A Christmas Requiem

by S. J. Parris

  ‘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 ha
ir 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 blanket 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.

  The coach smelled thickly of blood. I had considered myself a man of science and reason, but after an hour trapped in that dark, lurching space, avoiding a dead man’s accusing stare, I could think only of my grandmother’s stories about vengeful wandering souls; in the rattling of the wheels and the buffeting of the wind I was sure I heard voices whispering. When at last we stopped and Tito opened the door, I shot out like a hunting dog, gulping down cold air that did not reek of death.

  His lantern concentrated the darkness around us. Overhead, the sky was a velvet cloth stitched with diamonds. Only the cries of night birds and the distant howl of wolves broke the silence. I could make out the silhouette of mountains on the horizon, and the broken shapes of boulders all around. There was no sign of movement anywhere.

  Tito lugged Renzo’s body out of the carriage and once again we grappled him between us in his blanket. We must have carried him for near ten minutes before I dropped my end; my arms ached with the weight and sweat stood out on my forehead.

  ‘Not much further,’ Tito said, trying to sound encouraging, though I could only guess at how much he must resent me for all this.

  I wiped my face on my sleeve. ‘I can’t go on.’

  ‘You can and you will,’ he said sharply. ‘Nearly there. Come on.’

  I bent my legs to take the weight and we dragged him a few yards more, until Tito motioned for me to set him down. He held up the lantern and looked around.

  ‘Are we going to bury him?’

  He shook his head. ‘Ground’s too hard. Keep back here, it’s a long way down with some vicious rocks at the bottom.’

  I followed the direction of his finger and saw that we were close to the edge of a gulley where the ground fell away. He unrolled Renzo from the blanket, then wandered off with the light, searching for something at his feet. I crouched by Renzo’s body, trying to examine him.

  ‘Do you think he had the pox?’ I asked, as Tito’s shadow fell across the body. ‘I can’t see any scars, but the light isn’t good. Porta said—’

  ‘I don’t think it much matters now,’ Tito cut in gently, setting down the lantern. ‘You might want to look away for this part, sir.’

  I glanced up and saw that he held a heavy rock in his right hand. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to make sure his own father wouldn’t recognise him. Just to be on the safe side.’ He pulled up his sleeve and adjusted his gloves.

  ‘I don’t think his own father ever did,’ I said, half to myself, as I turned to walk back towards the coach. ‘That was his problem.’

  At my back I heard the wet crunch of splintering bone. I paused by a boulder and heaved up the contents of my stomach, spat hard, wiped my mouth and finished the aqua vitae in Porta’s flask. There came a dragging sound, a scattering of loose rocks, and silence. Tito returned peeling off his gloves, which he dropped into the sack containing my bloodstained clothes.

  ‘Let’s get you home then, sir,’ he said briskly. ‘Try and sleep, if you can.’

  I must have slept; I had no idea how long we had been travelling, but the next time the carriage door opened I could see the faintest sheen of dawn light along the horizon. When I unfolded my stiff limbs and climbed out, I could smell the sea and hear the cries of gulls.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Port of Ostia. Stay here with the horses.’

  I leaned back against the side of the coach and breathed in the cold air. At length, Tito returned to inform me that he had arranged a berth on a boat bound for the Bay of Naples; I was not to give my real name. He pointed me towards the quayside.

  ‘Tito,’ I said, as he turned to go. ‘Have you killed a man?’

  He gave a worldly laugh. ‘I was a soldier, sir.’

  I nodded. ‘My father’s a soldier.’

  ‘Well, then. Ask him. The first one’s the worst.’

  ‘I’m not planning to make a career of it.’

  ‘My master will be relieved to hear that.’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘You’d best get on your way.’

  ‘Is it over?’

  ‘As long as you keep your mouth shut. My master says you know how to do that.’

  I nodded. Ahead, the stars were fading over the sea, and the salt air had begun to scour the taste of blood from my mouth.

  It was the day before Twelfth Night when the boat finally docked, wave-tossed, in the harbour of Naples. Behind an abandoned building at the port, I changed into my spare habit, but I kept the servant’s clothes, in case of future need.

  I had hoped to avoid attention when I arrived back at San Domenico, but I had been in my cell barely ten minutes when there was a knock on the door, and the prior walked in without waiting for an invitation.

  ‘I did not expect you back so soon, Fra Giordano.’

  ‘I didn’t want to outstay my welcome.’

  He appraised me with a swift glance. ‘You’ve lost weight.’

  ‘I was fasting,’ I said. I could hardly tell him that bad weather had prolonged the journey down the coast, and I felt as if I had not kept a meal down for over a week.

  He gave me a sceptical look and folded his arms.

  ‘So?’ he asked. It could have meant anything.

  ‘You haven’t heard …?’

  I had no idea how urgently the Pope would have dispatched his promised letter, nor whether Fra Agostino would have sent any message about my abrupt departure, but I was sure a fast rider could cover the distance between Rome and Naples in half the time my boat had taken.

  ‘I’m asking you.’

  I hesitated. ‘I think – it could have been worse.’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Well, at least they didn’t burn you. Not yet, anyway. What did you make of Cardinal Rebiba?’

  ‘I don’t think he liked me,’ I said carefu
lly.

  The faintest smile stretched the corners of his lips. ‘No, Bruno. Cardinal Rebiba doesn’t like me. He wanted to trip you in order to bring me down. But here we both are, still standing, more or less.’

  I stared at him. ‘If you knew that, why did you let me go?’

  ‘First, because you don’t refuse the Pope, and second, because I trusted you to speak for yourself.’ He folded his arms. ‘Naples is too small for you, Bruno. I’ve known that since the day you arrived here. You have a fine mind, and one day it will lead you away from us to greater things. But there is much you need to learn first, and I am not talking about your theology degree. To thrive in this world, you must learn how to talk to men of status. You must learn how to defend your arguments without appearing to think yourself cleverer than your opponents, even when you are. You must learn the arts of flattery and humility as well as plain-speaking, because if you can’t temper your views, and keep some of your thoughts to yourself, one day you will talk yourself into the arms of the Inquisition.’

  ‘You’re saying I must learn to be a politician. To dissemble.’

  ‘You chose the religious life,’ he said. ‘What else did you expect? I hoped Rome might give you a sharp lesson in those skills.’

  I shook my head. ‘I am content to stay in Naples,’ I said, with some force. ‘I’d be happy if I never saw Rome again.’

  ‘Well, it would certainly be wise to keep your distance for now,’ he said, and the look he shot me from under his brows made me wonder how much he knew. ‘But Rome has eyes everywhere. It grieves me to say it, but neither you nor I know who among our brothers might be watching.’

  ‘Spying for the Vatican, you mean?’ I dropped my voice and glanced at the door, as if someone might have his ear pressed to it at that moment.

  ‘The Vatican, the Inquisition, the Spanish, Cardinal Rebiba, Fra Agostino. It hardly matters. There are plenty of people who would like to see San Domenico in the hands of a prior more easily influenced in their favour, and would gladly use your natural disregard for authority as evidence that I allow heresy to flourish unchecked. So – guard yourself more carefully from now on. Popes do not last for ever, but you have used up your one chance with this one, and we can’t always be here to protect you.’