'Sick and pale with grief, That thou her maid art far more fair than she'!"
He was on his feet now, advancing on his sergeant's desk in a passion peculiar only to English eccentrics who hear their greatest poet slaughtered. "'Be not her maid, since she is envious'," he went on, with perhaps more force than the situation called for. "'Her vestal livery is but sick and green And none but fools do wear it; cast it off'!"
At this point he dropped the act, not completely sure whether he was addressing Camille or himself, what with his insistence on clinging to what she liked to call his monastic cell. It was just that, well . . .
These lines were so well known, so well-studied, over the lonely weeks of reading and re-reading them. There had been only one book in Charlie Hume's residence worth reading in those early days; just the one volume of Will Shakespeare's work in the unhappy beach hut Poole called a bungalow, before his own boxes from home had come. This play.
"And, and turn off that pernicious drivel while you're at it," he went on, cooling slightly. "Whatever third-rate hack's rot translation that is you've found, it has no place in a police station, unless it's evidence in a case of blatant defamation!"
Camille made a face at his retreating back and began to search her document for a line she could throw after it. Poole meanwhile, was cursing his own brain. Its before-mentioned neural paths, ever industrious and so incredibly handy in detective work, were now busily running on with the next lines in the scene, the ones that had replayed themselves over and over as he took in the view from his desk over to that of his sergeant: 'It is my lady, O, it is my love! O, that she knew she were!'
"'Alas!'" Camille muttered to herself, unconsciously taking on the idiom of Madame de Bataut's language as she dredged up a suitable line.
'Ay, me!' Poole's wayward thoughts corrected.
Stealthily, Fidel picked up his phone and positioned it so he could video and stream the upcoming second half. Dwayne just eased his shoulders into a more comfortable position. Both of them knew the play was not yet play'd out.
"'O Romeo, Romeo!'" Camille sighed. "'Why are you Romeo?'" How can you be so Richard? was the real question in her mind.
Poole shot up from where he had been sheltering behind his computer monitor, but managed to refrain from speaking to this.
"'What is that what is Montague?'" Camille went on, reading the wishes of her soul into every word. "'This is not neither the hand, nor the foot, nor the arm, nor the face, nor none of the other parts that belong to a man. Oh! be something else'!"
There was so much so incredibly wrong with this speech that Poole foundered among the corrections he could have sputtered, missing his opportunity to say any of them. Camille was rushing on, seemingly carried away by the beauty of Irène St Bonaventure's butchered blatherings.
"'What does it have in a name?'" she declaimed. "'What we call a rose by any other name would feel as good.'" She had to pause then and frown; it made sense, yes, but at the same time something seemed to be amiss with that phrasing . . .
Poole dropped into his chair, planted both elbows on his desk, jammed both sets of knuckles into his mouth and fumed. If it meant frying every nerve he had, he would not reply. He would not, not, not, NOT . . .
Fidel leaned to one side quite noticeably, phone in hand, to capture this development. Dwayne's desk was better placed, so he didn't need to shift to watch his boss's face gradually assume an interesting shade of puce. Camille, meanwhile, was forging ahead.
"'Romeo!'" she commanded, "'Strip yourself of your name!'" She took a quick peek to see if Richard was complying, then went on. "'And for this name which is not part of yourself, Take everything from me whole.'"
Poole hacked into his fists, not covering the gagging sound but successfully blocking the immediate, unthinking response: 'I take thee at thy word! Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized; Henceforth I never will be Richard – aw, um, Romeo!'
Stupid name, anyway! he added to himself, miserably.
Camille had poked her head out from behind her screen again at the sound, but now went back to the script. "'The walls of this orchard are high,'" she recited, her voice only a touch or two above a throaty murmur, "'and difficult to climb. Dream –'" She paused to take a closer look at her screen, frowning as she searched for a more suitable word – "no . . . 'Consider who you are; these premises are for you death If some one of my parents come to meet you.'"
'With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls,' Poole thought, feeling those unlikely appendages, or something like them, stir and sprout and then immediately fledge as he did so, because suddenly he did see a way he could use them. 'For, for "'stony limits cannot hold love out . . . And what love can do,'" he went on, aloud, pushing his bulky computer monitor aside, "'that dares love attempt; Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.'"
[Stage wait.]
Camille was staring, her mouth slightly open in astonishment. Who was this? What was this . . . Could it be that Richard was actually, finally . . .
Dwayne remained as he was, but Fidel was bent nearly double over his desk, his mobile pushed as far forward as he dared, breathing only very softly.
In a moment, Camille went on, her throat sounding dry. "'If they you see, they you will kill.'"
"'Alack,'" Poole told her, his own voice sinking lower, perfectly serious, "'There lies more peril in thine eye Than twenty of their swords; Look thou but sweet, And I am proof against their enmity.'"
There was a second moment of perfect quiet in the Honoré station, the only movement the swift rise and fall of Camille's upper blouse, with Richard Poole looking directly into his sergeant's eyes.
Camille rather spoiled it with a dry husk. "I – uck, 'I, um, would not for the whole world that they knew you here,'" she whispered.
Very deliberately, Poole stood up from his rickety office chair, his focus not moving from her. "'I have night's cloak to hide me from their sight,'" he told her, and took a step out from around his desk. "'And thou but love me, let them find me here: My life were better ended by their hate Than death prorogued, wanting of thy love.'"
Up on the hill above the bay, Juliet stood in the kitchen of her little house, her eyes glued to the miniature drama streaming on her phone, waiting. Fidel's arm was aching but he did not move. Dwayne blinked, once.
At last Camille managed a swallow, but for some reason her knees refused to allow her to stand. "Do you love me?" she asked, breathless, and the question was not from any script.
Poole flicked his eyebrows at her, and she dove for her screen, fumbling for the words. "'Who, ah – who has thee learned – uh, taught, to find this place?'" she got out, but then abandoned it to get back to the important part. "'O dear Romeo, if you love me, tell me sincerely; Or – or else, if you f-find me too quick to surrender, I'll –'"
"You'll frown and be perverse and say me nay," Poole supplied, cutting to the chase. "And so I will woo . . ." stepping a bit nearer.
"'I-in truth, beautiful Montague, I, I, I love you too much,'" Camille sputtered, her hands trembling on her keyboard, "'and, and you can find my drive light!'"
"'Drive'?"
"'You may think my behavior light'!"
"Better." Poole was halfway between the desks now.
But Camille could not continue through phrases like "expressions passionate" and "sincere love" before an audience. As she was frantically hunting through the prose columns for a suitable line, a shadow fell across her desktop and Richard Poole was propping himself on her desk, leaning over the monitor, his eyes boring into hers.
"'By love,'" he murmured, almost too low for Fidel's phone to pick up, "'who first did prompt me to inquire; He lent me counsel and I lent him eyes. I am no pilot; yet, wert thou as far As that vast shore wash'd with the farthest sea, I would adventure for such merchandise . . .' Alfric and Elaine are hiding out at the Seawall Inn, aren't they, Camille?"
The breath to speak had died between Camille's lips as she felt herself begin to drown in a beautiful, boundless green ocean, and it was a struggle to reply . . . "Yess, oh yes, Richard . . ."
"And you knew it all along!" In one bound Poole was back at his desk, catching up his jacket in triumph. "There had to be a reason you skipped over all that 'name' stuff to the walls, and then the sea . . . 'Lady, by yonder blessed moon I swear –' we'll have words about your reticence later. Right now, Sergeant, we have runaways to detain!"
Camille was not a decorated undercover agent for nothing. Her reaction time to an emergency situation was legendary in the business. "Richard!" she shrieked, jumping up and grabbing her handbag, "don't you dare! 'I – I feel no joy this night of our engagement! It is too hasty, too inconsiderate, too sudden –'"
Poole paused at the door, looking back at her.
"'Too lightning-like, who ceased to be before that we could have say'," she cried, rushing up to him at the door. "'Oh! Will you leave me if little satisfied?'"
"'IF little?'" he asked, screwing up his face. "'What satisfaction canst thou have tonight? I gave thee my –' that is, we, um – we'll talk. Later."
He hustled her out, looking pale and determined. Fidel adjusted the phone quickly, so the last thing Juliet saw, in her kitchen by means of her husband's stream, was Camille's radiant smile.
Dwayne, meanwhile, decided he had himself a play to read.
[Exeunt.]
NOTE:
The celebrated Shakespearean scholar Irène St Bonaventure de Bataut (1801-1864) is entirely fictitious. I just had fun tracking down a French translation of Romeo and Juliet and running Act II Scene ii through google translate. Then I imagined Richard's reaction to Camille saying the resulting tortured lines.