Prospero Lost: Prospero's Daughter, Book I (29 page)

“Mr. Prospero is conveniently missing,” Mab said sourly. “We were hoping you could tell us something about it.”

Ferdinand shook his head. “I regret that I know nothing that could help you.”

The wind whistled sharply. Its gusts were icy cold. The Italian workers had ceased their labor. Their eyes focused on us.

“Perhaps, we should go somewhere else,” I said.

“Let us find a café and dine while we speak,” Ferdinand suggested.

As the four of us walked down the steps, I murmured to Mab that Ferdinand had found a nice excuse to hit us up for a free meal.

“
YOU
say you escaped from Hell three months ago, Mr. Di Napoli.” Mab pulled out his notebook and stubby pencil. “What have you been doing since?”

We were sitting in a pretty Italian café a few blocks from the Mall. I sat next to Mab, across the table from Ferdinand, who was next to Mephisto. I had thought this choice of seating wise but was beginning to regret it. It allowed Ferdinand to gaze directly into my eyes, which I found disconcerting. I could not tear my gaze away.

“When first I regained Earth’s face, I found the sunlit world so bright I could not see,” Ferdinand replied. “I stumbled blindly, my hands before my eyes. Kind women came— social workers— and led me to food and shelter. They insisted I speak to doctors dressed in robes of purest white, who told me my wits had fled. In my youth, I would have slain a man for such slander. But years of taunts from demons and the damned had caused calluses to grow against such abuse. The utterances of these doctors disturbed me not.

“Instead, I treated them with greatest politeness. They announced my madness— which they called amnesia— was not harmful to my fellow men and let me be. The kind women found a place for me at a hall of learning, where I could study the things the doctors claimed I had forgotten. So, now, I attend the University of Chicago, and, to repay the kindnesses shown me, I make use of my meager skills to impart to my fellow students knowledge of swordplay, history, and the languages of the classics.”

“How did you learn English?” Mab asked. “You speak it awfully well for one who has been in America only three months.”

“In Hell, there is naught for a living man to do but talk with the dead. And so, I have talked. At first, my Latin sufficed to allow me to converse with many learned men. To speak with men of slanted eye or dark skin, however, I needed to learn new tongues. After a time, the tongue of scholars turned to Spanish, then French. Later again, English became the language the learned spoke. Of late, even the learned among the Orientals and the Africans have spoken at least a smattering of this tongue.”

“And how did you just happen to come by Miss Miranda’s hotel in Chicago?” Mab glared at him accusingly.

Ferdinand threw up his hands as if to demonstrate his innocence. “I inquired at the dread wizard’s office. I explained I was an old friend of the owner. The young person with whom I spoke had overheard the name of the hotel where Miranda planned to stay, and she passed it on to me.”

My gaze remained fixed upon Ferdinand as he spoke. His face reminded me of the statues of the gods of old and left me with the same dreaded longing to possess such beauty. I could well imagine my well-trained receptionist forgetting her security protocol and blurting out secrets to this man. He answered Mab’s question with calm assurance and measured words. Yet, all the while he spoke, his gaze drank in my face as a man newly emerged from the desert might sip from a cool mountain stream. I could not recall, within my long memory, anyone ever having looked at me that way, not even back when he and I were to be wed.

“What’s Hell like?” Mephisto rested his elbows on the table and laid his cheek upon his hand, smiling at Ferdinand.

Ferdinand frowned. “I am not certain
cara mia
would care to hear the horrors. . . .”

“Just leave out the torture and dismemberment parts and tell us about how the place is set up,” Mab suggested.

Ferdinand frowned, then shrugged. “Much is as Dante described it. Only
the virtuous pagans of whom he spoke were nowhere to be found. Apparently, Christ took them with him when he broke out, much to my sorrow. I would have given all that was mine for a chance to converse with them.”

“So there are nine circles, each with a guardian, and all that?” Mab asked, taking notes as he spoke. “And you lived in the First Circle, the one called Limbo?”

As Ferdinand nodded, the waitress came with our food. Ferdinand smiled at her and thanked her kindly. The young woman blushed, flustered. She remained, hovering at Ferdinand’s elbow until Mab gave her a sharp look. Mephisto pouted. Waitresses usually fussed over him.

“Limbo is not properly part of the Devil’s kingdom,” Ferdinand said, wrapping his spaghetti skillfully about his fork. “It is instead the realm of the god of the dead. The shades there are not tortured. They are merely forlorn.

“Of the rest of Hell . . . myself, I have traveled only as far as the Sixth Circle. Having read Dante in my youth, I knew that if I could make my way to the bottom of the Ninth Circle, I could pass through the gate there and reach Purgatory, beyond. So, I tried to descend, but the Hellwind always caught me and returned me to Limbo before I could venture half so far.

“Twice in my journeys, I reached the red-hot iron walls of the City of Dis, on the Sixth Circle, only to be turned to stone by the Gorgon that the Furies have set to guard that wall. Once, I remained stone for over sixty years— counting by the dates uttered by the shades of the newly dead— before some fiend conducting an inventory of souls dragged me back to my proper place and restored me. Only once did I actually pass Dis’s gates, and even then, I hardly got beyond the first row of flaming sepulchers before one of the fallen angels who patrol that foul city threw me out again.”

“How did you get past the Furies?” Mab asked. To me he said, “You never know what might turn out to be important one day.”

“I accompanied the angels of High Heaven during one of their raids. Every century or so, they swoop down from on high, burning with Heaven-fire, their pinions too bright for any of us— of those below— to see. They draw up with them the souls of those who have truly repented of their former sins. I begged them to take me as well, but they said that I, being flesh, could not dwell where they were going.”

“Why didn’t you just kill yourself and go along?” Mab asked.

“The angels explained to me that were I to deliberately shed my mortal clay, I would find myself a tree in the Wood of the Suicides.”

“Isn’t the Wood of the Suicides in the Seventh Circle?” Mab wiped
tomato sauce from his chin with the back of his hand. “Wouldn’t you have been closer to the bottom, where you wanted to go?”

“True, but I would have been stationary.” Ferdinand smiled into my eyes. I dropped my gaze, studying my calzone.

“So?” Mephisto broke in. “When are you two lovebirds going to get married?”

I glared indignantly at Mephisto, trying to douse the fire that had ignited my cheeks by an effort of will. Meanwhile, Ferdinand’s gaze rested earnestly on my face, as if life and death itself depended upon my answer.

When I said nothing, he spoke. “
Bella mia
, if you wish time before you answer the question your brother has so artlessly yet aptly asked, I will not begrudge it to you. Yet, I would still take you, if you will have me.”

“I have no interest in marrying.” I spoke coldly in my effort to force my voice to remain calm. “You or anyone.”

Ferdinand put his fork down slowly. “I understand, my darling,” he said softly. “You are still the servant of the Diana goddess, are you not?” When I nodded, he asked. “Might you ever change your mind?”

“It is unlikely.”

“I would it does not come to this.” Ferdinand held himself proudly, but it was clear it took an effort to force the words from his lips. “But if it does. I would agree to wed you for a day, in name alone, in the courts of these American peoples, so the vow you swore to me would be satisfied. So long as we never came together as man and wife, you could send an emissary to the Pope in Rome and request the union be annulled. Then, you would be free to wed elsewhere, should you ever desire to do so.”

“I will remember that.” I dropped my eyes, for the look in his was too revealing. I decided this was not the time to explain that ending a marriage no longer required intervention from the Pope.

The waitress brought us our check. I began to pull out my wallet, but Ferdinand refused to allow me to pay.

“I will not take money from the woman who will someday be my wife,” he said fiercely.

The waitress gave me a cold look. Recalling my quip about Ferdinand and the free meal, I felt ashamed. I suddenly wanted to do something to help him, but knew just as strongly that anything I offered would be turned down.

The four of us left the restaurant and stood together on the street.

“We must go,” I said to Ferdinand. “We are about some business for my
father. If you tell me where you are staying, I will contact you when we return. You already know how to contact me through Prospero, Inc.”

Ferdinand nodded and gave us his address. Mab wrote it down. Ferdinand turned up the collar of his overcoat and stood gazing at me uncertainly. He glanced meaningfully at Mab and Mephisto. To my surprise, they both stepped away.

“Miranda.” He drew closer until he stood too close. His hand came up and touched my cheek. Then, tilting my chin up until I could no longer avoid looking him in the eye, he said, “I cherish a hope that, given time, you will recall your love for me. For it would be a sin, indeed, if torn from each other by such unkind fates, we did not make use of this, our second chance.”

He leaned toward me, and I knew he meant to kiss me. I stiffened and drew back. He hesitated, and then drew away slowly. Lowering his head, so his lips were near my ear, he whispered, “No. I see the time is not yet right.”

He touched my lips lightly with one finger. Then, bowing, he turned and walked off into the windswept afternoon.

The afternoon sun hung low over the aquamarine waters. The winds blew steadily upon our sails, as sparkles of golden sunlight danced over the curling waves. To the starboard, a flying fish broke free of its watery home before splashing back into the depths; overhead, seagulls wheeled and sounded their cries.

Mephisto, Mab, and I were sailing out of Charlotte Amalie, the busiest cruise port in the Virgin Islands. We had spent the night in Maryland, feeling it was too late for a long flight after our meeting with Ferdinand. Then, rising early this morning, we flew to St. Thomas, as there was no landing strip on St. Dismas’s Island. Once there, we chartered the
Happy Gambit
, a spinnaker-rigged thirty-foot sloop, and set sail for Logistilla’s.

The prevailing wind speed averaged eighteen knots. We bounded along at a goodly clip, with Aerie Ones shielding us from excess wind and spray. While I could not deny the appeal of sailing with the sheet in one hand and the helm in the other, the appeal of lounging on the deck enjoying the sun and wind was even stronger today. It had been months, perhaps years, since I had taken a day off.

I charted a course to St. Dismas’s Island and sailed out of the harbor. When we reached open waters, I whistled up the winds and turned control of the helm over to the local Aerie Spirits.

The
Happy Gambit
was a beautiful cedar-strip sloop. I sat on the bowsprit, floating above the waves, a cool breeze blowing in my face. I had changed my attire and now wore a yellow-and-white sundress with a wide straw hat tied under my chin with a ribbon of bright yellow silk that fluttered about my face as I gazed at the sea. It had been a long time since I had been sailing. My own sailboat, the
Witchcraft
, sat neglected in some dry
dock in Portland. Sitting there, watching the water reflect the sky as our boat leapt from swell to swell, I resolved to find time to take her out again.

Sailing brought back such happy memories. It was hard to feel troubled when caught between the sky and the sea. One could almost believe one was flying. The warm Ca rib be an sun beat down on my face, as our hull moved melodically through the waves. What a splendid afternoon! What lovely weather! I loved weather, all weather, not just the good kind. I loved balmy days, fearsome storms, blizzards, and spring showers. And the colors! Every day brought something to be admired: the soft feathery patterns of cirrus clouds, the deep, dark grays of thunderheads, the lacy gold and peach of the early morning sunrise. The sky and its moods called to me.