“Nonna, you could be hurt.” When he looked at his grandmother, I could see the love he held for her—and the apprehension.
“How?” she asked. “This palace is guarded. My window is barred on the outside. Your men are loyal, are they not?”
“I bind them to me with responsibility, praise, payment, and my loyalty to them.”
“He is a smart boy,” Elder said to me.
I nodded.
“He got that from me,” Elder added.
I cast him an amused glance.
He grinned back, so cocky I realized with a shock I liked the man.
“And from Princess Eleanor?” I asked.
In a softened voice, the ghost said, “She gave him her grace, her endurance, her upright strength, and her endless capacity for love.”
That startled me. To me, love is frequently, loudly proclaimed, and generous with its application. Cal’s affection for sister and grandmother was obvious, fervent and protective, yet he dispensed his emotions like a miser dispensed his gold.
Being a man, maybe he didn’t know what they were.
I noticed Cal and Nonna Ursula scrutinizing me and the space around me.
Elder was right. If I didn’t get this mystery solved soon, I could find my pragmatic repute overlaid by whispers of madness. May God grant that Nonna Ursula’s séance prove fruitful in my quest to find Elder’s killer.
CHAPTER25
Grimly, Papà and Cal loaded the frail females into two sedan chairs—Mamma, Imogene, and Nurse crowded into one chair; Katherina and I were in the other. Not that we were actually frail, but one could never convince the manly men of that.
Although in this case, I conceded they might have a point. An unusual silence had settled over Verona, and what Nonna Ursula and I had considered a clever stratagem to force the hand of Elder’s assassin had turned into an after-dark excursion through the shadowy streets. Our citizens huddled on street corners or peeked through windows. It felt as if the world waited on indrawn breath for a battle to start.
With the armed accompaniment of the bodyguards, Marcellus, Holofernes, and Dion, and the prince’s most experienced bearers carrying us, and four outrunners carrying lit torches, we set out, brocade curtains drawn, to Casa Montague.
“Rosie, why . . . ?” Katherina huddled forward on her seat and whispered.
“It’s thedisciplinati.” I didn’t whisper, but I was very quiet. “They march along in masks and whip themselves for their sins and ours, so they say, and perhaps some are true penitents, but because they cover their faces, it’s possible for trouble to lurk among them. Many times, riots and unrest accompany them. Prince Escalus has given them a specific route to travel through the streets. We will avoid those streets, but—”
Katherina jerked her head around. “Listen!”
I heard it, too. The shuffle of many feet, the slaps of whips, and the moans and prayers rising like a ghostly mist among the buildings.
Cal gave a command. The bearers picked up the pace.
I clutched Katherina’s hand and shushed her comfortingly. Only the torches gave us light within the sedan chair, and that flickered with the swaying of the curtains.
Katherina had her head down, her hands clasped in prayer.
I risked a glance between the gap.
The sounds of thedisciplinatigrew, a muttering magnified by the tall stone buildings and the narrow pavement, but I could see nothing of them.
Then!
We passed through an intersection and there they were, men dressed in grubby robes of blue and white, hoods up, shuffling toward us, their eyes lowered, their backs bared, their whips slapping their flesh. They reeked of blood and sweat, and when I would have drawn back, one of them looked up and caught my gaze upon him. Through the slit in the cloth over his face, I saw his eyes: black pools of anger, contempt, fanaticism.
With a gasp, I drew back.
