“You’re just saying that to get me to tell you something juicy,” Caitlyn said doubtfully, suddenly tempted to tell Naomi all about the Screechers, Raphael, her mother and her tarot cards, and anything else that she’d ever kept to herself.
“You’ve seen through my cunning plan.”
Caitlyn laughed uneasily, feeling too aware of the temptation to tell all. “Did you come in here to study the painting by the great Fournier?” she asked, hoping to change the subject before she gave in to temptation. She felt like she could trust Naomi, but words once spoken couldn’t be unsaid.
“The haunted painting. Ha! Monsieur Girard told that story last term, too.” Naomi twisted to look at the painting, but it was hanging in shadows. She slid her hip off the desk and walked toward it.
After a moment Caitlyn followed. She had already had a quick second look at the painting, but nothing had sprung out at her, and the presence of other girls in the Grand Salon had made her too self-conscious to examine the painting closely. As the hours of the evening had crept onward and the other girls had left the Grand Salon for the night, shutting off lamps as they went, a disquieting awareness of the painting had begun to lurk in the back of Caitlyn’s mind. By the time she was alone, she’d been afraid to cross the room to look at it again. It felt safer to hunker down with her book.
Naomi found the switch to the light aimed at the portrait and turned it on.
The painting, four feet wide by six feet tall, emerged from the gloom in a burst of pale pinks, turquoise, and gold. Fortuna in her flowing robes stood on a cloud beside a tall black wheel with twelve spokes. Gold disks marked both the hub at the center and the terminus of each spoke on the rim. Each disk along the rim was studded along its edge in a different color of gemstone, and had a different female face embossed in its center; for the second time, Caitlyn leaned close to see how the artist Fournier had created the illusion of three-dimensional faces and jewels with his oil paints. The disk at the hub of the wheel had no face; instead, a large ruby was set at its center.
Fortuna floated in a sky lit by the magic hour before sunset, cumulus clouds roiling behind her. On the ground beneath, to the left, the land shot up in a golden cliff, Château de la Fortune perched upon its edge. On the ground to the right, a black chasm opened in the earth, from which a dragon emerged. A knight in shining armor fought the dragon from the back of a horse, a white shield with a red cross on his arm, his lance piercing the dragon’s throat.
Caitlyn’s heart skipped a beat. The Knight of Cups? But no, this knight was warlike and had none of the beauty of Raphael.
Caitlyn took in Fortuna’s strong body in her flowing light blue robes and
Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi
sash. Fortuna’s pink lips were parted, as if about to speak, but the blindfold erased any hint of what she might have said. Her dark hair was coiled around her head in an elaborate arrangement of braids, except where a few long tresses floated free between her neck and shoulders, echoing the lines of the clouds. “Who do you suppose the knight is?”
Naomi expelled a breath of disbelief. “It’s Saint George, of course.”
“Hey, there’s no ‘of course,’” Caitlyn said, defensive. “I’m not religious. I don’t know saints.”
“Sorry! He’s just so famous in Europe. He’s the patron saint of England and a couple dozen other countries. You know, Saint George killing the dragon, et cetera.” Naomi pointed to the shield. “The red cross of Saint George. You’ll see it on the surcoats of the Knights Templar.”
Caitlyn’s ears perked. “The Knights Templar. So Saint George is in the painting because of that legend about a Templar having once owned the castle, and burying his stolen, cursed treasure under the château.”
Naomi shrugged. “Yeah, I assume so.”
“It would be cool if the treasure was still here, wouldn’t it?”
“Sure, why not?” Naomi looked up at the painting, a hand on her hip, her head cocked. “You know, I’d wager that the entire idea of the Woman in Black got started right here, with this painting and Fournier’s story about being haunted by a ghostly woman.”
“The Woman in Black?”
Naomi gave her a sly look. “I’m not sure I should tell you about her, this late at night. You might never get to sleep. Are you afraid of ghosts?”
Caitlyn giggled nervously, thinking of the Screechers and the peculiar heartbeat in the storage room. “You have no idea. Positively terrified.”
“Good!” Naomi switched off the portrait’s light and went to the couch in front of the fireplace, curling up at one end.
Caitlyn joined her, tucking her feet under her and pulling a throw over her knees. She’d built a fire in the hearth earlier, keeping it stoked with the wood from the bin to one side. A primitive part of her hoped that fire would ward off evil spirits.
If nothing else, the light might. She’d learned years ago that her sleep was slightly less likely to be disturbed by apparitions if there was plenty of light; maybe it kept the Screechers away, or maybe it did something to her sleeping brain that didn’t allow them to appear.
“So who is the Woman in Black?” Caitlyn asked.
“No one is quite sure,” Naomi said in a quiet voice, as if afraid of being overheard by the shadows. “All anyone knows is that in the dead of night there is the sound of silk skirts rustling in the hallway, as of a woman walking quickly, searching for something or someone that she can never find.”
“Silk skirts?” Caitlyn asked. Not heartbeats?
“Rustling.
Shh, shh, shh … ,”
Naomi said, her eyes dramatically wide. “The most popular version of the story is that she was a young woman waiting for her lover to come back from war, but he was killed in battle and his enemy took the castle, and then took her, too. She threw herself off the battlements to escape him, and now roams the castle for all eternity, dressed in the black of mourning and searching for her lost love, Raphael.”
Caitlyn’s breath stopped.
Raphael!
She gaped at Naomi, and then the fire popped and she shivered.
“It’s not
true
, Caitlyn!” Naomi said, laughing. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
Raphael.
That name couldn’t be a coincidence! Caitlyn pulled the throw blanket up to her chest, feeling chilled. “Has anyone seen the Woman in Black?”
“Well …” Naomi bit her lower lip. “First you must solemnly swear never to repeat this.”
Caitlyn nodded. A mischievous smile curled on Naomi’s lips. “Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I wander all over the château. And you know how the halls are only dimly lit this time of night?”
Caitlyn nodded again.
“Well, Daniela caught sight of me once: she was on her way to the bathroom, and I was at the far end of the hall, almost in the dark, wearing dark blue pajamas and standing still. She stared at me with that cautious, rabbit-ready-to-run look of someone alarmed by what they see, but not quite certain
what
they see, you know? I remembered that she wore contacts, and realized that she had probably taken them out before going to bed. I must have looked like nothing more than a blurry, dark, human-shaped shadow to her. She stared and stared, and I don’t know why, but I didn’t say anything.
“And then I started walking toward her. Very slowly, you know, walking on the edges of my feet, not making a sound except where my satin pajamas rustled the slightest little bit.”
Caitlyn leaned forward, appalled and curious both. “What’d she do?”
“She backed away a few steps, making a sort of gibbering sound, then turned and ran back to her room. The next morning it was all over the school that Daniela had seen the Woman in Black.”
“Naomi, that’s awful!” Caitlyn said, even as a small part of her was glad of Naomi’s trick.
Naomi put the fingertips of one hand to her lips and widened her eyes in mock horror. “It
was
wicked of me, wasn’t it? I don’t think she’s gone to the bathroom in the middle of the night since.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“You’ve
met
Daniela.”
“Yeah. Okay. I guess I don’t need an explanation.”
“Anyway, I didn’t do her any harm. She’s been milking the story for a year, eclipsing Mathilde Obermann, who was the last girl to have seen the Woman in Black.”
“So there really
is
a ghost here?”
Naomi shook her head. “Mathilde’s Woman in Black was no more real than Daniela’s, I’m sure. She seems suggestible, and maybe not too bright. I’d think
I
would have seen the Woman in Black by now if she was real, considering all the time I spend wandering these halls in the middle of the night.”
“You have a point,” Caitlyn admitted.
Naomi yawned. “What do you think? Make a go at bed?”
“You go ahead. I’ll wait until the fire’s died down a bit more.”
She shrugged. “Suit yourself. G’night.”
“’Night.”
When she was gone, Caitlyn wrapped herself in the throw blanket and scrunched down on the couch, watching the fire. Her eyelids grew heavy, and her mind went back to what Naomi had said about the Woman in Black calling for Raphael. What did it mean? It seemed like there should be an explanation, if she could only think of it.
Who was the Woman in Black?
Who was Raphael, for that matter? And why had she dreamed of him, and felt so certain that he was her Knight of Cups? It made no sense.
Despite the tumult in her mind, her eyelids drooped.
And then she heard his voice.
CHAPTER
Ten
Caitlyn found herself standing in shadows beneath wooden scaffolding up against one side of the castle, in the courtyard of Château de la Fortune. She recognized the well in the corner, with its distinctive wrought-iron dome housing the winch and bucket. It was sunset, the sky above painted in pale orange, and she could smell horses and stone dust, straw and woodsmoke. For a moment she was confused, but then her dreaming mind accepted her surroundings, making its own sense of her being there.
“You should have come with me, Ursino!” Raphael called out.
Caitlyn sucked in a breath and peered out around a beam of scaffolding. Raphael stood a couple feet away in doublet and trunk hose, and leather riding boots up to his knees. He had his hands on his hips, his face turned up to an open window on the second floor of the castle. A groom was leading his horse away, its hooves
clipclopping
on the cobbles.
“It was a perfect evening for a ride,” Raphael continued, unaware of her watching eyes. “You spend too much time indoors, reading!”
A man about ten years older, with brown hair and a narrow, cadaverous face—Ursino, apparently—leaned out the upstairs window. “Better to fill my head than to leave it as empty as yours!” he taunted back.
“Women would rather a man had a full life than a full head, Ursino!”
“That shows how little either of you know,” said an elegant, slender, black-haired man holding a rapier as he walked out of a doorway into the courtyard, followed by a shorter, stockier man. “It’s a full purse they want.”
The men all laughed, including Raphael. Caitlyn smirked. She wouldn’t begrudge
Raphael
his laughter. With his shoulders relaxed and the smile on his lips, he looked gloriously alive and carefree.
The sound of laughter woke an elderly man, sitting on a bench near the wall, whom Caitlyn hadn’t noticed earlier. He coughed and stirred, then looked around with the confusion of the freshly woken.
Ursino retreated back into the room beyond the window above, and Raphael turned his attention to the old man on the bench, walking over to him. Caitlyn shrank back into the shadows under the scaffolding, choosing to wait for Raphael to be alone.
“Beneto, you should go inside,” she heard Raphael tell the old man. “It’s not good for your bones to sit out here on cold stones. They’ll ache tomorrow.”
“The stones were being warmed by the sun when I first sat here,” old Beneto said, a spark in his voice. He was bald except for wisps of white hair around the bottom of his skull, and he had a large hooked nose.
“But now the sun has gone,” Raphael said gently, and Caitlyn could see that he cared about the old man.
Who were they to each other?
she wondered.
Beneto looked up at the sky. “So it has.”
Raphael squatted down and picked up a stack of paper, a board, and a piece of red chalk from the ground near the bench and handed them to Beneto as the old man stood. Caitlyn caught a quick glimpse of a sketch upon the top sheet of paper; was the old man an artist? Beneto nodded his thanks as he took the things from Raphael, and then went slowly indoors, his movements stiff, his back bent with age.
Caitlyn heard a clanging and scraping of metal, and turned to watch as the slender black-haired man and the stocky one began fencing with rapiers in the center of the courtyard. They were both in their twenties, but the black-haired man moved with the grace of a dancer, making his opponent look like a lumbering ox in comparison.