Babblings of a Muppet-Loving Freak

Written for billspillequill for Yuletide 2020



Fortune's Fool

He had never intended to kill Mercutio. The possibility had been there from the moment their blades had crossed, but it had seemed remote, distant, as unlikely as snow in September. It was not even something he had particularly wanted to do. Mercutio might be a friend of the Capulets, but he was none of their blood, and to kill him was to court the severest censure of the prince, his nearest kin. Had Tybalt still been alive, he would almost certainly be under sentence of death.

Of course, he was no longer alive, so he had no need to worry about his execution. The prince’s powers extended only so far, and unless he chose to behave like Creon of old and exact retribution on his corpse by refusing burial, there was nothing that could be done to punish Tybalt by any earthly hands. Other possible justice might be coming, though, and Tybalt shivered, remembering the discourses of Friar Lawrence upon the spiritual penalties of dying with innocent blood on one’s hands.

“Art concerned o’er the fate of thy soul, Prince of Cats?”

Tybalt turned abruptly at the sound, recognizing it as Mercutio’s voice and yet not sounding quite like him. It was a voice without a throat or tongue, without air or the warmth of human breath, but he could somehow hear it. The public square where his own death had occurred was still there. The outlines of the buildings could be dimly perceived, as though he were looking at them through smoked glass. Figures moved, and if he concentrated hard enough, he could make out faces, voices, recognize humans he had fought with or against, but the world seemed bereft of color. Where his feet would be if he were living, lying on the ground in what must have been a pool of scarlet blood, was the body of Mercutio, looking like a lump of grayish clay. That was all the body was now: a lifeless form waiting to return to the earth.

“Thy corse lookst no better than mine,” Mercutio said. “E’en see. There thou liest, for Romeo, whom thou wouldst have slain, hath slain thee instead.”

“I have died and yet still I am not rid of thee and thy eternally flapping tongue?” Tybalt said, not quite able to find Mercutio in the midst of the strangely out of focus mental cacophony around him.

“Indeed, that ‘eternally’ is most apt,” he said as he resolved into view within Tybalt’s scope of vision, “and forever and anon shall I be here, or there, or anywhere, or nowhere, mayhaps.”

Tybalt ground his teeth but thought better of threatening further violence. He was still unsure of the rules of this place, and if judgment was nigh, offering to kill Mercutio a second time would most likely not be a point in his soul’s favor. Still, as tempting as a brawl was to his fiery temperament, when he remembered that he truly was guilty of Mercutio’s death, the heat of his blood abruptly froze.

Tybalt had killed men before, always in fair fights. Three other men of Verona had been sent to their tombs by him, two of them Montague allies, a third a common thief who had tried to make off with Tybalt’s father’s horse. He held no real sorrow for these, which in his rare colder moods he realized might be a fault in itself, but he did regret Mercutio’s death. For one thing, the blow had not been truly honest. Romeo had come between them, and Tybalt had meant only to wound Mercutio’s pride, not kill him, but the boy’s elbow had made the sword skitter from its intended target and had instead coaxed it home, into the man’s very heart. It was the first time Tybalt had been horrified at the sight of blood.

Mercutio’s figure nodded solemnly at him.

“Thou hast indeed slain me,” he said.

“I—” Tybalt paused, considering his words carefully. “I regret that. I would I had done some other thing. I did not intend harm.”

“No, but thou intended to kill elsewhere. Of that, I am certain,” Mercutio said. “Why?”

“Romeo behaved with marked boldness, e’en to the point of brazen insult, by coming to my noble aunt and uncle’s home for their festivities,” Tybalt said, and he felt the accustomed blazing in his chest as his anger bloomed like a scarlet flower in his bosom. “For that, the villain deserved death.”

“Why?” Mercutio asked again.

Tybalt gave him a sharp look. Had he still been alive, he would have struck the man, but as it was he supposed his best, most peaceful behavior would be the wisest course of action.

“I understand thee not,” Tybalt said, trying to keep the anger from his voice.

“Why, good Tybalt!” Mercutio repeated loudly. “I have asked why, why, why! Tis not merely a letter of the alphabet starting such useful words as yeoman, youth, and yonder, but a goodly question into the bargain, for one may not answer it merely with ‘aye’ or ‘nay.’ Why was Romeo’s coming to the Capulet home, to dance and drink a bit like any other guest, such an offense as to warrant death as its deserved penalty?”

“Because he is a Montague!” Tybalt all but roared. “That alone provides offense!”

“Why?” Mercutio said, more quietly this time, and his gaze seemed to pierce Tybalt through the eyes. “Why is to be a Montague to be worthy of death for the smallest of reasons, or no reason at all?”

“Montagues hate Capulets, and my aunt is married to Lord Capulet, so my loyalty is pledged there in defense of my blood,” Tybalt said, though he was beginning to have a most uneasy feeling.

“That ‘blood’ is a good word,” Mercutio said. “Thou art covered in it, as art a good number of Capulets, and Montagues too, no doubt. But Romeo did not mean to kill your good aunt and uncle. I took him to their home to cheer his drooping spirits, much to my misfortune, as thou canst see. Perhaps some fault lies with me, for had I not convinced him to go, he should have stayed, and he would pine for his Rosaline and then after many a heavy sigh of ‘o,’ a letter less good than y in my books, he would return to life again and seek some other poison for his heart.”

“Romeo desires Rosaline?” Tybalt asked, his interest piqued. Though a great lover of the boiling blood of the fight, he also had a hearty appetite for the latest tales. “The daughter of the captain of the guard? The one with a nose like a squashed pippin?”

“The same,” Mercutio said, “though that heavenly body was eclipsed when he found a newer, brighter star by which to steer his heart’s course.”

Tybalt was full of curiosity now, and, in spite of himself, he leaned a bit towards Mercutio and asked in a conspiratorial tone, “Then who?”

Mercutio looked in an exaggerated movement to his right and left then drew close to Tybalt’s ear before loudly whispering, “Juliet, thy cousin.”

He had obviously expected the explosion as Tybalt was unable to grab the spirit and throttle him for the sheer insult of the suggestion that his chaste, sweet cousin who was barely more than a child would excite the animal lust of a Montague, and Mercutio dodged the blow with a speed like a stallion in full gallop.

“She shall have none of him!” Tybalt said. “She shall deny him! She may well slay him with her own embroidery bodkin if he but suggest such a thing!”

“Forsooth, they were married this afternoon just before this fray occurred,” Mercutio said from a safe distance.

Tybalt had the word “liar” upon his lips, but something in Mercutio’s manner made the word die there. Somehow, he knew that it was the truth. What point was there to lie in death?

“That?” Tybalt said, staring at the blurry form of Romeo. “She chose that?”

“And he chose her, like Adam unto Eve, and the friar hath joined their hands and all but the animal rights are done,” Mercutio said.

“Thou knewest this?” Tybalt asked, wondering if this might be ample enough reason for him to fight Mercutio again as he felt as though if he didn’t fight someone soon, he was going to explode.

“Not I,” Mercutio said with a chuckle. “No, in this I was as innocent as a newborn babe.”

“Which she shall no doubt have in short order,” Tybalt said, spitting on the ground. “A half-Montague, half-Capulet abomination.”

“Oh, no,” Mercutio said. “No, not at all. Faith, no, for she will die. As will he, in fact, and a good many others, as I did at thy hand. Until that hand of thine drew its sword in spite of the peaceful words of the heir of Montague, hope blazed like a comet in the skies above. Now, tis gone. The stars are set in their paths.”

“By what art dost thou know all this?” Tybalt asked, and though he meant to make it sound as though he held Mercutio’s dire predictions in disdainful unlikelihood, he felt cold in a way his body never had. “Art thou a witch?”

“Nay. I have only been dead longer than thou hast,” Mercutio said vaguely.

“A full five minutes?” Tybalt said in disbelief. “That paltry ticking of the clock has taught you all this?”

“Five minutes here is not five minutes in the other world,” Mercutio said, “and my tutor was one thou hast not yet met. Behold! He stands behind thee, as he stands invisible behind us all in life, waiting, biding time, watching and marking all we do. Hast thou never heard the sound of his sickle being patiently sharpened on an everlasting flint as thou drifted away in slumber?”

Tybalt did not move. A presence was there, just behind him, the same one all feel in moments of too much quiet, too much darkness, too much solitude. It prickled the skin on the back of his neck, though he supposed he had neither skin nor neck anymore, but he certainly felt them, nonetheless. As he often did when afraid, he pushed the feeling down into his liver, shut his eyes, inhaled deeply, and converted it into anger. The trick had served him well many times, making him bold, though perhaps sometimes foolhardy into the bargain, rather than fearful. He whirled about, ready to confront the image of Death itself. He was not prepared for what he saw.

It was himself. A second Tybalt stared back at him, exact to the smallest detail, even to the fingernails. Though dressed in somber black, the cut of his clothes was identical to the doublet and hose he wore when he died. Even the ring of fiery ruby that his aunt had gifted him with last Christmastide sparkled like a drop of fresh blood upon his twin’s thumb. Tybalt narrowed his eyes in confusion, the anger drying up and blowing away like dead leaves in a winter blast. His mind tried to clutch at them, to keep the borrowed courage of rage, but they eluded him, leaving him alone with his darker self.

“Tybalt, meet Death,” Mercutio said, making a sweeping bow. “Then again, thou already hast, though not so clearly.”

The other Tybalt dressed in mourning never blinked, he noticed. It was unnerving, perhaps more than any other aspect of the thing before him.

“I do not understand,” Tybalt said.

“When hast thou ever understood aught?” the other said, his voice another perfect copy of him, though there was a hint of something in its cadence that somehow reminded Tybalt of the church bells rung during a funeral Mass. “We shall remedy that.”

“What is’t I am to understand?” he asked.

“Why thou hast slain Mercutio,” the other said. “Why thou brought about thy own death. Why the fair city of Verona, sweet and fruitful hunting ground of my own, is being all but picked clean by the hatred and anger of Montague and Capulet. That was to stop. The first steps were taken, and if all had remained well, as it should have, then the right of reaping would have returned to me, not to the wandering bloodlust of mere mortals who think they decide their own paths. In words elsewise more brief, thou hast spoiled it all for no reason that thou knowest.”

“Peace was to be between Montague and Capulet?” Tybalt asked in disbelief. “This hasty marriage of my near-child cousin and this saucy villain seems a weak vessel to carry that hope to shore. I believe it not.”

The change in the other Tybalt’s features was not radical, but the tiniest of shifts happened, the sharpening of the nose, the darkening of his hair, and the slightest tinge of red in the darkest part of his pupils. The result was all the more chilling for its subtlety.

“I do not lie,” Death said, each word distinct. “The love granted those two was ordained by heaven itself as a balm to end the many decades of violence that have plagued these streets for too long. Let others debate whether true love may be known in an instant, but in truth that was the gift they were given. ‘Twas an angel that brought their hearts together, the blessing of all creation upon them, and they were to live together as few have ever done, happy and safe, for many long years, surrounded by children and grandchildren, the first fruits of the peace that should have reigned at last in Verona.”

“Art thou not Death?” Tybalt asked, trying to avoid the slowly surging certainty that he had done something desperately wrong. “Do not all who die fall under thy scythe? Why this show of mercy?”

“All should indeed die under my scythe, but do not. Wars and murders rob me of my due. These are never how the slain were intended to die by Divine choice. Instead, humans, such as thee, set themselves up in my rightful place. It is thou who hast cast my features into thy mold, Tybalt; thou hast grafted this mask upon me. Thy unchecked fury in this foolish duel without cause hath undone all that was meant for good and shall reap yet more souls before their appointed time before the curtain shall close.”

Tybalt was silent as the weight of these words settled into his heart. He was headstrong and given to temper, this he knew. Doctors had told him his humours were out of balance, that yellow bile made him choleric and liable to swift anger, but he had never attempted to right the disproportionate reliance on rage in his heart. He found he enjoyed it. Still, for all that, the idea of innocent blood on his hands was sickening to him. His own cousin was to die for his sins, and this struck him as a grave sin on his conscience if true.

“Cannot this be changed?” Tybalt asked.

He saw his own face shake its head.

“Thou began this stone rolling down the hill. No matter how ardently thou callest it back into place or run to check its calamitous path, it will not stop. It is a doom beyond measure, one over which heaven itself weeps, and it began at the tip of your blade,” Death said to him.

“Who else shall die from this?” Tybalt asked, his heart clenching in preparation.

“From thee, thou meanest,” Death said. “In addition to thy cousin and Romeo, Paris shall die, and Lady Montague as well in addition to Mercutio, who is already slain.”

Mercutio waved gayly at him from behind Death’s back as though in greeting.

“I would thou wouldst not do that,” Death said in a voice filled with long suffering.

“Thou hast known him but ten minutes,” Tybalt said. “I assure thee, his presence ages less like fine wine and more like unto milk set out in the sun.”

Mercutio threw him an antic grimace before adding in a more sober tone, “Death and I are old friends. Madness and wit twine about him like climbing roses of similar hue, and these have long grown around me as well, invisible, binding we two together with cords beyond mortal understanding.”

Death regarded him, then nodded.

“A poet,” Death said softly. “Thou wast meant to be a poet, as are all who play the fool. What thou wouldst have made with more time, I weep to think of, as thy life was meant to wander many other paths, give many other delights to those who knew thee.”

“Mercutio is beloved by all,” he said, smiling to himself at the thought.

“Merry, tis true, except for one word, friend, and that word should instead be was,” Death said, his words grey with regret.

Tybalt watched the exchange, and guilt again stabbed him with a rapier tip. It was indeed his fault Mercutio had died, and that had not been right. But to slay two women, one his own blood? Even if the other happened to be a Montague, that was foul as well. Noble Paris, too, would die from these events, the prince’s own kin? Tybalt had reason to dislike the man. Romeo… well, Tybalt hated him. He would not lie to himself. But when added to the list of dead that could be counted as his victims, he became another mark on his soul, one no less horrid than the rest.

“I did not intend this,” Tybalt muttered. “’Twas not what I wished.”

“No,” Death said, drawing his attention from Mercutio back to Tybalt. “It is precisely as thou wished. Thou didst desire to have me dance Romeo away in return for his dance at Capulet’s, but thou sawst not what the end of thy vengeance would be. Neither did thou see its beginning, and that is to be thy quest.”

“Quest?” Tybalt asked.

“Before thou may receive judgment, thou must fulfill a quest,” Death said.

“A sort of purgatory?” Tybalt asked.

“No, that is another where. Thou hast not yet risen e’en to that level. Before thou canst be set before the bench and thy sins weighed out for punishment and thy good deeds for reward, first thou must know in what painting thy form is drawn,” Death said.

Tybalt frowned. He feared this would not end well.

“What quest lies before me?” he asked.

“Thou art to learn the beginning,” Death said. “Montague and Capulet hate one another, save for those two, but neither remembers why anymore. Both sides willingly spring to murder rather than question the cause of their revulsion at the sight of their enemy. Thou will find out why this began. When that is done, then judgment shall come, but not before.”

Tybalt thought for a long minute before nodding in agreement. “It is just. I shall find it out.”

Death then motioned to Mercutio to come forward. A momentary fear touched his features, but he soon swallowed it and walked calmly towards him.

“And I? Where do I go?” he asked.

“With me,” Death said. “The journey for thee is at an end. The decision on thy soul awaits.”

Mercutio looked worried, then glanced at Tybalt.

“I wish thee luck,” he said. “If I hold my death not against thee, wilt thou excuse my offenses at thy expense in return?”

“I will,” Tybalt said, feeling relieved.

Death watched them with approval, then put his arm around Mercutio like an old friend and led him a few paces before they both faded away.

Tybalt looked for a while at the spot where they had vanished before taking in the square once again. He could make out the whole of the living, mortal world more clearly now, but he did not feel part of it. His own corpse and that of Mercutio still lay upon the ground, bleeding, as those from either faction argued with the prince about who was to blame and what punishment was fitting. Tybalt knew the truth, though. The one most at blame was Tybalt, and Tybalt was beyond their scope of law.

He stood to the side and watched, for that was all he could do. He knew what doom was waiting, and, a mere phantom, he could do nothing but bear witness to the tragedy that would inevitably ensue. He stayed within the confines of Verona, walking the streets in silence, waiting, the familiar sights and sounds of his life close and yet somehow as removed from him and distant as a mountain seen on the horizon.

That evening, he visited the house of his enemy, much as Romeo had done, and stood at the bedside of Lady Montague. He supposed once she must have had a name other than Montague, but it had dissolved in importance once she become the wife of her lord. From that moment, she became someone he would hate. He wondered who she had been before that. Tybalt watched the woman as she lay in a delirium over her son’s banishment, repeating his name. Were she not a Montague, even his fiery heart would be drenched by her tears into human sympathy.

The longer he stayed, the less she seemed to him a Montague, the more she became only a mother bereft of her sole child.

The night wore on, and Lord Montague did not return. The servants did not call on her, and she thought herself alone. She was a small woman, frail, and though not more than thirty-five years old, a weariness sat on her brow that seemed more fitting for one much older. Tybalt stayed with her as her heart broke at first in loneliness, and then, from the great strain of her own grief, stopped of its own accord. He alone watched her die. He alone felt tears prick his eyes at the fate of this enemy he had slain without a sword.

Upon leaving her body, her soul stood up, but her ghostly form still sagged with the weight of her sorrow. Tybalt wondered if she would see him, and when her eyes looked into his and knowledge dawned in them, he knew she could.

“Art thou Death, Tybalt?” she asked, her voice stronger than he had expected.

“Sometimes,” he replied truthfully.

“I am sorry that my son killed thee,” she said.

“As am I,” Tybalt said.

At that moment, Death appeared again, though not in the form of Tybalt. This time, there was only a vivid light, similar to the way the sun’s rays might pierce through a window when the time of year was just right, making them look solid, as though one might touch them and feel not merely warmth but the surface of the sun itself. The light stretched across the chamber floor until it reached Lady Capulet’s feet. Her face looked frightened, but determined, and she remained still as she let the light encompass her, the brightness increasing until Tybalt could no longer look at her. Then, in a moment, both it and she were gone.

He wished he had asked her name.

It was not long before Tybalt found himself in another room, watching another woman grapple with death, but this woman was only thirteen, though now married, and she had no desire to die. Tybalt stood in a corner, quietly watching, wishing he could intervene. He was not sure if Juliet would die now or not, and he was impressed with her clarity of thought in realizing Friar Lawrence might have given her poison to clear away the problems of the marriage he had blessed. It saddened him to realize they had all grown distrustful: of Montagues, of the prince, of the Church, or one another. Vendettas and feuds engendered a constant paranoia, though perhaps it wasn’t truly paranoid considering how often murder really was being plotted. This girl, who should be happily naive and trusting in the first blush of wedded bliss, saw the potential for treachery even in the guise of a priest, and Tybalt couldn’t swear she was wrong. They had all turned their lives into an endless bout of suspicion, earned or not.

As he listened to her ponder aloud the different outcomes, each one horrible, that might come from her taking the dram, Tybalt grimaced. Death had said this was his doing. He had put the gears into motion, and if he simply hadn’t killed Mercutio, who had done very little to offend him and whom he had always rather liked, truth be known, his little cousin would not now be rambling to herself about his own bones keeping her company in the family crypt. In the midst of her nervous thoughts, she suddenly looked at a spot perhaps ten feet from him that was in deep shadow and cried that she saw him there. He looked at the spot, straining to see if aught else was present that he had not noticed, but he saw nothing. However, that was no sure proof that nothing was all that stood there. That he had learned.

She drank, and in a moment she was stretched motionless upon her bed. It was the perfect imitation, but Juliet’s supposed death did not fool Tybalt. He knew at once that she still lived. Though only two days had passed since his own death, he had seen enough of it now to know when it was absent. The family wailed and howled, but this time there was no vengeance to take, only mourning, and she slept on.

He stayed close, following her supposed corpse’s procession to the crypt, and he waited. A few hours, the length of a single disturbingly bright and sunny day, passed, and then Romeo abruptly arrived and just as abruptly killed Paris. Paris had meant no harm in all this, he supposed. He had been a fair choice for a husband for his cousin, though in truth Tybalt had always found him less than stimulating. In fact, he was rather inclined to provoke ennui in a listener after a few minutes of conversation.

The unusual part of Paris’s death was it occurred in a graveyard, and he was claimed into the next world without any ceremony, merely there a moment or two and then gone. Tybalt was not the only shade to witness it, especially since it was the dead of night. He had not spoken with many of the other shades he had noticed. None of them were inclined to overmuch conversation, and most of them had their own quests to be completed before they were marked as fit for judgment. A few of them had no such endeavor to pursue and wandered, sad, angry, vengeful, even deranged, without a purpose. These, he noticed, were often those who had lived lives that had made him tremble at their bloody appetites, their utter lack of honor. He wondered if they were damned and simply didn’t know it yet.

In his worst moments, Tybalt wondered the same thing about himself.

He watched silently as Romeo drank poison. Tybalt’s heart twisted within him. He still did not like the boy, but he knew Romeo was making a fatal mistake. It must have been remarkably fast poison as he was dead in moments. Tybalt watched as his soul left his body, standing to one side, still with its gaze fixed on Juliet.

“Where art thou, my love?” he asked, then glanced around the tomb, and his eyes lighted on Tybalt. At once, he was angry. “Hast thou taken her from me e’en in death?”

“Nay,” Tybalt said. “Poor fool boy, she is not dead. Not yet. Watch and thou wilt see.”

Romeo furrowed his brow as though trying to decide whether Tybalt was lying, but a low sound from Juliet made him whirl towards her, kneeling beside her, trying to draw her attention. So far as Tybalt could tell, she saw and heard nothing of him at all, and when she buried Romeo’s dagger to the hilt in her heart, Tybalt knew it had found its mark.

“I am here,” Romeo said as she left her body behind.

Tybalt saw his cousin turn to embrace her rightful enemy when she caught sight of him.

“Tybalt, my cousin,” she said, and a smile flitted over her features. “Thou hast come to welcome me to my new place in the shadows?”

“I doubt that you will stay here, or that one either,” he said. “That is for we poor lost.”

Sadness darkened her eyes.

“Can I not do anything to help thee?” she asked.

A thought came to him, and he said quickly, not knowing how much time they had, “Perhaps. Do either of you know why this feud began? Is there any who might know?”

Juliet and Romeo exchanged looks before both shook their heads.

“But there are two who may,” Juliet said. “Friar Lawrence knows a great many secrets, and so does my dear nurse.”

She had always been a clever girl, but as he opened his mouth to thank her for her counsel, she and Romeo simply vanished. No light, no guide, no preamble of any sort, just a sudden stop. Like their lives, it had been brief and suddenly ended. Regret came to him again, and he wondered if his growing ability to feel it was part of his punishment.

As the others arrived, Friar Lawrence discovering the pair, Tybalt regarded him appraisingly. Would he need to wait until the man died to find out the truth? Or the nurse, perhaps? Neither was in poor health. It might be many long years before he found his answers.

As the sizable crowd of Capulets, Montagues, and other citizens of Verona stared aghast into the tomb to see three dead where once there had been one, something odd happened. For one moment, as the friar wept beside his young protégé, he lifted his eyes in Tybalt’s direction and immediately started backwards as though terrified.

“Thou canst see me?” Tybalt asked, stunned, but the general chaos of the crypt put too many people between them, and the man was soon lost to his sight.

The next morning, after a double funeral for the young couple, Tybalt found himself inside the church, hoping that Friar Lawrence might linger there. He was again rather surprised to find he could enter a church at all, walk on hallowed ground, but like the blessed soil of the graveyard it had presented no challenge to him at all. He watched as Rosaline spoke quietly to the friar, her disproportionate sorrow testament to the falseness of her words spurning Romeo’s love. The words exchanged suggested she would indeed soon take the veil now, though. After she left through the great door of the church, reminding Tybalt of Mercutio’s dying witticism about the size of his wound, there were none else present. Tybalt removed himself from the shadows of the nave and went towards Friar Lawrence, who was snuffing candles on either side of the altar, his back to Tybalt. Just as Tybalt was about to speak, the sound of the church door opening again resounded through the space, and Tybalt glanced back to see the nurse genuflecting hurriedly and then walking with determination towards the altar.

“Friar Lawrence, I would speak with thee,” she said. “I must make confession or else hell itself yawns before my toes whene’er I look down.”

He turned to answer her, but Tybalt was certain at once that the old man saw him as well. The friar crossed himself, not breaking eye contact with Tybalt even as the nurse babbled on.

“Do you see anyone else here?” he asked her, stopping her in the middle of a sentence.

“What? No,” she said, looking all around, including for a moment right at Tybalt. “No one, save ourselves.”

“Not Tybalt?” Friar Lawrence asked.

“Tybalt? He’s dead! Thou did the right of burial with thy own hands,” she said. “Art thou ill?”

“He stands not three paces from thee,” Friar Lawrence said.

In acknowledgement, Tybalt nodded in what he hoped wasn’t a threatening way, though in truth if as a human he had seen someone he had known to be dead standing before him, he was certain his own reaction would not be a calm one. More than likely he would have tried to run it through with his sword, but that failing, retreat was an option he might have pursued wholeheartedly.

“What? Here? In the church?” the nurse said, looking around again. Then she seemed to consider for a moment. “I have heard much stranger things that are true. Why should he not be here? Juliet was his cousin, and Tybalt was always a good friend to me, and kind, and treated me with respect, so I fear not his shade if it is here, for a damned spirit would not be able to be in church, would it?”

“I cannot say,” Friar Lawrence said.

“Canst hear me?” Tybalt asked.

Friar Lawrence paled visibly, but nodded.

“It speaks?” the nurse asked.

“It does,” he said.

“All to the good,” the nurse said. “Ask him what present he did give me last Christmastide.”

“’Twas a gold coin,” Tybalt answered immediately.

“A gold coin?” the friar repeated.

“Indeed, it’s he,” she said, smiling. “Good Tybalt, I have missed thee, and I am right sorry thou wast slain. What dost thou here?”

“I am unwinding a riddle,” Tybalt said, “but with little success.”

“Faith, I’ll be no help there,” the nurse said dismissively after the friar relayed this information. “I never did understand riddles and mysteries.”

“What riddle?” the friar asked warily.

“I must know how the feud began twixt Capulet and Montague,” Tybalt said. “What is the reason for this ire?”

“Oh,” Friar Lawrence said, his face falling.

“What? What? Tell me,” the nurse said, obviously excited.

“He would know why Capulet and Montague hate one other,” he said.

The nurse made a dismissive gesture like she was brushing away a bothersome fly.

“Capulets and Montagues have hated each other since God made Adam,” she said. “It is the way things have always been.”

“It was not,” the friar said, sighing and sitting heavily in a pew.

“What?” the nurse said, staring at him agog and aghast. “That is madness!”

“No, this never-ending battle over neither side knows what is madness,” he said angrily. “I have hopes now that this may end, for there are no more Montague or Capulets to breed more of either. All are gone save the wretched parents, and those even with a hole in the shape of Montague’s lady.”

“True enough, forsooth,” the nurse said sadly. “Whether they will it or no, when both sides are dead, there is the end of the quarrel, unless it be taken up still in heaven or hell.”

“Or some place in between,” Tybalt interrupted. “Thou knowest something, good friar. I would thou inform me of it quickly.”

The friar looked at the spectral form of Tybalt and shuddered again.

“I may not divulge the secrets of confession without peril to my soul,” he said, “but what I can tell, I will. Over fifty years ago—”

“I were not e’en born yet nor thought of,” the nurse muttered, hunkering herself down into one of the pews across from the friar and looking at him attentively right through Tybalt. “Little wonder I knew it not.”

The friar cleared his throat impatiently, and she silenced herself.

“Over fifty years ago,” he repeated, “in this same Verona, there was yet another prince.”

“Faith, probably the father or grandfather of him who is now,” she said.

“His great-grandfather,” the friar corrected her. “He had a daughter, as beautiful as day, as graceful as the dancing waves, as soft-voiced and gifted at singing as the nightingale. I have n’er seen her like before or since.”

Tybalt nodded, but inwardly thought the description ridiculous. She might have been beautiful, but he had never understood the strange common desire of all storytellers to turn their maiden heroines into combinations of Venus, Helen, and every other supposedly perfect paragon of antiquity. Did none of them have so much as one crooked tooth?

“However, as beautiful as she was, she had a fault, and that was vanity, a common sin of women blessed with abundant charm,” Friar Lawrence said.

The nurse scoffed at him, then said, “And if they had not vanity, what would they have, hmm? If a woman values not her own beauty, then she has taken her greatest weapon out of its sheath and left it to rust in the sun. It rots quickly enough on its own and needs must be pampered during its brief life or she will bear no life herself, being left a barren field no plow will touch.”

Tybalt gave her an incredulous look, trying to number exactly how many mixed metaphors she had managed to put into her thought, but then he realized that in spite of her stumbling speech she was right, and in any case, she couldn’t see him anyway.

Friar Lawrence waved a hand at her as though to ask if she had finished, and at her nod, he continued.

“Two men in Verona sought her hand, for her elder sister had already been married to the prince of Mantua, and as Verona did not seek another city as ally in those days, she need not marry for politics. Thou canst e’en guess who these two were.”

“Montague and Capulet,” Tybalt and the nurse said together.

“E’en so,” the friar said. “They sang her songs of love, wrote her sonnets, plied her with sweets and fine wines, commissioned portraits of her, scattered roses upon the paths where she trod, and used every trick in love’s book to the very last to ensnare the lady’s heart.”

“The outcome was she was annoyed with them,” Tybalt said immediately.

The friar blinked, then nodded.

“What? I cannot hear him,” the nurse said as though she were listening to a traveling bard.

“Neither won her hand,” the friar said. “She eloped one night with a poor farmer whose many progeny still live to the west of Verona. The result was Montague blamed Capulet for driving her away, and Capulet declared Montague’s clumsy courting had instead been most at fault. They hated each other over her for the rest of their lives, never once speaking her name again until their deathbed confessions.”

“And what were those?” the nurse asked eagerly.

“That I am not at liberty to tell,” Friar Lawrence said discretely. “I will only say that neither ever fully recovered from Cupid’s arrow despite the good women they took to wife.”

Tybalt stood still, waiting for another word from the friar, but none came.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“Aye,” the friar said.

“But which drew blood first?” Tybalt asked. “That at least must be known.”

“Neither,” Friar Lawrence said. “Most thought the quarrel was too thin a thing to last, and yet it did. To begin, there was no outright violence, only loud insults and ridiculous pranks. Someone painted Montague’s roof purple, a color he loathed, in the middle of the night. All of Capulet’s drinking cups were stolen and found at the bottom of a dung heap. Montague’s gardens were picked clean of grapes. Capulet’s fountains were filled with foulest bilge water. In faith, I think it was not they but their servants who did such.”

“Merry, it was,” the nurse said with a laugh. “My husband which is dead these many years told me once of the tricks he played as a boy in the house of Capulet, attacking his own side. It was he and his friends who filled the fountains; Montague’s servants knew of it and did the like, a sort of game, for both sides laughed to see their lords’ most undignified reactions.”

“It grew worse,” Friar Lawrence said. “By the time their sons and their sons’ sons took up the old quarrel, it had drawn into blood. Two were found dead one morning, weapons drawn, the end result of mortal wounds, one of either side, and who had killed the other first or what had prompted it none knew. That is the story of the vendetta that has cost so many lives.”

Tybalt looked about him as though searching for something more valid as a reason. A woman who loved neither man, a pack of children’s tricks, a bloody quarrel between two men that could have been about a horse or a house or a whore or any other thing that drew in followers on both sides and ended in more lives lost until they extinguished their own lines.

“The woman,” the nurse asked, “what was her name, and who was the farmer she married?”

“She was called Lucretia, and Pietro Leone was her chosen husband,” Friar Lawrence said, then immediately looked as though he wished he had not said it.

“That,” Tybalt said haltingly. “That was—”

“Your grandparents, aye,” the friar said. “Lady Capulet, your aunt, your father’s sister, did marry Lord Capulet, and she was child of Lucretia and Pietro, as was your father.”

“So if they had not wed, I would not exist,” Tybalt said.

“Nay, nor Juliet, if it comes to that,” Friar Lawrence said. “None considered a feud with the Leones, for they were poor, though perhaps the fault in all this lay most truly with Lucretia.”

“For what?” the nurse said angrily. “Not marrying with either of two thundering idiots? What responsibility was it of hers to choose between those two alone? She had more wisdom than thou givest her credit for, good father. She knew neither had good sense, and Leone, as I recall, laid hold of the chinks eventually and rose up in the world.”

“He and his did,” the friar admitted. “Thou may be right.”

The nurse looked pleased with herself, and Tybalt found himself agreeing with her. Both other men sounded like self-pitying fools.

“The hate I was taught as a child,” Tybalt said slowly, “the anger that burned in me and spurred me to kill, the great honor of upholding the house of Capulet, all of it was a fool’s reverie. The offense was long ago and a poor excuse for war, save for the two men who killed one another, and that should have cancelled all.”

Friar Lawrence looked at the ground, sorrowful, before rushing to add, “They did not even kill one another. In a confession years after, a man admitted he had fought with both and killed them. He was no one of Verona, a passing servant from Mantua who was nearing death. I will not say his name, since I cannot. I never knew it, and I tread now on the edge of hell with this privileged revelation, but he has been dead many years, so I pray God will forgive me for speaking truth. By the time I discovered this news, Capulet and Montague hated one another for the sheer pleasure it brought them, a self-consuming fire that provided its own bloody fuel.”

“Then it was for nothing at all,” Tybalt said. “My cousin, the boy, Lady Montague, Paris, Mercutio, and, aye, my own poor deceived soul as well, we have died for naught. Tell others of this, Friar Lawrence! Tell them it is all for naught!”

“I doubt they will listen,” Friar Lawrence said. “Their ears are stuffed with the wool of complacency. When violence becomes one’s regular diet, it ceases to taste ill.”

Anger burned in Tybalt’s chest again at the thought that he too had been one of these deluded dupes, that he might have led a pleasanter, less raging life. Now he had no life at all.

“Good Tybalt,” the nurse said timidly, “I am right sorry for thy death. I did not say so before, and I should have done. Thou wast always kind to me, and thou hast many a time made my days less dark than they were with a pleasant word or smile. More to thee there was than a hot temper and a drawn sword.”

“I hope, good woman, that thy recommendation of my soul carries some weight in a higher court,” he said, with the friar repeating for him.

“Hast thou—” she hesitated, then asked quickly, “thou hast not seen my Susan?”

‘Tis was the woman’s daughter who had died as a mere child, he recalled. A moment of deep sorrow passed over him. While the nurse could be a prattling annoyance of no small size, he had always quite liked her for her honesty and forthright manner, and this tragedy of hers had never ceased to touch his heart.

“Nay, for she has gone to a good place, I have no doubt, unlike I who am locked here until Death release me a second time,” he said, his voice gentle even if she could not hear it.

“If thou dost, give her my love,” the nurse said after the friar had finished speaking, her eyes over-bright.

“A quest that I hope shall have a more satisfactory ending than this one,” Tybalt said. “Fare you both well.”

He left the church, his steps, without mortal form, still slow and sad. He had made every wrong turn possible, and now the road had ended, and he did not know where he would stay.

“Thou hast found it out?” Death said from behind him.

“I have,” Tybalt said, turning to see himself again.

“What hast thou learned?” Death asked.

“That I knew nothing at all,” Tybalt said.

“To know that is to know more than many men ever do, in life or death,” Death said. “Thou hast achieved thy quest. Tis time to go on, Tybalt.”

Friar Lawrence stood in the door of the church, watching the two forms speak, unable to hear their words, but their expressions were clear pantomime enough to declare what was happening. As though a breeze had unwound their forms, they drifted away, leaving nothing behind. His heart heavy, he went inside once more, closing the door with an echoing finality.