Angela sprinted up the hill to the castle. Where were her parents? Why hadn’t they come? She paused at the gate. Maybe the archduke was still inside. Maybe that’s why they were delayed. Her eyes searched for his carriage. It was gone. So were the sentries. The castle doors were wide open.
Something was wrong. Angela blew out Hans’ lantern, set it down, and crept inside. The place was ransacked. Draperies were ripped from the windows, furniture broken, tapestries stripped from the walls. What had happened to her parents? She raced up the main staircase to find them.
“Halt! Who goes there?” Six drunken soldiers staggered into the hall from a side room. One held a silver candelabrum. They stood at the foot of the stairs and squinted up into the shadows.
“Why, if it isn’t a serving wench,” snickered one with a pig nose.
What will they do to me? Angela panicked. Her eyes fell on a pool of moonlight that shone through the entrance windows and spilled across the steps below her.
Angela had an inspiration. She rolled her eyes up into her head, let out a tickle of otherworldly laughter, and slowly descended the staircase. As she floated into the light, the soldiers’ eyes bugged wide. Her hair was wild and matted; her face dripped sweat; her frock was sullied by mud. In the pale moon, the stains on her clothes resembled mold, and her sweat a glistening ooze of decay.
“That’s no serving wench!” a soldier gulped. “It’s the dead girl! The Little Countess!”
“We saw you buried!” screamed a second.
“Her ghost’s returned!” hollered a third.
The soldiers scrambled over each other to escape. “Haunted!” they shrieked as they raced to their horses and galloped into the night. “The castle’s haunted!”
Angela flew to her parents’ rooms. They’d been plundered. She dashed to her theater. It, too, was destroyed: the stage smashed, the puppets stolen, the pillow people dismembered. She heard a sound from under the stage curtain crumpled in the corner: a great wheezing snore like a hog at market.
“Nurse!”
Nurse lurched awake. At the sight of her Little Countess, she babbled and crossed herself. It took five minutes for Angela to convince her she wasn’t dead, and another five to explain what had happened. “But where are my parents?”
Nurse wrung her hands. “On the road to the capital. They’ve been arrested.”
“Mother! Father!” Angela cried out, her mind alive with the wails she’d heard rising from the palace grates. “The Necromancer betrayed us. He was the only one who knew about the potion. And what of the servants?”
“All fled, save me. I hid under this curtain.”
“Poor Nurse!”
“Poor Nurse, nothing,” said she. “Had those ruffians assailed my virtue, I’d have had at them with my knitting needles!” The vigor of her voice surprised her. She crouched in fright. “They’ve all gone?”
“Yes,” Angela nodded. “But when they tell the archduke they saw a ghost, he’ll know I escaped and return to kill me.”
“May they never reach him,” Nurse quivered.
“No, God speed them. News I survived will give my parents hope.”
“Let’s keep that hope alive,” Nurse said. “We’ll hide you in the village.”
Angela shook her head. “The village is the first place Arnulf will look. I must flee to the country to plan the rescue of my parents.”
“The rescue of your parents? It’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible.” Angela ran to the pile of pillow-people stuffing and rummaged about for General Confusion’s coat, boots, breeches, and helmet.
“This isn’t one of your plays,” Nurse pleaded. “What are you thinking? A rescue? And launched from the country? What do you know of the country?”
Angela pretended not to hear: If Nurse was flustered by the country, she’d have a heart attack knowing she planned to race all the way to Peter the Hermit’s. Angela swam into the general’s outfit, rolled up the sleeves and breeches, and stuffed the toes of the boots with Mistress Tosspot’s handkerchiefs. The helmet was large enough to conceal her hair, and the coat sufficiently roomy to hide her sack of burial jewels.
Angela saw Nurse squeezing herself into Lord Forgetful’s velvet pantaloons. “What are you doing?”
“Donning my own disguise,” Nurse grunted. “You hardly think I’d let my Little Countess wander about by herself, do you? What, while her mind’s beset by wild ideas?”
Angela gasped: Nurse could no more outrun danger than she could fly. She waited till the good woman’s head was lost in Lord Forgetful’s undershirt, then ran from the turret. “Farewell, Nurse,” she called over her shoulder. “I promise you’ll see me and my parents alive and home again.”