Page 99 of Thus with a Kiss I Die
“That night, Helena escaped your care?” I was guessing now, backed by the knowledge of what had surely happened.
“In the wildness of music and dancing, she slipped away. I sought her in the crowds, but so many masks! Demons and devils in red and black. Courtesans and ladies in feathers and fake jewels. She didn’t want me to find her, but—”
“She found the prince, for she was in love.” I glanced toward the wall where Elder had disappeared. Where was he? Why hadn’t he returned? Not that he could help me in physical manner, but perhaps he could guide my conversation, help me escape this loathsome trap.
“He destroyed her virtue, ruined her life, shattered my parents’ hearts—”
“I know that’s all true, but while Elder should never have broken his holy wedding vows, it’s a rare man who resists his urges, even when his wife is available for his pleasure, which Eleanor was sadly not.”
“I don’t give a damn about Prince Escalus and his forced celibacy.”
“While I know you hold in contempt any challenge to your plan for vengeance, you said it yourself—by your sister’s very presence at a masquerade peopled with demons and courtesans, she misinformed Elder as to her status as a woman.” I wished I could reach for my stiletto, but I deemed it more important to keep eye contact, for the manner in which Barnadine observed me told me I faced a warrior, cold with intent, and a wolfman who slavered with the desire to maim and destroy. “He believed her unchaste. If she also sought him out and indicated to him she was willing—”
“Shut. Up. Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up!” Barnadine squeezed his eyes closed, clapped his hands over his ears, bent as if he’d eaten stinking fish left too long in the sun.
Why should I feel sorry for him? He’d lured me up here to kill me.
Yet I did feel compassion for him and for Lady Helena. For a woman in our society, virtue meant respect. Nothing else mattered, as I myself had had amply experienced. For innocent Lady Helena to have actively reached out to a man, a man she knew to be married, and tempted him—that was walking into hellfire. Her fate had been sealed at that moment. Not even Elder had known of the existence of his son, for when Barnadine told of the time and the place, Elder’s devastation was clear to see.
The man responsible for Helena’s downfall stood before me. I spoke loudly and slowly. “Why are you here now?”
“As bodyguard, I’d given my solemn vow to protect my lord, the podestà of Verona, against all harm. Then he despoiled my sister, and she was with child. A babe born to that innocent maiden fathered by the very man I served. She bore a son in secret and in shame. Somehow I had to balance the scales, and at the same time pay the debt to my family, to my sister—the maiden who shone like the solace of compassion and holiness in our family.” Barnadine shook like a man in the throes of a seizure of the heart.
“Elder trusted you completely. Yet you murdered the man who’d fathered Helena’s child, the man you’d sworn to protect.” Barnadine stepped toward me and I continued, hastily spewing the words at him. “Elder told me someone came into his room. He told me he woke, knew he was drugged, while someone with a mask of red and black crept into his room. An assassin, he said.”
“Yes. Yes!” Barnadine pretended to admire me. “How well you surmise what happened.”
“I do not surmise. Elder told me. He said he was drugged, couldn’t grasp his sword, that it dropped from his fingers.”
Barnadine appeared discomfited. “No one knows that. How do you know?”
I wasn’t going to explain about Elder again. I intended to pound Barnadine’s doubts down to rubble with an assault of facts. “When the assassin climbed onto the bed, Elder pulled a knife from under his pillow, and he swears he bloodied it with a thrust.”
Barnadine inhaled, a big gasp of air. “That’s true. He did.”
“Not you.”
“No.” He pushed wisps of hair off his sweaty forehead. “No, I gave the task to my brother. Jamy was a gifted warrior, albeit young and unblooded. He begged to do his part to recapture our family’s honor, and I thought—”
“After you had drugged Elder, you expected your inexperienced brother to triumph, thus relieving you of the stain of a vow spoken in service. But Elder rallied and—”
Barnadine took up the tale. “And Jamy hesitated. It’s one thing to learn the skills of a sword and knife. It’s another to thrust a blade into someone’s heart and see life fade, never to return.”
I nodded. I knew that from my own grim experience, and from Biasio’s traumatized reaction.
“Prince Escalus was a good podestà, beloved in Verona.” Barnadine wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Jamy knew him, liked him.”
“Which made Jamy’s duty doubly onerous.” Great. I felt sorry for the young, ill-prepared assassin. “Elder said after he stabbed, he pushed the man off the bed.”
Madre de Dios,why had Elder not returned? Not that he could help me, but to leave me alone, facing the man who had murdered him, who’d attacked Nonna Ursula, who killed Pasqueta, who sought to kill me . . . I could have used his support, and I didn’t understand his retreat.
“Jamy fell to the floor. I caught him. I saw blood on his ribs. Very little. I didn’t realize that his tight doublet compressed the flood.” Barnadine picked at his collar and stared as if seeing the scene again. “He pulled a scarf and pushed it to his gut. He gave me the mask and waved me away, up on the bed to finish the revenge that he could not.”
“Still, you had to kill the lord you’d sworn to protect. Still, you had to break your vow and condemn yourself to hell.” My voice rose with every word. “It wasn’t victory and peace wrung from your courage and action that drove you to action. Nor was it the birth of your sister’s son, a child never to be acknowledged, to be raised in secret.”
Barnadine grunted as if each word was a punch to the gut.
“What drove you to take action at last was the news that while your bastard nephew was being raised in a Franciscan monastery, fated to become a penitent monk, Princess Eleanor would soon bear a babe to be exalted as royal, raised in all pomp, privilege, and honor, a child of the savior of Verona. It was the prospect of Elder’s rising happiness, contrasted against your sister’s fall from grace, that set the torch of vengeance to your cruel bonfire.” By Barnadine’s reaction, I realized my speculation was correct, for he no longer wavered between brokenhearted brother and snarling wolf.
