Prince of Shadows

QUARTO 5

It was a cloudy night, with no kindly moon to light the way; out of respect for the friar, I had shouldered the weight of the crowbar and shovel he had demanded of his fellow. The lantern in his hands should have shed enough light for us, but the path was narrow, and the friar’s robed bulk blocked out most of the glow.

Yet he was the one who grumbled. “Saint Francis be my speed! How oft tonight have my old feet stumbled upon graves. . . .” He froze suddenly. We were well close now to the graveyard, and to the grand structures of the tombs. “Who’s there?” I prayed it was not the watch; carrying tools of grave robbing was yet another hanging offense in Verona, and here was I, well equipped for a crime I did not intend to commit.

But instead, I heard a familiar voice out of the darkness. “Here’s one, a friend, and one that knows you well.” Balthasar! My servant approached, and I peered around the friar to see the calm set of his face. Friar Lawrence put down the lantern and threw his arms around the man.

“Bliss be upon you!” he cried, and kissed him on both cheeks out of sheer effusion . . . but then, as he pushed Balthasar away to arm’s length, his gaze went past, and his face paled. “Tell me, good my friend, what torch is yonder that vainly lends light to eyeless skulls? It burns in the Capulet monument.”

“It does, holy sir, and with it is my master Romeo,” Balthasar said, and I closed my eyes for a moment in sheer relief. All will be well. Despite the lost letter, despite Mercutio’s curse, Romeo had found a way to Juliet. The friar’s optimism had been sound, after all.

But Friar Lawrence did not sound reassured. “How long has he been there?”

“Fully half an hour, sir,” Balthasar said, and I understood that was too long a time.

“Go with me to the vault.” He was speaking to me, but Balthasar had still not glimpsed me behind the friar’s bulk, and he stepped quickly back.

“I dare not, sir. Master Romeo thinks I am gone, and he menaced me with death if I stayed.”

“Stay then,” Friar Lawrence said, and pushed past him. “Fear comes upon me. Oh, much I fear some ill unthrifty thing. . . .”

Balthasar called my name in surprise as I came after, carrying the tools, but I had no mind for him in that moment, until he caught my arm and delayed me. “Master, wait. . . . As I slept under this tree, I had a dream—a dream that Romeo and another fought, and Romeo slew him. . . .”

I thought he had dreamed of Tybalt, but before I could say so, I heard Friar Lawrence cry out, and none of that mattered any longer. I dropped both crowbar and shovel with a clatter and followed the bobbing light of the friar’s lantern down.

I slowed when I saw the blood.

“What is this?” the friar asked, in a trembling voice. “What is this blood that stains the entrance of this sepulchre?” He was right. The blood was fresh, still red and glistening, and two swords lay entangled together in the dirt, but only one was well smeared with crimson. That sword at least I knew: It was Romeo’s. I bent to pick it up, but before I could, Friar Lawrence leaned into the tomb, which held its own guttering flame, and cried out in such a voice that I started to my feet again. “Romeo! O, pale—who else? What, Paris, too, and steeped in blood? Ah, what an unkind hour is guilty of this terrible chance. . . .”

Count Paris and Romeo, both dead? But only Paris must have suffered a wound. I tried to force my way past the friar, but he blocked the doorway, and now he said, in a terrible hushed voice, “The lady stirs.”

I froze, and heard her soft voice, much softened by sleep and the drug, say, “Friendly friar, where is my lord? I remember where I should be, and there I am, but where is my Romeo?”

There was a noise from behind us, rocks rolling under approaching feet, and I clapped a hand on the friar’s shoulder in warning.

“Lady, come you from that nest of death and contagion. . . . A greater power than we hold has thwarted our intentions here. Please, come away. . . .” He took a great gulp of breath when she did not answer. “Lady, thy husband lies there dead, and Paris, too. Come to me. I’ll get you to the sisterhood of holy nuns. Stay not to question, for soon the watch will patrol—come, come, good Juliet. I dare no longer stay—”

The sound of her movements stopped, and there was a terrible silence, a silence that seemed to me to be filled with unvoiced screams, and then the girl said, in a dreadful soft voice, “Get thee hence. I will not go away.”

I heard a distant clatter. Men walking on the rocks, armed and armored. I tugged hard on the friar’s shoulder. “We must go,” I hissed at him. This was a terrible thing, and our presence here would demand questions we could not answer. “Come away, Friar, quickly! She’ll be safe enough; the watch is coming!”

The girl’s voice, through some eerie trick of the tomb, followed us as we escaped into the night, with Balthasar quick behind us. “A cup, closed in my true love’s hand? Poison has been his end . . . and no friendly drop to help me after? I will kiss your lips, and hope some poison hangs on them. . . .” The frantic anguish in her voice twisted at me, slowed my steps, and I turned back to stop her, but Friar Lawrence’s hand grabbed for mine.

“You cannot,” he begged me. “A Montague, present at such a scene! Come; the watch will save her; they are moments away!”

From behind us, in that torchlit tomb, Juliet whispered, “Your lips are warm,” and I shuddered as if a ghost had riven straight through me. Now I plainly heard the clatter and calls of the watch as they closed in. “Noises sound. I must be brief—oh, happy dagger, this is your sheath. There rust, and let me die—”

Romeo’s dagger. She hadn’t waited for the poison on his lips to finish her.

I heard her cry out, just a little, as the dagger found its place.

Friar Lawrence let out a choked, desperate sound, and now it was my own turn to hold him away, push him forth.

Juliet Capulet was a suicide, and so was my cousin, and Count Paris murdered beside them. Mercutio’s curse, made flesh and evil intent.

I felt my body flush suddenly with an unnatural heat, and sweat began to pour from my body, dampening my clothes. I felt as I had always when facing my grandmother—roasting in discomfort, aching to be elsewhere . . . no, not elsewhere.

I knew where I needed to be. My body bent that way, like a compass to true north. In the blink of my eyelids I saw Rosaline’s face, and I felt the press of her lips on mine like a ghost’s promise, and I wanted . . . no, I needed her. Fire was a pleasant warmth in a hearth, but it could also burn down a house, and that was what I felt: a fire raging beyond control, beyond sanity.

I breathed, and breathed, and breathed, and behind us I heard the watch coming to discover the dead.

Balthasar hesitated, and then said, “I will delay them, sir,” and before I could think to stop him, he was scrambling back the way we’d come, and drawing away the pursuit.

“They cannot find you here, young Montague,” Friar Lawrence said. He pushed me on my way. “I will explain all that occurred here. Go.”

I heard them catch the friar and drag him back, and as I achieved shelter behind another set of tombs—ironically, the graceful marble lines of the Montague death house, where lay my sister only newly arrived—here came a new line of torches and lanterns, and well-dressed nobles roused from their beds to see the horrors that awaited them. Prince Escalus, and with him Capulet and his wife. I was too far now to hear all but the loudest of cries, but Lady Capulet’s screams could have sundered a heart of stone.

As I stole away, feeling bruised and broken inside, and drawn like metal to a magnet toward the emptied-out Capulet house, I passed my own uncle hurrying through the streets to join the lamentation. He looked wild-eyed and not himself, and I grasped the arm of his manservant, Gianni. “Where is my aunt?” I asked. She was too strong-willed; she’d not have allowed herself to be left behind in such extremities.

“Oh, sir, great tragedy tonight—your aunt’s breath stopped, and none could rouse her. She died of grief, sir, for your cousin’s exile, and now they cry that Romeo is dead, and Juliet, and Count Paris, too; is it true?”

My aunt, dead in her bed. I let go of him, too numbed to feel much. “It’s true,” I said. “Be careful of him. Too many have died already, and I fear the shock may undo him.”

Gianni nodded and hurried after, anxious for my uncle’s health in such disasters.

And I stumbled on, moving the other direction, through predawn streets boiling with roused, confused citizens all telling dire tales of war, murder, treachery, and assassins.

A plague on both your houses, I heard Mercutio whisper, and give that mad laugh.

“You have your revenge,” I told his shade, which seemed to stalk me in the dark now. I felt dizzy, and there seemed no goodness in the air I gasped in. “Let it be, my brother; please let it be, . . .” But the ghost was not Mercutio, not him in whole; it was made of grief and fury and rage, and it knew no measure or mercy. And so it drove me straight on, through the chattering sleep-dazed crowds gathered by lantern light, through the Piazza delle Erbe and the fountain topped by the serene Madonna, into the streets past and toward the Capulet palace. There was a fell tension in the air, and I saw Capulet adherents fighting Montague on every corner, wildly shouting, “Murder!” and “Assassin!” without knowing anything of what had occurred.

Someone ran past me crying that the moon had turned to blood behind the clouds, and another screamed that Lord Ordelaffi had hanged himself from a tree in his orchard, and I stumbled on, anonymous in my gray clothes.

The Prince of Shadows. This was my realm, then, this confusion, for it seemed to me that the sun would never shine again on fair Verona.

The Capulet door was barred, but as I approached it a servant fled through the front, taking with her an apronful of precious silver. Chaos and disaster, and all the world gone to ruin . . .

Turn back, something screamed in me, but the heat inside urged me on, on, into the hall, past Capulet men and women who were too affrighted to challenge my purposeful steps. One man braver than the rest tried to bar my way, but I drew my sword, and he retreated. Juliet’s door was open, and her nurse lay senseless on the carpet beside her curtained bed, one hand clutching her prayer beads.

Rosaline’s door was shut and locked from within.

I banged my open hand upon it. I did not speak, because I knew she was there, as she would know I was without; I could feel her nearness beyond that barrier, pressed against it. I could almost feel the sweet whisper of her breath upon my face.

“No,” she said. Her voice sounded choked and desperate to my burning ears, and I pounded again, more urgently. “No, Benvolio, for God’s own love, no, you must go; we must be stronger than this; we are the last two of our houses in this generation; if we die—”

If we died, the curse would be satisfied. Perhaps. Or perhaps it would only spin on, seeking ever more distant relations to ruin. But did not all mankind narrow back to a common root, of Adam and Eve? Would Mercutio’s curse carry away every living soul, in the end?

“I care not,” I said. My own voice sounded a stranger’s to me. “I care not for death, or doom, or curses; I care only for you, Rosaline, and I know you feel the same; I know—”

“The curse,” she said. I heard tears, and I also heard the key trembling in the lock, as if she had taken hold of it to turn. “There must be a way to break its hold over us. You must know a way!”

She pulled out the key and threw it away; I heard the clatter of metal on stone as it slid over the floor. I put my eye to the keyhole and saw her there, leaning against the door. Only a small, pale portion of her face, and a lock of her hair, but it was enough to drive me to desperation. “Please,” I said. “Please open the door, Rosaline. You know you cannot keep me out for long. I can pick the lock. I can climb the wall. I can open the shutters.”

“You won’t,” she said. It sounded weary now, and heartsick. “You won’t, because you are not such a man, Benvolio; you are an honorable man, and you will not do it. You need me to let you in, and it rips me in two that I deny you that mercy.”

“They are dead,” I said. “Romeo and Juliet. Both dead. Count Paris, my aunt, Mercutio’s father, all dead this night. Can we not find some comfort in all this?”

“Comfort in each other’s bodies, heedless of consequence. And how will it end?” she asked me. “With poison? Daggers? A rope for you and a cellar-dug grave for me when my uncle rages at my betrayal? There is no peace in it, Ben. Not until the curse is done. It must be broken. We must break it.”

“How?” I sank down to my haunches, resting against the solid bulk of the door, and my cheek pillowed against its hard surface as I gazed within at that tiny vision of her face. I felt hot, angry, desperate, and infinitely afraid—afraid of what I might do, equally afraid of not heeding my desires. “I have no way to find the rosary—”

“What rosary?”

I realized that she had not heard the witch’s confession—nor had I told her all of it. I had supposed she knew, since she had been at the priest’s house, but she had been looking not for the rosary, but for Mercutio’s diary—a diary I had already burned.

She did not know.

“The curse,” I said. “It is in three parts. One on Mercutio’s flesh, now broken. One in his own hand, in blood, in his diary. And the third placed upon a rosary that he took from his dead lover’s grave. I thought it was with the church, but I did not find it there.”

“A rosary,” she repeated, and there was something dull and strange in her voice. “I had a gift of a rosary, sent here to me. It came to me in secret, the way Romeo once delivered his love notes. I thought it was only another of his gestures.”

“Where is it?” My heart leaped within me, but at the same time, a terrible dark urgency was rising. The curse knew its danger, and the unreasoning fever increased, demanding that I batter down the door, shatter all resistance, do whatever must be done to be with the one I loved . . . if love this was. “Rosaline! Where is it?”

“I—I gave it away,” she whispered. “Ah, God, God, I cannot bear this, Ben; my soul cries out for you and I die every minute we are apart. . . .” Her voice grew softer, because she had moved. I peered through the keyhole and saw her crawling toward the key.

She would let me in. I had only to wait. Part of me rejoiced in unholy abandon, and part of me despaired, because I would never have the strength to stop. If Rosaline fell, I would fall with her, and we would both burn.

“Rosaline,” I said. Her hand was on it now, trembling with eagerness to pluck it from the stones. “Rosaline, in God’s holy name, where is it?”

Her head turned, and she rose on her knees with the key cradled in both hands as tenderly as a nun might cradle a cross. She closed her eyes and swayed, and my whole body took flame at the sight of her barely concealed beneath the linen shift she wore, with the candlelight gliding over her like a lover’s hands. . . .

“Juliet’s nurse,” she said. “I gave the thing to Juliet’s nurse, who had broken her own rosary. I gave it as payment for taking you a message. I meant it a kindness, but what have I done?”

I remembered the old woman, collapsed in Juliet’s room, with her hands clasping prayer beads. It was only a few steps away, only a little distance, but I could not move. My flesh was married to this door, and all my will could not force me from it.

She must have known that all my resistance was fled, for Rosaline’s eyes opened, and she stared toward the door, toward the keyhole through which I peered.

“Forgive me,” she whispered, “but I know of no other way to stop myself.”

She took in a single deep breath, and then screamed.

This was no maiden’s cry, soft and tentative—it was a full-throated, awful sound that broke through all my drugged, cursed longing and shocked me, just for a moment, back to myself. Back to the Prince of Shadows, who knew that discovery in such circumstances meant death.

As she knew.

I heard the Capulet servants rousing below—even though they had fallen into disarray, her cry had rallied them, and they’d be up in only a few heartbeats to her defense. I would be cut to pieces on the stairs, or in the hall, and the curse would be well satisfied. Rosaline, knowing her cry had brought my death, would find a way to join me.

A plague upon both your houses.

“No,” I said, and forced myself up, back, away. Even then, I could hardly bear to tear my gaze from that keyhole, from the distant view of Rosaline clutching the key to our mutual destruction. “No!”

Two steps back, then three, and then I broke and ran for Juliet’s room.

Her nurse was not sleeping, but dead, eyes wide and staring, mouth agape—like my aunt, her breath had been stopped in the night. Her hand gripped the rosary with pale savagery, and I ripped it free and slammed the door on the startled faces of the arriving armed servants, then turned the key.

I had little time. They would break down the door if needed, and already they shouted for a heavy ram. The rosary felt cold in my hand, ice-cold, and slick as bone; menace clung to it like the miasma of death, and I felt Mercutio’s shade again in the room, avid and furious.

“No,” I told him. “Enough!”

Juliet’s fireplace still held dull red embers. I shoved in more wood, grabbed hold of a lantern, and crashed it into the mess; the oil spewed out, and the wood caught with an eager rustle that quickly became a roar.

The door shivered beneath the hit of something large—a bench, perhaps, carried by willing hands. It would not hold.

“Be at peace, my friend,” I said, and I thought of Mercutio as I had known him best in life—laughing, sharp, brilliant, and tender when no one watched. I thought of the glimpse I had once had of him in embrace with Tomasso, and the purity of the passion in his face. “What a scourge is laid upon hate, and heaven means to kill our joys with love. Let it be finished.”

I kissed the rosary, and tried to fling it into the fire.

It clung to my hands.

No.

I gave a raw cry of fury, and shook them, but the rosary had wrapped tight and would not loose me. There was a filthy kind of life to it, as if it did not want to perish any more than I.

I heard Rosaline calling my name, chanting it in a wretched, broken voice. I heard the doom in it, the despair. If I did not give in to this, it would kill her, too. It would take away the only reason I had to draw breath. I knew this as if Mercutio whispered it in my ear, and when I turned my head I saw his shade there, bending close. Bound to this rosary ripped from the hands of the dead.

He was just as I remembered him now. Fire and beauty, passion and wit, love and longing. All his fineness and all his awful tragedy bound up together.

“You are my friend,” I told him, and I felt the grief and heartbreak of it. “I should have helped you. I should have saved him. You are right to hate me, but for the love of God, for the love of Tomasso, spare her your hate. She deserves none of it.”

His pale shade gazed at me, and just for a moment, I saw a smile curve his lips. He bent forward, and I felt his hand close over mine.

The rosary loosened its grip, but not enough, and I saw the regret and sorrow on his ghostly face. He could not stop it in death any more than he could in life.

There was only one thing I could do, and I did not pause to think. I dared not.

I thrust my whole hand into the flames.

The agony hit in an instant, but I held; I held, though I heard my cry go up to echo from the walls. My sleeve caught fire, and I heard flesh sizzle.

Mercutio’s ghost wept.

My whole body shook, and I knew that I would die if I did not pull my hand back.

Better dead, I thought with absolute, cold clarity. Better it ends here, with me, and she might live.

Perhaps it was that release of my own selfish desire to live that caused the rosary to finally let go its grip on my fingers and slip away to drop into the flames.

I drew my poor hand back and batted out the flames on my sleeve as I collapsed to the floor beside Juliet’s perished nurse. I felt that same hell-borne heat of my grandmother’s rooms pressing on me, through me, as if it meant to ignite me from bones out. . . .

And then I felt it turn to ashes and dust, and all the terrible weight of it fled under the press of cool, still air.

The burning in my hand was gone. I turned my head and looked into the fire, and saw the rosary blackening, cracking apart, falling to ruins.

I lifted my hand and slowly clenched and unclenched the unburned flesh, the unscarred fingers. Then I looked at Mercutio’s shade, which still stood looking down on me.

And he smiled. It was the smile of my old friend, the smile of delight and mischief and glory. His lips shaped words, and I read them as if they were written on the air between us.

Love well, if not wisely.

And then he was gone.

I closed my eyes and struggled not to weep: for love of my friend, and for the loss of him, and Romeo, and innocents Juliet and Tomasso, and yes, even my sister, who in no way had been guiltless. For all of them, swept away on a senseless tide of grief.

Then I rose, wiped my face, and reached for the bedroom’s locked door.

It shuddered against my hand, leaping against the lock, and I realized that, incredibly, the world in some ways had not changed. I was a Montague, intruding in a Capulet’s rooms, with a woman lying dead beside me. There would be no quarter for me here. The door would give in one more blow, and I’d be taken and ripped apart out of their blind fury.

I ran to the balcony. Juliet’s balcony, from which she’d listened so ardently to my cousin’s declarations of love, and perhaps it had been love after all, true and wrongheaded, at least in the beginning, before the curse took its hold of them. Beneath, the garden was hushed and still, and only the fountain’s gentle whisper stirred it.

The door splintered behind me with sudden violence.

I knew I could still win my way free. I jumped up to the balustrade, balancing there; it was an easy jump to soft ground, and a wall I’d climbed more often than I ought to ever confess. An easy escape in the confusion.

But I didn’t want to escape.

I jumped for Rosaline’s balcony instead.

It was a long way, and a standing jump instead of a running one, and even though I stretched as far as I could, my fingers only grazed the stone railing, and I knew I’d fall. . . .

But something bore me up, just for a moment, and carried me those last vital inches, so that my hand wrapped around one of the stone braces beneath and stopped me, and when I looked down, I saw a shade there, limned cold in the moonlight as it broke through the clouds.

My beloved cousin Romeo. Only a last, wavering image of him, shivering like an illusion of heat.

His lips moved, though I heard no voice, and then he smiled, and where he had floated there was only mist rising into the night.

I scrambled up, vaulted over the balcony railing, and found the shutters closed. Shouting from within Juliet’s room told me the servants had uncovered the nurse’s body, and I quickly slipped my dagger between the wooden leaves of the shutters and raised the latch, and then I was inside Rosaline’s apartment.

She was at the door, threading the key into the lock with shaking hands, and she whirled as the fresh breeze blew in to flap the curtains around me. The candle on the table guttered, but did not quite go out.

I stayed where I was, and she where she was, as if we tested ourselves.

“I feel . . .” She swallowed, and hugged herself hard. “I feel cold. And very . . . very alone.”

I knew that. I felt the desolation, too, the sadness, but I knew that it was only the aftermath of that awful flame that had been lit between us; a passion like that, flaming so fast, could only scorch, not warm.

So I crossed the space between us and put my arms around her, and after a long heartbeat’s pause, she sank against me, and rested her head upon my shoulder, and sighed a little in utter relief.

“What do you feel?” she asked me, in a quiet, muffled tone. She did not raise her head to meet my gaze.

“Grief,” I said, and stroked her hair. “But grief passes.”

“And the two of us, will we also pass?” She was crying, but it was a silent thing; I felt the damp heat of her tears through my shirtsleeve, but she made no sound to betray it.

“No,” I said, and she lifted her head then, eyes shimmering and wet, and lips parted. “I saw Mercutio’s ghost a moment ago. And he spoke to me.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Love well, if not wisely,’” I said. “And I love you well, Capulet.”

Then I kissed her, and tasted tears and flowers, fear and hope, dread and dreams. Her lips were as soft and warm as the petals of a sun-heated rose, and something rose within me, a thing of fire and feathers, spreading wide wings. This was not wise, it was not politic, it was not sane, and yet I no longer cared for anything but the way she trembled when I touched her, and pressed so close to me. Not a curse, this feeling. A blessing.

Her lips held the sweetest and most intoxicating brew in the world, and I drank, and drank, and drank until I was dizzy with it, and her.

And so they found us, when they broke down the door, lost in that embrace.

• • •

I had been to Castelvecchio only twice in my life—once to be presented to Prince Escalus when I was only six years old, clumsy and fat in my finery, and once when I accompanied my cousin and uncle there for a feast.

This time, I was marched through the long, narrowing series of halls and doors, and the straight line of smaller and smaller arched doorways seemed as if I were being swallowed up by a giant beast of marble, stone, and plaster. Fine works of art glared at me from the walls, as if angered by the clatter of my passing—the jingle of my guards’ swords and armor. I walked silently, and unarmed by so much as a dagger. Even my hands were firmly tied.

Following along at a distance came the Capulet family—the great man and his lady, and a heavily veiled and guarded Rosaline behind them. Somewhere in the distance, perhaps, my uncle might arrive, but by the weak, fragile light of this day, I was not sure he had the stomach for more grief.

I resigned myself that this trial would be mine alone. Oh, Mercutio, is this your last laugh? Am I your final victim? It might be both.

I felt weary, dirty, and hungry; they’d let me quench my thirst, but I still wore the clothes in which I’d been taken, and the apple I’d downed many hours ago had long since ceased to keep body and soul together. My head ached dully.

And oddly, I had never felt quite so fine in my life.

“I don’t understand you,” said the guard at my right elbow; he was a talkative, amusing fellow, while the one at my left was as taciturn as a stone. “Throwing away your life for a woman. You know the prince will exile you for this, on the Capulets’ bitter complaints; he will not be disposed to aggravate their grief just now. And yet you smile!”

“I do,” I agreed.

“Why?”

“Because I am happy.”

He shook his head, and the chain mail lapping his neck made a slithering hiss, like a serpent preparing to strike. “Fools are happy, young sir. Wise men are always sad.”

“Pray God I am never stricken with wisdom, then,” I said. “The happiest men I ever knew were followers of folly. It was only when they were stopped from it that their lives turned grim.”

“Men were not made to be happy,” he said, my philosophical guard. “Men were made to suffer and be made ready for the happiness of heaven.”

“A harsh sentence for the crime of birth.”

He shrugged. “Life is not fair, young sir; if it were, I’d be swimming in gold and ale.”

“You already swim in ale,” said his less talkative companion, in a repressive rumble of a voice. “Quiet. I’ll not take your lumps for you.”

That must have been an effective warning, because we passed through the last two halls in silence. Servants stood off, watching as they cleaned; courtiers stopped their hushed conversations to turn and watch my progress.

And then we passed the final arched doorway into a large, square room floored in marble, with a single heavily carved chair upon a dais at the end of it. Prince Escalus was not in the chair; instead, he was standing at its foot, listening to an aged priest bending under the weight of his robes, and as we clanked to a halt ten feet from him, he nodded a dismissal to the man and straightened to regard me.

He looked tired, our prince; he’d had little enough sleep, and I could well imagine governing such an unruly city would take its toll on him. He still stood tall and strong, though, and he stared at me a moment before he turned with a swirl of his half cloak, climbed the steps, and settled himself in the throne.

“I will hear the tale,” he said.

It was, it seemed, not my place to tell it, as a smooth-faced courtier all dressed in black robes—a lawyer—stepped forward and bowed. “My prince, in last evening’s late uproar, an alarm was raised within the Capulet household while the lord and lady were absent. When servants answered this call, they found Juliet Capulet’s nurse dead upon the floor, and this man—a Montague—in carnal embrace with young Rosaline Capulet, sister to slain Tybalt and cousin to poor Juliet.”

The prince nodded, eyes still fixed upon me. “And who raised this alarm?”

“Rosaline Capulet, my lord.”

Put in such terms, it did sound damning. I looked behind me. The Capulets had formed a knot of red behind me, blocking the doorway, and Rosaline’s uncle looked murderous daggers at me. Behind him, the veiled figure of Rosaline stood very still, breath stirring the fabric that shrouded her face.

“And was the nurse murdered, then?”

“Well, my prince, who can say? There were no marks upon her, but a strong young man may kill an old woman by smothering, or by choking—”

“Were there then marks of hands upon her throat?” Prince Escalus asked. He sounded only mildly interested. “Or did her eyes show red?”

“Red, my prince?”

“A physician from Venezia gave a lecture—perhaps you might have attended it more closely—in which he said that one might tell a smothering by the telltale red stains left upon the eyes, as the veins burst within.”

The lawyer hesitated a moment, then bowed. “You are most wise, Highness, but there were no such discolorings that I have been told, and no sign of hands upon her throat.”

“Then there is no evidence that the young man smothered or choked the woman, only that she is dead. There has been a plague of death upon this town of recent days, and almost all within three houses: Ordelaffi, Capulet, and Montague. I understand Benvolio’s aunt expired in the night. Shall we suspect him of that murder as well?” The prince waved away the lawyer’s response before it was delivered. “No, the crux of the matter is that Rosaline Capulet raised an alarm. Why?”

“The villain was breaking her door, my prince,” Capulet said, and stepped forward. “To save her most precious honor, she screamed for aid, and aid was given, but not before this wretch slipped outside, came through her balcony, and began his assault, which was thankfully incomplete.”

The prince’s eyebrows rose, though his face showed little else. He turned his attention back to me. “I do not see your uncle,” he said. “Is there no one to speak for you, Benvolio?”

“I can speak for myself, my prince.”

“Then do so,” he said, and leaned back with his arms on the carved lion’s-head armrests of the throne. “I attend.”

“I must go back, with your patience, to the death of a young man hanged outside these walls. . . .”

I told the story, then, of Tomasso and Mercutio. I ignored the cries of protest from those who felt the tale too perverse for the fragile ears of the ladies, and grimly went on with it, to describe the anguish of Mercutio, his fury, and finally, his curse. “Romeo had never clapped eyes upon the Capulet maiden Juliet until he saw her at the feast where the Capulets would celebrate her betrothal to Count Paris,” I said. “Is it then sensible that he formed such a close attachment that he would marry her in only days? Or that he would linger in Verona past his exile to stay in her embrace, when he knew well his life was forfeit? Mercutio’s lover was ripped from him, and he wished to visit that horror upon those he saw as guilty—to make them feel that love, and that terrible loss.”

“If there is a curse, it follows there must be a witch,” Prince Escalus said. His brows had lowered again, into a frown now, and he rested his chin upon one closed fist. “Can you produce her?”

I heard a bustle from behind me, and as I turned to look, I spotted the bulk of Friar Lawrence pushing through with whispered apologies. He held up his hand as he came forward. “Your Highness, the witch is gone, but I can attest that I heard her speak of this curse to young Benvolio,” he said. He had clearly run a long way to be here; his face shone with sweat, and his body trembled as he sucked down whoops of air. I had never been so glad to see his merry face, even if it looked not so merry at this moment. “Benvolio set out to break the curse; I am sure of it. It is a sad truth that he was too late for his cousin Romeo and the poor child Juliet, who lay together in death, making it a bridal tomb. And too late also for your poor cousin Paris, who did no one any ill in this matter, but only stood between the lovers and so died for it.”

“This curse matters not in what the Capulets charge,” Prince Escalus said, and fixed that broody gaze on me once more. “Were you then in the Capulets’ palace, Benvolio?”

“I was.”

“Came you there upon anyone’s invitation?”

“No.”

“Did you knock upon Rosaline’s locked door and try to enter?”

There was no help for it. “Yes.”

“Did you then scale to her balcony and enter in that way?”

“Yes.”

“And did the Capulets truly find you in carnal embrace of this girl?”

“In embrace, yes,” I said. I could not rightly call it wholly carnal. There was too much of heaven in it.

“Then what possible defense do I consider? You agree to the plain facts of the complaint against you. You trespassed, and you compromised the honor of the Capulet girl. You are lucky indeed that the door fell to their servants when it did, or your penalty would be much harsher—”

“Wait!” There was a struggle behind me, surprised and distressed cries, and then a veil settled to the floor like a cloud as Rosaline struggled against her aunt’s grasping hands. “My prince, wait! Let me be heard!”

The lawyer stepped forward, shaking his head, and said, in a low voice, “My prince, this is not proper. The girl is bound for the convent, and women have no place to speak here!”

“Then there is no harm to her soul in letting her speak, nor to us in lending our ears,” Prince Escalus said, and gestured toward the Capulets. “Let her come forward.”

I drank in the sight of her as she pulled free of her family’s protection and stepped out to walk the distance alone. She was straight-backed and unafraid, head held high, and she exchanged with me a long, warm glance before settling gracefully into a low curtsy before the prince.

He bade her rise, and said, “What have you to add, then, my lady?”

“Benvolio Montague did not try to force my door,” she said. “I do not ask you to understand what occurred between us, but there was a curse, my prince, and it was working upon us both; even so, even with the madness of black magic driving him to me, he did not offer me any violence, nor any insult. I screamed to protect him, sir, and not to damn him.”

“Ho, this is a turn.” The prince sat up straight, and a buzz of whispers ran through the crowd—so many, I had not realized. They’d been slipping in quietly behind me, and now half the notables of Verona were gathered to see. “How so?”

“To drive him away ere I opened that door myself, so bespelled by the curse was I,” she said. “And to force him to find the object that fixed the curse upon us. Which he did, in Juliet’s rooms, and so shattered the evil.” She took in a slow, steady breath, and said, “I confess that we did kiss, Your Highness, but there was nothing of violence offered from it, and nothing but sweet comfort, for I love him, sir. I know he is the enemy of my house; I know that rivers of blood lie between our two families. But surely the deaths of our dear cousins must, in shared grief, work to end that anger.” She turned on her uncle and her aunt. “Did you not say that at the tombs you wept, and so did Montague? That the taste of this feud lay bitter on your tongues?”

“But—”

“She is right.” A new voice, and an oddly frail one; my uncle’s normal strength was gone, and he leaned heavily upon his cane, and upon the arm of my mother, who stood beside him. “I have promised to raise a statue to the honor of young Juliet, and so Capulet has also sworn to honor my fallen Romeo. Are we then to deny a living love, whilst honoring a dead one?”

I searched my mother’s face for any trace of anger, but she smiled at me, and through her tears I saw a real and genuine happiness.

And then came the dreaded tapping of a cane, and the crowd swirled and parted in frantic haste, for tottering into the room, much supported by her anxious attendants, came the Iron Lady, my grandmother. She wore black, and all the layers of velvet and lace and veils made her look a charred corpse. Her face was eerily white, and her filmed eyes roamed the room, marking enemies, and settled their fiercest gaze upon me.

“Traitor to your blood and your line,” she spat, and raised her cane. “Half-blooded unnatural thing! My curse upon you, fool boy—look you, my prince, upon the face of that villain you’ve sought all these years, who foxed your guards and defied your edicts. Look you upon that lawless wretch, the Prince of Shadows!” She stamped the metal-shrouded butt end of the cane upon the marble, with enough force I thought the stone might crack, and the impact rang through the room like the tolling of a death bell. Shock waves went through it, and faces turned toward me, and then toward the prince. Half of those here had been victims of my crimes, and they waited only upon his reaction to cry my neck into a noose.

Prince Escalus, in turn, looked to Montague and my mother. I held out no hopes. For too long, my grandmother had terrorized our house; she had ruled with fear and hatred, and driven us all before her like leaves in a storm.

But now my uncle straightened his back and said, “My apologies to you, good prince, but my mother is unwell. Her mind has wandered these past few weeks, and she sees threats and phantoms everywhere, as the frail and elderly sometimes do. I beg you, pay no heed to her wild fancies. We will tend to all her needs in our home, and see that she never spreads such wicked lies again.”

Her mouth gaped open, and the dumb surprise on my grandmother’s face was so remarkable that I thought I might spoil it with laughter. Had she ever in her life been so directly contradicted? And by him?

My mother curtsied to the prince and said, “My lord, I will take her home, with your kind permission. She is not enough in her wits to be seen here.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my mind!” my grandmother spat, and shook her cane hard at the prince. “You vile English whore, you weak-bellied coward of a son, I tell you my grandnephew is—”

“See she is well cared for,” the prince interrupted. “And that she is neither seen nor heard from this day forward.”

“My lord,” my mother said. She snapped her fingers at Grandmother’s attendants, and they closed around her feebly struggling body, like black-clad ants, and bore her away, still protesting.

My mother followed, and I thought that I could almost see the mantle of leadership settle from the old woman’s shoulders to hers as my mother took charge of House Montague.

A new day, indeed.

“My guards swear to me that the Prince of Shadows is dead,” Prince Escalus said. His gaze had fallen back upon me, weighty with significance. “I think we’ll see no more of him now. And with the lady Rosaline’s testimony, I find no weight to a Capulet claim that Benvolio came uninvited to her, nor that her honor was much compromised by it. Now we have funerals, and a glooming peace this morning has brought. The sun, for sorrow, will not show its head today, and so we will go to have more talk of these sad things.” For the first time, then there was a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “But tomorrow, perhaps, there will be sun, and a lifting of gloom, and a different tale, of two warring houses brought together at last not in grief, but in some measure of joy. Now clasp hands, Benvolio, with your Rosaline. She is not meant for a convent; nor are you meant for a prison house. Go and soothe your family’s ills, and tomorrow we will speak of happier things.”

I turned to her, and before I could reach out to her she was reaching to me, both our hands joining and twining, and Prince Escalus was wrong, after all, for just then the sun came spilling in through the window, and in its glow I felt the warmth of a blessing—from Romeo, and Juliet, and Mercutio, and Tomasso, and all the lovers lost.

And in her smile, her glorious and lovely smile, we were lovers found at last.

EXEUNT