15. February 23, 1711 Venice, Italy #3
Beatrix used to think of herself as a shadow—part of this world, and yet not.
She’s built a wall around the memories of her stolen life, armored her heart so she would never feel that pain, that loss, that grief again.
She has even learned to live with the loneliness, most days, and deal with it on the days she can’t bear it any longer.
But a shadow is still connected to something real and solid and familiar, even as it stretches into a shape of its own.
She isn’t connected to anything or anyone, every link to the past severed by time, every new connection she forges limited by it.
It has taken her years to realize she isn’t a shadow at all.
She is a ghost, an unwelcome spirit moving through a world that has no place for her.
Beatrix meets the man’s waiting gaze. “Live,” she says. It’s as meaningless as her wish to be happy, but the man doesn’t dismiss her answer this time.
He smiles. “If I had champagne, I’d raise a toast to that.”
Beatrix stands. She takes the man’s hand and pulls him from his seat. “Then let’s go find some.” Drinking until she forgets sounds like the best answer of all.
She turns and bumps into a towering man.
She steps away, but her apology sticks in her throat.
Another man joins him, and another, all clad in long black coats, wide-brimmed hats, and those terrible masks, bone white and shaped like the skull of a bird.
She shudders as they pass, a chill crawling down her spine at the memory of them.
The man watches them go. “Plague doctors. They are unnerving, aren’t they?”
Beatrix can’t fathom why anyone would want to haunt a celebration like Carnevale with ghosts of the plague. Then again, no one else here has died of the plague.
She thought her curse would save her from falling ill, but the faerie was crueler than she gave her credit for.
She woke in the morning, sore all over, with a chill she couldn’t shake, but she chalked it up to a night spent sleeping in an alley.
By afternoon she had lost the little breakfast she’d eaten in the gutter, and by the time the sun set she was collapsed inside St. Paul’s, staring up at the bleeding colors of the rose window, too weak to even lift her head when a priest tried to shoo her away.
The rest is a blur of pain and delirium.
It hurt to move. It hurt to lie still. She couldn’t breathe, tore her throat raw with the coughing.
She vomited blood until she was sure her body had been emptied of it.
Watched as her skin decayed and healed, then turned black and rotted away again.
She even thought she saw William once, right before the end.
He kneeled over her, took her blackened hand in both of his, and whispered, I’m here.
She wanted to cry, but she had no tears—nothing—left in her.
Then he was gone, and the faerie was there.
She looked exactly the same as the night Beatrix died. Sounded the same when she murmured, “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” in her ear.
Of course that was why she’d come. Beatrix wanted to die—desperately—and the faerie sensed her victory, like a wolf catching the scent of a wounded animal. She just needed to say the words and the suffering would end.
Beatrix gathered the last dregs of her strength, breathed in her last rattling breath, and whispered her dying words. “Go to hell.”
When she woke, she was healed, and the faerie was gone.
The man’s voice returns her to the present. “It’s the last night of Carnevale.”
“So?” Beatrix asks, watching as the costumed doctors melt into the crowd.
He sighs. “They’ve come to remind us all good things must end.”
Beatrix meets his gaze. “But not yet?”
“Not yet.”
Beatrix has always found time a strange companion.
Tonight, it is fleeting, the night rushing toward dawn too fast. She blinks, and the two bronze figures on top of the clock tower are striking their bell: midnight, one, two.
She blinks, and she is leaving the piazza with the man, her arm slipped through his.
Her feet ache from a night of dancing and her head buzzes with icing sugar and bubbly wine.
She isn’t sure where they are going. She is sure she doesn’t care.
They stop on the Rialto Bridge. Beatrix leans over the side of the stone railing, watches the Grand Canal flow beneath her feet.
The man leans next to her, his arm brushing against hers.
The sound of revelry has faded with the coming dawn.
She should get back to the manor before Jane finds her missing, but her goodbye dies on her tongue.
Beatrix pulls the heavy felted wool hat from her head, lets the breeze off the water drift through the loose strands of her hair. The man tucks one behind her ear, his fingers grazing her neck. His touch lingers. Her pulse quickens.
He reaches for the ribbon securing her mask. “May I?” he asks, his voice low in her ear. It sends a shiver through her.
“Yes.”