`If you knew it was going to take all that time and travel,' Bernaba said stubbornly, `how could you expect the answers in such a short time?'
`All right. I will put Palo onto it.'
`I don't think you want that, Baldassare. if I do it, the information, whatever it is, will be safe with me, but if Palo does it – well, he is Palo.'
`So you do think she is concealing something important. Why' should there be anything, to conceal? This is a routine state investigation. As her cardinal, I seek only to prevent the remote possibility of any censure by putting her true, past on the record.'
'Ah, well, then,' she said. `If it is only routine and for the state, perhaps you should put Palo onto it.'
His expression became deadly. `You refuse to do this?' he said.
She could read his eyes and his face. She knew he was ready to kill her or to have her killed by Palo. She. sighed. `I will do it.'
`I need time.'
`How much time?'
`People will need to be found and bribed. I'll have to travel. The ' marchesa is a brilliant woman, and if she chooses to hide her past it is possible that…”
He struck her heavily. Very slowly she regained her feet and stood before him again, betraying neither her hurt nor her hopelessness. He struck her again, then he smiled at her, that wonderful smile. `You have ninety days,' he said, `beginning now.'
Bernaba had stayed out of sight for almost a month when he summoned me to demand news of her. I was heavy and sullen. `In this whole world,' I told him, `we don't have another friend as good as Bernaba. But you not only struck her, you sent her on a wild goose chase. Where is she? What do you care? She could be dead.'
`I am a prince of the Church!' he; shouted. `I will not be talked to in this way by a slave. Are you a part of this conspiracy, or are you pleading with me to bring Palo into this, who will rip out eyeballs to get at the truth? I have had enough of this! I am going to send Palo after Bernaba.'
‘Cossa?'
“I will send you to the, slave market at Bari!'
'Cossa,' I said to him, `You must be insane or you would never say such things to your friends. You believe that, if you can learn terrible things, true or not, about the marchesa, you can break the spell you think she has put upon you and make yourself her master. But after you find out the worst you want to, know, even if you are reduced to having Palo deliver it to you as a fabric of lies, won't you, wish you were dead?'
'Franco, my friend, forgive me, please forgive me. But I have to know about her.'
'Then ask her.'
'How can I ask her? What can I say – are you a spy for Ladislas? Or – what was your life before you gave your body to Gian Galeazzo? Do I ask her – since you sold Milan to me so easily, will you just as easily sell me and the papal states to Naples?'
`if that is what you want to know, then that is what you must ask her.'
Cossa slumped into a chair. 'I could lose her.''
'If you will not ask her yourself, then only Palo can find out for you. After Palo is through with her, she will either be dead or you will banish her. She will be gone from you. And, as desperate as you are before me today, you will be more desperate trying to find her again. But if you must know, then you yourself must ask her – at least, that way, there is a chance for you, Cossa.'
The marchesa found him in the tower room of the palace. His face was grey. A-sheaf of papers lay on his lap. He looked up at her hopelessly as she came into the room as if, despite his love for her, she had forced him to destroy her.
'Cossa? Are you ill?' she asked.
' I know, Decima. I know everything about you. You sold whores in Rome. You dealt in boys with degenerates. You told fortunes as a heretical witch, made charms arid, amulets, and sold poisons to vengeful women:' He leaped to his feet scattering the papers. 'Don't deny it!'
She stared at, him with such contempt that he almost lost the certainty of his judgment. 'How can such things matter to you?' she asked him.
'How? You dare to ask me how?'
`You have taken money from the whores of Bologna for almost fifteen years and from the whores of the cities of the papal states for almost two.' She stared at him with distaste.
'Bernaba told you that! It is a lie! I helped her when I was a student and out of gratitude she set up those women to get me information to advance my position.'
'You took money from whores.' 'I was a boy!'
`You still take money from whores but you aren't a boy; you are a prince of the Church.'
We were talking about you, not me.'
'We will soon, of course, Cossa. But not yet. Let us talk instead about the night you murdered sixteen men to steal the pope's gold.' `Franco Ellera!' he screamed in pain.
`No one else living knew that.'
'Oh, yes, they did.'
`Who?'
'You.'
'Me?'
'Last; winter, when you were dying of fever after murdering that little boy at Rocco di Cento, you told, me everything. You ranted in my arms because, you told me, the men you had killed had come back to murder you.'
He held up his hands to make her stop speaking.
'I said to myself,' the marchesa went on, 'that, if that were the kind of man you are, then that must be what drew me to you. What else could the son of a pirate know to do? What else could be expected of a general of condottieri? I saw that, if you believed you owned a part of those whores, you had to take money from them because that was your share, as you saw it. You didn't need the money, but that is how a pirate or pitiless condottiere would think. Everything is a share in the loot which costs human bodies. You came from the sea. The pope's gold convoy was no different to you from a convoy of poorly armed merchant ships. You took the pope's gold then, as a natural conclusion for a brutalized man; you killed all the witnesses, your own people, because you feared the pope's vengeance. That explained everything to me, but it changed nothing. You are still a whoremonger and a pimp. You are still a thief and a murderer, which is rare enough work for a cardinal of the Holy Church: But we are what we become, Cossa, not what we think we are.'
His eyes became opaque with pain, trying to blind himself to this vile knowledge of himself. He wanted to find just enough light to show himself to himself as he had always seen himself. Deadly things lurked beyond such light. Because he could not shut out the truth of how she saw him and how he mast now see himself, he began to weep, sitting with his face clutched in his hands so he later confessed.
She knelt beside him and stroked his head. `I would have told you anything you wanted to know,' she said to him. 'If I couldn't conceal my life from myself, how could I hide it from you whom I love?' He reached out blindly to touch her cheek. 'Come" the marchesa said, – 'it is night. I have travelled a long way and I have been too long away from your arms.'
The marchesa had travelled over the mountains from Florence, where Cosimo di Medici had told her that his father had decided that the time had come to get the papacy for Cossa and end the schism in the Church. While the schism still existed, the Medici dream of getting one consolidated church banking account could never be realized. Giovanni di Bicci di Medici's plan was now the plan of the Marchesa di Artegiana because she was expected to execute it. She had had to be severe with Cossa about his boyish anxieties. He had to be, lifted into his saddle and sent off to his glory. There was a lot of money to be made.
21
With his mind revolving like a prayer wheel ten thousand times, Cossa told me where he had allowed his life to take a wrong turning. It happened, he thought – and of course he was wrong – during one winter's night when he was in bed with the marchesa at the Anziani palace in Bologna. The eternal rat moved across the bedchamber, where a single, foot-thick, half-spent candle burned at the centre of the room, twelve feet away from the bottom of the bed. Its melted wax piled up at its base like heaps of fallen angels. The bed stank of him and it mingled with the smell of the blind sanctity of the candle and the marchesa's faint s
mell, like sea moss.
She must have felt the golden hawk of her ambition, which was always perched inside her, fly in upward spirals across her chest, higher and higher from deep within her, until it was a nearly imperceptible thing in her sky but from such an elevation that it could see everything in the future. She listened to Cossa's hoarse, shallow breathing gradually subside. She turned towards him, brushing his arm with her breasts, and whispered into his ear, `You can be pope,'
His answer was a thick, contemptuous grunt.
She waited, thinking of the, enormity of the room and of the rooms around it, all nested into the size of the palace she had taken. She willed him to answer her.
`There are already two popes,' he said.
`The treasure of the Italian people is the papacy, Cossa,' she said harshly. `The French have their, university. The English have their kings. The Germans have the Holy Roman Emperor. The Italians must have their popes:'
'They have Angel Corrario, whose ancient body is called Pope Gregory XII'
`He is Ladislas's servant! We have a pope who cannot even hold Rome because he is eighty-one years old. And da Luna, the other great pope! Da Luna composes his ancient and tiny body – his dapper, tidy, neat and tiny body in Perpignan. He is Pope Benedict for the Spaniards and the Scots.'
She got out of bed with one lithe movement of her long legs and pulled a fur robe over herself, a powerfully made, tall, blonde woman of thirty-seven years – youthful, with cheekbones like kneecaps and a large soft mouth against, porcelain skin. I can see her carnal glory in my mind's eye. She strode around the bed and pulled a stool close to it at Cossa's side. She looked down at his shut eyelids, rectangular upon his square brown face. She leaned over, close to him, and spoke. `History has changed itself, Cossa„' she said. `The people of ltaly speak different languages, eat different food and think differently from the people of the other nations, except that they all want an end to this long ruinous papal schism.'
He grunted.
`Do you know: what this schism is doing to business in Europe, Cossa? How it is devastating the politics of the nations? Money and the power of the, Church are being thrown away instead of increasing themselves by a steady expansion of business. And, with the strength of the papacy split in half the nations are being ruled more and more by the princes… Not by popes. Not by the businessmen who understand what is best for all. This weakening must stop. You must stop it. You must dissolve the schism by uniting the Church under one people themselves. Not stable; papal, authority and containment, nor even the iron rule of princes, but rule by the people who are as hostile to the princes – with whom the Church can at least deal – as they will most certainly become to the popes.'
“This is something I must think about, Decima.,'
Her eyes hardened with her heart as she thought of Cosimo di Medici, with his own purity and sense of devout piety, actually believing that one needed only to offer the papacy on a platter and the nominee would reach for it eagerly and gratefully. This provincial bandit of the Church needed to be made more aware of his position on the games board. It has been a mistake to set him up as the Adonis of my desiring love, she thought, because that makes men who are naturally lazy lazier. She would need to chill him down if they were to get anywhere with the greatest opportunity she would ever be offered by God or man in her lifetime.
`No, Cossa,' she said. You don t need to think about it. I spoke of you in Germany to the electors. They share my view that you are the man who could end the schism. They want the schism ended because only the one pope in Rome can consecrate their Holy Roman Emperor, ruler of Germany. The three great archbishops of the, Rhine represent the German Church the Archbishop of Mainz, Archchancellor of Germany; the Archbishop of Cologne, Archchancellor of Italy;, and the Archbishop of Trier, Archchancellor of Burgundy. Then there are the King of Bohemia, cupbearer of the emperor; the Count Palatine, who is grand-seneschal; the Duke of Saxony, who is grand marshal; and the Markgraf of Brandenburg, who is grand chamberlain. They are seven men whose single reason for collecting is to elect the King of the Romans, who will be crowned as emperor by one single pope. I was with D'Ailly and Gerson in Paris and they – and remember they are French – agree that you are the single figure in the Church around whom the Galllcans would rally to end the schism if the reform of the Church followed. Floret – holds the same views. Piero Spina is the pope's ambassador to Naples and, as you know, that means my daughter, Rosa, is there. Rosa can prepare Spina to prepare Ladislas to take his armies into the field against you so that, while the prelates pray and orate for the end of the schism: at our council, you will be defending the Church against a mortal enemy in whose interest it is to continue the schism for ever – because, with the world behind one pope, Ladislas could never conquer Italy.'
`You talked about me with strangers? As if I were some boy you were trying to find a place for?'
`They are not strangers to me. They are pivotal men in Europe and they have investments to protect. What do you imagine happens when there is a need for a new pope, in this case one unified papacy? Do you believe that the people who run Europe do not confer with each other so that the man most suitable to them be chosen?'
`Aaah -get into bed.'
`When we have this settled.'
`All right! It's settled. A council will be called.'
'Where?'
'You must have thought about that.'
`Pisa, I think. I was born in Pisa.'
`Pisa, then. Now get into bed.'
`When will you call the council?'
He closed his eyes and lay very still to prevent his anger from dissolving the erection which had grown upon him because he had been staring at her beautiful breasts and at the sanctuary within that V of black hair above a passage which must be made of writhing snakes and gripping chains contained by catapults. He said, 'The two schismatic popes must be advised that a council is to be called.'
`Neither will answer.'
"I will also need time to assemble quorums of the colleges of cardinals from the schismatic curias. They will send out proclamations of the convention of the council and set its starting date. If everything works out, the council will meet in one year's tune.'
She stripped the fur robe from her body and stood over him. 'Ah, God,' she said, `there has never been such an exciting man as you,' then fell upon him.
22
At the end of my life – I am nearer the end than the beginning in these calm late-autumn days, I have been befriended by the marchesa's daughter, Maria Giovanna. She talks to me for hours as I sit in the garden at Cosimo's great house, doing my needlepoint. She remembers her mother and her sisters. Yesterday, she remembered the exciting days before the Council of Pisa.
In the sweet summer-like October of 1408, Rosa Dubramonte was twenty-two years old, the youngest of the four daughters of the Marchesa di Artegiana. She had a passionate nose, whose thrust was surrounded by a lascivious face of certain beauty, all supported by a professionally effulgent body. Maria Giovanna was the most womanly of the daughters; Maria Louise the most cunning; Helene the most vividly intellectual; but Rosa was the most intelligent. She thought her way through life's illusions and sensations and would trust in none of them, except at her mother's command, and unless she had good reason. Rosa had a mind which could herd mice at a crossroads, the Irish abbot MacMahon once said of her.
Rosa rode with an escort of six armed men from the establishment of her protector, Piero, Cardinal, Spina, through a countryside of vineyards and olive groves. Among the vineyards there were trees, including a great number of pomegranates which punctuated the distance with vivid colour. She rode under a broad scarlet straw hat, wearing slippers embroidered with pearls and a light, yellow riding cloak over a lime-green Chinese silk dress. She was travelling from Naples to a family conference in Perugia called by her mother. Her manufactured blondeness flashed in the wine-light of the lantern sun which hung at the eastern edge of the world. She would soon be with her f
amily. They were almost across the valley, more than a thousand feet below the Etruscan walls of Perugia. Little of the town could be seen, but soon the climb towards its frescoes would begin, up the steep road that looped through the olive groves.
The marchesa's house in Perugia was set beyond the prior's palace, near the eastern wall of the city, standing at the end of a straight tree-lined drive whose entrance was flanked by stone figures of Juno and Venus. The main building was in two storeys, built partly in travertine, partly in Assisi limestone, with red and white marble from Bettona. It had a fine entrance doorway with a round arch, richly decorated by the Sienese artist Shanon Philippi, and in the lunette was a statue of St Ercolano, patron saint of Perugia, holding the hand of St Catherine of Pisa. There were lower recessed wings on either side of the central building; each end of these was flanked by curved buttresses. The whiteness of the architectural rhythm was emphasized by the stands of tall cypresses behind it.
Within the house, the piano noble was divided into rooms for the marchesa's daughters, arranged around a cruciform hall, each with a coved ceiling At the top of the cross, a square salon had been formed, from which a line of rooms extended to the left and right along the garden. The walls and ceilings of these rooms into the salon were decorated with frescoes by Giacomo Ricardo Blaca and painted at the zenith of his powers. The frescoes, masterpieces of trompe l'oeil, made each room appear to have been placed within open arcades overlooking the marchesa's native Pisan countryside on a perfect summer's day. Level valleys soothed beneath blue-tinged mountains, with vineyards, olive groves and chestnut trees, offering shade and peace.
At the base of the cruciform was the, main room. On the coved ceiling of the aula, Blaca had achieved a supreme triumph of illusionistic painting, in which an enormous figure of the marchesa, clothed in coloured silk, soared across the painted sky in a vastly calming composition, with the imagined heavens around her filled with a host of cherubims, flying or seated upon banks of clouds, all their small figures in the likenesses of the marchesa's daughters as babies.
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