Lastly, and worst of all, the Abbot had hidden the truth from me about the three cardinals and what they up to when we followed them: the dying King of Spain had requested the Pope's assistance in resolving the problem of the succession to the throne and the Pope had instructed the three to draw up the reply. I had taken part in a hunt without knowing what quarry we were pursuing.
Of course, I understood perfectly well that, given his prudence and his mistrustful nature, Atto could not always reveal to me what he was plotting: all the more so in that his principal reason for coming to Villa Spada concerned something very different: the secret correspondence between the Connestabilessa and the Most Christian King.
Nevertheless, his stubborn silence on the Spanish question had made me feel like a marionette who could not be trusted with secrets. The worst of this was that I could not even blame him for his behaviour: I myself had betrayed his trust by reading his correspondence with Maria, and that forced me to remain silent.
We had amply fed at the gentlemen's table. Cloridia absented herself briefly to put the little girls to bed alongside the children of the other servants. Returning to me, she took me by the hand and guided me towards the pavilions. There, under cover of the late hour and guided by the braziers giving off their odours of pungent spices - and protected by the fact that most souls were overcome by so much imbibing of sugary liqueurs - the chaos of the domestics' chatter had given way to conspiratorial whispers and amorous murmuring. My spouse and I made our way between stockings and shoes abandoned on the lawn and bare feet echoing on the thresholds of those silken kiosks.
We settled down some way off, on the edge of that curious village, by now silent, yet full of activity. There, under a fluttering tent of Armenian gauze softly interwoven with gentle shades of amaranth red, we prudently unrolled the hangings to close the entrance and, far from prying eyes, my members sank amidst plumed cushions and my memory dissolved utterly in my lady's melting, rounded warmth, while the aromatic perfume of the braziers blended with other secret and ineffable fragrances.
"To what do we owe the honour?" said Cloridia, smiling in the most natural way in the world to someone behind my back.
I gave a violent start and turned sharply, as a hand was laid on my shoulder.
"I have news," said Abbot Melani, without so much as a hint of embarrassment. "Get dressed. I shall wait for you at the gate. My respects and my most profound apologies, Monna Cloridia," he added; then, just before pulling the entrance curtain behind him, "and my compliments..."
"How dare you!" I shouted, quite beside myself, after dressing and joining him.
"Calm down. I did call you from outside the tent, but you were too busy to hear me. . ."
"What do you want?" I cut him short, purple in the face with indignation.
"I have spoken with Lamberg."
"And?" I rejoined, hoping that some light had at least been cast on the assault suffered by Atto.
After a long wait, Abbot Melani had at last come face to face with the powerful Count Lamberg, scion of one of the Empire's most glorious families of ambassadors.
Exercising the greatest possible caution, he had come accompanied by Buvat. But the sombre Lamberg had begged the servants to leave him and his guest in private. Consequently, the secretary had remained in the ante-chamber.
"I know you by reputation, Signor Abbot Melani," Lamberg began.
Atto was instantly alarmed: was this an allusion to his treatise on the conclaves? Had he perhaps received it by some oblique route, perhaps from Cardinal Albani himself, and already perused it from start to finish?
"When the Emperor sent me here from Ratisbon," the Ambassador continued, "I expected to find benign influences here in this Holy City where the Jubilee is now taking place. Instead, I found Babylon."
"Babylon?" repeated Atto, growing even more circumspect.
"I find myself caught up in a sea of confusion, of horrible wars, of partisan struggles," he continued, scowling grimly.
"Ah, yes, I understand: the difficult international situation..." said Atto in an attempt to bring some calm to the conversation.
"Wretch!" Lamberg screamed suddenly, banging his fist on the table.
Silence descended on the room. Innumerable pearls of sweat ran down Abbot Melani's forehead. Such threatening and violent behaviour might even presage an attack. Without giving any sign of doing so, Atto had begun to look around him: he feared the sudden attack of assassins ordered to murder him. Damnation, why had he not thought of that? It was too long since he had been on mission in the Empire and he had forgotten how different the Germans were from the French. "Those damned Habsburgs, mad and bloodthirsty every one of them, from Spain to Austria, ever since the time of Joan the Mad." Before the meeting, he had promised himself that he would accept nothing from Lamberg's hand, not even a glass of water; but the possibility of an ambush had not crossed his mind.
"No one would ever find me. Only you knew that I had gone to visit Lamberg, but no one would ever have believed you," observed the Abbot.
He began to curse himself for having brought Buvat; they might kill the pair of them and both would simply disappear from the face of this earth.
At that point in the Abbot's narration, I remembered the Bezoar stone which, as I had secretly read a few days earlier in his correspondence, the Connestabilessa had sent him for its powers in warding off poisons. Atto had promised to keep it in his pocket during the audience, but it would be of little use in the event of an ambush. . .
As these dark thoughts rushed through the Abbot's mind, Lamberg remained silent, looking him straight in the eye. Melani returned the stare, not understanding whether the Ambassador intended to continue the conversation or to pass from words to action.
A sudden thought consoled him: too many people had seen him enter the Medici palace, which was the Roman property of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his protector. Atto was well known there. If he were to die of stab wounds, it would be difficult to hush the matter up for long.
Still Lamberg said nothing. Atto dared not move a muscle. He remembered an old story - who knows whether it was true or not? A minister of the Emperor who had apparently died of a heart attack had in fact been killed with an invisible inoculation of poison behind the ear. There were any number of poisons that simulated a natural death: some could be sprayed on clothing, in one's hair, vapourised in the air, poured into the ear, dissolved in baths and foot-baths. . . All this, Atto knew perfectly well. The serpent of fear again crept up his back.
"Wretch. . ." hissed Lamberg once more, betraying in his trembling voice anger of an intensity approaching madness.
Fear or no fear, Atto could not allow himself to be insulted like that. Calling up all the audacity of which he was capable, he replied as his honour demanded.
"I beg your pardon."
Lamberg's eyes, which had for a moment wandered elsewhere, again fixed his own with unbearable intensity. The Ambassador stood up. Atto did likewise, fearing the worst. He grasped his walking stick firmly, ready to defend himself. Lamberg, however, moved to the window, which was ajar. He opened it wide.
"Are you happy in Rome, Signor Abbot Melani?" he asked, suddenly changing the subject.
"That's an old trick," thought Atto to himself, "continually changing the subject to confuse the person with whom one is speaking. I must be on my guard."
Meanwhile, Lamberg was looking out of the window, with his back to him: an unusual, and somewhat embarrassing situation. Atto waited awhile, but as the Ambassador continued to show him his back, which was in terms of diplomatic protocol quite unprecedented, he felt entitled to move so as to be able to see and hear him better. However, hardly had he taken a step forward than he realised the Austrian's chest was shaking rhythmically. Atto could hardly believe his eyes, yet there could be no doubt about it.
Lamberg was weeping.
"Wretch," he repeated for a third time, "he did not leave me so much as a scrap of paper. But the Emperor will make him
pay for this, ah yes, that he will! He will pay for every one of his misdeeds," said he, turning and wagging his finger menacingly at Melani. "That wretched dog Martinitz," he sobbed, with a crazed expression contorting his face.
Count Martinitz, Atto explained to me, had been Lamberg's predecessor. A few months previously, he had been relieved of his post as Ambassador and hurriedly replaced because he had made himself too many enemies in Rome. Everyone in town had heard of this.
What no one, however, knew of and Lamberg angrily explained to Atto, was Martinitz's revenge. On his arrival in Rome, poor Lamberg had found in the Embassy archives, as he himself had confessed, not one single scrap of paper. His predecessor had carried off the entire diplomatic correspondence with him.
The new Ambassador (who in fact knew neither the city nor the pontifical court) was thus deprived of all the information essential for his work: the contacts upon whom he could count, the list of paid informers, the cardinals with whom there were good relations and those of whom one must be wary, the character of the Pope, his preferences, the details of pontifical ceremonial and so on and so forth. Of course, when he was appointed, he had, as was common practice, received instructions from the Emperor; but the situation really obtaining at the Rome embassy he could only learn from Martinitz, who had instead played this atrocious trick on him.
"I understand, Your Excellency, the matter is extremely grave," murmured Atto sympathetically.
Atto knew perfectly well: the representatives of the Empire were rigid and intractable and incapable of any spark of imagination. Without a written trail to follow, Lamberg was perfectly incapable of building up his own network of acquaintances and informers.
The Ambassador's outpourings continued like a torrent in full spate. I lardly had he set foot in Rome, he recounted, when he realised (but no one had forewarned him) that the pro-imperial party in the city was very weak indeed, while the French had it all their own way and obtained from the Pope whatever they wanted.
"Really?" I exclaimed in surprise.
"He even told me that he was unable to obtain an audience with the Pope, while Uzeda and the other ambassadors come and go freely every day in the Vatican."
In other words, the long-awaited meeting with the man suspected of being behind the wounding of Atto and perhaps even the assault which had brought about the death of the bookbinder Haver, had turned out to be nothing but a litany of whining and complaints. In the end, Lamberg had approached Atto, putting him on his guard against the malign forces which were abroad in the city and inviting him especially to beware of the Sacred College of Cardinals, that nest of every vice and iniquity.
"I expected to find here the government of the just, but I was all too soon forced to change my mind," said he in lugubrious tones. "What counts in Rome are reasons of state and in the pontifical court worldly affairs are handled with no respect for reason or rights, not even for the law. Religion counts for absolutely nothing!"
"I seemed to be hearing the music of that compatriot of theirs - what is he called? Ah yes, Muffat. A symphony so grave, so slow and severe as to be positively mournful," said the Abbot with perplexity written all over his face.
Faced with this outburst, Atto, once more sure of himself, had retorted: "But what did you expect to find in these parts, Signor Ambassador? This is the city of deceit, dissimulation and eternal postponements, and of promises never kept. The Pope's ministers are past masters at spinning illusion, saying but not saying, intriguing, attacking from under cover."
The Abbot had continued freely to list the iniquities of the court of Rome, while Lamberg nodded disconsolately; until the Ambassador, perhaps because of another visit, sent him warmly on his way, honouring him with a sincere handshake.
Sincere? Once in the street with Buvat, Atto had regretted allowing himself to be dismissed so soon. He realised that Lam- berg's behaviour bordered on the improbable. What if it had all been put on? If it had been he (as really had appeared to be the case until that moment) who had woven the thread of the assault on the Abbot and the theft of his treatise on the Secrets of the Conclave, then he must be malign and subtle indeed. If that were so, would he not be able even to act the part of the fool? The emotions displayed by the Ambassador had, however, been so violent and unexpected that anyone would have been caught out.
"In other words," I commented, "we are back where we started."
"Alas, yes. This Lamberg is either a soul whose true vocation was to be found in the peace of an Austrian cloister, or else he is a consummate actor."
"If I have understood, he got you to speak at length about the court of Rome while he himself told you little of any use."
"What do you think? Of course, I told him only what is generally known, nothing of any importance. Do you take me for a novice?" Melani retorted, somewhat piqued.
"I am not for one moment doubting your word, Signor Atto; however if Lamberg really put on a show for you but you were not pretending with him. . ."
"What of it?" he asked nervously.
"Then he knows your nature but you don't know his."
"Yes, but I do not think that. . . Buvat, what is this all about?"
Atto's secretary had arrived all out of breath. This was clearly an emergency.
"Sfasciamonti had caught the second cerretano, the friend of Il Roscio."
"Is that II Marcio, the one we followed at the Baths of Diocletian, but who got away?"
"The very man. It was sheer luck: he made a false move. He was begging in church, in Saint Peter's itself. Seeing the protection enjoyed by the cerretani, he must have thought he could get away with it. Instead, Sfasciamonti was around and he caught him. He has already interrogated him using the same methods as last time: real prison, false notary. He enlisted the help of a couple of colleagues."
"Those are people who do nothing out of friendship," commented Atto. "I think I shall have to shell out another large tip... So, what did the cerretano say?"
"Sfasciamonti is waiting to tell us all about it."
"Let us make haste, then," Atto exhorted me, as I resigned myself to doing without Cloridia's company for the rest of the evening.
The catchpoll was hiding behind the toolshed in the garden. He was in a state of agitation and one could not blame him for that. It was the second time in a few days that he had laid hands on a cerretano and, if the sect were really that powerful, he was risking his skin. As he talked, he panted with excitement, as after a long run.
"They are holding it tonight, by all the daggers."
"Holding what?"
"They're meeting tonight for the new Maggiorengo-General. The leader of the scoundrels. They all get together, even those who come from far afield, to appoint the successor."
"And where?"
"At Albano."
"Can you repeat that?"
"At Albano."
I saw Atto Melani lower his eyelids, as though he had just heard a friend had died, almost as though he had been told that the Most Christian King had ordered him never again to set foot in France.
"It simply is not possible... Albano, a stone's throw from Rome ..." I heard him gasp. "How could I not have thought of that?"
Albano. And not Albani. When Ugonio told us that the cerretani intended to bring Atto's papers ad Albanum, we thought that they meant to hand them over to Cardinal Albani. Instead the old tomb robber meant that they were to be taken to Albano, the little town near the lake of the same name, which has been a well-known holiday resort since the days of Cicero.
I saw Atto's face relax a little. At least there was no danger of Cardinal Albani covering him with infamy, as he had feared.
There remained the unknown factor of Lamberg, and the Grand Legator: why should the cerretani have to go to Albano to deliver the treatise on the Secrets of the Conclave to him?
"What will they do with my manuscript at Albano?"
"The vagabond knows nothing of that."
"What else did he say?"
"Besides elec
ting the Maggiorengo-General, the cerretani have to change their way of speaking. But there's a problem. The new secret language appears to have been stolen."
"But by whom?"
"The ragamuffin does not know. If you want, I can read the record of his interrogation to you. As I did with II Roscio, I changed a few dates and names, you know, in order not to run any risks; but the rest is exactly as I said."
"Not now. While we are on the road."
"While we are on the road?" I asked, without grasping what he meant by that.
Geronimo. That was the real name of II Marcio, the cerretano caught by Sfasciamonti. Now we had his words under our eyes, lit by the tremulous flame of a lantern, written in a tiny no-nonsense handwriting of which one could with a little intuition sense that it lent itself readily to lies: the hand of some catchpoll in the habit of falsifying, distorting or cutting statements. As we had been told, the date of the interrogation had been altered for safety, as had already been done with that of II Roscio. Sfasciamonti had back-dated it by more than a century so as to be able to place it in the Governor's archives while making sure that it passed unobserved. So this second record of proceedings was dated 18 March 1595, as ever at the prison of Ponte Sisto.
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