CHAPTER 2
LUCIA
Alessandra Rinaldi has been in my house for six days, and I have learned things.
I have learned she takes her tea at a temperature that requires its own thermometer.
I have learned she has thoughts about the flower arrangements.
I have learned she calls Antonio “Your Highness” in company and “Antonio” in doorways, and that she has a gift for doorways, for being framed in them, for arriving in them exactly when a conversation turns toward the future.
Mostly I have learned that my mother-in-law has been planning this for longer than six days.
You don’t produce a duchess and her heir-shaped son with matching luggage on an hour’s notice.
That takes choreography. Marguerite doesn’t improvise.
Marguerite has a drawer somewhere full of contingency plans, labeled in that perfect handwriting, and I’d bet my foundation that one of them says Succession: Option B.
“She means well,” Antonio says.
We’re in our dressing room. He is choosing cufflinks with the focus of a man defusing something, because he knows what’s coming.
“Stop saying that. She means dynasty. We’ve had this fight.”
“Then stop making me defend her.” He drops the cufflinks and turns to me. “I told her the boy isn’t staying in the family wing. I moved them to the guest wing this morning. I told her the comment at dinner was out of line.”
The comment at dinner. The comment. Marguerite had watched Luca chase one of the palace dogs down the corridor, laughing, and she’d said, in a voice pitched perfectly to carry, “This house has needed the sound of a child again.”
The table went silent. Even the staff froze. My fork stayed in the air halfway to my mouth while my whole body went somewhere else, somewhere with hospital lights.
And Marguerite had buttered her roll.
“You told her it was out of line,” I repeat. “Did you tell her to leave?”
“Lucia, please.”
“Did you tell her to pack up her houseguest and her houseguest’s nine-year-old solution to the succession question and take them home?”
“The Rinaldi family controls votes on the council. Their banks hold half our port financing. Alessandra’s support matters right now, with everything uncertain. Sending her away would be read as an insult by people who are already looking for reasons to challenge us.”
“Read as an insult.” I sit down on the ottoman. “Antonio. Your mother moved a child into this palace and announced that the house needed the sound of one. While our daughter’s room is upstairs with the door shut. What do you imagine that was read as?”
“It was read as exactly what it was. My mother being cruel.” He kneels in front of me, his second time on his knees this week, a habit I’m starting to find less charming.
“And I handled it. I will keep handling it. But I need the Rinaldis calm for a few more weeks, and then the council settles, and then they go home and this is over.”
“A few more weeks.”
“A few more weeks.”
“She isn’t auditioning for a role, Antonio.
She’s been cast. Your mother has cast her, and the boy, and they’re running lines in my house.
” My voice cracks on the last two words.
“They are auditioning my replacement while I am still grieving our daughter. I need you to hear the whole sentence. Not the political half. The whole sentence.”
“No one could replace you.” He says it fierce, both hands on mine. “No one. There is no version of my life where that happens. I need you to hear the whole sentence too.”
We stay there for a while. This is our marriage now: two people on their knees in a dressing room, each begging the other to hear a whole sentence.
The thing about Luca Rinaldi is that he is wonderful, and it is the worst thing about him.
He’s nine. He adores the palace dogs and is frightened of the peacocks and thinks the underground service tunnels are “the coolest thing in the world, don’t tell my mother.
” He asks me at breakfast, very seriously, whether it’s true I built clinics that drive to people who can’t drive to clinics, and when I say yes, he says, “That’s amazing,” and means it, and I have to leave the room.
I hate leaving the room. I love the boy. That’s the trap of it. He is innocent, and he is being used, and every adult in this palace knows it except him.
The old Villaris know it best. I watch them at Marguerite’s salon on Thursday, the aunts and the uncles and the cousins with their port and their calculations, and I watch them warm to the boy one laugh at a time.
Emeric, Antonio’s uncle, the council chair, a man who has never remembered my foundation’s name, sits Luca down and asks him about school and actually listens.
Aunt Oriana teaches him a card game. Someone says “good shoulders, the Rinaldi line,” and someone else says “bright eyes,” and I stand there holding my glass, understanding that I am watching a family fall in love on schedule.
Alessandra moves through it all as though she was born in these rooms. Precisely the point.
“Lucia.” She appears at my elbow with two glasses, offering me one. Always managing. “You look tired. Are you resting? Truly?”
“I’m resting, Alessandra. Truly.”
“I’m so glad.” Her smile is a small, perfect thing. “Grief takes so much out of a woman. The country forgets that. They see a princess and expect a monument.”
“And what do you see?”
“A friend who should let people help her.” She touches my arm, once, a gesture rehearsed until it looks spontaneous. “That’s all I’m here to be. I hope you know that.”
I look at her hand on my arm. She removes it.
“Of course,” I say. “A friend. With luggage.”
Something flickers behind her eyes, the first real thing I’ve seen there, and then it’s gone.
On Friday I find Luca in the wrong corridor.
Well, not wrong for him. He doesn’t know the house yet, and the guest wing and the family wing share a staircase, and he’s nine, and he’s following one of the dogs.
Wrong for me, because I come out of the library and there he is, twenty feet down the family corridor, standing directly in front of the yellow door.
My whole body stops.
He’s not touching it. He’s just looking at it, head tilted, the dog sitting beside him with its tongue out, and then he looks up and sees me and his face is full of guilt.
“Sorry. I got lost. Otto went this way.” He points at the dog. “Why’s this door shut? All the other doors are open.”
“It’s a room we’re keeping closed for a while,” I say.
“Is something broken in it?”
Yes, I think. Something is broken in it. It was me, and they let it happen there, and then they painted the door yellow as if paint could fix it.
“Close enough,” I say.
He accepts this and moves on. “Are there really tunnels under the whole palace? Even under the sea?”
“Not under the sea. Under the cliff.”
“That is so cool.” He says it in a whisper of pure awe, and then, because he’s nine, “Mamma says we’re going to be here a long time. She says maybe I should learn the history. She says the family here is going to need a boy who knows the history.”
I kneel down so I’m at his height, and I take a breath that costs me more than he will ever know.
“Luca. Listen to me. None of that is yours to carry. Your job is to be a kid. Dogs and tunnels and being bad at cards. The adults will handle the rest.”
He studies me with his mother’s dark eyes. “Aunt Oriana says I’m good at cards.”
“Aunt Oriana cheats, obviously.”
His laugh explodes out of him. I walk him back toward the guest wing with Otto trotting between us, and I do not look back at the yellow door.
I feel it behind me the whole way, and I think about a boy being taught a history he’s supposed to inherit, and I wonder how long a long time is, in Alessandra’s plans.
That evening I take the long route through the portrait gallery.
It’s a mistake.
Marguerite is in there with Emeric. They don’t hear me at the door.
They are standing in front of the long wall, the Villari succession in oil and gilt, hundreds of years of grim men and patient women, and at the far end the newest frames: Antonio’s coronation portrait, and beside it mine, from the year we married, when I still believed the hard part was learning which fork to use.
Marguerite is not looking at me per se. She’s looking at the empty stretch of wall beyond the frames, the place where the future hangs.
“The line has never failed to continue,” she says to Emeric. “Not through plague, not through war, not through occupations. It finds a way. It always finds a way.”
“With help,” Emeric says.
“With management,” Marguerite corrects, and her eyes move one frame sideways, to my portrait, and then past it. That’s how you look at furniture you’ve decided to replace.
I back out of the doorway before they see me. In the corridor my heart is going hard.
They aren’t waiting for my grief to end.
They’re planning around it. Builders don’t wait for a condemned house to fall down. They schedule the demolition and work politely in the meantime.
I go to find my husband.
*
The photograph arrives on Saturday.
It’s on the front of the Gazette by nine, on every news site by ten, on Beatriz’s phone by the time she brings my coffee with a face that says she tried to hide the paper and failed.
Antonio at the marina, at some soft-duty ceremony for the fishing fleet.
Luca beside him, laughing up at him, and Antonio has his hand on the boy’s shoulder, easy and warm, because Antonio is kind to children automatically, without thought.
And Alessandra at his other side, close, composed, her hand resting lightly on Luca’s back, the three of them arranged in the frame like a portrait someone posed.
The caption mentions succession.
“Who let the photographers that close?” I ask.
Antonio is already in the doorway, already dressed, already furious in the controlled way that’s worse than shouting. “The press office approved a pool for the fleet ceremony. Standard. Yet the angle is not standard.”
“Your hand is on his shoulder.”
“He tripped on a rope. I caught him. It was a second or two at most.” He comes and takes the paper out of my hands and puts it face down on the table, which does nothing, because the image is in my head now, printed there permanently.
“Lucia. Look at me. It’s a photograph of a man catching a child who tripped.
The Gazette can caption it however it wants. It doesn’t make it true.”
“It doesn’t have to be true. It has to be seen.
” My voice is flat, thick with the calm that scares people in entrance halls.
“That’s what they understand that you don’t.
Or won’t. Bellacosta just watched its future have breakfast at the marina.
Duchess, prince, heir. Who needs my permission?
Who needs my grief to be finished first? ”
“I will have it pulled.”
“You can’t pull it. It’s already true.” I stand up and put the paper back in his hands, right side up, and make him hold it. “You want to know the worst part? You look happy. All three of you. It’s a lovely photograph.”
Something breaks in his face. “Don’t. Lucia…”
“Send her home.”
“I can’t. Not yet. Not this week.” He sets the paper down carefully, like it’s evidence. “Give me the few weeks I asked for. Then they go. I swear it to you. On Sofia, I swear it.”
And that’s the moment I should have known it was already lost, because he brought her name into it. He invoked our daughter to buy time for the people erasing her.
I let him hold me. I stand in his arms and I let him believe he’s comforting me, and over his shoulder, on the table, the three of them smile up from the front page, framed and patient and in no hurry at all.