The King's Diamond (35 page)

The courtyard was crammed with people. The men of the garrison were forming up, with their harquebuses and powder horns and sacks of food. Nobles, bishops, servants, poor men and women pushed among them, while Papal officials called out orders which no one could hear. I shoved through the crowd to the door of the armoury, where Hannah and I had lain among the powder casks. There was no sign of her, or of Grace or Susan either. ‘Martin!' I commanded. ‘Wait here.' I moved towards their lodgings, but at that moment I caught sight of John's head above the crowd. We pushed towards each other. He looked displeased.

‘The Cages?' I asked.

‘Already gone down. They are with Casale at the head of the column. Well, we shall catch them up later.'

I glanced at him sidelong. The crowd was beginning to move. From far below we heard the beating of drums and the clank as the portcullis was raised. It was the seventh of June: a month since the Sack and the siege had begun. We pressed down the stairs and the long, winding ramp, walking several abreast through the heart of that ancient tomb. Torches burned in the darkness, lighting up the barrel vault above, glinting on the soldiers' breastplates and their sombre faces. We were an army in defeat. A mere three hundred men at arms, but ten times that number of priests, merchants, women. We passed under the gate and across the bridge where the Cages and I had fled that misty dawn. The column stretched away ahead of us out of sight. As the last of us left, the Imperials streamed with wild shouts inside the Castle. They were not to enter the drum tower: there the Pope and his cardinals were safe, but prisoners.

Beyond the bridge we entered the ruins of Rome. Houses were burnt out and windowless. Rubble and the stinking dead lay everywhere. The three weeks I had spent inside the Castle had seen the city reduced still further to an abomination, a wilderness where men turned into beasts, a terrible mark of the judgement of God upon man. Almost every door we passed had the plague-mark on it. Mobs of ragged soldiers watched us hungrily from the street corners. Somewhere ahead of us were the Cages; but my attempts to push ahead through the column came to nothing. The bands of lansquenets assigned to guard us through the city pressed us close on either side, and with the murderous stares of the soldiers beyond them I was glad of it.

Outside the Gate of Saint Paul, where I had first entered Rome five months earlier, the column divided. One portion turned east and then north, bound towards the hills. This was where Cellini was headed.

As we clasped one another a last time, he said, ‘Greet King Henry for me.'

I laughed. ‘And thank your father for letting his son become a goldsmith.'

He embraced Martin too.

‘A good servant you have,' he told me. ‘But what bad advice he gives. Think if you had never come to Rome!'

I watched Benvenuto as he disappeared among the nodding helmets and feathered hats of the soldiers, winding north across the Campagna.

‘Master!' Martin pointed: our column was on the move. We hurried on. After a few minutes we caught up with John.

‘They are still far ahead.' His face showed rather too deep a concern.

I growled, ‘I know very well you would like to have Hannah for yourself.'

‘My dear Richard! Mrs Hannah is yours. Of course she is.' His eye twinkled. ‘If you can keep her.'

I made a grab for him, but he darted ahead and looked back, laughing. ‘Come, Richard, you can never be angry with me.'

I caught him up and we linked arms. ‘No. Because you are right: Hannah is mine.'

Ahead over the marshes rose the castle of Ostia, and beside it the mast of the ship that would carry us home: home to a triumph more glorious than I could have imagined when I first set out from Broken Wharf those many months before; home to Hannah's love and victory over my mother; home to where King Henry waited for the sight of his diamond.

Cover photography © Jeff Cottenden