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“Y our father always bragged you were an unusually clever girl.” Elder ladled on the sarcasm with a liberal hand.

“So I am.” I considered him. He did indeed look like the portrait .

. . almost. He seemed more worn, so I supposed this apparition resembled his appearance at the moment of his death.

While the center of his being looked solid, as my gaze moved to the edges, I realized his outline wavered as if blown by the breezes of eternity.

I remarked conversationally, “I wonder what vapors are in the air to bring about a phantom’s appearance in my mind. ”

“I might be an illusion caused by food or drink,” Elder offered.

“I’ve had nothing to eat or drink since my arrival at the palace. Maybe your appearance is caused by hunger?”

Elder sagged and sighed. “It’s a good thing you’re going to marry my boy. Not to offer refreshments before dragging his betrothed and her family along on a tour of his tedious—”

“Ha! Now I know you’re not real. You’re telling me what’s in my mind.”

“You don’t believe I’m real?” He seemed offended. “You don’t believe in ghosts?”

“I’m all of twenty years, and while I’ve heard much about them, I’ve never before witnessed one.”

“Until now.”

“I’m not seeing you. You might not know this, but I’m quite an accomplished herbalist and an apprentice apothecary—”

“Now who’s lying? Your father would never allow such a thing.”

“I work with Friar Laurence. Do you remember him? He who performed the secret marriage of my parents, and when Mamma’s father wished her to marry Lord Paris, he provided her with a potion that lent the appearance of death for two and forty hours.”

“Of course, I remember Friar Laurence. He’s an accomplished apothecary.”

“He is.”

“Ladies are unfit for such work.”

I smiled with chilly disdain. “I’m unfit for many things, Elder, especially becoming the wife of Verona’s podestà.

Yet here I am, being rushed to the altar by your son.

” I took a clarifying breath. Why was I arguing with a phantasm?

More to myself than him, I said, “In the prince’s garden of exotic plants, one has pollen that causes hallucinations.

” I thought of Friar Laurence’s teachings.

“Or perhaps I brushed against a leaf or flower that contains intoxicants.”

Yet for all my good sense, Elder didn’t disappear. “Quiz me. Ask me questions you don’t know, but I do.”

“How will I know if you answer true?”

That seemed to stump him.

“Ha!” Again I gloated at him.

He took it ill. “Like all women, you imagine victory in petty pleasures and tiny triumphs.”

Since I was enjoying my tiny triumph, I continued the conversation. “I hadn’t heard that the palace is haunted. Do you often lure guests up here?”

“No one else can see or hear me.”

Startled, I spoke unwisely. “The hell you say. Your son?”

“No. Do you think I wouldn’t have rather communicated with a sensible man than a foolish woman?”

I tapped my foot. “I see now where your son got his high-handed manner and unjustified sense of superiority.”

Elder broke into a smile that lit up his elderly, handsome face. “ Now you sound like my wife.”

I looked around. “Is she here, too, gliding through the air and speaking to the unwary?”

“Is she not still in the convent where I sent her in safety to have the child?” He viewed me intently.

That gave me pause. “Your wife, the princess Eleanor, gave birth to your daughter, Princess Isabella, and, on hearing of your own demise, fell into a decline and died of sorrow.”

He seemed unmoved . . . for a moment. He drifted toward the railing and looked out at the city, as I had, and I saw him struggle to contain a fresh grief.

“I’d feared that was so. When I arrived back in the palace and saw that the child was here and she was not .

. . Eleanor was the wife of my heart. She would never have left the little girl alone unless she had no choice. ”

I joined him at the railing. “I’m sorry for your loss, but please enlighten me. How could you not know? Is she not nearby?”

“She died in a state of grace. She has gone on. I fear I’m condemned to wander until justice is done.”

He looked at me, and I saw the diamond glint of ghostly tears. “She was fragile, you know. After Escalus, she lost the babies, one after another. I should never have touched her again, but we loved each other.”

“I comprehend.”

Swiftly he turned on me, no longer a man discussing his lost love, but a judge. “How do you know such a thing? Are you not a virgin?”

I tossed my arms in the air. “Everybody in Verona! Even the ghosts! Why this huge concern with my virginity?”

He looked me over—not like a man looks at a woman, but as a farmer looks at a farm animal purchased for breeding. “I admit I was surprised at my son’s choice. You’re very old.”

“A withered crone.”

“A trifle overripe, perhaps.”

It sounded as if he was trying to comfort me, which made me grind my teeth.

He continued, “I suppose he thinks your maturity will stand you in good stead as you deal with the social and political divisiveness of Verona.”

“So he informed me.”

“Also, your mother Juliet is exceptionally fertile. How many children are there now?”

“Seven, and one on the way.”

“I’m sure that played into my son’s decision.”

“He told me that, too. A girl could swoon over the romance.”

“Surely, a woman of your advanced years—”

“I’m perfectly healthy, thank you.”

“—has enjoyed her previous moments of silly swooning.”

“Until very recently, no.”

“You fell in love with my son.” That pleased him.

“No.”

That dis pleased him. His facial expressions were remarkably lifelike for a figment. “Who then is your lover?”

“I . . . don’t . . . have . . . a . . . lover,” I said between my teeth. “Lysander of the Venitian house of Marcketti is my One True Love. We’ve never done more than touch hands, and because of your son’s hateful maneuvering, my darling is forever lost to me.”

Elder was interested. He questioned me. I told him of the events in the garden, how Prince Escalus deliberately tricked me into kissing him rather than Lysander, how we were caught and now must be wed.

And how when I explained to Lysander that I was misled, he had taken it amiss that I’d failed to discern the switch.

“I’d never kissed either of them before, so how would I know the difference? ”

After Elder got done laughing—FYI, laughing from a ghost sounds like an off-key madrigal—the judgmental old fart said, “Sounds like my son did the right thing by agreeing to marry you.”

“You mean, like a favor ? Prince Escalus is doing me a favor ? Did you hear the part about deliberately ? He deliberately tricked me, because when he made a list of my wifely attributes and my decayed faults, I came out on the plus side.”

“He was ever a logical boy.” Elder approved.

I charged on. “He decided he wanted to marry me and rather than deal with messy emotions and actually being pleasant to me, or even proposing the match to my father like a civilized male, he publicly humiliated me. All Verona has heard the tittle-tattle and is laughing at me, and I haven’t dared to set foot out of Casa Montague since the scandal, at least not in daylight except to come here, and that in a covered sedan chair guarded by the prince’s bodyguards, and by the way, as I was carried through the streets, I could hear sniggering.

” By the time I finished, I was bellowing.

I knew I was bellowing, but I assured myself that it didn’t count as breaking my promise to my mother because Elder didn’t really exist.

Interestingly, Elder’s expression now grew serious. “I believed my son had a good brain for strategy, but Cal made a stupid mistake there.”

“Who’s Cal?”

“Escalus. His mother used to call him Callie, so I shortened it to Cal.”

Callie. Heh. I filed that away in my mind for future use. “I’m curious. What stupid mistake is that? Until this moment, you were his champion.”

“The greatest love shrivels at the sound of laughter. If he wishes for an amiable marriage, he should never have exposed you to scandal and mockery.”

“There’s nothing to shrivel. There’s no love between us.”

“Nor can there be until he makes amends. I’ll speak to him.”

“You said he couldn’t hear you.”

“I can still speak.” Elder’s voice held such a tone of royal command, I didn’t understand why he couldn’t make himself known to whomever he wished.

Probably because he was merely a phantom of my mind, the result of a plant exhalation. Maybe I was, in truth, unconscious somewhere—my recent fever had forced me to live through amazing and terrifying nightmares and memories, and I knew that was possible.

I asked, “What difference does it make? I vowed never to wed unless I loved and he loved, and the union between us would be as amorous and devoted as has been shown to me in my own home.”

“We can’t all be Romeo and Juliet.” Elder sounded prosaic.

“To be truly together, body and soul—it can be done.” I believed that, although few others seemed to. “All else is distant politeness, infidelity, indifference, and, all too often, loathing.”

“I thought youth was a time of idealism and romance.”

“I have a mind, sir, and my logic is the match of any man’s. All that a woman of good sense has to do is look around at the misery created by two ill-joined people to want to avoid that state.”

“With an attitude like that, I don’t think you should marry my son!”

“We are agreed on one thing, then. The only one who should have compromised me is Lysander!” I kicked the stone post and winced at the twinge to my already bruised toe.

“Now I have to get married to . . . to . . . to the prince of Verona!” For the first time, the enormity of what now faced me—social leadership, political maneuvering, being a wife and chattel to a man I didn’t love—struck me and I burst into tears.