Death of a Duchess (21 page)

‘
The Bandini
!’ cried the nun, on her feet.

‘Be at ease.’ Sigismondo’s hand sat her irresistibly down. He shook his head at her, and smiled. ‘Barley is telling us this man’s excuses. One who wants me dead is not on oath.’

She subsided, doubtfully.

Barley scraped his plate with bread. ‘But I dare say the rest is true, knowing you: that you’ve found your way into Palace secrets.’

‘The Duke trusted me; but he trusts his brother more. It was the Lord Paolo who feared I had seen too much.’

‘There’s a good man!’ cried the widow. ‘I’d a Mass said in St Agnes’s for Federico on his anniversary last year,’ her hand moved in a cross, ‘and Lord Paolo spoke to me in the great doorway as I left. There he was, a man with a great place at Court, stopping in the middle of the crowd of folk to talk to a crying widow; good sensible comforting words too, nothing mawkish. And as he went off, I saw he’d come half across the Cathedral to talk to me — his friends were waiting at the door that leads to the Palace. Someone said, “Isn’t that the Lord Paolo for you!” And they say charity flows from his hands. I remember on that day when I was walking back to my town house, we were held up by a great fight in the square, di Torre and Bandini men, all among the market stalls — poor folk packing up their goods as best they could to save them, fine potters’ ware shattered and trampled, good cloth thrown down, and I took up a little child to save him, half dead with a broken arm. I can see I have a di Torre partisan at my side,’ and again she patted the nun’s hand, ‘but Rocca will never prosper while those two fight.’

‘The Duke should banish the Bandini, then!’

The nun seemed surprised that the others laughed at her fierce reply. Barley said, ‘One story is that Jacopo di Torre had the Duchess murdered and the Bandini boy left at her side.’

The nun looked, for a moment, horrified, and Sigismondo said, ‘Rumours, rumours. Truth lies at the bottom of a well, and I dare say was drowned long ago.’

The door opened to servants with more dishes: apple fritters, pumpkin fritters, a compote of mulberries, and little biscuits. The maid, taking away dishes of the former courses, avoided Angelo and watched him with wary, fascinated eyes. As the door shut, Sigismondo continued, to Angelo, ‘One thing we may be sure of, is that the man who hired you was not alive to hire Barley. But is the same person behind them both?’ He smiled, widely benign. ‘It’s someone who hired men who are strangers. But let’s consider that in the morning. Tonight, there’s good company and good wine and food.’

‘And I drink to our hostess. May she enjoy peace all her days.’ Barley raised his replenished glass and bowed to her. She, murmuring that peace was not always concomitant with enjoyment, acknowledged also the others at the table who raised their glasses to her and echoed variations of Barley’s toast. The companion hiccupped loudly in the quiet while they drank.

‘Oh! Your pardon... unaccustomed to strong wine...’

Barley looked round about him on the floor. ‘What was it? Did a mouse fart? It is excellent wine, lady. Blame nothing on the wine.’

Perhaps not unconnected with this, the widow now decided that the men had best be left to their drinking while she saw the women to their beds. Sigismondo said that Benno could wait on the drinkers, and she did not demur but sent her servants to their beds as well.

Benno brought, as she had bidden, another great flagon. More wood was put on the fire, one candle snuffed; the men moved to the fire, Barley bringing the silver basket of nuts and each man his glass. Sigismondo sat in the big carved chair, Barley sprawled along a Venetian day bed. Angelo folded himself down on the wolfskin rug, Benno hunkered with his back to the stone pilasters by the hearth at Sigismondo’s side. He cracked walnuts with the fire irons, but Barley used his fist alone. The house sank to quiet about them as they munched and drank, and they heard the hunting call of an owl as it ghosted outside in the night. Barley heaved himself round to throw nutshells in the fire and said to Sigismondo, ‘There’s altogether too much you haven’t said. You listened to Angelo’s tale. You know why
I’m
here — the Duke wants you dead. So what have
you
done?’

‘Did the Duke himself tell you he wanted my death?’

‘I heard his wishes from the lips of the Lord Paolo.’

‘Mm-hm. And why choose you?’

‘Who else looks like me?’ Barley sat up, throwing out his chest, and smiled in his beard. ‘He saw me trying out an act for the Festaiuolo. I’m not to be missed in a crowd.’

‘A crowd of dwarves,’ said Angelo, and rolled away from Barley’s kick. ‘The Lord Paolo oversaw the entertainments on the Duchess’s behalf. He watched us all try out, and came to see us rehearsing too, making suggestions; and not bad ones either, for an amateur. The Palace people said that’s his way. He’s such a saint they’ll cut him up for relics when he’s dead.’

‘Too good to be true?’ Sigismondo hummed, as if in deprecation of his own comment, and Barley wagged a finger at him.

‘He loves his brother like his own life. Like that crippled son he dotes on. He’d kill for that one. Every time that boy puts his foot to the ground he steps on his father’s heart.’

‘You’re a poet, Barley. Of course they say the English are a race of poets—’

Benno ducked and dropped a nut into the ashes as his master seized Barley’s wrist as the hand grabbed for his throat. He relaxed as Sigismondo broke into laughter.

‘A Scot, a Scot! The English are nothing but rhymesters and only the Scots are poets.’ Sigismondo threw the hand from him, and Barley sat back. ‘So Lord Paolo and the Duke think me a traitor. Do they think I am an agent of Duke Francisco?’

‘Are you? By God, Duke Ludovico’s days are numbered, then.’ Barley shouted with laughter and, tilting his beard at the ceiling and its painted beams, threw a handful of nuts into his mouth. ‘Why were you in Rocca in the first place?’

‘I came looking for work, as you did, my sweet Scot. I’d done the Duke a service in the past, and he trusted me enough to employ me in the matter of the late Duchess.’

‘What could you do there? The Bandini boy is a lamb to the slaughter if the Duke himself killed her. Were you hired to make it look otherwise?’ Barley’s small eyes surveyed Sigismondo acutely, and Angelo too rolled over to look at him.

Holding out his glass to Benno, Sigismondo hummed. ‘That’s more than I can tell, as yet. Much in this whole business,’ he extended a broad hand and closed it on the air, ‘is like grasping a cloud.’ He leant forward and put the hand on Barley’s massive thigh. ‘One thing for sure: it’s a cloud will rain blood soon.’

He paused and looked around, at Angelo, at Benno, again at Barley. ‘We must leave for Rocca at dawn.’

‘You’re anxious to get us all killed?’ Barley, staring, crushed a handful of nuts and held them in his fist, thumping it on his knee to mark his points. ‘Rocca? Here’s Angelo: he’s dyed his hair, and killed the fellow who wanted his money back, but we all know that was another man from the one who hired him and who could recognise him as the dancer who played the Wild Man.’ He paused while Angelo turned up his eyes and drew the edge of his hand not across his throat but, to Benno’s surprise, across his belly. ‘He’ll end up spilling his guts on the scaffold with the Bandini boy.’

Barley stopped to sort out kernels from shards and to bat them into his beard. ‘Then, there’s me,’ he went on, obscured. ‘I was supposed to kill you, remember? If I turn up without your head in a bag someone is going to require mine instead. And people notice me. My death too is waiting for me in Rocca.’

‘Death waits for us all, even the most overgrown Scot amongst us; but with some, he is forced to have greater patience than with others.’ Sigismondo held his glass towards Benno to be filled, and went on, ‘And I am officially a traitor and so in Rocca any man’s hand can be my ending. We must all seize the moment when our watchful Death yawns, and we tiptoe by.’

The vision of Sigismondo and Barley tiptoeing past anything, whether or no it were equipped with a scythe, gave Angelo a silent spasm of amusement. Benno, however, was anxious about someone else.

‘What about the Lady Cosima? They’ll be looking for her, won’t they? Now you tied up the nun and all.’

Barley and Angelo both turned to look at Sigismondo, who sat, fondling his chin, smiling.

‘
Tied up the nun?
That’s my Martin! What now? Was it the pretty nun at supper? I’d tie her up myself if she hadn’t the look of one who’d bite. Who is the Lady Cosima?’

‘She. That is the Lady Cosima. The nun who was tied up was Mother Luca, Infirmarian at the Castelnuova convent. She objected to losing her patient by other than natural means. It’s her clothes you saw at supper.’

‘Tied her up
and stripped her
? Infirmarian at the big Benedictine house on the hill near the border? In Duke Francisco’s country? Martin, you have a genius for trouble.’ Barley thumped a paw down on the shoulder beside him and leant to gaze admiringly into Sigismondo’s face. ‘Not content with stirring it up in Rocca, you have to thumb the nose at yet another duke. Had you all the lives of a cat you couldn’t satisfy them all.’

Angelo shifted on the wolfskin and, firelight gilding his face, looked up too. ‘Why, if you’re Duke Francisco’s agent, are you raping his nuns?’

Barley broke in, shocked. ‘He said no word of rape—’

‘Who is this nun who is Lady Cosima? The Lady Cosima who was snatched by bandits?’

‘By
Bandini
. That’s what they say in Rocca.’

‘They say in Rocca!’ Sigismondo’s cynical hum rose up the scale. ‘They say anything in Rocca. They say what they’re told in Rocca! But listen to a Bandini, you will hear how di Torre stole his own daughter to put the blame on them, then stabbed the Duchess and, stuffing Leandro Bandini into Wild Man rig, knocked him unconscious and threw him on her bed.’

Angelo was sitting upright, grey eyes narrowed. ‘Did he? Was it di Torre who hired me?’ A quality in the light voice suggested he was ready to go back to Rocca knife in hand once he knew who had hired both his assassin and himself. An unexpected answer came. Benno spoke.

‘The Lord di Torre?’ Benno spoke from an instinct to protect the Lady Cosima’s father rather than from conviction. ‘He wouldn’t do that, not my old master, he wouldn’t. Not stab the Duchess. Not ever so much to spite a Bandini.’ He looked round the faces turned to him. ‘What I reckon is, whoever killed her Grace really hated the Duke,
really
did, wanted to fix things so it’d stir a hornet’s nest, what with the Duke being called a murderer and the di Torre and Bandini tearing Rocca apart. Say there is an agent of Duke Francisco in Rocca, I reckon that’s what he’d be pleased to fix up.’

He nodded his head with finality, unaware that in |the eyes of two of his audience he had graduated from being a half-wit to being one of the party. Sigismondo’s hum was deep, like that of a bee in a flower.

‘Come on, Martin. What’s your story after the Duke gave you the push?’

‘Ugo Bandini hired me to find Cosima di Torre; the Duke had ordered him to produce her, no matter how swore he hadn’t an idea where she was. So I was to find her, to prove to the Duke that di Torre had hidden her in the first place.’

‘Did the man truly think the Duke would believe him if you turned up with the girl, swearing you’d found her in a field with no Bandini in sight?’

‘A man whose son and heir is scheduled for a public garrotting is not at his most logical. For the boy’s sake he was ready to do a deal with the Devil.’

‘And along you came.’ Barley’s punch was affectionate, easily fielded. ‘Poor bastard. I understand all right. But what of Duke Francisco? Where is his hand in this?’

‘Bandini changed his mind. At the start, he was sweating blood; ready to shower gold on me to find the lady, so he could bargain for his son’s life. Then his steward came whispering in his ear and he bustled off and left me for the best part of an hour. When he came back, he was singing another song and not even in the same key: he grudged any money save what would guarantee my leaving the house fast. I thought then that it was because he’d been told where the lady actually was. Now I’ve changed
my
mind.’ Sigismondo picked over the palmful of nuts Barley held out to him.

‘How had he heard? How did you find her?’

‘By following the wrong clue, perhaps. The only messengers to arrive were nuns from Castelnuova; and so we went there. While I was busy preparing to abduct the Lady Cosima from the convent, Benno, who as you know is little better than an idiot, was in the stables; and he was interested in two men who had little to do there. They seemed to wait for word from Mother Luca, Infirmarian of the convent. You note that he much resembles a bundle of old rubbish, and it was as such that he listened to her instructions; these were from Duke Francisco. Bandini was to be told that the wolf would be at the door on the feast of St Romualdo. There was an instruction in the same words to someone else, whose name they did not speak, and to Jacopo di Torre.’

Barley clapped his hands together, and Benno jumped.

‘I see it. You’re right, the old fox Francisco has everyone by the cods. Di Torre and Bandini do his will to protect their children; Duke Ludovico is branded
murderer
and his own people believe it; but the wolf at the door?’

‘My old master doesn’t have to do what he’s told now,’ Benno said. ‘We’ve got the Lady Cosima.’

‘Di Torre doesn’t know that.’ Sigismondo picked up his glass from the floor. ‘That is one of our reasons for going to Rocca.’

‘Give us another,’ Barley invited, hunting round his feet for a dropped kernel. ‘I like to know why I’m going to die.’

‘We have the Lady Cosima, but Leandro Bandini is still in the Palace dungeons. As long as he’s there, Ugo Bandini’s life and, what may be more important, his cash, is at Francisco’s disposal.’

‘What kind of money does Bandini have?’

Sigismondo’s hum was respectful. ‘The sort you lend Popes.’

Barley whistled. ‘And you are proposing, my crazed Martin, to disguise yourself as a rat, slip into the dungeons and gnaw the Bandini boy free?’ His gaze sharpened. ‘There’d be quite a reward, eh? Bandini’d cough up a few ducats to have his son and heir in his arms again?’