CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 40

Let's give up a cheer for me, who did not jump and scream.

She stood against the wall, a dark-clad, veiled, painfully thin woman, tall, yet with hunched shoulders and hands like claws.

Outside the tomb, I heard the screech as my nurse threw herself against the massive door. But the sound was muffled by stone and metal, by death and decay. This was no place for the living. Here was the place to abandon all hope and die as one is always fated to do.

I wished I could abandon hope. It would be so much easier than these next minutes promised to be. But my character was not one to fail under pressure.

"You are Titania," I said.

"Yes." She flung back her veil in a grand reveal.

I recognized her. She had been at my betrothal ball, the veiled old woman I had knocked down and remorsefully cared for. But not an old woman; emaciated, yes, skin pale yellow and shriveled like the last lemon clinging to the tree, blue eyes faded to pale gray, yet still alive and wild in her gaunt face . . . and the slash of a dagger had cut across her cheek, opening it to show bone. She'd tried to sew the wound together, but not surprisingly, she'd managed only a few large stitches of black thread.

Agatha had made her mark.

In my home, I had fostered a monster. A murderess. "You're alive, yet you're old. How is that possible? You're younger than me. Are you a demon?"

Titania laughed an exultant, wide-mouthed laugh.

Her teeth had turned amber like an old man's and seemed to hang by a thread in her red gums, and the gust of her corrosive breath convinced me she was no demon. The reek was all too human.

"Have you been so stupid, Rosie?" Titania's voice quavered as she spoke. "Have you been unable to discern my schemes?"

"I didn't often think of you," I replied truthfully. "After you died and I mourned, I had my own life and family to consider."

As if my words pained her, she spasmed and shook.

I stepped forward to . . . to assist, I guess. I mean, how stupid is that? Getting within the grasp of a woman who had killed, again and again.

But she straightened and smiled with those terrible teeth and those shrunken lips. "You're invariably kind, Rosie. It's your downfall."

"Kindness didn't carry me here." I spoke briskly, the way one does to an untrained dog of disreputable origins. "What brought me was preposterous suspicion. But not preposterous after all, for you are here, much changed, but still . . . Titania. So what I couldn't bring myself to believe . . . is true."

"Are you sure I'm not a ghost?"

Nurse pounded on the door and yelled, but in here among the black drapes and moldering bodies, the sounds seemed far away, and a quick glance at the door proved Nurse had no chance to break in—and I had no chance to break out, at least not without a fight. I knew the fight would have to occur, and having witnessed the results of Titania's skill with a dagger, I knew it would be bloody.

But first I wanted to know. Know why. "No ghost can wield a knife. No ghost can poison a person, and drive another mad." I gestured at Miranda's corpse. "She knew about you. She tried to warn me. You lured her here."

"Like you, she couldn't stay away. Somehow she gathered the strength to climb the hill to her death."

Because I'd given Miranda a coin with which to buy a meal. Sweet Mary be my witness, I meant no harm!

"Do you wonder how it is I live and so many others die? Porcia. Miranda." Titania gestured toward the body reclining on her slab. "That apothecary who betrayed me with a bad potion. My darling lord and husband, Leir, who I love more than life itself . . ." She didn't use the past tense, and in these circumstances I wondered—had she somehow managed to bring him back to life? Or had she lost her mind so thoroughly she couldn't distinguish the line between life and death?

As was my wont, I answered bluntly. "No, I don't wonder. I've got that part figured out."

"No, you don't," she snapped back.

"Do you not remember who I am?" I aggressively patted my chest. Because I wanted to make a point, and because she was threatening to make me a permanent resident of Duke Stephano's tomb. I was not okay with that. "I am the daughter of Romeo and Juliet. I've heard that tale a thousand times, how my mother theatrically tossed back the potion to put her in a sleep of death for two and forty hours, all for the love of her Romeo. You adored that story. While I fake-stuck my finger down my throat, you would beg Mamma to tell it."

Titania clasped her hands in front of her emaciated chest. "True love!" she breathed.

Nurse's pounding sounded regular as a heartbeat.

"Excessive drama," I said flatly.

Titania turned on me as if I'd slandered my family. "Lady Juliet's parents were forcing her into marriage!"

"She could have sat down like a rational person and explained to them she was already married."

"They would have had Lord Romeo killed!"

"Maybe. They might have tried." Knowing them, I was doubtful. "My dad's not easy to kill, and my grandpa loves to settle arguments over a meal and a glass of good wine. The Montagues make very fine wine." Titania drew a breath to object, but I didn't give her time. "Mostly, even if they are the most melodramatic family in Verona—and late events have undermined my belief in that—after some lamenting and reproaching, they would have come around. They love Mamma, you see, and they want her to be happy."

"You are a betrayal to romance, to your bloodline!"

"I know. I'm horribly rational, but the Montagues and the Capulets love me anyway." As soon as I said it, I thought . . . oops. Both were true, that I'm a betrayal to my family and that they love me, but Titania's childhood had been so bleak and loveless and the lack of parental mourning at her death had been so marked, I had been perhaps less than tactless.

Time to move on. "You got the idea from my madam mother's own performance, didn't you? For some reason, you decided to use the potion to put you into a sleep of death and . . . and what? Why?"

Titania's face, so unnaturally withered, took on a malevolent cast. "You're so smart, but you can't figure out why?"

I thought through all the events that had occurred before and after she was buried. "Factoring in how quickly Duke Stephano picked a new bride—"

She pointed her finger, and I saw that her knuckles looked oversized and her nails bruised with purple. "You!"

"I would say that his interest in you was fading—"

"It wasn't fading!" She crept close to Duke Stephano's body, leaned over him, caressed his cold cheek. "Every day of our marriage, I adored him, serviced him, made him the center of my life. Then . . . then . . ." She gasped once, twice, three times. "Then he grew impatient with my worship and shouted at me."

I was unimpressed. "Husbands and wives do shout. I've heard that in my own house."

Nurse gave up pounding, no doubt her fists hurt, but valiantly she kept yelling.

"Not like this. He said cruel things, terrible things." Titania gazed at him as if he had this moment broken her heart. "He said that if not for me, he'd be able to take you to wife for the power you'd give him."

"I've heard that before. He said it." I tossed my hands in the air. "But what power? He could have chosen any woman in Verona. What power could I bring him?"

"He likes virgins."

When I finished grinding my teeth, which were already pretty ground down about this virginity thing, I said, "Okay. He could have chosen any virgin in Verona. Titania, I'm an aging spinster of a good family, but I'm no conduit to power! I wish someone would tell me what he thought he'd accomplish by wedding me."

She shouted, "I don't know what power you could bring him. I don't care what power he thought you had. All I know is when I then told him what I'd done for him, he wasn't grateful."

"What you'd done for him? Like the adoration and the servicing and marriage-type stuff?" I didn't really think that's what she meant, but to what exactly did she confess?

"I loved him since he—" She paused as if unsure how—or if—to continue.

That sharpened my interest to a needle's point. "Since he what?"

"Since he visited your parents. He found me in the garden, alone and sad because your father didn't return my . . . Well. It doesn't matter why I was sad. Duke Stephano told me I was pretty and he liked me." Her voice got dreamy and childlike. "He hugged me and he kissed me and—"

"Duke Stephano visited my parents and assaulted one of our female guests?" This got worse and worse.

"He didn't assault me! He was being nice to me." She smiled faintly as if she were looking at a pretty, mythic tapestry. "He told me so."

Nice? I didn't want to know exactly what that entailed, but the picture my imagination built horrified me. "Was his first wife still alive?"

"Yes. So what? She didn't live much longer." Titania's mouth curled in satisfaction.

I'd known immutable facts about Duke Stephano, believed what all Verona believed. He had killed his wives, one by one. He'd done it for money, for sin, for cruelty. He was guilty, because no other explanation was possible. Now Titania's mania seemed more like madness, and I stated my newest notion as if it was ridiculous. Because it was ridiculous. Wasn't it?

Please, don't let this horrible theory be true.

"His first wife died of poison," I said. "Did you poison her?"