"Here we are," the other interrupted him, placing in his hand a rose just cut from the bush, "I know what you want to get down to: the Tetrachion."
For a moment, the Abbot fell silent with astonishment.
"The Master Florist is most intuitive and a man of few words," Atto then said in amiable tones, yet looking swiftly all around to make sure that no one was watching us.
"Oh, it was so obvious," came the reply. "Our common friend told me that you wished to resume the matter upon which we touched in our first conversation, in which I referred to the Tetrachion and in which I also mentioned the Spanish jonquil and Catalan jasmine. And now you speak to me of the Escorial: one does not need to be a genius to understand what you are leading up to."
"Ah, yes, of course," Atto hesitated, somewhat troubled by the rapidity of the other's deductions. "Very well, this Tetrachion. .."
"Let us proceed step by step, Signor Abbot, step by step," said the Master Florist, pointing at the rose which he had just placed in Atto's hand. Now, smell it!"
Somewhat taken aback, Atto twirled the rose a little in his hand; at length he raised it to his nose, breathing in deeply.
"But it smells of garlic!" he exclaimed with a grimace of disgust.
Tranquillo Romauli laughed delightedly.
"Well, you have just demonstrated that, as with the palate, so with the flower; if the smell is not good, every beauty is insipid and as though 'twere dead. Thus, giving a good odour to a flower that has none, or only a bad one, is as beneficial as the miracle of giving it life."
"That may be so; but to this. . . er, impertinent flower," objected Melani, dabbing his nostrils with a lace handkerchief, and again shivering with disgust, "death was given, not life."
"You are exaggerating," said the Master Florist amiably. "It is only a medicated flower."
"Meaning?"
"To treat flowers, one takes sheep's manure, which one then macerates in vinegar, adding musk reduced to powder, civet and ambergris, and in this one bathes the seeds for two or three days. The flower born of this process will smell of fresh and delicious aromas, those of musk and civet, which tone up and revive the nostrils of whosoever brings it to his nose."
"But this rose stank of garlic!"
"Of course. It was in fact medicated in another way, to make it resistant to parasites. For, as Didymus and Theophrastes teach, it suffices to plant garlic or onions close to any kind of ornamental flower, especially, close to roses, for the latter to be instantly impregnated with a garlicky stink."
"Disgusting," Atto muttered to himself. "However, what has that to do with the Tetrachion?"
"Wait, wait. By means of medication," continued Romauli, quite unperturbed, "one can completely remove the bad smell of flowers that are rather disagreeable to the nose, such as the
African marsh marigold or Indian carnation, whichever you prefer to call it. One need only macerate the seeds in rose water and dry them in the sun before sowing. Once the flower has been grown, one must take the seeds and repeat the operation, and so on."
"Ah, and how much time does it take to arrive at the result?" asked Atto, growing vaguely curious.
"Oh, a trifle. No more than three years."
"Ah yes, a trifle," replied Atto, without the other becoming in the least aware of his irony.
"And even less time is needed for these little ones," said Romauli, utterly unruffled, jumping lightly up and tiptoeing as he invited Melani to lean over and look into a damp, shady corner behind the bench, between the trunk of a palm and a little wall.
"But these flowers are. .. black!" exclaimed Atto.
He was right: the petals of a group of carnations, hidden in this little cranny (where I had often noticed the Master Florist busying himself of late) were as black as anything I had ever seen.
"I made them grow there so that they should not be overmuch in evidence, said Romauli.
"How did you do it?" I asked. "In nature, there are no black flowers."
"Oh, that is a bagatelle for one versed in the secrets of the art. You take the scaly fruit of the alder, which must first be dry on the tree, reduce it to a very fine powder, and incorporate it in a little sheep's manure, tempered with wine vinegar. You must add salt to correct the astringency of the vinegar and the whole thing will grow soft. Thereupon, you incorporate the roots of the young carnation, and there you have it."
Atto and I, although bored by the Master Florist's explanations, were both astounded by the amiable and ingenious perversion whereby he obtained floral miracles. Not even to me, his faithful helper, had he revealed the existence of the black carnations. Who knows, I wondered to myself, how many such prodigies he had sown in the flower beds of the Villa Spada. He did in fact confide to us that he had just planted an entire bed with lilies the petals of which were painted with the names of the spouses (SPADA and ROCCI) in letters golden and silver; another, with roses medicated with the rarest of oriental essences, and a third with tulips from bulbs soaked in colours (cerulean, saffron, carmine and suchlike), thus tinted with striations of myriad hues, almost as though a rainbow had come down to earth; yet another, with monstrous plants, born of heterogeneous seeds planted in the same ball of manure, as well as parsley with its leaves infolded in the form of cylinders, obtained by pounding the seeds in a mortar and squashing their meatus, and a thousand other wonders of his art.
"I cannot wait for the moment," he concluded, "when Cardinal Spada brings the guests to take a look at my little productions."
"Ah, good. But I still do not see why you no longer wish to speak of the Tetrachion, and I am beginning to wonder whether I may not be wasting your time," said Atto, his tone betraying his real meaning, namely that he was wasting his own time; having said which, he rose from the bench with a decided air.
I too looked around me in confusion. Was the Master Florist having second thoughts?
"Yet, we are getting there," he replied. "The gardens of the Escorial are withering miserably, as I had occasion to mention last time we spoke."
"The gardens of the Escorial, did you say?" Atto asked with a slight start.
"Many, who are wrongly informed, maintain that those Spanish gardens, which were once so splendid, have no future, because of the climate, which has become icier in winter and more arid in summer. I have read much about those unfortunate gardens, you know. They need only a Master Florist and they would be saved. I have never been in Spain, nor indeed have I ever set foot outside Rome. 1 do, however, love to make comparisons with the gardens ofVersailles, which I know to be quite hardy, despite the damp, unhealthy air of the region, and with the many-coloured flower beds of Schonbrunn, which, I have read, were only recently reclaimed from the harsh conditions of the Vienna woods."
Abbot Melani turned and looked at me with hatred in his eyes, while the Master Florist carried on with one of his gardening tasks.
"And I," I tried in a whisper to justify myself, "when I told him that you were worried because death was hovering over the Escorial, thought he might not have understood. .."
"So that is what you said to him. What a refined metaphor, eh?" hissed Atto.
"I have the solution for saving those gardens," continued Ro- mauli, without realising a thing, "and it is indeed fortunate that you should be here, given your deep interest in the matter, as I have learned from your protege."
"Yes, but what about the Tetrachion?" I stammered, still hoping to learn something useful from the Master Florist.
"Precisely. But let us take this step by step. It is a delicate matter," announced Tranquillo Romauli. "Think of anemones. If one wants them to be double, one must select the seeds from flowers which are not early- or late-blooming; they must have suffered neither from heat nor from cold, and thus will produce completely perfect seeds."
"Double flowers, did you say?" I asked, beginning to imagine, and to fear, what he was getting at.
"But of course, from a single carnation will come a double one, if a seedling of the former is plant
ed in excellent soil within the thirty days beginning on the 15th of August, Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mother of God, in a warm place that is well protected from the extremes of the summer. From a double carnation will come a quadruple one if one takes two or three seeds of the double species and, having enclosed them in wax, or in a feather that is wider at the base than at the tip, placed them in the ground. That is what I have done, you see."
Lovingly, he pointed to a few flowers with rather bizarre characteristics: they were carnations of the purest white, with four flowers on the same stem, which bent almost in an arc under their sweet-smelling load.
"Here is my secret recipe for saving the Escorial. These flowers can resist every variation in temperature and climate; I invented them. These are my tetrachion carnations."
"Do you mean. . ." stammered Atto, blanching and stepping back a little, "that your Tetrachion is... this plant?"
"Yes, indeed it is, Signor Abbot Melani," said Romauli, rather surprised by Atto's evident disappointment. "They are so noble, these quadruple inflorescences, that I wished to give them an unusual name: tetrachion, from the ancient Greek 'tetra' meaning 'four'. But perhaps you do not share my opinion and my hopes for the Escorial. If that is so, I beg you to tell me at once, lest I bore you any longer; perhaps you might have preferred to visit my elaboratory of flower essences. I myself can take you there. You will come and visit me one of these days, will you not?"
The conversation with Tranquillo Romauli had cast us into the deepest gloom.
"A bane on you and your wife!" Abbot Melani began, the moment that we left him. "She promised us heaven knows what information through her supposed network of women, and here we are with a fistful of dead flies."
I lowered my head and said nothing; Atto was right. In fact, I was beginning to suspect that, after having risked my life to serve Abbot Melani, Cloridia might secretly have changed her mind about the assistance she had at first promised me and decided to provide me with little or no further news, in case such information might spur me to undertake perilous courses of action. Obviously, I said nothing to the Abbot about my suspicions.
"Clearly, the Master Florist has nothing to do with the women's password," I retorted; "yet he did give us one useful piece of information: Tetrachion means quadruple."
"But tell me, what the Devil has that to do with Capitor's dish?" cried Melani, hammering each syllable and laughing hysterically.
"Nothing whatever, Signor Atto, as far as I can see. But, as I said, at least we know now what the word means."
"I certainly did not need your Master Florist to know that 'tetra' means 'four' in Greek," the Abbot rejoined angrily.
"Yet you did not know that Tetrachion means simply 'quadruple'. . ." I hazarded.
"I had simply forgotten, at my age. Unlike Buvat, I am not a librarian," Atto corrected me.
"Perhaps there was something quadruple in Capitor's dish."
"As I told you, it represented Neptune and Amphitrite driving a chariot through the waves."
"Are you quite sure that there was nothing else?"
"That is all I saw, unless you regard me as completely senile," protested Atto. "However, we shall know for sure the moment that we find Capitor's three gifts. And you know well where we must look."
So, at a tired, funereal pace, we moved yet again towards Elpidio Benedetti's arcane Vessel. I then recalled that I had something urgent to ask Abbot Melani: whoever was that Countess of Soissons, who had sown trouble between Maria and the King? Was she in fact the Countess of S., the mysterious poisoner to whom the Connestabilessa had so reticently referred?
I was suddenly overcome by a bout of acute resentment for the Abbot: he still had made no mention to me of the Spanish succession, yet the Connestabilessa's letters spoke of nothing else. Atto spoke to me of another Spain, that of fifty years ago, the Spain of Don John and Capitor with her mysterious gifts to Mazarin. Might there be a connection between these two Spains? Perhaps there was one, contained in the mysterious essence of the Tetrachion.
"You are lost in thought, my boy," observed Atto, who had in truth until that moment been more absorbed than I.
The Abbot was observing my frowning, pensive face with some anxiety; like all professional liars, he was forever worrying that someone might sooner or later piece together the broken threads of his half-truths.
"I was thinking of the Tetrachion and, now that we are again approaching the Vessel, of Maria Mancini," said I with a great sigh.
This was, of course, a lie. It is true that I was thinking of Maria, but only because in the letters which she had sent to Atto, and which I had by now inspected several times over, there were still a number of things that eluded me.
"To be specific, I was wondering about the court's cruelty to that young woman; for instance, about the Countess of Soissons — by the way, who is she?" I asked with false ingenuousness.
"I see that even the intense events of the past few hours and even the lack of sleep have not caused you to forget all that I have been telling you," replied the Abbot with some satisfaction, probably believing that I had been so moved by his narration of the amorous vicissitudes of the young King of France that I was now begging him for more details. He had expected no less of me.
The Countess of Soissons, explained Abbot Melani, was none other than Maria's elder sister. She was called Olimpia Mancini and, according to some, she had been among the young King's initiators in the arts of love.
In the spring of 1654, when she was seventeen and Louis fifteen, they would often dance together on festive occasions; and she nursed the kind of hopes that might be expected in the circumstances. ..
However, her uncle, the Cardinal, promised her early on to the Count of Soissons, a member of the House of Savoy related to the royal family. They married in 1657.
"Olimpia was rather envious by nature," croaked Atto, bringing up what was plainly a disagreeable memory. "She had a long, pointed face with no beauty about it other than dimples on her cheeks and two vivacious eyes, which were unfortunately too small. The court wondered: 'Was she ever the King's mistress?'"
"Well, was she?" I interrupted, in the hope that Melani would let drop some detail of interest for my research.
"That is not the right question. One cannot speak of mistresses in connection with a fifteen-year-old boy. The most that might be asked is whether they may have given in to their urges. And the answer is: what does it matter?"
According to Atto, one thing was certain: whether platonic or not, the time passed with Olimpia left absolutely no mark on the young King: nothing that touched his soul. And when Maria and Louis's hearts first beat for one another, Olimpia was already expecting her first son.
"Alas, pregnancy did nothing to curb her terrible jealousy for her sister, who had succeeded in the most natural way in the world in obtaining what she had vainly but deliberately set out to win: the heart of the young King."
Spite thus spurred Olimpia once more to flirt with the Sovereign, between her first and second pregnancies; but this time, in vain. She then gained the secret support of the Queen Mother, who feared the love between Louis and Maria, and took pleasure in troubling her sister by showing her letters in which the King's mother expressed her opposition.
"So it was she who calumnied Maria in the King's ear, as soon as she returned to Paris after the Spanish wedding!" I realised in surprise.
Given my condition as a foundling who had never had brothers and sisters, I had always dreamed of and liked to imagine myself with many, many siblings. And in my dreams, I always saw them as the truest and most trustworthy of friends.
"Are you surprised? Since the times of Cain and Abel, things have gone thus," replied Atto with a complacent air, whereupon he recited:
Blood brothers often will ingest
Dame Envy's fatal venom best:
First Cain, then Esau, and Thyestes,
And Jacob's sons and Eteocles,
For they were fired much more than
others
As if their victims weren't their brothers,
And consanguinity incited
Will burn up stronger when ignited.
"As you heard, it is no accident that Sebastian Brant, who is so dear to that Albicastro, should have dedicated verses in his Ship of Fools to fraternal hatred. Fortunately, however, there is no infallible rule. Maria always kept up the closest of ties with another of her sisters, Ortensia."
Ah, yes, I thought. Was not Atto himself a living example of fraternal love? He had all his life been tied to his brothers by an unbreakable mutual aid pact. I had heard of this many years before, at the Locanda del Donzello, when a lodger hissed disapprovingly that the brothers Melani always moved "in a pack, like wolves".
Secretum Page 56