Death of a Duchess (23 page)

Angelo supported her across the threshold. The moment had come. A shape had got up from the straw, was standing there. She could sense bewilderment. Boldly, she did as Sigismondo had rehearsed her: she stepped forward, flinging back her veil and holding out her arms. They closed round a young man’s shoulders, the first she had ever touched, and she pressed her cheek to a rough one, whispering urgently in his ear, ‘Pretend to know me. If you want to live, join with what we say.’

She felt his sudden tension, his deep breath. Then hands held her shoulders. He said aloud, ‘My love?’

Cosima put her forehead down on his shoulder. She heard Angelo speak. The prisoner crushed her to him and said again, ‘My love! You came — you came at last!’

And, unaware that it was Cosima di Torre he held in his arms, Leandro Bandini kissed her with heartfelt enthusiasm.

Cosima di Torre, who was well aware she was being kissed by a Bandini, almost at once lost appreciation of that fact. Her lips seemed to be connected to the whole of her body in a completely new way. If this was what being kissed by a young man was like, then it was perfectly obvious why unmarried girls should be protected from the experience. Rapturously she returned the kiss. His arms tightened, wrapped round her further, so that suddenly she remembered the situation and who she was. Flushing, horrified, she made an effort to release herself and they sank together on the straw. The jailer had set his lantern down in the doorway and was engaged in a muttered exchange with Angelo; a bar of light fell across the two where they sat in the straw, gilding the face of each to the benefit of the other. Cosima was amazed that a Bandini could be so handsome; her imagination had foretold a face marked by generations of evil. Leandro thought it only fitting that someone who had come to rescue him should resemble a being from Paradise.

‘My lady.’ Angelo bent over them, plaits swinging, blocking the light to their mutual disappointment. ‘We must go; but we’ll return with a priest. Piero has agreed to allow the marriage.’

‘Marriage!’ Leandro’s start and cry brought an oily chuckle from the jailer.

‘They get you in the end, lad, even with the gallows waiting.’

‘Sweet Leandro—’ how strange the name sounded in her mouth. She bent her head modestly and managed to utter the words she had rehearsed, wishing she could sink through the ground — ‘it is for the child’s sake.’

Leandro snatched up her hands and bent his head to kiss them, most likely to hide the astonishment she had momentarily seen. Cosima felt it appropriate to her role to lean forward and kiss his rumpled hair, and managed to breathe ‘Trust us’ as she drew back.

Angelo helped her to her feet before the jailer could, and with professional swiftness arranged her veils over her face against his leering glance as he raised the lantern.

‘No more kisses, little bird, until the priest says so. Been too many already, eh? Oh, how lucky you are to find Piero here. He’s got such a soft heart for lovebirds in distress. Such a soft heart.’

Wagging his head in approval of his nature, Piero ushered them out, clanged the door to and clashed key in the lock while Leandro peered through the until it was shut on him. Cosima thought she saw such a look of hope on his face that her heart melted. Poor young man, to have been brought up a Bandini.

It was getting dark, the sky an intense green behind the distant hills, the pale violet of spring twilight overhead, when Cosima, weary, set off on her second journey through the city streets to the Castle prison. Again, she was accompanied by Angelo, wrapped as she was herself in a cloak now that the bitter little wind of evening keened round the alley comers. There were as many people in the street as before, but an unease struck her; there were groups who talked in low voices. The man who went ahead now was not Barley but Sigismondo, cowled, and furled in his black robes. She observed something strange; although he parted the crowds with easy confidence, as they approached the Palace his gait altered, grew less sure; his shoulders hunched, as though he shrank from what was to come. For the first time Cosima thought truly what peril they were all in: that even Sigismondo, on whom she had to rely as implicitly as Benno did, had good reason to fear.

The guard at the door had changed. Cosima’s heart missed a beat at the unfamiliar face, but evidently they were expected. The new guard was just as entranced Angela’s smile and just as ready to accept a bribe to let them in as the other had been. His colleague, who had not been at this door either, seemed inclined to take his bribe from Angela in the form of a kiss, to which the maid acceded very readily. The priest, clicking his tongue, called them to order and they continued on their way, Cosima increasingly disturbed at Sigismondo’s stumbling walk.

‘Can you manage the steps, Father? Not easy at your age, I know.’ The guard seemed a kindly man, if amorous; but as he put out a hand to help Sigismondo, Cosima sent up a piercing prayer that he would not feel, through the woollen folds, the steel muscles of this ageing priest. She understood now why Sigismondo’s height seemed to have lessened and his step become shaky. He must seem pitiful and not threatening. She remembered his saying that he had already visited Leandro in prison. The jailer might well recognise him. The guard was now pinching Angelo behind, and got a cack-handed little feminine punch on the arm for his pains. He left them at the top of the last crooked flight of steps. Cosima picked her way down the worn treads, skirts bunched in her hands — telling herself that her heart beat so fast because of the danger they were in, and not because of the coming meeting with Leandro Bandini.

Piero had heard them and waited, lantern in hand aloft, in an expansive mood suitable to a wedding. From the extra layer of smell on the air, he had been drinking their former bribe in anticipation. He greeted Sigismondo with a respect that from him was gruesome, bending his knee and head together.

‘Your blessing, Father. Makes a change from hearing confessions down here, having a marriage. May be the first the place has seen, who knows, since the Romans built this,’ and he slapped the wall. ‘A wedding, and then straight to the last rites, eh?’ His laugh, Cosima thought, sounded as a rat might if it choked on a gobbet of flesh, and she pinched her nostrils shut as they followed him down the dank passage to Leandro’s cell. He was still expatiating about the Romans as Sigismondo tottered at his heels making little yaps of assent.

‘Here is your bride, Bandini!’ Piero flung wide the cell door with a flourish, jangling his keys like wedding bells. Leandro was ready for them, Cosima saw, anxiously smiling. She was touched to see he had brushed the straw from his clothes and combed through that thick hair with his fingers. How he must have suffered in this place! What had he thought, all these days, as he waited for death?

Sigismondo was bent over his breviary, tilting it towards the lantern, his shaking hands making it tremble as he muttered words that Cosima was surprised to recognise as good Latin. What kind of man was this who had first emerged into her life dressed as a widow? But here was Angelo, putting back her veil for her, handing a ring to Leandro, standing beside her with meek bowed head while Sigismondo maundered on, turning the page. The jailer held the lantern near, the light sending knows swimming across their faces, Sigismondo’s but invisible beneath his cowl. She was aware of Piero’s eyes on her, his head cocked to see into face. Leandro, directed by the ‘priest’, took her hand and put the ring to each finger and at last to the ring finger itself. He had said the words,
she
had said the words... If Sigismondo had really a priest — and she was visited by the chill idea perhaps he
was
— she would now be married to Leandro Bandini and her father would die to hear of it. If he saw her now he would certainly succumb to apoplexy.

‘Is it all over, Father?’ Piero put the lantern down on the threshold and, horribly, advanced on her. ‘First kiss from the bride! Piero’s reward for a soft heart.’

She had no time to shrink from the foul breath that preceded him, hardly fell the grip of Leandro’s hand draw her back, only saw a violent movement behind the advancing Piero like a whirling darkness against darkness itself. Piero’s face lurched towards her, large as nightmare, eyes suddenly starting like a hare’s, tongue thrust out as though it would reach her first. A curious loud retching sound filled her ears and the next second she found herself pulled round against Leandro’s chest, held against his thudding heart.

‘The keys. Right...’

Despite Leandro’s hand, which tried to keep her head against his chest, Cosima twisted round to see. The lantern’s light flickered, protected though it was, as if the wind of struggle had nearly doused it. But its uncertain light showed Sigismondo and Angelo busy over something on the floor in the corner. As they stepped back, she saw a huddled figure on the pallet and Angelo twitching the ragged blanket up over the grey greasy curls. Sigismondo was unwrapping his rosary from his wrist and knotting it again at his belt. She felt once again a heave of nausea as she knew what she had seen: Piero being strangled...
He deserved it
, she told herself, with dismissive anger. This was not a time to be squeamish. Sigismondo was pulling a dark robe of fine wool from under his habit, and he and Angelo flung it over Leandro’s head, like a couple of bizarre tirewomen. Sigismondo was thus restored to his usual figure. Angelo took up the lantern, Leandro seized her hand and they left the cell, Sigismondo bringing up the rear. She heard him lock the door.

She needed both hands to manage her skirts up the narrow flight of worn stairs, and Leandro, letting go, whispered, ‘I’ll never forget this! Never! You shall have anything in the world—’

He was cut short by the sudden appearance of a figure carrying a lantern of its own, at the head of the stairs. Leandro halted a moment, Cosima gasped. It was another figure out of nightmare, too small for a man, too thickset for a child, and with an iron-grey beard. So far from challenging them or raising an alarm, he put a finger to his lips and then, turning, beckoned them on and led at a rapid pace down a passage branching off the one they had used before. Cosima, as they all followed, fancied for a moment that they had slipped into one of the tales told by her nurse or by Sascha, and that they might see a witch, or a monster barring their way, before they could come to the world outside again.

This did not happen until they had traversed quite a few passages, some so narrow they had to edge in single file, one so low that only the dwarf could walk upright. Cosima understood that he led them by ways known only, perhaps, to his own kind. She had heard of the Palace dwarves and she imagined, as she parcelled her skirts close to her chest and felt her veiling catch on rough stone, that the whole ancient Castle was honeycombed with such ways where the small people might go about their lives unseen. The present passage seemed to be a tunnel cut in the rock. She thought the dwarves might almost have made it themselves.

Here she stumbled on some debris, and Sigismondo’s hand was instantly under her elbow. If
he
was bringing up the rear, any danger must be expected from behind, pursuit rather than confrontation.

They began to hear the sound of people not far off, talking, the clash of what might be halberds, the barking of a hound farther off. It sounded as if it were barking to the sky, there was no echo from a confined space. They might be near an outer door, with its guardroom. They must, she thought, and could feel her heart drumming, they must be very near freedom. Here the walls were of dressed stones.

It was here that they met the man with the torch.

He came suddenly from a small door, and wheeled to look at them, holding the torch high. The dwarf slid his dark-lantern shut. So, at the rear, did Sigismondo. If Piero had looked like a large rat, this man was like a weasel, with small glittering eyes and a long nose that twitched.

‘Who are you? What do you here?’ The voice was sharp, but educated. He was no jailer, no guard, in his long gown.

Durgan said, ‘They are friends of mine. I vouch for them, sir—’

‘
Master Leandro!
'

Cosima heard herself let out a short cry like a yelp. Leandro stepped back against her, shielding his face with one arm from the torch’s flare. The weasel-man had thrust aside the protesting Durgan, and dashed the torch at Angelo as he forced his way past, hand out to grasp Leandro.

‘You’d escape, would you? We’ll see—’

What he, in that confident plural, had been going to see dwindled suddenly into realms of conjecture. Cosima, pressed back against Sigismondo, knew she hampered him from acting; the weasel had only to cry out, it might fetch those guards and lead to all their deaths. Angelo had snatched the man’s torch, even as he continued to come forward, hand outstretched, mouth open; but instead of words, blood poured out.

Leandro staggered under the man’s sudden weight, sending Cosima back to be steadied by Sigismondo as he crammed himself against the wall past her and supported the man’s body. She, with a fearful glance into the dark they had come from, flattened herself all she could, and he got by. She saw Angelo now, pulling his knife back, wiping it on the man’s gown, slipping it out of sight where he had produced it from. The beautiful face between the gold silk plaits had neither anger nor satisfaction but, though serene, he breathed fast and had moved even faster.

There was now silence. Sigismondo was listening. No change came in the sound they had heard beyond the wall. He murmured to the dwarf, ‘Where can we put him? He mustn’t be found.’

‘But it’s my father’s secretary,’ Leandro whispered. ‘What—’

‘Ask later. Durgan?’

The dwarf had pursed up his mouth. Now he nodded and pointed the way they were going. Angelo put out the torch on the floor, and pushed Leandro and Cosima ahead, after Sigismondo who carried the body. The light of Sigismondo’s — Piero’s — lantern presently brought, up the rear in Angelo’s steady hand.