Suicide Kings (31 page)

“Do not underestimate these women,” called a familiar voice from the door, “for these five are not the only victims of their wrath.” Niccolo, of course. He stepped into the nave, the gendarmes immediately giving way in deference to him. He surveyed the damage done with an impassive eye. “How fortunate you have Savonarola’s warrant, though no matter how unassailable your legal position, a scandal will be unavoidable.”

Two women killing five men? Niccolo was right; they’d be the talk of the town for months. “What do I care for scandals? My path has been unalterable long before now.”

Niccolo approached her, regarding her with care. “I have some authority in spreading the news of this incident. I will take care that the story is told so as to portray you two in the most favorable of lights. There are enough people in this city who like the tale of virtuous maidens defending their honor against foreign brigands that you will soon find yourself heroines.”

Diana met his gaze. “Thank you, Niccolo,” she said more softly this time. She could not help but notice Siobhan move away from them discreetly.

“You’re injured,” he observed with a pained expression.

She held up her left hand, spreading the fingers so he could see that the last remained only in part.

“Come, I can bind it for you.” He ripped a bandage from his own shirt, and bound her destroyed finger in the gentlest manner. As he tied the bandage round her palm he inquired coolly, “How fares Bernardo Tornabuoni?”

She laughed at that. “I don’t think he’d care much for a nine-fingered wife who’s killed more men than he.”

His lips pulled to one side as he thought over his comment. “When I first met you, I worried greatly for your safety. More and more, I see how greatly I underestimated you. Any man of wisdom would consider himself fortunate to find a wife of such strength as yourself.” He looked directly into her eyes.

“Oh Niccolo,” she sighed, “how did I get to this place? All my life I fantasized about saving lives. Instead I find myself most adept at taking them!”

He touched her arm, gently and quickly, an uncharacteristic gesture of affection. “Go home, Diana. Get some rest; take care of your wound.”

She nodded, wiping away the drying remains of her tears from her cheeks. She began walking away, exhausted and ready for the rest Niccolo recommended.

“Oh,” Niccolo called after her as if remembering something, “I’ve found the man called the Boar. He languishes in Savonarola’s prison and his fate rests in the friar’s judgment. If you have any final words for a poor suffering penitent such as he, I wouldn’t wait long past the morning.”

Diana considered his words quietly. “Thank you, Niccolo,” she replied at last and, with Siobhan at her side, left behind the slaughter they had wrought.

Chapter Eighteen

The Hunt

Diana gritted her teeth as Siobhan and Francesca argued over how to treat her severed finger.

“We need to heat up a blade to cauterize the wound,” Siobhan insisted, a long kitchen knife already procured for the job.

“Are you mad?!” Francesca scoffed. “Can you even imagine the pain of that? And it will leave what remains of the finger a horrid ball of tissue. We must stitch the wound to stop the bleeding.”

Diana liked seeing Francesca coming round a bit and sticking up for her ideas. Unfortunately she knew neither of the other girls’ plans were optimal. No best path for treating a wound like this offered itself. Cauterization was too brutal and dangerous, and there wasn’t enough free tissue to adequately stitch closed the tattered remains of a partially severed finger. “Enough, both of you!” Diana snapped. “Someone bring me some spirits, quickly!”

Siobhan left on her orders, leaving Diana and Francesca alone for a moment in the kitchen. Diana trailed a pattern of blood drops wherever she moved. Her right hand remained firmly clamped on her left, the strip of cloth between them soaked through. “For the love of God, I never imagined one finger would bleed so much.” The blood loss worried her. It wasn’t much compared to a head wound, but it didn’t seem to want to stop. Eventually it would become a problem.

Siobhan returned with a bottle of brandy. “Strongest I could find.”

Diana held her hand over a pail. “When I take away the cloth, pour the brandy over my finger liberally. Once it’s done, Francesca, I’ll need you to pass me those strips of cloth.”

Francesca nodded, beside her the torn remains of one of Diana’s father’s freshly laundered shirts. It would have been best to boil the cloth, but Diana was impatient for a fresh bandage and this would have to do.

“All right.” Diana peeled away the soaked cloth to reveal the miniature remains of her left little finger. It looked terrible, a black and purple center infused with blood. Without waiting for instructions, Siobhan let the brandy pour. Diana saw white before her eyes, arrows of agony shooting up through her elbow toward her shoulder. “Sweet Mary, mother of Christ,” she hissed.

Francesca passed her long strips of the white cloth. These were lengthy enough that Diana could secure them in place by wrapping them round her wrist. She applied them liberally, one after the other, until blood no longer soaked immediately through the outermost layer of wrappings. The result looked very awkward but appeared to do the intended job, and the pain ebbed to a constant roar. Twice daily, once in the morning and once in the evening, she’d have to tap the bandaged stump hard against a solid surface to encourage the proper formation of scar tissue, and reduce the potential for chronic pain. All because she didn’t know how to duck properly.

Siobhan and Francesca watched her apprehensively.

“I’ll be fine,” Diana assured them, finally breathing easier. “No one dies from losing a finger.”

A figure appeared in the doorway—her father.

“Perhaps I spoke too soon,” she whispered to herself.

Her father surveyed the scene quietly for a moment, the blood on the floor, the blood on her coat and dress, the wrapped hand. “Would you young ladies kindly leave us for a moment?” he asked at last, his voice steady and calm.

Siobhan and Francesca obeyed without a word. Diana watched them go with a sinking feeling. She ran the fingers of her good hand through her hair, forgetting they were matted with blood.

“The servants told me you’d been injured. I’ve heard as well about the incident at the church,” her father explained, his face unreadable. “Is the injury bad?”

She put her good hand against an unused stove to steady herself. “I lost most of a finger. Could have been much worse though I suppose.”

He nodded, made no move to come closer to her. “You left five dead behind you I’ve understood.” She nodded. “These men were involved in your mother’s death?” he asked after a moment’s pause.

Diana nodded again, finally looking him in the eye.

“Then it’s over?”

She shook her head. “These men were only hired by others. I still don’t know who wished her dead.”

“Well, at least we can be sure her death was not a suicide now.” He nodded to himself, “That’s something at least.”

Her soul would be in heaven, not trapped forever in Hell is what he meant, Diana figured.

He looked at her evenly. “I would prefer not to lose a daughter as well as a wife. Can what you’ve accomplished thus far not be enough? Let Savonarola take care of the rest. He has as much reason as you to destroy this…Sacred Council.” So, her father had been brought fully up to speed, no doubt by friends within the government.

His statement retained some truth. If she stepped aside now, Savonarola might very well press ahead where she left off, rooting out the Sacred Council once and for all. She could stop now, resume some semblance of a regular life.

Her father sighed, looking at his feet, probably guessing before even she did she would never turn back. “I could never imagine the little girl I once held in my arms would leave half a dozen dead in her wake.”

His words broke her heart. She looked down at the floor, eyes remaining transfixed on a droplet of her own blood.

A moment passed. Her father sounded so weary when at last he spoke. “I always relied on your mother to act as an intermediary for us. She seemed always to know what to do, what to say to you. I suppose I never allowed myself a proper chance to understand you. I haven’t been much of a father to you. For that I am sorry.”

Diana looked up at him, watched him for a moment. “Perhaps neither of us have come to understand the other. If you haven’t been much of a father to me, I haven’t been much of a daughter for you.”

Her father pursed his lips. “I don’t suppose it’s the same thing, do you? I should have known long ago you weren’t meant for the typical course of a woman from Firenze. I just don’t know how to support you on whatever course you are on.”

Diana’s eyes burned and she sucked in a deep breath to keep her emotions under control. In his way, he was trying to apologize, she knew. Still, within the apology she couldn’t help miss the note of despondency; that she could never be the daughter he expected…the daughter he wanted.

“Whatever I have that you need,” he said softly. “Money, the Swiss Guards, whatever it takes for you to finish this safely, you take it. You needn’t ask.”

“I haven’t been…” she replied, unable to stop from breaking into a wide but fragile smile. He smiled back at her as well, a rare moment of warmth and connection passing between them. “Thank you, Father,” she said at last.

He nodded. “Be safe.”

****

The prisons of Firenze were much as Diana expected, and worse. True to her imagination, the cells were dank and dark, a central corridor between the bars running with a thin turgid stream of water, leaked down through a cracked ceiling from melted snow in the streets above. Diana hadn’t anticipated the stink, the stinging smell of fermenting urine and worse. She nearly gagged as the first wall of this smell hit her when the jailer opened the main door. The inmates receded into the corners of their cell, visible only by the flash of lantern light against a scuffed boot, or scab of flesh. These were a quiet lot, paying a woman in their midst no mind at all. Death awaited these men and women, enemies of Savonarola to a name. Some had been prominent in former lives, others scoundrels through and through. Most had spent their time on the rack and now merely awaited the Mad Friar’s final decision on their fate. No hope emanated from any of the cells.

The jailer, a stiff young gendarme practiced in the arts of suppressing compassion pointed out the cell of the Boar to Diana. She thanked the jailer and went to the bars at once calling out the Boar’s name. “Pietro. It is Diana. Are you there?”

From the darkened recesses came a stirring and a shadow emerged. In the dim light she saw his teeth first, the great tusks rising up from his lower jaw. Then she saw the bruises that covered the remainder of his face, evidence of the beating he assuredly took at the hands of his captors. “Lady Savrano, it is the greatest of pleasures to receive your company,” he said, the words struggling to form properly around his massive teeth.

She felt a tingle in her spine and a heaviness in her heart at the sight of him. Always a pitiable creature, to have fallen to such a depth. Could God have smiled on poor Pietro any less? “Pietro, I must confess I never expected you would be captured. So wily and clever you always seemed.”

The corners of his mouth, torn from abuse, nonetheless curled upward into a kind smile. “Unfortunately all things must come to an end. No matter how clever you are, there is always luck to work against you. Fear not for my fate; all will happen as it should.” He gripped the bars between them to support his weight. “I have heard much about your travails, and what I hear impresses me greatly. You are truly from your mother’s blood.”

A pronouncement no doubt containing both good and bad implications. “Niccolo Machiavelli told me you were here. Have they treated you with any decency at all?”

“Firenze is not known for the clemency of its courts nor the mercy of its inquisitors,” he answered with a wry smile. “What time we are allowed together will not be well spent lamenting over my inalterable fate. You’ve come to ask some last questions.”

She didn’t know to what degree she could trust Pietro, but he had been her mother’s friend. To hear him speak with such finality troubled her. This affair had brought death to so many. “Mancini is dead. In his last moments he still insisted he hadn’t been the one to slip my mother the poison. Nor that he knew who hired him to try. He had no reason to dissemble in those last moments.”

“Nor any incentive to tell the truth. Still, I suspect one would hire the sort as Mancini when one wants an assassination known to the public, not disguised as natural death.”

“It’s frustrating. Even as I progress forward it seems I know nothing more than I did at the start. I understand in your own dire circumstances, helping me must seem a trivial matter.”

“I assure you, it is not. My difficulties in the end, were brought on only by myself—allowing my own seduction by this mystery cult as a salve for loneliness. Better by far had I kept to my rooms and the shadows. I might have contented myself with the life of a monster rather than the death of a heretic.” He regarded her with sorrowful eyes for a moment. “If Mancini speaks the truth, it would seem two individuals, likely both within the Sacred Council, wished death upon the Lady Isabella, your mother and my friend. Her first error, shared with myself, came in seeking solace with the Council, her second error in vocalizing her intent to leave perhaps not only to myself, who ranked below her in the Council, but perchance also to that person above her, whoever had recruited her to the membership and whose identity, like my own, would be known to her. In leaving the Council, she presumably raised fears she might go to Savonarola with what she knew about the group. Those in the leadership position presumably were those to hire Mancini. However, whoever recruited Lady Isabella for the cult, his or her identity would be known by your mother and have particularly much to fear. In some impatience, they may have taken matters into their own hands.”

Diana felt the familiar pain growing behind her forehead. “So the Council raced itself to kill my mother.”