by Imogen Rossi
‘My Highness is completely sure of it!’ Catriona barked, loud enough that the old man recoiled. ‘Now go away!’
Secretary Franco bowed out of the room without another word.
Bianca took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ she said brightly. ‘Why don’t we try it with Marco sitting on the edge of the table? Duchess, let’s –’
‘How rude!’ Duchess Catriona muttered, still glaring at the doorway. ‘Franco, I mean. How dare he interrupt?’
Bianca sighed. ‘Well, he obviously doesn’t think he’s interrupting anything important, Your Highness.’
The Duchess folded her arms over her bodice and went ominously still. Then she turned around, and Bianca realised they were never going to get back to the lesson. That mischievous light glinted in Catriona’s eyes, just like it had before she’d tickled Marco’s foot.
‘I think Franco deserves to be taught a little lesson, don’t you?’
I think he was just trying to do his job, thought Bianca. Even if he was being rude about it. She didn’t really want to hesitate – she wanted to grin back at Catriona just like Marco was doing. Maybe the Duchess was right, maybe she was letting her new post get to her and she just needed to relax.
‘How about after your lesson … ’ she began.
‘No. After my lesson it’ll be time for lunch, and then he always spends the afternoon with the scribes. We’ve got to get to him while he’s in his study. You’ve got the key with you, right?’
‘Well, yes, always, but – but you did bring me here to work, Your Highness, and you have to … ’
‘ … do the work you were set to do.’ Duchess Catriona spoke along with Bianca, finishing her sentence.
Bianca let out a giggle, recognising one of di Lombardi’s well-worn sayings. Was she turning into her dour old master? As much as she had loved him, she didn’t want to be him. ‘Oh my stars. I really am getting old!’ She grinned cheekily and whipped Master di Lombardi’s magical paintbrush key from her pocket. ‘Come on, let’s do it! Let’s have a bit of fun with that old grouch.’
They hurried over to the magical painting in the alcove beside a potted orange tree. It was a scene of a balcony overlooking a beautiful leafy landscape, enchanted so that it looked like a real extension of the room that you could walk into. The sun in the painted sky glowed and the leaves of the trees waved slightly in a magical breeze. Bianca smiled as she remembered Catriona hiding Master di Lombardi’s special blue chalk underneath the painted couch inside the picture. That had been pretty funny. She hoped that secretly di Lombardi had thought so too.
Holding up the paintbrush, Bianca whispered, ‘Hidden rooms, secret passages, second city!’ The minuscule cogs inside the thin wooden handle of the paintbrush clicked and whirred as the handle slid away and the copper prongs folded out into the shape of a key. With another grin at the Duchess and Marco, Bianca stepped over the threshold into the painting and turned the key in the lock of the small wooden door at one side of the balcony. It swung open and she stepped through into the secret passages.
Bianca smiled as she breathed in the cool, fragrant air and ran her hand over a wall that looked and felt like stone but smelled like canvas and paint. This whole place had been painted into existence, a way to travel between every one of the magical paintings in La Luminosa. She guessed it had been di Lombardi who’d created the passages – but she still had no idea how, why or when it had been done.
‘Lead the way, Bianca!’ Catriona said, coming after her with Marco on her heels.
Bianca turned left from the Duchess’s drawing room, then took the next right, and counted ten doors along as Marco and Catriona hurried behind her, laughing. She’d started to learn her way around, at least when it came to the most useful paintings inside the palace. The trick was to try and put the real world out of your head completely – paintings that were next door to each other in the secret passages might be miles apart in the real city. And there were still areas of the painted world she hadn’t explored.
The painting in Secretary Franco’s office was a sombre depiction of San Pietro studying the Elder Mysteries, surrounded by teetering piles of books, glimmering scientific instruments and a large, bleached white skull. The saint moved a little, not too much, just enough to give the impression that he was reading the page in front of him with great attention and wisdom.
Bianca opened the door at the back of the painting a tiny crack and Catriona and Marco crowded up behind her to see through into the office. Looking past the saint’s elbow, Bianca could see Secretary Franco in almost the exact same pose, poring over a huge pile of parchments and scrolls. His beaky nose practically grazed the surface of the document on the top of the pile. The letters that Duchess Catriona had signed and sealed sat in a neat basket by his left hand.
‘What should we do?’ Marco whispered.
‘I bet I could hit the back of his head from here, but I don’t have anything to throw,’ Duchess Catriona said thoughtfully, patting her pockets. ‘Apart from my rings.’
‘No.’ Bianca pushed the door shut. ‘Even if he didn’t see us, where would he think it came from? I’ve got a better idea, let’s just ruffle his feathers. I need something long and pointy.’
‘I’ve got just the thing.’ Duchess Catriona bent down, her huge, silky skirts pooling around her. Bianca winced as she grabbed the hem and ripped along the seam. ‘It’s all right, it’s always getting caught on the roses when I go walking in the garden – Helena will just think it’s torn itself on a bush.’ She fiddled for a second and brought out a long, curved strip of thick wire.
Bianca took the wire with a grin. ‘This is perfect!’ She pulled it straight and reopened the door. Secretary Franco was still reading the same document – if anything he was moving even less than the painted saint.
Slowly, Bianca poked the stiff wire into the room until it was right behind the secretary’s back. As he reached for a pen on his right, Bianca jabbed to the left, toppling the basket of sealed documents onto the floor. Secretary Franco jumped several inches into the air, his velvet robe rippling around him. Bianca tugged the wire back quickly. Behind her, she heard the muffled sound of Duchess Catriona giggling through a mouthful of her own sleeve.
Secretary Franco sighed and bent down to his left to pick up the basket – so Bianca poked the stack of papers to his right. They flew up in the air like a flock of birds leaping from the branch of a tree. With a gasp, the secretary stood up and stared at the scattered papers, his mouth hanging open.
‘Let me, let me!’ whispered Marco. Bianca sniggered and pressed her finger to her lips. Marco took the wire and Bianca strained to see over his shoulder as he waited patiently for Secretary Franco to place the basket of trade agreements back on his desk and walk around to pick up the mess on the other side.
Marco hooked the big document that the Secretary had been studying and flipped it into the air, yanking the wire back at once. Secretary Franco spun around in time to gape in horror as the document floated back down to the desk.
‘What in the name of the Duchess is going on?’ he whispered to himself, standing by his desk as if ready to grab any other documents that decided to make a break for freedom, and Bianca saw Duchess Catriona sink to her knees in a puddle of silk skirts, her shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.
Bianca looked back into the study just in time to catch the large, elaborately written title of the big document as Secretary Franco seized it.
She gasped aloud, and then clamped her hands over her mouth. She felt as if she’d been slapped.
Franco didn’t seem to have heard her gasp. He was muttering as he scribbled on a piece of paper. ‘To whom it may concern … a summons … the reading of the will … reckoning of properties … final wishes … tomorrow, the twelfth of May, in the presence of Duchess Catriona, Her Royal Highness, Supreme Ruler of, etc, etc.’ He signed the note with a flourish and folded it into an envelope.
Bianca slowly closed the door, and turned to Duchess C
atriona and Marco. ‘It’s being read tomorrow.’
‘What is?’ asked Marco.
‘My master’s will,’ she said.
Chapter Three
‘I’m sorry, Bianca. I didn’t know,’ Duchess Catriona said, as they walked back through the passages. ‘I haven’t been through my appointments for tomorrow yet.’
Bianca let out a long breath. In all of the chaos and intrigue and adventure that’d followed di Lombardi’s death, she’d forgotten that he would have written a will.
‘I expect he’s left everything to the Museum,’ she said. ‘He always said he was a servant of the Crown and the people, not just some private craftsman.’
Duchess Catriona took Bianca’s hand and squeezed it tightly. ‘He was a great man, Bianca. I still miss him every day.’
‘Me too.’ Bianca put her other hand into her pocket and ran the soft bristles of the paintbrush key over her palm, remembering her master.
Her sadness had softened over the last few weeks. At first it had come in horrible waves, sharp and unpredictable, as if every tenth tile in the palace had been loosened and was waiting to trip her up. Now it was more like a limp from an old wound – it was just there.
They found an empty room and clambered out through a painting of two young ladies warming up for a dancing lesson.
‘I have to go. I’ve got a meeting with Ambassador Inchuk and I’m already late,’ the Duchess said. Then she hugged Bianca fiercely. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Bianca nodded and she and Marco waved as the Duchess hurried off, the bottom of her dress trailing without its wire.
‘Good morning, Miss Bianca,’ said a voice, and Bianca turned to see a maid bobbing a curtsey as she scurried past.
‘Good – oh,’ Bianca began, but the maid was gone. ‘I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to that,’ she said to Marco, shaking her head as they started back to the Duchess’s drawing room. ‘They don’t wait for me to answer, they just curtsey whenever they see me and run off. It’s weird!’
‘You’re special now,’ Marco smirked. He swept a low bow and seized her hand like a fancy gentleman from one of his father’s plays. ‘A master artist!’
‘Geroff,’ Bianca laughed. ‘I’m not special. And I’m definitely not a master.’ She wasn’t nearly a good enough artist to be called master.
Marco shrugged. ‘You’re going to have to get used to people treating you all poshly if you live in the palace,’ he said.
‘Why? You live in the palace, and you spend almost as much time with the Duchess as I do and nobody pretends you’re a gentleman!’
‘Charming,’ said Marco, but he grinned. ‘Tumblers aren’t respectable, not like artists.’
They turned a corner into the Rose Gallery and Bianca’s heart skipped a beat. It was here, while she was working on the huge mural that took up the length of the corridor, that she’d discovered the secret of the passages. She turned her face to the mural as they passed, feeling the warmth and light from the painted greenhouse on her face. Inside the bright glass structure, raised earth beds lined the ochre-tiled floor and Bianca couldn’t help trailing her arm into the magical painting, grazing the delicate petals of the rose bushes, their scent flooding her nostrils. At the end of the flowerbed was a door – seemingly leading to a painted building. But it was a door that led into the picture and to a secret passage – the first she’d ever painted. She remembered the joy that’d surged through her when she’d realised she could create a real door out of magical paint.
She was distracted from her reverie when a woman dressed as a mermaid marched through the door in front of them and stopped dead. She plonked her hands on her hips, ruffling her blue-green scaly tights, and tossed the twisted fabric strands of her blue wig over her shoulder.
‘Marco!’ the mermaid snapped. ‘There you are! We’ve been looking for you everywhere!’
‘Oh sorry, Olivia,’ Marco said. ‘I got, um … waylaid.’
‘Well, come on,’ Olivia snapped. ‘We’ve got a scene to rehearse and this wig is itching like mad.’
Marco just about managed a wave and a ‘see you later’ to Bianca before Olivia herded him out of the gallery, still muttering about the wig.
‘Bye.’ Bianca sighed to herself. She wondered what Rosa and Cosimo and her old master’s other apprentices were doing right now. They would certainly never curtsey to her.
She turned around and almost walked into a tall man in a cream velvet doublet trimmed with white fur. ‘Oh sorry, My Lord.’
The man gave her a wide, slick smile. ‘Ah, dear little Bianca,’ he said, bowing almost as low as Marco had. Bianca curtseyed back and tried to remember that it was wrong to give dirty looks to lords – even if they did call you ‘dear little Bianca’.
‘Lord di Cassio,’ she said, and tried to step aside.
‘Actually, Bianca, I was looking for you!’ di Cassio said. He gave her another oily grin. ‘I wanted to talk to you; I know you were just giving our beloved Duchess her art lesson, and I was wondering if she said anything about the matter of Lady Rosalita’s dowry.’
Bianca rolled her eyes. If it wasn’t cringing servants, it was courtiers like di Cassio – they all had something they wanted her to talk to the Duchess about. People like him wouldn’t have given her a second glance two weeks ago, unless it was to tell her to get out of their way.
‘Um, not right now, I’m very busy – Artist-In-Residence business,’ she said, neatly sidestepping the courtier and making a break for the Duchess’s private drawing room.
She made it, but she still wasn’t alone. The Duchess’s drawing room was full of maids. They were sweeping the floor, plumping up the cushions on the couch, taking away the juice and making it seem as if the room cleaned itself by magic every time the Duchess left. They all dropped what they were doing and bobbed curtseys to Bianca, and then stood still with their eyes averted so they wouldn’t meet her gaze.
Guilt burned the back of Bianca’s throat and she hurried to clear away the Duchess’s art things. None of the maids would be able to get on with their jobs until she was gone. She rolled the coloured chalks into their case, folded up the easel, scooped up the rather small pile of sketches, and shoved all of them into her canvas bag.
She hurried out, clutching the bag tight. She had to find somewhere she could be alone, without servants or lords or ambassadors or actors watching her every move. If she was going to get anything done as Duchess Catriona’s Artist-In-Residence, she had to get some peace and quiet!
For the first time since she’d spotted Master di Lombardi’s will, Bianca felt a warm smile spread across her face. I know just the place.
The old Duke’s sitting room. It had been shut ever since the Duke’s death.
Bianca stepped into the sitting room and looked up at the breathtaking scene of life and movement in the exotic garden painted on the wall. Two majestic tigers lay curled together in the foreground, under the dappled shade of a glossy green fern. A lion stalked back and forth between two trees, sometimes stopping to wash its forepaws just like the cats that hung around the palace kitchens.
Bianca walked through the thick dust on the floor and stepped into the garden. She reached out as she passed the lion and ran her hand through its bright yellow mane. It parted just like real fur, but if she shut her eyes the strands felt more like the frayed ends from a piece of canvas that had unravelled.
The lion was so lifelike, with its huge pink tongue rasping over the back of its paws, that she almost expected it to look up and rub its head against her side. But of course, it was only a picture that’d been given the illusion of life. It went on doing the sequence of actions it’d been enchanted to do.
Bianca glanced back at the wonderful garden before she stepped through the old wooden door at the back of the painting and into the secret passages. She found herself directly opposite the short corridor leading to Master di Lombardi’s secret workshop.
It was wonderfully good luck that the clo
sest door to di Lombardi’s workshop led into a room that nobody went into.
But is it luck? Bianca wondered, as she turned the key in the workshop door. Master di Lombardi had been the Duchess’s spy and protector as well as a master artist. Knowing he foiled an assassination plot, Bianca could easily believe that he’d somehow arranged for the Duke’s sitting room to stay shut up for years. There really was no limit to her old master’s ingenuity.
Bianca stood and gazed around the workshop. Its hugeness still surprised her. There were separate, neatly laid-out benches for woodwork, metalwork, stonework, varnishing, soldering, sanding and more. In between the benches, di Lombardi’s inventions hung on wires from the glass ceiling or sat on blocks like carts having their wheels replaced. She walked up to one of the contraptions and tried to follow its logic by running her fingers over its odd combination of pipes and shovels and glass tubes. She still hadn’t worked it out.
A metallic chirping high above made her look up. The mechanical bird that she’d found the first time she and Marco had discovered the workshop was fluttering between the hanging inventions. It swooped down and perched on one wing of the flying machine, tilting its head with a little clicking noise.
Bianca sighed as she looked at the flying machine, with its glorious mechanism of gas, steam, copper and huge expanses of leather. Its body was precariously balanced on top of one of the woodworking benches and one of the wings was propped against the wall, the other trailing on the floor. Taking off had been quite easy – especially when the Duchess’s life had been in danger – but landing had been a lot harder. Now one of the pipes had burst and several cogs were bent.
She’d resolved to try and fix it as soon as she could spare the time … but so far something had always got in the way.
Cracking her knuckles, she headed for the soldering bench. As she pumped the bellows and ignited the thin gas flame that would heat up the iron, she thought about that crinkled piece of paper in the Secretary’s hands – the Last Will and Testament of Annunzio di Lombardi.