Instead, I had been forced to listen, still, to Romeo’s half-drunken rambling paeans to the beauty of a woman he would not name, but who must have been Rosaline Capulet. She was not, of course, in attendance at the wedding; the Capulets would not set foot where Montagues entertained. Yet her shadow loomed large over all.

Romeo had brought home the rumor that Rosaline had been the hot tongue who’d betrayed Mercutio’s secret; he mourned, but he forgave her this feminine weakness, which undoubtedly did not run true to my grandmother’s plans. I kept him from writing poetry, or going anywhere near her, but it seemed to me that he would never lose his infatuation. Romeo had never been so constant in love, and it worried me to think that he might have truly set his heart on something so massively unwise.

I stole.

I suppose I could claim that the pressure of knowing of my sister’s cruel betrayal, and Mercutio’s misaimed bitterness, was to blame for the Prince of Shadows’ thieving rampage in Verona; I made a list, sitting in the stillness of my rooms, and in the evenings, almost every evening, I escaped the claustrophobic pull of my guilt to bring misery to someone who deserved it more.

I stole the diary of the wife of the Ordelaffi servant, in which she confessed her horror of her husband’s fondness for unnatural acts, and—more damningly—the pilfering he’d done from his master’s coffers. The diary found its way into the chambers of the Ordelaffis’ busybody cook, who soon presented it to Lord Ordelaffi.

The servant was driven out into the streets, stripped and beaten. I watched from the safety of a nearby wine shop. It was a sour sort of victory, because with him went his innocent wife and children, now reduced to beggars.

I remedied my wrong by visiting the jakes late the next evening, and retrieving the stinking bag of gold and jewels that I’d hidden there. The jewels and the sword were too easily known, but the gold I transferred to a clean cloth bag. I found the sad little family huddled in a sour alley, shivering in the chill; the father, already weak, seemed likely to die. I could not bring myself to care overmuch. But the haunted terror of the wife, and the children . . .

I knew they could not see my face in the shadow of the gray hood, and even if they did make it out, the silk mask would tell them to seek no more.

“Sir,” the wife said, staring up at me from where she knelt on the cobbles beside a very meager little brazier, cooking what seemed to be a skinned rat for her frightened family. “Sir, I beg you, in God’s name, leave us be. . . .”