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.
Chapter 9
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 han
ds.”
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.
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