Miss Dorothy

In a crumbling Neapolitan palazzo where candle-smoke writes curses on the frescoes, the widowed Duchess Sangro—her bloodline older than the volcano—imports Miss Dorothy, a governess stitched from moonlight and arsenic, to civilize Mara, the last sprig of a bastard fortune. Mara, a porcelain grenade stuffed with silk money, greets her new tutor by setting the library ablaze with a magnifying glass and a page of Saint Augustine. Instead of scolding, Dorothy teaches the girl how to read the flames. Lessons pivot from declensions to necromancy: they salt the ballroom floor and summon the Duchess’s buried lovers, whose finger-bones click out stock prices on the parquet. With each apparition Mara grows colder, richer; Dorothy grows paler, more diaphanous, as though the girl’s ferocity were photographic developer and the governess a negative slowly emerging as herself. When the Duchess finally discovers that her ward’s signature on a new will is scorched into human skin, she tries to exile Dorothy, only to find the woman already evaporated into the fresco, leaving behind a single glove still twitching like a decapitated spider. Mara inherits everything, rules from the nursery, and sends for another tutor—yet the mirror now shows two faces, both wearing Dorothy’s enigmatic, predatory smile.