Stop, I told myself sternly. You’re as ridiculous as Romeo. Except that I would never even consider dragging the Montague reputation through the streets for a woman. Whatever I felt, it would be kept masked, chained, and hidden away like a mad relative. Suffering was the path to Christ, I’d been told. Perhaps one day I’d be made a saint—the patron saint of fools and lovers, if those terms were not exactly the same.
My mother made polite, empty conversation for a few moments more, then swept grandly out of my room. She had a full day of intrigue and tension ahead of her, and little time to waste with her eldest—and only—male offspring.
“Will you be beating me now for letting you sleep through mass, sir?” Balthasar asked, with a helpfully bland expression. “Shall I fetch a strap?”
I cuffed him. “He jests at scars who never felt a wound, fool. Have I ever beaten you?”
“Perhaps it would be helpful,” he said. “I shouldn’t wish your lady mother to feel I am the devil’s whisper, leading you on the path to damnation. I would never find another placement.”
“I don’t need a strap to beat you.” I formed a fist, and winced; I’d forgotten the scabs on my knuckles, which stretched painfully. Balthasar raised thin eyebrows, which gave him an owl-eyed look.
“Clearly, sir,” he said. “Will you be a peacock or a crow today?”
“Crow,” I said. “It better suits my mood.”
My servant moved off to open cupboards and drawers, and returned with carefully folded, sandalwood-scented clothing. Smallclothes and the linen shirt, which went on quickly enough, though the short ruff, as always, chafed my neck; the padded hose did not go on so easily, but I bore it with patience. Over that came the coppice, the doublet, and as Balthasar tied on the ink black sleeves, I was already beginning to regret my choice for the day; it would be sunny and hot, and while the brighter (peacock) colors wouldn’t be cooler in any practical terms, as the fabrics were just as heavy, they somehow felt so.
Balthasar saw the look on my face and sighed. He untied the sleeves and switched them out for robin’s-egg blue with midnight slashes. The doublet remained black, but it too had the Montague blue worked in intricate patterns, needlework that must have taken the ladies a month to complete. “I suppose, in the mood you’re in, the black is the most practical,” he noted. “It wears blood so much more nobly.”
“There will be no blood today.”
“Optimistic, sir, very optimistic. I salute you.” He adjusted the fit of a sleeve, cocked his head, and nodded approval as he went to get my shoes and the chest of jewels. I was never as gaudy as Tybalt Capulet, but I could hardly leave the house without showing the wealth of Montague in some small way. Today it was an emerald ring I wore on my undamaged left hand, and a lion brooch in gold with eyes of pale blue topaz. I stopped him when he would have decorated me further, like some feast-day statue, but I finally accepted a single earring that flashed more pale topaz. For a young man of my age, it showed almost priestly restraint.
Balthasar brought me the necessary tools of the day—a long, thin left-hand dagger, with the Montague crest worked into the hilt, and my sword. I belted them on and felt complete. The rest was necessary, but weapons, ah, those made me decently clothed.
He picked a bit of lint from my shoulder. “Shall I accompany you, sir?”
“I’ll be with Romeo,” I said. “And with Mercutio, if he appears. No need to nursemaid me.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll just get my bag.”
It was a source of bitter amusement to me that as powerful as everyone assumed a scion of Montague to be, I could not even effectively order my own servant. He was right, of course. If he allowed me to venture out alone and anything untoward happened, his head would be for the chop. Better to die with me on the point of a Capulet sword than face La Signora di Ferro.
We left my apartments and almost immediately saw Romeo, who was sitting on the same bench in the open atrium I’d shared with my sister, Veronica, earlier. He looked as dejected as a half-drowned kitten. I sat beside him. He had also chosen black for the day, relieved with only the smallest bits of color. Anyone seeing him would believe him to be in mourning.
He had a liver-colored bruise on his chin that gave me a savage, unchristian jolt of satisfaction when I saw it; not admirable, that impulse, and like any good cousin I choked it down and kept the smile from my face. “You look well down,” I said. “Last night was no small success, coz.”
“Success, you’d name it? To hear that the fairest face of the city, the fiercest heart, burned all the words of love I wrote? To hear she had no more regard for me than for the slops tossed in the street? Perhaps it is your ideal of success, Ben, but hardly mine.” Romeo was truly sunk in the depths, and gathering up rocks to drown more efficiently. “Still, better to have loved—”
“Shut up,” I said, pleasantly but with an edge, and he cast me a quick glare.
“You hit me,” he said. “I won’t forget.”
“Good,” I said. “Then you’ll remember the real pain and not the imaginary pleasure. There are a hundred suitable flowers blooming in the garden of Verona for you. Leave the Capulet alone.”
“A hundred, you say? And yet you seem to be unable to pick such a flower for yourself. Is it the color of the blossoms that repels you, or the smell?”
I resisted the urge to strike him again. Balthasar, hovering nearby, had an anxious look on his face that warned me I might do well to hold my anger. “Have a care what you say,” I said, very quietly. Perhaps it was the dark look on my face, or the tension that tightened my left hand on the hilt of my sword, that made Romeo take a step back and raise a hand in surrender.
Duels between cousins had been known to happen, even within the downy bosom of House Montague. I was rarely the first to take offense, nor to draw steel, but when I was, Mercutio had long declared me the deadliest of us three, and the least likely to see sense. Romeo was a fair hand with a blade, and witty when the mood took him, but I had a cold, green streak of poison running through my veins, and he knew it well. I had spent my entire life learning to keep it contained, lest it sicken others as well.
“I meant nothing by it, coz; you know I love you as well as my own heart,” Romeo said, in as gentle a tone as I’d ever heard him utter. “But you wound me, and I wound you in turn. You think my love for Rosaline is a passing thing, and it grieves me you think me such a light-head.”
I took a breath and deliberately loosened my grip on the sword, but the fury inside me did not bank itself. “Brood on, then,” I said. “I care not. But if you even think of casting eyes on the wench again, I will do more than mar your looks. If you think La Signora will punish me, think on it again. She’d rather have a dead heir than a foolish one.”
He looked taken aback that I’d said it so directly, and more than a little afraid (of me, I think), but I did not stay to dispute with him. I stalked on, half cloak swinging, and although I did not grip my sword again, my right hand clenched tight for the need of it.
“Perhaps . . . perhaps some soothing wine, sir,” Balthasar suggested. “Wine, shade, some pleasant company . . . ?”
“Stop your mouth,” I said, and set out instead to find trouble.
• • •
It was a frustrating thing that trouble, being so kindly invited, failed to appear. Even the usual swaggering Capulet bravos took their boasts a different way as I approached. I never got close enough to deliver any direct insult, not even to a Capulet loyalist.
In truth, I was not sure why I was so angry at the Capulets, other than Tybalt. My own cousin was the root of my fury, and I’d already bruised him for it. There was a wildness trembling inside me that begged to let fly, and let the arrows fall as random as rain. Balthasar seemed worried. Well, it was likely sensible enough; I was in no fit state for any man’s company, even a servant’s—especially a servant, honor bound to cast his life ahead of mine, or futilely after. The anxious tightness of my man’s face gradually cooled my anger. If I drew him into needless and fatal trouble, I would be as foolish as Romeo.
We were walking the narrow aisles around the Basilica de San Zeno and making for the vivid, always busy Piazza delle Erbe, where the great mingled with the low, and the rich with the poor. I was a curious mixture of all . . . great in my name and my house, high and also low, in my half-English state. Rich with honor and position, and poor in purse, at least as far as my mother and grandmother knew; they tightly controlled the strings for all of us. The fact that I had a comfortable income from less honest means . . . well, that was nothing that needed to be confessed beyond the church walls.
I passed a small chapel, and on a whim paused and entered. It held a beautiful plaster Madonna and child, and small heaps of flowers—some fresh and fragrant, some wilted and dusty. I genuflected and bent a knee, with Balthasar quickly assuming a penitent stance behind me.
And then I prayed to the beloved Virgin for patience, guidance, and most of all, for my cousin to stop loving Rosaline Capulet.
Because if he did not, I genuinely thought I might go mad.
• • •
It is a signature truth of the world that when you court trouble, it tends to avoid you for sheer spite, but when you become reconciled to peace, peace behaves just the same. I left the chapel with a great deal more piety in my heart, well disposed to forgive an insult should one present itself to me . . . and naturally, upon turning the corner out of the chapel, I came faced with three louts wearing the colors of Capulet. No fine gentlemen, these; the coffers of our enemies had bought some low, dangerous men. They were decently barbered, but clearly had more experience with razors drawn across a throat than over a cheek. Their clothes were poor, and as yet clean of any fresh bloodstains, so they’d not been successful in baiting my fellow Montagues today.
Seeing me and Balthasar, alone and cut off from the support of our fellows, they clearly felt they’d been given a heaven-sent gift.