Death of a Duchess (4 page)

‘My lords.’ Formally, the Duke bent his head to both; both bowed to him. Jacopo, deprived of supporters, looked oddly frail, but his energy returned in a rush when the Duke turned to him and said only ‘Your daughter—’

‘
Stolen!
I accuse Ugo Bandini! There stands the man who has snatched my daughter from me! I demand justice from my Duke!’

The Duke, who could scarcely be accustomed to interruption, frowned. His tone sharpened. ‘There are questions to be put to you, di Torre; why, if your daughter was snatched from her chamber, did she have time to dress and to take with her the slave girl and the dog?’

Di Torre started an answer, failed in it and began a protest, stopped, and glared at Sigismondo.

‘You told our agent that her abductors must have come over the roof, yet there was no sign of disturbance, no tiles cracked, no plant broken. Nor did any dogs bark, so the men you say came either were no strangers to the household or they never entered.’

Protest bubbled now on Jacopo’s lips but the Duke went relentlessly on, his voice ringing harshly in the room’s emptiness. ‘You yourself, di Torre, arranged for your daughter to go. You sought to disobey our decree that she marry Leandro Bandini.
You sought to deceive us
. And you have been terribly repaid.’

He nodded to Sigismondo, who went out through the gold-hung doorway and reappeared bearing a blanket-wrapped form. At the foot of the dais he laid down and pulled the blanket away. The white-clad body with its swathed head rolled free, a hand hitting the floor, and the swathing fell partly aside disclosing a burnt cheek and ear.

Sigismondo had let go the blanket and moved straight to di Torre so that he was behind him, catching him as he dropped. The Lord Paolo was just as quick, hurrying to a side table out of sight behind the dais curtains, and returning with a cup of wine. The clerk, on the Duke’s orders, laid the blanket over the girl’s body once more, turning his face from sight.

Di Torre gasped and groaned, drank wine, and was helped upright. Lord Paolo was the only one showing concern. Bandini evinced a most dislikeable righteous distaste. The Duke looked as merciless as an animal before the jump that sets its teeth in its victim’s throat.

‘That is not your daughter, di Torre. It was her slave girl who, either in fear or in complicity, put on her clothes.’

Jacopo was still working on some form of reply when the Duke turned his blue stare on Bandini. ‘And you, my lord. To maintain the feud between your two families, the feud that threatens our state, you have been ready to kill.’

Benno had once seen a man walk off the edge of mounting block expecting a stair; the same change happened now to Bandini’s face. ‘Your Grace, I swear—’

The Duke’s hand, flashing light from its rings, silenced him.

‘You took di Torre’s daughter from outside his house. There were signs of struggle in the road, our agent tells us, and blood upon the wall. You had her conveyed out of the city at dawn.’

The words gave Jacopo his strength if not his senses. His hand fell to his dagger and he began to draw it. Sigismondo’s hand clamped down and rammed the weapon back in its sheath before it had showed its steel in the Duke’s very presence. Ignoring him, the Duke continued, ‘You had the slave girl murdered and left in the fire to destroy any chance of identifying her face; you wished it thought that the Lady Cosima di Torre had perished there, dishonoured.’

Bandini, flinging his arms wide, answered, ‘Not by me, your Grace. Not by me or my orders. I am innocent of all this. The Lord di Torre seeks as always to discredit me in your eyes, and by what a vile trick he has done it this time. What proof can there be that any of this is my doing? Robbers have taken the girl and murdered the maid.’

‘Why should robbers leave a valuable dress on the dead girl, a dress sewn with gold thread and ornamented with gems? Do robbers behave so?’ The Duke’s voice was cool now, as if he debated an ordinary question. ‘There was design to deceive.’

‘To put your Grace’s justice off their track, perhaps. Who can tell what may be in the minds of thieves? To honest men, the intentions of rogues are not to be fathomed.’ A raised arm jabbed a finger towards di Torre. ‘He has fastened this abduction upon me to deceive your Grace. He,
he
has had the poor girl slaughtered to further his deception.’

Jacopo turned on Sigismondo with sudden energy and scrabbled at the breast of his jerkin. ‘The cloth, man, the cloth!’ He was busy trying to undress Sigismondo, who looked down at his efforts with grave interest and then produced the rag of yellow and red from the pocket on his belt. Jacopo snatched it, but Sigismondo had swung it overhead from his grasp. Di Torre’s voice cried like a daw, ‘Your Grace! Tell his Grace—’

The Duke’s hand and glance silenced his tongue, his hands continued to make urging movements if to a dog. Sigismondo showed him the cloth. ‘Is this the one you mean, sir?’

‘Of course, of course it is.’

‘It is the piece found on the nail by the door? The door by which the Lady Cosima seems to have left your house?’

‘Yes, yes. See, that is the mark of the nail.’

Ugo Bandini watched with close-shut mouth and eyes of fury, a hound on a tight leash. Sigismondo approached the Duke, and, going down on one knee, owed him the cloth. ‘Your Grace will see here the pucker where the nail held the cloth.’ His deep voice might be that of a priest teaching. ‘The seam is well-stitched and close.’

‘We observe.’ The plural at this juncture might be supposed to mean not the Duke himself only but his brother too, who had come forward with quick interest.

Sigismondo stepped to a pillar near the dais, and his fingers found what he must have noted, a nail for hanging garlands. He fitted the cloth over this and, after a moment’s pause, gave it a sharp wrench. Returning, he held out the rag between his hands. The nail had dragged a hole in it, and every stitch in the seam was frayed.

Lord Paolo spoke. ‘Then this was not torn before? Surely, it could not have been manufactured to implicate...’ He drew back, averse to saying out loud what he thought; but his eyes went towards Bandini.

His distaste was magnified a thousandfold in the whole person of Ugo Bandini. He seemed to swell with indignation; but his outburst and di Torre’s violent denial rang together. They turned on each other, but discovered Sigismondo between them. This silenced them for the moment it took Lord Paolo to say, ‘If I may ask a question of your Grace’s agent?’

The Duke still watched the antagonists. He gave permission, as before, with a hand.

‘Was it you who found — this poor girl?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘How did you trace her?’

‘I asked at the gates, my lord.’

‘The guards at the gates, they must know the household servants of the great houses, do they not? They could surely have identified any of them leaving the city. You have not said that those who went out with the girl were of di Torre’s or Bandini’s house. If the guards did not know them, then surely they must be robbers.’

‘They were hooded, my lord, and this was at cocklight; but they did see the colours of one rider by the flambeaux.’

‘Colours?’ said the Duke. ‘Whose colours?’

Sigismondo held out the scrap of cloth. ‘Bandini, your Grace.’

The Duke was on his feet as the two men launched into howling oratory. His handclap, like a thunder crack, silenced them and brought an eruption of men-at-arms through the doors. He held up his hand to still his men, and ordered the doors closed. In the resumed quiet, he nodded to his secretary, who went to stand at his desk. Di Torre was once more sagging, Bandini working his hands inside his sleeves in frustration.

‘When I last called you before me,’ said the Duke, and his voice grated with anger, ‘I warned you that one single act more in this feud from either of you would be punished. The fine I threatened then is now exacted. You are both confined to your houses, you and your families.’

As both men began to speak, he strode to the front of the dais and there towering above them said, ‘Silence!’ The secretary’s quill skittered and squeaked, recording his decree. Sigismondo had stepped back from between the men and stood with hands clasped before him. The Duke’s surge of movement was a tangible force that stilled the antagonists.

‘You would speak? You would object? Protest at our mercy? I tell you now — do you mark me, Bandini? Do you hear, di Torre? — that this is the last of our mercy to you. If either lifts hand or causes hand to be lifted against the other, their kin, goods, chattels, servants or lands, that man forfeits his possessions to the State, his household goods and merchandise, moneys and bonds, clothing and chattels, and his very life shall be at Our mercy. I will have these wars no more. Bandini, you will restore the girl. This is Our decree this day and shall not be revoked.’

He turned on his heel, and strode from the chamber, the great cloak swirling behind him. The secretary still wrote, the guards opened the doors and the Duke’s Marshal entered. Both antagonists seemed stricken to stone. Di Torre recovered first, hurrying to meet his secretary and steward, talking to them frenetically as they followed him to the door, and paying no heed to the slave girl’s shrouded form. Bandini spoke to Sigismondo, who bowed slightly, before he went out by another door. The girl’s body was lifted and taken away. Courtiers entered, crowding round the great fireplace, speculating loudly and with animation on what might have passed, guessing and making bets. Sigismondo turned and came down the length of the room. With one hand he collected Benno from his niche and propelled him past the men-at-arms at the side door into an anteroom of plain unadorned stone. He gave Benno’s head a slight cuff that set it ringing.

Benno followed him down a stair and into an unexpected small room in a bend of the flight. A leather curtain shut it off from the stair, a lantern burnt on the floor beside a pallet. There was a decided lack of space for anything else. Sigismondo lifted a corner of the bed and pulled out a roll from below it, which undid into a cloak resembling the duke’s only in size, being plain dark wool. He lent Benno a corner of it, furled himself in the rest, and said, ‘We have time to sleep before the feast. If you can make yourself cleaner you may stand behind me at table and get a share.’

Benno, who had long ceased to smell his own ours, and who had been smelling the feast for some time, felt cheerful. He had not given any thought to how he might eat; that was Sigismondo’s responsibility as his master and he felt well catered for in the prospect. He curled up on the end of the pallet. ‘I’ve never been to a feast before,’ he said.

‘Make the most of it. Tomorrow may be well occupied.’

‘What—’ Benno said, and stopped.

‘Mm — mm. Well done... I’m far from sure that Bandini will be able to restore your lady to her father.’

‘What’s he done with her, then?’ Benno straightened up, alarmed, and the bed’s ropes creaked.

‘I’m far from sure that he ever did anything with her.’

‘But his colours, that Nardo saw?’

‘His colours, like the ones di Torre hung on a nail in his house? We may be looking farther than Bandini. Perhaps even beyond Rocca.’

‘Beyond?’ Beyond the city itself was far enough for no to envisage. He knew the road to Jacopo di Torre’s country villa, and some of the rides round it where Cosima was allowed out as she could not be in the city, but it had not occurred to him that there was more. The Lady Cosima was very learned, and had told him there were places called Rome and France, and her explanations had placed these for him in the sky beyond Rocca’s wide valley.

‘The Duke Francisco has an interest in causing trouble.’

‘I thought the Duke was called Ludovico,’ Benno said.

Sigismondo suddenly hummed in a sound like laughter. ‘Our Duke Ludovico is Duca di Rocca. All the world is made up of states like Rocca. To the east is the Duke Francisco. His duchy is mountainous and he’d like the rich farmland and the sea coast of Rocca. Like the di Torre and the Bandini, these dukes have their rivalries.’

A vast and terrifying horizon opened to Benno, a world of confusion, distance and the unknown. He took breath.

‘How...’

‘Mm. Ask.’

‘Does it go far?’ Benno asked uncertainly.

‘Does what?’

‘The world.’

There was a silence in the near-dark. Sigismondo’s voice came at last. ‘I’ve travelled over some of it. It’s much the same everywhere: rocks, fields, hills, streams, cities, farms. I’ve been to places where they speak other tongues — Muscovy, the Holy Land, Hispania, England, the Low Countries.’

Benno sighed. He could make out Sigismondo’s head propped against the wall with the square shape of the leather pillow behind. His eyes were shut. The smell of cooking distracted Benno’s mind, and he evaded the thought of all that strangeness by homely imagination of the feast.

The night was a cold one. Even the Duchess, giving the feast for the Lady Cecilia, could not command it otherwise; a wind with ice on its breath came down from the snow-sprinkled hills to the north, to investigate the preparations. The bonfire in the Palace courtyard, that was to burn all evening, flamed more brightly to its gusts, and sparks blew away to the cold stars; round the courtyard were the windows and balconies where spectators, waiting for the feast, leant out to admire the conflagration and to throw down sweetmeats at the crowd below. They held their furs and velvets close round their throats.

The wind was less kind to the beggars crowding outside the walls, trying to cram into what shelter they could find, waiting patiently enough for what would come their way when the feast was over. The wind at its keenest brought the sound of drums, tabors and the confused roar of people enjoying themselves inside.

As there must always be those who starve while others gorge, so there must be those who work while others benefit in idleness. The kitchens were ablaze with fires and quarrels, sweat fell into the dishes as cooks bent to arrange the last touches, to press the last bit of gold leaf that kept falling off, to spread the peacock’s feathers behind the roasted bird so that it could sail in its glory on the golden dish and make the guests applaud. They would be less pleased when they came to eat it, but they knew that anyway.