Dorothea returned to Miranda’s quarters two days later.
She came with wine, smuggled in under her skirts, though she had been sent into Miranda’s room on the pretense of taking Miranda’s measurements for a ball gown.
“What is it?” Miranda had asked as Dorothea poured the substance, red as blood, into the glasses she’d brought.
“You’ll like it,” Dorothea had promised, an impish grin on her lips. And Miranda had: it reminded her of the drink her father made from berries on the island, though this stuff was much stronger.
They sat together at the table by the window, watching the weak winter sun cut across the barren trees. “Doesn’t the sun ever shine here?” Miranda despaired, watching the last of the rays disappear. “I don’t think I remember what sunlight feels like.” She was only allowed to leave the castle on Sundays, when she was taken, without Prospero, to attend Mass in the vast, unfinished Duomo di Milano, which she’d heard her fellow churchgoers joke had been under construction since the Ascension. Heavy fog wreathed the cathedral most mornings, its Gothic spires sticking through the clouds like swords. Once inside, Miranda liked the sight no better: the man with thorns in his hands on the wooden cross made her think of Ariel, knotted and bound in the bowels of a tree. Caliban’s mother, Sycorax, had entrapped Ariel in the rift of a cloven pine long ago, until Prospero came to the island and freed him, turning the spirit’s powers to his own purpose.
“Milan is awfully drab in the winter, it’s true,” Dorothea said. “It’s lovely in the spring. Much more colorful. You may be happier here then.” She leaned forward. “What is it like where you come from? Is there a winter there too?”
Miranda found herself unable to answer in her surprise. Ferdinand and the rest had entertained the court in Naples with tales of her island, exhibiting Miranda, with her quirks and gaps in knowledge, as the prop for their stories of their adventures abroad. But no one had asked her in any detail about her world, before now.
She told Dorothea how she used to measure the seasons, of the tiny purple-green frogs that laid eggs in the pond in the first weeks of spring, of the fragile pink blossoms that began to appear in the low bushes near her cottage. Stories spilled from her lips as she recalled the wonders of the magical island where she had grown into adolescence, of its marvelous music and temperate breezes and bounty of wild fruits.
Miranda trailed off, ashamed of speaking at such length, of disclosing the details of the strange life that had made her a pariah in her native land, and Dorothea sighed. “It sounds wonderful. Really wonderful, like the places you read about in books.” She tilted her glass, letting the last of the drops within run down her throat, and Miranda turned her head away. Her face felt hot, and though she now wore much less than she did outside of her rooms—a simple dress, without all the layers and frills of her more formal garments—her clothes weighed heavy on her too. Back on her isle, she had worn the lightest garments she could, to run faster, to jump higher, to escape the heat and feel the sea wind on her skin.
“You had a brother, didn’t you?”
“I—” Miranda turned back to Dorothea, startled. “A brother? Do you mean Caliban?”
“Caliban.” Dorothea rolled the name around on her tongue. “I knew it was something like that! Most of the girls won’t say his name, you know. They think it’s some kind of curse.”
You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse. She shook Caliban’s words from her head, her flush spreading from her cheeks down to her chest as she remembered how they had spoken to each other, in her last days on the island. “He wasn’t . . . my brother.” She drew a breath. “He was there before we came. Is that what people say? That he’s of my blood?”
“That’s the rumor—one among many. They say your father bedded a witch, and she bore him a son. That they were both driven out to sea, but your father killed the witch and tried to raise the wild boy alone.”
Miranda shook her head. “No. It’s not—why would they say that of my father? Isn’t he their duke? Aren’t they happy to have him returned, and the usurper gone?”
Dorothea watched her for a long moment. “So he’s a good man, your father.”
Miranda opened her mouth, but her jaw hung slack. “He’s . . .” From what she learned of God in her weekly Masses, he seemed something like her father: master of great forces, though not always heedful of their effects. He was kind to her, most of the time. He was brilliant, and eloquent, and when she was young she believed the sun rose and set on him. Yet she remembered the way her father had tortured Caliban: racking him with cramps; taunting him with demons; chasing him and caning him, beating him about the head until his face grew puffy and red, leaving him to cry in the dirt. And she had other visions, hazier, of far more heinous acts: of her father pulling Sycorax’s bones from the shallow grave in which they lay, making them dance before Caliban as he wept in the firelight, the blackened skull grinning, the rotted teeth clacking. She thought these only nightmares, in the morning: but hadn’t she felt the heat of the fire, the thorny branches brushing her calves? Hadn’t her father caught sight of her, and then—
And then—
So many of her memories ended this way. Strange sights, inexplicable visions: and then sleep, a heavy, sudden sleep she never experienced here, on the mainland. Sleep, if anything, eluded her now: she lay awake in her father’s drafty castle, listening to all its shudders and echoes, longing for the intoxicating music of her lost isle.
She felt Dorothea’s hand on hers and fought the urge to pull away. “I don’t ask to upset you.” Dorothea insinuated her way into Miranda’s line of sight, ducking down to catch her eye, to bring a hand to Miranda’s chin and tilt it upward. “I don’t know your father, or his history. I don’t hold the grudges the old families of Milan do. But . . . there was a reason your father was sent away, wasn’t there? Haven’t you ever wondered what it was?”
“Trickery. Treachery.” Antonio had coveted the dukedom and forced her father out. There was no mystery there. Only the deception of kin.
“Yes, but how? What did your uncle tell them, to make them send their duke away? Hmm? Even if he gave them a pack of lies—don’t you wonder what those lies were, and why they rang with truth?”
Miranda felt herself slipping, like she was standing on crumbling soil at a cliff’s edge. “The rumors.” Her throat was dry. “What else do they say, about my father? About me?”
Dorothea hesitated. Miranda tightened her grip on the other girl’s hand. “Dorothea. Please. Tell me. What do they say I am?”
“A ghost.”
“A ghost? What do you mean, a ghost?”
“I don’t know what it means.” Miranda started to protest, but Dorothea stopped her. “I swear to you, I don’t. The other girls don’t talk to me much. I’m a witch from foreign lands, remember? But I overhear things. I heard them talk about Caliban. And about you. And they called you—they said you were—”
“A ghost.” She swallowed. Her father was capable of unimaginable feats: Had he crafted himself a daughter? A filial spirit, docile and deferential? Was that the crime Milan had banished him for? Her free hand ran along her thigh, finding reassurance that she was there, that this body held firm.
“They’re afraid to talk too much about your father. They never say his name. And the older ones, the ones who remember when you left, they never talk about him at all. They slap the girls if they hear them gossiping. But when they first brought you to the castle, I kept hearing one word, whispered when they thought no one could hear. In the streets, in the servants’ quarters: everywhere I went. Over and over: Bice. Bice.”
“Bice.” Miranda tried out the unfamiliar word on her tongue. “But what does it mean? Is it a name?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
Miranda growled, snatching back her hand. “Of course I don’t know! I don’t know anything about your stupid city, these terrible lands. I don’t want to know what lies they tell about me in this hellish place. I only want—” Her breath caught in her throat as tears welled in her eyes. “I only want to go home.”
“I didn’t mean . . .” Dorothea watched her with wide eyes. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t calling you a fool. It’s only . . . I thought you knew. Bice . . . it’s an eke-name. For your mother’s name, Beatrice.”
“My . . . mother?”
“You don’t remember her?”
“No.” Her early memories of Milan were locked away in some shadowed corner of her mind, lost to time, save for a few random glimmers. And her mother—she never thought of her mother. She knew, of course, she must have had one, but she had always been incurious about the woman who gave her birth, the woman who must have died before they departed Italy’s shores. “Why . . . why haven’t I thought of her? I never asked my father about her, Dorothea. Doesn’t that seem strange? Why would I forget my mother?”
“Maybe he wanted you to.”
They sat in silence a long time, those words ringing in Miranda’s head. Her father, who could reshape the world to his whims, would not hesitate to reshape her mind. She could hear that truth as Dorothea spoke it. She felt she was stepping outside of herself, seeing the world in a way she never had before. It terrified her. If her mind was not her own—her body, maybe someone else’s too—
“Miranda.” Dorothea’s voice, soft as a lute, slid through her panic. “Look at me, Miranda.”
She did. She saw Dorothea’s open face, her brown-green eyes, the color of a vernal pond as sunlight played over its surface. She anchored herself in those eyes and calmed her heaving breath. “Good.” The other girl placed both of her hands on Miranda’s wrists. “Breathe deep. I don’t know what your father has done, but it’s in the past. You’re here. You’re alive.” She pressed the spot where Miranda’s heartbeat pulsed. “I can feel it. You’re no ghost, Miranda. Though if you stay locked up in this room, you may become one.”
Miranda let out a hoarse laugh, something like a sob. Dorothea smiled. “Let’s leave here, eh? Go for a walk. Only down the corridor: only so that you can see past these walls. It will make you feel better, I think.” She stood, extending a hand. “Come on. Let me dress you.”
Miranda obeyed. Obedience, so far in life, had been her only virtue. And she longed to trust Dorothea, though some part of her still urged caution. Some part of her—the future wife of Ferdinand, the proud daughter of Prospero—compelled her to send Dorothea away, to tell her keepers of the girl’s calumny, of the seeds of doubt she had sown in Miranda’s mind. But though they had not known each other long, it pained Miranda to think of the betrayal she would see on Dorothea’s guileless face. As they stood this close, with Dorothea wrapping the brocaded silk around her waist, slipping her fingers down Miranda’s spine as she fastened and smoothed, Miranda could not fathom banishing her.
Dorothea, at last, placed the veil over Miranda’s face, and then they walked into the cool of the castle’s halls, where torches flickered to light their way. “Have you seen the portraits?” Dorothea asked, threading her arm through Miranda’s. Miranda shook her head. “Let’s go and see them. I’m sure there were no painters on your isle.”
Dorothea pulled her along, telling Miranda of a room they should see, one painted by a famous artist to look like a garden, flowering indoors. Miranda followed in a trance, trying to make sense of her surroundings. This was meant to be her castle, she knew. Meant to be her home. But every time she walked its floors, she felt as though she were walking into a new world, frigid and alien, one she would never understand.
They came to the portrait gallery, which stretched into the darkness of the encroaching night. Old men and women stared out at Miranda from the walls: men and women who looked like her father, with his aquiline nose, his leonine features. She thought of what Caliban would say about these staid, unhappy figures, what epithets he would hurl as he slandered their ostentatious garb, their snobbish expressions.
Dorothea was looking at her, bemused: Miranda didn’t realize she’d been laughing out loud. “What is it?”
She released Dorothea’s arm, moving closer to the portraits. “Oh, it’s nothing. Only . . . I thought of what Caliban might say. He wouldn’t understand this at all. These people, their faces: he would hate them on sight.”
Dorothea laughed too. “They do look pompous, don’t they? This one”—she moved towards the painting of a balding man with the countenance and bearing of a toad—“looks like he must have terrible piles.” Miranda burst into giggles, scandalized. “What? I know an ointment that could help him. Very effective.”
They walked the length of the hall, and Miranda got as close as she could to the lifelike images, luxuriating in the ability to examine each small wrinkle and curve of the painted faces, to stare as she could not with living people. At the hall’s end, she came to a portrait of her father with a beard brown rather than gray, his hand resting on a silver-tipped cane, his hawkish eyes monitoring the empty corridor in which she stood. It did not startle her, for Miranda was used to her father appearing at unexpected moments, surfacing at one end of the island when she had thought him at the other, catching her in the midst of conversation with Caliban or the island spirits. What caught her attention was the portrait beside his, of which she could only see the corner of a thick golden frame: the picture was draped with a shroud, its material not unlike her own black veil.
She glanced at Dorothea. “Do you know why they keep this one covered?”
Dorothea shook her head. “It’s always been that way. I’ve never looked beneath.”
Distant footsteps echoed down the hall. Miranda moved towards the portrait as if mesmerized, taking hold of the cloth. Why had they covered it? She lifted it one inch, and then another. There was a shoulder, in a scarlet garment, and then a collarbone. The curve of a jaw. Rose-colored lips. And then—
“You, girls! What do you think you’re doing?” Miranda dropped the cloth and turned to see a woman she recognized, though the woman had never deigned to introduce herself, a woman who looked a little like her and might be a cousin or an aunt. “Get away from there.” She strode across the gallery and seized Miranda by the wrist, pulling her back towards her rooms. Miranda caught Dorothea’s eye, but Dorothea looked even more frightened than her.
Miranda was dragged through the halls back to her chambers and thrust inside. She heard the locks tumble into place: and then, silence. She fell upon her bed and wept.
Towards midnight, as she counted the chimes of the church bells, she heard a scratching at the door. She ran to press her face against it, to peer into the crack at its base. “Dorothea?” she whispered, placing her fingers beneath. She felt the pressure of a hand on her own, an almost phantom touch, cold and fleeting as the castle’s drafts: then it vanished, without reply, and she heard no more until morning.