Mirror Mirror (18 page)

Primavera was out at the well, rinsing Bianca's face. She heard Lucrezia Borgia bellow. Primavera's lips set more firmly together. When, at last, she heeded the summons and stood to obey, her ankles shook.

Interview with an assassin

Y
OU
appreciate the reward?” She looked down at the soft purse of coins in her hands and shifted it gently back and forth, to make the musical remark of the money within more alluring. He wasn't used to being in the house, at least not farther than the kitchen. He stood as if before a magistrate and looked her in the eye. “Enough to ask about the service required.”

“Take the child from the house, deep into the woods, far beyond where anyone might find her.”

“There are woods enough to lose a child in.”

“I want her more than lost. I want her life.”

“The woods will take her life.”

“I want you to take her life.”

“She has seriously offended.”

“It's not your place to ask why. Nor are you to find yourself capable of remembering this interview. You are a hunter. Wait
until night has begun to fall, and take her life however you must.”

“You trust a lot to a man you don't know.”

“You have an aged grandmother in my employ. You will want her to see her final days in comfort, not—otherwise.”

“I've no one else but an aged grandmother. My father and his brother were both killed in the bombardment of Forlì, and my mother died of grief soon thereafter.”

“What is your name?”

“I'm the hunter.”

“What does your grandmother call you?”

“Obedient.”

“Fair enough. Do as I say. Bring me her heart carved from her chest.”

Ranuccio lifted his bearded chin.

“I don't want her to survive, to call on relatives from across the sea to avenge her abandonment. Make good my request and you shall have this purse, and your silly grandmother shall sleep on her own straw pallet until the end of her days.” She threw the purse on the table. “Her natural days.”

He picked up the purse and weighed it in his hands and didn't speak at first. It was as if he'd never come across coin before. They both heard the sound of his
nonna
's voice calling the chickens in. It was an old voice, and the only one left he knew. He said, “I can hope to commit a murder and to eliminate a child. I can decide not to ask questions about your reasons.”

“Can you also manage to forget that we have ever discussed any of this?”

“Any of what?” he said, and smiled for the first time.

A walk in the woods

B
IANCA HAD
eaten already, but she sat in the kitchen helping Primavera prepare a meal for the Borgias. It felt safe there—well, safer than anywhere else. Primavera was scowling and cursing protectively. “What is that monstrous bitch up to, that your face is covered with blood?” she'd said.

There wasn't anything to say, because Bianca could hardly describe what had happened, or why. “It was an accident,” she insisted.

“You were standing like a docile sweet orphan and a vase flew into your head by accident?”

“I'm not an orphan.”

“Of course not, and a vase isn't a bird with silver wings either. The blood in your eyes, mercy. I should tell you about blood.”

“Please, Primavera, not that again. I know about that.”

Upstairs, Lucrezia had picked up a lute and tuned it. The familiar melody that skittered down the stairwell was lopsided, its syncopation
the result, perhaps, of a snapped string not yet replaced. Primavera didn't talk over the sound of the music. She supervised a joint of pork bound in strings, and took from a hook in the chimney stack a parcel of olives she'd been smoking. Sharply, her worry showing, she told Bianca to stir the white beans simmering in a pot suspended from a chain in the kitchen fireplace.

Bianca's eyes were cleared of blood. She was glad to have something common to do—stir the beans—and already she felt better. She was afraid that the presence of blood was going to bring Primavera around to discussing her favorite topic, the imminent arrival of a young woman's menses. Bianca was neither skittish of her female development nor eager for it. But Primavera, sensitive to her own desiccation, found no more enjoyable a topic than the rehearsal of what the monthly complaint was like. The cramps, the mess, the induction into a life of fecundity and danger.

Tonight Primavera restrained herself. She felt the atmosphere curdle and pause. The house had a musty air, as if an atmosphere of grief was leaching through the stones from an underground source. No obvious message in the beans or the clouds. Ranuccio had bought her a chicken and wrung its neck, and after she finished cutting it she'd spill its liver and see what mischief was afoot.

What was the source of the sour miasma? Had a rat died beneath the floor joists, and was it extruding its malodorous juices? Or was the spirit of the house's previous owner making itself felt? When she wasn't being a superstitious seer, Primavera was a realist. Her grasp, increasingly, was on the present. If the ghost of the former landlord was bent on causing their skin to crawl, he was doing it effectively, but he was still no more than a ghost, and in any contest, the quick overcrowded the dead in all geographies but the churchyard and the spiraling corridors of hell.

Or might it be a more recent arrival, the ghost of Vicente de Nevada himself? Perhaps, months ago and far away, he'd met his end and his ghost had taken its time returning to the family home.

Primavera knew it didn't do to turn a blind eye on such things.
She descended to the cold keep below the stairs to get a dip of oil. Intestines spilled in augury should then be cooked and eaten, for the sake of economy as well as spitting at the fates. Below steps, she heard a gasp from the kitchen. It took her a minute to turn—she'd put on a few pounds lately. She needed to step down a level or two and find room to negotiate her bulk on a flat bit of flooring rather than to risk twisting on a stair. By the time she returned to the kitchen, she saw the stool on which Bianca had been sitting, overturned in a clumsy way. The spoon for stirring the beans was on the floor.

Bianca had made no protest when Primavera's grandson entered the kitchen, picked up a heel of bread with one hand and grabbed her own forearm with the other. He shoved the food in his mouth and yanked her from her seat roughly; she was dangling like a newly caught trout. She kicked not out of alarm but with an instinct for balance.

Then Ranuccio barreled out the door, knocking the crown of Bianca's skull on the stone doorframe, and she was abstracted with swimming sparks of pain. By the time she could focus her eyes through her distress and register something discernible, she was outside—this is the meadow, now this is the lower meadow, and Montefiore is retreating above me, like a storm cloud in reverse. Its low wings and barns close their arms against the bulk of the main house, its red roofline lowers like a furrowed brow.

The house became richer, more obtuse, a red-brown rose growing in reverse, back toward secret potent bud.

She saw the gooseboy who stood gaping at the side of the road, adrift in his snowy cackling blanket of friends. She tried to utter a
Help me!
or a
What?
or a
Come now!,
but all she could manage was a strangled sort of duck quack. He waved his hand and smiled at her—they were hardly friends, Bianca and the gooseboy, just people who lived on the same hill, basically—and then he and his downy companions had been swallowed up in the arms of apple trees, which in turn became an apron of apple trees sweeping in a single tide away
from her. She was past Lago Verde and up to the bridge her father had forbidden her to cross.

There Ranuccio stopped. Was he going to throw her over the side? Or did he somehow know about her father's prohibition? But no—he was fishing with one hand inside his shirt. He came up with a sack of coins. He tossed them in the water. He was distracting the mudcreature! Must be so. He continued down the other side of the bridge, and she was being hustled away from Montefiore without further assault. As if this assault weren't enough.

Montefiore was becoming the dense irretrievable past, the dead childhood, dead, cold dead on its slab, and no mercy existed in the world or out of it to slap it back to life again.

Ranuccio wasn't a giant, though; not a mudcreature, not an ogre from some comic hearthside tale. He was a strong man and a big one, but he was only a man, and she was after all eleven; she ought to be able to figure this out.

She hadn't seen him often. Occasionally when the weather was harshest he would show up and share some food with his grandmother—either bring her some treat, a brace of pheasants or rabbits, sometimes a haunch of venison or a slithery set of steaks cut from the flanks of a boar. Primavera would prepare the meat; she was no stranger to the benisons of wild garlic, lemon, and black peppercorns from the East. But though Ranuccio and his grandmother shared a grief—the death of the generation between them—they seemed to have no other common language. In the years in which Bianca de Nevada had come to be aware of Ranuccio, his arrivals and disappearances had been conducted in an almost conspiratorial silence.

Thumping against his side—for even as slight as she was, she had some weight, and so in time his muscles ached—she twisted and finally caught enough breath, and enough sense, to begin to complain. She yelped her confusion at first, and, her breath ignited, she began to wail, and to try to twist her arm free so she could beat against his side. “Where are you taking me?” she said. “Where are we going?”

The promontory for which Montefiore was named leaned above them, and the house was lost in its leafy opacity. “Where is my home?” she demanded, more frantically. “Where are we going?”

“A walk in the woods,” he said.

“I'm not allowed to go alone into the woods.”

“You aren't alone.” He set her down and jabbed her playfully in the side with one hand, though with his other he continued to keep her wrist in a circling grip stronger, she imagined, than iron shackles could possibly be.

“The dark is coming on, and Primavera will worry.”

“The old smelly goose mother knows what this is about. Don't worry about her.”

“But she didn't say a word to me. She would have told me—”

“She didn't want to alarm you. She wanted it to be a surprise.”

Bianca stood still to consider this. There was so much unclear about how adults behaved, and Primavera, it was sure, was more quixotic and fickle in her behavior than most.

“What is your intention?” said Bianca, as firmly as her quavering voice would allow.

“Let's walk a while together and learn our intentions.”

“If you let go of my hand, I can walk more comfortably.”

“If I let go of your hand, you will run away.”

“I will not run away.”

“You will run away. I know children, and when they are scared they are foolish as hens. They bolt at the first chance they get. I tell you, there is little reason to be scared.” From a leather pouch slung on a strip of leather around his waist he picked a dagger with a handle of worn antler.

She shrunk from him as best she could, as if she could shed her own hand and leave it there in his grip. Her underskirt had gone damp.

“What use is that knife to you here?”

“To protect us in the woods,” he said. “Do you see that it's getting dark?”

“I don't see as much as I would like.”

“Because it's getting dark.” But the light in the sky was ample enough to shine on the silvered blade, making it stand out against the blue-black undergrowth. They poked deeper into the woods, and the sky darkened now as the canopy of trees closed above them.

“If I let you go, you will run,” he said again, many minutes later, when the dark was no longer considering a visit but had moved in for the night. The only light was the luminescence of late summer bugs, the stripe of silver along the blade, and the wet in Ranuccio's eyes. She could smell from her own body a sour moisture, the reek of her body's fear.