by Rachel Caine
“Hsst!” I said, and slapped Romeo’s head sharply. He jerked upright, eyes wild and wide. “Under the bed. Hurry!”
He pushed the chair back and slid beneath the wooden frame, and I scooted in from the other side and pulled the hangings down to conceal us, just as the door opened and heavy footsteps crossed wood, aiming toward us. No servant walked thus, with such assurance. I lifted the draperies just enough to spot the expensive leather of the shoes, and the gleam of gold buckles.
Lord Ordelaffi looked down on his son for a long moment, and then dragged a chair close—the same one Romeo had pushed away—to sit. Dust sifted into my face as Mercutio moved in the bed, and I closed my eyes against it; it crawled into my nose, and I had the horrible fear I might sneeze, or Romeo might, but we both stayed dead silent, somehow.
And Lord Ordelaffi finally said, “You live to see the dawn, then. It is a sign from God that even He does not want you.”
Mercutio’s voice came thready and weak, muffled by the swelling of his nose and mouth. “And no credit to the love of my father.”
“You brought this horror on yourself, with your filthy ways. But I pray you to take the instruction it offers: Give up your sinful perversions, and embrace a life of piety and duty to your family. You will not be offered this pardon again.”
“Pardon? Why, sir, I beg your pardon, for if that was pardon, then fists are love and nooses are kisses. You speak of duty? Duty is the rope that strangles me. Piety is a bed of broken glass. And family is the company of hateful demons.” His voice was half-mad. The bed shifted, as if Mercutio had rolled on his side, away from his father. “I want none of it.”
“You beg another beating!”
“I do not beg. Even if you hate me, I am your son and only heir. Kill me, kill your own name.”
“What matters a legacy when it will breed none of its own?” Lord Ordelaffi shoved the chair back and paced with sharp agitation. I watched the shadow move beneath the draping curtains. “You will marry the girl when you are presentable enough, and you will get her with child. Past that, I care not of you, or for you. You are no son of mine, save in necessity. We will never speak again.”
He left then, and slammed the door behind him. I heard the metal scrape of the lock.
Romeo and I slithered out from under the bed, and I wiped pale dust from my face and coughed. Mercutio had taken off the compresses. His face was not as swollen, but the bruises had flowered dark, and he scarce looked human.
But he did look . . . different. No longer the fast-witted, silver-tongued jester I had known all my life. There was something older in the hard-to-see glint of his eyes, and the tension in his puffy chin.
“You stayed,” he said. He sounded less distant today, but no less flat. “I love you well for it, but if you’re found in my company here, you’ll be named as sodomites for certain. I am a pestilent friend; I poison all I touch. I beg you, go, and don’t return. Once I am safely married and lashed to the family plow, I can see you again. Not until then.”
“Mercutio—” Romeo looked at him with real worry on his earnest, handsome face. “You spoke of daggers as friends last night. Say you do not mean it, for the love we bear you.”
“A dagger is the only friend I cannot corrupt. Even my blood cannot defile good steel.” But Mercutio carefully shook his head, which must have hurt. “Fear not; I will not give him satisfaction in seeing me safely buried. No, I will gadfly him a while longer, the wretched man who frowns on perversion while he capers at murder. I will bring down the guilty; see if I do not. All the guilty, even should I pull down the temple on my head, like Samson.”
I wanted to be glad for him, to wish him success in that, but I was all too aware that the temple that he would be pulling down would be the palace of the Montagues. My sister and my grandmother had set this tragedy in motion, and the coming waves were sure to wash us to far distant shores.
It might be up to me to be sure those waves did not drown us all.
FROM THE DIARY OF MERCUTIO, HIDDEN BY HIS HAND
In only a week’s time, how quickly Tomasso has disappeared from the world. His body has not yet completed a feast for the worms, and yet no one remembers him. I am presentable enough to dine in the hall now. My father ignores me; he will keep his silence toward me to his dying day; I know that. No one remarks on my face, or my newly crooked nose. No one asks whether I am well. I am a ghost at the table, as dead to them as the boy they helped murder.
None of them knows his name.
None of them cares.
Damn all of them to hell.
• • •
It has been almost a month. The bruises are gone from my face, and the mirror shows me a new man—a stranger, with shadows in my eyes and a cruel tilt to my mouth. My father took the heart from me, and what remains is a cavern of roaring blood, and no pity left.
My servant Elias has brought me whispers and pieces of rumor, and I turn them over greedily, as once I turned over the treasure the Prince of Shadows brought to me. I have wealth secreted away, clean coin from the sale of my friend’s ill-gotten loot. I had meant it to take us away, into a new and likely impossible life together, but with Tomasso gone the gold means nothing, save a tool to loosen tongues and buy my vengeance.
Today Elias has told me a Capulet betrayed us. I’ faith, I almost hate the Montagues as much; I know in my head that Romeo and Benvolio could do nothing for me, or Tomasso, yet knowing they saw his death, saw my humiliation, goes hard. Hearing of Capulet guilt makes me think had I not been such fast friends with Montague it would not have happened.
My fault, again.
I pray every night for forgiveness. I pray that Tomasso will intercede for me, but I do not pray for salvation; that is beyond me now, and I know it.
All that is left is vengeance, and I will have that, at least, if nothing else. I will contrive a revenge yet.
• • •
The worst is upon me. I am wed.
She sickens me, though I should have pity on her; she is as trapped in this web as I, but she is a symbol of all I have lost of myself. And I loathe her. It is a bitter bed we make, and after, she weeps herself to sleep. I tell her that once she bears a living heir she can be shut of me, and I know she is well content with that. We both cling to the promise of loneliness.
Men say that love is cruel, but it is the lack of it in the act that is cruelest.
I saw my Prince of Shadows in the market today, but I avoided him. I think he would have followed me, but I fell in with some drunken fellows instead; he prefers his sobriety, my serious young friend. I wonder if he is still stealing, and if so, where he hides his loot. (Even here, I will not inscribe his name. I owe him that much.)
• • •
Today Elias brought me a priest. He was to hear my confession, but I confessed him, instead; I heard from his own lips how Rosaline Capulet, that convent-bound bitch, had pointed the finger at us and roused my father’s ire.
It is proof enough.
• • •
My wife’s maidservant came to me with reports that my wife sneaks away to visit a witch, one who doses her with potions to make her more fertile. She desires a babe as badly as I, and for the same reasons—it is our salvation from this fleshy purgatory we inhabit.
I forced the wench to tell me where the witch lives, and tomorrow I will pay her a visit.
• • •
The witch must have been in terror that I would betray her; the penalty for such unholy acts as she commits is death, but I will not betray anyone with a secret. I threw gold on the table, a mountain of it, and told her to continue to dose my wife with whatever herbs might induce her to conceive, but to make for me a curse, a great and terrible curse.
Imagine my surprise to discover that this young slip of a witch once had a cousin, a cousin I so tenderly cherished. She had come to Verona to discover the reason for Tomasso’s death. Once she learned who I was, she was cheerful in her help to me.
I had long consid
ered carefully how to achieve my vengeance. One blade alone might cut a few throats, but not enough, and not the right ones. No, I needed to destroy the Capulets, root and branch, before turning the vengeance upon my own father and his varlets.
A curse for love, cast in my own hand and faith and flesh. A curse of love, on the house of the guilty.
Let them feast on love, as crows feast on the dead.
Perhaps I am, after all, mad.
• • •
I have made me a poem of my madness, and it concerns Queen Mab. In part, it reads:
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.
I think Mab has made me mad. I no longer care.
• • •
I have consorted with the witch to make this curse, and there are three parts to my vengeance: flesh, mind, and spirit. Let me then speak my mind, here:
CURSED BE THE CAPULETS.
CURSED BE THE HOUSE WHO BETRAYED US.
Let Queen Mab visit her madness upon us all.
QUARTO
3
One would believe that Tomasso had never existed, save for the new twist in Mercutio’s once-straight nose; the bruises had faded, and if our friend’s humor had taken a turn for the bizarre and bitter, I could scarce blame him. He had been wed, with all the necessary pomp, to a blushing young girl; Romeo and I had helped put Mercutio to bed with her according to custom, a strange and horrible business knowing what we did, but we’d been spared the awkward business of listening to any consummation behind the curtains, though some servant would have done so.
Instead, I had been forced to listen, still, to Romeo’s half-drunken rambling paeans to the beauty of a woman he would not name, but who must have been Rosaline Capulet. She was not, of course, in attendance at the wedding; the Capulets would not set foot where Montagues entertained. Yet her shadow loomed large over all.
Romeo had brought home the rumor that Rosaline had been the hot tongue who’d betrayed Mercutio’s secret; he mourned, but he forgave her this feminine weakness, which undoubtedly did not run true to my grandmother’s plans. I kept him from writing poetry, or going anywhere near her, but it seemed to me that he would never lose his infatuation. Romeo had never been so constant in love, and it worried me to think that he might have truly set his heart on something so massively unwise.
I stole.
I suppose I could claim that the pressure of knowing of my sister’s cruel betrayal, and Mercutio’s misaimed bitterness, was to blame for the Prince of Shadows’ thieving rampage in Verona; I made a list, sitting in the stillness of my rooms, and in the evenings, almost every evening, I escaped the claustrophobic pull of my guilt to bring misery to someone who deserved it more.
I stole the diary of the wife of the Ordelaffi servant, in which she confessed her horror of her husband’s fondness for unnatural acts, and—more damningly—the pilfering he’d done from his master’s coffers. The diary found its way into the chambers of the Ordelaffis’ busybody cook, who soon presented it to Lord Ordelaffi.
The servant was driven out into the streets, stripped and beaten. I watched from the safety of a nearby wine shop. It was a sour sort of victory, because with him went his innocent wife and children, now reduced to beggars.
I remedied my wrong by visiting the jakes late the next evening, and retrieving the stinking bag of gold and jewels that I’d hidden there. The jewels and the sword were too easily known, but the gold I transferred to a clean cloth bag. I found the sad little family huddled in a sour alley, shivering in the chill; the father, already weak, seemed likely to die. I could not bring myself to care overmuch. But the haunted terror of the wife, and the children . . .
I knew they could not see my face in the shadow of the gray hood, and even if they did make it out, the silk mask would tell them to seek no more.
“Sir,” the wife said, staring up at me from where she knelt on the cobbles beside a very meager little brazier, cooking what seemed to be a skinned rat for her frightened family. “Sir, I beg you, in God’s name, leave us be. . . .”
I threw the bag down on the cobbles beside her. It broke open, and coins scattered like dreams over her dirty skirts. She gasped and pulled back, as if the coins might turn to serpents . . . but when they did not, she looked up again, still openmouthed. Tears glittered in her widened eyes.
“Not for him,” I said. “He deserves his fate for what he’s done. Take your children and flee.”
She shook her head, but I knew, as she clawed the coins back into the bag and tied it shut, that she would do as I said. Her husband was dying. She might linger long enough to see him gone, but I’d read her diary; there was no love between them, and his death would free her.
Widows had more power than wives.
As far as the other villains, Tybalt Capulet still swaggered, cock o’ the walk, through the streets, ever more arrogant and overweening, and I badly itched to take him down, this time hard enough to leave scars, if not a corpse. My sister, Veronica’s, wedding drew near, a happy event that meant we would be shut of her forever, and I’d rarely have to spy her cruel, smiling face again. I wanted to avenge Tomasso’s death upon her, but her blood, if not her sex, protected her from my rage.
Fortunate for her.
As for Romeo, he was hopelessly entangled in family politics. I doubted he even bothered to learn whom it was they intended for him to wed. It would hardly matter what he thought about it, and so he plunged himself headlong into his empty worship of Rosaline, a girl he’d never so much as met, an impossible match that was a safe indulgence of his lovesick notions.
We were each gone mad, in our ways.
I continued to steal, relentlessly. I came near to getting caught several nights, as the prince’s men had become furious at my success and doubled their patrols; my likely targets also made it more difficult for me, and on two occasions I had been trapped in the house, hiding, until the stir had died and I’d been able to creep away with my ill-gotten goods. And a curious lot of things they were: the treasured riding whip from Lord Ordelaffi, with which he’d often lashed his son; the hoarded savings of two of the Ordelaffi men who’d pulled on the rope; the jeweled ring of the bishop himself, who had written a sermon praising the moral outrage of the people of Verona over the sinful perversions of sodomites, adulterers, and witches.
He’d delivered it at Mercutio’s wedding. A very pointed commentary indeed.
In my own small way, I continued to exact vengeance, though I knew the sin really flowered from the root of my own house.
I knew I should confess all these things, but I did not trust the slick, bland-faced priest who often occupied the booth in the cathedral; I knew he was an ambitious man, political, and it would be well within his interests to drop a word to the bishop I’d relieved of his precious ring. Better to let my sins fester in my heart and damn me in heaven’s eyes, rather than Verona’s.
My real confession came at an odd time, and in an odd way.
It was inevitable that my obsession would see me caught, sooner or later; I was a great thief, but not invisible, nor invincible. It was a very late Thursday eve when I burgled a fat purse of jewels from the shop of a Capulet goldsmith who beat his apprentices, and who’d blinded one with hot metals; all well and good, but I’d been surprised by a vicious dog, and as I limped away with ill
-got goods weighing me down, I also left a bright red trail of blood from my badly bitten leg. It was not a graceful escape, nor an effective one, as the goldsmith roused his household and guards and sent them beating after me, with the vicious dog howling on its leash.
I had just enough time to make it to the small, shopworn chapel, where Friar Lawrence dozed near the altar in an untidy heap. He woke with a snort, glared at me, and then saw the blood trail I’d tracked inside. “What’s this?” he said, and started to his feet to waddle his way to me. “You cannot be here!”
“Trouble,” I said in a gasp. I’d doffed the mask—no point in straining our friendship—and I showed him the bloody gouge in my calf beneath the ripped hose. “They’re after me, Friar.”
“For what crime?”
“Being tasty to their pet?” I said, but my heart was not in the humor. “Later, later—for now, I stand well set to be hanged if you do nothing. I beg you for sanctuary.”
He frowned. “You must touch the altar for that.”
