Death of a Duchess (3 page)

After a walk through the town, Benno found the answer to the question he had not asked. They reached the town’s east gate, not far from di Torre’s house, and Sigismondo fell into conversation with the guard.

Benno might, on experience so far, believe geniality to be well beyond Sigismondo’s capability or even his wishes. Now, in easy conversation with the guard, he flowered into smiles. He told jokes. It could be observed that he had good teeth. In twelve minutes he had established that the guard indeed kept good watch for they were accountable to the Duke’s Marshal, a man in whom the milk of human kindness had long ago curdled. Because of the interest being shown in Rocca by the Duke Francisco of Castelnuova, they kept tally of who went in and out. No strangers this morning, no riders, only market people and the charcoal men; and the di Torre dungcart that went out as usual.

‘That one’s too mean to pay the city scavengers. All his shit has to go back on his own fields.’

‘Nothing unusual about that cart, eh? No escort of angels.’

This went down so well that they almost neglected to tally-in a pigeon seller and a dwarf from up in the hills.

Sigismondo left them, and asked Benno for the handiest way to the next gate. Benno closed his mouth and led Sigismondo through alleys and courts, down arched twittens between houses, through a church, two market gardens, a carpenter’s yard and a square full of washerwomen full of interesting suggestions as to their relationship as the linen was smacked on the troughs, and out onto a main street where Benno halted to smile up proudly. He received an approving hum on three descending major notes, and a grip on the shoulder.

This gate was busy. It took longer, but Sigismondo leant on the wall in the sun, and bought almonds from a passing seller, and handed them round, and commented on the passers-by, the succulence of two girls who went up the street, and the ancestry of the Duke’s Marshal. Before long he was conversing.

Out of this gate, which gave onto the road to another of the Duke’s towns, a good many went. In the early morning, yes, it was easier to notice people. The only outgoers that were unusual and therefore noticeable this morning, for instance, had been a closed litter escorted by a Dominican. It was decrepit, the curtains shabby and both their laces and the horse’s harness mended with twisted tow. The monk was taking his aunt to her family to die among her kin, and the litter-driver was not being paid enough to make him good-tempered.

At the third gate was Benno’s cousin Nardo, gifted from birth with an enormous curiosity and a tongue hinged in the middle. He wanted to know what Benno did, strolling the streets. Benno claimed to be looking for a job, since he rather thought he was out of one. Nardo told him, taking some trouble about it, why his own job would be beyond Benno’s intellectual grasp, and Benno listened, wide-eyed and agape, to a description of what it entailed.

‘Do you have to remember things like who went in and out?’

Nardo not only had to remember any influx of unknown people but was gifted with total recall. In the face of Benno’s amazed incredulity, he recited the day’s traffic. Sigismondo once again leant his shoulders on the wall and listened. Once more he had found a patch of sun that gilded his face and threw the surprising shadow of his eyelashes on his cheekbone. Nardo’s list had some of the properties of infinity, but Benno’s expression did not change. The sole item of interest, a grain of rice in an interminable trickle of sand, was that a party of horsemen had left the town not long after the gates were opened, one man with a girl wearing a fine cloak huddled in his arm. This rider, arranging his own cloak, had lost hold of it just as he rode under the flambeau on the wall, and had shown the Bandini yellow and red beneath.

The great bell in the clock tower gave the town its accustomed nasty shock at last, and Sigismondo heaved his shoulders from the wall, told Benno that he hadn’t got all day, and set off up the street. When Benno caught up with him, he said, ‘Nicely done. Now we need a horse.’

The track they rode out on spread across a hundred yards of countryside. Wagons had made mudholes and deep ruts, and had driven wide to avoid former mudholes and deep ruts, and horsemen had ridden either side of this to avoid the mess, and those on foot had plodded either side of this to avoid the poached hooftracks and manure.

Where any path led off this highway to left or right, Sigismondo rode to look at it and Benno, up behind him on the big bay, would lean to see if what Sigismondo was looking at would tell him what it was. He had no idea why one such path held such appeal for the Duke’s emissary that he turned his horse along it. They rode into trees at the edge of a sizeable wood.

He gazed in the direction of Sigismondo’s pointing finger, where a thin line of smoke waved upwards through the trees ahead. He thought he understood, for anyone tending a fire might of course have noticed horsemen passing with a girl. Sigismondo moved his heels and the horse quickened pace. The riders ducked beneath bare winter branches of the oaks as they went further into the wood. At length they came upon the small clearing and the fire.

Benno writhed round and dropped from the horse, stumbled as his ankles hurt, and was running forward towards the white-dressed figure lying half in the fire. Sigismondo’s feet thudded to the ground and together they lifted the girl from the embers. There was a choking smell of burnt meat, burnt cloth and burnt hair. Benno coughed, a sound very like someone who might vomit.

She had been lying on her face and there was very little left of it. Her small skull was blistered and scorched, the frizzled roots of her hair across it.

Benno ducked from the sight. He was weeping. He picked up a fold of her skirt and thrust it at Sigismondo.

‘My lady. My lady.’ Gold thread glittered in arabesques on the cream satin. A small pink embroidered flower had a crystal in its centre that winked in the light as Benno’s hand trembled. ‘They killed her.
The devils
...’

Sigismondo released her hands, which had been tied behind her, with one sweep of his knife, and Benno possessed himself of one of them and kissed it, weeping. Sigismondo sat back on his heels and waited. After a minute Benno made a questioning sound, blinked, and scrubbed at his eyes. He stared at the hand he grasped. Then he looked up and met the steady brown gaze of Sigismondo, who hummed thoughtfully.

‘You’re right, Benno,’ he agreed. ‘They’re not her hands.’

Benno said, ‘Sascha.’ He lowered the hand he held, gently, to the girl’s breast, as if to hide the rough, short nails, the needle-frayed fingers, callous from some routine work she would not ever do again.

‘Her maid, Benno?’

Once more picking up the embroidered hem of the dress, and holding it out to the brooding face opposite, Benno asked, ‘Why is she wearing my lady’s dress?’

‘A disguise. To fool people. To make any who saw such as your cousin Nardo, believe it was a lady riding away with horsemen.’

‘They only saw her cloak, not her dress.’ Benno stood up and glanced about.

‘No cloak.’ Sigismondo had seen that already. ‘The dress
might
have shown; they might have seen it, as they saw the horseman’s livery.’ Benno, reminded of the Bandini, clenched his fists, but before he could speak, Sigismondo leant forward and began to undo the girl’s dress.

‘What are you doing?’

‘If you’re my servant, you’ll not question what I do. In this instance, I’ll tell you. We’re looking for injuries.’

Benno scrambled nearer and helped to pull off the dress and the shift. He looked at the bruised throat and bloodied thighs and said, ‘Bandini devils. But I mean she was only a slave. That’s what servants get, isn’t it?’

Sigismondo began to put the dress on again, wrapping the terrible head in her shift. Then he crossed the girl’s hands on her breast and, kneeling up, pulled off his hood. Benno, once again startled by the totally shaven head, only automatically knelt, and as Sigismondo spoke phrases of Latin, Benno stared and failed to say ‘Amen’. Sigismondo looked at him and he hastily shut his mouth. However, his face had asked the question and Sigismondo, humming amusement, rubbed a hand over his bare brown scalp.

‘I’m not a priest, no.’

He said no more. They returned to the city with the girl in Sigismondo’s embrace under his cloak, Benno at his stirrup, unaware of the stripes of tears down the grime of his face.

Sigismondo commandeered a blanket from the inn where they had hired the horse, and rode on up to the palace, where he asked for a private audience with the Duke. That he was at once granted it made Benno’s jaw drop once more. He trotted after his master, turning his head constantly to admire painted columns, friezes, statues and tapestries, and coming up suddenly against Sigismondo’s back when they stopped at a door. While his master was admitted, Benno gaped at the marble door-casing and, it being suggested forcefully by the guard that he should remove his person somewhat, he stood back. He felt in his pocket for an old sweetmeat stuck to the lining, prised it out and put it in his mouth. He sucked at it loudly, and revolved slowly on his heels to take in the coved ceiling with its gold leaf gleaming in the torches’ light. There were decorated pillars with painted oak garlands twining up, and tapestries of the hunt that rippled in the draughts and made the figures seem to move. There were garlands of bay, tied with scarlet ribbons, that servants were busy hanging along the front of the gallery above; the work was done without the argument and shouting he was used to in the di Torre household. He was admiring the smooth black and white lozenges of the floor when he heard a familiar voice and slid prudently into the nearest shadows.

Jacopo di Torre had arrived, supported by his secretary, a man who would have looked at home in a weasel’s den and who had once deliberately stuck the point of his quill into Benno’s hand when he interrupted him at work; and his steward, who habitually kicked Benno whenever he saw him. Benno became one with the shadows.

His former master was, in these few hours, a changed man. Grief had dealt rather badly with his face, hollowing the cheeks and swelling the eyes and nose. Even the hair straggling from under the velvet cap seemed greyer than before. Now the swollen lids lifted and rage succeeded grief; secretary and steward changed their grasp desperately from support to restraint: Ugo Bandini approached with contemptuous slowness, furred gown dragging on the marble, pages in red and yellow two paces behind.

‘
Where is she
? I will have justice of the Duke! You shall be forced to give her up!’

Ugo Bandini chose the most infuriating response. He said nothing. A man of late middle age, he had lugubrious face all downward folds like that of a hound, and an expression managing to combine exhaustion with superiority. Benno, ingrained by the years of being partisan, could perfectly understand anyone wanting to kill him just for looking like that, let alone for stealing their daughter. Steward and secretary were having a time of it preventing Jacopo from surging forward to hammer Ugo into the black and white marble. Benno decided he would look rather well as the centrepiece to one of the bay garlands, his neck encircled by the scarlet ribbon.

Others were arriving now; the servants were being bustled to finish with the garlands by a man with a gold-tipped white wand, who used it to point out the bits they had not got straight. A page ran up the steps of the dais to brush the red velvet seat and carved back and arms of the chair of state, and to tidy its fringes of gold bullion. He ran lightly down again, his curled hair bobbing at each step.

Men and women already collected in gossiping groups near the dais. There was an impression of rich jewel-sewn cloth sweeping in sleeves and skirts, of fur and brocade, gold-woven gauze twisted round the women’s heads, great ornate brooches and pendants. Benno’s loyal eyes saw no woman as lovely as the Lady Cosima though several were as young — appearing in public only because they were married. Jacopo had turned away from the crowd, his cramped shoulders eloquent of the feelings barely under control. Most of the crowd glanced at the two men continually, isolated on either side of the hall.

The curtains of gold brocade over the door that had admitted Sigismondo now parted. The two pages in green and white with bannered trumpets swept them to their lips and blew, the sound hushing the crowd and turning them all like puppets to face the man who entered.

He stood for a moment magnificent, in an open gown, green lined with ermine, and a high-collared cloak, observing the bent heads, doffed caps and curtsies, and then he strode to the chair. When he sat, pages arranged the great spread of fur that draped three steps beneath him. A small movement of one of his hands made all rise from their reverences; a second movement brought Sigismondo’s dark figure to stand on the lowest step at one side. Benno was aware of a whispering in the crowd. Sigismondo, standing there, one foot on the next stair, with lowered eyes and bared head, his face grave, hands at his sides, produced an extraordinary sense of strength.

As the Duke seemed about to speak, a figure detached itself from a small group and approached to speak in the Duke’s ear. Benno identified him, the Duke’s bastard half-brother the Lord Paolo, much loved at Court as a peacemaker and in the city as a giver of charity.

The Duke’s brother stepped back, the Duke raised a hand and spoke. ‘We will hear the Lords di Torre and Bandini in private.’

Benno shared the feeling of acute disappointment obvious among the withdrawing courtiers. Unlike them, however, he had no intention of leaving; he had a strong confidence born of experience that having made himself invisible he would not be seen. Indeed, two ladies, discontentedly murmuring to each other as they passed, brushed his face with their gauzy head-veils without seeing him in the pillar’s dark embrasure.

Finally, all had left except the Duke’s brother, a man with a clerk’s face Benno supposed to be the Duke’s secretary, the enemy lords, and Sigismondo. Pages and guards retired, closing the doors. Benno, for the moment holding his breath, had a strong and curious feeling that Sigismondo, though he had not turned his head towards him at all, knew that he was there.