Page 22
T he next evening, Nonna Ursula, holding a small cloth bag, hobbled on my arm into the castle’s library.
The setting sun shone through the glass windows.
As convocations go, this one was not large.
Mamma, Princess Isabella, Katherina, and Imogene sat on wooden chairs around a small parquet table, a lit candelabra in the middle.
Princess Isabella and Katherina looked wide-eyed and scared.
Imogene was all energy and excitement, ready to leap out of her skin at a moment’s notice.
Nurse leaned against the wall, arms folded, her mouth puckered in disapproval.
Elder slipped in through the unlit fireplace. “I’ve never witnessed one of these,” he told me. “It’s always been ladies-only entertainment.”
I ignored him for all I was worth, and tried not to consider that if he was within my vision, other spirits could join.
Nonna Ursula asked, “Rosie, who’s attending this gathering?”
I didn’t know if Nonna Ursula was playing her “I can’t see” card, or if the angle of the sun and the arrangement of the candles obscured her sight. “In this chamber are Lady Juliet, two of my sisters, Katherina and Imogene, and Princess Isabella.” I didn’t mention Elder. That seemed premature.
Nonna Ursula peered toward the flickering candlelight. “You have a third sister, the little charmer at the end of last night’s table. Where’s she?”
“Emilia is eight and I didn’t want her to view our proceedings,” Mamma explained.
“Because afterward she’ll wet the bed with fear?” Nonna Ursula asked.
Nurse snorted.
“No, because she’s brave to foolishness, and she’ll burn down our house attempting to lure the spirits by herself.” Mamma knew her daughters very well.
Nonna Ursula cackled. “I like your children, Lady Juliet.”
“Thank you, Nonna Ursula.” Mamma accepted the compliment with complacent ease. “I like them, too.”
Today she seemed less uncomfortable, less on edge, and may I say it? Placid. Papà was right. He did indeed know how to care for Mamma.
I guided Nonna Ursula to the chair with arms and helped her seat herself. Katherina and Princess Isabella scooted her close to the table.
“Rosie, take what’s in the bag and place it in the center of the table.” Nonna Ursula may have been amused.
I opened the bag, reached down, and grabbed what felt like a bony, oblong ball, pulled it out and . . .
Listen, I’m not much of a screamer, but I screamed.
So did Katherina and Princess Isabella.
I dropped the skull on the floor.
It rolled to rest at Nonna Ursula’s side. She picked it up, looked into its empty eye sockets, and said, “Alas, poor Yorick, such rough treatment, when soon you’ll be called upon for assistance!”
“Is that truly the legendary Yorick?” Mamma asked in a conversational tone.
“Who’s Yorick and why is he legendary?” Imogene seemed much less perturbed at the sight of a skull than the other girls.
Or than me, for that matter. I wiped my hand on my skirt and glared at Elder, who tried not very hard to smother a grin.
“Yorick was our jester, a man of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.” Nonna Ursula placed Yorick next to the candles. “He was the only man I ever allowed to attend me at my séances, and after his untimely death, I’ve kept him close to call in the spirits.”
Imogene could contain herself no longer. “Are we really going to contact the spirits of the dead?”
“If they wish to be contacted.” Nonna Ursula smiled a mysterious smile, and as she did, the last rosy ray of the sun struck her face, flushing her with the pink of artificial youth and making her cloudy eyes glow with a fiery red.
The children gasped—I admit to a tremor myself—and Elder said, “ That’s a neat trick.”
Princess Isabella asked, “Nonna, are you . . . yourself?”
“Yes, yes, who else would I be?” As she spoke, the light faded, and she was once more a wrinkled woman with white-blind eyes and an impatient expression.
“First, let us pray that Jesus, Mary, and all the saints guide and protect us in our undertaking this day, for should the spirits venture forth, we seek only enlightenment, and not a haunting.”
At her closing words, I looked meaningfully at Elder.
Who, of course, ignored me. I then closed my eyes, bent my head, and listened to Nonna Ursula’s surprisingly fervent prayer.
But not so surprising, really, for everyone believed in ghoulies and ghosties, although few claimed to have met them, and fewer still really had.
I was in an exclusive club—the only person I knew who had actually visited with a ghost. I admit to some hope that after the “Amen,” Elder would be gone from me.
He must have read my mind, for he said, “No such luck for you.”
Nonna Ursula firmly tapped on the skull with her knuckles, then indicated Mamma should repeat.
Mamma knocked. Imogene knocked. Then—reluctantly—Katherina, Princess Isabella, and I.
Each strike on the hollow bone sounded startling in its suddenness, contributing to the eerie ambience.
“Yorick has now summoned the ghosts. You”—Nonna Ursula pointed a crooked finger at Imogene—“blow out all but one candle.”
Imogene blew, and left the candle in the middle burning. As the sunset turned to purple dusk, the circle of light around us drew in like a warning, and the empty spaces where Yorick’s eyes and nose had once been seemed to come alive.
I could hear humming in my ears; it was the sound of my listening.
“My mother is good at this,” Elder observed. “Even I’m spooked.”
I shot him a glare. I was not amused.
“Let us hold hands so none of us wander alone.” Nonna Ursula offered one hand to Imogene. “Are you frightened?”
“A little. Mostly, I want to see my Zuann!” Imogene offered her hand to Princess Isabella, and they entwined fingers.
“Your Zuann?” In bewilderment, Nonna Ursula turned to Mamma.
As Mamma took Princess Isabella’s fingers and then Katherina’s, a smile played around her mouth. “Zuann is her dog. He died last year after a good long life.”
“Then your Zuann is at peace and we mustn’t disturb his slumber,” Nonna Ursula advised Imogene.
Imogene sighed. “Mamma said you’d say that.”
Nonna Ursula continued, “We seek to speak to the spirits who wish to give guidance about their untimely deaths.”
“The palace should be full of those.” Princess Isabella glanced over her shoulder.
“We won’t call them all,” Nonna Ursula answered. “Only the ones who witnessed the death of my son, your father.”
“Why doesn’t Rosie ask him who killed him?” Imogene suggested.
Elder cackled a laugh.
Everyone jumped as if they’d heard him, and jumped again when Katherina grabbed my hand as if it was driftwood bobbing in the Adige River. The completed circle of touch seemed to send a spark through us that forged us into one.
“Imogene, why would Rosie be able to inquire of our murdered prince on any matter?” Mamma asked.
“You gave Rosie the name of your friend and his love, Princess Eleanor, so Rosie’s connected to them both.” Imogene explained it as if everyone should know.
“Hm.” Elder hovered behind his mother, and mused, “As good an explanation as any. Does your sister have the Sight?”
“Yes, but we don’t speak of it.” Then I cursed myself, for looking at him, answering him out loud. He was so . . . there.
Imogene added, “Also, Mamma, if she’s not, then she’s gone mad, for she sees things that aren’t there and replies to questions we don’t hear.”
Heads turned between Imogene and me.
Mamma used both of her joined hands to stroke her belly in her calming manner, and perhaps she brought the child into the circle, for he subsided.
Yes, I’d said I’d communicated with Elder; that was what had given Nonna Ursula the idea of a séance. However, for the first time, she considered that what she viewed as a jest could be the truth, and turned to me. “Do you truly see him? Is he here?”
I should lie and save myself from possible incarceration or accusations of witchcraft. I knew it. But the meanest old woman in Verona trembled and looked on the verge of tears, carried there by hope and a half-realized belief that her son was almost within reach. “Yes.”
Nonna Ursula brushed at her damp lashes, recovered in typical iron-lady fashion, and fixed her ruined vision on me. “Why does he not tell you who killed him?”
“He doesn’t know. He was drugged. The villain wore a mask.” I’d quickly reached the point where speaking to and for Elder seemed—dare I say it—normal?
Nonna Ursula leaned back in astonishment. “You really have confidence my son’s ghost is haunting you.”
“I’m not haunting her,” Elder snapped at his mother. “I gave her a task, and she’s doing a damnable poor job of accomplishing it.”
“You know why we’re sitting around this little table holding hands.” I was speaking to him. “This is for you!”
But Nonna Ursula answered: “Don’t use that tone with me!”
“Not you. Him. ” I tried to point toward the hovering spirit.
Katherina hung on to my hand as though I was drowning, and only she could save me.
“My son?” Nonna Ursula was clearly disbelieving. “You’re talking to my son in that tone?”
“What’s he going to do, Nonna? Haunt me some more?”
“I said I’m not haunting, I’m—” Elder caught sight of my smirk. “You’re mocking me.”
“You and your son are such upright autocrats, it’s hard not to tweak you both a little,” I told her.
Elder stared at me as if I was quacking a message. “Tweak me a little? I’m the prince of Verona!”
“You’re the murdered prince of Verona. The long-dead, moldering-in-the-grave prince of Verona.
” I was not trying to put him in his place, but to give him a sense of historical perspective.
“Which, by the way, helps not at all. If you seek to know who killed you, why are you hanging around the palace? Surely, it would be easier if you wandered about Verona or Padua or Venice or wherever the suspects inhabit and see what they’re up to! ”
“I can’t leave the palace. The bounds of this property hold me.”
“You didn’t tell me that!”
“When I first returned, after I tested Cal and realized he couldn’t help me, I determined that in Verona, there must be some wise man who could help me.
I hurried toward the gate that guards the palazzo—and it was like lightning striking.
With a flash of light and pain, I was flung back into the garden, weakened and amazed. I tried again.”
“Of course, you did,” I muttered.
“I’m confined, unable to leave these boundaries. I can’t move beyond these walls.”
“Why?”
“No one explained the rules,” he said testily. “I was alive, then I woke up dead. There wasn’t a ‘Dear Prince Escalus the elder, Welcome to the Other Realm Dinner Party and Ball.’ ”
“Probably because you’d argue about who should sit at the head of the table, you or the Lord God Himself.” I clapped my hand over my mouth. Blasphemy most dreadful, and I waited to be wiped from the face of the earth.
Hands separated.
Everyone at the table crossed themselves.
Mamma crossed herself. “Rosaline Hortensa Magdelina Eleanor!”
Elder himself looked around as if alarmed.
With a crash as loud as thunder, the heavy wood door slammed open. “What is going on here?”
We all jumped, but it wasn’t the voice of God.
It was Prince Escalus the younger. Papà stood with him, the bodyguards and Barnadine stood behind, and they all wore faces that promised that impressive masculine shouting would commence.
Table of Contents
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