The Marshal Makes His Report (12 page)

She lowered her voice and for some reason, perhaps enjoying a new audience, she addressed herself now to the Marshal.

‘It took two of them to hold him down . . .’

The Marshal instinctively drew his face back a little from hers, not sure he wanted to hear what she was going to tell him, but the rheumatic fingers clutched the sleeve of his uniform jacket.

‘There wasn’t a mark on him but it took two of them to hold him while they did what they did to
her.
They took her body away with them and pitched it in the Arno, but it came up at the bridge . . . two bridges down from this one, what’s it called—’

‘Ponte alla Carraia!’ prompted William in her ear. ‘But the head, Tata! What about the head?’

She still had hold of the Marshal’s sleeve. A fine string of saliva hung from the left side of her mouth.

‘They hung that on his bedpost, hung it there on one of the wooden spikes, the eyes staring out of it, staring at
him
and him staring back. And that’s how they found him in the morning. And there was blood,
blood
all over the place. It had soaked right through the bedclothes and through two mattresses and through the wooden base of the bed, and
he
was covered in it but he hadn’t moved an inch. Where they’d left him, there he was found, staring at that head with its bloody hanks of hair.’ Her grip tightened on the Marshal’s arm. ‘And he never spoke another word as long as he lived. Now then!’

The Marshal, who felt as though he had been holding his breath for the last half-hour, let it out now with a sigh and shifted his bulk on the hard chair, but she was still holding on to him so that he was prevented from getting up.

‘There’s nothing goes on round here,’ she said, ‘that I don’t know about. Nothing.’

If only that were true! The Marshal had tried more than once to ask her about the night Corsi died but each time she had raised a crippled hand and stopped him.

‘Wait a bit. I’m telling you something . . .’

And she would be off on another of her rambling tales of vicious murder. There was a copy of the local paper tucked behind her in the armchair and the Marshal had no doubt that she collected her gruesome tales from that. More interesting, perhaps, than reading the obituaries to see how many of her friends she had survived. In fact, by this time she had probably outlived them all. Still, it was disconcerting, hearing all those gory details from such a frail and white-haired creature. And the way she told them, you’d think she’d been there at the time. That one about the body in the cellar was enough to give you nightmares, but that sounded more like she’d got it from a book than from a newspaper because that quote about ‘Here is an end of all my troubles’ and so on sounded a bit old-fashioned. They didn’t put stuff like that on tombstones these days. Well, wherever she got it from, it wasn’t here that the Marshal would find an end to all
his
troubles, that was certain. The only good thing was that the visit had been paid, his duty done. He had seen everyone he had to see and had collected no evidence for suicide except the story of a late night quarrel. And if every late night quarrel were to be supposed to lead to suicide . . . He must somehow detach the old woman’s hand from his arm. Inspired, he asked, ‘Will you let me look at your icons before we go? You have so many.’ Not that she heard a word he said. William had to repeat the request, bellowing in her ear, before they were allowed to stand up. One wall was entirely covered with red plastic icon lamps.

‘But . . .’ The Marshal thought better of it and shut his mouth.

‘Mm. I thought you’d be surprised. Shall we go?’

Leaving wasn’t easy. The old tata clung to William and in the end he had to promise to return the next day.

Out in the courtyard he admitted, ‘It’s a rotten trick, but you see she doesn’t really distinguish the days and if I call in for a minute on Saturday or Sunday it will be just the same. The surprising thing is that she doesn’t forget who I am altogether when she doesn’t see me more than about twice a year.’

‘The surprising thing,’ the Marshal contradicted him with considerable vehemence, ‘is that those pictures—’

‘Ah yes. I thought you’d like those. Did you understand who they all were?’

‘I recognized the Marchesa . . .’

‘Ah, the photograph. Well, all the photographs on that part of the wall were of her. At various ages. Her wedding picture too, did you see? Not saints, as you thought, but Ulderighi. The photographs go back as far as photographs can go back and then the rest are prints of oil paintings and so on. When she really gets going she’s convinced that she’s nursed every man Jack of them for the last nine hundred years. Once, on one of her more lucid days, she did tell me that her own mother was wet-nurse to an Ulderighi—I forget for the minute which—so that she grew up in this house herself and was working as a nursery maid by the age of eight. She’s ninety-one and has never known anything outside the walls of this place, but she certainly knows about everything inside. It’s a great pity that she’s so gaga, because she’s a mine of information if only you can get at it. She’s been a help to Catherine once or twice because, you see, she knew just how many boxes and trunks of papers and books there should have been in the cellar and what was in most of them better than La Ulderighi or anyone else. After the flood damage, I mean.’

They had paused by the well, deep in conversation, not noticing that under the shadow of the colonnade Grillo the dwarf was watching them.

‘But surely,’ the Marshal said, ‘that was twenty-odd years ago?’

‘It was, but Catherine’s still finding stuff and she reckons it will take years of work yet to restore all the papers. Nobody’s a hundred per cent sure how much stuff was lost and those cellars are a labyrinth. You wouldn’t believe it.’

‘I wouldn’t have believed that business of the family icons, either, if it comes to not believing things, not to mention the bloodthirsty tales, but I gather she gets her stories from the papers.’

‘Those and books, and hearsay, of course.’

‘I thought as much when I saw the
Nazione.
’

‘The
Nazione?
’

‘I saw it sticking out from under the cushion of her chair.’

William’s eyes were bright with merriment. ‘All she reads in that rag are the births, deaths and marriages! Listen, you don’t have to go yet, do you? Can you spare a quarter of an hour? Let me fascinate you! You’ve got a lot to learn about this place. Come on.’

The Marshal knew he ought to get back to his office, write that wretched HSA report and get this business off his hands. Had he only known it, this was his last chance of doing just that. He hesitated. He hated this house but it did have a sort of chilly fascination, and besides, he liked the company of this young man so different from himself. He did go as far as to look at his watch. Was it chance that made him decide to stay? That was the way it seemed, and yet, when he looked back afterwards it seemed as though he’d been treading a well-defined and determined path right from the very beginning, right from the moment when he’d stood looking down at Corsi’s dark-stained face. So perhaps it hadn’t been so important after all that he had thought to say, ‘I ought to get back’, and instead had said nothing but followed William’s smart Chaplin-like step back towards the studio.

‘ ’Evening, Marshal.’

That was when he noticed that the dwarf was there. But he thought nothing of it. He followed William into the studio and closed the door.

An hour later he was still reading, or rather, deciphering.

‘No . . . I can’t make it out.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Try this. It’s not complete but it will give you the gist. Catherine had it photocopied from the Maruccelliana Library. It doesn’t always help, but it can sometimes indicate that there’s a whole chunk of information missing which means a missing or misplaced page. Here . . . Skip all that stuff about Cosimo the Elder—1490 . . . Neri Ulderighi, there he is: let me . . .

‘ “In 1490, Neri Ulderighi decided to enlarge his Florentine
house. He purchased the houses adjoining his medieval tower
in the city centre and sent to Rome for a design of the façade
and courtyard. The drawing he received, supposed to be by
Raphael, was given to the master builder, Lapo Cinelli, for his
estimate of the work. The drawing was never returned, Cinelli
claiming that he had lost it. Neri applied to Lorenzo de’ Medici
for help—” ’

‘Here, you see? This is from the letter you were trying to decipher:

‘ “Since the drawing is a very splendid thing and the artist
has no time to make another and Your Highness knows that
were I to apply to the courts they would only inflict a fine for
the loss of a manuscript which avails but little against
scoundrels.” ’

The Marshal sat bemused as William perched on the edge of the worktable and read to him. ‘But did he—’

‘Wait . . . Lorenzo’s answer is lost but there’s a quote from it which proves that he did answer . . . Here it is:

‘ “Let the court send for him and the drawing be found.” ’
‘There may not actually have been a complete letter to Neri, of course, just a note in the margin of some other orders or a mention of the business in a letter to someone else.’

‘And was the drawing found, then?’

‘Wait! The plot thickens. Listen to this:

‘ “Lorenzo’s intervention was to no avail. Cinelli insisted
that the drawing was lost but that he remembered it well
enough to proceed with the work, which he would do at a
reduced cost in apology for the drawing’s being lost. Not long
after work had begun, a rumour reached Neri that Cinelli was
boasting of having tricked him and that a drawing by
Raphael was worth much more than the reduction in his fee.
Within three days of Neri’s hearing this, Cinelli was dead,
murdered in the cellars where he had begun building and
entombed within its walls. Cinelli’s son carried out the contract
and the Palazzo Ulderighi was completed, but it is said
that the son knew who had murdered his father and that it was
he who carved the inscription on the cellar wall behind which
Cinelli was buried:

H
ERE IS AN END TO ALL MY WOES

A
ND A BEGINNING OF YOUR OWN
.

‘So it was true . . . The Marshal, who had sat as still and attentive as a well-behaved schoolboy during the reading, shifted in his chair and looked about him, bothered again by the lack of windows in these rooms. He liked to stare out of a window while he was thinking, though he stared without seeing what he was looking at. Here he felt constrained.

William was still leafing through the photocopies.

‘It was true all right. The Ulderighi had more bad luck after that—oh, they always managed to stay in power by a system of alliance with the strong, that is, no real alliance to anyone or anything except themselves. They were at court when the Austrian Grand Dukes ruled Florence and even though they thoroughly disapproved of Cavour’s machinations for the unification of Italy, there they were at court again when Florence became the first capital of the kingdom of Italy. They’ve survived two world wars and the rise and fall of Fascism and here they still are. They’ve lost money, of course, what with taxation and having their neglected country estates confiscated by the new Rupublic. Even so, in that way they haven’t been bad survivors. The curse— and everybody regarded the Cinelli inscription as a curse—had to do with the succession.’

‘I only meant,’ the Marshal said, ‘that it was true what the old woman told us. The murder in the cellars. I didn’t think . . .’

‘You thought she was rambling, I imagine, but all of it was true and all of it attributed by chroniclers of the time to the Cinelli curse. They kept on losing their heirs. Francesco was the first of them.’

‘Francesco . . .’ The Marshal cast his mind back over the tata’s ramblings. ‘Ah, the one with the garland of spring flowers on his grave who had an accident of some sort, that one?’

‘That’s the one. He was the eldest son. There were two sons and Neri tried to marry Francesco to one of the Della Loggia family, a girl called Lucrezia. Francesco, if you remember, was the good-looking one, and the garland of flowers was what he wore for the wedding. It’s a good story . . . Wait, it must be here because it happened almost immediately after the building was finished. I remember seeing it. It begins
“A marriage was arranged”
. . . A marriage . . . Ah:
“Neri Ulderighi had two sons . . .”
this is it:

‘ “A marriage was arranged between Francesco and
Lucrezia Della Loggia. On June 24th, the feast of St John, the
patron saint of Florence, the handsome Francesco, dressed in
white with a garland of flowers on his head, rode out of the
Palazzo Ulderighi to his wedding. Outside the doors, drums
were being beaten and silk flags tossed in his honour. As he
rode out from the dark courtyard into the brilliant June sunshine,
a flag spun out right in front of his white stallion’s
head. The horse shied and reared and Francesco was thrown.
His garlanded head hit the great stone portal and the Palazzo
Ulderighi claimed its second victim. Many blamed the Cinelli
curse but some thought that the flag-thrower was in the pay of
certain families who were jealous of the combined influence of
the Ulderighi and Della Loggia families at Lorenzo’s court.” ’

‘There you are, then.’ William shuffled the papers into a semblance of order and dropped them on the table. ‘The Cinelli curse in action. That’s why they married the poor girl off to the ugly, smelly brother who turned out a bad ’un so that, according to the dear old tata, she couldn’t help but have his little girlfriend decapitated. Though I have my theory about why she defends the murderous Lucrezia. She looks so much like the present Marchesa that Tata gets them confused. I just wish Catherine were here because she’s got the keys. Anyway, when she gets back she’ll take you down to see the Cinelli inscription.’