Chapter 3
The “Little” Countess

“Prepare to die, Boy!” howled the Necromancer. “I’ll drain your blood to feed my ghouls!”

The Boy hung from a hook on the back wall, his wooden head and limbs smudged with dirt and clay. A line of hideous creatures, suspended by strings, scraped toward him. Out of the dark a voice rang out: “Halt, O Specters of Hell! It is I, Angela Gabriela, Avenger of God!”

The line of ghouls stopped in its tracks. The Necromancer trembled. Angela Gabriela was about to swoop in, wielding her Sword of Justice.

Only she didn’t. She was distracted by a snore—a screechy snore as loud as a hog at market that echoed around the little turret theater.

The Countess Angela Gabriela von Schwanenberg had had enough. She stormed from her perch above the puppet stage and marched through the side curtains to confront her audience, the Necromancer marionette swinging from her right hand.

The usual suspects were in attendance, propped up on a row of mismatched castle chairs: Lord Forgetful, Lady Bottoms-Up, Mistress Tosspot, and General Confusion. Angela knew they were innocent. After all, they were nothing but pillows and cushions sewn together and draped in costume finery, with button eyes and horsehair wigs. The fifth audience member was another matter altogether.

“Nurse!” Angela exclaimed. “Nurse!”

Nurse blinked in midsnore. Seeing Angela, she clapped wildly. “Bravo, Little Countess! Bravo!”

“Stop calling me ‘Little’ Countess. I’m twelve. In barely a month, thirteen!”

Nurse pursed her lips, adjusted her spectacles, and took up her knitting, an endless gray shawl that had fallen from her ample lap onto her sewing basket. “Oh my!” she muttered, so Angela could hear. “A full grown-up countess still playing with her dollies.”

Angela flushed. “They aren’t dollies, they’re marionettes. And if you don’t stop ruining this rehearsal, next week’s production will be a disaster. Please, Nurse. Mother and Father will be coming. I need them to like it. I want to make them proud.”

“Then do a lute duet with the music master. That would be far more ladylike.”

Angela bristled. “Puppet troupes are serious business. They perform at all the great courts of Europe.”

Nurse glanced heavenward. “Aren’t we a little big for our petticoats? Here you are in a child’s nursery, talking about the great courts of Europe.”

“My theater is not a nursery! Father imported it from Venice. The curtains are velvet. The stage is oak.”

“Indeed,” Nurse mocked. “And the audience is stuffed with goose feathers.” She winked at the pillow-head slumped to her right. “Isn’t that right, Lord Forgetful? You’re not quite up for a ball at the palace, are you?”

“Be as mean as you like,” Angela said. “Plays matter.”

Nurse snorted and took a gander at Angela’s newest creation. The marionette’s body was wrapped in a dirty velvet shroud. The arms and legs sticking out from it were goose bones. The head was an owl’s skull, its eye sockets empty.

“What fiendish thing is this?” Nurse whispered.

“If you bothered to watch my rehearsals, you’d know,” Angela said, barely hiding her hurt and fury.

Nurse clutched her chest. “I asked you a question. What have you made? What have you done?”

“I’ve made the Necromancer, as if it isn’t obvious. See the bits of dried leaves I glued to the bones to look like his scaly skin?”

“That doll of yours will summon the creature himself,” Nurse trembled. “He’ll sweep up from his lair in Potter’s Field, him and his crows. He’ll enter your dreams. He’ll ruin us.”

“For heaven’s sake, Nurse,” Angela sighed, “if the Necromancer could really speak to the dead and make evil spells, Father would do something.”

“Even your father dares not touch him,” Nurse said. “Oh, Angela, his power is real. Ask anyone in the village. Destroy that thing!”

“No!”

“Then I shall!” Nurse exclaimed, and grabbed the puppet in both hands. Angela darted about her, screaming to get it back, but Nurse was on a mission. She dashed the owl skull on the stone floor, broke the goose bones across her knee, and wrapped the shards in the velvet shroud.

“You had no right to destroy my puppet,” Angela cried. “I am the Countess Angela Gabriela von Schwanenberg!” She tossed her golden curls in fury and strode to the turret window, chin up, chest out.

“A countess doesn’t sulk,” Nurse said.

“I’m not sulking,” Angela snapped. “This is an intermission.”

“Is it now?” Nurse removed the crucifix from her neck and tied it tight around the unholy bundle. Then she returned to her chair, placed the broken puppet in the bottom of her sewing basket, and laid her knitting on top.

Angela gazed out the turret window to the barrens on the horizon. All she cared about was her theater, but Nurse was right. It was a nursery. Despite her titles she was a child, a girl, a nothing. Her future? To marry some stranger and be stuck in his castle far from home. Her only pretending would be pretending to be happy.

As if she wasn’t pretending to be happy now. I’m all alone, except for my puppets, she thought. Mother and Father haven’t time for me, and who can I play with? No one.

It was true. An only child of noble birth, she could hardly mingle with the village urchins, and the offspring of other counts lived so far away they might as well be dreams. Except for Georgina von Hoffen-Toffen, who’d been a nightmare. She’d mocked Angela’s theater and called her silly. Then she’d married Archduke Arnulf and drowned in a bath of milk. So now who was silly?

Angela sniffed and turned her gaze north to the sunny farms that led to the great forest and the far mountains beyond. She thought of the ghost marionette she’d made of Georgina, and of the others. The one of herself, of course, and of the Necromancer, and of the strange, mysterious Boy from the barrens. He starred in all her plays. Sometimes he was a rogue, other times a wretch or a hero who’d save her from the Wolf King, said to live in the great forest with his monster horde. Nurse had noticed Angela’s interest in the Boy. She called it unnatural. Then again, Nurse found everything unnatural except for her Bible and her knitting.

Still, why did Angela think of the Boy? He was a peasant—a nobody—with hair as brown as dirt and a pale complexion ruddied by clay. He stood alone in ditches when her family’s carriage passed by, or at the edge of the village square on feast days. Angela imagined she’d need a perfumed handkerchief over her nose to get within ten feet of him. Yet when he glanced at her, she always blushed and looked away.

Angela gasped. No sooner had the Boy crossed her mind than her eyes had drifted to the bulrushes at the foot of Castle Hill—and there he was, asleep. How wonderful to come and go as one pleases, she thought. How wonderful to be free.

But what was he doing on her estate? Should she call the guards? If he were caught, he’d be in trouble. But if he was up to no good and she did nothing, whatever he did would be her fault. What was he in real life: hero or villain?

“What are you looking at?” said Nurse.

“Nothing,” Angela fluttered. “It’s time to get back to the rehearsal.”

“Not so fast, my girl.” Nurse had a nose for mischief, and it was twitching up a storm. She made her way to the window, propped herself against the casement, and had a good squint. “God spare us!”

“From what? He hasn’t done anything.”

“Oh, but he will, my love!” Nurse pointed to the county road.

It was then that Angela realized Nurse wasn’t frightened of the Boy. She was terrified at the sight of the twenty soldiers galloping toward the castle. In their lead, a team of stallions drew a fearful black carriage. It bore the standard of His Royal Highness Archduke Arnulf, ruler absolute of the Archduchy of Waldland.