3 - Cruel Music (8 page)

In a corner, Rossobelli was fidgeting with a bookcase that rose up from behind the cardinal’s priedieu.

“Where is His Eminence?” I asked.

“I’ll take you to him. This way, if you please.”

The bookcase creaked, then swung outward. A gust of cool air met my cheeks. Rossobelli lit a hand-held lantern from a little candle illuminating a statue of the Virgin and motioned me toward a gaping dark rectangle that had appeared in the plastered wall. “Come…he’s waiting.”

I hesitated. It had penetrated my addled brain that there was more here than a sleepless cardinal. Rossobelli was frightened—frightened enough to have totally dropped his habitual fawning persona.

“Where does that lead?” I asked.

“To the pavilion in the garden. Follow me. The cardinal needs you.”

The passage that swallowed my reluctant steps descended in a series of enclosed, sharply angled staircases: no dusty cobwebs or skeletons hanging in irons, simply a hidden access designed to ensure privacy. It was at the bottom that my real qualms began. Several windowless corridors branched off into the ground floor of the house, but Rossobelli dove to the left, into a mouth of stone that reeked of stagnation and mold.

“What is this place?” I asked, stooping to follow his crabbed form.

“An old aqueduct. The Romans built it as a conduit for water to drive grain mills on the Janiculum. It runs above ground outside the city, then dips underground at the Aurelian wall.”

I froze. We were traversing a centuries-old tunnel? With how many tons of dirt over our heads? A cold clamminess raced down my spine. Involuntarily, my feet shuffled backward.

The lantern swung around. Rossobelli’s long fingers encircled my wrist. His nails dug into my flesh. “Don’t be a fool. It’s perfectly safe. I’ve been through here more times than I can count. Look—” He swept the lamp in an arc, illuminating neatly reticulated blocks. “The Romans knew how to build. The only bits that are impassable are where they intentionally collapsed the walls so the Goths couldn’t sneak through in the Siege of 537.”

Nodding, I remembered that I’d been impressed by a triumph of Roman engineering just that day. Both the Pantheon and this aqueduct would probably survive until my nephew’s grandchildren had grandchildren of their own. I moved forward gingerly and was soon scuttling beneath the garden like a creature of the dirt. I almost crashed into Rossobelli when he stopped at a staircase of roughhewn rock that intersected the tunnel. The aqueduct continued downward, in the direction of the Tiber, I surmised. I wasn’t sorry that we climbed the stairs.

A vertical slit of light descended to meet the glow from our lamp. Rossobelli seized my shoulder. “I trust you aren’t squeamish.”

“Not particularly,” I answered, attempting to suppress a hiccup.

“Good. The last thing His Eminence needs is a fancy boy with a weak stomach.”

Rossobelli widened the crack of light by opening a door that formed part of the thick garden wall. We entered the pavilion that I had seen from my balcony. It was an artfully rusticated retreat, rather like a tiny hunting lodge built of pale stucco and floored with a mosaic of black and white pebbles. The night air circulated through the garden entrance and the lattices covering the unglazed windows. Empty pots awaiting spring planting were stacked in a terra cotta pyramid beside a trio of low ironwork benches.

The effect was charming—except that the nearest bench held one very dead girl. She was curled on her side with her face to the wall and one pale arm flung back at an odd angle. Loose dark hair obscured her features, but her mode of death was obvious. She’d been strangled from behind. A long white scarf bit into the soft flesh of her neck; its free ends trailed limply on the pebbled floor.

Cardinal Fabiani towered above the corpse, standing as still as a marble statue. Praying? Without wig or cap, his bowed head was bald as an egg. His chin was buried in the fur-lined collar of his dressing gown and his hands wrapped in a cloak of rough, brown wool that he clutched to his chest. At Rossobelli’s quiet cough, he roused and sent me a look that bore right through the remnants of my wine-induced haze.

Part Two

“A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.”

—Edgar Allan Poe

Chapter Eight

“Gemma Farussi,” Fabiani said offhandedly, as if introducing a tiresome courtier, “my mother’s maid.”

“Yes, I recognize her gown.” The calmness of my tone astonished me. Inside, my heart was hammering on my ribs.

Fabiani’s pointed nose twitched in surprise.

“We met before the concert last night. The marchesa had wandered into the music room…” I paused to drum up a bit of courage. “What happened here?”

“We don’t know. Rossobelli found her, just like this.” The cardinal shook his head and resumed his silent contemplation.

As slender as she was, Gemma’s corpse seemed to take up a great deal of space. After a moment, Cardinal Fabiani knelt and gently unwound the fatal length of silk from her neck. He examined it closely before directing his next remark to Rossobelli. “Did you find my mother?”

The abate answered with a brisk nod. “She’d hidden herself in the larder off the kitchens. If the fringe of her shawl hadn’t caught in the door, I’d be looking still.”

“Anyone about?”

“Only the footman at the front entrance. He didn’t seem to realize that anything was amiss.”

“And Matilda?”

“When I returned Marchesa Fabiani to her bed chamber, Matilda was sleeping in her chair by the fire.”

Still kneeling, Fabiani crumpled the scarf into a ball, molding the delicate fabric in his restless grasp. “You didn’t wake her, did you?”

“No. The marchesa sought her bed without a whimper, so I left Matilda as I found her.”

“Good man. With God’s favor, my plan may just work.”

Fabiani shot me a keen glance. “You seek to worm your way into my most intimate circle, Signor Amato. I cannot think of a better place for you to begin.”

“Your Eminence,” I stuttered. “I was sent to entertain, not—”

He cut me off with a wave of his hand. “Time is too short to fence with words. It is already well past midnight. I know why Antonio Montorio made me a present of you, and I know all about your brother’s arrest.” He sighed. “Perhaps your depth of family feeling will give you some sympathy for my position.”

Rising, he unfurled the cloak, laid the length of coarse wool beside the bench, and rolled poor Gemma onto her back. “Help me, Rossobelli. She’s so small, her cloak will cover her form.”

The abate averted his face. “Hideous,” he whispered. “She was so young, so lovely.”

“I’ll grant you she was beautiful.” Fabiani stroked Gemma’s chin with his thumb and gazed at her contorted face for a long moment. “But she’s also dead, and we have work to do. Grab her feet, man.”

As Rossobelli moved to do as he was told, the cardinal addressed me. “Tito, I want you to run down the lane to the Via della Lungara. Do you know the Porta Settimiana?” He referred to the gateway to the Trastevere that Benito and I had passed through that morning.

I nodded.

“Right before the Settimiana, on the left side of the Lungara, you will find Atto Benelli’s hut. He’s an old woodsman who fishes the Tiber and tends a market garden by the river’s edge. Wake him. Tell him you are from the villa and need him to bring his boat round to the mouth of the old aqueduct. Tell him to bring some chains. Heavy ones.”

I didn’t answer. Gemma’s death mask had robbed me of speech.

“Well?” Cardinal Fabiani scowled. “Do you need an encore?”

I shook my head miserably. “No, I understand.”

“Go on, then. Down the first garden path to your left and straight out to the lane. Get back here as quickly as you can. You won’t have any trouble. Benelli will follow orders…I own the land where he grows his cabbages.”

I did as I was told. The night air was brisk and I had no cloak, but I don’t think I would have felt the cold, even if I had not been running. I might have been moving through a nightmare. I heard my steps pound the graveled lane as if from a great distance—likewise my ragged breathing—but my body was numb. The little maid who had seemed so full of pluck and vigor lay dead, strangled by another’s hand. Fabiani should have roused the household, summoned a magistrate, sent a messenger to Gemma’s family. Instead, he had hastened to conceal the crime and had drafted Rossobelli and me to help him. The reason was obvious: he believed the old marchesa had done the deed and wanted to protect her.

Protecting family I could understand. The face that floated before me, all through my headlong flight to Benelli’s hut, was Alessandro as I’d last seen him—my brave brother bruised and beaten to further the Montorio cause. Would cooperating with Fabiani help me gain Alessandro’s freedom? I wasn’t sure, but I did judge it certain that failing Fabiani would mean the end of my usefulness to Antonio Montorio. In that eventuality, Alessandro would be tried and executed as a smuggler before the month was out.

The old woodsman’s hut was easy to find, waking its owner more difficult. I pounded as hard as I dared, hoping the good people of the Lungara were all fast asleep. When Benelli finally opened the door, the odor of cheap wine and old sweat clung to his nightshirt. His rheumy eyes opened wider at each repetition of my request, and he muttered excuses about a pain in his shoulder and a leaky boat. It required the invocation of Cardinal Fabiani’s name to turn the tide and secure his promise that a serviceable boat would be waiting.

I returned to the pavilion as quickly as I could. The cardinal had vanished. Rossobelli was pacing nervously. The abate must have returned to the villa while I’d been off waking Benelli, for he now wore a short, hooded cloak. He ran to me and clapped my cheeks between cold, damp palms. “Thank God,” he squeaked. “Is it all arranged?”

I nodded.

He opened his watch, then closed it with a decisive click. Gemma’s body stretched full-length on the floor, cocooned in her cloak like the larva of a giant moth. “Grab her head,” ordered Rossobelli. “I’ll take the feet.”

“Must we?” I swallowed hard. “I mean, isn’t this going to make things even worse? Surely a magistrate could see that the marchesa is not in her right mind. She wouldn’t be hauled before the criminal court. She could be secured somewhere…a comfortable place where she can’t hurt anyone else.”

The abate simply rolled his eyes and tapped his watch with a meaningful frown.

The girl made a light burden. Even so, it was a job getting her down the hidden stairway and through the portion of the aqueduct that descended to the Tiber. As we picked our way along, I asked, “How did you happen to discover her?”

Rossobelli shifted his hold on the lantern, throwing a harlequin pattern of light and shadow over the damp walls. “I was making my midnight rounds, checking to see that all the doors were locked and all the servants where they should be.”

“I would expect the housekeeper to perform that chore.”

“Signora Battista is a lazy cow, in bed by ten almost every night. While she snores the evening away, footmen gamble at cards, maids sneak out to meet lovers, and the bootboy makes himself sick trying to learn to smoke a pipe.”

“You check the pavilion every night?”

“No. I look out for Cardinal Fabiani’s interests as best I can, but even I cannot do everything. I secure the house and leave the gardener to see to the grounds.”

“And the stables?”

“They are beyond the stand of trees on the other side of the villa from the garden. Well away from the house, thank heaven.”

“Then—oof.” I stumbled over a rough juncture. Falling to my knees, I struggled to keep the maid’s head from hitting the hard floor.

Rossobelli seemed glad of the short respite. He was breathing hard and continued his story in ragged gasps. “I went out to the pavilion…because the footman on duty at the front door said that Marchesa Fabiani had been tearing through the hall, mumbling about going to the garden for an ice…when I found a back door standing open…I knew it would be easier for me to retrieve the marchesa myself rather than track down Matilda.”

Having secured my hold on our burden, I rose shakily. “Did you meet anyone on the way out to the garden?”

“No.”

“Hear anything, see anything?”

“Such as?”

“Footsteps, someone running away.”

“Of course not. I’m sure Marchesa Fabiani was in the larder by then. By the time I found her, she’d spilled flour all over the tiles and had eaten her way through an entire cold pie. She must have run away and found her hiding place as soon as she saw what she’d done.”

“Matilda was supposed to be watching the marchesa?”

“That is true. His Eminence had given Gemma the night off.”

“When did she leave the villa?”

“Not long after the conversazioni—after I assured myself that the marchesa was settled in her room with Matilda.”

“Where was Gemma going?”

“How would I know? It’s not my business to keep track of the servants when they’re out of the villa.”

“But she was on the grounds, in the pavilion. At least she was when she was killed. What do you suppose Gemma was doing there?”

Rossobelli heaved a deep sigh and suddenly became very busy rearranging his hold on Gemma and the lantern. As he resumed his reverse march through the tunnel, his feet seemed to slip and he threw out a hand to break his fall.

After more grunting and fumbling, I repeated the question.

“I wouldn’t know,” he finally replied, shrugging under Gemma’s weight. “Why don’t you ask your friend Abate Lenci?”

Before I could speak again, Rossobelli bade me shut my mouth so he could mind his footing. Thus, we pushed on toward the Tiber in silence, soon emerging to fight our way through a thicket of bushes and brush that lined the riverside. Once on the bank, we set Gemma down, then straightened to rub our arms and stretch our backs.

A full moon hovered over the dark bulk of the Janiculum, casting a net of silver threads on the waters of the Tiber. Straining my eyes, I saw Benelli and his rowboat standing out as a dark form bobbing in the channel. Rossobelli pulled his hood forward, raised the lantern, and moved it back and forth.

“This is as far as I go.” Rossobelli’s whisper was tentative, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was saying.

“What? I can’t manage alone.”

“You won’t be alone,” he answered with more determination. “Benelli is old, but the girl is tiny. He will help you get her into the boat and row you out to the river’s deepest pool.” Turning swiftly, Rossobelli blended back into the shadows before I could voice further protests.

I hardly like to recall the rest of that terrible night. Acutely aware that mine was the only face the old woodsman could associate with this criminal undertaking, I presided over Gemma’s watery, unsanctified burial on a deserted stretch of river north of the city. As her weighted corpse sank with barely a gurgle, it seemed to take the few remaining scraps of my youthfu
l innocence with it. I couldn’t have felt more befouled if I’d murdered the girl myself.

After Benelli had returned me to the dry land of his vegetable garden, I headed back to the villa at a dirgelike pace. Bare winter branches formed a skeletal canopy over the gravel lane and filtered the moonlight into pale, angled shafts. With the chill air sweeping the cobwebs from between my ears, I reached a worrisome conclusion: Cardinal Fabiani’s theory about Gemma’s murder was as full of holes as a fisherman’s net.

At first, in the rush to conceal the deed, I’d accepted his belief that the old marchesa had strangled Gemma in a fit of lunacy, but the more I considered, the more I doubted. The scarf around Gemma’s neck had indeed appeared to be one of the marchesa’s, but I’d seen the old lady shed her shawls and scarves as easily as a tree scatters autumn leaves. Gemma was always picking them up. Until she could return them to her charge’s shoulders, she would tuck them in her sleeve or tie them about her waist. Poor Gemma could have been carrying the instrument of her demise on her own person.

That was only the starting point for my questions. As I reached the edge of the wooded Fabiani estate, I paused to picture the marchesa’s pipestem arms and bony shoulders. Even in the fury of madness, could the elderly woman have possibly mustered the bodily strength to overcome a strong, healthy girl? To tighten the silk around her neck until she grew limp and still? I had never witnessed a strangling, but I supposed that it must take several minutes.

With the wind soughing in the limbs above, I left the lane and ascended the narrow path to a gate that I’d barely noticed on my wild flight to Benelli’s hut. The gate stood half open, its iron bars set in a corner of the stout garden wall well away from the house. I gave the gate a shove, but the hinges didn’t budge. Wrapping both hands around the bars, I redoubled my efforts. The gate barely moved. Looking down, I saw why. Tussocks of dried grass and weeds were matted thickly around its base. I’d wager this gate hadn’t been shut since last spring.

I picked my way through the terraced herb beds and shining pools, anxious to return to my chamber, but the moonlit paths were deceptive. Rounding a tall evergreen, I found myself in the graveled yard that surrounded the pavilion on three sides. With pulse pounding, I approached the miniature lodge and stopped at the doorway. The interior was totally black; I had no desire to go farther. Like a perfumed scent that lingers once a woman has passed, an air of menace hung over this place.

Hanging my head, profoundly wishing that I had never followed Rossobelli down the hidden stair in the first place, my gaze was caught by a piece of metal that glinted in the moonlight. A thick, leaf-bare vine arose from one side of the doorway to twine over the arched entrance. Something dangled from a low tendril: a good-sized pendant worked in silver and attached to a leather cord. Faster than a Monte dealer, I palmed the bauble and gave a tug. The light was too dim to examine my prize properly so I transferred it to the pocket of my breeches.

A few false starts set me on the path that led to the villa, but one last surprise awaited: the doors were locked front and back. Even if I screwed up my courage to return to the pavilion, I had no lamp to locate the catch on the hidden entrance or to navigate the blackness of the aqueduct.