The Duke Is Indisposed

Chapter One: The Spoon Dies With the Mouth

The first thing Maddie Grasso ate on the last evening of Duke Gaspare Belloni's life was a spoonful of eel broth, and it was, as always, too salty.

She noted this the way a physician notes a pulse. Salt was information. Salt hid bitterness, and bitterness was the flavor of nine poisons out of ten. So she rolled the broth across her tongue, held it against the roof of her mouth for a slow count of five, swallowed, and waited.

The kitchen waited with her. It always did. Eleven people stopped chopping, stopped stirring, stopped breathing, and watched a small brown-haired woman of four-and-twenty stare at nothing.

"Salty," she said.

The cook, a vast damp man named Beppe who had been frightened of her since she was fourteen, wrung his apron. "Salty how?"

"Salty like you salted it. Not salty like somebody wanted me not to notice something. Send it up."

The kitchen exhaled and returned to its noise. Maddie moved down the long deal table to the figs.

There were eleven figs, because the duke ate ten and the eleventh belonged to her mouth. She split it with her thumbnail, examined the pink interior with the flat suspicion of a customs officer, sniffed it, ate it, and put down the stem. Figs were easy. Nobody had ever managed to poison a fig without making it look like a fig that had been got at.

The wine came next. Sweet wine from the terraces above the harbor, poured into a pewter cup that was hers, that had her initials scratched in the base by a bored blacksmith a decade ago. She drank two fingers of it. She let it sit. She counted.

Twelve years, she thought, and I have never once been hungry at my own convenience.

That was the shape of Maddie Grasso's life, and had been since she was twelve years old, when the sisters at the convent of Santa Prudenzia had sold her to the ducal household for four ducats and a promise of prayers. They had discovered her gift by accident. A barrel of eels had gone off in the laundry cellar during a hot September, and Maddie, being small and hungry and unsupervised, had eaten three of them. Everyone waited for her to die. She did not die. She burped once, apologized, and asked whether there was bread.

The next spring, a girl had dared her to eat foxglove leaves from the physic garden, in a salad, with oil. She had eaten the whole bowl. Her heart had gone strange and skippy for an afternoon and she had seen the Virgin standing by the mangle, but by supper she was fine and rather pleased with herself.

The abbess had written to the palace. The palace had sent a mule.

So: twelve years. Twelve years of eating first. Twelve years of never choosing a meal, never ordering a dish, never once saying I should like chicken. She ate what the duke ate, when the duke ate it, in the quantity that proved it safe. Her palate was the finest in the duchy and she had never used it on anything she wanted.

Under the pigeon loft on the north roof, wrapped in oilcloth inside a broken jar, she had ninety-one florins. She counted them on the first Sunday of every month. Ninety-one florins would not buy an inn. One hundred and fifty might buy a small one, a bad one, in a wet part of town, with a leaking roof and eight tables.

She wanted it with a steadiness that frightened her. Not the inn. The dinner. One dinner, cooked by her, chosen by her, eaten by her, first.

"Grasso." Alberto Fienza came through the kitchen door sideways, the way he did everything, the majordomo's chain of office lying on his chest like a small tired snake. He was seventy-one and had served three dukes and intended to bury none of them before his pension came due. "Is it cleared?"

"It's cleared."

"How long?"

"I ate the broth a quarter hour ago. If it were arsenic I'd be sweating. If it were the yew, I'd be on the floor. If it were the slow Neapolitan sort, I'd be dead in June and so would he, and there's not a thing either of us could do about it tonight."

Alberto's mouth did the thing it did when he wished she would be less accurate. "Send it up."

And here is the thing about Monteverro, which is a damp little duchy on the Adriatic coast, forty miles of vineyard and marsh and one harbor: it has survived four hundred years by being too poor to be worth conquering and too well-walled to be worth insulting. It has a cathedral with a crooked campanile, a garrison of two hundred mercenaries, a debt to the grain merchants of Ancona, and a custom.

The custom is older than the walls and shorter than a rope. It is this: the spoon dies with the mouth.

A taster whose master dies of poison hangs at dawn. Not as punishment — as proof. Proof that the loyalty was real, that the taster ate first in truth and not in fiction, that the office means what it says. The city likes this custom. The city says it keeps everybody honest, and the city is not the one eating the eels.

A taster whose master dies of anything else — apoplexy, war, drink, falling down stairs — gets a pension of eight florins a year and a pewter medal with the ducal arms stamped a little off-center.

Maddie had held the medal once. It weighed about as much as a spoon.

Upstairs, in the long dining hall with the smoking chimney, Duke Gaspare Belloni ate ten figs, a plate of eels in green sauce, and the better part of a jug of sweet wine, and complained about all three.

He was fifty-two. He had a chest like a wine barrel, a beard he oiled personally, and the profound, uncomplicated self-satisfaction of a man who had inherited everything and lost only some of it. He had buried one wife, produced no children, and was five days away from marrying an heiress from the salt-fish coast whose dowry — eleven thousand florins, on mules, with an escort — was the only thing standing between Monteverro and an unpaid garrison.

"These eels," he announced to the table, "are an insult."

"Yes, Your Grace," said Alberto.

"They taste of the bottom of the lagoon."

"They come from the bottom of the lagoon, Your Grace."

"Then they should be ashamed of themselves." The duke ate four more. "Grasso! Is she there? She's always there. Grasso, what's wrong with these eels?"

Maddie stepped out of the shadow by the sideboard, where she stood every night of her life. "Nothing, Your Grace."

"Nothing! She says nothing. Twelve years and she has never once said a dish was good."

"I say a dish is safe."

"Safe." He waved a fig at the room. "There is a woman with the finest tongue on the Adriatic and she uses it like a customs man. Do you know what I'd give for your tongue, Grasso?"

"You give me eight florins a year and my meals, Your Grace."

The table laughed, because the duke laughed. He was, to be fair, an easy laugher. He was easy about most things. It was the great tragedy of Gaspare Belloni that he was not remotely a wicked man; he was simply so pleased with himself that there was no room in him for anybody else.

He rose at the ninth hour, wiped his beard, and announced to a room of thirty people that he was going to bed early because he had "correspondence."

The correspondence was named Aurelia Vitelli, she was waiting in the mirrored bedchamber on the second floor, and she had been in the pay of the duke's brother for two and a half years.

At a quarter past ten, the palace heard a noise like a kettle.

Maddie was in the still-room, scraping her tongue with a silver blade, which was a habit and possibly a superstition. She heard the noise and then she heard the running.

She got there first. She always got there first; it was the whole of her job.

The mirrored bedchamber was Gaspare's pride, thirty-one Venetian glasses set into the paneling so that a man could observe himself from every angle at once, and it had cost the city a bridge. In the middle of it, on a bed the size of a hay wagon, the Duke of Monteverro lay on his back with one leg still hooked improbably over a bolster, purple as a plum, absolutely dead, and grinning.

Aurelia Vitelli stood by the window with her shift half laced and her cloak already in her hand, which told Maddie everything about the last three minutes.

"Poison," Aurelia said.

"Don't," said Maddie.

"He was fine and then he wasn't. That's poison."

"He was doing the Stork of Padua," said Maddie, looking at the leg, "at fifty-two, after eels, after wine, in a hot room, with his own reflection watching him from thirty-one directions. That is not poison. That is arithmetic."

Aurelia's eyes flicked to the door, to the window, to the emerald buttons on the duke's discarded doublet, in that order. She was a handsome woman of thirty with the particular alertness of someone who had never in her life been in a room she couldn't leave.

Sandro Peruzzi arrived at a run, carrying his bag, wearing one shoe. He was the palace barber-surgeon, a lean twitchy man of thirty-five who could pull a tooth in four seconds and had never once been calm.

He looked at the bed. He looked at the leg. He put his bag down very slowly.

"Oh," he said. "Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no."

"Sandro."

"He's dead."

"Yes."

"Maddie, if he's dead of poison—"

"I know what happens if he's dead of poison. I've known since I was twelve." She was surprised at how steady her own voice was. Somewhere underneath the steadiness a much younger woman was screaming, but that woman had been trained for twelve years to swallow things and wait, so she swallowed and waited. "Aurelia. How much?"

Aurelia Vitelli tilted her head. "How much what?"

"How much to walk out of the harbor gate tonight and be forty miles away by morning, saying nothing to anyone."

"I have obligations."

"You have a patron. I know whose. Everybody knows whose." Maddie crossed to the doublet, took out her knife, and cut the emerald buttons off it, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. She held them out on her palm. "Seven emeralds. And one hour's head start before I raise the house."

Aurelia looked at the emeralds for slightly less than a second.

"He was dead when I got here," she said, taking them. "I never came. I was at my sister's."

"You don't have a sister."

"I have a very convincing one." She pulled her cloak on. At the door she paused, and something almost human went across her face. "He was happy, you know. Right at the end. I've never seen a man so pleased."

Then she was gone down the back stairs, and Maddie Grasso was alone with a corpse, a barber-surgeon, and five days.

She did the arithmetic. She was good at arithmetic; it was the same muscle as tasting, the same slow careful noticing of what was in a thing.

Item: the duke was dead and there was no heir. No son, no brother in the city, no cousin nearer than Rimini.

Item: the garrison had not been paid in eleven weeks. Captain Liza Bandini's two hundred mercenaries were currently the only reason the walls counted as walls.

Item: in five days, Bianca Serra would arrive from the coast with eleven thousand florins on mule-back to be married. No bride, no money. No money, no garrison. No garrison, no city.

Item: forty miles away at Fossalta, with a papal escort and a lifelong interest in Monteverro's deep-water harbor, was the duke's younger brother, Cardinal Ottavio Belloni.

And underneath all of it, in letters of fire:

The moment anybody says the word poison out loud, I hang at dawn.

"Maddie," Sandro whispered. "What do we do?"

And the Duke of Monteverro sat up.

Not the body. The body stayed exactly where it was, purple and grinning and hooked over the bolster.

Something else sat up out of it — the same shape, the same beard, the same appalling grin — sat up, looked around the mirrored room at thirty-one reflections of nothing at all, and said, in a voice Maddie had heard complain about eels four thousand times:

"Well. That went marvelously."

Maddie Grasso, who had eaten rotten eels and foxglove salad and once, on a bet, a whole raw ortolan, made a sound she had never made before.

Sandro looked up. "What?"

"Nothing."

"You screamed."

"I did not scream. I—" She stared at the shimmering, self-satisfied thing on the bed. "Sandro. Do you see anything on the bed?"

"I see the duke."

"Anything on the duke?"

"His leg's on wrong."

The ghost of Gaspare Belloni turned his head and looked directly at her with enormous delight.

"Grasso," he said. "You can hear me. Excellent. Now listen. Three things, and they are in order of importance. One: somebody has murdered me and I want them found and I want them opened. Two: my official portrait in the great hall makes my calves look like a clerk's, and I want it repainted before the funeral, because that is the picture they hang forever. Three—" and here the ghost of the duke leaned forward with terrible urgency — "nobody, Grasso, nobody, not the priest, not the city, not my brother, not God, is ever to learn that I died halfway through the Stork of Padua."

In the corridor, a dog began to howl.