Prince of Shadows: A Novel of Romeo and Juliet (3 page)

My grandmother was waiting for some response, but I gave none. She finally flicked her fingers at me in weary contempt. “Go on, then. Be off with you.”

“Yes, Grandmother.” I knew better than to ignore an invitation to flee, and so I did, bowing deeply on my way out. I escaped through the thick, ancient doors, which boomed shut behind me as servants muscled them into place.

Freedom.

I leaned against the stone wall to suck in the clean, cool air. I imagined I could see steam curling up from my sweat-soaked clothes, as if I’d escaped like Shadrach from the fire.

“Hsst!”

I looked in the direction of the low sound, and saw a shadow lurking near the conjunction of the walls. A stray bit of sunlight from a high, barred window picked out skirts too rich for a servant’s, and a gleam of a jewel on a headpiece.

It seemed my fair younger sister wanted speech with me. The day wasn’t yet trying enough.

“Honest women don’t hide in shadows, Veronica.” I let my head drop back hard against the stone. The ache of the impact temporarily drove away my sweaty discomfort, but not my sister . . . almost fifteen, vaguely pretty, and as deadly as a snake.

“I’m hiding from
her
, of course. She wishes to instruct me on the nature of wifely duties.” Veronica grabbed me by the collar of my doublet and pulled me around the corner, into the shadows. She let go with a sound of disgust. “Ugh, are you poxed? You’re as sweaty as a laborer!”

“Shall I go tell her that you need no instruction on wifely duties? I imagine you could write a philosopher’s pamphlet on the subject already.”

“Pig!” She tried to slap me, but I caught her hand an inch from my face.

“I won’t pretend you are pure as the Virgin if you won’t pretend to care. If you are set on avoiding Grandmother, why come here at all?”

“Mother was concerned. She sent for you an hour ago, and bade me find you.”

“As did Grandmother. Which would you obey first?”

Ronnie snapped open a feather fan and batted it with great energy. “Did the old witch talk about me?”

“Why would she? She’s made you a fine match. You’re no longer of interest.”

“She’s marrying me off to an old man!”

“A wealthy old man,” I said. “In ill health. You’ll be a fortune-heavy widow before twenty, with a long future of dalliance before you.”

“Easy for you to say. You’ll not be the one he’ll paw in the marriage bed.” She eyed me over the fan with wicked intensity. “Or perhaps you’d prefer that, Ben. Given the company you keep—”

I pushed her against the wall in a flash, and she hardly had time for a startled squawk before I sealed her mouth with my palm. I put my lips very close to her ear and said, “Before you run your clever tongue about my friends, remember the boy they hanged last winter. Claiming someone a sodomite is no joking matter, Ronnie. Say it again, and I’ll swear to teach you better manners.”

She shoved me back with sudden, furious strength. There were spots of red high in her cheeks, and her eyes glittered, but she lowered her voice just the same. “It’s the same penalty for me if they hear you jesting about how
expert
I am in wifely duties! Or perhaps they’ll take pity on me and put me in a convent’s cell, where I shall never see the sun again. Or did you forget?”

“No,” I said. “Neither should you.”

“You are my brother! How is it that you don’t protect me with as much passion as your companions? They say women may fall when there’s no strength in men, you know! Perhaps my lack of moral quality is
your
fault.”

I walked away. Sister though she was, I didn’t much care for Veronica; girls were raised far differently, and separately, and what I knew of her I didn’t savor. The sooner she was married off, the better for us all.

I heard a rustle of fabric, and looked back to find Veronica hurrying to follow me. Her stiff skirts brushed the walls in a constant hiss. “Wait!”

“For what? I’ve nothing else to say to you.”

She raised her voice to a carrying, malicious volume. “That’s not what you whispered in my ear last night, brother. Why, the things you said . . .”

I swung around on her, and she quickly danced back out of reach, eyes bright and malicious. “Well,” she purred. “That begged your attention, didn’t it?”

“I’m warning you, Ronnie, sharpen your claws on another.” Despite the urge to strike her, I didn’t. Engaging with Veronica was a hazardous business when there were no witnesses to prove my case, especially should she make some outrageous accusation. I’d seen her make malicious sport of others, to their ruin; she’d never yet done it to family, but it took little to taint a man’s reputation, or a woman’s, and I would not take the risk.

She was terrifying, and she was not even fifteen.

I walked away, well aware she was still scurrying after me.

I slowed as I took a sharp right turn, and the hall vaulted upward into an open atrium, with the sun pouring down to spark sparse, precious flowers into bursts of color against the marble flagging. There was not so much risk here, as Romeo’s own father, the head of Montague and most often simply known by the family’s name, limped restlessly at the other end of the garden; from the look of him, his gout was bothering him yet again. I took a seat on a marble bench commemorating the death of some long-dead uncle or other.

Veronica drew to a stop, staring at me as her corseted breasts heaved for air. “You lack the grace of a gentleman,” she said. “Sprawling like a boy when a lady should be seated.”

“I would offer my place if a
lady
presented herself,” I said, but grudgingly moved over to make room for her huge skirts. She was wearing a dress too hot-tempered for the day, but my sister wished always to be noticed. Vanity before comfort. “You’ll be punished for avoiding La Signora’s summons. She enjoys her little lectures on morality, and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

Veronica made use of her feather fan again, as if her hasty pursuit had made her faint with effort. “I’ll give a female excuse,” she said. “She dotes on them. It makes a girl seem pleasingly fragile.”

I cut her a glance. “You’re as fragile as a barbarian’s broadsword.”

She gave me a knife-sharp smile from a flutter of peacock tails. “I’ve yet to see a barbarian close enough to examine his broadsword.”

I was hard-pressed not to smile. Veronica could be occasionally—
very
occasionally—amusing.

“Did Grandmother summon you about Romeo?”

I frowned at her this time. “And if you avoided her apartments, how could you possibly know that?”

“Oh, her ladies gossip,” Veronica said. “Romeo claims to be perishing for love of the fair Rosaline, you know.” She added to that an overdone pantomime of swooning, so realistic that I had to resist the urge to grab her to keep her from slipping from the bench. Since I
did
resist, Veronica was forced to pull herself back upright with an ungraceful flailing of arms and legs.

My annoying sister might be worth something, after all. “You know Rosaline, do you not?”

Veronica looked cross, and the fan beat faster. “She’s a cow, that one. Fancies herself above us. She dresses as badly as a servant and pretends it to be some sort of virtue. She spends her hours
reading
, of all things. Even nuns don’t
read
. It isn’t decent!”

“Is she beautiful?” I knew the answer, but it was a question a man might ask who stood in ignorance. And I knew it would bait more information from my vain sister.

“I suppose she’s regular enough of feature, but she doesn’t bother to flatter it at all. One can’t be beautiful if one works so hard at being plain. Reading gives her wrinkles, you know, around the eyes.” Veronica loved to rain scorn upon a girl’s hair, or eyes, or skin, or stature, or figure . . . but seemed to have little to say about Rosaline at all. In her own terms, it was something akin to praise.

“But you’d say she’s pretty enough to keep Romeo spinning.”

Veronica snapped the fan together and batted me on the shoulder with it. “It’s
Romeo
. He’d swoon over a dancing bear if it wore a skirt. If you wish to protect him, tell his father to see him safely married off before some scandal of his bursts like a boil.”

“You sound much like Grandmother,” I said, which earned me another, more forceful blow of the closed fan.

“That is very cruel, Benvolio.”

“Kind!” I responded.

“Kind as the very devil.” She rose and stalked away, skirts brushing the servants out of her way as she went like dust before a broom.

A sister like Veronica, and a cousin like Romeo.

What had I done to deserve so much trouble?

•   •   •

R
omeo failed to show his face at dinner, and his absence was noted, with chill precision, by his mother, Lady Montague. She asked me, rather too loudly, whether I had news of him. I responded truthfully that I did not.

My dinner was not made any more savory by the looks given me by my own mother, who seemed to feel that I should leave the table and go in immediate search of my cousin.

I kept my seat. No one specifically ordered me to the search, and I was well aware it was a fool’s errand. Romeo would appear if and when he wished. I’d been charged with his moral reformation only in late afternoon, after all. I could hardly be blamed if he went straying the same evening.

The nuts had been placed on the table, and my uncle Montague was well into his fourth cup of wine and loudly declaiming on politics when Romeo at last stumbled into the hall. I say
stumbled
as an accurate description; he tripped on a rug, skidded, and grabbed onto a servant to stay upright. The servant noisily dropped a tray containing the sticky remains of roast pork, and Romeo immediately pushed away, heading with speed but not precision toward the table. As always, he left damage in his wake.

“
You’re
not Veronica,” he said to me as he poured himself into his usual chair. “Ronnie usually sits there, and she’s far prettier company.”

“She’s out of favor with Grandmother,” I said.

“For what?”

“Ignoring her summons.”

He laughed with wine-fueled good humor. “Good for Ronnie. If we didn’t bow and scrape so much to the old witch, life would be infinitely sweeter.” Romeo balanced his chair up on two wavering legs, and spotted Veronica sitting at the far end of the table with our youngest and most disfavored country cousins. She looked mutinous and flushed, and Romeo gave her a drunken little wave, which she ignored with a lift of her chin.

I kicked the side of his chair, which made it wobble even more unsteadily; Romeo thumped it back down to four legs with more alarm than grace. “Attend me, fool. It’s not just Ronnie who’s in disfavor. Grandmother’s not well pleased with you, either.”

“She’s never well pleased with any of us, save perhaps for you, O perfect one,” he said, and waved a servant over. The servant in question had a strained, long-suffering look as he bent to listen. “Where lurks dinner?”

“It has been served, master,” the servant said. I didn’t know this one by name; he was new, I supposed, though he seemed flawlessly well trained. “Shall I bring you soup?”

“Soup and bread. And wine—”

“Water,” I interrupted. “Bring him water, for God’s sake and his own.”

“A traitor at my side,” my cousin said. The servant left, looking relieved.

“Where were you?” I asked Romeo.

He let his head drop against the high back of the chair. We looked similar, but I was taller, broader, and not as handsome. My nose had once been just as fine and straight, but a street brawl with the Capulets had done for that decisively. At least one maid had claimed it granted me character, as did the faint scar that cut through my eyebrow, so there was some benefit to my adventures. And, of course, my eyes. My eyes always betrayed my half-foreign ancestry.

“Hmmm. Where was I?” Romeo echoed dreamily as his eyelids drooped. “Ah, coz, I was in contemplation of peerless beauty, but it is a beauty that saddens. She is too fair, too wise, wisely too fair, since she refuses to hear my suit.”

He was
very
drunk, and coming dangerously near declaiming his wretched poetry. “Who inspires you to such heights of nonsense?”

“I shall not cheapen her name in such company, but in sadness, cousin, I do love a woman.”

“We’ve all loved women, and almost always sadly.” Well, I reflected, almost all of us had done so. But that was another subject that needed no expression here. “We’ve survived the harrowing.”

Romeo, even drunk, was sensible enough to know that uttering a Capulet’s name at a Montague dinner table wasn’t sane. He left it to me to read between his lines. “Not I,” he said. “She cannot return my love; she’s vowed elsewhere. I live dead, Benvolio. I am shattered and ruined with love.”

The servant returned with a bowl of hot soup, which he deposited in front of Romeo, along with a plate of fresh bread. The soup steamed gently in the cool air, and I smelled pork and onion in the mix, along with sage. Romeo picked up the bread and sopped a piece in the broth.

“I see death hasn’t dimmed your appetite,” I observed. “Do you think to change the girl’s mind?”

“I must, or sicken and wither.” He said it with unlikely confidence, and took a bite of the bread. “Already my words are in her hands tonight. They’ll add to the chorus proclaiming my faithfulness. She will favor me soon.”

“Chorus . . . How many of these missives have you sent to her?”

“Six. No, seven.”

I stared at him as he spooned up the soup. I was hard-pressed to bring myself to ask the question, but I knew I must. “And did you . . . sign them?”

“Of course,” said the idiot, and missed his mouth with the spoon, spilling hot liquid all over his chin. “Ouch.” He wiped at it with the back of his hand, frowned at the bowl, and raised it to his mouth to take a blistering gulp. “I could not let her ascribe them to some other suitor. I’m not a fool, Ben; I know it was unwise, but love is often unwise. Your own father took a wife from
England
. What wisdom is that?”

I narrowly resisted the urge to cut his throat with a conveniently placed carving knife left on the tray in front of me. I took a deep breath and tried to blink away the reddish tinge across my vision. “Leave my mother out of it,” I said. Insults from Grandmother were one thing, but Romeo using my parentage to justify his own folly . . . “If the girl’s relatives don’t slaughter you in the streets, I’m certain that La Signora will order you manacled to a damp wall somewhere very deep, and have your madness exorcised with whips and hot irons. I’ll wager you won’t look fondly on your ladylove then.”