TEACH THE TORCHES TO BURN #3
Before I could ask what was wrong, Cal said, “Stop it, you two!” He rarely showed exasperation. In fact, he rarely showed any emotion but calm. Right now, he wasn’t happy with his sister or me, and he stood by my chair and gestured toward his grandmother. “You’re encouraging her!”
“As if she needs encouragement?” I didn’t try to hide my amazement at Cal’s misguided conviction.
Nonna beamed beatifically.
A commotion in the outer sitting room presaged the arrival of Lady Pulissena. She leaned heavily on Mamma’s arm and emitted evil enjoyment as she said, “Ursula, my dear friend, you are a most excellent soothsayer. When Friar Laurence hears of it, you’ll be praying the rosary for hours!”
“I know,” Nonna said. “I’d say my poor knees, but thankfully, I can’t kneel anymore.”
“Yes, you can. You simply can’t get up afterward.” As she laughed, Lady Pulissena slapped her sides with her hands.
Cal glared daggers.
I was surprised. Usually his equanimity, whenever breached, quickly re-formed. Today he seemed as irritated as a monk in a hair shirt.
Mamma helped Lady Pulissena to the second bed set up in the dowager princess’s suite, and when she was settled, she turned to me. In a tone clearly meant to convey bad tidings, she said, “Rosie…Great-Uncle Magno has arrived.”
I started up out of my chair as if I’d sat on a pin. “What? What? I didn’t invite him. How? How? Of the miserable, self-important impersonators of male magnitude who ever walked the earth …how did Magno arrive here, now, without an invitation?”
“He’s your great-uncle, your grandfather’s middle brother,” Mamma said gently.
I gestured as if I needed vigorous sign language as well as rude words. “I know who he is, and I didn’t invite him!”
“Probably one of the other relatives did.” Mamma frowned in thought. “Possibly Great-Aunt Claudia. She’s a sweetheart, always believing the best of everyone. She probably thought his lack of invitation was an oversight.”
“It was not an oversight.” Great-Aunt Claudia was a sweetheart, she was probably the guilty party, and never before had I wanted to strangle her. “It was quite deliberate!”
“I’ve found Magno much improved since I lost my hearing,” Nonna Ursula said amiably.
“Is he as awful as ever?” It was a sincere inquiry based on Lady Pulissena’s time in exile.
Nonna and I snorted in unison.
“He’s a swine,” I said.
“So he’s a swine. Most men are. He’s a boring swine.” Clearly that was Nonna Ursula’s ultimate condemnation. “He’s a self-important swine.”
“Then he hasn’t changed.” Lady Pulissena bobbed her graying head.
Meanwhile, Mamma explained to Princess Isabella, “Great-Aunt Claudia’s a dear woman, very hospitable, the next to the youngest of the Montague siblings.
You need not fear a conversation with her.
” Mamma had been giving the Leonardis, especially the pretty young princess, a road map of the Montagues and the Capulets, who to trust, who to avoid, who drank too much, who pontificated most drearily, and which swaggering swine to stay well away from their lecherous, groping hands at all times and never, ever let them catch you alone.
Of the last two issues, Magno was the worst offender.
“No. Mamma, no!” I moved from denial to pleading. “Magno cannot remain. You know what he’s like. Except the sycophants who hang close wanting his snobbery to rub off on them, everyone despises him.”
Princess Isabella glanced between Mamma and me. “What’s he a snob about?”
“He’s a professor at the university at Padua and an ampelographic specialist,” I told her.
She looked to Mamma inquiringly.
“Wine,” Mamma said.
“That’s what I said. An ampelographic specialist.” I poured on the scorn. “Give him five minutes and he’ll lay that on you in the hopes you ask him what it means so he can explain ampelographic comes from the Greek root word ampel, meaning large, and ographic, meaning pain in the—”
Before I could get too wound up, Princess Isabella cut me off.
“He’s a Montague. Of course he knows a lot about wine.
Everyone in your family knows a lot about wine.
Cesario is seven, and he knows a lot about wine.
” For a twelve-year-old, she was imminently sensible and clear thinking about…
some stuff. Most stuff. Although she had shown an unexpected taste for adventure that caused no end of problems for me.
Mamma sat and patted the chair opposite, and when Princess Isabella joined her, Mamma began the Montague family lineage. “My father-in-law is one of five children. Born first is Great-Aunt Vendrimina. She is…”
Mamma groped for tact.
Not bound by such a need, I pulled a chair close and explained, “Great-Aunt Vendrimina is a bossy know-it-all.”
Mamma was too serene to smirk, but her lips did quiver. “Some say Rosie resembles her.”
“Some do not live to see the dawn,” I pronounced.
Cal came around behind Mamma and stood, arms crossed, observing me intently and almost critically. Was he changing his mind?
“Actually, last time I met Vendrimina, I’d thought she’d mellowed,” Nonna Ursula said.
“Age has softened some sharp edges,” Mamma conceded.
“Too bad it hasn’t worked that way on Ursula.” Lady Pulissena grinned at her friend.
“You wouldn’t know me if I was sweet and gentle,” Nonna Ursula retorted.
“I still contend that bang on the head you suffered has softened your skull.”
I loudly interrupted before this could turn into a major old lady pissing match. “Princess Isabella, if I could have your attention!”
She stopped looking between Nonna and Lady Pulissena and focused on me.
In a calming tone, I continued the systematic outline of the family.
“My grandfather, Lord Montague, is the second child, the oldest son, heir to the vineyards and the title. Like my father, Nonno can fight and fight well, but as he’s aged he’s more likely to settle arguments over a glass of wine.
Nonno is secure in his position in the family and in the world.
Great-Uncle Magno is always scrambling to be important and he—” I looked at Mamma, mutely questioning how far I should go.
She nodded, so I said, “And he constantly deserves the middle finger.”
Which, if you don’t know, gentle reader, is an offensive and obscene gesture of ancient origins, even so far back as the Roman Empire, although the Greeks also proudly lay claim to it as a symbol of an erect male member. Why should that be offensive, you ask?
Hm.
Whatever was the truth, Mamma looked pained. “Dear Rosie, that is perhaps too blunt.”
“I don’t think so. Do you think so, Pulissena?” Nonna clearly expected to be supported.
Lady Pulissena had other ideas. “Ursula, she’s going to be the princess. She’s going to have to learn to watch her tongue at some point.”
“We’re private here!” Nonna said.
“It’s a palace. The walls have ears and you know it.”
Nonna sighed. “You’re right. But I do hate to muffle the child. She makes me laugh.”
Without inflection, Cal said, “As my wife, I won’t allow Rosie to be muffled. Everyone in society will learn to be charmed by her blunt opinions.”
Startled by his stern defense, I smiled at Cal. “Really?”
He crossed his arms and scowled. Not unnaturally, I was confused. Was he happy? Was he annoyed? Was he dealing with any possible challenge to his sovereignty with princely pronouncements? He had shown that tendency.
In any case, Nonna Ursula announced, “Ha!” in triumphant tones and Mamma said, “Rosie, do show some sense.” Then to Princess Isabella, she said, “Magno was born ten months after the heir to the title and fortune, and constantly seems to be compensating for being the lesser son.”
“How lesser?” Princess Isabella asked.
It was an honest question from a girl of thirteen, yet Mamma and I exchanged pained glances and, right on cue, both the old women cackled.
Lady Pulissena pronounced, “He’s shorter in height, too.”
More cackling.
Cal closed his eyes as if he couldn’t stand to view his grandmother chuckling about…you know.
At first Princess Isabella looked confused, then so shocked I patted her hand.
“My father-in-law is a man of many talents and kindnesses. He sings well, he is learned, handsome of face and charming of manner.” My lady mother seemed to think that addressed Magno’s issues. “After Magno was born our darling Great-Aunt Claudia, a woman who thrives on hospitality.”
“She’s the one you suspect told Magno about the wedding in the innocent belief that he’d been omitted by accident,” Princess Isabella recalled.
“That’s right.” My lady mother beamed at Princess Isabella, who had proved herself a quick study in all manner of social correctness. “Last in the family is Great-Uncle Martin who went on a crusade to the Holy Land and came back—” She hesitated.
“—Charming and funny and broken.” I loved Great-Uncle Martin, but in all my life he had never been more than a man who hid behind a broad smile and a jesting tone.
It was only when he stayed at Casa Montague we discovered that he screamed when the nightmares took him, and afterward he walked the floor trying to flee the memories.
He never wed. He had no children. And I know my father and Nonno feared for the sins he might be contemplating.
I could see Isabella memorizing the names and information.
She understood that her task as princess was to know all the guests, greet all the guests, make all the guests feel welcome.
And, because she’d already grasped the intricacies of the Montague/Capulet balance of power, she comprehended that she, too, might be called on to mop up blood.
She seemed to enjoy her new circumstances, and for that reason I felt the need to give more warnings.
“About Magno—he’s an aging rogue who imagines himself to be an irresistible lover.
Irresistible, he is not, and according to rumor, as a lover he would make a good rabbit. ”
Lady Pulissena nodded. “It’s true.”
Everyone looked at her.
“According to my source who is reliable and quite scathing.” She nodded primly. To Nonna Ursula, she said, “Tell you later.”
Nonna Ursula grinned in anticipation.
I continued, “He’s a man of distinguished learning, handsome demeanor and many big words which he uses to impress and diminish.
He dominates every conversation, weighing it down with his constant parade of unnecessary knowledge.
He lectures about wines until we’re ready to drink ourselves into a stupor so we can’t hear him anymore. But he tells us we must wait to taste.”
“Wait for what?” Cal asked.
“For him to finish his lecture. He is the ultimate wine snot.”
“Snob, dear,” Mamma rebuked me, but a smile played around her mouth. “The word is snob.”
In a tone of amiable curiosity, Cal said, “Explain again why we had to delay the wedding long enough to allow all your relatives to arrive?”
Look for THUS WITH A KISS I DIE, the second Daughter of Montague historical mystery starring Rosie, the delightfully irreverent eldest daughter of the not-so-ill-fated Romeo and Juliet, as she returns to sleuth another day in fair Verona, now on sale!