It was four days before Agata saw Bice again.
She walked through the portrait gallery for the first time since Bice’s death and lingered before her cousin’s portrait, the bright pinks and reds of its palette subdued by the waning midday light. The motionless, peaked woman in the frame looked more like Bice on her deathbed than when she was in full health. Bice was never that still. She was always in motion, always walking and laughing and talking, to everyone, to the cooks and the servants and the porters as easily as to the nobles she entertained at court. She asked them all to call her “Bice,” even though Agata told her that she shouldn’t.
With her passing, the castle had fallen under a black spell. Prospero was nowhere to be found: Agata knew of course that he had locked himself away in his workshops in the tunnels, but she dared not seek him out and demand that he present himself to his people in these days of mourning. She left that task to Antonio.
She left the portrait gallery and walked out to the courtyard. The storm that had loomed for days had never come, though the air still thrummed with dry, restless energy. A few servants crossed through the courtyard, all dressed in black. One of the young men, a dark-haired boy with a vulpine look about him, glanced up at her where she stood on the landing and detached himself from the entourage, gliding up the stairs.
He glanced around as he ascended the top step and then dropped his voice low. “Prospero requests your presence in the tunnels at midnight. He has something to show you.”
She stared at him. “And he cannot tell me this himself? Who are you to tell me where I am to be and when?”
The boy shrugged. “Midnight, he says.” He turned to go down the steps and then glanced back. “And he said not to tell his brother. Not yet.”
She looked after the boy as he disappeared into the hall off the courtyard, the one where Virgil’s statue stood guard.
* * *
Midnight came, and Agata found herself in the tunnels.
She had not intended to go. She had no desire to involve herself with Prospero’s plans, whatever they might be. But she had tossed and turned in her bed an hour, and then she had gotten dressed, telling herself she would walk the halls to calm her nerves. She had walked, and walked. In the end her feet had carried her to one of the dark entrances to the labyrinth, the one near the armory, underneath which, she knew, Prospero’s workrooms lay.
It was said the branching tunnels beneath Milan ran from the castle all the way to the countryside, though she had never gone that far. In fact Agata had never walked the tunnels on her own, but only with Bice, who was fascinated by them. “They’re a feat of engineering, Agata! A perfect marriage of science and art. How can you help but explore all of this when it’s right under you?”
Agata could help it easily. She wanted to return to the warmth of her bed, to await the comfort of dawn and the morning Mass she would attend. Yet she was curious why Prospero, who had never spoken to her alone, would request her presence in such cryptic fashion. So she traced the steps she remembered from her few trips with Bice, when Bice had showed her where Prospero did his mysterious work.
“This one makes little sparks,” Bice had said, showing Agata a glass orb with metal inside, “and this one predicts the weather. And this is called an aludel, and this is an alembic, and—oh! In the next room he stores his athanor. Isn’t it a wonderful word, ‘athanor’? Let’s go see.” It was clear Beatrice knew how to work the strange contraptions, and Agata had to hold herself back from telling Bice, once again, that such instruments were surely sinful; the harsh way their foreign names scraped at the ear made that clear enough. Bice had never listened, and afterwards she would barely speak to Agata for days. Agata could never bear Beatrice’s silence for long.
That was long ago, when Prospero still let Bice enter his rooms freely.
Agata sighed and pressed on into the darkness, torch in hand. She hesitated before the great iron door of Prospero’s laboratorium, unsure if her decision to come had been wise. But before she could turn back, the door swung open, and Prospero ushered her in with the sweep of his massive arm. “Midnight is the time of miracles, Agata. And this night is filled with them. Come inside and see what I have made.”
She crept into the room, a shiver running down her spine as Prospero closed the heavy door behind her. He crossed to the opposite side, to the apogee of the half circle in which they stood, and thrust open the door there, summoning her with a crook of the finger. “Follow me, Agata. Follow, and fear not.”
She knew the room they entered contained books upon books: she had seen it before, with Bice. What she did not expect, however, was for Prospero to run his hand down the side of one of the many bookshelves, the one just across from the doorway, and for the bookshelf to move. It swung back to reveal yet another entrance, this one unlit, a dark cavern concealed behind Prospero’s multitudinous tomes.
Prospero vanished into the darkness, and Agata followed, as if in a trance. She saw now the true design of Prospero’s lair. The workrooms she had seen with Bice were only the first level of the laboratorium. Set around them, behind them, were other rooms, and around those a tunnel, the narrow tunnel she and Prospero were walking through. They turned to the right, though she saw that it also continued on to the left, meaning it must ring the full crescent of his workspace. From this tunnel, one could enter any of the hidden rooms through the closed doors they were passing. They passed one, then two, and then came to a third, to the very end of the passage.
Prospero stopped and turned to face her, the light from her torch flickering over the ridges and dips of his broad face.
“You will see wonders untold tonight, Agata. Your mind may not at first comprehend them, but remember that your own Bible is full of tales of such marvels, such feats of grace. Remember that Jesus of Nazareth rose after three days, and Lazarus four. Remember the words with which the apostle Paul urged us to empty Sheol and rob death of its ill-begotten prize. ‘I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction.’”
Never before had Prospero quoted Scripture in Agata’s presence, or, in fact, indicated that he had any knowledge of its teachings. He meant to enthrall her, to beguile her in some way. Her heart beat fast in her chest, for she feared she grasped some meaning in the muddled message of his semi-blasphemous ramblings. “Prospero,” she managed, her throat choked, “what is behind this door? What have you done?”
He pressed a large hand against the door and opened it. Agata could see nothing at first. Only a dim light, playing off the wall. Prospero urged her forward, and she came to stand before him, staring into the cell he had revealed.
A figure sat in the center of its confines. It wore a shroud, and its shoulders were hunched, as if it might at any moment keel over. Agata breathed in, trying to calm the hammering in her chest. “Prospero—”
“She was never lost, Agata.” He passed by Agata and stepped into the cell, filling it with his mass. “Never gone.” He pulled off the figure’s veil, holding it high as he crumpled it in his fist. “She has been returned to us, by the great powers of this universe, wielded through my hands.”
Agata staggered back, her hand flying to her mouth.
It was Bice.
Some infernal copy of Bice. Bice as though she had been a thousand years at the bottom of the sea, her skin washed to a stony blue-green, her lips the blanched color of dead coral, her hair as lank and tangled as kelp.
The thing peered at Agata, its eyes focusing with great difficulty, and stretched out a skeletal hand. “Gata,” it rasped, from somewhere deep in its ruined throat. “Gata.”
“What have you done?” Agata’s voice was low, but it seemed to boom in the small stone space. Prospero looked at her, a smirk on his lips.
“I have returned her to this mortal plane, of course, from which she was expelled so cruelly. I have rescued her from Purgatory, Agata. The corrupt Church claims its priests, fattened with cheese and wine they’ve bought off the backs of peasants, can hasten one’s entrance into Heaven. Why can the journey not work the other way? For those who were taken too soon, who have so many more years to live: Why should we not return them to Earth, to their rightful home, if we have the power, if we have the will?”
“Sacrilege,” Agata gasped. The thing’s eyes were still on her, and she could hardly bear its stare.
“No.” Prospero drew himself up to his full height. “I have consulted with the true masters of the Church. I have received their blessing for my efforts. Not all will agree, of course, but I have the support of many. The ones who see reason are on my side.”
Lies, thought Agata, but this time she did not speak aloud. She kept her eye on the creature, which reached for her still. Could it be some copy? Some phantasm, meant to deceive? But she knew Bice’s face better than her own. She knew Bice’s every expression. And the look etched into each line of this being’s hauntingly familiar face was terror.
She had seen that look not very long ago. She had seen it as Beatrice begged Agata to burn her body and scatter the ashes to the wind.
“Had her soul gone on to Heaven, to its final resting place, I never could have retrieved it. She was in Purgatory, for she was never meant to be taken from us so soon. But I have restored that spark of life unjustly plundered from her form by completing the great and difficult work of anastasis. It was a noble art once known to Christian mages in the Holy Land, though the knowledge was lost over centuries. I have reconstructed their writings, and now, once again, we hold the ability to create life where there was only death, to turn back the mindless tides of fate.”
Agata knew Prospero’s tricks. She knew his powers of persuasion. His effort to exert them upon her, to convince her this was some pious and necessary act, stunk of deception. But she did not care. Here was Bice. Her Bice, Bice pulled from the safety of her grave bed. And she looked so very scared.
She came forward, taking Bice’s cold, waxy hand with only the slightest flinch. “It’s all right,” she murmured, trying not to breathe too deeply of the fetid scent rising from her cousin’s skin. “It will be all right.”
Prospero relaxed, stepping back. “You see, Agata? She needs someone to care for her. I must attend to other pressing matters and cannot be with her always. The world does not stop turning, even for wonders such as this.” He looked down at her, his eyes black voids in the torchlight. “Will you help her and not say a word to Antonio? He will not understand, not yet. We must give her time, time to recover, and then present her to him when she is truly whole again.”
She felt a pang, thinking how Antonio would rejoice to see Bice’s face again, though his horror would surely match her own. “Yes.” Her voice was but a whisper. “I will help her. Tell me what she needs.”
* * *
She spent the first night washing the filth from Bice’s limbs, tending to the body she had seen expire only days before. The body that even now should be sleeping beneath the dirt, its soul gone to claim its eternal reward.
Agata bathed Bice’s body in a ceramic tub Prospero had set in the room beside his blazing alchemical furnace, where the air was a little warmer, though she did not know that Bice could feel it. “Too much liquid on the skin will cause deterioration,” Prospero warned. “Use sparingly this rosewater, which ameliorates the smell.” He delivered his instructions the way he used to dictate certain household tasks, as if bathing a corpse were in no way extraordinary. Perhaps, Agata reflected, it was not for him. She had heard the stories about the foundling wheels and prisons. If his claims were true, unbaptized infants and criminals were perfect candidates for his form of redemption from Limbo and Purgatory alike. How many unfortunates had he brought back before Bice? How long did they last? How long did Bice have?
Bice looked at her with dull, glaucous eyes as Agata ran a cloth lightly over her arm. She had bits of grime stuck to her in all kinds of places, but Agata dared not scrub the patches too hard. She did not know what was part of Bice’s body now. Even if Prospero had halted her decay, rot had set in the moment she drew her last natural breath.
“Gata,” the creature said again, and Agata closed her eyes. Bice knew her, but Agata could not tell if she knew anything else. Did she understand what Prospero had done? Did she think? Was she truly Bice, or only a shell? In either case, Agata knew she would keep her promise not to tell Antonio, however unwillingly. Bice’s soul was in peril, caught here in this liminal state, and she did not know what would become of Bice’s spirit if harm befell this body. She had to tread carefully. Prospero believed that she trusted him, that she credited his miracle. She would keep him believing until she could determine what to do.
The creature muttered something else. Agata ignored Bice’s complaint, patting her arm dry, until the word came again, this time clearer, more insistent.
“Mranda.” A kind of grunt, all running together. “Mranda. Mranda.”
Agata dropped the cloth, staring at Bice’s face. Bice turned slightly to fix her gaze upon Agata, moving her lips more deliberately now, the motion slow but certain. “Mi . . . ran . . . da. Mir . . . anda. Miranda.”
“Bice—”
“Miranda.”
“Bice—” The world spun. Agata had performed this exchange over and over in the days before Bice’s passing, but death had not stopped Bice’s moans. Even now, she was crying out for her daughter. Even now, with this impossible animation, with her mind rotted by death, Miranda was all she wanted.