I cleared my throat. “It’s true,” I said. “I knew a man who had to have his foot amputated because of a cat scratch.” (This was a lie. I did once know a man who’d had to have his foot amputated because of a catbite,though.)
“There, you see?”
“It turned dark red and black, and swelled up to twice its normal size, which was quite unpleasant, because then his toenails—”
“But none of that is going to happen toyou,” Nurse said hastily, drowning out my catalog of symptoms. “Because we’re going to treat thisright now.”
Snow stared at me with awed horror. “Did hedie?”
“Almost.”
She was still staring at me over her shoulder when Nurse led her into the bathing room to wash out the scratches. I settled into the chair, took out my notebook, and prepared for a long day of note-taking.
Reviewing my notes in the evening, I felt dejected. Snow’s appetite had increased somewhat, stretching to an entire sandwich at lunch and almost half a plate of food at dinner, but that was the only thing of significance. No, Nurse wasn’t using any home remedies. Snow sometimes drank peppermint tea for her stomach, but I’d been through the tea, and yep, that was peppermint, all right. My dreams that there might be aconite rolled up in the dried leaves had died before they had even properly started.
I was probably going to have to investigate the kitchens more thoroughly, which I wasn’t looking forward to. There are just somanythings in a kitchen, and the cooks tend to get very annoyed when you confiscate all the spices to run tests. Plus, I still didn’t know what exactly I was looking for. Snow’s symptoms were all so maddeningly vague. Lead, mercury, arsenic, antimony—I couldn’t rule any of them out, nor the possibility of something truly exotic. There is at least one plant that causes wasting illness if you eat the seeds for weeks on end, which seemed like a fine candidate, except that it only grows in harsh cold. Someone could import them, certainly, but you have to eat alotof seeds to get the effect.
This did not make it any easier to know what to watch for.
What Ireallyought to do was go through Snow’s belongings, but I kept shying away from that like a horse spotting a snake.
I’d had a friend when I was about sixteen, a broad, colorless girl named Lucia, who blended into the background at parties. I wasn’t as good at blending in, but no one was asking me to dance anyway, since by that point, I was a head taller than most of theboys. So I talked to Lucia, who had a sly sense of humor once you got to know her, and we struck up a friendship conducted a few hours at a time, between the strings of bright lanterns above the courtyard and the square red tiles underfoot.
Her mother went through her room at least once a week, convinced that Lucia was hiding something from her. I was never clear on what the woman suspected, exactly. Love letters, Lucia told me, or maybe a boy hiding in the closet. Or money or maps, in case she was going to run away. I got the impression that maybe her mother didn’t know either.
We went shopping together once and only once. When we came home, Lucia’s mother had held out her hand and snapped her fingers as if ordering a dog, and Lucia had silently handed over her packages. They held the most banal contents imaginable, but her mother dug through them as if she suspected Lucia of smuggling opium. I remember her turning socks inside out, growing more and more frustrated that she wasn’t finding anything illicit. It felt obscene, watching her paw through her daughter’s things with such bizarrely greedy hope.
Then she turned to me and held out her hand formypackages, and I took a step back, my eyebrows shooting up, and said, “Excuse me?”
She must have realized that she’d crossed some line, because she blinked at me like a woman awaking from a stupor, then backed away—but Lucia was never allowed to go anywhere with me again.
“Does she do that every time?” I asked at the next dance, while the favored spun in colorful blurs and the less favored held up the walls or congregated around the drinks table.
“Oh yes,” Lucia said calmly. “Every time. She used to pull the ribbons off my hats to make sure that there was nothing hidden under them.”
I gaped at her, but Lucia was always very calm.
I imagine she was even calm a few months later, when she vanished without a trace. It wasn’t until I ran into her a decade later, while visiting my sister Catherine, that I learned that she had been systematically hiding her pocket money for years, until she had enough to escape to the Convent of Saint Otter, high in the mountains. The sisters will take anyone in return for a suitable donation, and they are notoriously close-lipped.
“Are you happy?” I asked tentatively, unsure of how to respond to this stranger with my old friend’s face.
And then she smiled, and it was Lucia’s familiar smile, as if we were both sixteen again. “Very, very happy,” she said, and I was happy for her, and for a loose end finally tidied away.
Probably there’s multiple lessons there, but the one I took away wasDon’t rummage through your daughter’s things or she might run off and become a nun.
(Okay, I’m being overly flippant about it. The truth is that Lucia’s mother scared me a little. She hadwantedto find something terrible, if only so that it would justify all her paranoia in retrospect. Even twenty years later, the memory makes me uncomfortable.)
I knew that I was going to have to go through Snow’s possessions if I couldn’t find another source of poison, and I knew that it was in an infinitely better cause, and I still felt a little ill at the thought.
One more day watching,I decided.Then I’ll get down to work on the spices. Then I’ll worry about the rest.
I put my notes away, cleaned my teeth with sage and salt, then got into bed and blew out the candle. Cool air crept through the gap between the balcony doors, as light-footed and elusive as the one-eyed cat. I pulled the blankets over my shoulders, enjoying the contrast between the warm bed and cool air.
I was nearly asleep when I felt a cold prickle along my scalp and realized that someone was watching me.
I was lying on my side with my back to the balcony. I kept my eyes almost closed, hoping that whoever it was wouldn’t notice that I was awake. If it was an assassin, that might make the differencebetween… well, realistically, between dying in the next five seconds or the next five minutes. If they knew that I was awake, surely they’d strike at once.
Still, I’d take the five minutes. There was always a chance that I could roll off the bed and sprint out the door, screaming, before they got me. (Why didn’t I start screaming now? Simple, because I hadn’tseenthe assassin. It was possible that I was imagining things, in which case I’d wake the house over nothing. Was I really picking death over embarrassment? Yes. Yes, I was. I am not saying that I was making good choices in that moment.)
