More soldiers, the Pope’s Swiss Guards, were pushing a wedge through the crowd. Men were flung out of the way; an officer barked an order and the soldiers cocked their pikes with a rattle of ratchets and held them forward, fingers on the catch-releases. People scrambled backwards, falling over each other; fired at close range, a pike-head could go clean through a man.
Pasquale pulled Niccolò around a pillar just as the Pope appeared. He was bareheaded, in a white cope that fell in generous folds around his bulky body. Servants liveried in black velvet supported him on either side. A flock of red-hatted, scarlet-robed cardinals trailed behind, amongst a rabble of servants. Screams and shouts, a tremendous tramping of boots, soldiers clashing their pikes as they came to attention. The Pope swept past, so close that Pasquale could see the beads of sweat on his blue jowls, and then he was gone, through the narrow door into the night.
Niccolò snagged a councillor at the end of the procession; the man struggled in a moment of panic before he recognized Niccolò and relaxed. ‘I can’t talk to you here!’ he said loudly.
Niccolò spoke directly into the man’s face with a quiet, firm intensity. ‘You can tell me what happened at least, my friend.’
The councillor blurted, ‘Murder! Murder, Niccolò!’
‘Hardly the first time the Palazzo has seen blood shed.’
‘Blood? No, no, it was poison. Right before the Pope himself. It is a miracle I am here to speak to you; my own glass was almost at my lips when he fell—’
‘Who was it?’
‘We could all have been murdered! All of us! Any hope of alliance is done for. As for what will happen now—’
Niccolò grasped the lapels of the councillor’s heavy fur-trimmed robes. The man goggled at him. His hat was askew; his face was white above his full black beard.
Niccolò said softly and urgently, ‘Who was it?’
The councillor gathered himself together, shook off Niccolò’s grip and straightened his robes and his hat with a kind of distracted dignity. ‘Niccolò, old friend, please, for the sake of Christ keep clear of this. It is dark, dark business, dark and terrible.’
‘I want only to know who it is that was murdered.’
‘The painter. The Pope’s painter, Raphael. He made a toast to the Pope and drank, and we were about to follow him when he clutched his throat and fell. Horrible, horrible! There, I’ve already said too much and will say no more. Take care, my friend. Don’t even dip a finger in these waters. My advice is to get off the streets at once. Go home. There’ll be a terrible reckoning this night—if we’re lucky, that will end it. If not—’ The councillor had been looking around as he talked. Suddenly he shouted to an officer of the militia, shook off Niccolò’s hand and hurried away, two soldiers falling in behind him.
‘We must go up there,’ Niccolò said.
‘Then Raphael was involved after all!’
‘Perhaps, perhaps.’ Niccolò looked drawn, suddenly looked every one of his fifty years. ‘Stay close to me, Pasquale. Help me as you can. I’ve always tried to see things as they are, not as they ought to be. Christ knows that I will need all of that ability now. If I’m right, this little conspiracy into which we have fallen has spread further than it should. Those in wise council see only a small part of it, and may mistake it for something worse than it is.’
Soldiers barred the way to the grand staircase, grim-faced behind their closed visors. Niccolò hailed a clerkly man, who shook his hand and began to repeat the story of poison. ‘I need to see,’ Niccolò said. ‘I believe it less worse than it is.’
The clerk said, ‘They have precipitately hanged the assassin, Niccolò. There’s no way to put his corpse to the question, and besides, you’re not the man to do it. Go home.’
‘You’re the second person to tell me that. It makes me more determined.’
‘No one can go up there, Niccolò. I certainly can’t, so please, don’t ask me.’
The soldiers parted to let two or three people up the staircase. Pasquale recognized one and called to him. The boy, Baverio, turned and stared. He was dressed in the same dark green tunic and breeches as before. His face was quite white, as if powdered with chalk, and his eyes were red-rimmed and wet.
Pasquale quickly explained what Niccolò wanted. Baverio shook his head and said, ‘The man who killed my master is dead, and nothing can hurt my master now.’
‘Raphael’s name must still be defended. Please, Baverio. For the sake of your master’s name. You helped me before, and I remember and am grateful. This one more time.’
The boy bit his lip. ‘Yet you have not found out why poor Giulio was killed. And now my master is dead, and Giovanni Francesco has disappeared.’
Pasquale could not tell the boy that Francesco too was dead. ‘It is all a piece, Baverio. We see only a few parts of the picture. We must see the rest to understand it.’
‘If it will help, then follow me.’
The boy, after speaking with his companions, led Pasquale and Niccolò past the soldiers and up the stairs. He explained that Raphael had been struck as if with apoplexy after making a toast at the serving of the fifth course of the feast. The Pope’s own physician had rushed to his aid but in vain, except to say that it was poisoned wine.
Baverio said steadily, ‘Two of my friends rushed from the room and caught the wine steward, looped a cord around his neck and threw him out of the window. A soldier who ran in at the cry of murder helped them. I was not there, Pasquale, and I should have been. If I had tasted the wine first my master would not be dead.’ Tears stood in his eyes, and he tipped his head back so that they wouldn’t run and spoil his powdered cheeks.
‘There’s no end to what might have been,’ Pasquale told the boy. ‘What’s important here is the truth of what has happened.’
The feast had been held in the Hall of Victory of the Republic, the big high-ceilinged room at the heart of the Palazzo della Signoria. Two long tables ran down the room, and a third was set across the head of these, beneath the fan of stairs that led up to the balcony. The tables were strewn with dishes and bowls of food, fine fluted glasses, silver spoons and knives. Burning forests of candles filled the room with heat and steady light. Pasquale gaped at the frenzied glory of Michelangelo’s gigantic friezes of the war against Rome and her allies, the Battle of Cascina on one wall, the Florentine victory at Anghiari at the other, where the Great Engineer’s armoured turtles had marched through the enemy lines, and multi-barrelled cannon had decimated what was left of their ranks. Then he remembered himself and hurried after Niccolò and Baverio, towards the knot of people gathered at the end table, where the canopied papal throne stood.
Raphael’s body lay under a heavy tapestry someone had torn from the wall. Niccolò bent and gently uncovered the face. There was foam on the blue lips; the eyes were closed by silver florins. Niccolò looked up at the men around him and asked who was the physician. When a handsome grey-haired man stepped forward and bowed and said he had that honour, Niccolò said, ‘How quick was this?’
‘It was very quick, thank Christ, or there would be many more dead. It struck at his lungs—you see here the foam and the cyanosis of the lips—and it paralysed his breathing. He was clawing at his throat, then suffered an apoplectic fit. He would have known only a little pain before dying.’
‘A strong poison, then.’
‘Obviously, signor.’
‘Administered in the wine?’
‘His glass is here. Raphael knocked it over when he fell, so the wine is spilled, but I have tested the spill and found poison. A miracle, as I say, that Raphael drank before anyone else.’
‘He made a toast,’ Baverio said. ‘He was a loyal friend to His Holiness, and it has killed him.’
The captain of the Palazzo Guard said, ‘The wine steward was responsible for testing for poison. Instead, he must have stirred poison into the wine.’
‘It was not friendship that killed him,’ Niccolò said, ‘nor was it the wine, I think.’ He peere
d at the black stain left by the test on the heavy linen table-cloth, then took the fallen glass by its foot, sniffed it, and said, ‘It is subtle. You have not tested the glass.’
‘What need? The wine—’
‘If you would, signor. The rim of the glass, but carefully. Perhaps someone else will fetch the wine that was served.’
The captain of the Guard said, ‘The wine steward is already executed.’
‘Yes,’ Niccolò said with asperity, ‘but they did not fling out his wine with his body. Bring me what was served here at the high table.’
The physician exclaimed, and held up the glass. The poison-specific stain had left its black deposit around the gold band at the rim of the glass.
‘Well,’ Niccolò said, looking pleased. ‘Here we have it. It is a long time since I have had the honour of attending one of these feasts, but I do seem to recall that new glasses are set out with the serving of each wine. I fear that the wrong man has been accused and tried and executed. It was not the wine that was poisoned, but the glass.’
The physician said, ‘Surely the glass shows a positive trace because it was in contact with the poisoned wine.’
‘Ah, but not a trace like that, signor. If the glass was contaminated by the wine it held, then the trace would be evenly spread over the inside surface. Here, though, we see the trace is in a distinct ring, a very narrow ring, around the inside. This poison—is it a contact poison, or must it be ingested?’
‘It would not pass through the skin unless there was a cut or a wound, if that’s what you mean.’
‘That’s precisely what I mean,’ Niccolò said, his eyes gleaming with excitement. He was possessed by the spirit of inquiry. ‘Here is how it fell out. The assassin would have known that there would be checks for poison in the kitchen, and by the head stewards, before food or wine was served. So he smeared poison on his finger and wiped his finger around the edge of the glass before setting it before poor Raphael. You can see the break in the ring where Raphael sipped, and took the poison on to his lips. We will haul up the body of the wine steward, and test his fingers for poison. I am sure that it will test negative. Ah, now here is the wine. Have we a clean glass?’
Niccolò poured a generous measure, then downed it in one. People around him gasped. He smiled. ‘You see. I am unharmed. The wine was not poisoned—indeed, it would be a mortal sin to pollute this fine vintage. No, it was Raphael’s glass that was poisoned, quite deliberately. This is not a general plot against the Pope and the good councillors of the Signoria, but a specific one, to murder poor Raphael.’
The captain of the Guard called up four of his men. To jeers from the crowd gathered in the square below, they hauled up the dead weight of the wine steward’s body and laid it on the floor beneath the window from which it had been flung. The physician applied his stain to the dead man’s fingers while Niccolò hummed tunelessly.
‘There’s no trace,’ the physician said at last, creaking up from his knees.
Someone said, ‘That only proves he did not contaminate himself.’
Niccolò said sharply, ‘You would have him wear gloves? Where are they? Who would have set out the glasses, Captain?’
The man considered this gravely. ‘No one specific, I would suppose. Any of the servants of the first table.’
‘Then we will round them up and put them to the test! Pasquale, you can best help by comforting poor Baverio here.’ Niccolò grasped Pasquale’s shoulder and added in a whisper, ‘Go with him, see what else you can find out. Perhaps Raphael was killed because he knew something.’ He raised his voice. ‘Captain, we will not find the assassin by tarrying here.’
When they had gone, and when the soldiers had removed the body of the unfortunate wine steward, Pasquale took Baverio in hand and had him sit at the end of one of the tables. Pasquale was hungry, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch the fruit and bread piled in baskets of woven gold in the centre of the tables, not with Raphael’s body still lying there on the floor at the far end of the huge candlelit hall.
As if reading Pasquale’s thoughts, Baverio suddenly said, ‘We came for my master’s body.’
‘The soldiers will be back. Or I can go and look for them now, if you’d like.’
Baverio shook his head. ‘Signor Machiavegli will find who killed him?’
‘We’ll help you, if you’ll let us.’
‘Is this to do with the glass I gave you?’
‘Yes, yes I think so.’ Pasquale could not put off the moment any longer. ‘Baverio, we saw Giovanni Francesco murdered. He too was poisoned, by a choking vapour.’
Baverio’s face was chalk-white, but his voice was steady. ‘I knew that he was dead. When he. did not come back this morning, I knew it, and so did my master. That was why he was determined to speak out.’
‘If there is something that your master knew, can you tell me what it was?’
‘He would only say that it was to do with a secret of your Great Engineer. He believed that Giulio Romano was being blackmailed in some way, which was why poor Giulio took the little devices, the flying toy and the box and its glass, although that last secret is no longer a secret, of course, not after tonight. But he did not know that Giovanni Francesco was also involved.’ Baverio looked down the length of the candlelit room, to where Raphael’s body lay under its tapestry shroud, looked back at Pasquale, his eyes brimming with tears. ‘My poor master, Pasquale! He cared so much for his assistants!’
‘Do you know why Romano was being blackmailed? Was it the usual?’
‘The usual?’
‘Well,’ Pasquale said, thinking of Signora Giocondo, ‘I mean an involvement with a married woman.’
‘Oh, no! Nothing like that. My master…but I won’t speak of that.’
There was a silence. Pasquale prompted the boy, ‘And Romano?’
‘My master thought that he had been involved in a commission to produce…a certain kind of art. You know the kind.’
‘Stiffeners, you mean. Hardly a matter of honour, I would have thought.’ Pasquale supposed that the picture he had rescued from Giustiniani’s grate was a kind of stiffener, if your tastes ran to blasphemy.
‘I didn’t ever see what it was,’ Baverio said, ‘but I know that it was something different, something more real than the usual wood-cuts or engravings. My master saw something of it, and said it was a perversion of art in every sense. I think that the glass I gave you was something to do with it.’
‘How so?’
‘It is the great secret that the Great Engineer revealed this night. A way of registering light and shadows. His assistants brought into this room bright lights and a larger version of the box I found amongst Giulio’s possessions. All present at the first table, the Pope and my master and members of the Signoria, had to pose stiffly before it. Taking a picture, the Great Engineer called it.’
Pasquale thought of the glass plate blackened by some chemical process, and then of the picture he’d fished from the fire—the strange shadowy picture. Shadow art, art of shadows…Dr Pretorious had said that the artificers would put the artists out of business, although this business of simply capturing a likeness of a scene could hardly be the full answer. Even if it could be done, it would be no more than simple reality. There would be no narrative, no grace, none of the dense allusive symbolism by which paintings gave contentment and pleasure and glory to God.
He started to ask Baverio about this, but even as he began to speak a strange dull tremor shook the floor. Knives and glasses jingled along the tables; candle-flames bobbed. As Pasquale and Baverio looked at each other with wild surmise a tremendous clamour was raised somewhere outside the hall. A moment later the captain of the Guard ran in with his soldiers at his heels, and shouted that they must leave.
Baverio started to say something about his master’s body, that he was here to take it away. His voice rose in panic, and the captain slapped his face and said with a hysteria hardly more controlled than the boy’s, ‘No time for that, you
fool. We are under attack. Your master’s safe enough lying there—he won’t be going anywhere.’
Pasquale was hauled to his feet by two soldiers; Baverio by two more. As they were marched towards the door which opened on to the great staircase there was a thunderclap in the balcony that ran above the far end of the room. The windows there blew in with a crash of glass, followed by a tremendous outpouring of smoke.
The captain began to shout about fire, but then the acrid stench of rotting geraniums reached Pasquale. His eyes and nose stung and watered, and he knew at once who was responsible for this.
The soldiers holding Pasquale began to choke. He twisted out of their grip, clapped one hand over nose and mouth, caught Baverio’s sleeve with the other, and dragged him through the door.
At the bottom of the staircase, the cortile was filling with the choking orange fog, and a panicky throng of soldiers and clerks and bystanders were pushing and shoving as they all tried to get out at once. Pasquale kept hold of Baverio’s sleeve in the crush as the crowd carried them along—then they were outside, in the cold black torchlit night.
Pasquale, dragging Baverio with him, found shelter in the lee of the ceremonial platform that jutted out from the Palazzo. Half his mind, caught up in the crowd’s fear, believed that anything could happen, at any moment; the other half, the rational half, coldly observed, with an epicurean particularity, that it was indeed a kind of magic that could make people suddenly distrust the very skin of things they’d previously thought of as solid and unchangeable. He wondered where Niccolò was.
Overhead, orange smoke was pouring out of windows on the second floor of the Palazzo. The Great Engineer’s cosmic engine lay wrecked, its lower half blown apart and on fire from the oil spilled from the smashed lanterns of its central sun. Bodies lay around it, reduced to bloody rags. Some cried out, feebly stirring in pools of their own blood. People ran here and there, soldiers amongst them as panicked as the rest. From the crenellated roof of the Palazzo burning rockets shot down into the square with keening howls and whistles, trailing great tails of sparks, striking paving-stones and bursting with sharp thundercracks or skittering off amongst the legs of the mob. And here and there masked men on stilts strode about, tossing little glass globes that burst into clouds of orange smoke. The very air was alive and inimical, stinging the skin of the face, making eyes and nose water. It was altogether a scene out of one of the paintings of that school of Flemish artists who delighted in depicting the grotesqueries of Hell.
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