Prince of Shadows: A Novel of Romeo and Juliet (38 page)

“You’d best be telling the truth, boy!” The soldier cuffed him, shoved him backward, and ran to join his fellows in chase of a phantom.

I made quick use of the ladder—since it was there—and ran toward the boy, who was shaking off the blow and rubbing his chin. Moonlight fell on his face as his ill-fitting hat slipped off and unleashed a tangle of thick, dark hair. . . .

And that was no boy at all.

Rosaline.

I did not spare a moment for thought, or for shock; I grasped her arm and propelled her at a run in the opposite direction from where the soldiers had gone. Beneath the cloth, her arm had a different feel from that of a young man—less of muscle, yet somehow still strong. Ahead was the Church of Saint Maria Antica, and I tugged her that direction. My heart was racing with more than the excitement of the chase, and I’d forgotten my bruises and hurts, though they still ached, unremarked.

I pulled her into the shadows and brushed off the ridiculous hat, which drifted down toward the cobbles. Against the rows of white tufa and reddish brick, she seemed taller now, and oddly at home in mannish dress, though her hair tumbled wild over her shoulders. She was breathing quickly, and her eyes caught and held the shimmer of the moon. So did her parted lips.

I was holding her too tight at the shoulders, I thought, and loosened my grip to something gentler. “What are you doing?” My voice came out low and rough, and I thought the watch would hear the violent pounding of my heart, even as far afield as they’d wandered. “Don’t you know what you risk, stealing out so dressed?”

She plucked at the too-large linen shirt. “I took them from the laundry,” she said. “Faith, these hose feel very strange. . . .”

What was strange, and dizzying, was seeing a woman’s shape so plainly and audaciously displayed, even in the shadows. I struggled to keep my eyes fixed on her face. “How come you here?”

“I followed you,” she said, with calm assurance. “Well, to be more fair, I followed your captors when they dragged you from the priest’s house. I thought you might go there.”

“You thought— How? Why?”

She smiled a little, but it seemed grim. “Women are buried in their houses, but we talk; there’s little else to do. I asked my maids to tell me gossip of the Ordelaffi, and the fount flowed now that Tybalt is gone and they no longer fear him so. . . . I learned Mercutio’s father had already disposed of his son’s possessions, and that some had been sent to the monsignor for the Church. I thought Mercutio might have left some clue as to the curse within some writings.”

“And you thought what? That you would try your hand at thieving it?”

“Do you think I would be a bad thief?”

“I think you would be a novice,” I said, “and novices are caught and hanged every day. If they’d found you to be a girl, it would have gone far worse for you. Women may be buried in their homes, but there is a reason for it: to keep you safe—”

“Safe?” Rosaline raised her chin, and her lips set themselves in a firm, straight line, as did her brows. “Safe? You know nothing about us, Benvolio Montague. We live our lives in terror, not in safety—terror of our fathers, who may beat or kill us with any reason or none at all. . . . Terror of the men we will wed, having scarce set eyes upon them before that moment and yet expected to submit to all they ask . . . terror of other women whispering rumors that destroy us, with no defenses possible. You have swords to defend your honor. We have
nothing.
Safety?” She pushed me back, and I stumbled on a loose brick. “Give
me
a sword, and I will make my own safety.”

“You don’t know how to use it,” I said, very reasonably, I thought. But she only glared.

“And if I were taught? Trained? How then?”

“Swords are expensive—”

“Give me a trade and I will earn my own!”

This night had taken on an unreal cast, one that made me think I was dreaming, and the dream had gone very, very wrong.

I heard distant voices ringing out, and stepped forward again to drive her deeper to the shadows, then snatched up her discarded hat and slapped it down on her head. “Put up your hair!” I whispered, and she did, twisting it together with quick economy and securing it thus. I stripped off my cloak—even plain as it was, it would be something the watch looked for—and left it discarded on the ground.

Then I drew her behind the church, into a darkened doorway that was little used, and kept barred from within. “There was nothing at the priest’s house we needed.”

“You’re bleeding,” she said, and her hand touched my cheek. “They beat you.”

“A painful disguise, but better than to be recognized.” I did not mean to do it—truly I did not—but somehow my hand touched hers, closed around it, and I lifted her fingers to my lips.

I felt her shiver all the way through.

“I will see you home,” I said. “Surely they will remark on your absence soon.”

“They will not. All are in mourning for Juliet. . . .” She paused, watching me, and frowned again. “But Juliet is not dead, is she? I wondered. I saw Friar Lawrence, and he only half listened to my confession today; he is behind this plan, is he not? To sneak Juliet away?”

“If all works,” I said. “But if there is a curse, and I think there is, then surely this too is doomed to fail. I know not how it can, but perhaps the witch gave the wrong potion, or the friar gave her too much, or she wakes too soon—a thousand things, and none of them we can prevent. But you must go home, Rosaline. With Juliet dead, to their thinking, you are their bargaining chip. They will not waste you on God, but spend you on Paris.” I touched her chin and raised it, very gently. “You were calling for your own sword a moment ago. Why show fear now?”

“Because I have no sword, nor any weapon at all,” she said, and took in a slow, deep breath that moved parts of her that should have been bound tighter. I was so distracted with this notice that I almost failed to hear the rest, as her voice dropped still lower. “And because I think I do not love Paris, but . . . another, and if Mercutio’s curse has worked so deeply upon our two cousins, if they die, surely it falls upon me next. And upon you.”

I had not thought so far ahead, and I felt an icy shock at her words, as if she had plunged me into a fountain in winter . . . because she was right. Mercutio had cursed our
houses
, and not one person he held guilty. If the curse indeed had struck Romeo and Juliet, and forced them into this ill-considered love, then what would happen next?

Did it account for how I could not forget her, even if I applied myself . . . not her face, nor her voice, nor the way she had looked lit by candles the first night I saw her? That image would not leave me, and it—being honest—was the last thing I saw each night before sleep carried me off, and the first I thought of upon waking. Was it a curse?
If it is a curse, I die cursed, and happy,
I thought, and almost said so. Only the biting of my tongue kept me from it.

“Do nothing to draw attention,” I told her. “Keep your cloak close about you, and your head down. If anyone calls to us, let me speak; you may pretend to be worse for your cups, if you like, but say nothing
.
Your voice gives you plain away.”

“I’ve heard youths with voices higher than mine!”

“Not with your height,” I said. “Quiet. And keep you close.”

It frightened me, walking with her down the dark streets toward the Capulet palazzo. . . . I had ever been with men abroad in the evening, and what few women ventured out were hardened veterans of the streets, well able to care for themselves. She was . . . different. And keenly my responsibility. “How got you out?” I asked.

She lifted one graceful hand, and I pushed it quickly back into the shadow of her cloak. Those hands, too, would give her away. “I waited until a group of tradesmen delivered supplies for the kitchen,” she said. “It was near dark, and the men were milling about readying for Juliet’s procession. No one paid me mind.”

“Getting back inside will be different,” I told her. “You cannot climb that wall, and even if you could, you could not climb to your balcony.”

“I can,” she said. “I am not weak!”

“Forgive me, but I do not think your needlework has well prepared you for—”

“I ride,” she shot back. “To the hunt. I have helped spear a boar. My father—”

Such pleasures were normally reserved for men, and I was surprised to hear that the Capulets had allowed a girl so much, but then I remembered that her father was dead, like mine. Unlike me, she had known hers; he must have allowed her beyond what convention and propriety said was right. And she was right: She was no weakling, not if she had faced down a maddened boar bent on escape.

“Well, boar killer,” I said, “then we will try.”

She was far stronger than I expected, for a housebound young woman; I wondered whether she still, in secret, practiced the exercises her father would have made her take to fortify her arms and legs for the hunt, and the weapons she would have to bear. She could not, as I could, climb a wall with a running start, but when I climbed first and gave her the first handholds, she pulled herself up more competently than I expected.

“Careful,” I told her in a whisper, from the top of the Capulets’ wall. “There is—”

“I know,” she huffed back, a bit waspishly, and I smiled down at her and offered her a hand for the rest of the way. Once she was crouched beside me in the single ivy-covered spot of safety—and her balance was only a little unsteady, from effort—I braced myself, took her hands, and lowered her slowly down into the dark corner of the garden.

“Can you make your balcony?” I whispered down, and she looked up, face cool and calm in the moonlight, and nodded. I tried to think of some good-bye, something other than what I ached to say, and I settled for the lukewarm, “Be most careful.” I think the tone of my voice betrayed me, even so.

“And you,” she said, and her own sounded soft, almost a caress. Then she smiled at me, a full and carefree urchin’s grin, and made her way to her safety.

For my part, I waited a bit longer, watched her climb to her balcony and slip inside, and then eased down from the wall and ran back, quickly and quietly, to the monsignor’s household. Why would they fear my return, when the city watch had carried me off to meet the prince’s justice at the end of a short dangle?

I let myself in as before, made my way down to the still-broken stronghold, and this time I took away as much gold as I could comfortably carry.

Then I piled it in the doorway of the Church of Santa Maria Antica, with a note scratched into the white stone beside it:
Alms for the poor.

Then I went home, to an uneasy few hours of sleep.

•   •   •

I
slept like the dead until I was roused by impatient servants; my uncle had business for me to do in town, and I received the instructions from him, only barely aware of what I had agreed to do. At least I was dressed and decently barbered, though the steadiest of hands could do nothing for my swelling nose and spectacular bruising, which occasioned much exclamation when I presented myself to my uncle’s chambers.

“Well, this won’t do,” my uncle said, frowning at my aching face. “I can scarce recognize the boy myself. Very well, rest, Benvolio, and lay some poultice on those bruises; you’ll do me no good bearing my messages out looking so ill used. A Montague is meant to win the fight, you know!”

“But I did,” I said, and bowed respectfully. He waited, head cocked, for more explanation, but I did not give it, and he finally let out a frustrated sigh.

I listened to the man’s hasty lecture about how I should comport myself, to reflect honor upon Montague. I suppose he had thought that since Romeo had received these lectures as heir, I had been spared too many of them, but I’d endured hours of sweating, hellish torment in my grandmother’s chambers listening to much of the same. I well knew what was expected of me, and in fact, the bruises upon my face were a testament to how much I valued the honor of House Montague, though he could not know it.

It had the fine benefit, though, of freeing me to my own devices for the day—and a portentous day it was. Friar Lawrence’s account had claimed that if all went well, Juliet Capulet would wake today in her tomb, and my cousin Romeo would be there to joyfully greet her and see her swept away. A triumph of love and devotion.

Perhaps I was too much of a cynic, but I could not see it happening so. Mercutio’s dire words in his journal haunted me, and so did the frantic desperation of the witch who’d crafted the curse on his behalf. If hate could move mountains, then the mountain was still moving, and we could only watch, helpless, as it collapsed upon us.

I had been all but ordered to keep within Montague’s walls, but I had never cared for being penned up, and by the time the evening Angelus bell had rung I was moving through the streets. It seemed Verona continued untouched by the upheavals of the past week—all the deaths, the tragedy, the drama had passed by the common folk, whose lives were full of their own troubles. I bought a roasted leg of pork to eat as I walked, and made for Friar Lawrence’s cell.

He arrived after the service had finished, out of breath but smiling for all that; he greeted me warmly, clucked over my wounds, and hummed a merry—though scandalous—tune as he ushered me within. “All’s well, all’s very well,” he told me. “Romeo will have received word in Mantua and hastened here, and even now he should have entered the tomb and gathered his love in his arms, to ensure her waking goes from rest to paradise itself.” He seemed so very pleased with himself, I thought. “And then they will be safely off together.”

“To what?” I asked him. “Two youths with no funds and no family?”

“Love will sustain them.”

“Hard coin would sustain them better,” I said. In my purse I had some of the monsignor’s gold, rescued from his vaults. It was not right to keep it for myself, but a donation to the poor was a just and good use for it. “You must have been plotting to meet them, Friar.”

“I will see them soon,” he said, and accepted the heavy gift with a smile. “Your cousin will be most grateful, young master.”