Death of a Duchess (10 page)

‘I cannot be expected to tell you if I am continually—’

Sigismondo said, ‘The person who presented the ring for sale was of your stature.’

Only the raised arms of the elderly dwarf prevented an outraged and chaotic explosion.

‘This person was dressed as a woman, in a headkerchief. The Master Goldsmith, whom you see here, believes that it might have been a man. The Duke therefore commands that every one of you should be inspected by Master Goldsmith.’

One of the row on the table, rapidly tying on his headkerchief, scrambled to his feet and said in a falsetto, ‘Ring for sale. Who’ll buy my ring?’ with out-thrust rear, and a dance step.

The outrage this time was from the women, and he was pulled off the table, but the tone of the assembly had changed. Linen flew as heads were covered, kerchiefs adjusted, a commotion of simpering was only hushed by a scandalised ‘Remember the Duchess!’ from somewhere. The inspection, now conceived as a turn of theatre, was accepted. Nothing could make it orderly. Sigismondo, whether recognising a
force majeur
or in dispassionate relish, did not try, but sat on a stone bench vacated by a line of dwarves as they precipitated themselves into the throng.

The steward and the guards organised something of a parade before the goldsmith. Kerchiefed faces were raised to his in turn, some bearded. Many came round for a second or a third time. They began to march.

Seeing panic burgeon in the goldsmith’s complexion, Sigismondo suggested that to hear a voice might be of use; but it is open to doubt whether the repetition of ‘My mistress wishes to sell this ring’ in every conceivable pitch, was truly an improvement. The goldsmith flung up his hands.

All he could be got to say was that
most of them
looked like the seller, which caused umbrage. The steward asked whether a further parade would not enable him to be certain, and the goldsmith, shaking his head very decidedly, said that, though he was afflicted to confess it, he could not, he really
could not
, identify the person.

The dwarves were permitted to disperse. Sigismondo, watching the steward trying to collect the kerchiefs he had issued, and being not only unable to halt those going out but being faced with an elderly matron wearing, she coldly informed him, her own coif, and trying to placate the distressed goldsmith, was addressed by the dwarf he had first spoken to, who leant patiently on the table as his companions boiled out of the room.

‘The Duchess had a great number of rings.’

‘This was one she always wore.’

‘That green one? A rich emerald, I suppose.’

‘Yes.’

‘Shortly they’ll seize some of us to be tortured until they find one who’ll confess.’ He was matter-of-fact.

‘Very likely. Were all of you present? What about the missing one?’

He received a very sharp glance. ‘Poggio? He’d been banished. In the fashion, along with di Torre and Bandini. It didn’t keep Leandro Bandini out.’

‘No.’

The man nodded significantly.

‘You are saying that banishment is ineffective.’

Another nod.

‘Where does Poggio live?’

Pushing himself away from the table, he passed Sigismondo on his way out. He said, ‘He was born in Altosta.’

The bitter wind from the mountains had been amusing itself all day, plucking at the roofs of stalls, and women’s skirts and coifs, blowing hoods and hats off heads, rattling shutters as though keen to come in by the fire and thaw the ice from its breath; sidling under doors to worry people’s ankles, and driving straw and dust everywhere. Now, rejoicing, it met Sigismondo and Benno on the road outside the city walls. As they bent before it, furling cloaks over their mouths, urging the horses on, the wind threw in a sprinkle of snow as an added caress, token of what lay ahead in the hills they rode towards.

Benno bore the journey with his habitual philosophy. His stomach was fuller than when he fed in Jacopo di Torre’s kitchens, there were provisions and wine in the saddlebags, together with the nicely maturing dove; the horse under him was a good one from the Duke’s stables, better than any he had been allowed to ride in di Torre employment. He just had to remember to keep his mouth shut when his master was thinking, as the wind was now helping him to do. The only pain in his existence was worry about the Lady Cosima; Sigismondo had assured him that it was in the interest of anyone who was holding her to ensure her welfare, and he was willing to believe it, yet still he worried; to distract himself, he went over the various things he had eaten the night before, savouring them again in imagination, and paying little heed to the rising track over the bare fields. After all, his master would certainly find the Lady Cosima; and God would protect her.

Altosta, as they wound up the hillside towards it, their horses slipping now and again on the great exposed slabs of rock powdered with snow, did not look much like a village. It more resembled a collection of ruins at which someone had flung birds’ nests. Roofs constructed of branches, turf, straw, anything which might keep out the weather, and weighted with slabs of rock, crouched low and welcomed the snow as an extra layer of warmth. Huts perched on unlikely slopes or crammed themselves among boulders as if hiding, the spaces between them rutted with cart tracks or blocked by frozen dungheaps.

A donkey’s bray rang out loud on a gust of wind, from some ramshackle stable. Nobody stirred, although smoke seeped grudgingly from more than one thatch. Benno had a conviction, located at the back of his neck, that they had not arrived unnoticed.

His master had dismounted and stood, so shrouded and sinister in his black cloak that Benno thought no one could be blamed for fancying he carried a scythe at his saddlebow, that Death was come. He got off his own horse, stumbled because his legs were so cold, and waited hopefully.

What came to greet them in the end was a dog; a small dog whose ribs showed through the dirty wool of its coat, who had one ear only but bore it bravely aloft, whose tail slapped its flanks as it twisted from side to side in an ecstasy of welcome. Benno thought once of his mistress’s beloved Biondello, but this dog had seen no more food than its own fleas for a week. It went to Sigismondo as a saint might go to Death, with joy and trust.

It received earthly reward in the shape of a lump of sausage from the saddlebags, which disappeared into its stomach in a gulp. Benno, watching this, said, ‘I thought there’d be more. Villages like this send out dogs to eat strangers.’

The dog now lay on its chin before Sigismondo, its rump in the air and its tail threatening to hurl it off balance.

‘Perhaps there haven’t been enough strangers,’ said ‘Sigismondo, ‘or perhaps they’ve eaten the dogs.’

Whether or not he was the only dog left, this one grateful to be alive. Sigismondo’s warning hand prevented Benno from giving him more to eat. ‘D’you want to kill him? His stomach has to learn what food is.’

The sausage brought the child. Tied into dirty rags from head to foot, it came steadily towards them and stood at Sigismondo’s feet by the dog, looking up much the same expression. Sausages that came the sky were worth such risk. Benno could hear a cautious unbarring of doors. A face appeared momentarily at a gap in a wall which a gross misuse of language might term a window. Another gust of wind brought wreathing acrid smoke as though the village been holding its breath and now let it out. A hen over a hurdle fence and began to peck, staring wisely sidelong at grain it imagined.

‘What do you want?’

Impossible to tell from where the voice came. It the village speaking. Benno stopped in the act of handing a bit of sausage to the child, and it snatched and ran, diving into a hut. The dog barked. Sigismondo spoke from under his cowl and, despite the efforts of the wind to carry it away, his voice rang out clearly to their invisible audience.

‘I come from the Duke to Altosta.’

Benno was not surprised at the ensuing silence; even the hen stopped pecking. Dukes were bad news in villages; anyone in power always wanted more of what villages were short of: money, food, men to fight for them. Dukes didn’t send free pigs to villages.

‘Is it known here that the Duchess is dead? Murdered by an unknown hand?’

The silence continued. Duchesses, alive or dead, were no better news than Dukes. Murder was not news at all. They had some of their own, from time to time, and felt entirely no need for more. If Sigismondo had not been sent by the Duke, who therefore knew where he had got to and might presumably send soldiers along if he didn’t come back; and if he had not sounded like a man who knew what to do with an axe, the village would have swallowed him up, servant, saddlebags, horses and all.

‘The Duke has commanded me to seek out the dwarf Poggio. The first who tells me where he lives will get a reward.’

The silence changed quality; perhaps a speculative mutter almost below the limit of sound showed that various factors were being weighed. Matters beyond the visitors’ ken tipped the balance: the airs Poggio’s mother had given herself since her son had been taken on at the Palace, the pig she’d bought herself with the money he sent. Yet many would get a share when she killed the pig, whether a cheek or half a trotter. Then there was the fact, awkward at the least, that she was a witch.

The tall man in the black cloak was tossing a coin up, and again. It shone brighter than the harvest most of them never saw. There came the crab-like scampering, across the ruts and the blowing snow, of a larger bundle of rags. The hen squawked and flew, the dog cowered. The bundle extruded a hand like a root and pointed at the farthest hut in the village, retrieved the thrown coin and scuttled from sight. Sigismondo, followed by Benno leading the horses, and by the dog, picked his way to the Poggio residence.

It was tilted at a debauched angle in a nook of the hillside. Poggio’s mother let Sigismondo in by hoisting the door open. Like all the village, she had been closely observing until now, and she had formed her plan and now carried it out. She denied, not Poggio’s existence, but his presence. She had not seen him since last summer. He was too busy to visit his poor mother. It was a pity he was not here when the gentleman had come to see him, but his poor mother...

She was a large woman, a woman whose bulk in a village such as this showed a source of food denied to the others. Food was the only currency they had with which to pay for her skills, as midwife, as layer-out of the dead, as mixer of potions for enemies and lovers, for wives to endow fertility or to check it. Bunches of herbs hung in the half-dark round her head like suspended bats, a fire of twigs and rubbish gave off an unpleasant smell, to which a tallow lamp and Poggio’s mother contributed. A snuffling grunt in the shadows told that a pig shared her accommodation.

Sigismondo heard out her excuses and lamentations without further question. He pushed back his cowl and hood and her eyes took in the shaven head.

‘A priest? Oh, Father, I’m telling the truth. I’ll swear it on your cross. My Poggio isn’t here, I’ve not seen...’

The priest produced, not a cross convenient for her to perjure herself on, but a sword. She screamed. Three hens which had been quiescent in the rafters launched themselves into the room. The pig squealed. Benno, outside with the horses, on guard over beasts and saddlebags with a cudgel in hand, wondered if Poggio had been found.

He was not, at first, but as the sword enquired into the corners, somewhere halfway up one of the wattle and daub walls a quantity of straw plugging a hole fell out and a face appeared. It was a large, intelligent face with a wide mouth, turned-up nose and very bright eyes that examined Sigismondo with care. The next minute the large face was followed out of the hole by a small body in a green jerkin and red hose. With the agility of a stoat he put his foot on a projection of the wall, his hand on another, and dropped to the floor. He flourished a Court bow.

‘Poggio, and your servant, lord.’

Poggio’s mother, infected by these courtesies and unembarrassed by her son’s proving her a liar, fetched, and wiped clean with the filthy sacking of her apron, a three-legged stool. When Sigismondo was seated, she put a cake of dung on the fire and poured a brew smelling of tansy into an earthenware cup which she offered him, showing several teeth in an ingratiating smile. Poggio dumped himself on a pack of straw, presumably the bed, and seemed surprisingly ready to talk.

He was sorry to hear of the death of the Duchess. She had been kind to him. Yes, he had made a foolish joke about her, and the Duke had been angry. The Duke was often angry. All the dwarves had to be careful. Poggio had been hoping to be summoned back from exile at any time, but now that her Grace was dead, the Duke was not likely to want jokes.

Sigismondo drank his thin ale and smiled comfortably at him.

‘On the contrary, his Grace has sent for you.’ He held out the hand on which the Duke’s heavy ring gleamed. ‘As you hoped.’

Poggio’s face contorted into what he probably would have liked to be an expression of surprise and pleasure. To his mother, who was skilled in reading his face, and to Sigismondo skilled in reading faces, it was plain he was terrified. Sigismondo’s smile widened.

‘He wants to question you about her Grace’s ring.’

It was not particularly warm in front of the meagre fire, but Poggio’s face shone with sweat.

‘I know nothing of her Grace’s ring. I cannot. I was not there.’

‘You were not there — when?’

Poggio glanced desperately at his mother who, quick on cue, bent to fold him in her arms where he all but vanished.

‘My child! Of what do you accuse my child? He has been with me all this time. What could he have done?’

Sigismondo rose, genial still. ‘That’s what the Duke’s torturers will discover. That’s their task. Mine is but to escort your son to the city.’

A wail from Poggio’s mother, a convulsive wriggle from Poggio and he was free from her and heading for the door. Sigismondo’s sword across the door had the speed of him. Had Poggio been able to think, he might have preferred a quick death then to a slow one later, but a sword can be an eloquent object in the hand of a man with Sigismondo’s face. He stopped. He was gestured back to the bed, and Sigismondo sat down again, holding out his cup to be refilled. Once full, it was handed to Poggio.