“Bice!”
Beatrice did not slow. She was far across the hills, and Agata struggled to keep up. Bice’s legs had always been longer, her gait more assured. She strode where Agata straggled, and her strong, tanned limbs carried her across the green expanse easily even with Miranda in her arms, tucked against her bosom as she carried the apples they’d already picked in a swinging basket in her other hand.
Beatrice’s skin freckled brown in the sun, and she would do nothing to protect it, which had caused Agata’s aunt no end of consternation in their youth. The portrait of Beatrice recently hung in the castle’s gallery painted her skin as smooth and creamy as milk. Her true skin was dappled with spots though she had barely reached her twentieth birthday, her face already grooved with lines from lounging about outside and from laughing. She laughed often, Beatrice did. Or at least she had, until these last few months.
It was unfair, Agata thought as she caught up to her cousin, that all these flaws only served Beatrice’s beauty. She had always looked a touch wild, like a mare who couldn’t be broken. Now, as a young mother, she looked like a goddess, her dark hair flowing down her shoulders, her teeth gleaming white as she bit into a crisp red apple.
“Mm.” Beatrice chewed, spitting out seeds as she went. “They’re even better this year! It’s the cold, I think. Made them tastier.”
“We can’t eat them all out here. Giuseppe promised to make an apple tart this evening.”
“We won’t! Well, at least I don’t think we will.” Beatrice slipped a small knife out of the pouch tied to her skirt and cut off a piece of the apple to give to Miranda. Miranda chewed thoughtfully as her mother spoke. “In truth, I don’t wish to return. Can’t we stay here, Agata, and start an orchard of our own? We could live in a simple shack and sell fruit on the road to Como. If I ran away, would you join me?”
Agata sighed. “Don’t be foolish, Bice.” She lifted an apple from her own basket. “Have you spoken to him?”
“We’ve spoken.” Beatrice scraped her teeth over the core. “We’ve spoken, and still he persists. I do not think he hears me anymore, Agata. Truly. I think all he hears are the voices in his head. No one can reach him. Not me, not Antonio. Not even Miranda can persuade him to stop his work.”
Agata looked down at the little girl, who had cocked her head at the sound of her name. Everyone else said that Miranda had Bice’s eyes, her ears, but Agata could only see Prospero in her face, in the defiant jut of the lip, her hooded eyes. It wasn’t the girl’s fault, but Agata couldn’t help but resent her for the change she had brought to their lives, and to the castle. All this trouble began with her conception, three years before.
Prospero and Beatrice had been married a year before the pregnancy, and happily. Bice’s parents were thrilled when the duke of Milan had taken an interest in their last surviving child after coming to tour their famous vineyards and had urged the match on, despite the reservations of their neighbors in Franciacorta, far from the city’s walls. Perhaps the duke was eccentric, as they said, and a touch withdrawn, but on his arm their daughter would be a duchess. No strangeness in his nature could surmount that fact.
They had sent Agata along with her to Milan, to help Beatrice manage the castle and because Bice and Agata had been inseparable their entire lives. Though they were cousins, they called each other “sister,” for Beatrice’s parents had raised Agata after her own parents died in the fire that had claimed her childhood home. Their families had faced far too many tragedies, but now their fortunes were changing. Perhaps, they hinted, Agata would win the heart of the duke’s unmarried younger brother, the dashing Antonio. She was plain, it was true, and growing older, but she favored Bice around the eyes a little, or maybe it was the mouth. “Be charming,” her aunt had told her, “and attentive. Maybe your piety will impress him. They say though he is proud, he is devout, while the duke has not set foot in a church for a decade or more.”
Agata had not needed urging, for she had fallen for Antonio at first glance. He was lean and muscled, stalking the castle like a wildcat, his black hair shadowing the sharp lines of his face. When he drank too much, which he did often, his cheeks flushed pink, and he would push his hair back, the shock of his dark unguarded eyes almost too much for Agata to bear. They worked closely together, tending to the many concerns of the castle that Prospero neglected, and talked often, though not nearly as often as Agata would have liked. She shadowed his steps like a younger sister, and he repaid her with all the grudging affection that relationship entailed.
Nothing she did swayed him, for Antonio had eyes for no one but Bice. He had never said it, but he didn’t need to. She’d seen the look before. Countless men looked at Bice that way. And if Prospero ever extracted himself from the spirit world and took note of the way his brother looked upon his wife, he would see it, plain as day. Agata knew that would never happen. Prospero’s blue eyes were clouded with visions from beyond this world. This palace, the people in it, were mist to him. If all of Milan drifted away as he worked, Agata was not certain he would miss it.
“Has Antonio appealed to him?” She turned her attention back to Bice, who was staring out at the first orange rays of the soon-setting sun. “If anyone can stop him, it must be Antonio. Has he tried?”
Beatrice scrunched up her nose. “Antonio will do nothing but what he wants, and he wants Prospero to keep himself locked away, so he can run the dukedom as he pleases. He wants Prospero to remain ensconced in his work and never again attend to matters of state. I know what Antonio wants.”
Not all of what he wants, Agata thought, but she bit her tongue. Beatrice had never understood the power she wielded over men. She had mostly ignored their fervent attentions until the duke came along. She had been fascinated by his stories, his research, and his travels. They had spent hours together that first year, hours poring over the books in his libraries, hours discussing the true aims of alchemy and the building of a better world. It turned Agata’s stomach, for such talk reeked of sacrilege. It was not for man to reshape the world and its workings, but for God alone. She told Bice as much, and Bice rolled her eyes. “It’s hardly an affront to the Father, Agata. He changes metals into other metals and searches for new cures to old ills. There are alchemists with other aims, those seeking immortality, those craving unholy powers, but Prospero is not one of them. His art is harmless.”
But then Beatrice’s belly had begun to grow, and Prospero had become obsessed with the origin of the creature within. “Man creates life easily and yet understands little of its genesis,” Agata had heard him say to Bice. “What man can make, he can understand. What he can understand, he can command.”
He withdrew into his work as Agata tended to Beatrice’s needs, as she prepared the ducal apartments for the coming of the baby. Agata had hoped Miranda’s arrival might prompt in Prospero some paternal instinct, might inspire a tender attention to distract him from his labors, but he was nowhere to be found on the morning of Miranda’s birth. When he did appear, he seemed to delight in the child’s tiny fingers, her well-formed limbs, and yet his fascination lasted at most a month before strange habits again consumed him. While Bice raised Miranda, relishing her new role as a mother, Prospero’s eccentricities and absences only increased.
His experiments had grown more frequent and more secretive. He disappeared now into his workrooms in the tunnels for weeks at a time, emerging only to demand the latest texts from Cairo and Baghdad, from Samarkand and Tiflis and the Far East. He employed a team of men in his service: grim, silent servants whose brutish looks frightened Agata as she passed them, guarding the entrances to the tunnels. These men left the castle on mysterious errands day and night, and the porter at the western gate told her of the covered carts they ferried in and out of the castle, the rumored midnight trips to the prisons and the foundling wheels along the canal. She did not understand what their work could be, but she knew the whole castle had begun to speak of it. She knew they wondered if their duke was of sound mind, and why, these past few years, Antonio had become the face of Milan, the de facto duke and representative of his noble family, while Prospero hid himself away.
She had urged Beatrice to intervene, and Bice had, to no avail. Agata heard her and Prospero screaming at each other in their rooms, only once, and then the fighting had ceased. Beatrice had become oddly tranquil, taking to her bed more frequently than she once had: she, who had always glowed with energy and health, with a robustness Agata could never match. She seemed to brighten whenever she and Agata left the castle together, when they went into the city or back to Franciacorta, and so Agata had begun taking her farther and farther from its walls, dreading the inevitable return to Prospero and his dark doings at the end of the day. This afternoon had been long and lovely, filled with Bice’s laughter and Miranda’s squeals. But the sun was quickly sinking, and Agata knew this day, like all those lovely others, would soon draw to an end.
“We should get back.” Beatrice got to her feet, a touch unsteadily, still holding Miranda and the basket. “We should—” She took a step and stumbled, Miranda and the basket of apples tumbling to the ground.
“Bice,” breathed Agata, and then she rushed to her side, pressing her hand to Bice’s arm. “Bice! Bice, what’s wrong?”
Her cousin’s skin felt feverish to the touch, and she lay on the ground in a boneless heap, insensate to Miranda’s keening cries. Never once had Bice ignored Miranda when she heard her crying. Never once had she abandoned her daughter, not in sickness, not in exhaustion, not in sadness.
Agata swept Miranda up and ran back to the waiting carriage, waving her arm to the driver, summoning him to help, please help, come as quickly as you can.
* * *
Bice’s fever did not abate.
Prospero sent for the best doctors and healers he could find, caring not if their methods were medical or mystical. Agata seethed as charlatans spread unguents over Beatrice’s skin, chanting in strange tongues as Bice lay unmoving under their hands. She attended Mass daily, begging God for Bice’s recovery, begging him not to hold Bice accountable for her husband’s sins.
Despite Agata’s entreaties, Bice withered. Her strong limbs grew thin. Her face paled and sank in on itself. In the three weeks after that day in the hills she transformed, before Agata’s eyes, into a living corpse. Three weeks, and Beatrice had pleaded with Agata, each of those endless days, to bring Miranda to her. She begged to let her see the daughter she could hear, down the hall, crying out for her mother, the mother who could not hold her, for fear that the illness plaguing Bice would infect her, too.
Miranda’s screams reverberated throughout the castle for hours at a time, only strengthening in volume and frequency as the weeks dragged on. Agata grew to hate the child. The little beast wailed like a creature from Hell, and she beat her fists on Agata’s chest whenever Agata attempted to hold her. She had everything of Prospero’s temperament, and Agata could hardly help but abhor anything Prospero had made. She loathed herself for these thoughts, of course: she repented for them every morning in the pews, but she could not swallow the disdain she felt each time she laid her eyes upon Miranda’s small, snotty face as she entered her room, the sense that Miranda had taken from Bice something vital, something she needed now to live.
Agata did not bring Miranda to her mother. And so the halls were filled with their last yearning calls to each other, with Bice’s moans and Miranda’s sobs, in a castle otherwise as silent and still and patient as the tomb.
* * *
The day they buried Bice was cool and gray, and the clouds hung heavy with the threat of lightning. Agata stared at the tree above Prospero’s head, the oak that loomed above Bice’s graveside, and imagined it splitting. Imagined branches crashing down on Prospero’s head, crushing him with their weight. Imagined his proud, ruined body laid to rest beneath the dirt, instead of Bice, beautiful, lost Bice, gone to live with the angels.
This was Agata’s only solace: Bice was in Paradise now. Her soul was safe, her suffering finished. Christ had taken her into His embrace, and it was not for Agata to question why it had been so soon, so terribly soon, so cruelly, unbearably soon.
The last days of Bice’s life had been the worst of them. She could not eat. She could not sleep. She twisted and writhed, and Agata struggled to pin down her arms so that she would not hurt herself, so that she would not scratch at her own eyes, as she had begun to do. “I see them,” she would mutter, her voice raw and low. “I see them, and I know. Close my eyes, and I see them still. You can’t make me sleep, Prospero. You can’t make me—” These strange murmurings always ended in wracking spasms, and Agata stayed by Bice’s side as she spat up blood, careful to keep it off her own skin. No one else had contracted Beatrice’s illness. No one knew the cause. Agata thought of Bice’s long months of lethargy and wondered if she should have known. Wondered if she should have taken Bice far from the castle, back to her parents’ home and the lush vineyards she loved so well.
The day before she died, Bice had uttered words of blasphemy so profane that Agata struggled now to strike them from her memory. Bice’s ravings were the words of a fever-addled mind. She didn’t know what she was saying. But she had gripped Agata’s hand, digging her ragged nails into the skin, beseeching her. Asking Agata to trespass against God, to commit a crime that would put both their souls in peril.
“Burn my body, Agata. Please, when I go. Burn it, and throw the ashes to the wind.”
“No.” Agata covered her mouth. “No, we would never cremate you, Bice. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“I beg of you, Agata, I beg—” She began a fit of coughing. “You must. There must be no trace of me. Take what remains to Franciacorta, and spread me in the hills. If I return, it will be as a tree, bearing fruit, living on through the wine. Agata—my sister—you must—”
Agata wrapped her fingers around Bice’s wrist, bending low to speak into her ear. “You’re delirious, Bice. You must rest. And you must not speak a word of this in the presence of the priests, or Archbishop d’Este will refuse to deliver your last rites.” Already she and Antonio had struggled to convince the archbishop to set foot in the castle to attend to Bice, for the leaders of the Church detested Prospero. But they could hardly deny a dying woman her eternal reward simply because of the stories that swirled about her husband, as Antonio pointed out to them. There was no proof that Prospero’s work and clandestine research violated the teachings of the Church. Perhaps he skirted the line at times, but Antonio could vouch for him as a brother, and he did, for Bice’s sake. Prospero might be absent from Mass, but still, Antonio promised, he adhered to the will of God. His experiments were in God’s service.
And so the black-frocked priests had come, and they had anointed Beatrice, and prayed over her, and delivered unto her the viaticum, though Beatrice had trouble getting the wafer past her lips. And in the end she passed away quietly, with no more talk of fire and smoke, with her eyes closed and Agata by her bedside. Prospero was absent for Beatrice’s last breath, still whiling away at his false cures, still convinced he could save Bice, though the Lord above had granted her eternal rest.