I felt a wild, furious urge to fling sense to the winds, to do what Romeo had done with his Juliet; my grandmother had ordered it. Ruin the girls, ruin the family; that had been her message, but it had been a hateful one, and one I could not believe had any place in Romeo’s heart.

“Benvolio,” she said, and her voice pulled me out of a dark contemplation—would she resist me if I took hold of her, kissed her, bore her back to that curtained mattress? Would she cry out for help, or would she sigh my name, rise to meet me, crave the same senseless release I did? “Benvolio, Juliet knows well that this is a fool’s course. Why has she done such a thing?”

“For love,” I said. My voice had dropped lower in my throat, and I could not stop gazing at her, not to save my soul.

She took in a deep breath and slowly let it out, but she did not meet my eyes. “Juliet is a child, but she is no fantastic. She has been raised knowing her duty to this house, and she has been at peace with it all her life. One chance meeting with a boy—the sworn enemy of her own family—would never overcome it. She might engage in flirtation, but this . . . Benvolio, this cannot simply be love. It borders on sorcery.”

She was right, I thought, and with a chill, I thought of the witch, of her talk of curses. Of Mercutio’s last words. “Madness or love, done is done, and this is very thoroughly done. Whatever passes now is beyond our ability to change.”

“Have you given thought to how it changes us?” Now, finally, she looked on me, and the color stayed high in her cheeks. Her fingers were restless, fretting at the wood of the table. “When this is known—and it must be known; she cannot be so foolish as to damn her soul with a bigamous marriage to Count Paris; nor would Friar Lawrence allow it—then Juliet will no longer be my uncle’s to give away.”

“You will be,” I said. “I know.” It impressed me how quickly she’d reasoned it out, even given the rapid shocks of the day. “I think you may no longer fear imprisonment in the convent, at least.”

“Perhaps not, but now I dread the other outcome. Unlike Juliet, I was never resigned to that duty, to marriage to a man I did not know, bearing children for the sake of family honor. I do not know . . . I do not know how I can manage it.” She was immediately ashamed of this confession, I saw, and turned the blade of it on me. “At least your station increases from this.”