“Benvolio Montague did not try to force my door,” she said. “I do not ask you to understand what occurred between us, but there was a curse, my prince, and it was working upon us both; even so, even with the madness of black magic driving him to me, he did not offer me any violence, nor any insult. I screamed to protect him, sir, and not to damn him.”

“Ho, this is a turn.” The prince sat up straight, and a buzz of whispers ran through the crowd—so many, I had not realized. They’d been slipping in quietly behind me, and now half the notables of Verona were gathered to see. “How so?”

“To drive him away ere I opened that door myself, so bespelled by the curse was I,” she said. “And to force him to find the object that fixed the curse upon us. Which he did, in Juliet’s rooms, and so shattered the evil.” She took in a slow, steady breath, and said, “I confess that we did kiss, Your Highness, but there was nothing of violence offered from it, and nothing but sweet comfort, for I love him, sir. I know he is the enemy of my house; I know that rivers of blood lie between our two families. But surely the deaths of our dear cousins must, in shared grief, work to end that anger.” She turned on her uncle and her aunt. “Did you not say that at the tombs you wept, and so did Montague? That the taste of this feud lay bitter on your tongues?”

“But—”

“She is right.” A new voice, and an oddly frail one; my uncle’s normal strength was gone, and he leaned heavily upon his cane, and upon the arm of my mother, who stood beside him. “I have promised to raise a statue to the honor of young Juliet, and so Capulet has also sworn to honor my fallen Romeo. Are we then to deny a living love, whilst honoring a dead one?”

I searched my mother’s face for any trace of anger, but she smiled at me, and through her tears I saw a real and genuine happiness.

And then came the dreaded tapping of a cane, and the crowd swirled and parted in frantic haste, for tottering into the room, much supported by her anxious attendants, came the Iron Lady, my grandmother. She wore black, and all the layers of velvet and lace and veils made her look a charred corpse. Her face was eerily white, and her filmed eyes roamed the room, marking enemies, and settled their fiercest gaze upon me.