Sessione 12 – The Masquerade

The night of Capulet’s revels had drawn on, and the bells of Verona had scarcely rung the eighth hour when the company of five (Fancy, Nico, Volpeo, Gianna, and Guido) came to the open gates of the merchant’s grand house. They had been invited there by the Prince, on Capulet’s behalf, to walk in borrowed finery among ancient rivals and hidden plots, and to sift rumor and truth from the music and the wine.

They had come masked and costumed, each in a guise that yet revealed their true nature. Volpeo, tall and lean, swept in like a shadow given purpose, all in black -- hat, cape, mask, and boots -- his once-dark hair completing the figure of a man who would rather be a rumor than a guest. Gianna, a fighter by trade and bearing, wore black and white: white shirt, black trousers, black clothes neat and plain, her hair drawn back and half her face veiled by a long mask that hid one side like the visage of a phantom. Guido, who called upon the powers of heaven and had a way with birds, had chosen a humbler guise, the rough attire of a dock worker, as if he had merely strayed from the quays and into high company by mischance.

Fancy came arrayed in colors that could not be ignored: a gold, corseted bodice shaped like metal armor, with velvet green sleeves and an embroidered skirt full over its crinoline, her horns wrapped in gold filigree and her hair bound up in a Renaissance knot. A fox-like mask hid her features, though no mask could disguise the sharpness of her gaze. Nico wore a golden dragon half-mask and golden cuffs linked by a chain across his horns. His great cloak fell about him in overlapping, iridescent scales, midnight blue edged with gold, blood-red silk within, and golden-scale bracers guarded his arms. They entered as if they belonged, yet each knew he walked upon a knife’s edge between festival and peril.

Within the foyer, music seeped from the inner halls, and two raised platforms framed the space like small stages of their own. To one side a band played, strings and wind carrying bright dance tunes, and to the other lay a punch bowl and platters of dainties: pâté and hors d’oeuvres. Among the masked faces, Fancy spied a familiar figure: Mercutio, sharp-tongued and merry, a friend of the Montagues and a man whose wit cut as keenly as any rapier. Gianna and Volpeo drifted toward the food, as all sensible warriors did when peace allowed; Guido, drawn by the music, went to stand among the band, for musicians, like ravens, always knew where trouble nested.

Mercutio recognized them and, with a wink through his mask, welcomed them to Capulet’s extravagance. He cast his gaze around the hall at the silks, the jewels, the gilded walls and sneered softly, calling it “Capulet’s largesse, a peacock strutting in peacock feathers, such finery to hide a goose beneath.” His tongue wandered to scandal as lightly as his hand to the pâté, speaking of old insults between Capulet and Montague, of words so trifling that no one could now recall them, yet words that had drawn blood in the streets. “These roly‑poly fat men,” he said in substance, “have such thin skins that a jest can birth a duel.”

Fancy, amused and curious, asked after the gossip, seeking any threat hidden behind this glittering mask of civility. Mercutio’s answers, half jest and half lament, painted Verona as a city where honor was brittle and pride deep, and where steel answered slights that wiser men would have laughed away. Gianna, standing quietly nearby, received a “pâté cake” from Mercutio’s hand, his humor turning even food into a jest. Guido, meanwhile, plied the band with coin and questions; they told him Capulet paid well and let them eat their fill, and that they asked no questions of a patron whose gold rang true and whose tables groaned with meat.

Not all inquiries were so light. Volpeo soon sought out Liam, a playwright they had met before, a young man with ink-stained fingers and a restless mind. He found him scribbling in a notebook, practicing what he called “people watching,” catching phrases and gestures to weave into plays. Volpeo spoke to him of the feuding houses, of merchants and sea trade and the ways of Venice, and Liam’s eyes shone as he jotted down thoughts of “two households alike in dignity” and lovers trapped amid ancient grudges. Volpeo, ever the actor in his own right, whispered the seed of a darker comedy: Commedia dell’arte played straight, where a cuckolded soldier’s tale might be tragedy instead of farce, and Liam, delighted, scribbled more, dreaming of a future theater far away in Britannia.

Yet beneath all this talk and laughter lay the true purpose of the five: to uncover proof that Capulet, a wealthy Genoese merchant, was working with Byzantines to smuggle weapons, seeking to shake Venice from within. The Prince had bid them find not only weapons and contraband but written proof of this treachery, a trail of ink that might bind Capulet surer than any chain.

The party’s heart was the great ballroom. When Gianna stepped through its doors, she found a chandelier above, like a fallen ship’s wheel hung in midair, and the floor already filling with pairs of dancers, swirling in time to the band’s new-roused tune. Capulet himself stood near the floor with Lady Capulet, a goblet raised high. With a voice trained to command markets and men alike, he cried, “Welcome, noble strangers, Verona’s halls open wide tonight. Join the dance; let feet fly free as our spirits.” At his words, the musicians struck up a stronger measure, and the guests took to the floor in earnest.

Dance, as ever, had its small dramas. One red‑gowned lady drew two suitors at once; one pushed the other aside, and the rejected fellow, looking about for a partner, caught Gianna’s eye and hauled her laughing onto the floor. She danced willingly and well, but when the song ended and he sought another turn, she excused herself, leaving him to drown his disappointment at the banquet table. Guido, wandering the eastern edge, found a young man lingering alone, a young man with two left feet, staring wistfully at a girl in an orange dress. Guido urged him to bravery, but the youth fretted that she had come with another, though the other was nowhere to be seen.

Fancy’s talents that night were not of steel but of mind. She slipped quietly into the music room where the band played and, unseen, extended her awareness with a sorcerous ESP, listening to the thoughts of the lead musician while praising his performance and swaying to his tune. His mind, as it turned out, was wholly given over to thoughts of food -- to the canapés in the next room, the meats and cheeses waiting until the end of the set, and how soon he might lay bow and pipe aside to feast. Later, Fancy carried the same spell to other minds, treating surface thoughts as threads to be drawn carefully from a tapestry of secrets.

Nico, meanwhile, looked not to the dance but to the doors others overlooked. On the ground floor he spotted a side door, locked and guarded only by a weary servant and the distractions of music and wine. He conceived a need for a distraction and, after a brief exchange with Guido, slipped to the back wall and tested the lock with deft, practiced fingers. Though a servant glimpsed the motion, Nico covered his attempt with a quick lie about a cloakroom, and the man redirected him toward the ballroom, none the wiser that the door now stood unlocked.

As time passed and the quarters of the house filled with masked guests, Fancy sought deeper currents of intrigue. In one hall she spied Romeo and Benvolio entering, masked but unmistakable, accompanied by their companions. Mercutio, ever their mischief-making friend, herded them toward the dance, chiding Romeo for his tardiness and lamenting the missed first dance. Fancy slipped through the throng to Romeo’s side, threading her arm through his with charming familiarity and addressing him as though they were old acquaintances.

All the while, she listened with ESP to the turmoil in his mind. Romeo’s thoughts were not of politics or plague or trade, but of a woman named Rosaline. He peered through the crowd, silently pleading, “Where is she? I am only here because they said she would be here. Rosalind, where are you?” Fancy, reading this yearning, spoke softly to his pride, suggesting that Lord Capulet had meddled in his affairs, seeking to keep him from the woman he loved, and that he ought to stand up for his own heart, Prince’s warnings or no. Romeo, who cared little for politics and everything for love, agreed that he should pursue his heart’s desire and pulled free of her arm, moving toward the ballroom where he believed Rosaline to be.

Benvolio’s mind, when Fancy turned her spell upon it, showed a different hunger: he longed to see what trouble would blossom from Romeo’s pursuit, thinking, in essence, “I must get in there! this is gonna be good!” Leaving the Montague youths to their fates, Fancy delivered a plate of canapés to the band “from one working entertainer to another,” and slipped away to the gardens and corridors in search of servants and secrets.

In the garden hall, she found a servant who warned her politely that guests should remain on the ground floor, and that any door locked against them was not meant to be opened. But in his mind she sensed more: a fleeting impression of a secret room somewhere within the mansion. When she pressed, he would say no more than that guests might go everywhere that stood unlocked, yet she knew, from that brief echo of thought, that hidden spaces existed behind the walls.

All the while, the dance wove its own tale. Volpeo, earlier, had played the go‑between in a drama of hearts. Seeing Romeo’s despair as he watched the red‑gowned Rosaline dance with another, Volpeo proposed introducing him instead to two “very nice women” he had just met: the older Nurse and the young girl in orange. Romeo, scarcely listening, pointed out Rosaline once more, but when Volpeo drew him toward the girl and her Nurse, the Nurse named the orange‑clad maiden: Juliet, lady of the house, engaged to be married in a fortnight.

At that introduction Romeo’s wits deserted him. He stared at Juliet as though the world had narrowed to the span of her face, while she blushed deeply, torn between her father’s wishes and the strange new pull she felt toward this masked stranger. Juliet protested that she did not know how to dance; Romeo offered to teach her, and the Nurse, who understood very well what she was about, hustled them out onto the floor “for practice” before Paris, Juliet’s betrothed, arrived. Volpeo, seeing their mutual enchantment, graciously allowed the Nurse to pull him away toward other amusements, leaving the two young souls to spin together at the center of the hall.

After a dance with the Nurse, Volpeo found Gianna, and they turned their own steps toward quieter chambers. In a side room off the ballroom they found Capulet and Lady Capulet in low conversation with two other men: one with a heavy handlebar mustache and another of handsome mien. Their talk fell to silence at the advent of strangers, and Capulet’s courtesy, though smooth, was edged with impatience; he bade them take food and rest their feet in an adjoining room of sofas and tables, and to enjoy the party rather than loiter in places where households plotted their affairs.

Guided by curiosity more than humility, Gianna and Volpeo moved into a smaller sitting room, where two men invited them to a game of cards. The game, some form of whist or bridge, cost the newcomers five gold pieces apiece before it finished, for neither Gianna nor Volpeo had the measure of their opponents’ cunning at cards. Yet the gold was not spent in vain. Over clinking coins the men spoke more freely: one confessed he ran a local accounting house that occasionally kept Capulet’s books; the other oversaw dock workers who unloaded Capulet’s cargo. When Volpeo inquired about the merchant’s trade, the dockmaster named textiles as Capulet’s principal business, but after a glance at a nearby servant, he added that there was also a “side project”: importing items of the “sharp and pointy” variety, the sort Venice did not wish to see wandering its streets under cloaks.

The accountant, smirking, hinted at multiple sets of books: one honest enough for officials, another where numbers shifted like dice in a loaded cup. Volpeo, pretending a shared understanding of such practices, asked if any of these records lay in the house. The answer was careful: there might be records, but if so, they were beyond the easy access of humble guests. Still, it was enough to confirm their suspicions. Capulet’s gentility was a cloak; beneath it lay the iron commerce of forbidden arms.

Elsewhere, Guido had slipped into a lounge where a woman in green, armed and bearing herself like a warrior, reclined among two companions. They called themselves “associates of Capulet,” neither friends nor family, and spoke lightly of riots, scandals, and princes who never quite came down from their high horses. They joked about Verona’s relative safety from plague, crediting nearby friars skilled in apothecary’s arts, and mocked Guido’s dock-worker “costume” as a bit too convincing (after giving him a mocking sniff). Their banter revealed no hard secrets, but confirmed that Capulet’s web drew in a rougher class of allies than mere counting-house men.

The party’s undercurrent darkened as the hour turned from eight to nine. In the dining-room hall where Gianna lingered near the banquet tables, a man entered with storm in his step and a sword at his side that was no ornament. This was Tybalt, fierce kinsman of the house. He went directly to Capulet and hissed that “this villain Romeo” was in the ballroom and that he would not endure it. Capulet, mindful of the Prince’s decree and the need to keep peace under his own roof, answered in low, hard tones that Romeo “shall be endured.” He would not have bloodshed in his halls this night.

Gianna listened from a careful distance, feigning interest in the food, and caught more: Lady Capulet, angry and afraid of disgrace, furtively urged the handsome man beside her to support Tybalt and to take Romeo “behind the woodshed,” while the man tried to soothe her, visibly siding with Capulet. The handlebar‑moustached guest, for his part, merely rolled his eyes, impatient with the whole affair. In the end, Capulet’s word carried the day. Tybalt was sent back to the ballroom, simmering with thwarted fury, his steps slower than before, his hands still itching for steel. Gianna followed at a discreet distance and saw him gathering his fellows in a corner, gesturing angrily toward Romeo and glaring like a wolf who has been denied meat.

Nico had not forgotten the unlocked door. Returning to the foyer, he met Fancy, who had drifted back from her quiet interrogations. He gave her a subtle sign, tapping his temple to indicate her ESP, and in the silence of thought told her that the door he had opened led somewhere forbidden and that he meant to slip inside, if she could turn the eyes of the guards. They moved arm in arm across the hall as if merely seeking another dance. Nico stopped short of the door, remaining just within the shadows, while Fancy approached the nearest servant, her manner all urgency and grace.

She told the man he was needed at once near the dance floor, that he had been summoned by Capulet, and her words, sharpened by natural charm rather than spell, carried the ring of truth. The servant, thinking his master’s business called, hurried after her toward the ballroom. Fancy did not rely solely on speech; the music filled the foyer and she began to dance, a swirling, fox‑masked figure whose movement drew the attention of the nearby guards. For a moment their watchful eyes followed her instead of the door, and that moment was all Nico needed.

He slipped across the floor like a shadow and eased himself through the unlocked door into Capulet’s private study. Inside the air was still, the noise from the party muted by thick walls and heavy shelves. Maps lay spread upon a table, papers in ordered stacks, as though interrupted mid‑reckoning. Nico moved quickly but methodically, rifling through documents with a thief’s practiced care, seeking anything that spoke of Venice, Byzantium, or arms.

At last he found what they had sought: papers detailing a Verona–Mantua arms deal backed by Byzantine gold, naming routes and quantities, enough to prove that Capulet trafficked in weapons meant to destabilize Venice. This was no rumor or jest but cold evidence, forged in ink and sealed with greed. Nico folded the document small and tucked it close against his body, as precious and dangerous as any jewel. It had cost them only stealth and a bit of spilled wine to obtain, but they all knew Venice would weigh such proof heavily.

While Nico searched, Volpeo pressed his own exploration. In the kitchens beyond the dining room he found a harried chef -- spectacled, keen, and proud of his sausage rolls and deviled eggs -- preparing the next wave of food for the revels. Volpeo, posing as one summoned to meet an accountant, pressed for knowledge of a private office, but the chef knew only his ovens and the storerooms. He admitted there was a locked room beyond, used for storage, but insisted that guests had no business there.

Volpeo passed through into a dark storeroom guided only by the shapes of barrels and crates. A great cask loomed there, large enough to supply a whole season of feasts. When he turned its tap, wine spilled onto the floor, a small crimson river in the dark, and he hastened to shut it again. Other doors in the storeroom were locked fast, beyond the strength of subtlety alone to open; without Nico’s tools or Fancy’s magic, they remained closed mouths guarding their secrets. Circling back through another door, he emerged again into the bright spaces of the ballroom, where the nurse greeted him with a toothy wink and an offer of more private “tours” that promised little in the way of intelligence and much in the way of awkwardness.

By then, Fancy’s ESP had uncovered another thread of danger. Hearing Nico’s silent plea for distraction had drawn her back toward the foyer, and once freed from that task she returned to her earlier design: to stir trouble among Capulet’s guards by hinting that Montagues lurked where they should not. She approached a guard and, with careful malice, told him that Montagues -- Romeo among them -- were inside, intent on mischief. Her words, though, were taken as a jest, and the man laughed them off rather than sounding any alarm. Had she spoken with knowledge of Juliet’s engagement and Romeo’s dance, as Volpeo had learned, the spark might have caught fire, but such knowledge had not reached her; the strands of their several intrigues had not yet been woven together.

As the nine o’clock hour struck, the party hummed like a hive. The Montagues had slipped into the ballroom; Romeo had found not Rosaline but Juliet; Tybalt burned with frustrated rage; Capulet and Lady Capulet balanced honor, politics, and family upon a dagger’s point. In quiet corners, the five companions had learned much: of scandals old and new; of associates and dockmasters; of apothecary friars and plague; of secret rooms hinted at in a servant’s thoughts and locked doors resisting the hand; and, most crucially, of a Verona–Mantua arms deal glinting in black ink behind Capulet’s respectable trade.

So the night’s revels stood poised between feast and feud. The dance still whirled beneath the chandelier, and laughter still sparkled like wine in gilt cups, but beneath the music lay a drumbeat of coming strife: Tybalt’s hand upon his sword, Romeo’s heart given in a single dance, and a packet of incriminating papers folded against Nico’s chest, ready to carry the truth of Capulet’s treachery out into the cold streets of Verona.