From his own love.
If there was anything, anything at all, that could be gleaned as silvery hope from the ashes of this disaster, it was that at least that Romeo would now be forced to give up his mad pursuit of Juliet. His life would be forfeit if he lingered inside the city beyond this hour, and Friar Lawrence had told me that though vows had been spoken, no marriage bed had been made. Even in the eyes of God, it was still no marriage at all.
Still, Mercutio’s cry upon being mortally struck haunted me as I joined my family for the uncomfortable journey back to our palazzo. A plague on both your houses!
Surely his dying warning was already coming true.
• • •
I took my leave of my aunt and uncle and went to my rooms, where Balthasar had already arrived; who had found and informed him of the day’s dark events, I did not know, but he had arranged for a tub of hot water, and took away my bloody clothes. Whether they were to be cleaned or burned, I did not care. I sank into the steaming bath with an almost pitiful sense of gratitude, and washed death’s leavings away.
I stayed in the tub, easing stiffened muscles, until Balthasar came back with a bath sheet to dry me. As he scrubbed me down with rough, efficient motions, I felt I was a toddling boy again, and a strange lassitude washed over me. I wanted to take to my bed and be coddled until the fever passed, but this fever was cold, not hot, and I feared it might not be banished so easily.
Inside me was a wild, howling emptiness where all my certainties had once lived. I had lost Mercutio, burning bright in both anger and love; I had as much as lost Romeo, just as hot-spurred but with a sweetness to his temper that Mercutio had never dreamed. My brothers in spirit, if not in blood, and both gone, blown away on an ill wind.
I had never felt more alone.
Balthasar wisely said nothing to me, only brought me warm wine and sat me in a chair near the window, where I might look down on the streets below. After a moment, I rose and closed the shutters. The cobbles outside were stained with a sunset Mercutio would never see, and it put me too much in mind of the blood I’d washed away in the tub. The sight of gray Verona’s stones reminded me of his pallid face and slackened lips.
I closed my eyes awhile, and when I opened them, my mother was there.
Balthasar must have brought her a chair, for she sat straight-backed and proper across from me, dressed in her habitual mourning black with glints of gold at her throat and cuffs. In the privacy of our house, she had taken off the wimple; her hair was pinned up in a complex series of braids and knots that must have taken her lady’s maid hours to achieve. As always, she seemed almost blank of expression, but I thought there might have been a flicker of concern, at least a passing one.
“Benvolio,” she said.
“Mother.” My tone did not invite discussion.
She ignored the dismissal. “I am sorry for Mercutio,” she said. “He was a loyal friend, if sometimes a loose one.” I waited. She had not come to see me to give me her regrets. After a moment’s silence, she came to it. “Your cousin Romeo is ruined in Verona. No one faults him; he was right to kill the Capulet villain for Mercutio’s death. But without him, Montague has no male heir to take hold of its fortunes. Your uncle must name you, Benvolio.”
“Me?” I said. It was fool’s work to be surprised, but yet I was. I had not thought of it, and now that I had, it disgusted me. I had never wanted such a role, and never at the cost of Romeo’s future and fortune. “My uncle does not favor me, Mother. He never has.” I did not say, Because I am a half-blood. The English in me was a matter of constant suspicion, however much I looked or acted the part of a true Veronese. I would always be seen as an alien, either here or in my mother’s home of London.
“Needs must he favor you now,” she said, and looked down to fuss with a fold of her skirts. “Have you seen your poor cousin since the brawl?”
“Not since he fled, as I urged him to do,” I said. “Should I seek him out?”
“Under no account should you be seen to involve yourself in his troubles. He has done Montague a good turn, there is no doubt of it, but be careful, my son, lest you share his fate.”
The phrasing, I realized, was deliberate; I should not be seen to involve myself; she meant I should be careful. It was a masterful piece of misdirection. My mother gave nothing away in either her posture or her voice, but there was a slight tightening around her eyes that told me she was worried—worried to be sending me this message, which doubtless had not come from her. She was only the helpless messenger.
I sensed my grandmother’s palsied, iron-strong grip was behind it.
I nodded to show I understood, and my mother rose to go. She took a step, then stopped, and without turning said, “Do you grieve, my son?”
“Does it matter?” I asked.
She shook her head silently, and a little color burned in her cheeks. “I liked the boy,” she said. “He had a love of life, and a careless grace that was good for you, I think. I hope he taught you some of that joy.”
“You taught me to be cautious,” I told her. “And that lesson, at least, I’ve learned well.”
She turned and looked at me, and her light green eyes met my darker ones. She was still lovely, my mother, though her beauty had faded like a painting kept too long in the sun. I wondered what hopes she had once held for her life, and what dreams. She was far too practical to harbor anything so useless now. “Then be practical now. Guard yourself,” she said. “There’s a fey darkness in the air. I fear the bloodshed is not done, and as Montague’s heir, you will be at even more risk.”
“Is that my grandmother’s sentiment, or yours?”
That woke a flash of temper from her, after all. “I am still your mother, Benvolio. I am allowed some concern for my own child!”
“That doesn’t answer.”
She gave me a long, measured look that reminded me that buried very deep within that calm exterior lay the same fiery temper I carried burning like a coal within my breast. “I lost your father to this ages-old quarrel, and now your cousin has fallen prey to it, and your friend. If I do not fear for your safety, then I am naught but a fool.”
I smiled a little then. “I don’t think you a fool, Mother.”
“Only a cold schemer, like your grandmother?” Her own lips twitched in what might almost have been a smile then. “I come from warmer stock. Your sister has taken well after the Montague example, though.”
Veronica. Ah, yes, my dear, sweet sister, on whose plump shoulders so much of this must rest . . . She had, for sheer malice’s sake, betrayed Mercutio and Tomasso, and turned Mercutio’s rage against the Capulets. Her invisible hand had pushed the blade that had taken him, and Romeo’s that had killed Tybalt. Perhaps she was a worthy heir to the old crone, after all.
“Your uncle has asked her bridegroom to delay the wedding to next week, for the sake of propriety, but the old goat won’t have it,” my mother continued. “He says we have no sons to mourn, and the Capulets would not attend in any case, so why delay? He means to bed Veronica with unseemly haste, it seems.”
Perhaps, I thought, he had caught a whisper of my sister’s unmaidenly behavior . . . or he was simply randy and feared he might die unsatisfied. I might have pitied her the fate, if she were not such a coldhearted schemer and like to earn more from it than she paid.
But my mother’s point was not to bring my sympathy, but to warn, and I followed her there only a moment later. “At the wedding, we will be exposed,” I said. “All of Montague, defenseless in the cathedral for the ceremony. But surely even the Capulets would not attack us there, on sacred ground. . . .”
“Sacred ground did little to sway the assassins of the Medici,” she said, rightly; the story of the long-ago attack on Lorenzo the Magnificent was legend. They had failed to kill him in the cathedral, but they had bloodied the holy floors with his brother’s gore instead. Assassins struck in church all too often, where God seemed to take little interest in enforcing peace. “We must be tightly on our guard, my son. Always, but most especially, in the house of our Lord.”
It was a grim message, but I knew she was right; if I was to be made heir of Montague, I would be the first and most vital target for Capulet revenge. And revenge they would have for Tybalt’s death; that much was sure.
She nodded to me, and then left, proud and unbowed by all that fate had heaped upon her. There was something to admire in my mother, something more than her carefully lived life. She knew tragedy with an intimacy that was almost obscene, and yet it had left her unbroken.
I stood up and threw off the sheet. Balthasar caught it deftly and folded it, and said, “No house colors, then, sir?”
“No house colors,” I agreed. “It’s time to keep to the shadows.”
• • •
I scouted the night as the Prince of Shadows, all in gray, blending with the stones and shades.
I thought to find evidence of Romeo’s departure, but instead, and disquietingly, I heard tavern tales of my cousin being seen in the streets of Verona after his hour had passed—not riding hard for the city gates, either, nor buying supplies for his departure. He’d been seen moving with stealth in streets that I knew bordered the Capulet house—a way I knew well, as I’d watched him run it not so long ago, in darkness.
It came to me then, with a cold slap, that he was not intending to leave Verona at all. He meant to finish his marriage vows, tonight, with Juliet Capulet.
In her bed. Within Capulet’s walls.
That made cold sense; she was a prisoner there, rarely seen without the palazzo, and it had been a miracle she’d been allowed out to make her confession to Friar Lawrence today—even if it had been no confession at all, but a marriage. Romeo must go to her, if he wished to have his marriage rights.
But to do such a thing tonight, with his head in the noose—it defied all belief. Was this love, to betray one’s family, and to defy certain death? To risk the life of the one you adored? It seemed less love to me than a fever, a sickness burning away caution and good sense.
