The Dead of Winter

by S. J. Parris

  I grabbed Renzo under his arms and dragged his body out of the main arena, laying him down behind a pile of fallen masonry. I knew that my best hope was to delay discovery of the body while I put some distance between myself and Rome. I returned to pick up his sword and swung it speculatively back and forth; I had never held such an expensive weapon. Briefly I considered throwing it in the river, but the sight of a friar hurling a sword into the water would be memorable for anyone who happened to be passing. As I stood, testing its weight, the silence was broken by a scattering of stones from beneath the arches, as if someone had fled in a hurry. I whipped around, but could make out nothing in the shadows; dogs, perhaps. I decided to leave the sword by the body. I smeared it with blood from Renzo’s side and placed it by his right hand, so that whoever found him might think he had taken his life for love.

  I hurtled through the streets, holding my habit above my knees, as if the Devil were at my heels, blindly running for the Este palazzo. Porta was the only person who could help me now; I was not sure he would be willing to dirty his hands with this situation, but beneath his genial good manners there was a ruthlessness, and I knew that he had experience in making bodies disappear. I followed the river until I began to recognise landmarks, and after a few wrong turns, found myself at the entrance to the rear courtyard where I had been shown out the night before. If the guards on the gate recognised me, they gave no sign; breathless, wild-eyed and bloodied as I appeared, I could hardly blame them.

  When I asked for Porta, I saw the guards exchange a glance, before they informed me that the family had retired for the night and were not admitting visitors. I pulled my cloak tight around me to hide the blood on my habit, but I suspected there was plenty smeared across my face. I insisted that it was urgent; one of the men raised his pikestaff, but to my great good fortune a servant arrived at the gate leading a horse and I saw that it was the groom who had taken me home the night before.

  ‘This man knows me,’ I cried, lunging at him so that the horse reared its head back, white-eyed, and whinnied. The groom steadied her, cast a glance at me and nodded reluctantly to the guards to let me in. I followed him into the courtyard and saw the lady Leonora walking by herself, gazing up at the stars, fur cape tight around her shoulders. At the commotion, she turned her head and her mouth dropped open at the sight of me. I rushed across; she was far more likely to find Porta for me than any servant.

  ‘You should not be here,’ she hissed, darting a glance behind her to the house. ‘My sister has accused you of trying to rape her. She has your belt as proof.’

  ‘I didn’t, I swear. I turned her down.’

  ‘I believe you. But I did warn you. Luigi does not intend to do anything about it, she’ll calm down eventually – but you can’t be seen here while she’s still insisting you attacked her. That does seem needlessly provocative.’

  ‘I’ll go, but I must see Don Giambattista – please, it’s urgent.’

  She took in my appearance for the first time. ‘Madonna santa, what has happened to you? Is that blood on your face?’

  ‘I – I was assaulted,’ I said. It was the first thing that came to mind. ‘In the street.’

  ‘How dreadful. Are you hurt?’ She pressed her hands to her face. ‘Should we call for the watch?’

  ‘No,’ I said, too quickly. ‘I’m fine – I just – I must speak with Porta, this minute.’

  ‘You’re shaking. Come with me.’ She looked back at the house again, then led me across to the stable block, where she pushed open the door of an empty stall. ‘Stay in here. Don’t let anyone see you – if Lucrezia finds out you’re in the grounds, she’ll clamour for your arrest and that will put my brother the cardinal in a very difficult position. Here.’ She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve, licked it and rubbed a spot on my cheek. ‘That’s better. You look like you’ve come from the battlefield.’ She smiled and dropped her gaze, as if suddenly shy. I found myself thinking that she was not as obviously beautiful as her sister, but she had kind eyes. ‘I was looking at the stars again,’ she said, as if I had asked for an explanation. ‘I’ve been pondering what you said about other worlds.’

  ‘Please don’t repeat that,’ I said. ‘I’m in enough trouble as it is.’

  ‘Yes, I had heard. The Holy Father accused you of witchcraft.’

  ‘He didn’t— how did you know?’

  ‘Oh, you’re quite the centre of attention among the cardinals. They’re saying it’s a Christmas miracle you got out in one piece. Rebiba will be terribly disappointed.’ She laughed. ‘Well, I will fetch Porta to you.’

  I sat down on a bale of straw and a wave of exhaustion crashed over me; Leonora was right, I was trembling all over like someone in the grip of a fever. It was not the first time I had seen a man die. I had been assisting Fra Gennaro in the infirmary since I was sixteen; every autumn, when the fogs rolling in off the Bay of Naples brought the influenza, it always took a few of the elderly brothers. I had watched others die of tumours, agues, infected wounds or, in one case, from falling off a roof. Once or twice I even thought I could pinpoint the moment when the soul left the body, as I stood by the bed with a fumigation while one of the senior brothers gave extreme unction. But I had never, until today, watched a man die at my hands. I stretched them out in front of me and examined my bloodstained palms. I was a murderer. Self-defence, accident; call it what you will, I had taken the life of a young man, barely older than me, who should have had decades left to live. Not only that, he was related to a prince. I thought of the strappado, the torture device I had seen in the Campo dei Fiori. I was a dead man. I put my head in my hands and began to cry.

  ‘Hey, hey – none of that.’ Porta’s voice, almost fatherly, cut through my self-pity. The flame of his lantern sent a wavering light up the wall. ‘No one believes Lucrezia, not even her brother. If anything, they feel sorry for you – they think she probably jumped on you. But it was not a good idea to come here. Lie low till she’s forgotten about it.’

  ‘It’s not that.’ I stood and opened my cloak to show him my blood-spattered habit. ‘It’s worse.’

  He kept a hand pressed over his mouth as I told my story, nodding at intervals until I hiccupped my way to the end. He was silent for a long time, his eyes fixed on my clothes, while he made his calculations. Eventually he started to laugh softly.

  ‘What?’ I stared at him, incredulous.

  ‘You’ve been here two days, Bruno, and already you’re accused of rape by a cardinal’s sister, the Pope has called you a witch, and now you’ve killed a man in a duel. Such havoc has not been wrought in the city since the Sack of Rome forty years ago. Imagine if you stayed a week.’

  ‘Jesus, Porta – it’s not funny. And it wasn’t a duel. I told you – he ambushed me.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, folding his arms, ‘Renzo Arduino is no great loss to Italy, I assure you. You know he had the French pox? He would have died young anyway, in exquisite agony, after his nose and cock rotted off – in many ways you’ve done him a favour.’

  ‘I don’t think the law will see it like that. Or his family.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t imagine the Prince of Piombino will stir himself. The boy was chronically in debt and constantly begging for money. That’s why he was courting Lucrezia so frantically, not that he had any hope of marrying her.’

  ‘Still, he didn’t deserve to die.’

  ‘Sounds like he was going to cut your throat.’

  ‘What if he wasn’t?’

  ‘Well, it’s done,’ he said, with a brisk sniff. ‘No point wallowing in guilt. The thing now is to tidy up after you. Did anyone see you leave Santa Maria?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I went over the wall.’

  ‘Good. How long till they notice you’re gone?’

  ‘They’ll call at my cell when I don’t show up for matins at two.’

  He nodded. ‘That gives us almost three hours. And will they go in search of you, when they realise you’ve left the convent?’


  I had no idea; I had not discussed with Fra Agostino anything beyond my audience with the Pope. I had assumed I would stay in Rome until Porta was ready to leave. Fra Agostino might be offended at my sudden departure, but I did not suppose he would regret it, unless he was still entertaining hopes of further punishment. ‘I doubt it. Oh, but – Renzo left a message with the gatekeeper there, asking to meet. He signed it from you.’

  ‘Ah. Well, I can take responsibility for it, if anyone asks. I’ll claim I helped you slink away in shame after your audience with the Pope today.’ He smiled. ‘I wish I could have seen that, truly. I said you’d be the talk of the town, didn’t I?’

  ‘This was not what I imagined.’

  ‘Life never is, Bruno. Get used to it. Now – make yourself comfortable in this stable, as Our Lord did at Christmas, and I’ll send Tito to you. We’ll meet again in Naples, but not for a while. Not until you’re less notorious.’

  ‘But—’ I stretched out a hand to him. ‘Am I still part of the Academy?’

  He pressed a finger to his lips. ‘Always. But all of us in the Academy are sworn to protect one another’s secrets, and you and I have rather a lot of those between us. You will be watched closely when you return to Naples, and I don’t want that to mean they start watching me. Now – trust me, do everything Tito tells you, and you’ll come out of this in one piece. Unlike Renzo.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I held out my arms to embrace him, but he stepped back.

  ‘You look like you’ve come from a slaughterhouse.’ He paused and turned in the doorway, his expression serious. ‘Bruno. Listen to me. You did what any man would have done with a blade to his throat – you defended yourself. It was his life or yours.’

  ‘What if that’s not true?’

  ‘Tell yourself it is. Oh, and – better give me that knife back, just in case.’

  After he left, I knelt down in the straw to pray. Even at twenty-one, great cracks had already formed in the foundation of my faith and only continued to widen; the more theology and philosophy I studied, the more I saw only the gaps in their explanations, and my association with Porta and the Academy had opened my eyes to the vast scope of all that was still unknown to man, but might one day be encompassed. I was no longer willing to accept that we had reached the limit of the knowledge that was permitted to us when it came to the universe and its workings, nor could I call that imperfect understanding ‘faith’. But I still had a fierce sense of right and wrong, and I could not share Porta’s cold dismissal of Renzo Arduino as unworthy of regret. True, he had been brash, arrogant and swaggering, but I had been all those things myself at one time or another. He was young; he might have grown into less of an entitled prick in time, but my blade had robbed him of time, and I couldn’t shake the knowledge that God was watching, and had made a note of it in His great book, even if I were to escape the law. No point wallowing in guilt, Porta said, but my conscience was not so easily appeased. Could I be absolved of a sin I could never confess? There was no one to whom I might even put the question.

  My prayers were interrupted by a discreet cough; I snapped my head up to see Porta’s bodyguard Tito, his broad shoulders filling the doorway. He carried a pail in one hand, steam rising from the lid, and in the other a lantern; under each arm a bundle of cloth.

  ‘Here.’ He set the pail down and handed me a sack and a towel. ‘Do you have a change of clothes?’

  ‘In here.’ I patted my travelling bag. ‘But—’

  ‘Good. Save it. You’ll need it when you get back to Naples. Wash yourself, put your soiled clothes in the sack with the towel. Then dress in these.’ He placed a pile on the straw bale and I saw that it was a servant’s brown tunic and breeches, with a rough woollen cloak and cheap boots. ‘And take this,’ he added, drawing from inside his jacket a silver flask. ‘From my master. He says you’ll need it. I’ll be back in ten minutes.’

  I unscrewed the flask, sniffed it, and tipped half its contents down my throat; aqua vitae, fierce and burning, making me cough. While I waited for its heat to lend me courage I stripped, shivering so hard that I had to clench my jaw to keep my teeth from rattling, and sluiced myself head to foot with the hot water. In the dim lamplight I could not see whether I had rid my skin of all traces of blood, but the linen towel came away smeared with dark streaks. I stuffed it in the sack with my stained habit and cloak, tucked the flask inside my tunic, and when Tito returned I appeared like any groom or serving man, complete with a wool cap that I pulled down low over my eyes, and thick gloves. He assessed me with a practised glance and nodded.

  ‘Go out there,’ he instructed, checking that the courtyard was empty and indicating a small door in the wall, ‘round to the courtyard gate and wait for me in the street.’

  When I reached the wide entrance to the stable yard, I saw Porta’s coach parked in the street, the horses in harness and Tito holding their bridle, a kerchief tied around his mouth and nose. Black cloth had been draped over the windows and the sides of the coach to hide Porta’s insignia.

  ‘Get in.’ Tito motioned to the door. I noticed he was carrying a heavy sword at his belt. ‘And don’t look out. Those drapes are there for a reason.’

  Distant sounds of late revellers carried through the night air as the carriage lurched through the streets and I rattled around inside it in the dark, fearing at every turn that we would be stopped and questioned. The aqua vitae burned in my guts. As we pulled to a halt I feared I might be sick with nerves, but when Tito opened the door I saw, to my relief, that he was alone. The great semi-circular wall of the amphitheatre towered over us. A wave of nausea rose in my throat again.

  ‘Come on, then,’ Tito said. He carried a lantern and a blanket over his shoulder.

  ‘What about the horses?’

  ‘They’ll stay put. If anyone comes near them, they’ll let us know. This needs two pairs of hands.’

  He handed me the lantern and I led the way. I need not have worried about finding Renzo’s body again in the vast darkness of the amphitheatre; the pack of dogs huddled by the fallen wall, yelping wildly in their frenzy for blood, would have led anyone to him. Tito drew his sword and shouted at them; most fled at our approach, and he swiped at the last determined stragglers until the corpse was visible in the dim light. Renzo’s naked skin gleamed white against the dark ground, pale as a marble statue, except for the gash in his stomach and the marks where the dogs had gnawed him. I froze, and could only stare in horror.

  ‘What did you do with his clothes?’ Tito hissed, unfolding the blanket over his shoulder.

  ‘I didn’t. I mean – he was dressed when I left him.’ My voice had risen to a panicked squeak.

  ‘Huh.’ Tito glanced around. ‘Suppose a homeless man doesn’t care if a jerkin is covered in gore, long as it’s good cloth.’

  ‘His sword is gone too,’ I said, disbelieving. I had been gone less than an hour and those unseen figures who sheltered in the theatre’s shadows had stripped him completely; even his earring had been taken. I looked down at him. His body was athletic and finely muscled, his skin smooth and pale, with a furze of hair running from his chest to his groin. I wondered if Porta had told the truth about the pox, or if he had said that to make me feel better.

  ‘It’s all to the good,’ Tito whispered. ‘Any of his stuff turns up on a vagrant’s back, they’ll be the ones questioned.’

  ‘What if any of them saw me?’

  ‘You think the word of a drunk beggar would count for anything, even if they remember? No, it’s best if they have his clothes. Saves me getting rid of them. It’ll look like he fell foul of robbers.’

  ‘He was going to cut my throat,’ I said, defensive.

  Tito held up a hand. ‘I don’t need to know the detail, sir. Give me a hand to shift him.’

  He spread the blanket on the ground and we gracelessly rolled Renzo’s body on to it, wrapped him in it and took an end each. He was surprisingly heavy and every few minutes one of his limbs would loll out of the bla
nket as if he had turned over in his sleep, but between us we managed to haul him to the carriage. Tito shoved the body on to the floor inside and motioned for me to get in.

  ‘What? In there? With him?’

  ‘Well, he can’t sit up front with me, can he?’

  ‘But I—’

  ‘What did you think we were going to do with him?’

  ‘Put him in the river?’

  He shook his head brusquely. ‘Too dangerous. Too many of them bob back to the surface to tell their tales. Someone would recognise him. Get in, he can’t hurt you now.’

  He closed the door after me and I pulled my feet up on to the seat so they would not touch the corpse. I had been too panicked to close Renzo’s eyes when I first realised he was dead, and Tito was too much of a soldier to bother with such delicacies, so the dead man continued to stare at the roof of the carriage. The jolting of the road caused the blanket to slip off, and every time we bounced over a rut his head would jerk upwards as if he meant to sit up; I could not bring myself to touch his face now, and had to bite my sleeve to stop myself crying out every time he seemed to look at me. It was barely three days since Porta had joked that I would have to get my own carriage if I wanted to take corpses home for Gennaro; I wondered if one day we would be able to laugh at the irony.