“Ah, yes, young Juliet.” Count Paris was a handsome man, and, like all who’d survived the cutthroat world of Veronese nobility, no fool at all. He gave me a carefully measured smile. “A pity we could not arrange such a match with Montague, but alas, your fair sister’s hand was already promised.”
Your good fortune, I wanted to say, but I smiled back, with equal false sincerity. “I wish both bride and groom the happiest of lives,” I said. “Good sir, have you seen my cousin Romeo about today?”
“I have,” he said. “He seemed in a great hurry. I wish you luck in catching him. Fair day, Benvolio.”
“And to you.”
We bowed again, I much deeper than he, and his parade swept by us. Behind me, Balthasar let out a gusty sigh. “He’ll soon regret having Tybalt as a relation,” my man said.
“Anyone would,” I agreed. “Now be off with you, to find this witch woman.” I sent him a nod as a dismissal.
He did not go. “I shall not leave you alone and unattended,” he said. “’Twould not be right, sir.”
“Don’t be foolish. I can well care for myself.”
“All the same, it’s my head in your grandmother’s winepress if you tumble onto the point of a Capulet sword and I’m not dead before you to prove my loyalty. No, master, I’ll not leave your side unless you are with better company.”
He was maddeningly stubborn, but he was also right. It was dangerous to be left alone, wearing bold Montague livery, in a crowd that could, at any moment, erupt with partisan violence. I looked around for succor, and spotted a familiar face.
“Oh, no, sir,” Balthasar said in a low, disapproving tone. Because the familiar face was that of Mercutio, lounging like a lazy cat in the sun on the central fountain’s low ledge. He nursed an empty cup, and looked vaguely into the crowd with dull disinterest . . . until he spotted me.
“Well met, Benvolio!” he called as he lurched to his feet, and the sad relief in him was too much to deny. He was brokenly lonely, and I had not the heart to turn him away. “How fare you this fine day?”
Balthasar was giving me a disapproving shake of his head, and I grabbed him close to whisper, “As long as he clings to me, he cannot interfere with you and your mission. Go. Now.”
“Master—”
I shoved him hard away, and he stumbled off into a run, still frowning with unsettled worry.
My servant had ever had better sense than me, or any of my kinsmen.
I turned to Mercutio, and flung an arm around his shoulders in friendship. “I do well enough, though I lack for pleasant company,” I said. “I seek Romeo; have you seen him?”
“What, lost again? I thought he was never to be separated from your skirts, nursemaid!” He clapped an arm around my neck and squeezed, but not hard enough that I needed a defense. “I’ve not seen the villain, but shall we winkle him out of his hiding place? Surely you don’t think him still licking the cobbles behind that Capulet wench.”
I thought for a moment that he knew of my cousin’s new, mad obsession, but he was not, in fact, thinking of Juliet; I knew that from the bitter, angry expression that twisted his face from angel to devil. He was thinking of innocent Rosaline, into whose cipher he had poured all his grief, loathing, and hatred. I feared for her again, thinking of what he would do—or might have already done.
If he had resorted to poisons, I could not save an enemy’s daughter at the cost of my broken, wronged friend, and it might come to such a choice. But neither could I stomach sheltering Mercutio if he murdered the innocent, Capulet or no.
Mercutio was well drunken, even by the early hour; from the smell and state of his clothes, he’d not bothered to visit home, nor change his linen. His smell had a metallic edge of sweat and anger, sweetened with too much wine. But there was no peaceful looseness to his muscles, as there should have been; beneath my arm, his shoulders were bunched hard as a hangman’s rope. When a passing servant in Capulet livery gave us a wide berth, he lunged at him, clashing his teeth, and laughed as the youth blanched and scurried away.
“You’d best be off home, Mercutio,” I told him. “A bath would serve you.”
“Many things would serve me,” he said. “But none so well as a Capulet on the point of my blade.”
“Too hot for that, and the mood hotter still,” I told him. “If you will not go home, then will you not come with me? Balthasar is on errands, but I’ll order a bath for you, and a bed. You can sleep in peace under our roof.”
“Can I?” he asked, and drew in a sudden, wrenching breath. “I would much desire the peace of a dreamless rest, but, Ben, I will confess to you as I cannot to those hard-mouthed priests: I cannot sleep, in peace or out of it. I shut my eyes and Tomasso’s face is before me, or worse . . . he is not dead, and I cannot release him to his rightful rest.” He ran a hand over his face, wiping sweat, and I noted how it trembled. “He haunts me. He lies beside me, and will not speak; we are parted but not parted enough. How then may I sleep, unless wine weighs me down into the dark?”
He sounded as broken as I knew he was, and it made me cringe; weakness in our world drew wolves. “Come, then,” I said, and clapped him firmly on the back to brace him. “A bath, and a safe and solitary bed in a place where your ghosts cannot find you.”
“Your grandmother will take it ill.”
“My grandmother may take it as she likes.” Brave words, but he was right: She would resent that I sheltered Mercutio under her roof. Even decently married, and with a rumored babe on the way, he would never be beyond gossip. “It’s too bright a day for trouble.”
We might have escaped that trouble, save that in that last moment, Mercutio spied Romeo.
My cousin rounded the corner from the cathedral, walking with brisk, purposeful steps. I spotted him in the same instant, and noted the vivid, almost religious ecstasy of his smile; he was bestowing it upon the low and high alike, and making no effort to cast a careful eye upon his surroundings. My cousin, the strutting young peacock, was kitted in his finest, and he glowed and glimmered in the warm light like some hero of legend.
It was not a day to be making himself so obvious a target. He’d not even bothered with a single retainer to follow behind and keep the knives from his back. If my grandmother was right, Capulets would be sharpening their blades for just such an opportunity.
Mercutio saw none of that. He saw only a chance for rough play, and before I could stay him he lurched forward, shouting too loudly, “Signor Romeo, bonjour! That’s a French salutation to match the French cut of your breeches, sir, and where hid you last night?”
Romeo’s ecstatic smile faded. He did most ardently want to avoid the scene, but could not, so he pasted on false cheer and came toward Mercutio, with me following behind like a reluctant old uncle. “Good morning to you both. What do you mean, hid?”
“You gave us the slip, sir, the slip,” Mercutio said, and waggled his finger. “Your cousin’s been eaten with worry.”
“Pardon, good Mercutio.” Romeo bowed. “My business was great, and in such a case as mine, a man may strain courtesy.”
Mercutio laughed and likened courtesy to curtsies, and lifted invisible skirts to deliver a mincing little illustration of it. “I am the very pink of courtesy,” he said, and got in my cousin’s way as he tried to bow his way onward.
“Pink for flowers?” Romeo’s smile fixed, and was growing cold. This was a turn I did not much like; it was a taunt, a very pointed one. That earned us a murmur of disapproval and a scorching look from a passing old dowager and her entourage.
It also earned Romeo Mercutio’s shove. “Just so!”
“My pump is well flowered,” Romeo said. It was the sort of jest a gentleman might make only among close company, not on the streets in full hearing of passersby. It was also cruel, harkening as it did to Mercutio’s enforced marriage—a subject with which our friend was as much anguished as angry.
I stepped forward, but I might have as easily stepped between two men bent on duel. They ignored my intervention.
Mercutio laughed, and snapped teeth. “I will bite you by the ear for that.” He threw a heavy arm around Romeo’s neck, snake-quick, and locked him in embrace. “Come, is not this better than groaning for love? Now you are sociable; now you are Romeo. This driveling love of yours is like an idiot that runs up and down, the better to hide his toy in a hole.”
That earned us more angry glares, for it was too close to vulgarity for the public, and Romeo caught the hint quickly. “Stop—stop there.”
Mercutio tried to go on, and I was sure he would plunge us into real trouble, but then a fat nurse separated from the oncoming crowd, attended by a servant, and headed toward us with purpose. I nearly remembered her swollen, heat-pinked face; she huffed as she approached, and whisked the air vigorously with her fan. What now? I wondered, because I saw Romeo freeze in place like a schoolboy caught with a stolen apple. He writhed free of Mercutio’s headlock and shoved us both away.
“Go home,” Romeo said to me. “I’ll follow anon.”
I placed her, then, this overstuffed woman; she was Capulet, the nurse who sometimes hovered near young Juliet when the girl was allowed the freedom of the air. I had seen her quaffing large wine cups at the feast. “Coz . . .” I took Romeo by the arm, and he shook me off. The servant walking behind the nurse—a Capulet, though without the identifying colors—half drew his dagger as he looked at me, and I released my hold. “Come with us.”
“I said I will follow,” he said, and turned back to the nurse.
Perhaps, if I’d been alone, I’d have dared force the issue, but Mercutio was already offering more insult, in form of an offensive good-bye to the fat old nurse, and I could see her face purpling with outrage. Two of the city guard turned toward us and headed in our direction, and all I could do was grip Mercutio’s elbow to draw him away, and leave Romeo to his intrigues.
