“Thank you,” he says. “My mother was an instructor. She would be glad to know I’m putting her lessons to good use.”
“I’m sure dancing with strangers at Carnevale was not what she had in mind when she taught you,” Beatrix says. Royal balls were more likely.
The man laughs. “I’m sure you’re right.”
Beatrix takes anotherfritolefrom the basket. “What’s the best food you’ve ever eaten?” she asks. “Besides these.”
He ponders the question as he chews. “It’s a tie between oysters fresh from the Thames and pizza in Naples.”
“You’re a traveler?” Beatrix asks.
The man seems surprised by her assessment. “I guess you could say that.”
“All right, then, what’s the strangest food you’ve ever eaten?”
“That depends on your definition of food. My brother dared me to eat a snail out of our mother’s garden once.”
“I hear that’s a delicacy in France,” Beatrix says.
“So had he.” The man laughs. “What about you?”
“Not to brag, but my sisters and I used to make the best mud pies in all of Britain.” Isabella was only six, Alice nearly eight, the last summer they were allowed to play together on the riverbank. The tree had only just fallen in the clearing, claimed by an early summer storm, and they turned it into their bakery. They lined up their best pies and cakes, topped with acorn caps and wild forest flowers, and used the roundest, smoothest stones from the river as their coins. They took turns playing all manner of customers.
“We never ate any of them,” Beatrix clarifies. “Only pretended.” It’s the same thing she told her mother and her father and the parish priest when they asked her to explain what, exactly, the girls had been up to in the forest.
“Never?” the man asks. “Not even once?”
The parish priest didn’t believe her, either; he stared at her with those watery blue eyes, waiting for her to confess to something she hadn’t done. He left their cottage in a huff, and her father told her it wasn’t safe for her to go into the forest anymore. She thought he sounded almost sad when he said it.
That night, her parents’ voices drifted to where she lay next to her sleeping sisters, and she understood. The danger wasn’t in the forest.
Their neighbor’s wife had died that morning, struck by terrible stomach pains and fever. Mr. Brown was bereft, until his daughter told him she had passed Beatrix in the woods on her way home with the washing, that she had seen her making strange cakes from dirt and sticks, that she had watched her eat them while she played at being her mother. The girl was inconsolable after that.
Mr. Brown went to the priest immediately, demanded Beatrix be held to account for his wife’s death. What did it matter that she was only a ten-year-old girl playing a game with her sisters, when he suspected she wasn’t a girl at all?
“Sorry to disappoint,” Beatrix says. “I have, unfortunately, eaten questionable meat pie.”
The man makes a disgusted sound. “That might be worse than snail.”
“I agree.” She licks the last of the icing sugar from her fingers.
The man considers her for a long moment before he asks, “What’s one thing you want to do before you die?”
Beatrix shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Oh, come on, there must be something,” he says.
“This conversation is becoming a bit serious for Carnevale, isn’t it?”
“It’s the masks,” the man says. “They turn people honest.”
“Do they now?” Beatrix props her chin on her hand. “What’s your answer, then?”
The man leans across the table, as if he’s about to whisper a scandalous secret in her ear. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
Beatrix scowls. She has never given it any thought, because it doesn’t matter. She has all the time in the world. She can do anything. Everything. And yet she hasn’t. She hasn’t even considered it, until now. “Anything?”
“Anything,” the man says. “Doesn’t matter how expensive, how far away, how impossible it sounds. Practicality doesn’t factor into it.”
