There, in the sunlight, stood Saara and Gaspare, with the horse. Gaspare was looking sulky. So was the horse. Saara had one hand wrapped in the black mane, and she had evidently been bestowing a few home-truths upon both of them.
Damiano came out blinking against the white light. In his arms he cradled three lengths of black wood, wrapped in a twist of brass wires. “It has been taken apart,” he announced. “The harp. He said… he said to me…”
“That he would never take it apart again,” added Gaspare.
“Not… while he lived to play it.”
“He was your friend?” Saara asked gently.
They had been walking with great purpose toward the river for some minutes before he answered her. “I guess so. He was very good to me. I did nothing for him.”
Gaspare giggled awkwardly. “What were you supposed to do? He had money and position. You didn’t. And we only knew him for a few weeks.”
Saara watched Damiano rub his eyes with his shirt-sleeve. He noticed. “Pay no attention to that,” he barked at her. “I do it all the time. It means nothing—no more than a sneeze.” Then, in an excess of frustrated feeling, he drew back his fist as though he would slam it into the nearest wall.
But as he was a musician and that wall was made of stone, he thought better of the action and hit his fist into his opposite palm. “Curse it all to hell!” he shouted, and then stared wildly from one friend’s face to the other.
“Wait for me here,” he commanded. “There’s something I must find out.” He darted down a side street. There followed a disgruntled whinny, and the tall horse followed his master at a trot, a small pot of blooming violets hanging from his mouth.
“He is mad, our Damiano,” said Gaspare complacently.
The door was locked from within, the hanging sign was missing, and the windowless face of the jeweler’s shop gave no clue to what lay within. Yet Damiano’s senses told him that there was someone alive in the shop or above it. He pounded on the door repeatedly.
Finally a voice cried out from a slot window above his head. “Closed! Go away.”
Damiano backed into the street. “Ormerin, let me in. It’s Delstrego.”
“Who?”
“The man with the ruby pendant.” There was no answer, and Damiano added, “I swear by all the saints, man, that I am not sick of the plague. In fact I am probably the safest man in all Avignon to let in your door.”
After a moment’s reflection, the jeweler called out, “What do you want, Italian? Do you want to buy your ruby back?”
“You still have it, then?”
The jeweler cleared his throat. Damiano could see one small brown eye and half a mouth at the burglar-proof window. Ormerin was watching Damiano’s horse as the beast tried its black nose into all the ground floor windows on the street. “It’s not the sort of thing one sells every week or two. I haven’t even shown it yet.”
“Ah?” Damiano nodded his head forcefully, as though this bit of information was important. “And your family, Monsieur Ormerin. Your wife and little ones. Are they well?”
Ormerin, who was small and smooth-faced, regarded Damiano with his other eye. “So far, and may God maintain us.”
“That is all I wanted to know,” replied Damiano, and he ran away again. Festilligambe followed reluctantly.
Damiano returned breathing hard. He had twisted his foot slightly on a stone and walked gingerly. “He hides his lies in a shell of the truth,” he gasped. “Like a worm in a hazelnut. You think you have learned to ignore him, and then you find he has struck you in another level of deceit.”
Saara stared at her lover without comprehension. She bent down and took his ankle in both her hands. After a few moments the pain departed. “What are you talking about, Dami?” she asked at last.
“The Devil. He told me I was responsible for the plague in Avignon.”
Gaspare’s gooseberry eyes rolled. He put one arm at the small of Damiano’s back and marched him forward. “When was all this?” asked the boy indulgently.
“Last week,” replied Damiano, testing his leg.
“Last week there was no plague in Avignon.”
The sprain was gone entirely. At the end of the street the Rhone sparkled, its surface shattered by the breeze. “That was what made him so convincing. He said the sickness came in my ruby, which I sold. But the jeweler is well, along with his family. I think if the ruby were a plague stone, they’d have been the first…”
Saara’s child-pure features expressed anger. “You said you had thrown it away, Dami. You said you believed nothing that he said.
“No more do I,” he replied shortly, and ran his hand over Saara’s sleek braided head.
“You did not bring the plague to Avignon.” She pulled away from his touch. “It came on a bat, I think.”
“A bat?” Gaspare snickered. “A ruby is easier to believe.”
“A bat or a rat.” She shrugged. “Something with a squeak. Or that’s what the earth tells me.”
The peach trees were past their best bloom, which is to say that tiny green leaves peeped and pried among the pink petals. The three stopped beside the house, while Festilligambe trotted down to investigate the river.
“Sing us in, my lady,” whispered Damiano. “Let’s see whether Evienne is missing, or whether Gaspare merely missed her.”
The boy cursed under his breath, but made no objection as the Fenwoman opened her mouth in a wailing, foreign chant. Damiano sprang the lock with a word.
Cardinal Rocault’s pleasant villa was in considerable disarray. There was broken crockery in the garden, and the chickens were loose. Lying disconsolately across the front stoop was Couchicou, the wolfhound. Damiano stroked him, exempting him from Saara’s spell. His tail, heavy as a man’s wrist, beat the stone stair.
In the kitchen sat three of the cardinal’s servants: two women and the man whom Gaspare and Damiano had met earlier guarding the kitchen door dog-fashion. They were eating the cardinal’s cheese and drinking the cardinal’s wine. The older of the two women sat on the fat man’s lap. They consumed their illicit pleasures determinedly, but none was smiling.
Saara, Gaspare and Damiano passed by with no more regard than they would have displayed passing a public fresco. The dog tarried at the table.
Gaspare was quite correct. Evienne was missing, along with her tapestries and her feather bed. A glance into her armoire revealed that her clothes had likewise accompanied her. In fact, the tiny cubby above the peach trees held nothing which would interest a thief—even a poor thief like Evienne’s brother. Damiano’s senses told him further that the girl was nowhere in the house.
“Gone,” he stated. “But not run away by herself, unless she did so atop a loaded cart.”
“It is as I said,” insisted Gaspare, searching futilely once more through the empty drawers. “She has been stolen.”
Damiano made an equivocal gesture. “Stolen? Say rather taken to a place of safety by her protector, the cardinal.”
“Whatever, still we must find her.” Gaspare shoved home a drawer with emphasis.
Damiano sighed. “Again?” Saara looked from one to the other.
“Surely that will not be so difficult?” she asked brightly.
“But it’s Easter,” replied her lover. “Easter Sunday itself. And there are more pressing problems in Avignon than a sister who keeps moving about. And also”—he gave an enormous, jaw-distending yawn—”I’m so sleepy.”
He walked into Jan Karl’s office alone and shut the door behind him. The blond cleric didn’t see him at first, as the table at which he sat with quill and ink faced away from the door, and he was very busy writing a list of names. Damiano gazed calmly at Jan Karl’s bald crown until the man turned around.
“Delstrego! What…” And Jan’s glance darted quickly from his visitor to the paper under his hand and then back again. He covered his script with blotting sand and swiveled his stool around.
“What brings you back here, today o
f all days?”
“Today of all days?” repeated Damiano very politely. He pulled the only other chair in the room over to the table and he sat himself down in it, lifting his feet up onto the table. His heavy, black mountain boots were pointed at Jan Karl like a threat. “Why is today special, aside from the fact that it is Easter?”
The Dutchman scraped his chair sideways, so that Damiano’s feet were no longer pointed at him. He ran a hand through his border of silky yellow hair and his long face drew longer. His mouth made a small moue and he raised his blue eyes to the ceiling. “Do you see these authorizations?” he began. “They bear the Holy Father’s own seal. Today I woke up as a lector of the church. An hour after dawn I became a deacon. Just before you walked in I was informed that I was about to be ordained a priest and—by the way, Delstrego, it was a great good thing you didn’t take but two of my fingers back there in that wretched hamlet in Lombardy. A man without fingers cannot offer the mass—and as I was saying, I am also made officer of the palace refectory. Before this day is out, I could be a cardinal.”
Damiano nodded in calm good humor. “Or you could be dead. Life is full of surprises, especially when there is plague in the city.”
Karl’s face froze and he gripped the short arms of his stool. “The plague is part of the reason for my advancement, certainly. The court has known many losses in the last few days, especially from among the lower ranks.”
These two men who faced one another without friendship were built in quite similar fashion: tall, lean and not too broad of shoulder. It is hard to explain, then, why the Dutchman, Jan Karl, gave the impression of having been stepped on by something large at some time in the past, and of expecting to be imminently stepped on again, while Damiano gave a very different impression. The dark Italian slouched by the window, imperturbable, with eyes of black stone, looking (had he only known it) like the Roman General Pardo, when he interviewed young Damiano himself in Partestrada.
“But it is not only that, of course,” continued Jan, as he poured more sand over his parchment. “It is also the discovery of Rocault’s plots.”
Damiano watched the Dutchman empty his sandpot. The effort seemed less directed toward drying the ink than concealing the substance of his writing. Damiano considered telling Jan not to bother: that he could never read script across the width of a table, but Jan’s last sentence stopped him.
“Discovery? Of Cardinal Rocault?”
“Inevitable,” replied the blond with a superior shrug. “Considering how the man was overstepping himself. It was in the kitchen, you know. That is how the post of officer of the refectory has so suddenly become open.
“Oh, there are many new opportunities in the hierarchy now, Delstrego.” Jan gave a little giggle. “It is so good to be in the right place at the right time for once.”
Damiano rubbed his left hand over two days’ growth of beard, making a noise like a pumice stone at work. “Hmmph! I see. The kitchen, was it?” Then he was silent.
Jan, too, had run out of things to say, and stared at Damiano, whom he suddenly seemed to remember was not exactly his friend.
“I, too, once wanted to become a priest,” mumbled Damiano, giving the impression of a man deep in thought. “Of course I discovered that a born witch cannot be ordained, no more than a man who is missing his thumb or first two fingers.” He scraped his stubble again and peered vaguely at Jan from under a thicket of black curls. He yawned. “And anyway it’s just as well, considering what I’ve been and what I’ve done.”
Then his head was raised an inch and once again the eyes were made of slate. “It’s too bad Evienne couldn’t also be in the right place at the right time, isn’t it?”
“E-Evienne?” Jan Karl stuttered as though the very sound of the name were strange to him. “What has she to do with my ordination?”
“With your ordination? Nothing, I imagine. But with the discovery of Cardinal Rocault’s plot…”
Jan snorted. “She had nothing to do with that. She hasn’t the brain for politics.”
Damiano nodded assent. “I agree completely. She has nothing to do with any plot against the Holy Father. So why has she vanished, my dear Jan? Who has stolen her, and where did they take her? Her brother, you see, would like to know.”
Karl rose to his feet. There was no expression on his face. “Gone?
Did you go to see her at the cardinal’s, then? That was dangerous. Too dangerous for me, anyway.”
“He went to see her twice. She was locked in her little kennel, like a bitch who is carrying a litter of great value. But now she is missing, and all her furniture is gone with her.”
The blond’s lips moved soundlessly. Then he said, “If Rocault had got her locked up, then she probably ran away.”
“With her featherbed under her arm? No, Jan. She refused to run away, although I offered to help her do so. She was staying where you put her, like a good girl, and her only fear was that you had been killed by the wolfhound, who by the by is waiting for me outside your door this minute, or that you had forgotten her and would not return with the glass copies of her jewelry you had promised to deliver.”
While Damiano spoke Jan Karl had turned away and was staring blankly out the single, viewless window. The Italian prodded him with a boot. “Heh? Did you make copies of her jewelry, at least? Mother of God, Jan! That sweet, stupid little girl loves you!”
Jan Karl shuddered fastidiously. “You exaggerate, Delstrego. How like an Italian you are.” He paced across his square box of a room, his hands folded at the front of his long black robe. Jan Karl, with his pale skin and dry face, looked quite spectral in black. “We were friends once, certainly. But she is the sort of woman who does not remember things for long. Her senses are earthy and her feelings very low. I am confident that she no more expects me to… to visit her in her confinement than I… than I expect…”
“Than you expect what, Jan?” inquired Damiano, who was feeling a slow heat of anger spread from his chest out toward his hands and head.
Suddenly the Dutchman turned at bay, his hands pressed upon the edge of the writing table. “I expect nothing from her. I am being ordained, Delstrego. The affairs of the flesh I have put behind me.”
Damiano said, “How noble of you. What a sacrifice.” He sighed, willing his anger into control. “I didn’t really come here to talk about all that, Jan. I think Evienne is better off without you, myself.
“I need you only to tell me where she is gone. Is it likely Rocault himself took her out of the city before his discovery, to keep her from the plague?”
There was a noise in the distance, along the hall, of someone weeping: a man, giving way to deep, hopeless sobs. The cleric was distracted for a moment, and his brow creased. He sank back into his chair.
Damiano also listened, and his lips pulled back from his teeth. “Perhaps you may expect another promotion today,” he said with a touch of bitterness.
Jan Karl ignored him. He sat biting his Up. “It was Friday midday that Father Lemaître, the officer of the refectory, confessed that he had agreed to offer poison to Innocent in the Easter dinner. He may have been the very first in Avignon to die. He thought the disease was a judgment upon him.”
“Indeed? And for what is the rest of the city being judged?” asked Damiano in a low murmur.
“Within an hour the cardinal had been brought into the palace, and no more has been heard of him since. So I don’t think it would have been he who gave the order to remove Evienne.”
“Then it must have been the Pope himself who took the girl away,” whispered Damiano, only half believing his own words.
Jan Karl cleared his throat. “More likely Commander Sforza, if anyone. But I think, rather, she ran away by herself, Delstrego, once she got wind of what had happened.”
Damiano shook his head. “No, for then she would have come to you. She has not tried to see you, has she?”
Karl shook his head.
“I thought not. Tell me, where would
the Holy Father have taken her—assuming he took her anywhere?”
The Dutchman raised his hands in complete mystification. “He has thousands of troops in hundreds of barracks and dozens of secret cells beneath them.”
Damiano slapped his thigh like a man making a decision. “I will ask him,” he announced. “That is the only course.”
“You will what?” yelped Jan Karl, rising once more. “You will ask… the Pope himself… what he has done with his enemy’s mistress?”
Damiano stood also. “Yes. After all, I have met him, and he seemed very approachable. I will tell him Evienne’s complete story, and I’m sure…”
“You cannot!” Jan Karl’s wail echoed through the room, competing with the cries of the unknown sufferer in the distant reaches of the building. “You can’t tell him without revealing my part in…” He grabbed at Damiano’s gold-chased sleeve. “You mustn’t reveal my name!”
Damiano pulled away. “One can’t go about telling half-truths to the Holy Father,” he said.
Jan Karl put his two remaining left-hand fingers in his mouth and bit down on them. “Wait. Wait, Delstrego, before you try anything as desperate as that. I think I know where they might have taken her.”
For some minutes after the witch had left, Jan Karl sat beside his writing table, pouring sand from one hand to the other, his fear and his ambition warring with the memory of Evienne’s red hair. His eyes gazed unseeingly at the parchment he had been filling, which began: “I have reason to believe that the following men have been involved in the recent and disgraceful attempt…”At last he put that sheet aside in favor of one of those which had come to him that morning, took his fingernail and began to worry at a beribboned blob of wax.
Chapter 13
It was a strange little procession that wound its way through the rabbit-warren of halls and chambers which was the Papal Palace at Avignon. It was led by Damiano (for only he had been told the way), elegantly dressed in scarlet and gold, his black boots striking the tiles soundly. Saara followed: a sweet-faced and barefoot peasant in a dress bright as some child’s painting. Her steps made no noise. After her came Gaspare in finery grown quickly shabby with ill-use. His soft city shoes scuffed a nervous and uncertain rhythm, and his shoulders had crawled up his neck. Gaspare wished they would hurry.
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