“Very well. Either you come in the front door or the back, is that it?”
Stefano said nothing, but his weight shifted, and the leaves crunched under his boots; he put out his hand. Nicholas had no idea what this gesture meant. He shook the extended hand and that seemed to serve.
“Tomorrow?” he said.
“Yes.” Stefano smiled at him and walked off through the garden toward the gate.
Juan watched him go. When the gate slammed, the servant hurried over to Nicholas.
“That was—he was here, once.”
Nicholas said, “Hunh.” He started around the corner again, going to the back of the house, to put away the shutters.
“What sort of fellows do you bring into your house?” Juan came after him like a harpy.
“Thieves and rogues.”
He stowed away the shutters in the little shed against the back wall of the house. Juan followed his every step.
“And now you have invited him back again!”
“He amuses me,” Nicholas said. He backed out of the shed, brushing the dirt from his sleeves. “Go in and make me a breakfast.”
The old man scowled at him, turned away, and went around the house to the door, muttering of Nicholas’s sins. Nicholas shut the door of the shed and fastened it with a bit of wood.
When he walked into the workroom of the legation, where the scribes were bent over their tables, all work and talk stopped. That warned him; without hanging up his coat he passed through a hush to the corridor leading to his chamber. At top speed he ran down the corridor and threw open his door.
Beyond his desk the young aide Ugo snapped upright, his cheeks ashen. His hands were still in the drawer he was rifling.
“Shall I help you look?” Nicholas said.
“I can explain,” Ugo said, at the same time, so that the words intermingled.
“Explain!” Nicholas started around the desk, and Ugo jumped back, as if Nicholas might attack him. Pressing himself to the wall, he shot forward again like a freed spring, jumped across the desk, and dashed out the door.
Nicholas slammed the open drawers. He pulled on the bottommost of them, which was shut, and found the lock still closed. Relieved, he straightened. Ugo’s footsteps reached him from the hall, going fast away. He went at a leisurely pace around the desk and down the corridor after Ugo.
As he walked into the workroom, Ugo was just leaving by the rear stair. Nicholas went onto the landing. Down the flight of narrow steps the top of Ugo’s head raced away around the corner.
“I will see you when you return, Messer Ugo,” Nicholas called.
In the workroom the scribes and pages all wore grins like painted puppet faces; they were poised over their work, but no one worked; no one moved. Nicholas looked slowly around the room. They avoided his eyes. The grins were less in his favor than against Ugo, whom everyone hated. Probably they all hated Nicholas as well. He went calmly along behind the stools of the scribes, examining each man’s work over his shoulder.
The last of the scribes murmured, “I told him not to do it, Messer Nicholas.”
Nicholas said, “You write an excessively vulgar hand. I suggest you practice from a copybook.”
A page hooted. Nicholas turned on his heel, sweeping his gaze around the room. The four boys stirred and pulled their faces straight. Nicholas began, “Perhaps you young gentlemen have not—”
Bruni walked through the main door, his hat in his hand and his cloak over his arm; he looked sleepy or half-drunk. At the sight of him Nicholas broke off his pompous little speech, the pages came to attention, and the scribes left their stools and stood up straight. Bruni looked around him, his eyebrows lifting. One page came forward to take his cloak.
“Is something wrong?” Bruni asked.
Nicholas said, “Good morning, Excellency. The morning dispatches have not yet arrived, I’m afraid.”
Bruni’s eyebrows lowered again. “What is wrong?” He shook his head at Nicholas. “Come into my chamber.”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
Bruni walked heavily toward the corridor. Nicholas hurried around ahead of him to hold the door; just as they were going into the corridor there was a shout in the workroom.
“The dispatches!” Ugo burst in from the back stairs. “The courier came—Valentino is retreating! Florence is saved!” Ugo wrung his hands together over his head and danced a jig in the center of the room. “He is leaving Tuscany!”
The scribes and pages screamed, cheering, bouncing off their stools. Bruni’s face cracked into a broad smile.
“I knew it. Mars is retrograde at last.”
Nicholas walked away down the corridor.
Pretending to read, Nicholas waited three hours for Stefano Baglione to come. At last, well after the watch had gone by on their ten o’clock round, there was a knock.
Juan opened the door. A low sound escaped him; Nicholas, waiting tensely over his book, shot up onto his feet. Stefano crossed the threshold. His face was swollen out of shape, and mottled with patches of drying blood.
“Good God,” Nicholas said.
“Close the door,” Stefano said.
The old servant shut and latched the door. Without waiting to be told, he went out to the kitchen. Stefano forced his lumpy cheeks into a smile at Nicholas.
“Am I late?”
“Very.” Nicholas sat down.
Stefano took the chair opposite him. He sighed as his weight left his feet. His fingers pressed his side through his gaudy green coat. His hands were bloody.
“I won a lot of money at cards,” he said. He arranged himself gingerly in the chair, his legs stretched out, and his broad shoulders pressed to the chair back. “Those I won it from tried to take it back.”
“Tried,” Nicholas said.
The kitchen door shrilled on its hinges; Juan brought a basin of warm water and vinegar across the room. He set the basin down on the chair beside Stefano and stood back, a piece of clean linen folded over his arm. His face was screwed up in distaste. Stefano picked the basin up and setting it on his knees plunged his hands into it. He groaned with pleasure. Water slopped onto his coat and onto the floor. He splashed handfuls of water over his face. The vinegar penetrated the room with its acid smell. Nicholas laid his book aside. In the big mail’s thick damp hair he saw an oozing lump, and his stomach twisted. He looked away, at the walls, at Juan.
“Wine,” he said.
Juan went away on the new errand.
“I did not know you played cards,” Nicholas said.
“Yes. Tarocco.” Stefano blotted his streaming face on his sleeve. “That’s my chief work. I only steal when I run short of money to gamble with.” Juan brought him a glass of the strongest wine, and he gulped it, like a horse drinking.
“That’s too good a wine to drink so fast,” Nicholas said.
Stefano smiled at him again. There was a kind of triumph in his looks, a buoyant elation, as if the wounds were awards.
“I knew them,” he said. He flicked one bruised hand at Juan. “Give me the towel.” His attention snapped back to Nicholas again. “I knew they would try something, so I was ready. I left a few more lumps with them than they left with me.” Scooping up the vinegary water in his hands, he bathed his face again.
“Don’t order my servant about,” Nicholas said. He spoke to Juan in Spanish. “Give him the linen. And see if there is lotion of aloes.” Juan left.
“What tongue is that?” Stefano asked. “You are not Italian, are you?”
Nicholas shook his head. He watched Stefano daub and rub at his battered face and hands; Juan returned and stood there with the towel and the white jar of lotion. The water and the towels were bloody. Nicholas looked away, down, off across the room, turning his mind to other subjects, but his gaze and his mind turned constantly back toward the bloody man bef
ore him. The dirt and the blood disgusted him, and yet the sight of the work of violence quickened a hateful interest in him, which he could not restrain or fathom, some lust.
Stefano patted lotion at the deep oozing cut on his head. He winced. Nicholas’s face contorted in mimicry. He pulled his cheeks and mouth straight again, forced his eyes away. His was the superior life. He crossed one leg over the other, staring at the wall, his armpits damp with sweat.
With the French king and his army marching south toward Rome on their way to Naples, Valentino withdrew his troops out of Tuscany; as a vassal of the crown of France, he was required to join his suzerain in the war against Naples. The spring’s Bullying of Florence had won him little. He had forced a contract of employment for himself and his troops, but the Signory had never paid him any of the money.
Now the attention of everyone who mattered turned toward Naples. The ancient city in the south was the head and heart of a kingdom embracing all southern Italy. The King of France had an old claim to its throne, and once before, in 1494, he had marched through Italy to enforce that claim. In 1494 the French had taken Naples, but as soon as the king went home to France the kingdom fell back into the hands of the Spanish dynasty that had ruled it since the days of the Sicilian Vespers.
The Borgias had fattened on that campaign, and no one doubted that they would feel their ambitions again in the course of this one. There was also the matter of the King of Spain, who was sending an army under Gonsalvo da Cordoba, his greatest captain, to the support of the King of Naples.
Nicholas said, “An agent of the Borgias used my house in the spring to meet someone connected with the Aragonese. Whatever the Spanish intend in Naples, the Pope surely is informed of it.”
He and Bruni were walking down a path in the garden of Cardinal Barbieri, whose Sunday gathering as usual had attracted hundreds of Romans, diplomats and hangers-on, pretty women by the dozen, churchmen, nobles, and philosophers. The garden extended along three sides of the palace; hedges divided the walkways from green, sunbathed meadows where the Cardinal’s assemblage of antique statuary was arranged in groups. The orange trees were flowering and the warm opulent scent filled the air. Inside a laurel bower at the middle of the garden a consort of lutes and pipes played French music. Nicholas had been told that in France one heard only Italian music. Nicholas went on with what he was saying. “Yet Valentino will march south with a French army. The only solution to this puzzle is that the French and the Spanish do not mean to fight.”
Bruni sighed dramatically.
Nicholas said, “I suggest that they have already reached some agreement over Naples. It cannot be that the French king will come all this way merely to surrender his rights. Therefore the King of Spain must have betrayed Naples to the French. The only question is what Spain receives in return.”
Bruni was shaking his head. His hair curled back from his ears in the latest fashion to display a dark pearl shining in one earlobe. “You have supplied me with no evidence for this.”
“The evidence,” Nicholas said, “is the logic.”
“Ferdinand of Aragon, the King of Spain whom you credit with—or discredit with—such base intentions, is a great soldier, and a most strictly pious man. I cannot believe he would betray his kinsman.”
“He is also a worldly prince, and therefore must act according to the laws of the world, and not the precepts of Heaven.”
“What does that mean? What are you suggesting?”
“That whatever the King of Spain chooses to do will be justified or not by its outcome. And rightly so, for what other real measure have we?”
“The will of God.”
“Is obscure to me, and I imagine, to most men, especially when I consider the example of Pope Alexander, who does all evil in his office, but who can be seen to prosper even beyond his ambitions.”
“What a dance you lead me, and all for nothing!” Bruni cried. “I think you are seriously demented, Nicholas—perhaps you require time alone, to meditate and pray.”
Bruni would listen to no more. Nicholas stopped his arguments. They walked side by side along the gravel, came to an opening in the hedge, and went through it onto a little lawn, polished by the sun and studded with pieces of antique marble.
Amadeo was there, Nicholas’s merchant friend. Nicholas paused in his steps. He had not seen Amadeo since the evening his friend had thrown the Spaniards at him. Bruni went away to admire the statuary, and Nicholas strolled across the green grass toward Amadeo’s side.
The taller man jumped, seeing him, and a shadow passed across his smile. He burnished it again and put out his hand.
“Nicholas, my dear—I have not seen you these past two weeks.”
Nicholas took his hand in a flaccid grip. “No—I have been much at my work. You must have heard.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” Amadeo would not let go his hand, but shook it up and down, and fastened his other hand to Nicholas’s forearm. “Tell me—how have you been doing? You look well.”
“Oh, very well,” Nicholas said. He was determined not to speak of the Spaniards. Amadeo’s eyes shone, and his smile creased his cheeks. His voice was strained with excess of fellowship.
“And your old man, there—Pedro?”
“Juan,” Nicholas said. “He is well, very well.” His hand was going up and down between them like a pump.
“Such a splendid house you have—I must come by—you must invite me by one of these days, to enjoy it again. Such a marvelous house.”
“Do,” Nicholas said. “Whenever you have an afternoon free.”
“Such a marvelous house!”
“I must go now,” Nicholas said. “I see my superior, there, looking for me.”
“But we must find time to talk,” Amadeo said. He let go of Nicholas’s hand and took one step back, away from him.
Nicholas gave him a vague smile and a wave and sauntered off across the lawn. He did not look back all the way across the clipped grass, until he came to the edge of the lawn, where several men and women were standing before the newest of the Cardinal’s antiques; there, taking shelter among them, Nicholas did glance back. Amadeo stood rooted where he had been, staring after him. Jerking his eyes away, Nicholas went through the hedge to the gravel path.
The King of France entered Rome in a magnificent procession, with seventy gentlemen personally attending him, all in scarlet coats embroidered with the royal emblems in silver, and riding chargers whose harness glistened with silver; all along the way of the procession, the Roman people greeted the French with drums and flutes, staged scenes from history, and masses of girls carrying flowers and singing. The procession wound through the Arch of Titus and the Arch of Constantine and through several more arches made of wood and plaster especially for the occasion, and circled below the Campidoglio twice, before it headed up the wide straight street called the Corso. All the palaces along the way were hung with tapestries. Most of the nobles had hired folk to stand and cheer before their houses; the French king distributed gold and sweets. Nicholas did not go to watch this triumph.
Juan did, and reported everything to him in more detail than he wanted to hear.
With Duke Valentino at his side, Pope Alexander welcomed the King of France to Rome at the gates of the Vatican. This public ceremony Nicholas did attend. He stood behind Bruni in the dignified crowd as the Pope spoke of the love and faith that unified the Holy See and the King of France. Valentino waited behind his father, his hands clasped behind his back. Beside the Pope in his stiff gold robes and the cardinals in their princely red, Valentino was dressed all in black, like a stranger. Nicholas was too far away to make out his face.
Bruni said, “Is he in mourning, do you suppose?” and laughed.
At that moment Valentino stepped forward to kneel before the French king as his liege lord. The crowd murmured in a diffused excitement; the young Borgia had the gift of
action that every gesture drew all eyes to him.
Bruni said, “Mummery. When does the General Council meet?”
“Tomorrow.”
The men around them were pushing to the right, where a line was forming; someone trod on Nicholas’s foot. Bruni strode toward the line. His hands patted over his brushed velvet coat, his gold chains and medals, and his fine hat trimmed with braid. He drew his beard down into a cone with his curled hand. Nicholas went along in his shadow. They joined the line, already moving past the Pope, whose shoe each man knelt to kiss, and the French king, before whom they bowed. A herald spoke their names and offices. When Bruni and Nicholas were presented, the herald confused them and gave Bruni’s name to Nicholas and Nicholas’s name, garbled, to the ambassador. As he bowed before the French king’s vacant smile, Nicholas imagined that it was a doll inside the rich clothes, a wooden man that wore the crown.
In the twilight of that evening Bruni went off to a formal dinner for the king. Nicholas went to a gathering at Valentino’s rambling palace in the Trastevere.
All along the east and south walls of the palace, second-story balconies overhung the street. Through their open doors several strains of music spilled out, muffled in laughter and voices. Here and there in the street the local people had gathered in little knots; they stood on their toes, striving to look in, and the scattered light from inside the palace gleamed on their eyes and now and again shone on half a face.
Nicholas loitered a moment outside the gate. A steady stream of frivolously dressed people rushed by him into the courtyard beyond, as if something were there they could not wait for. One or two arrived in chairs, like merchants of Cathay. The torches in their iron stanchions rippled and made ghastly shadows against the walls of the palace. Inside, a shout went up from many throats, a horn blared, and a kettledrum began to pound. Nicholas went in.
In the courtyard a large plaster fountain gushed streams of wine. The horn and the kettledrum were playing tunelessly just beyond in a recess in the wall. Nicholas went through the crowd there toward the nearest door.
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