Death of a Duchess (20 page)

Angelo’s skills were under discussion at the table also. Barley described some of his own activities since he last saw his friend Martin; how, recovering from wounds that for a time made him unable to hire his sword out, he had led a vagabond life, even joining a troupe of performers who journeyed from city to city, dancing, singing, selling ballads, doing a bit of juggling, fortune-telling and wrestling. It was in this troupe, whose members came and went like summer clouds, that he had met Angelo. Over the pork and cabbage soup, he described with large explanatory gestures an act they had great success with. For Barley it had involved wearing a bearskin — and from the expressions of his audience they appreciated how convincing this must have been — and wrestling with Angelo, who each time eventually vanquished and led him, in triumph, round the crowd collecting money. Angelo could sing like a bird, like a cathedral chorister... and dance! Barley leant across the table to seize his friend’s sleeve.

‘I tell you he is the best dancer in the world. He can trip it like a whoreson fairy. Up, Angelo!’ Barley swept a vast hand above the dishes. ‘Up and show them!’ He wagged his red beard at them all, looking round, and then assured his hostess, ‘Don’t fear! He’ll not touch a dish nor break a glass.’

Angelo, whose eyes had remained as modestly downcast as any nun’s while he was praised, submitted to the general encouragement. One foot on his bench, one on the table and he was up, and began, to Barley’s handclap and deep singing of an
estampie
, to dance among the dishes and flasks and glasses, the spoons and pieces of bread, on the table. The companion, who was now very flushed, beat her hands in rhythm as loudly as anyone, and was reminded in a muddled way of having heard how angels dance upon the point of a pin. Even the nun clapped her hands. Sigismondo waited until Angelo had leapt down and had accepted another glass of wine from the admiring widow. Then, as Barley had done to him, he leant across the table and seized not the sleeve but the breast of the young man’s tunic, bunching it in his grasp.

‘You have a tale to tell me,
Wild Man
.’

For a moment grey eyes stared into brown and then the table witnessed the resurrection of the viper; a knife glinted in Angelo’s hand from nowhere. Sigismondo released Angelo’s jerkin and clamped onto his wrist, Barley uttered a roar and jumped up knocking over the bench, the companion shrieked shrill as a whistle and the maid, carrying in a dish of baked onions stuffed with ham and cheese, dropped it and hared for the door. Sigismondo repelled Barley with a punch to the chest that sent him over the upturned bench into the onions, and gave such a twist to Angelo’s arm that the knife fell spinning onto the table, chipping a glass his dance had not touched.

‘Peace. I’m your friend. All I want is your story, man!’

Angelo, snarling and gasping, Lucifer after the Fall, glared unconvinced at Sigismondo from where he was held down on the table. The companion had closed her eyes the better to concentrate on screaming.

‘My oath on it, I mean you no harm,’ Sigismondo repeated above the noise.

‘You’ve not come to kill me?’

Sigismondo released Angelo’s wrist and began to laugh. Barley, asprawl among the debris on the floor, joined with a bass bellow of enjoyment.

‘Kill you? Didn’t you come here to kill
me
?’

Angelo, rubbing the wrist still white from Sigismondo’s grasp, began reluctantly to smile. He stood looking at Sigismondo, who made no effort to impound the knife or to rise. The deep voice, however, was now serious.

‘If you think your life is in danger, it is for the same reason that Barley was sent to kill me. There’s a mystery here and we need your help too, to unravel it.’

Angelo took up his knife and sheathed it, docile again. Barley, sampling an onion close to his hand, was still chewing and brushing cheese off his jerkin as he righted the bench so that they might sit. The Widow Costa put down the napkin she had been holding tightly to her lips; the nun shifted her hold on her ivory-handled knife to a less aggressive one, and Sigismondo, by clapping the companion on both cheeks and then taking both hands in his and warmly kissing them, made her open her eyes and stop shrieking.

‘Dear lady, all is well again.’ Taking the nearest wine jug, he topped up her glass and folded her fingers round its base. ‘It is time for another story.’

‘First things first,’ the widow said, rising. ‘I must see what is to replace the onions.’

‘We owe you apologies,’ Sigismondo said, also rising.

‘Nothing very wrong with the onions,’ Barley protested. He, and the other men, had certainly eaten food far worse than that to be retrieved from a well-kept floor. He was at that moment removing an onion, very much the worse for his weight, from the rear of his jerkin. He spread his napkin over the tapestry of the bench to protect it from what remained.

Their hostess, however, was picking her way towards the door when it opened boldly to admit Benno with a meat axe, followed, not readily, by two farm men with more of the cook’s armoury.

Benno lowered the axe on seeing his master genially at ease, and the reported assassins seated, not threatening — one of them chuckling still.

The widow gave orders about the onions and about her dishes, and came back to the table. She said, ‘Truly, Hubert, no apologies are due. I’ve not had so interesting a time since Federico, rest his soul, left this earth.’ She sat down and, settling herself in the big chair, said, ‘And now, this story.’

‘We are going to hear the tale of how a Wild Man danced for a Duchess and who set him to do it.’

‘That, I can’t tell you.’ Angelo’s voice was soft but definite. ‘I saw his face but I don’t know who he was.’

‘Or for whom he worked? Was he a man of rank, perhaps?’

‘No; a servant, but not in livery.’

‘Tell from the beginning what happened.’

Angelo accepted Sigismondo’s own glass, full, and drank consideringly. The widow leant forward to this was news even the citizens of Rocca had not heard.

‘Barley and I were in Rocca for the wedding, along with a crew of others.’

‘Everyone knew there’d be pickings,’ Barley interrupted, stretching a long arm to take the wine jug from Sigismondo, and pouring for his hostess and the pretty nun, whose eye he had been quite unable to catch. ‘We went to the Palace to see if the Festaiuolo would take us on.’

‘So everyone knew you were together?’

Angelo and Barley exchanged a glance. Barley shook his head. ‘There was a whoreson great crowd, dwarves and all, waiting to show their acts, and Angelo got called out alone because they wanted a special dancer. I was hired too.’ He threw out his chest and looked around. ‘I was to have been a giant. The Festaiuolo thought I would look well with the dwarves at the end. Then
you
wrecked it all.’ He gave Angelo a friendly shove that nearly sent his golden head into the companion’s bosom.

‘I was supposed to do as I did! Those were my instructions: to dance along with the dwarves, to mime, to offer the heart to the Duchess, to spill wine onto her dress. It’s not easy, sending wine to spill where you want it to go.’

‘It was beautifully done,’ Sigismondo’s voice soothed. ‘I was there. When were you told to do that?’

‘Just before the feast started. This man — he had come to me before when we were rehearsing and offered me money, if I would execute a jest, he said; an admirer of the Duchess would pay me well for it. It was a lot of money, because he said it might well get me into trouble.’

‘Did you get the money?’

Angelo smiled. ‘And kept it, though that I wasn’t meant to do.’

Silence supervened while one of the servants brought in another dish and served it. Anther swept up the onions into a pan and wiped the floor. They departed together to tell the company below stairs that it was like supper in a monastery.

‘What was to happen when you’d kicked the wine over?’

‘Clear out quick; and I didn’t need telling.’ Angelo rubbed his ribs. ‘I wasn’t popular.’

Sigismondo hummed. ‘Her Grace gave orders you were not to be beaten.’

‘They didn’t wait for orders. Everyone got in a swipe at me on the way out. I earned that money.’

‘What became of the Wild Man suit?’

‘I was to get out of it, quick, and hand it over to man who’d told me — he was waiting for me in one of the antechambers. Helped me get the skin and mask off and bundled it up, inside out. He gave me my money and said I’d done well and I was to clear out.’ Angelo paused and drank, the companion watching him devotedly. ‘I wasn’t intending to hang about and get everyone’s opinion taken out on me. I don’t like messing up a good act in the first place, but money’s money. So I went out the way he took me, back ways through the Palace.’

‘He knew the Palace well?’

‘Like a mole. He didn’t need his eyes. He shut me out of this little door that opened on the courtyard where they had the bonfire. People were coming out to see the fireworks and I was sorry to miss them.’ The beautiful face became wistful. ‘On my way, I looked back to see if they were going to set any off, and then I saw him. Lucky I did.’

‘Saw the man who’d paid you extra?’

Angelo showed his teeth — crooked, more like a devil than an angel — and nodded. ‘Him. He was chucking the skin right in the middle of the bonfire.’

‘Why’d you call that lucky?’ Barley thumped the table. ‘Cost money, skins. That bearskin, now—’ he drank — ‘and it stank.’

Angelo wrinkled his nose. ‘Who had to wrestle with you? Who got hugged to it? No, it was lucky I looked back because I got suspicious. Why was he so close behind me? Why was he burning the skin? I thought, some people don’t like parting with money, and it’s a good sum; and burning the skin looks like the Wild Man was set to disappear. When I got out on the street I kept my eyes open.’

‘
Especially
the ones in the back of his head.’ Barley clapped Angelo with a fond crippling hand on his shoulder. ‘
They
can see in the dark too.’

‘For God’s sake, sir,’ said the widow, ‘let him tell his tale. Did he follow you?’

Angelo nodded. ‘For a little way. I made sure that’s what he was doing. Then he jumped me with a knife.’

There was a pause while everyone pondered the foolhardiness of this move. The companion made a noise like a trodden-on cat.

‘What did you
do
?’

Surprised at the question, Angelo said, ‘I killed him.’ He frowned. ‘I thought at first that he’d simply wanted his money back. He wouldn’t be the first. When I got back to the inn, I found word was going round that the Duchess had been murdered and I knew I was in the shit. When he—’ the golden head jerked sideways at Barley — ‘got back to our lodgings he told me Leandro Bandini was in prison at the Palace for killing the Duchess. I started to breathe again. I thought that let me out. Then he said Bandini was found dressed in a Wild Man skin.’

‘So it was
Bandini
’s man who hired you!’

They all turned to look at the nun, who had spoken for the first time. There was no question of her keeping custody of the eyes as she leant forward to stare at Angelo, her pale pretty face intent. ‘Bandini planned that you should take the blame. The action of a murderer and a
coward
.’ It was clear, as she spat out the words, which category she thought was the worse. ‘He had to have someone to do the dancing, which he couldn’t do.’ She was scornful. ‘To kick the wine over the Duchess so that she would have to retire — I see it all — and then he could kill her!’

Suddenly she was aware of their attention upon her, and she flushed vivid pink. The Widow Costa, patting her hand, thought it a shame so lively a spirit should take the veil; judging by the men’s faces, this girl would never have lacked for offers.

‘But, Sister, why should he want to kill her?’ she asked.

The nun gave a small shrug, as if to imply that no one need ask why a Bandini should murder. Sigismondo was silent, watching.

‘One can see,’ Barley spoke through a mouthful of braised turnip and leek, ‘that the Duke tries to mend the di Torre-Bandini feud by marrying the di Torre girl to the Bandini boy and of course—’ he flung his arms wide — ‘they don’t like it. Saving your presence, Sister, it’s hate the world runs on, not love. They hate the Duke for it. And they’ll ruin Rocca between them.’

‘But why kill the poor Duchess?’ the widow persisted.

‘It’s easy.’ Barley sprayed some turnip, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Revenge, isn’t it. You don’t have to get at a man direct to hurt him. And now what they’re saying in Rocca about the Duke...’

‘That he is the murderer.’ Sigismondo roused to pour wine. Barley pointed a spoon at him triumphantly.

‘You’ve heard. It’s all whispers in corners, but it’s being said.’

The widow put in impatiently, ‘She can’t have been murdered by Leandro Bandini
and
by the Duke.’

‘Lady,’ Barley was a patient bear, ‘if you’re Duke you can’t kill your wife just
so
, pouff! She has kinsfolk, she’s highborn. Dukes need scapegoats.’

‘That’s not sense. One minute you say the Bandini boy did it out of hatred at the idea of marrying the di Torre girl — am I right? — and next minute you say it was the Duke himself. Was the man who hired your friend Angelo, then, working for the Duke?’

‘What I would like to know,’ Sigismondo’s deep voice came in after the widow’s contralto, ‘is why you called me a traitor to the Duke. Someone hired you to kill me for that?’ He folded his arms on the table and regarded Barley under his brows. The companion, pleasurably dazed though she was with wine because Angelo had kept her glass filled, put her hands to her heart and hoped that no fight would start anew between these redoubtable men.

‘He told me, this one that hired me, more than I needed to know. The name and the money was all I needed; or a passable description if there’s no name. But these people — they want to be at ease with their souls about what they do, so they tell you their reasons.’ Barley laughed indulgently and drank. ‘So this shaven Sigismondo has become privy to the Duke’s secrets and has then gone and hired himself to the Bandini—’