My lady mother, Elise Montague, entered in a cloud of rosewater and the soft glint of gold, and paused at the foot of my bed as Balthasar quickly hurried to the shutters and opened them to admit more light. I winced as the brightness lanced through and bounced from the red-gold chain around my mother’s neck, and the dangling drops in her ears. Her hair gleamed rich as well, the color of ripe wheat, and as always it was smooth and perfectly dressed, held in a gemmed net that framed her still-lovely face to perfection. I’d inherited my foreign green eyes from her, though my hair and skin were Italian-dark; even after so many years in the healthy climate of Verona she seemed wan and pale, and very thin in her dark, elegant gown.

She regarded me with steady, cool assessment.

“Good day to you, Mother,” I said, and sat up. “Did I miss mass?”

“Yes,” she said. “And your absence was noticed. Are you well?”

“I have a sickness of the stomach.”

“Ah,” she said, and snapped her fingers without glancing toward Balthasar. He quickly grabbed an armchair and moved it beneath her as she lowered herself—a trick that only the truly rich and entitled could manage, I thought, without looking either awkward or foolish. “A disease of drink. That explains everything. Benvolio—”

“Mother, if you’ll remove yourself, I’ll make myself decent and call on you in your chambers,” I said. “I’m not a child.”

“No, you’re a man grown, and held to the same standard,” she said. “Your father was little older than you when we were married.” I knew. He’d been all of nineteen, and she had been seventeen, when he’d died on the point of a Capulet dagger. She’d been heavily pregnant, but not with me; I was already a healthy boy of almost two, and had the vaguest possible memory of him; my sister, Veronica, still in the womb when he perished, would have not even that.

I groaned and rubbed my forehead. “If you’ve come to aggravate my condition with talk of marriage—”

My mother turned her head and speared poor Balthasar with an utterly impersonal glance. “Bring food for him,” she said. “He’s of no great use to anyone in this condition.” She dismissed him with a firm nod, and he scurried to do her bidding. My rooms were, I thought, one of the few places in Verona where my mother could be assured that she’d be obeyed without question; even within the Montague halls she was still the excess widow, the foreign flower dragged into the toxic hothouse of one of the richest, most ambitious families of the city. Grandmother did not approve, and God knew, what Grandmother disapproved would never find much favor within these walls, or without.