PART I
Lumi
“So, dear cousin, are you excited for tonight?”
Juliet turned from her overstuffed wardrobe of glittering gowns and gave me an arch smile. “I dare not answer. You will mock me no matter what I say.”
“Will I? I wasn’t aware I had such a reputation for mockery,” I said, my eyes comically wide with feigned innocence.
“You know you do, Rosaline. If I say ‘yes’ you will laugh at me for being excited about something so silly, and if I say ‘no’—” She broke off and hastily held up a blood-red velvet dress that dazzled with gold brocade, tilting her head as if considering its merits, though I doubted she even perceived what color it was. Her eyes had a faraway look, and despite the lightness of her tone, there was a melancholy air about her.
“If you say no? Would you?”
She pretended (because I knew it was pretense) to fuss over the other items before her. There seemed an endless number of them, all of the finest quality and highest fashion—my aunt Capulet’s doing, no doubt. She could tell you down to the tiniest satin ribbon what the good ladies of Venice and Milan would be wearing even before they knew it themselves—and could afford to dress herself and her daughter accordingly, despite Juliet’s lack of enthusiasm for these crucial matters.
Any other girl about to be presented at her first family banquet would have indulged in everything that her vanity craved. And hers was not just any ordinary family; these were the Capulets, one of the great families of Verona. Then again, Juliet was not just any ordinary girl.
Nor was I, for that matter. This, after all, was not to be my first but rather my last appearance at this kind of event.
“They want me to marry,” Juliet said abruptly.
“Of course they do,” I replied, and waited a moment for her to continue.
“They want me to marry Count Paris.”
“And? How do you feel about the gallant young man? Yes, all right, I see what you mean; that sounded like mockery,” I added, softening. I could see she was brooding over something, and I had a feeling I knew what it was. “Do you object?”
“No,” she said, but she stretched out the word like a wistful note in a sad song.
“I will ask again, Cousin, with no mockery whatsoever: how do you feel about Count Paris?”
“I don’t,” she blurted. The delicate silk sash she had been fingering was now flung away as if it were a serpent. “I don’t feel anything about him. I don’t know him.”
“Ah, stop there,” I interrupted. “It’s not that you don’t know him. Don’t say that, for you know what the response will be: ‘You’ll have plenty of time to get to know him after you are married.’” My cousin’s weary sigh told me I was right and she’d heard this too many times already. “And what’s more, you won’t know the person you do fall in love with, not at all. That will be part of the reason you fall. Who doesn’t love a good mystery?”
Her delicate brows knitted together. “I know nothing about Paris and I feel nothing for Paris! And I’m supposed to marry him—to entwine the rest of my life with his?”
“It’s not just that you feel nothing for him, Juliet. You are being told what to feel about him, and that is impossible.”
Now Juliet’s eyes flashed astonishment, like two newly made stars. “Yes! That is it exactly. How can one love on command?”
“One does not. There is only one thing a person can do on command: obey. All else is irrelevant, at least to the one commanding.”
She waited eagerly, as though for some additional bit of wisdom I could bestow upon her that would somehow give her the answer to all her problems. I tried not to laugh, as that most certainly would come across as disdain. Since my announcement that I would be going to the convent at La Fortezza by the end of June, people treated me in one of only two ways: as the object of pity or else as a great sage, wise beyond her years.
“You’ll have to cut your lovely hair off, you know,” the first type always said. Then, “Ah, the poor hearts you’ll break if you do.” If. As though these stupid things they said would change my mind. As though the effect my decision had on others was the only thing that mattered, and not the effect it would have on me, on my life.
The other type, the seeker of sage wisdom, was rarer, but also more difficult to deal with. There she was, my lovely cousin, looking at me with forlorn longing, face open like a flower, waiting for answers. Whatever made her think I had any? I wasn’t interested in anything so dull as simple answers anyway; I wanted more than that.
