Page 36 of Thus with a Kiss I Die

“Men are weak.” She made her pronouncement without a hint of doubt.

Elder glared at his mother.

“Escalus loved Eleanor, but when she couldn’t bear a child and each pregnancy weakened her,” Nonna Ursula said, “he resolved to no longer touch her.”

I dug into the marrow of the matter. “He was a flesh-monger?”

“I was not!” he protested.

“No,” Nonna Ursula said. “There were not many women. He was fastidious and circumspect, careful never to bruise Eleanor’s kind heart.”

Sarcasm rolled off me like fog off the Adige River. “How magnificently controlled of him.”

Elder lifted his hands toward heaven. Which was funny in a peculiar way.

“Men.” Nonna Ursula lifted one shoulder. “They think they’re strong, in control. If one of them ever gave birth, all of Adam and Eve’s children would disappear off the face of the earth.”

“She’s right about that,” Elder told me.

I answered them both. “I know.”

“I’ve recently felt he’s near, but that’s perhaps my own procession toward the spirit world.”

“She seems pretty lively to me,” Elder observed.

“Rosie, when you claimed you’d seen the ghost of my son”—clearly, she didn’t believe a word of it—“you gave me an idea.”

“What is that, Nonna Ursula?”

She leaned forward. “When I was younger, I was adept at contacting the spirits.”

Torn between astonishment and alarm, I said,“Really?”

“She’s an old fraud. She never saw a single spirit,” Elder declared.

“No, I’m an old fraud. I never saw a single spirit,” Nonna Ursula echoed.

“Ha! I knew it.” Elder rubbed his hands in glee.

Nonna Ursula continued, “Yet if my son’s killer is still living among us, and hears of our visits with the dead—and he will, for there’s nothing the people love more than royal gossip of a celestial nature—he will perhaps reveal himself with suspicious behavior.”

I considered the idea from all angles. I thought it would work, but . . . “Might that suspicious behavior be violence?”

“You’d think she would have thought of that, wouldn’t you?” Elder viewed his mother with ghostly irritation.

Nonna Ursula said, “I hear you’re quite good at defending yourself.”

Someone must have told her about the incident a few months before.

“And you’ll be on your guard, will you not?”

“Yes.” I took her hand. “But I’m not the only one who might be harmed.”

Nonna Ursula drew herself up. “No one has the guts and nerve to touch me.”

“I admire her confidence.” Rising ghostly irritation.

“My dowager, I admire your confidence.” I was more gentle in my tone than he. “But you’re elderly, nearly blind, nearly deaf, and a woman.”