“Dueling is a death offense, by the prince’s own command,” I said. “And it takes skill to become a good thief. Skill, and nerve.”

“Very well, then. You steal. What else?”

“I’ve killed,” I said, more quietly. “Two Capulet men who cornered us in a narrow place, if I might answer for my servant’s sins as well.”

“A fair match?”

“Fair enough, and outnumbered.”

“Then you’ve no guilt for that, beyond that of any decent man. What else?”

I hesitated, and then said, “I let a boy be hanged, and I did not try to stop it.”

That brought a long silence from the monk, followed by a heavy, soul-deep sigh. “Aye, you are far from alone in that,” he said. “No doubt your cousin Romeo flinches from that memory as well. But to act on your own against a mob would have been foolish and useless. Your friend Mercutio courted his disaster, and the boy’s life was the price. You have sin, perhaps, but not in as great a part as he, who had not the courage to turn away from his lover, nor to defy his family. I knew Tomasso. He was a sweet young man, but weak willed and too much in love. It was never to end well; may God have mercy upon his soul.”

Now, to the hardest. “It was not the Capulets responsible for betraying Mercutio to his father,” I said. “It was my sister. Veronica. I know common talk blames Rosaline for it. That was Veronica’s malice.”

“It matters little now, and Veronica’s sins are not yours,” Friar Lawrence said, and I saw the shadow on the other side of the confessional screen shake its tonsured head. “The boy’s gone to God; Rosaline is safely on her way to the convent. The trouble between the Capulets and Montagues can get no worse.”

“It can if Mercutio takes it in his head to seek vengeance.”

“The boy was rashly angry, true, but he’s calmed now; he’s well married, and rumors say there will be a babe on the way soon. His grudge against the Capulets may well stand, but what of it? You have as good a reason, or better.” He meant my father’s death. But my father had been born into the feud; the Ordelaffi family had typically been Capulet allies, but only on the outskirts of the conflict. Mercutio might have cheerfully accepted his own death at the hands of a Capulet, but not his lover’s, by intrigue and at the end of a rope his own father had carried. There was no honor in it.

I judged it would not gain much to argue, so I let the point pass. “I have had lustful thoughts,” I said.

“So have all men, my son.”

“Forgive me, Friar, should you not upbraid me for my shortcomings, and make me promise to do better to earn my forgiveness?”

“Oh, yes, I see your point. Very well, then. Think on the girl no more; she’s lost to the world now. And I know you are sensible enough to know you’d never have had her in any case.”

I did not want to answer that, so I let silence answer for me, until Friar Lawrence’s shadow gave a sad sigh. “Ten Our Fathers and a donation to the poor for the part you played, however small, in Tomasso’s death. Ten Hail Marys for your lustful thoughts.”

“And my thieving?”

I heard him rattle the heavy bag I’d pressed into his hands. “I think this would buy you a dispensation even in the court of the pope, my son. Fear not; I will not waste it on sinful pursuits. I will commission a new saint for the chapel. Perhaps Saint Nicholas.” There was mischief in that. Saint Nicholas was commonly held to be the patron saint of thieves. In a sly way, it was a dedication to the Prince of Shadows as a generous donor.

“You’ll need to sell them far away,” I warned him. “Della Varda will recognize his own handiwork easily enough.”

“I will sell them in Fiorenza,” Friar Lawrence said placidly. “I was bound there soon in any case. And even should he track them to my door, what guilt has a holy brother for accepting a generous, and anonymous, donation? The bishop will never let him have it back. What’s given to Christ is always Christ’s.”

The friar had a streak of larceny in him, I thought, and I wondered what his occupation had been in the days before he’d shaved his pate. Something a good deal less holy, I thought. “I wish you luck, Friar.”

“And I you,” he said, with more concern in his voice. “Stay a moment, and hark me well. This stealing you do has less of greed in it than grief, and it will bring you more. You see it as an adventure, sir, and so the poets would name it, stealing grandly about in the moon and avenging your honor in secret. But I tell you, it will bring you nothing but pain in the end. I beg you, and I instruct you, to give it up and follow a straight path. Make me a promise, then, and receive your forgiveness with your God.”

I thought for a moment, and then said, reluctantly, “I cannot promise, Friar, for it’s worse to break a promise to God than to continue to sin, and seek forgiveness later.”

“Boy . . .” He sounded aggrieved, but the friar knew me better than to deliver another speech. “I cannot grant you absolution for what you do not regret.”

“You said you could not grant me absolution at all,” I reminded him, and opened the door of the confessional. “Thank you for listening, Friar. Be careful with your new donation.”

“God be with you,” he said.

But I felt, as I left the chapel and limped homeward, that I walked alone. More alone than ever.

• • •

Romeo was still an utter fool. I found this out nearly by chance, as I sought him out in the predawn morning. He was not abed, as he ought to have been. Instead, he was sitting at a table, bathed in candlelight, scribbling furiously with pen to paper. His handwriting, I saw when I leaned over his shoulder, had far too many ornate flourishes to be addressed to a merchant or banker.

No, this was to a girl. And so I did what any near-brother would do: I snatched it away from him and held it up to the candle’s glow to read it while he argued and tried to grab it back.

It was written, by name, to my lady Rosaline, and it was all the things he had been warned not to do, not to say, not to think or feel. It was a death sentence for me, should it ever see eyes beyond my own, and I cursed under my breath, stalked to the fireplace where the embers were banked low, and threw the thing in. I brought the blaze back to a brisk roar with a poker before my cousin attacked me with his full strength, knocking me almost into the inferno myself. I kept hold of the poker, more to prevent him from using it than out of any murderous impulse, though his stupidity was reason enough to bash him senseless.

I threw him back, but in the process my bad leg gave way, and I overbalanced with him, crashed over an inconveniently placed trunk, and ended up on the losing end of the battle, with my furious cousin sitting on my chest, fists clenched and ready to batter. “You puking dog!” he spat. “You vile, insolent—”

“You disobeyed me,” I said. I sounded calm, though I felt none of that. I still held the poker in my hand, and I could have brained him with it, but I did not. “We agreed you’d write no more to her.”

“I wasn’t!” His fury was already sliding past, his fists loosening. Romeo was still a child in many ways—he was quick to temper, and quick to forgive. He’d grow slower in both before long; the world would beat the gentleness from him, the way it had me. “I write not to her. I write for my own . . . my own amusement. I would have burned them when I was finished!”

“Then I just hastened it along,” I said, and winced as his weight came down harshly on my wounded leg. “Off with you; you’re as clumsy as a jackass on cartwheels.”

Even after he rose, I was slow to follow, and had to grasp a wall sconce for help in finding my balance. He frowned at me, my critique of his poetry already fading. “What’s the matter with your leg?”

“A dog,” I said. “He found me tasty. Worry not; it’s been well looked after; I’m not likely to burst and bleed.”

“A dog,” Romeo repeated, and his frown deepened. “A guard dog? Were you seen?”

“Espied,” I said. “But pursued. It’s been seen to, I tell you. All’s well.”

“Not if it’s known you were injured! Can you walk without betraying yourself?”

“I’ve a plan for that,” I said. Rosaline’s plan. “Tomorrow morning, you and several servants will be witness to my falling down the steps. So long as the wound is well wrapped, it can be passed off as a wrenched ankle.”

“And if they make you show them?”

“The day some common merchant’s street thugs can force a Montague to strip will be a dark day for our house,” I said. “You know it will never happen. All I need do is stand on the family’s honor and face them down. If not with bravado, at sword’s point.”

He nodded slowly, gravely. My cousin had acquired new gravity these past few months, especially since Mercutio had been removed from our presence. We had both felt heavier, I think. More tethered to our duties and responsibilities. Would that it were not so . . .

“Come,” I said, and clapped him on the shoulder. “No more moping over women. Love is a pain that both of us can well do without. Off to our beds, and dream of nothing but sleep itself.”

He gave me a weary, crooked smile. “I dream only of red lips and sweet kisses,” he said. “If I did not know her destined for holy orders, I would think her a demon, to haunt me so.”

He loved an idea, I thought, and not the girl herself; to him, Rosaline was a perfect, unobtainable jewel, more icon than flesh. I did not, in that moment, hate him; instead, I rather pitied him. My cousin was in love with love, and it would never be requited.

At least I had seen the woman behind the pretty fog of words, seen the flash of temper and sweetness in her, known her for a wholly unique and engrossing puzzle. That puzzle would never be solved by me, nor by Romeo, and I had to be content with that.

I ruffled his hair, which made him give me an ungentle shove, which I returned, and the play went on until I cried for mercy with my poor, dog-chewed leg aching. Then I limped off to my bed, leaving Romeo to seek his.