“As sinful Eve,” I said. “And quite a willing mouth on her, too.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “Best to get on with the job, I thought.” Though there had been a drunken moment when I’d considered something much different, in wild and exotic detail.

“Disappointing.” He put the hand back in place again. “We’ll teach you how to use a woman yet. Granted, I have only a little experience in that way, but more than you, I’d wager.” He laughed a little, but it sounded like gallows laughter to me. “I’m to get more, it seems.”

I sat down opposite him, suddenly worried that this was not merely Mercutio’s usual dark moods. “Tell me,” I bade him.

“My dear and sainted father has decreed that I soar too high to remain free, and so I am to be caged,” he said. The bitter taint in his voice chilled me. “Caged and hooded, jessed and trained to the perfumed hand of a lady. But no matter how you tame a falcon, still they will hunt, will they not? Hunt, or die.”

“What’s this talk of death, my friend? Of cages?” Surely his father, whatever he suspected, would not put his own son to a public trial for the crime of sodomy; that would forever tarnish his own name. Were they discovered, my own offenses would be puffballs and nonsense beside it.

“I put it to you plainly: I am to be swiftly married off,” he said. “Married and buried, wed and dead. ’Tis no accident the words rhyme so well.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “And ’tis no surprise, as they’d published the banns—what brings on this dark—”

“Dark and lark, love and dove, hawk and handsaw, I am not fit for this, Benvolio; I am not fit—do you not see it?” He was weeping, I realized with a start; he angrily swept tears from his cheeks and glared at me as if I were the cause of all his suffering. “I will hurt her, this soft bride of mine; I cannot help it—I am all the wrong shape, you see? I may be forced, as she may be forced, but both of us will bleed for it . . . but blood is all that families require, marriage blood, maiden blood, proof of cruel love. . . . She is too young; she cannot understand what I am, what I feel, what I know of myself. I am to hurt her, and she is to hurt me. And it comes on us fast as plague.”

It was clear to me then. “There is a date set.”

“Two months hence,” he said miserably. “Two months. And Tomasso weeps and will not see me, and there is naught I can do to make any of it less vile. We have been wed in heart for five years, from the moment we first clapped eyes on each other, and now it is broken, broken as my heart. I know I will hurt this girl, in revenge. It is not a pretty thing, but the thought of her sickens me, and I cannot . . . I cannot—”