by Imogen Rossi
‘Lady Margherita,’ Bianca said, ‘can’t I –’
‘Ah?’ Lady Margherita held up a warning finger. Bianca briefly fantasised about chopping it off.
‘May I see my mother today?’ she asked carefully.
‘Sit up straight and ask again,’ said Lady Margherita.
Bianca suppressed the urge to argue. She was already learning to pick her battles. She straightened up, making the corset dig deeper into her side, and said, ‘May I see my mother please?’ in a clear, polite tone.
‘Her Royal Highness Duchess Edita is very busy,’ said Lady Margherita, without looking up from her embroidery.
Bianca and Marco rolled their eyes at each other. Duchess Edita was always busy – or very busy, or extremely busy, or not available right now, or completely otherwise indisposed. Bianca understood that her mother was a Duchess and had duties to her city and her people … but still, surely she could take a few minutes to spend time with her long-lost daughter?
Bianca was sure it wasn’t Duchess Edita’s fault – she imagined an army of Lady Margheritas and Secretary Francos ganging up on her, keeping Bianca away. None of the court seemed to like Bianca very much, and she knew they all thought Marco was suspiciously foreign and not a suitable companion for a member of the royal family.
‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’ Marco suggested. ‘We could see more of the city. Aren’t royals supposed to know about the places they rule over?’
Bianca gave him a grateful smile. ‘That’s a wonderful idea,’ she said.
‘Absolutely not,’ said Lady Margherita.
‘Of course not,’ Marco whispered.
‘It’s not safe,’ Lady Margherita went on. ‘Not for a lady such as yourself – there could be assassins and vagabonds flooding the city as we speak, just waiting to take advantage of your naivety! And moreover, you might get into trouble. Nobody here has forgotten that you were dragged into the castle as common thieves!’ She fixed her glare on Marco again. ‘As your chaperone, I won’t let you get talked into anything so … low.’
‘Well, we won’t go walking then!’ Bianca said, as brightly as she could manage. ‘Can I – may I at least do some painting? I’d love to try to capture this garden. And I was thinking I could paint a portrait of my mother, and –’
‘Paint?’ Lady Margherita looked scandalised. ‘Why would you want to paint? You would stain your dress and your fingernails and … no. Painting is not a pastime for a lady.’
‘In La Luminosa, I gave Duchess Catriona herself painting lessons!’ Bianca said, raising her chin and trying not to remember how few of the Duchess’s art lessons had actually got as far as painting. But Bianca did miss her friend.
‘Well, in Oscurita, your mother the Duchess would never turn her hand to anything so messy.’ Lady Margherita put down her embroidery with a sigh of suppressed annoyance that almost matched the one building inside Bianca. ‘Lady Bianca, is there something wrong? It’s as if you don’t like it here!’
Bianca shook her head. ‘I love Oscurita! It’s just … surely even ladies have to have something to do.’
‘If you really can’t just sit still and enjoy the garden, why don’t we go through our deportment basics again, hmm?’
It seemed to be the best offer Bianca was going to get. She got up and stretched.
‘No!’ Lady Margherita snapped. ‘Sit!’
Bianca sat. She avoided Marco’s eyes; she knew exactly what he’d say about her following orders like a dog.
‘You must learn to rise like a lady! Don’t spring to your feet as if you’ve found a needle on your chair. Remember, you are a future Duchess – time itself will wait for you if you command it.’
Bianca took a deep breath and then got up as slowly and gracefully as she could.
‘Now, let’s see you walk,’ said Lady Margherita. She folded her hands in her lap, giving Bianca her undivided attention. Bianca glanced at Marco. He grinned and made an elaborate, sweeping ‘go on’ gesture.
Bianca took a few steps, her back straight, her head up, her hands held neatly but not too tightly in front of her. She walked as far as the trickling fountain and gazed down into the dark water. Then she turned and walked back to the bench.
‘No, no, no,’ muttered Lady Margherita. ‘You still walk like a peasant, child. Fold your hands more neatly. Keep your chin up – not that far! Keep your skirt out of the flowers, but don’t fiddle with it. You must make it look natural.’
Bianca turned a little so she was facing Marco, with her back to Lady Margherita. ‘Can you imagine Duchess Catriona putting up with this?’ she whispered.
Marco sniggered. ‘Not on your life!’
‘Marco Xavier! What are you saying to Lady Bianca?’ Bianca stood back as Lady Margherita leapt to her feet, completely ignoring her own rules about sitting. ‘I have half a mind to have you thrown out of the castle!’
No! Bianca felt her face flush. I definitely can’t cope with all this on my own!
‘Lady Margherita,’ she said, drawing herself up as tall as she could. She thought, what would Duchess Catriona do? ‘Fetch me my embroidery,’ she commanded. When Lady Margherita opened her mouth, Bianca cut her off with her best impression of Catriona’s withering glare. ‘It is my desire. And in case you’ve forgotten, my desire is your command.’
Lady Margherita raised an eyebrow, but she curtseyed low and scurried away.
As soon as she was gone, Bianca let out a heavy sigh and sank to her knees. The stiff silk of her skirt ballooned around her and she tried to pat it down but it only seemed to inflate somewhere else.
Marco got to his feet. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here and back to La Luminosa before she comes back!’
Bianca frowned up at him. ‘I can’t go back! I haven’t even had a chance to explain about the Baron to anyone who’ll listen yet. What about my mother?’
‘What about my father? Two whole days, Bianca!’ Marco sank back down on the bench and stared at his hands in the flickering light from the flowers and the dim thunder-lamp on the wall. ‘We’ve been staying in this place for two days and I didn’t even get the chance to tell Father I was going to meet you, let alone run off to a completely different, horrible world!’
Bianca gasped. ‘It is not horrible!’
Marco raised his eyebrows. ‘You hate it here just as much as I do!’
‘I do not!’ Bianca protested. I don’t, she added to herself. Not as much as he does.
‘Oh right.’ Marco scoffed. ‘You like the way Lady Deportment treats you, do you? And the rest of the court? They all look at us like we’re … ’ He flailed his hands, looking for the right word.
They look at us like we don’t belong here, she thought. On their first evening in Oscurita they’d attended a grand dinner in their honour that had felt more like a funeral feast. It wasn’t just the black clothes and the dim light – Bianca still thought the castle was beautiful. It was the way the courtiers sat and whispered together. Some remembered to smile when they spoke directly to Bianca, but they gave each other odd looks and shushed each other when she met them in the corridors.
Bianca sighed. ‘I know, it’s all a bit strange. But I can’t just leave!’
‘So you enjoy your lessons in royalty? You like learning to sit and walk and not being allowed to touch your own garden? You like the idea of never painting again?’
Bianca flinched as if he’d jabbed her in the stomach. ‘No, of course not! None of this is me, you know that. But I’m sure if I can just talk to my mother –’
‘Bianca, your mother hasn’t bothered to spend more than two minutes with you since you arrived.’
Tears sprang to Bianca’s eyes. She struggled to her feet and stepped back, hoping the dim light would hide her face from Marco’s limited vision.
‘Come with me,’ Marco insisted. ‘Come home. You’re not happy here.’
‘I am extremely happy here!’ Bianca snapped. The lie caught in her throat, and her thoughts echoed back: I want to
be happy here … She sniffed back the tears and turned on Marco, her face flushing. Much as she missed La Luminosa, there was no way she was leaving. ‘This is where I belong, and this is where I’m staying.’
‘Well, I’m going. At least I know my father will be glad to see me.’
It was as if she’d been skewered right through the heart with a shard of ice. ‘I bet your father hasn’t even noticed you’ve gone,’ she snarled. She felt the next sentence before she said it, rising behind her teeth like water behind a dam. ‘Who’d miss a tumbler who can’t stand heights?’
Marco glared at her from underneath his eyebrows. ‘Lady Margherita’s wrong,’ he said slowly. ‘You have changed since you came here. You’ve forgotten everything you care about. What about Duchess Catriona? What about the other apprentices? What are they going to do if the only one who knows how to make magical paints has swanned off to play at being a royal? What about di Lombardi’s legacy?’
With every word Bianca’s heart beat faster and faster. Catriona, Cosimo, Rosa, Lucia, di Lombardi, Marco, her mother – how was she supposed to serve them all at once?
‘I’ve got to try!’ she said. ‘I’ve only just found my mother! I just … I don’t care about di Lombardi’s legacy right now!’
The words felt like poison in her mouth but she raised her chin at Marco defiantly.
‘I see. I’d better go, then,’ Marco said. ‘You’ll have to open a painting for me.’
Bianca sucked in a deep breath. She wished she could take back everything she’d just said. But she nodded. ‘Margherita will be looking for my embroidery for a while. It’s not in my room – I dropped it behind the bench over there.’
For a second they grinned at each other – watery, strained grins.
‘Come on. There are some paintings in my drawing room; I’ll see if I can get one to open.’
She led the way back inside, through the tall door set with thick, distorting glass and into her private drawing room. She sighed as she looked at the huge room. Three enormous couches surrounded a fireplace nearly as big as her attic back in di Lombardi’s old house. In the hearth, twisted black wood gave off bright blue flames that heated and lit the room – but not enough to keep Marco from shivering or tripping over the black marble tables and piles of silky purple cushions.
Bianca had felt a little bit lost and alone in this room even with Marco around. She could barely imagine it without him.
Then she scolded herself. If he wants to go, let him go. I’ll be perfectly fine. I’m home now.
Most of the paintings in the room were portraits of people who looked faintly familiar – they had to be old relatives, but she hadn’t been able to talk to her mother long enough to find out about them. Only one had a door: a portrait of an old lady with hair as white as snow, wearing a deep crimson robe embroidered with a white dragon. She was standing, leaning on a cane and looking out of a high window. The door was black, just like the one that’d led Bianca to Oscurita, except instead of blue trim, it had bright red edges, the colour of a La Luminosa rose.
Bianca ran her fingers over the door within the painting. The painting didn’t have much depth, but she could definitely feel something solid. She pulled the paintbrush from the jewelled purse that hung over her shoulder and held it up to her lips. ‘Hidden rooms, secret passages, second city,’ she whispered, and the familiar clickclickclick sound began as the tiny copper key unfolded from its hiding place inside the handle of the brush.
Bianca’s heart sank, despite herself, when the key fitted easily into the lock. The door swung open to reveal the familiar maze of passages. Their dim, flickering torchlight seemed bright in comparison to the permanent darkness of Oscurita.
‘Wow,’ said Marco softly. Bianca turned to see him holding the map to the passages. While she’d been opening the door he had slipped away to fetch his bag. She felt a stab of heartache when she realised it must have already been packed.
Marco held out the map so she could see that another line had magically appeared – this one shooting off from another passage into what looked like the fields to the north of the city.
‘So opening doors here puts their doors into the passages,’ Marco muttered. ‘That’s amazing. Master di Lombardi was a genius.’
Bianca nodded silently.
Marco rolled up the map and shouldered his bag. ‘I’ll be off then.’
‘All right,’ Bianca said. She didn’t mean it to come out as a whisper, but it did.
Marco put one foot through the door, and then suddenly turned back to face Bianca. ‘You have to come back to La Luminosa,’ he said. ‘At least visit. Soon. Promise?’
‘I promise,’ Bianca said.
‘Because only you can open the doors. I can’t come back here without that key,’ Marco went on. ‘If you don’t come back we’ll never see each other again.’
‘OK!’ Bianca felt a smile stretch across her face, and it was as if someone had lit a bright torch in a dark room. ‘I really promise.’ She hesitated, and then grabbed Marco into a hug.
‘I’ll always be around if you need me,’ Marco muttered. Then he pulled away and climbed into the painting. Bianca waved, and he waved back, and then the door closed between them.
Bianca went back to her private garden and sat staring into the trickling fountain for a few minutes, waiting for Lady Margherita to realise her embroidery wasn’t in her room. But instead of being cross and red-faced, when her chaperone burst back into the garden she looked even paler than before – her cheeks were white as bleached bone.
She laid eyes on Bianca and clutched at her heart as if she was having an attack.
‘Lady Bianca, I am very, very sorry to have left you alone for so long!’
Bianca blinked, surprised by Lady Margherita’s sincerely worried expression. In fact, her chaperone actually looked a little … scared.
Could she really be that worried about not finding a bit of sewing? Bianca’s heart thawed – maybe her attempt to impersonate Duchess Catriona’s intimidating glare had been much more successful than she’d thought.
‘Oh Lady Margherita, I’m glad you’re back,’ she said. ‘I found my embroidery. It was here all the time. I’m so sorry I sent you on a wild goose chase.’
Lady Margherita nodded, her heaving chest starting to slow. ‘I’m just glad nothing untoward happened to you while you were alone with that … that boy. Where is he, anyway?’
‘He left,’ Bianca said quietly. ‘He … we decided it was time for him to go home.’
‘Oh! Well, I really think that’s for the best, don’t you?’ Lady Margherita said, brightening considerably. ‘Now, let’s see your needlework.’
She settled down on the bench and Bianca reluctantly joined her and fished out the rumpled, knot-ridden embroidery. It was a black handkerchief that she was supposed to be edging with a bright golden flame pattern – but her flames looked more like jagged shards of glass.
She saw Lady Margherita cringe, but then rein in her reaction.
‘That’s very … interesting, Your Highness. But I’m sure you can do better. Why don’t you unpick it and start again?’
After a few minutes of work, Lady Margherita spoke again.
‘Yes, that’s right, if you find a knot just snip it with the scissors. Oh, and Lady Bianca … there’s no need to tell your mother that I left you alone for so long,’ she added, in an overly bright and cheery tone of voice. ‘You know she worries so. But nothing happened, so there’s no need to say more about it, is there?’
‘No, no need at all,’ Bianca said. She felt Lady Margherita relax beside her.
Bianca shook her head and bent over her needlework. She had to admit, Marco was right about the odd way things were done here. What did she think I could get up to by myself for a few minutes? she wondered. Or did she really think Marco was secretly an assassin?
Bianca tried to focus on her sewing, but everything she did seemed to make it worse. It was so frustrating she started to fantasi
se about running over to one of the torches and setting fire to the stupid thing. If it’d just been boring, repetitive work it might not have been so bad – Bianca had spent plenty of hours trying to mix exactly the right blue or painting a hundred perfectly even lines of brickwork onto a picture. But, unlike the embroidery, those things she’d been able to do; she’d accomplished something.
What if they really won’t let me paint ever again?
She couldn’t think like that. She just had to wait, then her mother would talk to her and everything would be fine.
Bianca used her embroidery scissors to snip a few of the lux aurumque flowers while Lady Margherita wasn’t looking. She slipped them quickly into her jewelled purse. She was just wondering if she might have time to experiment with making her own magical paints later when she heard the clicking of several pairs of delicate shoes on stone. She turned, and her heart skipped a beat at the sight of Duchess Edita, flanked by a group of courtiers. The long, sweeping gowns that hid their feet made them look a bit like ghosts floating into the garden.
‘Curtsey!’ hissed Lady Margherita, snatching the embroidery from Bianca’s hand.
Bianca got to her feet and dropped into the most graceful curtsey she could manage. It wasn’t very graceful.
‘Your Royal Highness,’ Bianca said meekly. She kept her head down, waiting for Duchess Edita to speak.
This isn’t what I thought having a mother would be like. She hadn’t dared to expect much – she’d thought her mother might reject her or even have her thrown in jail. But to accept her as the lost princess and then leave her here, bound up in beautiful gowns and guarded by a chaperone …
Duchess Edita didn’t speak, and the blood flushed to Bianca’s cheeks as she stared down at the grey stone. How long should she stay like this? She hadn’t been told the protocol for looking up if the Duchess didn’t give her permission.
Then a purple gown swept into view under her nose. Duchess Edita reached out and touched Bianca’s face, slowly raising her chin until she was standing up straight and looking into her mother’s eyes.