Death of a Duchess (28 page)

The Duke regarded him for a long moment and then spoke.

‘You have our pardon, Poggio, for your theft.’ His voice sharpened. ‘Now earn it.’

‘Tell his Grace how you came to hear what passed in her Grace’s chamber the night of her death.’

Plaiting and unplaiting his fingers, Poggio told. He explained his need for the Duchess’s favour, and how he had hidden while the waiting-women were there, in the inner room. He was pitiably embarrassed over the extreme necessity for tact about what he had heard, but Sigismondo’s questions, unemphatic, insistent, got the truth: he had been on the very point of emerging to speak to the Duchess when he heard her greet someone. The newcomer had spoken softly but was a man. Poggio feared to make a sound by shutting the jib door, and so he had unavoidably heard. They had made love. He could — though he tried not to hear — distinguish two voices, at least, two... He foundered at this point and Sigismondo suggested ‘the sounds of two persons’ — yes, the sounds of two people, until at last one of them had given an odd cry, a strange short cry; then, there was silence. After a moment, someone, breathing hard, had crossed the matting of the floor. Yes, he had heard more. At ease over this part, although puzzled, he said he had heard curtains drawn, then a brief scuffling and a sound as if something had been thrown on the bed. Then the curtains again; and silence.

The silence, made deeper by the rattle of fireworks, had gone on until he thought it safe to venture out. The Duchess lay there, her hand over the side of the bed. He thought she slept and he began to creep past her. He knew he could not approach her now, in case she might guess he knew of her lover. He never thought it could be the Duke as they were so hurried and spoke so low. He had looked up to check that she slept, and saw the knife. It stuck—

‘His Grace saw the knife,’ Sigismondo said. ‘What did you do, when you knew she was dead?’

Poggio looked up anxiously at Sigismondo, transferred his gaze to the Duke, and said, ‘I took her ring and I ran.’ For this, at least, he had a pardon.

The Duke brooded. Duke Ippolyto studied Poggio’s face as if to estimate his truth — Poggio licked his lips and fortunately decided not to smile at him. The Cardinal stroked the cross that still lay on the table.

‘You heard nothing after this — cry — and the noise of something being thrown on the bed?’ The Duke had gone unerringly to the heart of the matter. He had been listening to witnesses for a good many years, and omissions of truth may have become apparent to his ear. Now he watched Poggio, who was unwise enough to put on an expression of childlike innocence.

‘What I have said, your Grace. No more.’

‘No one could have entered after that without your hearing?’

Poggio, relieved that he could answer this in complete sincerity, did so. He had not been asked if anyone actually
had
come in, so he had no need to mention the Lady Violante. His private devotion to her and his desire to keep her out of any possible trouble with her father would not have stood up to the threat of torture, but so far none had been made, and his trust in Sigismondo was profound.

‘Do you swear on the Cross that the witness you have given is true?’

Poggio ducked respectfully as the Cardinal moved the crucifix towards him. The sun that had shone on Angelo’s hair was now lower. It struck rainbow sparks from the diamonds and rubies embedded in the gold, eclipsed by Poggio’s hand as he laid it on the figure and swore.

The Duke spoke.

‘Go. You have our pardon, but not our leave to be in Rocca. By the third day from now, your pardon fails and your life with it if you are found here.’

Poggio’s scramble for the door indicated that he was starting his exile at the double.

When the door was shut after him, the Duke called for wine, as if to help them swallow all that they had heard that afternoon. Sigismondo conveyed the message, and brought the wine when it came, the golden tray, with three jewelled cups, the flagon of gold and crystal. The Duke moved to the long window that overlooked the square, and opened the casement for a view uninterrupted by the Rocca arms in burgundy and ochre stained glass. The sound of crowds outside, which had been so aggressively loud in the Cathedral, had dwindled all the time since, and now, instead of a turbulent sea of heads with a spume of arms, the great empty shore of stone was left, with only a few knots of people. The largest tide-wrack was round the scaffold where were still displayed the head and body of their Duke’s brother, the lately loved and charitable traitor. This group seemed to be silent, and as members of it moved away they were replaced by others as silent. Children were lifted up for a better look, but when one was held out to touch the bloody hair, one of the Duke’s men on the scaffold fended the child’s hand away with a nudge of his halberd’s butt. The Duke’s eyes had lingered, but now his regard ranged to the outskirts of the square, decorated by lounging archers. They stood, or sat, and leant on walls.

‘Sigismondo.’

‘Your Grace.’ He was nearby. The Duke’s quick turn of the head showed he had thought him to be across the room.

‘Those men?’

‘They were the men who started the cry of
Duca
!’

‘Are we to hear why?’

‘All is open to your Grace.’

The Duke regarded him for a moment and then gave a quick nod. Turning, he swung back to the table as if he would now, at once, bring this enquiry to a conclusion.

‘So, my lords. We are to believe, from what we have heard, that my brother paid an entertainer to make pretext for the Duchess to lie with him in secret while I and the court watched the fireworks; that then he murdered her. The dwarf seems to have heard my brother put Leandro Bandini on the bed. Why did the boy not struggle? Why was he not there when she was found?’

‘Because he did struggle, your Grace. Drugged by the mulled wine offered him by Lord Paolo’s man — who wore, he recalled, a chain with a little skull on it—’ they all glanced at the necklace that still lay where Angelo had left it — ‘Leandro Bandini had not quite succumbed when he was brought to her Grace’s chamber to be hidden there. The blow on the brow did indeed come from either her mirror or the candlestick found on the floor, but she did not inflict it. He was knocked unconscious and hidden under the curtains on the far side of the bed, on the floor, before her Grace came up from the feast.’

‘She did not see him?’

‘He lay between the bed and the curtains, your Grace. Lord Paolo, after he had done what was planned,’ and Sigismondo’s even tone made nothing significant in the words, ‘had only to drag him out and put him on the bed. He was not quite as unconscious as they may have thought, as he had some memory, when I spoke to him that night, of the Duchess lying there. In his horror, he tried to come to his senses more fully. It seems he struggled to move, perhaps to draw away from her Grace, and rolled off the bed into the oblivion where he was found. I saw that the curtains were pulled taut on that side as if something held them to the floor.’

The Duke laughed, an unattractive sound. ‘So my brother was right to proclaim him innocent. If I had found him where he was meant to be, I would have his blood on my hands.’ He looked down at them speculatively. Then turning to Ippolyto he asked, ‘Are you satisfied?’

‘I have no more to ask. She brought her own death, cousin, deceived as everyone was by that serpent.’

Ippolyto held out his own hands, fine-boned, wiry, to clasp those of the Duke who, looking at him closely and seeing in his eyes those amber-brown depths that had once delighted him in Ippolyto’s sister, drew him into an embrace to disguise his desire never to see him again. The Cardinal smiled that such great men were at peace, and resumed his great cross again, the weight slithering to rest on the scarlet watered silk. Sigismondo had disappeared beyond the door curtain, and the low vibration of his tones could just be heard.

‘Tomorrow we shall see the Duchess buried. Tonight, let us dine together in celebration of our renewed alliance.’

The Cardinal improved the occasion, lifting his hand in blessing. ‘Amity is pleasing to God, my sons. May you flourish in such harmony.’ Rustling out, the Church took precedence of the temporal powers, and benevolently proffered a ring towards Sigismondo, who knelt to kiss it.

One temporal power, after seeing the other out, remained and beckoned. Sigismondo closed the door and returned. The Duke leant against the table in the last of the evening sun.

‘You were to tell me, Sigismondo, your final secrets. To whom do I owe my Duchy?’

‘Like so many sovereigns, your Grace: to mercenaries.’

‘Those men round the square, the men who cried
Duca
and took the crowd with them?’

‘The same. They, in conjunction with your Marshal, are in control. Those citizens paid by the Lord Paolo now no longer dare to speak.’

‘Mercenaries don’t act on promises. They were paid. Who paid them?’ The Duke reached out and closed a hand on the black velvet sleeve. The face attentive to his was strangely reassuring, hooked nose, thick-lashed eyes dark and intent, the mouth with the sensually curved upper lip full above the restraint of the lower one, a mouth for secrets, a mouth that now smiled, with deep amusement.

‘Your Grace: Bandini. Ugo Bandini paid the mercenaries.’

The Duke, willing enough by now to believe Sigismondo, leant back and stared into the smiling eyes. ‘
Bandini
. When I was about to have his son executed? God’s teeth, what’s his reason?’

‘Loyalty, your Grace. He had been approached by Duke Francisco to pay the mercenaries in his name; and he, on gaining the city, would free his son; but instead, Bandini paid them to shout
Duca Ludovico
. If they had shouted
Duca Paolo
, as was their original order...’ Sigismondo paused and hummed, with foreboding of what might have been.

‘I would be dead. Even if Paolo had died too, Rocca would have been held for Francisco. I owe Bandini my life, then.’ He gripped his lower lip between thumb and forefinger, and mused; then shot out a finger and prodded the broad chest. ‘You. You know more than you’ve yet told me. How did that boy escape from my dungeons? It seems to me that his delivery from death predated by a few hours this loyal gesture of his father’s. Would you say that?’ Prodding Sigismondo’s chest repeatedly, he began to laugh.

‘Impossible to deceive your Grace.’

‘And where is the boy? The innocent boy? Are you going to tell me that, you villain?’

‘Why, your Grace, he and his father will be among the first to congratulate you.’

The Duke’s laughter had more than a touch of hysteria in it.

‘I forbade them the Palace, try to take the life of one of them, and now I am to embrace them as my saviours! Has the world any more surprises for me today? No one is what they seem. Next you’ll be telling me that
di Torre
is hand in glove with the Bandini to uphold me in Rocca!’

It was a problem in tact. The Festaiuolo, ready packed to go home to Florence, unpacked everything and sat, with a flask of inspiration and a ragged bundle of old pageant notes, cobbling up and casting a spectacle which celebrated the triumph of Justice and Right, without personifying Wrong. He looked regretfully at Envy’s iron teeth in their little rush basket — wholly relevant to the late traitor but impossible to use. And that dancer who had caused so much trouble had presented himself again for employment, with the reasonable remark that nobody had seen his face last time... and it was too true that there was a lack of full-sized skilful dancers although a plethora of small people expected to be used; and no help to be got as before from those useful men of the Lord Paolo’s.

The Duke’s Marshal, dealing with these useful men, found those who were willing, and likely, to die before implicating the Lord Paolo in anything but an excessive philanthropy and a disinterested concern for justice; and those who were willing, and zealous, in implicating the Lord Paolo, their colleagues, friends, enemies, officers and grandmothers in corruption, perfidy, sodomy and treason. The Marshal did manage to establish that old Matteo di Torre, whose encounter with a dish of scallops had set off the feud, had certainly been sitting next to Ugo Bandini, but on his right had been the Lord Paolo. Hindsight is a marvellous clarifier of situations.

Sigismondo, escorting Leandro openly through the streets to his father’s house, delivered him at the door to an incoherent Ugo with the words ‘
Tutum patrio te limine sistam
,’ which reprise of the
sortes Virgilianae
did not strike either of them at the time; nor that in this promise of Venus to Aeneas, the Goddess of Love had assumed one of her more interesting disguises in the person of Sigismondo. Ugo embraced his son, embraced Sigismondo, re-embraced Leandro, and led them both in under the Titans who seemed today almost easily to support the Bandini arms. In the comparative privacy of his library Bandini, after a Herculean effort at breaking his son’s ribs in another embrace, wept and thanked Sigismondo and then, in a belated hurry, the Saints and the Trinity. He would have given Sigismondo half his wealth, he exclaimed, had he not disbursed it too recently to Il Lupo and his band. What was left, although it was negligible, was all at Sigismondo’s service. Sigismondo obligingly said that his satisfaction lay in restoring Leandro to, so literally he might have added, his father’s bosom. Ugo thereupon took off a massy gold chain, of a design amazingly complex, with plaques of enamelled allegorical beasts and lumps of jewellery, and put it on Sigismondo, across whose shoulders and chest it looked remarkably at home.

The feast a few days after the Duchess’s interment was private and unostentatious. The Duke had expected Ippolyto to leave after the funeral, but he stayed and went hunting with the Lady Violante so the feast had to include him. The Bandini and di Torre representatives were invited.

Cosima, not at all enjoying being back at home, was particularly bored at the prospect of dining yet again with her aunt when everyone was at the Palace. Her aunt had done nothing but ask questions ever since her return, exactly as if she suspected that Cosima had in fact spent a night alone with two men. She wondered what was to happen to her and if anything ever would. There was no likelihood of seeing Leandro again, and now he knew that she was a di Torre he would not think about her at all. It was true that Sigismondo had called the feud a false one, but feelings did not so quickly alter; that is, men’s feelings. What would he have said to her, that night, when Sigismondo stopped him from coming towards her? By now, of course, he would have had time to reflect how very unfittingly she had behaved. He’d taken it for granted that she must be a common girl hired by his father.