Chapter TWELVE
Aurelio
I have not slept properly since the chapel conversation with my grandmother, and I've stopped pretending the cause is simple grief over a sixty-year-old crime I can't yet fully prove.
I lie awake instead turning over the particular, cold fear that has been building in my chest since the moment Adelina said the word Agata aloud — not fear of the truth itself, exactly, though that fear is real enough, but fear of what I might do, without fully realizing I'm doing it,
to keep the woman now sleeping beside me safe from whatever this truth ends up costing once it's fully surfaced.
I have spent the days since the chapel watching her work in the north-lit room I gave her, watching her hands move with the same patient certainty over four-hundred-year-old gesso as they moved the first day I met her, and I have found myself, more than once, standing in the doorway simply watching,
telling myself I'm checking on her welfare when I know, somewhere underneath the careful justification, that what I'm actually doing is making certain she's still there, still safe, still within reach of whatever protection I've decided, without consulting her, that she requires.
I wrote to Marco the morning after the grove search, instructing him to assign two men to her movements — discreet, I told myself, careful, nothing she'd need to notice or be troubled by.
I did not tell her. I did not, if I'm honest with myself in a sharp cold clarity of three in the morning, fully examine why I felt the instruction was mine to give without asking her first.
Costanzo finds me in the study two days later, the unanswered search of the grove still fresh in my mind, the letter to Padre Eustachio already sent, requesting whatever parish records might exist for a woman named only Agata,
vanished some sixty years past — still settling into something I haven't fully processed, and his face carries an expression I don't immediately recognize, something more pointed than his usual careful diplomacy.
"You've had her followed for two days," he says, without preamble, closing the study door behind him with a deliberateness that tells me this conversation isn't meant for anyone else's ears.
"Two men, rotating shifts, every time she leaves the east wing. I only just confirmed it myself, because you didn't think to mention it to me, which tells me you already suspected I'd object."
"I have her followed for her protection. Marzio's threat hasn't gone away just because the wedding closed his legal argument."
I don't look up from the correspondence I've been failing to concentrate on for the better part of an hour.
"You said yourself he'd be watching to see how long the foundation held."
"I said he'd be watching. I didn't say you needed to cage her to keep him from seeing what he wants to see."
Costanzo crosses the room, plants both hands on the desk, forcing my attention away from the correspondence altogether.
"Aurelio. Look at me. I watched you stand in that chapel days ago and tell twelve armed men you wanted her honesty, her judgment, her presence in your life. I believed you. I still believe you. But the woman who told you, on her first night in this house,
that she'd never been more afraid of a man who thought fear was the only currency she had to offer — does she know you've had two of my men tracking her movement since the two of you came back from searching that grove with empty hands and grim faces?"
The question lands harder than I expect, harder than I'm prepared for, and I feel that specific sting of being caught at something I hadn't fully admitted to myself I was doing.
"It's for her safety."
"Is it? Or is it for yours — your own fear, watching her search this land for a woman your own family may have murdered, that the truth she's chasing might cost you markedly more than a debt or a rival's challenge?"
Costanzo's voice has gone quieter, not gentler, exactly, but more careful, the tone of a man choosing to risk a friendship's honesty over a king's comfort.
"I've known you seventeen years, Aurelio. I watched you crowned at eighteen with your father's blood still under your fingernails. I have never once, in all that time, watched you confuse protection with control — that was always your father's failing, not yours,
and I'd hate to watch you grow into it now, with the one person in this house who's earned the right to expect better from you."
I'm quiet a long moment, the truth of what he's saying settling into my chest with the kind of settling weight of recognition.
"My father had Marco's predecessor follow my mother for the better part of a decade," I say, finally, the memory surfacing with a clarity I haven't allowed it in years.
"I remember finding out, as a boy, by accident — a conversation I wasn't meant to overhear, between two men who didn't realize I was in the corridor. I remember thinking, even then, even young enough not to fully understand what I was hearing,
that something about it felt wrong in a way the household's other dangers never quite did. I told myself, watching him do it, that I would never become a man who needed to control a woman's movement to feel certain of her safety."
"And yet."
"And yet." I stand, crossing to the window, unable to hold his gaze a moment longer.
"I told myself this was different. That Marzio's threat was real, that the danger justified the method, that two discreet men were nothing like whatever surveillance my father ran on my mother for ten years.
I'm beginning to understand that the justification matters considerably less than the pattern, Costanzo. A cage built carefully, with good intentions, by a man who loves the woman inside it, is still, at the end of the accounting, a cage."
"I'm relieved to hear you say it plainly."
Costanzo's posture eases, the friend underneath the right hand finally surfacing fully.
"I wasn't certain you'd get there on your own, or how long it would take if you did. I'd rather have this conversation now, while the damage is still small enough to repair with an honest apology, than after she's discovered it herself and decided the apology comes too late to mean anything."
"What would you have me do?"
"Ask her. Directly, the way you've apparently managed to do with everything else since the salon — what protection she'd actually want, given everything still unresolved. Let her choose the terms, the way you let her choose the terms of that workshop the first week she was here.
You were capable of that kind of restraint then, Aurelio, when the stakes felt smaller. I don't see why grief and fear should make you less capable of it now."
Costanzo straightens, some of the tension easing from his shoulders now that the hardest part of the conversation is behind him.
"Go to her today. Don't let this sit overnight and turn into something you have to explain instead of correct."
I stand, crossing to the window, the bergamot groves spread below in the same gold afternoon light that fell across the grove's quiet, unmarked northern edge two evenings ago, and I feel the truth of what Costanzo's saying settle into my chest, cold, the way it does when a man recognizes, too late,
a pattern he should have caught himself before a friend had to point it out.
"I'm frightened," I admit, finally, the words costing me more than I expect them to.
"Not of Marzio. Of what happens when the rest of this truth surfaces — when the consulta learns my own grandfather murdered a woman to steal something he had no honest claim to,
when men who've followed this family for generations have to decide whether the throne they've sworn to is worth anything at all once the gold leaf comes off. I'm frightened, Costanzo,
that protecting Ortensia from that reckoning is the only thing standing between her and a danger I can't fully control, and somewhere in that fear, I think I stopped asking her what protection she actually wanted, and started merely deciding for her instead."
"That's the most honest thing you've said to me since the wedding."
Costanzo's voice has softened, the friend reasserting himself over the right hand.
"Call off the men, Aurelio. Today. If you're worried about Marzio, ask her what kind of protection she'd actually accept — a guard she chooses, a schedule she sets, the same way you let her set the terms of her own workshop the first week she was here.
Don't make the mistake of thinking a cage built out of love stops being a cage plainly because you meant well building it."
I find her in the workshop that afternoon, the icon's reverse panel laid bare under raking light, her notebook open beside a fresh page of careful, dense notation, and I stand in the doorway a long moment before she notices me,
watching her work with the same patient absorption I watched the first day I gave her this room, and I understand, watching her, exactly how much I have to lose if Costanzo's warning arrives too late to matter.
There's a particular grace to the way she moves through this kind of work — unhurried, exact, every gesture considered before it's made — and I stand there, not for the first time, grateful that whatever else this week has cost both of us,
it hasn't yet cost me the simple privilege of watching her do the thing she's clearly spent her whole life learning to do well.
"I owe you an apology," I say, when she finally looks up.
"I've had you followed since we searched the grove together. Two men, watching every time you leave this room. I told myself it was protection. Costanzo told me, an hour ago, that it might be something rather less honest than that, and I've spent the walk up here deciding he's right."
She sets down her probe carefully, studying me with the same unflinching attention she's brought to every hard conversation since I first met her in the east salon.
"I noticed them yesterday. I didn't say anything, because I told myself I was being paranoid, that a king's wife probably does warrant a discreet guard given everything happening in this house."