by Rachel Caine
“We do love you well, Mercutio, and you know that I would gladly die by your side, but this—this is black folly. Come away; come and have a quiet cup of wine in a congenial place. Will you?”
Romeo spoke so gently, so earnestly, that perhaps even Mercutio’s much-scarred heart was moved a bit. . . . He reached out and clapped a hand on Romeo’s shoulder. “Well, then,” Mercutio said. “Well, then, perhaps the loss of a florin is not so great a thing. But you, dear one, will buy the drinks.”
“One,” Romeo immediately replied. “One drink. And then safe conduct home.”
Whatever madness had taken hold of Mercutio seemed to pass, then; we wiped away what blood and stains we could, and found a quiet shaded corner. One drink turned to three before it was done, and Mercutio seemed in fine enough spirit—fine enough that when interlopers approached within a few feet of us on the other side of the screen, he bade us hush and listen. It was no mere underling, lurking near; it was the sour Capulet himself, walking attended by a dim-witted servant and Count Paris, a cousin of Mercutio’s and a relative of the prince himself. An earnest man, older than us, and in need of a wife, it would seem; rumor ran that he sought Capulet’s daughter’s hand in marriage. I heard only random moments of their conclave; Count Paris claimed that younger maids than Juliet had made happy mothers—a claim her father disputed, sagely, with the observation that those wed and bedded too soon were often marred by it. Eventually, they closed their business—apparently something of marriage, to do with the young Juliet—and moved on.
It was nothing to me, until Romeo said, “We need diversion, cousin.”
I looked at him, frowning, but not yet alarmed. We’d all had, perhaps, too much wine on too hot a day. Romeo lunged to his feet and hurried off, with Mercutio only a step behind. When I joined them, I saw Capulet and Count Paris walking off together, well satisfied, and the dim-witted servant was left struggling with a paper he had been given. Before I could stop him, Romeo fell into step with the fellow, looking over his shoulder at the paper he was scrying.
“God-den, good fellow,” Romeo said, and clasped his hands behind his back, the very picture of a polite young gentleman of Verona.
“God gi’ god-den,” the servant said, and thrust the paper out. “I pray, sir, can you read?”
“Ay, my own fortune is my misery,” Romeo said, and after some banter, he took the paper and read it. I hurried to join them, as he began to recite names . . . Count Anselme, the widow of Vitravio, Signor Placentio, Mercutio. Rosaline was on the list, though I well knew she was gone; so was Tybalt, and I assumed, though I had not caught their mention, that the Capulet household entire would be included.
“A fair assembly,” Romeo noted. “Whither should they come?”
“Up,” the servant said.
Romeo sent me an amused look and put a conspiratorial arm around the man’s neck. “Whither, again?”
“To supper,” the servant said. “To our house.”
“To whose house?”
“To my master’s.”
The man was duller than a bucket of pitch. Romeo almost laughed, but managed to contain it. “Indeed,” he said, “I should have asked you before.”
“My master is the great rich Capulet,” the servant said proudly, and puffed out his chest, as if absorbing the gold and status merely by attachment. “If you be not of the house of Montague, I pray, come and crush a cup of wine. Rest you merry!”
He darted on, intent on delivering his message, though I doubted he would remember half the names Romeo had recited to him.
Romeo stared after him thoughtfully, and I felt the first inkling of disquiet. “What, coz?” I asked him.
“Rosaline,” he said softly.
“She’s gone,” I said. “Gone to safety, far away. She’ll not be there.”
“And if she is?”
I threw an arm around his shoulders and walked him back toward where Mercutio waited. My thoughts whirled furiously, shouting in the dark cavern of my skull, but above all was the clear, bitter voice of my grandmother, reminding me astringently of my duty, and the consequences.
“I will go,” he declared. “It is a masked feast, I heard it said. I will go in secret. If she is there . . .”
“Coz, I said she would not be.”
“You could be wrong,” he said, and there was no levity in it now, only a calm certainty. “I will go, Benvolio. If she has been spirited off to the convent, then my love for her must fade, as God wills. But I will go, to see for myself that she is gone.”
“You risk your life for nothing.”
“No,” he said. “I risk it for an angel come to earth. And so would you, if you were not made of ice.”
He had no idea how much I burned within at that, hot as the devil’s breath; he had no right to take this risk. No right to love her so diligently.
No right to put me so far at risk, because I could not let him go alone, unguarded, into that pit of vipers.
Some of the anger came out in my voice as I said, “Then let us go to this masked feast. All the beauties of Verona will be assembled there. Look upon their faces, and you’ll think your swan a crow.”
I said this, but I did not mean it; there was no woman in Verona, however fair, who held the power of Rosaline, I thought—though Romeo had an appetite for beauty, and he’d have plenty to dine on at this Capulet party.
Mercutio, watching us with bright, malicious eyes, finished off his wine and dashed the cup onto the cobbles, where it shattered. When the merchant shouted, he threw a coin to him without looking. “What mischief are you proposing?” he asked, and flung his arms over our necks, more to sustain himself than to embrace us. “What amusements? And mention not any woman’s name, or I shall choke it from your wretched throat.”
“A fine amusement,” Romeo said. “But you must promise to be on your best behavior, Mercutio. If you hold your temper, it will be a great adventure, and a trick for the ages.”
I had never meant him to involve Mercutio in this folly. I was sickly aware that in doing so, he had raised the stakes of this game from merely dangerous to catastrophic.
“A trick?” Mercutio echoed, and gave us a slow, delighted grin. “You have only to lead me to it.”
• • •
Romeo and Mercutio had the bit between their teeth, and whatever misgivings I had mattered not. I gave up trying to persuade them, and instead hoped only to help them survive this adventure. Misadventure, more like.
That night, cleaned and dressed in nondescript finery, we stole out of the Montague palace without any colors to mark us, and took only a few servants, in case we had to take to our heels quickly. My mask was of an owl; Romeo’s was a cat, likely in mockery of Tybalt. As for Mercutio, he wore a fanciful gold thing, bright as the rising sun, but then he was—of all of us—the only one who had an excuse to be at the feast. “Being a distant cousin to the prince has its privileges,” he told us, as he tied on the gaudy thing. “Even the Capulets fear to slight my family, though they disapprove of my . . . friendships.” I wondered whether he referred to the one with us, or the one his family had tried so hard to erase. Poor Tomasso—he had vanished entirely from the memory of Verona, except in whispers. No one dared remember him.
No one except Mercutio, of course, though if that was who he was thinking of at that moment, I knew not. He seemed back to his usual merry self, full of mischief and sauce.
We were but moments from escaping cleanly when there was an imperative rap on my chamber door, and we all went still and quiet. Ignore it, Mercutio mouthed, but I shook my head, removed my mask, and went to answer the summons.
It was not a summons, however; it was a visitation. The knock had not come from knuckles, however bony; it had been the hard wooden top of my grandmother’s cane, and the old witch herself stood there, layered in black and swaddled in shawls. I’d rarely seen her standing, and never, never had she darkened my door. She was not alone, of course; no fewer than four attendants shuffled around h
er in the narrow spaces, hovering anxiously lest she drop suddenly under the strain. They were under the delusion that she was a frail elderly woman, but what I saw in her face was volcanic fury, and no weakness at all.
She stamped her cane on the flaggings with such force the echo silenced all other sounds, and glared at me under thick gray brows. “Well?” she demanded. “Do you mean to keep me waiting inhospitably on the step, like a rude churl? Or must I have your manners beaten into you?”
I stepped back and gave her a profound bow, and my grandmother doddered over the threshold, each stab of her cane an emphatic pounding, like coffin nails being driven deep. Her retinue followed, all in the same dreary black, even the footman, who by rights should have been liveried in Montague colors. The old woman detested bright things as much as she detested everything else.
The footman shut the door behind her party and stood against it with the obvious intention of keeping all inside. I did not protest. I was curious—too curious, perhaps—at what had winkled my grandmother from her blazing hearth.
She glared at us each in turn. “Take off those foolish masks,” she snapped at Romeo and Mercutio. Even Mercutio moved quickly to obey, and stood eyes cast down, clearly wishing not to be the reason for her appearance
He was not. She turned that dragon’s gaze upon me, instead. “I warned you,” she said, and stabbed an age-crooked finger toward my chest. “I warned you there would be consequences for misbehavior. Someone’s tongue wagged, boy. The three of you, in a tavern only a little better than a midden! Blows exchanged, and men sore wounded! Did you think the prince would not hear of it and summon your uncle—and you, fool Mercutio, your father!—to his presence? You’ve shamed us, and raised Capulet in his estimation, and that cannot be allowed.” Her watery eyes narrowed, and her lips tightened with it. “Montague must be seen to be of greater wit than mere tavern brawlers. If you would risk your skins on foolish games, then play one that favors us in the end! I hear you’ve taken it into your empty heads to sneak into the bosom of House Capulet. Then do so. Find a way to embarrass them in their own home. Perhaps seduce that less-favored girl cousin—”
“Rosaline?” Romeo asked, coming to alert like a greyhound spotting a rabbit to chase. “Did she not enter a convent?”
“Gossip says she never reached it,” Grandmother said, and a thin smile cut her lips. “Her brother Tybalt rode out to bring her back, since she ran to a convent of her own choosing rather than the one her family chose. She’s been kept close, but whispers say the Capulets wish to present happy families at their feast tonight, so she will be on display, and likely dancing. You wished to ruin the girl once, Romeo. This is the perfect time.”
“Ruin her?” He was taken aback, the innocent soul. “I never—”
“Men ruin women,” she interrupted him, “and that is all they do, never mind all the amatory nonsense. All you need do is lead her off alone. Surely that is no great challenge for your too-tender conscience. Now, go and goad the Capulets until they rise to the attack, and mark me well: If one of you is cut for it, I will not weep. A few scars are what’s needed to make you men instead of feckless boys!”
I could not stop myself. I said, “And if we are killed?”
“Then you are a martyr for your family’s honor, and there’s no better end for you,” she snapped back, and emphasized it with a crack of her cane on stone. “Go and humiliate the Capulets without spilling their blood in their home. I cannot count on your uncle to salvage our honor this night if you fail.”
She turned, and then, without any warning, lashed out with her cane and caught Mercutio on the thigh, hard enough to leave a bruise. His jaw tightened, but he said nothing. Grandmother glared at him with real menace. “And you,” she said, in a low and harsh voice. “You, pot stirrer, unnatural creature, redeem your reputation with either a sword or an heir of your blood, and do it quickly. Lead any of mine to your perversions and I’ll see you dead where your weak-willed father won’t. Keep your sword sheathed.”
Mercutio said nothing, but there was something glowing in his eyes that almost matched La Signora’s bile. He bowed his head, but neither she nor we were under any delusion that it was surrender. His gaze followed her as she hobbled her way to the door, and out, followed by her attendants.
Then he donned his mask again, and the malice was almost hidden behind it.
“If I heard rightly, your matriarch has given us orders to embarrass House Capulet,” he said. “And I intend to obey. What of you, Benvolio? Romeo?”
Romeo nodded, but the light in his eyes came not from mischief but hope. The only word he could hear from all that grandmother said was a name. Rosaline. I had a foolish boy and a man ridden by a demon as companions, and sad to say, Rosaline’s mention had affected me as well. Something within me had quickened, something I thought I had successfully rooted out.
Hope.
This was gravely unwise. I could feel it now, a deep and uneasy tide within me that warned me we were embarking on a road that would lead only one way: down, into the dark. Grandmother would not weep at our scars, nor our deaths; Mercutio was bent on proving himself as violent a man as any in Verona. Romeo, my kind cousin, would be as easily led into trouble as he was into love.
And I, the responsible one, I knew I ought to put a stop to it, take whatever fury came roaring from the dragon’s mouth . . . but instead, a traitorous whisper in my mind said Rosaline’s name once more, and I knew that whatever doom was to come, I would go, and willingly.
• • •
We did not steal off in darkness, as was my usual habit; instead, we went to the Capulets’ feast in full view, masked and escorted, with torches lighting our way and warning off all footpads who might have tried us. Three young noblemen, eager for the feast and dancing. As fast as Romeo and Mercutio strode, I still led them. My heart pounded, but not from exertion; I had not thought to ever set eyes on Rosaline again, and if I had not I would have been well content that she was safe. If she was God’s bride, I could not be jealous of that, but now she was here, alive and real, and Romeo was extolling her beauty to a bored and restless Mercutio.
“I tell you, she has the fairest skin of any I’ve seen,” Romeo said, a little breathless from the pace I’d set as we walked the Via Mazzini. We saw other torches burning, other parties making their way to the Capulets’ stronghold; from the look of things, our arrival would be little noted. Some of those I spied, in the colors of the Scala, were ten strong or more, bringing along wives, daughters, sons, and distant cousins to share in the feast—perhaps even my possibly affianced, Giuliana. Capulet would spend coin on this, to be sure, but so he should to impress Paris with his daughter’s social prominence. A count of Paris’s status needed a wife he could present proudly.
“I will seek out Rosaline,” Romeo said eagerly, as we came closer to the street, and all the lurid lines of torches began to converge. “I know she will come away with me. All you need do is lure Tybalt, and ensure her ladies are likewise occupied—perhaps in dancing—”
Mercutio ruffled his hair. “So eager to deflower the girl?” he said, and jumped lithely away as Romeo rounded on him. “’Tis the job your grandmother set you, or missed you her message? Humiliate Capulet by showing that their precious convent-bound virgin is a trull. Unless you’d rather I do it for you.”
Romeo shoved him away. I could not see his expression behind his mask, but I imagined his scowl resembled the one that twisted my own face. “Enough,” I said sharply. “I am the eldest Montague, and there’s no reason for Romeo to risk his life for this. If Tybalt wants to wet his blade, better I be the pincushion than Montague’s heir.”
“Don’t,” Romeo said, and grabbed my elbow. “Ben, don’t. Grandmother may win her wars this way, but we should not.”
“Women’s wars are the bloodiest of all,” Mercutio said, and laughed bitterly. “A Capulet woman betrayed Tomasso to hang, and well I know it. I care not for their honor, nor for their safety. Your grandmother is
right. To the wall with the Capulet wench, and let her maiden’s blood be the price they pay for what she’s done.”
I shook free of Romeo and faced Mercutio instead. “What demon infected you?” I said. “Suffering for suffering, is that to be our lives? Blood for blood? Blow for blow?”
“Measure for measure,” Mercutio said. “It’s ever been our lives, brother Ben, and if you did not always know it, then you are a bigger fool than I ever knew, and it’s well your cousin is heir and not you. Weak English stock has watered your good Veronese blood.”
He turned his back on me, and I made a convulsive move for my sword, but reason stopped me—reason, and the knowledge that Mercutio would say anything, anything at all, to goad those near him. Even his friends.
“It is a demon riding you,” I said, “and the demon’s name is grief. But push me again and I will push back, Mercutio. Mark me.”
He held up a languid hand. “I care nothing for it,” he said. “Come if you are coming. If you do not, I’ll seek out this Rosaline myself and prove her false to her faith and family before the bells next ring.”
What could we do, then? Romeo and I each had our reasons for moving with him to the officious Capulet servant at the door ticking names from his invitation sheet. Mercutio gave his own, and waved at the two of us and named us country cousins. The servant frowned, but passed us in; Mercutio was a distant cousin of the Prince as well as Count Paris, after all, and no one wanted to be accused of slighting the potential bridegroom’s relatives.
Within the low-ceilinged hall, torches blazed, throwing a cheerful glow over groaning tables of food and drink pushed far against the walls. I’d not ventured into this space before, during my explorations of the enemy’s household, and my eye was caught by the grand silk Capulet banner fluttering on the wall, embroidered with the family’s crest and motto: We repay all. It was a clever enough turn of phrase, and it meant they paid debts and swore vengeance with equal vigor.
