That’s when I realized what I was looking at. That thing Amelie had signed—the thing her uncle had gotten so mad at her for, and burned all the copies of…except one, that she’d hidden somewhere close to her heart.
At first I’d thought she’d meant LITERALLY next to her heart, and that whatever it was, it must have been burned to a crisp along with her body in the royal funereal pyre after Amelie’s death.
But then I realized she hadn’t been literal at all. She’d meant next to her PORTRAIT’s heart…which, in fact, is from where the parchment had fallen—from between the portrait and its backing. Where she’d hidden it to keep her uncle from finding it…and where the Genovian parliament was supposed to look for it, after Amelie’s diary and the portrait were returned to them from the abbey to which she’d sent them for safekeeping.
Except, of course, no one ever did. Read the diary, I mean (beyond translating it, apparently). Or found the parchment.
Until me.
So then, of course, I wondered what this thing could say. You know, if it had made her uncle so mad, he’d tried to burn all the copies, and she’d gone to so much trouble to hide the last one.
And even though at first it was kind of hard to figure out what, exactly, the document was talking about, by the time I’d finished translating all the words I didn’t know with the help of an online medieval French dictionary (thank you, nerds), I had a pretty good idea why Uncle Francesco had been so mad.
And also why Amelie had hidden it. And left clues in her journal as to where it could be found.
Because it was possibly the most inflammatory document I have ever read. Hotter, even, than Kenny’s nitrostarch synthesis experiment.
For a secon
d, I could only stare down at it in total and complete astonishment.
And then I realized something…something amazing:
Princess Amelie Virginie Renaldo, all the way from 1669, had just totally saved my butt!!!!!
Not just my butt, but my sanity…
…my life
…my future
…my everything.
Really. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, and I know I do that a lot, but in this case…I’m not. I am totally and completely one-hundred-percent heart-pounding sweaty-palmed dry-mouthed serious.
So serious that for a minute, I thought I might have a heart attack on the spot.
Which is why as soon as I knew I was actually going to be okay, I called my dad and told him I was on my way uptown to see him. And Grandmère, too.
Because I have something to say to both of them.
Friday, September 24, 1 a.m., the loft
I can’t believe this. I can’t believe they’re—
This isn’t happening. It’s just NOT HAPPENING. It CAN’T be happening. Because how could my own blood relatives be so…so…so horrible?
I guess I could understand GRANDMÈRE’s reaction. But Dad? My OWN father?
It’s not like he didn’t think about what he was doing, either. He took the parchment from me and read it. He checked the seal and signature and everything. He studied it for a long time, while Grandmère sat there sputtering, “Ridiculous! A Genovian princess granting the people the right to ELECT a head of state, and declaring that the role of the Genovian sovereign is one of ceremony only? No ancestor of ours would be that stupid.”
“Amelie wasn’t being stupid, Grandmère,” I explained to her. “What she did was actually really smart. She was trying to HELP the Genovian people by sparing them from being ruled by someone she knew from personal experience was a tyrant, and who was only going to make an already bad situation, with the plague and everything, worse. It’s just bad luck that no one found the document until now.”
“It certainly is,” Dad said, still studying the parchment. “It might have spared the Genovian people a lot of hardship. The fact is, Princess Amelie made what, under the circumstances, was the best decision she could make at that time.”
“Right,” I said. “So we’ll have to get this to parliament as soon as possible. They’ll want to start nominating candidates for prime minister and figure out when they’re going to hold elections as soon as possible. And, Dad, I was going to say, I know this must come as a total blow to you, but if I know the Genovian people—and I think I do, by now—there’s only one person they’re going to want as their prime minister, and that’s you.”
“That’s kind of you to say, Mia,” Dad said.