Death of a Duchess (2 page)

The emissary said, ‘So the dog barked, after all.’

The lack-wit had large round eyes. He looked up at the broad-shouldered man in black.

‘Yes. Biondello had a good try.’

He rocked the dog in his arms, bending his head over it and crooning as a girl might do to her doll.

The movement allowed the dog’s head to fall back and showed the gash across its throat. Blood dabbled the fluff of the white chest and there was blood on its teeth.

‘Who’s a good little dog, then?’

A strange sound erupted from Jacopo, now rigid at the emissary’s side.

‘She’s been abducted!
My daughter has been abducted!
’

Patently, it had needed the sight of the little dead dog to bring home to him the fact he had been trumpeting since dawn. Howling and weeping, he had to be led indoors by his sister and a knot of house servants. No sooner had the knot crammed itself in at the door than it burst out again and Jacopo appeared on the threshold pointing.

‘You! Benno! Out! Get out! Don’t show your face near my doors again!’

As he bundled himself back into the house, it was obvious that someone had made a blunder: the dog, the dismissed servant, or the master himself.

The emissary, undisturbed by the disturbance, continued to look about him in the street and the courtyard, watched, from a prudent position outside the gates, by Benno caressing the dead dog. He examined the dungcart, its shafts up on a trestle, its lining of pitch far from clean, and finally he prepared to depart. He sent a message, by one of those who still found time to stare at him over the kitchen half-door, to present his compliments to their master and to tell him that a full report would be made to the Duke. At the courtyard entrance, Benno stood cuddling the dog so that its head was under his chin. He offered to fetch the emissary’s horse.

‘I have no horse.’

Nothing but incomprehension in the large, mud-brown eyes. ‘You’re the Duke’s man — master Sigismondo?’

‘I am, for the moment, the Duke’s man.’

‘Where’s your horse? Where’s your servant?’

‘I came on foot. You see more on foot. No servant. Servants talk too much.’ The deep voice was neutrally informative, neither kind nor unkind. The half-wit came closer, the dog seeming to squirm in his hands as he pressed it to him.

‘I’ll be your servant.’

The emissary considered this piece of opportunism.

‘I don’t talk too much,’ Benno offered.

After a moment the emissary said, ‘Show me where you found the dog.’

He quartered the ground in this vicinity, watched by Benno. The life of the street was now well established. People passed to and fro. An urchin offered to help look for the missing object, and moved about on his hunkers like a busy frog for as long as the large man searched. This willingness earned him a ruffle of the louse-encumbered mat that was his hair, and a small coin. The emissary then set off at a brisk stride, Benno trotting to keep up. They climbed the steep streets towards the Palace, whose bleak defensible walls rose like cliffs above the town. The emissary’s good clothes incited various sellers to importune him with offers of bread, water, olives, wine, dishes, knives, cloth, braid, jewellery, spices, confectionery, and their bodies. As the two came to the long ramp circling the castle wall up to the gate, and Benno paused at the sight in understandable discouragement, the emissary stopped too.

‘What do you intend to do with the dog?’

Benno put his head on one side. ‘I could bury it somewhere nice. Under a rose-bush. She’d like that.’

The emissary hummed. It might have betokened approval.

They set off up the ramp.

The Duke was in his chapel hearing Mass. He was also dictating to his secretary and looking over an architect’s drawing held up by a page. He turned his head at the moment the tall figure in black of Sigismondo lifted the curtain at the chapel doorway. The secretary was dispatched to bring him to the Duke, who extended a hand to be kissed and said, ‘So?’

The bell at the altar tinkled, rung by a round-faced child who was picking his nose with his free hand. The priest, aglitter with silk and gold in the candlelight, raised the Host. The Duke, his secretary, the page and Sigismondo touched knee to the marble floor and crossed themselves. After a few minutes with eyes closed, the Duke came abruptly to his feet and made for the door, his spurs jangling on the stone. A page waited outside with a cup; the duke disencumbered himself of the brocade curtain which had clung affectionately to his shoulder, and drank the cup off at one draught, filling the anteroom with a head-spinning smell of spiced wine.

Duke Ludovico was a lean man in his early forties. His French mother had bequeathed him blue eyes, but the force of their glance was his own addition. His mouth was wide, the nose short but with flared nostrils. It was a face, haggardly handsome and charged with energy, of a man it might be rewarding to amuse but deeply unfortunate to provoke. At the moment, latent temper drew down his brows.

‘Has lord Ugo stolen his enemy’s daughter?’ He thrust the cup towards the page and walked off swiftly along a high-vaulted passage ornamented with Biblical frescoes. ‘I offer those two my own arbitration of their dispute and arrange its solution by the marriage of their children and
they insult me
.’

‘To the foolishness of man there is no end,’ Sigismondo answered.

They came out on a long loggia above a great sloping courtyard where horses waited. Further down, near the gates, an ungainly bonfire was being constructed. The Duchess’s favourite, her Mistress of the Robes, a widow, was to marry today, and the Duchess had chosen to give the feast this evening — which probably accounted also for a thunderous argument for five voices going on somewhere indoors.

The Duke leant over the balustrade and shouted, ‘Walk the horses.
Walk
them!’ upsetting the grooms out of a cosy chat. He wheeled to face Sigismondo. ‘Is Ugo Bandini to blame?’

‘Shall I tell your Grace what I found?’

The Duke fixed Sigismondo with the blue stare, and waited.

‘The abductors entered, I am told, over a roof. The roof in question is well-made and without flaw. The houseleeks flourish on it unharmed. I was shown where the lady’s chamber shutters had been forced. The servants keep the lady’s loggia spotless. Her room was disordered, very much so. She, and her maid, were gone. Some of the servants sleep in the kitchen, some up under the roof. None of them heard a sound; they were not roused by the yard dogs. No one heard them bark. Nor did the lady’s lapdog bark.’

The Duke’s face was intent.

‘A side door to the lane was found unbarred. The lady and her maid, a Circassian slave, had been taken down a staircase. They may have been unconscious, but at all events there was no damage to the painted walls, no marks of scratching or the kick of a shoe. On a nail near the unbarred door was found this.’

He offered the particoloured rag to the Duke, who glanced and exclaimed, ‘So it
was
Bandini! I’ll have his head for it.’

The cloth was offered closer. The ducal head bent to examine the stitching. Sigismondo pointed to buckled threads on the yellow piece where the nail had caught. The Duke fingered the frayed edges of the piece.

‘And this was torn from, one supposes, a sleeve, with force enough to rip it clean away — and without its owner knowing.’ The Duke’s gaze now had reached incandescence. ‘Jacopo di Torre has done it himself!
He
has spirited his daughter away with pretence of an abduction, and placed this rag to put the blame on Bandini — to avoid marrying the girl to Bandini’s son. To avoid reconciliation. To disparage
my command
.’

The distant grooms turned their heads.

‘So far, the dumb witnesses say as much, your Grace.’

‘So far. Ah.’ He was at once quiet. ‘Go on.’

‘Outside in the alley, horses had waited, well-fed, country horses, my lord Duke, not mere dungcart pullers. These one supposes to be Jacopo’s men, with whom the docile daughter was to go, with her slave girl and her little dog. Then turn the corner into the road and we find four things: plaster fresh kicked from a wall; the wheel spokes of a dungcart that had stood in the road, kicked to raw wood; a trample of hoof marks, even close to the wall; and, beneath a splash of blood on the plaster, a dead lapdog.’

The Duke was almost vibrant with attention.

‘During all this time, while I searched, the Lord Jacopo’s demeanour had been full of indignation, of fury against the Lord Ugo. When he saw the body of the dog, he cried out with great despair,
My daughter has been abducted!
and he had to be led into the house, stumbling.’

The Duke’s head went back. Something not pleasant enough to be called a smile moved his lips. ‘The biter bit? The girl was stolen? Taken from Jacopo’s men in the street?’

‘Which suggests that Jacopo’s plan to hide his daughter was known by someone who took advantage of it to steal her.’

‘Ugo Bandini?’

Sigismondo shrugged.

The Duke turned restlessly away, and wheeled back. ‘This feud is costing me the peace of my city, and its prosperity. Jacopo has ruined a cousin of Bandini; there was a fire in a warehouse of di Torre’s that burnt a street down, that he swore was set by Bandini, and may well have been. They fight in the street, destroying goods and endangering innocent citizens. Trade is neglected to pursue this battle.’

‘Is it of recent birth, this feud?’

‘They have been rivals before, but the death of Matteo di Torre at a civic banquet started the worst of it. And all this time I am threatened by my neighbour, Duke Francisco of Castelnuova. And there is the girl Cosima di Torre, the boy Leandro Bandini, to unite the families...
They insult me!
I shall see these warring parents before the feast tonight. Can you find the girl?’

‘I can try.’

‘Tomorrow. I want you there at the meeting with these two tonight.’ The Duke clicked his fingers and extended his hands to a page who came hurrying with gloves. As these were being put on, Sigismondo spoke.

‘With respect, your Grace.’

‘With respect, Sigismondo? You have other thoughts?’

‘The scent will be warm still.’

‘You are free until the feast. I do not suppose that in the few years since first we met you have learnt to move more slowly.’ He strode off.

Sigismondo, straightening from his bow, watched the Duke join the horses. A girl, her gold hair in a gold net, herself furled in a sable cloak, was talking to the gentlemen who waited, and caressing the big dun whose green and white trappings declared it to be the Duke’s. She curtsied as the Duke arrived, and he kissed her — his daughter Violante, child of an adored mistress who enjoyed the unfair advantage over all other mistresses of being dead and thereby faultless. Recently widowed, Violante had come back to her father, much to his delight.

As he left the loggia, Sigismondo drew back deferentially before another nobleman. His entourage and dress showed his importance — he wore the furs and embroidered velvets of rank — and he had a strong likeness to the Duke, both in face and in a slenderness that showed even in their long hands, alike right to the shape of the nails. They shared that flare of nostril that spoke of a harsh temper, but this man must be the Lord Paolo, the Duke’s half-brother, whose reputation was of gentleness. Where he differed from the Duke was in the shape and colour of his eyes, dark eyes made melancholy by a curious downward fold of the upper lid, and in his olive complexion and dark hair. This, receding though partly hidden by the fur of his hat, made him look older than the Duke by more than his two years of seniority.

He paused and said, ‘Sigismondo?’

‘My lord.’

‘I thought you must be he.’ Lord Paolo smiled. It was a smile that did not reach the sad eyes. ‘I am glad to have the chance to thank you.’

‘My lord?’

‘You saved my brother’s life. All Rocca owes you thanks. You choose to be modest, but it can’t have slipped your mind. I understand he employs you now as his agent?’ He gestured his entourage to stand away, out of hearing. ‘It must be about this bitter affair of the feud.’

‘His Grace mentioned the death of Matteo di Torre?’

If the Lord Paolo noticed that his question had been answered with another, he merely laughed. ‘Alas. I seem heartless, I know, but I was next to him at the banquet. The trumpets sounded for the toast to his Grace, and poor Matteo, instead of rising to his feet with us, fell straight forward in his dish of scallops. Of course, his cousin Jacopo thought of poison, with a Bandini on Matteo’s other hand, but I — I thought of shellfish, and did not finish my excellent scallops.’

This time the eyes had smiled, and Sigismondo’s face, by nature sombre, responded.

‘What about the missing girl? I suppose it is the Bandini; although how they could have got hold of her is a mystery. Girls of good family are kept so close. What have you discovered?’

Sigismondo smiled again, shrugged and spread his hands. ‘Nothing of use, my lord.’

‘What, then, that is of no use?’

A page in green and white came running in, saw the Lord Paolo and approached him, bowing.

‘I’m waited for.’ Lord Paolo retreated towards the door. ‘His Grace isn’t patient. We must speak later.’

Sigismondo found Benno where he had left him, but dogless. ‘You found a rose-bush?’

‘There was ever such a nice young gentleman that was being carried in a chair, and he stopped them when I was being thrown out and he asked me about the dog and he made his servant take me to the gardener with orders about the rose-bush. He’s the Duke’s nephew that’s a cripple, the Lord Paolo’s son. I never saw him before, he don’t go about the streets.’

Sigismondo gave a hum of general assent. They walked down the wide cobbled ramp, and Benno began to speak but, looking up at the dark, somewhat monumental face, he stopped and trotted alongside in silence. They left the castello, coming out from the gatehouse tunnel and looking over the coral and gold patchwork, higgledy-piggledy, of tiled roofs, punctuated by the tall spires of churches and the towers of minor palaces. Beyond these were fields and the great encircling wall with its gates and turrets; beyond that lay farmland, brown patches of woods and the rising undulations of the hills. The river, which through the centuries had sliced through the hills to the north, had come up against the outcrop of Rocca in the course of its meanderings through the valley and, recognising an immovable object when it saw it, took a respectful loop round its base and dawdled off into the distance where, just visible, lay the sea.