The insult had not been forgiven but had warped and grown and calcified into hate, hardening with each year that passed. Or so it was said. Rosaline felt certain there was more to the feud than this slight, but could find none who would tell her.

Caterina cast a blizzard of flour upon the bench. "The Montagues are holding a masque. If you can believe it! Everyone else goes to church to give blessings and thanks, and they hold a ball! And the plague dead barely tucked into their pits. But that's the wont of the Montagues. At least we won't need to go nor send our excuses. God can just smite them as he fancies."

Rosaline was only half listening. The Montagues' parties were renowned throughout Verona and the Venetian Republic: fire-­eaters, tricksters, jugglers, the best musicians that money could hire (and the Montagues had a good deal), feasts of pigeon pie, bloody venison haunches, oysters heaped in alpine mounds, dissolving orange and lemon ices, and dancing until dawn. But all of that was as nothing. The festivities were held in the Montagues' gardens, a labyrinthine grotto of monsters and marvels that she and no Capulet had glimpsed in the flesh.

The gardens were said to have been built a hundred years ago by a Montague man driven mad with grief after his wife died. Terrified that she was lost in the ravages of hell, he had created the seven circles on the wooded hillside surrounding his villa so he could visit her in his dreams. On carnival nights, men and women caroused among a waking nightmare of visions conjured by a tormented soul and given form in stone and moss amid looming forests of cedar, sycamore, and pine.

All of this Rosaline had gleaned from descriptions passed on by neighbors and acquaintances. Before she had married Valentio, Livia had attended a party there with her family, and Rosaline had made her repeat the details of the gardens again and again. Of course when she became a Capulet, Livia was cast out, unable to experience those wicked pleasures again. No Capulet would consider attending.

The reluctant vow her father had pried from her echoed in Rosaline's heart: a dozen days and nights. If she must surrender the sinful world, then first she'd gorge herself on its pleasure. The thought of the Montagues was frightening, but she had so little time left. She must be brave. If the devil himself was playing host, she would attend with ribbons in her hair.


Rosaline paced her chamber. A mask was useful: it would hide her face from God. But for those on earth who knew her from Verona and who still might recognize her, she preferred a more fulsome disguise. She must not be discovered. Her father might have granted her a twelve-­night reprieve, but she knew with cold certainty that this was not how he intended her to spend it. If even a whisper reached his ears, she would be dispatched to the convent immediately. Not only for attending a ball unchaperoned, but at the house of the Montagues, against whom his grudge had petrified into cankered hate. Yet what possible concealment could she procure at this late hour? None of her own clothes would do.

She glanced at a chest at the foot of her wooden cot. This room had once been Valentio's in the years before his marriage, when he did not have a country house of his own. An idea came to Rosaline, and her heart was a bird with frantic wings, hurling against the bars of her ribs. She pried open the trunk. It smelled stale, and a fine larval dust from woodworm was sprinkled across the linen at the top.

It contained little. The torn wings of a long dead moth. A sheet, yellowed with age. Some old clothes belonging to Valentio from his youth. They had not been passed on to a servant in the usual way but tucked away in this trunk, presumably in hope of being worn by more living sons that had never come. The jacket had slashed black-­velvet sleeves, eaten here and there by the moths. The hose were gray, edged with silver brocade, the fabric smooth beneath her fingertips. Yes, she would go to the ball as Valentio. Or as he had been in youth.

Excerpted from Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons. Copyright © 2023 by Natasha Solomons. Excerpted by permission of Sourcebooks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.