Miranda in Milan

by Katharine Duckett

  A different girl, not Dorothea, brought in Miranda’s supper without speaking and then whisked it away again, returning briefly to light a fire and prepare Miranda for bed with as much haste and as little contact as she could manage. Miranda waited until she heard the girl’s footsteps recede far down the stone hall and then threw off her covers, rolling off the bed to look beneath. No trapdoor lay in wait.

  She stood, casting her gaze about the room. Heavy tapestries hung from every illustrated wall; jutting stones, from floor to ceiling, looked as though any one might be a secret lever.

  Miranda reached out and ran her hands along the perimeter of the room, feeling for cracks and catches as she moved from the first room of her chambers to the second. It was difficult to make out any anomalies by the light of the fire, and her fingers scrabbled fruitlessly over the stone, finding no purchase.

  Frustrated, she turned her eyes upward, examining the high vaulted ceilings. They were decorated on every side with scenes of golden-haired beings, winged creatures that reminded her of Ariel. Her gaze wandered from their skies and fell upon the far wall, which was covered all over in paradisal scenes of animals and trees. Upon it hung a weaving that depicted a serpent and an eagle, facing off.

  The room had grown drafty, and the tapestry fluttered slightly, though the others around it hung straight and still. Just above her head, in the center of the serpent’s green belly, Miranda thought she could make out a bulge. Or was it only a shadow?

  She took a chair from the table by the window where she ate her meals—until her manners improved, she had been told, she would not be permitted to dine in public—maneuvering it as well and quietly as she could to line it up with the bottom of the tapestry. Then she climbed, pulling the edge of the hanging back from the wall.

  There, underneath the basilisk, was a painted pond of rippling cerulean, with a silver fish in its center. The fish was raised a few inches from the wall, and from a distance of even a few feet away it would seem to be part of it, but Miranda could see now that it was a handle. She grasped its scales and pulled, and the pond peeled away from the wall, revealing a round portal into darkness.

  She glanced behind her, though she knew she was alone. Her nightgown was hardly made for climbing, but Prospero hadn’t allowed her to keep any of her clothes from the island better suited to this purpose. “You’re a child no longer, Miranda,” he had told her. “You’re a lady of Milan, and you will present yourself to your people as such.”

  “And yet they hide me under a veil,” she grumbled, running her hands along the opening’s edge. “So what does it matter?”

  She could not see how long the tunnel was or what lay within. Spiders, toads, and rats and mice didn’t scare her: she’d explored the island’s caves many times and grown used to the feel of small legs skittering over her skin. Her true fear was of the space itself, of being trapped in this passage, which wasn’t much bigger than her body. Anyone could come into her room, at any time. This place was not her own. And if she was discovered, what then?

  She thought how Caliban would mock her as she wavered. “Coward!” he’d say, as he did when they were young. “But then all the members of your sex are fearful little lambs compared to a man like me. I’m not afraid.”

  “You’re not a man,” she’d retort, and then she’d give in, jump from the cliff or tumble down the hill or swing from the hanging rope across the ravine. And Caliban would follow close behind, chagrined, but never truly angry, never far from Miranda’s side: at least not until that day Prospero found them sleeping together, as they sometimes did after a long day at play, and began to rave, beating Caliban so badly he had refused to so much as look at Miranda for a year.

  Her father had cowed Caliban, but her father was not here. Her father could not see into Miranda’s rooms. And so she hoisted herself up, slipping into the narrow entrance. She moved forward on her hands and knees, into the blackness, the firelight fading behind her.

  The tunnel sloped, gently giving way to a larger, lower passage. Now she could stand, and she saw that the tunnel branched, and that someone had lit torches farther down the way. She crept along the wall, careful of her steps, quiet as she could be in her slippered feet.

  She followed a curving offshoot of the main passage and found it led to another portal, this one on a low, angled wall just above her head. She prodded, and it gave way. She pushed again, an inch at a time, until she could peep through the gap, to see where in the castle the tiny door let out.

  She was looking up at a man’s ankles and feet. Huge, heavy feet beneath long robes. She recognized those stone legs, and the back of the head, crested with laurels, that she could see rising above them. She was in the long hall on the level below her own rooms that led to the ducal courtyard, at the base of the statue of the ancient man who towered there, whose name she did not know.

  Suddenly she heard voices coming down the passage and ducked back into the tunnels, breathing hard.

  If she were caught, perhaps her father would beat her, but she had been beaten before. He always spared her the worst of his fury, and in the end he would be happy to see her, she was certain. He had told her once that her face was proof of miracles untold, that her very name reflected its wonder. She had been proud of that, before coming to Milan, where it seemed every citizen shunned her countenance.

  Miranda walked on, choosing her path by the light, never taking the brightest route, but always keeping some illumination in her sights. Her sense of direction was sharp from years on an island where rocks sometimes got up and moved, where trees occasionally began to complain and shift themselves from place to place. She’d had to make a map in her head to navigate the isle freely.

  Here the tunnel was nearly as wide as a road, arched and set with smooth bricks on all sides. She walked along it for a time, until a movement within one of the dark apertures caught her eye. She thought, for a moment, that she saw a spark of aurulent light dance across its shadows, the kind of magic spark she had seen fly from her father’s fingertips, and again her heart began to pound. But peering into the cramped passage, she could see it was unlit and seemed utterly deserted.

  She glanced about and took up a torch from the wall of the covered road, making her way down the dark shaft.

  The passage curved, and Miranda followed it, losing the light behind her. She could only see a few feet in front of her until the tunnel debouched into a larger passage, this one with small, high windows on one side that let in a little moonlight, bathing the stones below in a bluish glow. On the side opposite, she could see a large iron door. It was open.

  She passed through, casting her torchlight ahead of her, and found three smaller rooms encircling the entrance, each with its door hanging open, almost as if someone had just departed. They fanned out from the spot where she stood, and she saw the rooms were part of a half circle, a self-contained space whose purpose she could not immediately divine.

  She could make out low long tables in the room to her right, and here and there the floor glittered with what looked like the dusty remnants of crushed glass. It reminded her of her father’s laboratorium back on the island, which he rarely let her enter. Once he’d brought her in to show her a new toy he’d made her, a little frog that hopped when he brought a finger to its back. It croaked, too, but not the croak she had heard from real frogs on the island: more of a creak, like it hurt its mouth to move it. “Alchemy,” her father proclaimed, “is a divine art, with aims that reach far beyond the mortal realm. We seek to deliver the gifts of the gods into the hands of man, to bring gold down from the heavens, to grant life unending. Why should our stay upon this earth be so precious, so brief? The spark of life, Miranda, can be summoned where no life lay before. The spark of life is ours to create.”

  She hadn’t understood his words, but she had taken the small creature in her hands, where it sat trembling. When she examined it later, alone, she saw the stitches in its side, in the skin that felt almost like a real frog’s, though ha
rder and colder. She saw that its eyes were made from black pebbles, pushed into its face. She released it outside, and when it would not jump without her prodding, she took it to a far pond and sat it on the muddy bank. She hoped it might find a home there, but the other frogs leapt away from the creature as soon as she set it down. For many months, she did not return to the pond, but when she finally did, the little toy frog was gone.

  She began to step farther into the warren but stopped when she heard a sound. Close. Far too close. The sound of breathing, heavy and low.

  Her legs tensed. The sound seemed to come from one of the unexplored rooms to her left.

  She stayed still, listening, but the sound did not move closer. She should turn back. She should flee at once, as fast as her feet could take her. But curiosity pulled her forward, as it had propelled her so many times as she traveled along her island’s shores. Never, despite her father’s warnings, despite the insect bites and the scratches and the gashes, had Miranda ever been able to resist an adventure.

  The room was empty. A wooden table stood against one wall: otherwise the space bore no trace of human presence. Yet she could hear the breathing still, sounding now as though it came from the walls themselves. She had the dizzying sensation of standing within a living lung, feeling the blast and crush of breath all around her.

  She spun slowly, throwing light onto each wall by turn. As it passed over the curve of the wall opposite the door, she saw a slender rectangular crevice set into the stone. She approached, as silently as she was able, and pressed her face against the gap.

  She looked into a cell hidden behind the wall of rooms. There, crumpled in a corner, was a man. A man she knew, a man whose face mirrored her father’s. Her uncle Antonio.

  He was asleep, his black hair splayed out on the stone floor, his gaunt torso twisted, for his hands were cuffed by long chains to the wall. She had missed what had become of him in the excitement of their arrival in Milan: nor, she reflected, had she seen much of him during their few days in Naples. He had worn the same dazed expression every time she’d glimpsed him since that day on the island, but he had walked free during their travels across Italy. Her father claimed to have forgiven him. Why, then, was he shackled in this secret enclosure?

  Within the cell a chain rattled, and Antonio lifted his head. She could not see whether he had opened his eyes, even as he began to speak.

  “And so the storm comes to our shores.” His voice seemed crusted with rust, as though he had not spoken for days. “And so Milan is lost, even though I had sworn to save it, even as I thought I had secured its reaches for all the generations yet to come.” A glint, in the darkness: yes, her uncle’s eyes were open, and his gaze had fallen upon her face. “What must you never do, when dealing with the Devil, girl? Turn your back to him, and give him time. Time, and books, and the sanguineous sea.”

  Miranda turned on her heel and fled, speeding back the way she had come, the web of tunnels passing in a blur. She barely breathed until she scrambled back through the portal in her wall, nearly toppling over the chair, and dove for the cover of her bed, her breath coming at last in dry, heaving gasps. What was the meaning of his strange speech, his muttered nonsense? Would he tell her father that he had seen her? She knew Prospero’s anger would be terrible if he found she’d had any contact with the traitor, even if she told him she hadn’t meant to.

  Her breathing calmed as she lay in bed. No one came to her door. She closed her eyes and tried to understand what she had seen. She resolved not to tell Dorothea about any of it yet, about the tunnels, about Antonio, even though she yearned to share what she had discovered, to ask Dorothea what she knew. She knew from experience how adept her father was at drawing out information, how he extracted it from Caliban with whips and lashes, and from Miranda’s own lips with tools more subtle. If Dorothea had been sent to spy on her, maybe her father wanted her to find Antonio. Maybe this was some kind of test. Dorothea seemed anything but duplicitous, but Miranda couldn’t risk a secret like this.

  They could speak of other things. They could spend time together, here in her room, as long as she held her tongue, as long as she told Dorothea nothing that might provoke her father’s wrath. As long as Miranda was careful, perhaps they could be friends.

  Chapter 2

  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?”