Prince of Shadows: A Novel of Romeo and Juliet Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”
    He was smart enough to realize that I was serious, and his drunken grin vanished, replaced by something that was much more acceptable: worry. “She’s just a girl,” he said. “No one takes it seriously.”
    “Grandmother does, and so do many others. No doubt your fairest love has whispered it about the square as well.”
    He grabbed me by the arm and pulled me closer, and his voice dropped to an intense whisper. “Ben, Rosaline wouldn’t betray me! Someone else, perhaps, but not Rosaline!”
    I remembered her gilded in candlelight, watching me very levelly as I stole from her brother. She could have betrayed me. Should have, perhaps.
    And she hadn’t.
    “It doesn’t matter whose tongue wags,” I said. “She has servants paid to be sure she does nothing to dirty her family’s name . . . such as accepting poems from you. If her uncle hasn’t yet been told,