A Dancer in Darkness

by David Stacton

  There is a point of acquiescence beyond which it is impossible to turn back. Dimly the Duchess passed it and seized at it. She had to save both himself and her.

  “Stop it,” she shouted at him. “How dare you. Stop it and get out.”

  He let go of her at once. It was as though something snapped in him.

  She was appalled by the look in his eyes. “I didn’t mean it,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”

  She stood there helplessly. She had hurt his pride, and so he would never be easy or spontaneous with her again. Something would always be held back. And in the pain of that she completely forgot that she had sent for him only in order to send him away.

  IX

  It was the next day that Bosola arrived, and it was because of this interview that at first he found out nothing.

  He, too, came to Amalfi by morning, by boat, for like his master before him, he also intended to spy out the land. But he saw Amalfi far differently than had Ferdinand. For one thing, he was not helped from the boat, but landed wet on the shingle. For another, there was no one to welcome him there. Where Ferdinand had seen a heap of impoverished dwellings to which he paid no attention, Bosola saw a dirty, powerful, and inimical town. He came alone, without anyone to back him, and on the worst of errands. He could not be blamed for shivering.

  Rather than go directly to the palace, he put up at a decent inn, though no inn in those days was really decent, and sent a message to Antonio. When the answer came, it was to say that Antonio could not receive him until tomorrow.

  Bosola sniffed. It was his nature to think that Antonio was now too important to see him at once. But that happened not to be true. At the moment Antonio could not bring himself to see anyone.

  When love turns out not to have been love, you go through the day very quietly. You tell yourself you have been very brave. And only when you are alone, and haunted by that adored face that will never again look at you in quite the same way, do you realize what your real feelings are. They are nameless.

  Yet you are gratified. You are deeply gratified. You agree to all her terms. You agree it was not love. It was affection, or fondness, or fellow feeling, or indeed anything, so long as you may not be utterly dismissed. And if affection or fondness is left, then your love pours itself into that, and takes it shape, and so you have not lost anything. Yet you have lost something. You have both lost something. That can be felt as soon as you embrace. For that lost something you cry together, and it brings you closer, and you grow drowsy in a mutual tenderness. It is like twilight. Perhaps you have never been so tender with each other before. The memory of what you have lost ties you together more closely than passion ever could. You are still together. And yet that is what heartbreak is. Heartbreak is not to lose someone. Heartbreak is never to be able to bear to lose someone with whom something has been lost. You could have had that lost something with no one else, and so you go on with them. You love them the more for being there. Heartbreak is marriage after the honeymoon.

  For Antonio it had been even worse than that. Yet he had the feeling that the Duchess had not truly dismissed him. Such feelings are beyond words. They are not beyond the power of love, for if passion understands nothing, love is passion with the blinkers off.

  So he was almost happy, knowing that he would see her every day.

  But for the moment he could not bear to see anyone. That was why he would not see Bosola until the next day.

  For his own part, Bosola was in his blackest mood, the one at the bottom that he almost never reached. He passed a bad night.

  That did not prevent him from being efficient. He went to the palace next day with more information than he had had before. First of all, and best for his own purposes, he had discovered that Antonio was not popular in Amalfi. He was an outsider, and he held a job which otherwise would have been given to an Amalfitan.

  About the Duchess public feeling ran a little differently. The feeling was that she would not last long, and since she was harmless and pretty, her subjects felt sorry for her. But they would not raise a finger to help her, should she fall into any danger, for they had backed the wrong side too often, ever to be moved by motives of chivalry. Amalfi had been given back and forth over their heads so often since the fall of their Republic that they were indifferent to their own rulers. They were more concerned with the price of fish.

  A spy has two abilities. The one is to find out secret information. The other is to see the hidden significance of information that is not secret at all. Bosola possessed both. As he entered the palace and crossed the courtyard towards the offices, his practised eye saw many things. They added up to the fact that he was in the presence of pomp without power and the great silliness of an impotent aristocracy. He began to feel more at his ease.

  Antonio kept up no pomp at all and received him at once. He felt so friendless that he was longing for someone to befriend.

  So Bosola’s case was won before he had even spoken for it. Like all men of guile, it never occurred to him that others might do what he wished for reasons of their own, of which he had no inkling. He looked at Antonio, and saw that the man was not to be envied after all. He was a fool and he had not prospered. At the moment he seemed under some kind of tension, and somewhat thinner than he had been in Rome. His face, too, was as tanned as the skins of white-skinned people ever get.

  As for Antonio, he saw a man he had almost forgotten, and one he did not altogether like the look of. For he felt instinctively that there was a wiriness in Bosola that might snap at any moment, and more than anything else he felt sorry for the man, as one would feel sorry for a poor relation. And indeed that is how men like Bosola manage to hang on at great courts, even though they think the reason is something quite different. What they attribute to their own cleverness is only the ability to inspire the same faintly uneasy sense of obligation that a second cousin inspires, a sort of family shame that does not do much, but at least keeps them from starving.

  So the matter was settled simply, and Bosola found himself a clerk attached to the Purse and Wardrobe, a sinecure that would keep him fed, lodged, and able to follow his own business, which in this case was not his own.

  Antonio proposed to introduce him to the Duchess.

  This was something Bosola was not prepared for, not because of the Duchess, but for another reason. But having dared to make a pretext to see her, Antonio was in a panic about giving the idea up, and so the matter was arranged. They went at once.

  The Duchess was in the great hall. It would be difficult to say why. Outwardly she was merely walking with Cariola, before going to her rooms. But actually these days she could rest in no particular room, but wandered aimlessly through the palace, in so far as that could be done with decorum, not in order to speak to Antonio, or even to meet him, but only with the thought of seeing him in the distance.

  Antonio introduced Bosola, who knelt to kiss her hand.

  She found the kiss repugnant. His lips were chapped and coarse, but that was not the reason. This meeting was not necessary. She was cross with Antonio for forcing it, even while she took hope from the fact that he had.

  She did not recognize Bosola, and yet he seemed familiar. If he was Antonio’s creature, she would prefer him. It would give her pleasure to do that. But she felt mistrustful, even while she bade him welcome to her court and added whatever meaningless phrases occurred to her.

  Because Antonio was there, even because she did not look at him, she prolonged the interview. Beside her Cariola gave a start. The Duchess looked round involuntarily. But Cariola said nothing. She merely looked troubled.

  The Duchess thought it was because of Antonio. And because the new man seemed eager to go, as well as because Cariola had brought her to her senses, she dismissed Antonio sharply and regretfully. But she did not leave the hall. She stayed there, watching Antonio until he had gone.

  Left to himself, Bosola leaned against a wall, and mopped his brow. He had almost forgotten about Cariola. Thinking he
was unwell, Antonio showed him to the rooms that had been prepared for him.

  X

  Technically, in the etiquette of those days, Bosola ranked with Cariola, several notches below those among whom he mixed, but still a member of the gentry. And in those days that meant a good deal. On the one hand it meant a vast and perpetual embarrassment not suffered, for example, by the likes of Antonio. But on the other, particularly in small courts, it meant that once given a position, and he was assured at least of adequate housing and honourable meals, a place or two above the salt. It meant that the gentry itself always knew who you were, but that the servants were sometimes confused, which was where the rub came. In our day the situation would be reversed.

  The rooms given Bosola were small and grudging, but there were two of them, they were neatly furnished, and the window of the bedroom looked across the courtyard towards the Duchess’s loggia, and the corridor outside gave on the corridor leading to her rooms. It was there he waited for Cariola, for he knew she would come.

  He had to wait a long time.

  Cariola was with her mistress, watching her with something very like dread. Once she had wished that the Duchess would confide in her. Now she heartily hoped that she would not.

  For she loved the Duchess, exactly as a nurse loves a child. She wished harm to come to her, but not too much harm, and never for too long. She wanted no one to worm out of her anything secret the Duchess might say.

  No one would have thought, to look at her, or even to know her, that Cariola was a passionate woman. But she was. She was that sort of person who loves only once, and whose passion is not blind to the faults of its object, but sees them even more clearly. The person she had loved was Bosola. He had tricked her badly, but she knew him well. As soon as she laid eyes on him, therefore, she sensed, rather than knew, why he was there. The only defence she could think of was to go and tell him so.

  But she also knew that he had used her before, and might use her again. For this reason she hovered over the Duchess with a special anxiety, unwilling to leave her, and at the same time urging her to go to bed.

  The Duchess did not want to go to bed.

  She had reached that stage of frustrated desire when one can think of a thousand reasons why one cannot have what one wants, and blames oneself for everything that has gone wrong. She had met Antonio privately only twice. The scene in the tomb-house she remembered only when she was exhausted with self-reproach. But the scene when she had told him to get out ran through her head interminably, as though it were joined end to end, to form a St. Catherine’s wheel, on which her conscience ceaselessly revolved.

  She was in such a position that she who should have been wooed was forced to do the wooing. And again and again, moving through the routine of her day, she thought of every mistake she had made. It was too much for a girl of twenty to endure. It was not her fault. It was not a position that a woman could endure with dignity, and it had no precedent.

  Why, when he had come up the stair, had she not rushed to him like a girl? Why had she not poured out everything she had to say? She had so much to say. And most of all, why had something wicked and impatient in her told him to get out? Was it because she had done none of those things, and because he could not woo her? She was wrong to blame him for that. The position was impossible. But they could not go back and begin again. She must put him out of her mind. But she could not put him out of her mind. Her mind swung up and down, like a teetertotter, and carried her with it, now exalted, now depressed. And all this time Cariola fidgeted, brushed her hair, and turned down the bed.

  The Duchess regarded the bed with distaste. No bed had any right to be that empty.

  Cariola listened for a moment from the next room, and then slipped out into the corridor.

  Antonio had a sense of protocol, and Cariola was Mistress of the Household. He had therefore consulted her earlier about rooms to be set aside for someone he wished to introduce into the staff. If she had known it was to be Bosola, she would have made them much meaner. With a tight-lipped expression, she turned down the shadowy corridor until she came to the turn at the far end, and then paused for a moment outside his door. She was about to knock, when she thought better of it, and slipped inside instead.

  Several lighted candles stood on a deal table. Bosola was sitting there, doing absolutely nothing. His dimly lit face made him look not like a devil, but one of the damned. It took her slightly aback. She leaned against the door she had closed, and stared at him.

  “Why have you come here?” she demanded.

  He did not seem the least surprised at this approach. Perhaps it was more or less what he had expected.

  “The Steward offered me the position when he was in Rome.”

  “At the Cardinal’s.” She almost spat the words out.

  Bosola was alarmed. He had forgotten how much she hated him. She hated him because she had once loved him, and she thought he had used her. Well, he had used her. Yet it was not true that he had meant to do so. In the beginning his affair with her had been quite genuine. That was the part he remembered. She, being the abandoned one, had remembered the rest of it. She could do him great damage here.

  “I know why you have come,” she said. “You will get nothing out of me.”

  “I do not want anything from you.”

  She sniffed. “You’ll not get around me.” She sounded more as though she were talking to herself than to him.

  His eyes narrowed. He had caught the double inflection, and it made him consider her more carefully. It was a long time since he had felt any physical warmth, and his body was far lonelier even than he, for though we get used to loneliness, our bodies never do.

  “Sit down,” he said, and nodded towards the flagon of wine on the table. He tried to make his voice agreeable, and was surprised to find he felt agreeable.

  For a moment she almost believed him, for he almost believed himself. His voice was sincere. His eyes, however, caught by the candle-light, were not.

  She was filled with an immense rage that anything so fine as her Duchess should run the risk of being clawed down by a man like this, and a rage equally great that she was still attracted to him, and so might, willy-nilly, be the lever he needed.

  He smiled wryly. “You might be wrong. Perhaps I am an honest man.”

  She was nervous. She snapped. “You are not a man. You are only somebody’s creature.” Unaccountably she felt herself burst into tears.

  Bosola was startled. Then he pushed the flagon of wine towards her slowly, realizing before she did the real reason why she had come. And even while he did so, he was filled not only with savage self-contempt, but also with a most peculiar and unusual gentleness, the gentleness of a man who drives himself, and yet unexpectedly finds a moment to sit down.

  XI

  Sometimes we do not fully realize our own motives. He had thought that he had kept her with him because it was the only way to calm her down. But once she was there, he found that he also wanted her to stay. They passed a strange night.

  She came to him from time to time after that, but always without warning, and always very late. He scarcely knew how he felt about it, but it was an immense physical relief for them both, and if we cannot rest, it is at least something if our bodies can.

  For the rest, he could find out nothing. Had it not been for the strange uneasiness he sensed not only in Cariola, but also when watching the Duchess, he would have despaired of there being anything to find out. And after a while his suspicions passed from Antonio elsewhere. There was nothing between them, he was sure. The mischief, if it did exist, must exist with someone else. He was reduced to sending the Cardinal minute descriptions of petty court intrigue, the opinions of the Amalfitani, and the condition of the State. It made him tremble for his position.

  But days and weeks, and then months, went by, and nothing happened. It became autumn. Frost ran up the orange trees and touched the oranges. The sea grew angry and the court wore warmer clothes. The mountains l
ooked colder.

  All summer Cariola had watched the Duchess try one diversion after another. She had seen her grave, gay, wise, coquettish, full of laughter, and a little sad, taking an interest in the proposed convent, talking with prelates at dinner, or riding alone in the mountains, with a hawk on her wrist. Yet no matter what the Duchess did, Cariola was not deceived. She still caught her mistress watching Antonio from time to time. Outwardly Antonio’s deportment left nothing to be desired, but something had gone out of him. He did not dance any more, and the court had grown sedate. His calves were going down. His legs were now wanly slim.

  Winter was early that year. The first snow fell early in October, powdering the ground only lightly, as though with sugar. The year was almost gone.

  Cariola hurried into her Mistress’s bedchamber, bringing heavy furs from the storage cassone, to find her mistress kneeling and in floods of tears. She dropped the furs to the floor and put her arms around the Duchess, kneeling beside her. She hated to see grief.

  For the Duchess it was not precisely grief. It was strain. She had controlled herself too long, so at last she had given way. It was the first winter snow that had proved too much. She could not bear that this year in which she had met him should go away without her seeing him again.

  And in her own mind she had settled something. She had watched Antonio covertly for months. She had blamed him with every base motive she could invent, and every infirmity of character she could think of. She had believed him cold. But sorrowing self-control had made her see at last that passion could have a passive as well as an active form. She was convinced now that he was suffering because of her, and tried to compensate herself for the gulf between them with that. But now it seemed that nothing could compensate her for that gulf. She clung to Cariola, and cried in her lap.