Prince of Shadows: A Novel of Romeo and Juliet (40 page)

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.”