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N onna Ursula didn’t wait for my reply; obviously, I’d do as she wished.

Everyone should do as she wished.

“I’m weary,” she announced. Silence fell, the men leaped up and all eyes fixed on her. The company waited, breath bated, for a pronouncement— spreads terror like manure, I remembered—but she merely smiled with those strong teeth. “Rosie will help me. Good night.”

The company slumped as if released from a great stress.

I didn’t make the mistake of helping her out of her chair—which irritated her no end. “Give me a hand, girl, give me a hand! How many times do you think I can stand on my own?”

“Madam, I do not assume anything about a lady of your age and strength.” I added more philosophically, “And I scheme to never get on the rude side of your cane.”

“Help me up, then. I promise not to thump you.” Between the two of us, we got her out of the chair. As she walked past her son, she whacked the back of his head with her open palm. “Come back on the morrow,” she commanded. “Bring your wife.”

Duke Yago would not, I thought, dare disobey a direct command from his formidable mother.

We walked slowly down the corridor. “Here.” She pointed into a small, cozy chamber.

When we’d entered, I realized this opened into a greater room, with a bed spread with woven blankets and fur skins, and a variety of pillows piled at the ornate headboard.

A large casement window filled with small panes of heavy, clouded glass would in the daytime allow light into the chamber, and more than portraits or statues or exotic plants marked the wealth of the palace.

“Your sitting room and bedchamber?” I inquired.

“Indeed. I can’t climb the stairs, and this places me in the center of things, where I can keep track of the household.” She added, “Shut the door. No spy holes gaze in here, no secret passages lead in or out. We can talk.” She tried to sit in a comfortable chaise, and wavered.

I leaped forward and steadied her, then helped her sit, then recline, and tucked pillows behind her head.

“You know how to care for the elderly,” she observed, and closed her eyes wearily.

“I helped Nurse with my Capulet grandfather as he faded.”

“It irritates that company fatigues me, that I can’t hear the words, much less the nuances, that I must strain to see.

” She opened her eyes. “But I can see and hear my son and his contempt. What a cabbage-cask he is, smelling of vinegar, shrunken with salt, puckering the mouth, and offending the nose.”

I gave her a summation of Papà’s philosophy. “Everyone does the best they can. Sadly, some are shit-crawling worm-suckers, and their best reeks of funk and failure.”

“Perhaps.” She smiled bitterly. “Yet I’m his mother and he’s my funk and failure.”

“She always did blame herself for his failings.” Of course, Elder had tagged along. “Yet I remember—he was born bound in pity for himself and lacking care and compassion for others. It’s in himself that the blemishes lie.”

“He’s not dead yet,” I said to both of them. “He may improve.”

“God grant,” they both answered.

Neither believed it.

“Nonna Ursula.” I took the coverlet folded at the foot of the chaise and tucked it around her slight figure. “I’ve heard naught but good about your faithful support of your son, your grandson, and your loving care for your granddaughter, yet you fret. Do you wish to unburden yourself?”

In the first nervous gesture I’d seen from her, she plucked at the heavy material.

“I should never have gone with Eleanor to the convent. I should never have left Escalus alone. Eleanor was the woman who made all Verona see that the brusque, hearty, insensitive man had a tender side. She feared for him. She begged to stay with him. With the unrest, she had no choice; she had to leave Verona to have her child, so turned her pleas to me, asking that I stay with him.”

“Did he not command that you go with her?”

“All his fears were for her, yes. Yet should I have decided to stay, my will would have been done.”

I examined her. “Eleanor needed you, did she not?”

“Indeed. For all that Princess Isabella is a comfort, Eleanor should never . . . they should never have taken the chance of begetting another child. The difficult birth left her exhausted, yet when she took the baby in her arms, she was revived. It was the news of Escalus’s death that put her in the grave.

If I’d been here watching his back, that wouldn’t have happened.

I’m good at sniffing out treachery, for most men believe women are stupid and old women are senile, and I, in particular, as we discussed, am blind and deaf. ”

“Then you have some suspicions about who might have arranged for the assassination.”

“I do. I did. Escalus was at the height of his powers at the time of his untimely death, thirty-three years old, a strong man and virile. When he had fought and won Verona back from the Acquasassos, no one in his right mind would have attacked him face on, so it had to be drugs and a knife in the dark.”

“Not poison?” I asked.

“I told you not poison,” Elder said in irritation.

I gestured him to silence.

“No. That makes me say it’s not a woman. Women who kill use poison. Men want blood on the blade. But”—Nonna Ursula lifted her hands in that unknowing gesture—“we all know women can be deadly in every way, and my son was not . . .”

I went on alert. “Not?”

“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.”

“The meanest old woman in Verona,” Elder reminded me.

“I’m also the meanest old woman in Verona, Padua, and Mantua.” Again Nonna Ursula, more or less, echoed Elder. Could she in some hidden part of her mind hear him?

“I’d wear the meanest old woman tiara for Venice, too, but last I heard that Acquasasso bitch is still alive. Lady Pulissena, cursed be her name. But, girl, do you have a better idea to find out if our assassin is still living? And for flushing out the villain?”

I couldn’t, and I looked to Elder.

He shook his head. “She told me I had a talent for intrigue, and that I inherited it from her.”

Nonna Ursula took my continued silence as acquiescence. “Tomorrow evening, as the sun goes down, we’ll gather a convocation of sympathetic women to lure the castle ghosts with chants and charms, and discover what they witnessed on that blood-soaked night of murder, treachery, and sorrow.”