by Megan Chance
“I didn’t come here from Milan.” Nero’s voice was rough. “I went to meet you in Paris. You know that. You were with me when I got the telegram about her death.”
“I think you’ve forgotten,” Samuel said. “You brought The Nunnery Tales from here. Do you remember? You told me you’d gone to get it, as you were so close.”
They were both so tense it seemed a strong breath might crack them. My heart pounded. My dread was overwhelming, the only thing I could feel. I could not bear to look at either of them; I could not bear to look away.
Samuel prodded, “Did your aunt know you meant to kill her? Or was that just a whim too?”
Nero said nothing, but I saw the trapped look in his eyes.
“You weren’t so careful to keep from making marks on her throat this time. Or perhaps you didn’t bother with Laura either, and it was only that the eels and the crabs ate them away. They didn’t find her for two days. Long enough for that, I think. How lucky for you.”
“Samuel,” I managed. “His aunt . . . he didn’t—”
I broke off when I saw Nero’s expression. The closed eyes, the swallow—everything in him spoke of something past cure, irretrievable. I could not breathe. “Nero. No. Please. Say something. Deny it. Please.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me, beseeching, plaintive. “You know already, Elena.”
“The question is, can she bear it?” Samuel asked. “I’ll take the blame for Madame Basilio, all Elena has to do is say the word. I’ll give her a life with you if that’s what she wants. But you’ll tell us the truth now. You’ll tell her what she needs to hear.”
I made a sound, a whimper; I felt everything falling away. And Laura’s spirit seemed to gain strength with my every pain, gathering it to herself, letting it coalesce and grow into something horrible, something mean. I felt her vindictiveness and her anger. “Nero, please don’t.”
He ignored me. “It was my aunt’s fault. If she had let Laura marry Polani, none of it would have happened. But no, I had to bear these . . . these letters full of hate and . . . and bitterness. As if it were my fault. I’m not the one who betrayed her. I loved her. I never stopped. Even when . . .” He took a deep breath.
“Even when you killed her,” Samuel provided.
Still that pleading gaze. I felt all of Nero reaching for me, begging me to understand. He said, “She could not stop nattering about Laura’s ghost. I never thought anything of it—who could believe it? Then Giulia wrote me to say that my aunt thought Laura might be speaking through Samuel. Aunt Valeria believed his illness made him susceptible. She was doing things to make him worse so the spirit could gain hold.”
“Giulia wrote you?” My voice did not sound like my own.
“It was a warning,” he said, looking sick and sad. “She told me to stay away. You can thank past affections. She was my first. She was always a bit . . . maternal after. But when I realized that my aunt was hurting Samuel for this . . . obsession . . . of hers, I had to come. I couldn’t leave him to her, could I? Could I, Elena?”
I could not answer his pleading glance. I felt numb.
The loneliness in his eyes . . . the heartache . . . and all the time her glee growing, the cold taking on an acid, unsavory edge. I felt her urging him on. Now, yes, now.
He went on, “It was a mistake to return. I only settled my aunt’s suspicions more firmly. She’d heard Laura shouting that night. I thought no one knew I was there, but Aunt Valeria heard me in my bedroom getting that cursed book. And then the exorcism confirmed what she thought she knew already. You said Laura’s nickname for me. Lasagnone. She used to call me her pretty lazy boy. Aunt Valeria told me she was going to Padre Pietro with her accusations early in the morning. All I had to do was wait for her to go.”
“But . . . but you were with me,” I said.
“You were exhausted,” he said in a pained voice, heavy with contrition. “I made sure of it.”
He’d lied to me. The realization was a blow, but what was worse was knowing how well I’d believed him, how certain I’d been that he was telling me the truth about not leaving my bed—the one thing that had given me the strength to repel the rest, to ignore it. The thing that had given me the will to save him. “All your protestations. The church. All of that searching at the market and . . . and you knew. It was all a lie.”
“It was. I’m sorry. If you only knew how sorry I am . . .”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Elena, please. I never lied to you about what kind of man I was. I told you—”
“You told me about a man you killed in a duel. You said you were jealous. That you had a temper. Not that you’d murdered Laura.”
“It wasn’t like that. Not really—”
“No? You didn’t put your hands around her throat? You didn’t push her into the canal?”
He came to me, falling to his knees before me. “It was an accident. I never meant to . . . I meant only to talk to her. But she goaded me. She hated me. My aunt made sure of it. It caught me by surprise. I went to tell her I would still marry her, but . . . I couldn’t reason with her.” He reached for my hands.
I recoiled sharply, and his expression changed, just that fast, from fear and desperation to anger. Laura’s spirit wavered like reflections behind him, gathering force.
“You said you loved me,” he accused. “Only a few minutes ago you said it. And you knew the truth then. I saw it in your eyes.”
“I wanted to pretend.” My vision blurred with tears. “I wanted to believe you.”
“Elena, please.” He grabbed my hands, yanking me to him.
Samuel cried, “Don’t touch her!” at the same moment cold air blasted through the room, so frigid and strong that our breaths turned immediately to frost. Nero started, jerking around to look, and his eyes went wide. I smelled her perfume, canal water and algae; I felt her anger as a force, that wall of air shifting as if the river of light on the ceiling and the walls had come between us. Colder than anything I’d ever felt. It seemed to freeze me from the inside out. Then the dim lamplight went red. Red as the walls in the receiving court with their bloody shadows. Red as a canal colored scarlet from a dyer’s vat.
Samuel was there, beside us, but he was no longer himself. His brown eyes had gone to black, and she was in them. I saw her rage and her hate and the pure gleam of vengeance in her eyes, and Nero gasped. “Laura.”
Samuel wrenched him away from me, spinning him, forcing him across the room, up against the wall.
“Samuel, no!” I cried, but when I rose I felt thrown back as if a giant hand had slapped me. The scene seemed to grow dim before me, as if she’d doused the light. I saw Samuel slamming Nero, once and again, the same way he’d slammed me. I heard the thud of his skull against the wall.
Again I tried to go to them. Again, that force pressing me back. I fought it, desperate to get there—Samuel was going to kill him; no, it was Laura. Laura was going to kill him, but it would be blood on Samuel’s hands, a horror he would have to live with, and I could not bear that, even now, after everything.
Nero gained hold, pushing Samuel away, his foot behind Samuel’s bad knee, jerking, and Samuel fell to the ground, scrambled up, grabbing Nero’s arm, and they grappled, up again, but this time it was Nero who had Samuel against the wall. Nero with his hands around Samuel’s throat, squeezing, Samuel prying at his hands, just as he had at the exorcism, just as terrible, wheezing and gasping, and I felt her fury and her resistance, fighting him, hating him, all her strength gone to that battle, none left for me, none to keep me from racing toward them, none to keep me back.
I grabbed the knife from my pocket, the Basilio blade, without thinking, wanting only to end it. I came up beside Nero and pressed the blade to his throat.
He froze.
I said quietly, “Let him go.”
He didn’t drop his
hands. Samuel pried at Nero’s fingers, which hadn’t eased.
I heard footsteps. They seemed to come from far away. I heard the quick knock on the door; I heard it open. Da Cola and Pasqualigo. I heard them come into the room and stop as they took in the scene. “Signor,” one of them said, appeasing, and then a stream of Venetian that Nero did not seem to hear.
“You don’t want to do this, Nero,” I pleaded. “I won’t let you do this. Please, Nero. You wanted me to save you. Let me.”
I don’t know what I meant by the words. I don’t know if I meant to try. I don’t know if it was forgiveness or redemption I was offering, or something else. I said them because he had wanted it so badly. I wanted only to make him stop.
And he did. He dropped his hands from Samuel’s throat, and Samuel fell to his knees, gasping. But before I could lower the knife, Nero’s hands curled around mine on the hilt, holding it in place. He looked at me, that endless depth of pain in his eyes, a pain that I felt with every part of me.
“I killed my aunt,” he said loudly, for the police who stood in the doorway. “Samuel had nothing to do with it.” And then, to me, a whisper, mine alone, “I love you, Elena. But you can’t save me.”
Samuel cried, “No!”
Nero twisted the knife in my hands, plunging the blade into his throat just as he’d once shown me it could be done, a quick twist and blood spurting everywhere, blinding, warm as it coursed over my hand. I heard a gurgling rasp, a short cry of such relief it staggered, and he collapsed against me, a last grasp at my hips before he fell helplessly to the ground, a pool of blood spreading at my feet, over the floor. I stared in horror and disbelief, frozen in place in the moment before I realized what had happened, what he had done.
Then I fell to my knees beside him, heedless of the blood, gathering him in my arms, whispering, “No, no, no.” Over and over again, because there were no other words; I could think of nothing else to say, not even when the light died in his eyes and he was gone, and I felt her all around us, a release of grief and pain and anger like ice shattering, and along with that a sense of satisfaction that I could not bear, that made me hate her. She had her vengeance, and I could not forgive her for it, nor could I forgive my part in it. I had not wanted it this way.
I buried my face in his chest, blood sticky on his shirt, on my skin, and my heart simply broke.
Samuel’s hand was on my shoulder, cupping, gently pulling. “Let him go, Elena,” he said softly, voice raw from choking, heavy with grief. “Let him go.”
I did. I let him go. I went, bloody and bereft, into Samuel’s arms, and I let him comfort me as the police took Nero away. I cried into his shirt and streaked us both with Nero’s blood, until there were no tears left, until there was nothing left at all.
Chapter 34
In the days after, I waited to feel her presence. I paused at every movement I caught from the corner of my eye. I waited for the uncanny cold, the whiff of her perfume. But her revenge had been complete, her unfinished business finished now and done. Laura was gone. It wasn’t as if the despair or sadness that was the palazzo’s history had disappeared, but now it felt old and distant, patinaed like copper in moist air, corroded but somehow inert and soft, tinged not with anger but with acceptance.
“If it’s any comfort, I was wrong,” Samuel told me. “He did truly love you. I saw it at the end.”
The world felt as if it should stop, but it didn’t, of course. It only started again, inexorable, unmoved, and yet . . . forever changed. The funerals had been brief, the mourners few—Giulia and Zuan and the Nardis; Father Pietro and another priest from the Madonna dell’ Orto. Samuel had taken charge, and as there was no family left, no one cared enough to question him. He was still not well, and the effort of arrangements left him exhausted often, headachy and collapsing into bed. But at least now his health was something I knew how to manage—healing ribs and knee and epilepsy, and if I sometimes saw shadows in his eyes, I think that it helped him that they were in mine too, that I had borne witness, that I understood.
We had kept everything very quiet; what friends of Nero’s might have come to the service were only told once it was over. Madame Basilio’s body was borne in a red gondola—the traditional Venetian color of mourning—to the island cemetery near Murano. The only funeral procession was the gondola following that carried me and Samuel, Giulia and Zuan. Nero could not be buried on consecrated ground, so his body was burned, his ashes scattered into the dyer’s canal—we waited until the water was blue, the color he’d loved.
“If there’s something you want to remind you of him, you should take it before they do the inventory,” Samuel told me. “No one will know.”
But there was nothing. The most personal things I had of him were the Basilio knife I’d carried for weeks that had killed him, and the Pulcinello mask that had revealed the truth to me. I wanted neither of these; the burden of them was too great. What I wanted was the man he’d been to me before I’d suspected anything, that first night; his gentleness and ardor, his laughing eyes and his tease, his body next to mine, my fingers in his curls. How did one keep hold of such ephemeral things? How could one live without them?
And yet . . . how could I have lived with them once I’d known the truth? How long would I have been able to pretend, because it was only by pretending that I could have him?
I suspected I could have done so for a very long time.
“You can save me,” he’d said, and I think I would have tried.
I didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t know what I wanted, and as the days went by, and the decision of what to do drew ever closer, I knew there must be a reckoning. I saw the way Samuel watched me too; measuring, thoughtful, and I remembered what he had said so many months ago—no, not that long, it only seemed that way. One of us would have to make a sacrifice for the other. I could not forget what he had offered in the sala. To go to prison, to take the blame, so that I might turn my head and live with a lie.
It seemed only fair that I should offer my own sacrifice in return. There was the redemption I’d wanted so desperately, and I wanted to save my father too, his reputation, his life. The truth was that I no longer knew how, or even if I could. Nero’s regret and misery had taught me that. He had not been able to live with the things he’d done, and perhaps in the end, that choice was all we had, the only redemption left to us—to live or not with the consequences we made, hoping we could do better, knowing that perhaps we could not.
I sent a letter to my father, and prepared myself to return.
I didn’t tell Samuel. I wanted what little time was left to me, and I didn’t want to give him the chance to make some heroic gesture. I would wait to say anything until it was too late. It was made easier by the fact that we didn’t speak of the future, of life beyond this moment. We spent our days arranging things: the distant branch of the Basilio family must be contacted in Crete, where they’d been for generations, hardly remembering their relations in Venice. Giulia and Zuan must be cared for; Samuel lavished money on them. It seemed Zuan had always wanted to open a cookshop, and it was a simple matter to help him. Samuel bought good will and promises—no, they would never speak of what happened at the Basilio; they would call Madame Basilio’s death an accident; they would talk of Nero with affection and respect. Not such hard things to do, it seemed. Giulia had been half in love with him all his life, and Zuan was a docile man who had no interest in angering his new patron.
Even after everything was done, we delayed, a tacit agreement. We had until the end of January, after all, and neither of us was in a hurry to face what must be faced. We spent long hours in cafés, walking the city, getting lost in the narrow streets until Samuel could not go farther because of his knee, which would probably always be weak, and then hiring gondolas to take us about. Art and churches, promenading the Riva to take advantage of the sun in the afternoon, the Public Gardens and the Zattere to wa
tch the artists at work, both of us thinking of Nero and neither speaking of him, or the things he might have shown us in this city of his youth, neither admitting that we were procrastinating.
Then, finally, it was time.
We were sitting in a café on the Riva Schiavoni, in a shaft of sun that warmed a small slice of the damp cold. The sky was impossibly blue, the Canal riffled with hundreds of tiny diamond sparks in a dark chop, gondolas swaying on the waves, the fishing boats in the distance with their ruddy-colored sails decorated with the black marks of saints. The air smelled of a low tide in the lagoon—fetid mud and seaweed, the tang of salt—and the bitter warm aroma of coffee and chocolate; nutty, rich roasted chestnuts from a peddler just down the way.
Samuel toyed with his tiny cup, swirling and dipping the last syrupy remains of coffee as if he meant to paint patterns. He said, “I don’t want you to go back to New York.”
I looked at him in surprise and dismay.
“I want you to have a Grand Tour, the way you hoped.”
“If we could all only have what we want,” I said. “You’ve already offered too much. I can’t watch you go back and marry that woman and live . . . that way. I couldn’t be happy knowing that you’d done it for me. Don’t ask me to.”
“Elena—”
“No. I’ve written my father already. I’ve told him that I’ve failed. No, don’t protest—I’ve already done it, so there’s nothing you can do. Tell your parents you won’t marry that woman. I release you from any obligation to me. You’re free to do whatever you like.”
He eyed me thoughtfully. “So you’ll go home and marry your cousin?”
I had wanted him to protest, I realized, though I had done all I could to prevent it. I nodded shortly. “It’s all right. I don’t need a Grand Tour. I’ve had these last weeks, after all. They’ve been lovely. Mostly.”
“But you miss him, despite everything.”
That ache behind my eyes, the quick blur of vision. “Yes. I miss him.”