I hobbled up. “I swear,” I said, “your amorous trysts are safe with me.”
I heard her gasp again, but this time it sounded less fear than fury, and though she had her hood up and face turned down, she could not resist an angry glare in my direction.
And the candlelight showed me just a small glimpse of sweetly familiar lines and flashing dark eyes, and I knew who she was, just as from the same glimpse she marked my face, and her lips parted in shock.
Rosaline Capulet rose, threw back her hood, and hastened to my side. “You’re hurt!” she said. I could not take my gaze from her. The beating’s effects had long passed, and though there was a thin scar near her hairline where she’d been cut, she looked as lovely as ever. I’d never thought to see her again, nor to be so close if I did, and the smell of pressed roses and oranges washed through me like warm rain.
And then she touched me, gentle fingers on my arm, and in flinching I almost fell. “Your face,” I said stupidly. I couldn’t stop drinking in the sight, the miracle of it. I controlled myself with an effort of sheer will. “I am glad you’re well healed.”
“You are not!”
“I’m well enough,” I said. Her presence was too overwhelming, and the implications were beyond me. “Why are you here, at such an hour, without escort?”
She looked quickly past me, at Friar Lawrence, who firmly took hold of my shoulders and steered me toward the confessional. “Now, now, sir, you’ve spoiled my efforts to keep fire and fuel apart, by which I mean Montague and Capulet, but you must mind your own affairs. The lady’s are none of yours.”
“But—” Surely she was not here for an assignation with this fat old man. The thought burned holes in me. “She should have taken her vows by now!”
“I delayed,” she said from behind me. “I dissembled. I pretended illness. But now my mummery’s come to an end. I am to be sent to a convent, where my faults will be . . . corrected,” she said from behind me, and I resisted the friar’s grip and turned to look straight at her. She was straight and tall now, hands clasped low, and the candlelight caressed the curve of her face like a lover’s hand. “Next week. The friar has promised me that he will send me tonight to a friendlier order, where I may at least be granted leave to read and study. My brother’s wish is that my spirit be broken, but I will thwart him in this. If I must be God’s, I will be God’s on my own terms, and not Tybalt’s.”
“Tonight,” I said. It felt like a blow, though there was no reason for that. “You go tonight.”
“Aye, boy, she’s risked much to steal away for this chance, and you’ll not ruin it from familial spite!” Friar Lawrence pushed me into one side of the confessional and tried to slam the door, but I caught it on both palms and shoved back. Rosaline had not moved.
“He’s not forgiven you, has he?” I asked. “For letting me go?”
She did not answer, but then, she did not have to; I knew the truth well enough. I was the reason her brother threatened her with the loss of the one thing she feared—her study. He’d see her sent to an order that held to the belief that women should be dumb beasts, content to parrot the responses given them and mortify their sinful flesh . . . and it would kill her; I could see it in her eyes. All that was precious in her would die.
My fault again.
“There are rumors about that you betrayed Mercutio and his lover,” I said, and saw her flinch. “I know you did not. It was said to put him against your family, not out of any truth.”
She let out a slow breath and nodded. “I heard of the boy’s murder,” she said. “I would never have betrayed them, even had I known. I believe God loves all, sinners and saints, and judgment is His business, not mine. But I’m grieved to be another excuse for hatred between our houses.”
I did not know what else to say to her. I’ve thought of you was true, but ridiculously wrong. . . . I was a Montague, and unlike Romeo, I knew my path. I finally said, “I am glad you’re well, lady.”
Her sharp gaze took in the blood on my dark clothing, and the bite beneath the ripped fabric. “I am glad the dog was slow,” she said, and smiled a little. “Though that limp will betray you tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“Stage a fall down the steps of your house,” she said, “in the early morning, before witnesses. Be sure the injury is well wrapped before you do; you’d not want blood to betray you, but you can feign a wrenched ankle then and none can disprove it.”
It was good, practical advice, and I nodded to her. I no longer trusted my voice; it wanted to soften, to warm, to say things I could not allow. It came to me with a horrible sense of sorrow that she would know these things from all her sad experience of concealing and explaining away her own injuries, suffered at the hands of her brother.
I let the friar shut the door, and sank down on the confessional seat with a feverish feeling of . . . what? Loss? I did not want to examine the feeling so closely; it felt too big, like a storm caged in the bone of my chest. She’d been alarmed for me. Worried. She’d touched me so gently, and the shape of her fingers burned and tingled still.
And tonight, she was leaving to fade away into a convent, never to be seen again. She’d have her books, her study. I should be happy that she was safe from her family’s ambition, from her brother’s fury.
But I could not be happy.
I waited in the cold, lonely confessional with my ears pricked for any words from her, any sounds; even the whisper of her skirts against the floor tantalized my senses. The smell of roses and oranges lingered on me, though I could not say why it clung so closely; she’d scarcely touched me at all (though it burned still on my skin). I ought to have been ordering my thoughts around salvation, around repentance, but all I truly repented was that I would never see her again. I gently bounced my head upon the hard wood behind me, trying to disrupt the thought. The chair was uncomfortable, the space narrow and close, and as the imaginary, intoxicating smell rising from Rosaline’s skin faded, the reality of stale incense and sweat descended around me. I heard Friar Lawrence whispering to her, his voice low and urgent, and her own replies carried some hints of reluctance. I thought she might wish to say something to me, some sort of good-bye . . . but perhaps it was only fear of change, of trusting to her fate.
I put my hand flat against the door, a silent valediction, a good-bye, a wish . . . and I waited, in silence, as I heard the groan of the chapel’s outer door open.
I slowly lowered my hand to my lap. I suppose it would have been appropriate to spend the time in prayer, but all I could think was that God had just taken away my only light in a dark, comfortless future—however distant and dim it might have been, still, it had been hope.
And now it was gone. No, I had to be honest with myself: Now she was gone.
I heard a sudden sharp cry, and a flurry of footsteps. I heard Friar Lawrence make a frustrated, deep-throated growl, and then the door of the confessional flung open.
Framed in the light from behind, with her cloak spreading wide with her motion, she looked an angel—more an angel than I was ever like to see. She stared at me with wide eyes, and I thought she had no more idea what to say than I, in that moment. We did not need words, I think, though fantasies tumbled through my mind in blurring bursts of color—her hair unbound and heavy as silk in my hands, her lips soft against mine, her breath whispering secrets.
And then I knew, with the fatal misery of a doomed man, that I wanted her, a Capulet, in ways that I had never wanted a woman before—not a hasty, impersonal fumbling in the dark, not the duty of a cold husband with an unfamiliar wife . . . something else, for the sake of passion, and fire, and challenge.
“Go,” I said. “I pray you will be safe.” My voice came out low and gentle, and I had the gift of her smile, for just a moment.
“Go with God, Benvolio,” she said. “Be careful.”
And then Friar Lawrence stepped between us, shook a finger at me in stern remonstrance, and slammed the door on me.
I did not mind. I closed my eyes in the dark and heard her say my name, again and again: Benvolio.
I had never realized how little happiness I had in life until she had shown me distant flickers of what it might appear.
I clung to one foolishly optimistic thought. . . .
She had not said good-bye.
• • •
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said to Friar Lawrence. He cleared his throat and leaned forward on the other side of the screen. He smelled like garlic and wine, and he needed a bath, but probably found them unholy.
“I’ve told you already, I am not a priest; I may not grant you any forgiveness,” he said. “And by sitting here and pretending to holy orders, I have sins of my own to confess!”
“Be quiet and listen,” I said. “I expect no absolution. I want only a friendly ear.”
“Well, then, you may have it, and right gladly,” he said. “Is it true, then? Are you this legendary Prince of Shadows?”
“Who told you so?”
“The girl, though hardly in so many words. I think she was sad to leave, when she had been lighthearted enough before. . . . Did you take her virtue, boy?”
“What? No!”
“You creep in the windows of the innocents,” he said sternly. “By her own admission, you came a-calling at the Capulet palace in the dark of night. I remember a certain evening when you importuned me to rush to her defense when her brother was angry. I thought it might be a case of lost family honor.”
“Rosaline’s honor is not her family’s,” I said. “And I did not take it, in any case.”
“Well, then. Continue, if you wish to confess.”
“I confess that I steal from the arrogant and the venal,” I said. “I steal to punish them for their insolence and their cruel pride. And I have no shame in that.”
“A straightforward nobleman would simply take it out in challenge,” he said. “And I hear you are no novice at the blade, and have a hot temper when pushed. Why this cold, dark-of-night pursuit?”
