And so the tradition of "I'm exhausted working on revisions and rewrites of my manuscript, so screw it I'm going to write Shakespeare fan fiction" continues. Fair warning: since the Prince has a grand total of 16 speaking opportunities in the play, I have taken quite a few liberties with his character. Meaning, I wrote him the way I want him to behave, and not at all the way he is likely to. And I'm aware that "the prince's kinsman" probably does not mean "the prince's nephew," but hypothetically it could, so roll with me here.
Also, equally fair warning: every single bit of Italian history and culture that I reference in this piece, however in passing, comes from the two weeks I watched every episode of Showtime's The Borgias last spring. I apologize for nothing.
There may be a second bit to this, and there may not be, depending on when and if the mood strikes. The policy for not apologizing holds.
On occasion, I wonder whether my nephew hates me or simply enjoys baiting me. I'll admit, compared to his parents, I am rather more easily baited. His behavior is nearly enough to madden me, though it is a rare occasion indeed that I let him see this. Shimmying out through his window at all hours to prowl the taverns or the stews with his friends, stumbling back drunk as a tailor at three in the morning, I've come to expect this from him. Is it because he is young, and youth always responds to comparative liberty with reckless abandon? Certainly I permit more than his parents did, before the sickness took them. Whether this is from a generous spirit or a general pervasive feeling of exhaustion that accompanies all attempts to discipline him, I am not sure.
But on such occasions I catch myself. I remember that if he has a vendetta against a member of my household, it is not me. Mercutio has loathed my son, and been loathed by him, since the moment he crossed my threshold at thirteen, with nothing but the clothes on his back that were later to be burnt to prevent the spread of pestilence. Paris' resentment I can reasonably well understand. To live life as an only child only to find your father's attention divided between yourself and your ungovernable spitfire of a cousin blown in from Salerno without so much as asking permission, I suppose any reasonable man would feel the same.
But Mercutio. He should feel nothing but gratitude. He is my nephew, but his mother and I did not speak, had not spoken since her horse trader of a lover filled her with child and they fled Verona to have the child and a highly retrospective marriage. The world would not have expected it of me, taking him in and raising him. His birth destroyed his mother's reputation, and his own. And what good is a man without reputation? Yet here he now finds himself, raised by the prince of Verona, on more than speaking terms with the best families, invited to as many gatherings and balls and comings-out as he can avoid getting himself dis-invited to with his own tongue. He should be grateful.
And yet the feeling that he is not is undeniable.
It is quite possible that my nephew hates me. On nights like this, it is quite possible that I hate my nephew.
It is past half two, and the owl outside my window has called to remind me of it, when I hear the front door to my house ease open. The porter will not open at this hour for any who are not family, and Paris knows better than to roam with such recklessness. My wayward ghost it is, then. I turn away from my desk—for I have not slept, and it seems shall not sleep—and pad down the stairs in stocking feet. There is something of the ghostly in my movements. I have to admit, I enjoy the figure I cut. It does him good to be scared every so often.
I hear him pacing through the hall. He has no candle, and makes his way toward his chamber entirely by memory. I stop walking at the top of the stairs and fold my arms across my chest. He will come to me, then. He has always, always come to me. His steps are surprisingly steady for the hour. I half-expected I would have to help him to bed, but he has abstained this evening, or has learned to hold it better. As he moves upward and is now some three or four steps from my person, I decide to make myself known. I cough.
It is entirely enough.
"Sacred prick of Jesus!"
Mercutio stumbles back, slips down a stair with a yelp of fright, steadies himself on the banister. I laugh, but it is quiet enough and dark enough that he cannot tell.
"A creative oath. I will give you credit for that."
"Uncle?"
Apparently I have not been expected. Odd, as this is my house.
"The same. To what do I owe the tardive pleasure?"
He gapes at me. It is an audible gape, if not a visual. I clarify.
"Where have you been, Mercutio?"
"I…" The stutter does not bode well for his response being the truth. "With Romeo."
It is a likely excuse. Romeo Montague has been all but inseparable from my nephew for all of his five years' stay in Verona. His first friend, and his fastest. Both with an equal inability to see consequences of future actions, with the thrill for dangerous living that comes with a man not yet twenty. It is entirely possible that he has been roaming the city's streets at moonlight with the heir to the Montague house, cat-calling at washerwomen and pelting ravens with stones. However, I do not believe it.
Particularly not as I would swear to high heaven I heard the swish of skirts behind my nephew's footsteps as he entered.
I decide to hazard my perception. The worst that can happen if I am wrong is that Mercutio scorns me as a suspicious liar and a fool, which would scarcely be a diminution from where I currently stand in his esteem.
"Where is she?"
I hear him gasp. The risk, then, was well taken.
"Uncle, I…"
"I did not ask for explanations or excuses. I do not care about why or how. I want to know where. There will be no whores hiding behind any of my tapestries."
I half-expected the girl to emerge of her own accord. There is something about the scathing disdain of a prince that moves most people to action. But the silence on the stairs is undisturbed. I am not even certain that Mercutio is breathing.
I try a different stratagem. "Or perhaps you are silent because you have lost her. Would you prefer me to wake Paris and have him help us search?"
"No."
The response is as quick as I knew it would be. Paris has been abed for hours, but he would certainly have leapt at the chance to catch his cousin in some scandalous wrongdoings, to the benefit of his own reputation. I am not sure what it says about my skill as a father that I have brought up two boys who are constantly and forever at one another's throats.
"Well, then. If you would be so kind as to introduce us."
He takes a breath—I can almost hear him weighing the consequences of action versus inaction. As I knew he would, he turns back toward the entrance hall, takes several steps away from me. From an indentation in the wall beside the unlit torch, he takes up flint and steel and, with trembling hands I imagine from the difficulty he has with the endeavor, strikes a fire. The light is useless at first, until he dips the head of the torch in the tongues of flame and it surges into hungry brightness. I see my nephew's face in the glow first, so like his mother's: pale, with red-brown hair and dark eyes. He looks back at me with nothing short of horror. Then, my eyes trailing behind his fear, I see the figure over his shoulder, who has stepped around the curved arch of the doorway and now stands at the very edge of the circle of torchlight.
For a moment, I do not understand my nephew's panic.
Then, after I have understood, I marvel at the extent he is able to keep his composure.
"Good evening," I say to Benvolio Savonarola at the foot of the stairs.
My nephew is not the only one with remarkable self-possession. "I think it should be 'good morning,' shouldn't it, Your Grace?" the young man responds. He is still wearing his cloak—I suppose that would explain the swish.
"Certainly," I concede. "It is nearly three."
"Uncle, I…"
I cannot remember the last time I saw Mercutio at a loss for words. I have to admit, though it is uncharitable of me to concede it, I rather enjoy the prospect. It is ridiculous, that as prince of Verona I should relish the chance to at last exert some kind of concrete authority over my wayward nephew, but there it is.
"I expect you are returning from the ball at the lord and lady Capulet's?" I ask. "It is rather late to be traveling all across town to your own home, Master Savonarola. Though usually I prefer to be warned of guests in advance, you are most certainly welcome to stay, should you wish."
This might be cruel. It troubles me only briefly that I do not care. I watch Mercutio squirm under the deliberate ignorance of my words. He knows that I must suspect something—his reaction is enough to make the most disinterested individual look twice at them, and I am hardly that individual. But I will not make this easy for him. If he wants my understanding, he shall have to ask for it. He shifts his weight from one side to the other, glances back at Benvolio, the trace of an apology in his eyes. It is not a question, it is an apology. Whatever he is going to do, he has decided in advance to do it, and young Savonarola will simply have to be dragged along behind it.
"Uncle," Mercutio starts, stops.
"Nephew." This is deliberately immature. Indulge me.
"Uncle, I… Benvolio and I, we…"
He is dreadful at this. But I hear the hitch in the back of his throat. I know that he is trying to be honest with me. His usual flamboyant use of metaphor, so perfectly suited toward the poetic, has faltered into these base pronouns, I, we, he, us. He does not say us but I hear it. As I have said, secrecy and subtlety have never been among my nephew's strongest suits.
I have just decided to spare him the ordeal of saying it outright when he blurts it out, without ceremony or decorum.
"We are in love, Uncle."
Benvolio closes his eyes in exhaustion or unwillingness to look at me. His trepidation makes perfect sense. In this city so close to the papal seat in Rome, anything against even the most minor details of Leviticus is met with something stronger than suspicion. Neither young Savonarola nor my nephew, nor I for that matter, have forgotten the mass arrests and executions in Florence of some forty years ago, those under accusation as sodomites rounded up and burnt screaming on the pyre to the sound of the mad friar's voice reading psalms. It is not the kind of thing one forgets. And Verona is not so terribly far from Florence, in distance or moral geography. There are those among our leaders of the church and the sword who would see men like my nephew strung from the cathedral steeple as a sign unto others. As the city's prince, I am a profoundly terrible person to whom to make this first foray into honesty.
But Mercutio does not think of me as a prince. From the first time he slipped through the window, paced along the rooftop, climbed down the trellis and took to the streets in direct disobedience of my orders, he has proven this. He thinks of me as an uncle, who took him in as an orphaned child fresh from the plague-ridden streets, and who despite all urging and reason to the contrary has raised him for the five years since, the best of his life. I know they are the best, not from any pride of my city over the flooded shit-stained pavers of Salerno, but because I see him take Benvolio's hand in his and look up at me with his mother's (will I admit my?) dark eyes. He says "together." He would say more, did our city allow it. Did I allow it.
"I hardly expect an offer of a dowry, Uncle," Mercutio says, a trace of his usual irony returning now that the worst is over. "But I want you to know that no matter how many priests you send against me, no matter what you think of this, it will not change me. It will not change this."
"Did you expect me to want to change it?"
Benvolio looks at me as though I have grown an extra head.
"Rather, Your Grace," he says.
"Then my house was a rather unfortunate place for you to pursue your relationship, was it not?"
"Uncle, I didn't mean for you to…"
"To hear you come in? Or to hear you later?
"Uncle…" He intends to explain, but I do not want to hear it.
"Listen to me. And listen very carefully, because I shall say this one time, and then I shall go to bed, where I would prefer to rest under the knowledge that the subject is closed."
"Your Grace," Benvolio murmurs.
Mercutio says nothing. His eyes are empty, his mouth a tight line. He must wait for what I shall say next. He does not expect he shall welcome it.
"I am the sovereign prince of the city-state of Verona," I say. "I am the sole responsible for keeping the peace in the streets, and every family with a coat of arms and a grudge is brawling with members of the other quicker than we can apprehend them. I am the sole responsible for garrisoning our borders against the raiding parties of the Romagna, which are bolder now the Papal States have been weakened with Pope Alexander's death. I am the sole responsible for the welfare of the poor, hungry, and vagrant citizens of Verona. I am not," I conclude, "the sole responsible for your romances. That responsibility falls to you. It is not that I am indifferent to your happiness, or that I do not wish that you and Master Savanarola be completely and vulgarly happy. It is that I simply do not have the time."
Mercutio, by now, is grinning. I recognize his face in this demeanor, and it puts me back at my ease. Worry does not suit him. Life should float off his back as it always has, water against oilskin, leaving no mark. He has heard the undertones of jest all throughout my speech, and with every word his smile has broadened.
"So if the two of you would still like to pursue your amusements, I must request that you give my chambers a wide berth. I have much work still to be done before dawn, and your room is not so far from mine."
"The library, then?" he suggests, still grinning. "You must admit, Uncle, that if any room in this house would smile on us, it would be where you house Socrates and Longinus and Plato. The Greeks, at least, understood what it means to love someone."
"Ah. If you deface a single of my books in the process, you must know I will have you eviscerated."
"I expect nothing less."
Benvolio, the poor young man, looks between my nephew and I as if we have taken complete and utter leave of our senses. I am not reacting the way he had expected. When I confronted Mercutio, Benvolio must have thought that he would soon be facing the wrong end of a rope. And now this? But if he thinks this is out of my character, then he does not understand mine. Though I believe that at last I begin to piece together my nephew's.
"Well, I would advise against the library, if you still intend to while away the night. Paris will be up early to advance his wedding preparations, and he likes the library best to work."
"Paris is to be married?"
Despite the situation, something about my son as a groom seems to have taken Mercutio by surprise.
"To Capulet's daughter. It is a most advantageous match. Fortunate, as it appears I can no longer hope to make one with you."
Mercutio takes Benvolio by the hand and pulls him closer until their shoulders are touching. "So you say, Uncle. I would propose that I've done reasonably well for myself, given my circumstances."
Benvolio looks at him with something at the midpoint of amusement and utter disgust. I imagine it is a look he deals my nephew on a relatively consistent basis.
"I am hardly qualified to comment on the matter," I say, with enough chill to sound affected. "Now, if you will excuse me, it is"—the bells from the steeple beyond, sounding three, give me somewhat more precision—"three in the morning, and I am going to bed."
"Good night, Your Grace." Benvolio has the strangest look on his face. It seems he never quite anticipated saying that phrase to me while I am in my nightgown. Stranger things have happened, I suppose.
Mercutio does not say anything. It appears that he is fighting too hard not to laugh to wish me a pleasant evening. But then, I have not come to expect courtesy from him. Honesty, this I will accept. Leaving the pair of them near the foot of the stairs, I turn and make the short journey back to my bedchamber, where I close the door behind me and sit at the end of my bed. The owl sounds again outside my window, but for the first time in quite some time, it does not sound like a bad omen. Perhaps for once, I think, it means that something good will happen to us. To me, to Paris, to Verona, and to Mercutio.
The odds are long, but there is never any harm in hoping.