Page 46

C al put the tray beside the bed. “Thanks to you, my own sister now calls me Cal.”

I tried not to grin, but he sounded so resigned, and I didn’t believe that for a minute. Always the man was in the right place at the right time, and always he steered himself there. “Earlier, you were here alone.”

“Even then, Emilia remained in the chamber with us and I trembled under her critical gaze.” He plumped the pillows and helped me sit up. He handed me a cold, damp, folded cloth. “Here. Put that on your eye.”

Ah, the palace ice. I had indeed achieved warrior status. I placed it on my bruised face, and both winced and sighed at the prospect of relief. “Nonna Ursula—has she spoken?”

“Not yet. But as you do, she drinks and eats and life comes back into her countenance.”

“That is the best news of all!”

“She’s guarded at all times, as is my sister and your sisters here in Casa Montague.

Thank you for putting Dion on duty when you left.

” He didn’t reproach me for leaving. He knew and understood duty and love, but he had expressly commanded I not go out, and the trip to Casa Montague had been a disaster almost unto death.

Baal of the flame eyes crawling toward me would live on in my nightmares.

Yet I would have gone even if I’d foreseen the events, and he knew it. “Shouldn’t you be out patrolling the streets?”

“Verona is Verona once more. Loud, busy, angry about the disciplinati rioters and the damage they caused, blaming me and my men for failing them. Except the people who for a price repair damage—they’re busy and pleasant.”

I enjoyed his wry humor, knowing he gladly shouldered his burden as both podestà and scapegoat of Verona. “Why do you do it?”

“For my people. For my place.” He placed a hand over his heart and gestured out my window: “For this city on the silver river.

“These red stones glowing in the sun.

“This arena, ancient monument among the ancients.

“This fortress built by Roman gods against the barbarians of the north.

“These men and women who live happily within these ancient walls.

“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this home . . . this Verona.”

All right, I confess, it was poetry, yet I tingled at that magnificent summing up of the beauty that was my city-state.

Prosaically, he handed me a mug. “Here.”

I drank, then peered into it in disgust. It was the same broth and porridge he’d given me earlier. “That’s it?”

“Bread? Cheese?” he suggested.

“Fruit! Honey!” I demanded, and handed back the mug.

Under my eager gaze, he cut an apple into quarters, dipped it in golden honey, and, with his cupped hand under it, put it to my lips.

As I bit eagerly into it, he utilized his handsome eyes and his deep, poetry-reciting voice.

“‘Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.’ ”

Cheating! He’d gone biblical on me, quoting a verse from the Song of Solomon 2. I chewed and swallowed, plucked the apple from his hand, and said, “Yes, I’d like bread and cheese, too, please. And wine, since you offer it.”

He poured a deep red wine, from a flagon, of course, and put it to my lips.

I didn’t like being suckered twice, so I placed the cloth-wrapped ice on the bed—yes, I knew I was going to have a damp spot on the blankets—then took the goblet and sipped.

He wasn’t smiling. He never smiled. But he radiated a manly glee at feeding me and offering wine and making me as aware of him as I would be of a generous lover.

In so many words, I wanted to tell him I got the message and to knock it off, but sometimes (frequently) that didn’t work out for me.

In his hands, my plainspokenness tended to rebound in unforeseen ways.

In other words, I was not a chess player, and he was, able to predict my movements far ahead of me and counter them in the way he considered most advantageous for him.

“Why did my father let you remain in my bedchamber?” I suppose I should have asked that first thing.

“I vowed to be on my best behavior.” Plucking the cup from my fingers, he turned it to drink from the exact place my lips had rested.

It didn’t take Eros to figure out that symbolism. “This is your best behavior?”

“Not at all. One day soon, I’ll pleasure you with my best behavior.

But for today, I keep the implication of my promise to your father.

” Cal carved a trencher out of the crusty bread, cut a slice of blue-veined cheese, finished slicing the apple, and placed them all in the bread bowl with a pool of honey.

“I merely provide you with food and drink. Call it reciprocity for preparing soup to hearten the bodies and souls of me, my sister, and my men.”

“Don’t forget about restoring the palace kitchens to respectability,” I advised him.

He settled into the chair and cut himself a slice of cheese and broke off a stem of grapes, and ate them as if the last few days in battle had been generous in violence, but sparse with food.

“If you’re right and the attack on Nonna Ursula came from within the palace, and was generated by my father’s killer—”

Maybe I was bruised and exhausted, but the way he changed subjects made my head whip around in a complete circle.

“—who do you suspect?” he finished.

Marcellus. But why? Because he didn’t like me and I didn’t like him? I knew better than to propose that solution. Shaking my head, I ate an apple quarter dipped in honey and followed it with a bite of cheese.

At my non-answer, Cal asked, “Who does my father suspect killed him?”

“He saw a man in a mask. He fought and then your father was dead. He doesn’t know.”

“Mayhap the spirit is lying. Mayhap the spirit is not my father, but one come to deceive us.” Cal made a good point.

But—“He looks like the portrait.”

“Can a ghost change its appearance?”

“I don’t know the rules, Cal. No one does, not even your father, or so he says, but I assure you, no ghost who wanted to gull me would be so rude and arrogant. If he drew breath, I would smother him.”

“Sounds like my father,” Cal grudgingly agreed.

Randomly I ripped off a chunk of bread and waved it as I took a stab at a suspect’s name. “Barnadine.”

“He saved my father’s life time and again on the battlefield. Nonna Ursula has treasured him all the years since. Why murder Papà and years later attack my grandmother?” He drank the wine again, then handed me the cup.

“Whoever attacked Nonna Ursula believes that in her séance and with the assistance of Yorick’s skull, she discovered the assassin’s treachery.” I drank, making sure I did not drink from the same place that his lips had touched.

He observed, and if anything, my skittishness pleased him.

Men. Who understands them?

“If she discovered the truth, the killer would already be hanging from a gibbet on the bridge over the Adige River.” He slipped a grape between my lips.

What was I supposed to do? Spit it out? I chewed and swallowed, and responded sensibly. “Your grandmother, being who she is, very well might not tell you what she knows. She might intend to handle it herself, and everyone in the palace and beyond realizes that.”

I could see Cal struggle with that truth. “Damn,” he said. “Yes, Barnadine would grasp that better than anyone, but he has no reason—”

“Unless he killed your father.”

“He fought valiantly with my father and valiantly at my side these last days, while in great pain. Does he really seem to you to be an assassin?”

“If so, I can’t discern why.”

Cal inclined his head in agreement. “Who else?”

Simultaneously we heard a crunching sound and turned to see Cesario standing behind Cal, looking curiously at us both and eating a crust of bread. Seeing that we’d noticed him, he came around to stand between us, forehead puckered, and examine us.

“Cesario, what are you doing?” Cal asked.

“Papà said I should come in here and see if you were canoodling with Rosie.”