She tossed the jacket at Nicodemus's chair and fairly danced with excitement. "That's so wonderful," she said. "Oh my God, Eddie, we're going to have such fun."

"We?"

"Yes, we. I mean, you'll be writing it most of the time, but I'll be helping. There's a lot you don't know. Dirt about Cesaria that she told me when I was little."

"Maybe you should keep your voice down."

"She can't hear me. She's always in her chambers these days."

"We don't know what she can hear," I said. There was a story that she'd had Jefferson design the house so that it funneled sounds to her chambers (which I've never entered, by the way; nor has Marietta). The story may be apocryphal, but I wonder. Though it's many, many months since I caught sight of the woman I don't have difficulty believing she sits there in her boudoir listening to her children, and her husband's children, conniving and weeping and slowly losing their minds. She probably enjoys it.

"Well if she can hear me, so what? She should be happy we're going to all this trouble. I mean, it's going to be a history of the Barbarossas. It'll make her immortal."

"If she isn't already."

"Oh no… she's getting old. Zabrina sees her all the time and she says the old bitch is failing."

"I find that hard to imagine."

"It was her saying that which started me thinking about our book."

"It's not our book," I insisted. "If I'm going to do it, it's going to be done my way. Which means it's not going to simply be a history of the Barbarossas."

She emptied her glass. "I see," she said, with a little chill in her voice. "So what's it going to be?"

"Oh, it'll be about the family. But it'll be about the Gearys too."

Now she fell silent and stared out of the window at the place where I sit with the birds. It took her fully a minute to bring herself to speak again. "If you write about the Gearys, then I'm having nothing to do with the fucking thing."