I didn’t make the mistake of helping her out of her chair—which irritated her no end. “Give me a hand, girl, give me a hand! How many times do you think I can stand on my own?”
“Madam, I do not assume anything about a lady of your age and strength.” I added more philosophically, “And I scheme to never get on the rude side of your cane.”
“Help me up, then. I promise not to thump you.” Between the two of us, we got her out of the chair. As she walked past her son, she whacked the back of his head with her open palm. “Come back on the morrow,” she commanded. “Bring your wife.”
Duke Yago would not, I thought, dare disobey a direct command from his formidable mother.
We walked slowly down the corridor. “Here.” She pointed into a small, cozy chamber.
When we’d entered, I realized this opened into a greater room, with a bed spread with woven blankets and fur skins, and a variety of pillows piled at the ornate headboard. A large casement window filled with small panes of heavy, clouded glass would in the daytime allow light into the chamber, and more than portraits or statues or exotic plants marked the wealth of the palace. “Your sitting room and bedchamber?” I inquired.
“Indeed. I can’t climb the stairs, and this places me in the center of things, where I can keep track of the household.” She added, “Shut the door. No spy holes gaze in here, no secret passages lead in or out. We can talk.” She tried to sit in a comfortable chaise, and wavered.
I leaped forward and steadied her, then helped her sit, then recline, and tucked pillows behind her head.
“You know how to care for the elderly,” she observed, and closed her eyes wearily.
“I helped Nurse with my Capulet grandfather as he faded.”
“It irritates that company fatigues me, that I can’t hear the words, much less the nuances, that I must strain to see.” She opened her eyes. “But I can see and hear my son and his contempt. What a cabbage-cask he is, smelling of vinegar, shrunken with salt, puckering the mouth, and offending the nose.”
I gave her a summation of Papà’s philosophy. “Everyone does the best they can. Sadly, some are shit-crawling worm-suckers, and their best reeks of funk and failure.”
“Perhaps.” She smiled bitterly. “Yet I’m his mother and he’smyfunk and failure.”
“She always did blame herself for his failings.” Of course, Elder had tagged along. “Yet I remember—he was born bound in pity for himself and lacking care and compassion for others. It’s in himself that the blemishes lie.”
“He’s not dead yet,” I said to both of them. “He may improve.”
“God grant,” they both answered.
Neither believed it.
“Nonna Ursula.” I took the coverlet folded at the foot of the chaise and tucked it around her slight figure. “I’ve heard naught but good about your faithful support of your son, your grandson, and your loving care for your granddaughter, yet you fret. Do you wish to unburden yourself?”
In the first nervous gesture I’d seen from her, she plucked at the heavy material. “I should never have gone with Eleanor to the convent. I should never have left Escalus alone. Eleanor was the woman who made all Verona see that the brusque, hearty, insensitive man had a tender side. She feared for him. She begged to stay with him. With the unrest, she had no choice; she had to leave Verona to have her child, so turned her pleas to me, asking that I stay with him.”
“Did he not command that you go with her?”
“All his fears were for her, yes. Yet should I have decided to stay, my will would have been done.”
I examined her. “Eleanor needed you, did she not?”
“Indeed. For all that Princess Isabella is a comfort, Eleanor should never . . . they should never have taken the chance of begetting another child. The difficult birth left her exhausted, yet when she took the baby in her arms, she was revived. It was the news of Escalus’s death that put her in the grave. If I’d been here watching his back, that wouldn’t have happened. I’m good at sniffing out treachery, for most men believe women are stupid and old women are senile, and I, in particular, as we discussed, am blind and deaf.”
“Then you have some suspicions about who might have arranged for the assassination.”
“I do. I did. Escalus was at the height of his powers at the time of his untimely death, thirty-three years old, a strong man and virile. When he had fought and won Verona back from the Acquasassos, no one in his right mind would have attacked him face on, so it had to be drugs and a knife in the dark.”
“Not poison?” I asked.
“I told you not poison,” Elder said in irritation.
I gestured him to silence.
“No. That makes me say it’s not a woman. Women who kill use poison. Men want blood on the blade. But”—Nonna Ursula lifted her hands in that unknowing gesture—“we all know women can be deadly in every way, and my son was not . . .”
I went on alert. “Not?”
