Under the racket of the dog another sound reached him, much nearer. He sat up in his bed, his ears stretching. Someone was walking about in the garden outside his house. He remembered the time that Stefano had broken into the house, but then he had not been alone. Perhaps it was Stefano. He pulled on his dressing gown and stuffed his feet into house shoes. If it were Stefano—if it were not Stefano—he opened the door enough to put his head out and scan the main room.
It was as he had left it; one candle burned in the iron bracket by the front door. Nicholas went across the room to make certain that the door was locked.
Just as he reached it the door swung open. He stopped. Miguelito stood there on the step.
Nicholas said, “What do you want with me?”
Miguelito came by him into the room. He wore a long black traveling coat; his muddy boots left a trail on the floor. He flung his hat off across the room.
“I have come from Urbino,” Miguelito said.
“Ah,” Nicholas said, and was out of breath.
“It worked,” Miguelito said. “Guidobaldo fled, Urbino belongs to Cesare Borgia. Who sends you this, with his respects.”
He gave Nicholas a ring.
“It worked,” Nicholas said.
He closed his fingers over the heavy jewel. A hot delirium welled up in his mind, a triumph almost like sex. He smiled, and Miguelito smiled too, a sudden bright unexpected flash of teeth.
“Have a glass of wine with me,” Nicholas said. “We shall drink to the victory.”
Juan was in the kitchen doorway, blinking at them. Nicholas waved him away again. Miguelito was smothering down a yawn; he glanced around the darkened room and smiled sleepily at Nicholas again.
“Aren’t you going to look at the bauble?” He unfastened the front of his coat and shrugged it off; it fell to the floor.
Nicholas opened his hand and looked down at the ring. In the light of the candle he could not make out the color of the stone, which looked black. The massive setting was carved of gold.
“Very fine,” he said.
Miguelito went to the nearest chair. “He is right. There is something mad about you—who can trust a man who cares nothing of a ruby? My horse is outside. Someone must tend him.” He sank into the chair, swung one filthy boot at a time up onto the plush cushion of the chair opposite, put his head back, and shut his eyes. Within the space of two heartbeats he was asleep.
Juan had come back into this room from the kitchen, a ragged gray shawl over his shoulders. Nicholas stood irresolutely. He was frightened of horses. He opened his hand again to look down at the ring. Now he saw that the stone was red, indeed a ruby.
“Go to bed,” he said to Juan. He went out to the garden, caught Miguelito’s exhausted horse, and led it by the bridle down the street to the nearest inn with a stable.
By morning the news of the fall of Urbino was general talk in Rome. Nicholas reached the Florentine legation half an hour later than usual; the rest of the staff was already in their places, buzzing, not a one of them at work. When Nicholas came in, every scribe and page rushed at him jabbering.
He went through the midst of them to the coat rack and hung up his coat. All in one voice, they were shouting at him, repeating over and over again the names of Urbino and Duke Valentino.
“Be quiet!” Nicholas shouted.
They all fell into a rapt attentive silence.
“Go back to your work. Whatever has happened in Urbino, our work must be done.”
“Messer Nicholas!” a scribe cried. He flung up a cocked fist. “Is it not evil—is it not such an infamy—”
“Whatever it is,” Nicholas said, “we shall not know for some time. In the meanwhile, we have a schedule of work to be met. If it is not met, I shall take steps.”
He nodded at them, all silenced, their faces long and furrowed with new doubts. He wondered what they would think if they knew who had conceived the infamy. They turned back to their desks, and Nicholas went down to Bruni’s office, where he was trying to order the ambassador’s daybooks.
Everywhere he went that day, people talked only of Urbino. When he met the Venetian ambassador during the noon hour to exchange some intelligences, the Venetian could not stop talking of the conquest.
“We should have known from the moment the Borgias began negotiations with Guidobaldo. To think a Pope could be involved in such an inhuman betrayal!” The Venetian tapped his fingers on the desk between him and Nicholas and shook his head. “What is worse is that as usual the Borgias will only profit from their sins. Perhaps we have misunderstood God all along.” He smiled at Nicholas, who laughed obediently, but it was clear the Venetian was at least halfway serious.
Nicholas gloried in this outrage, it was delightful to witness, to overhear, and to agree solemnly with it, like a ghost at his own funeral reveling in the eulogies. In the late afternoon, by no accident at all, he came across Amadeo, the merchant, whom he had avoided since Carnival.
Amadeo was taking a glass of wine in the shade of a grape arbor, near the edge of the city. He greeted Nicholas fulsomely enough, and Nicholas asked why he was still in Rome, in the heat of the summer.
“I was in the hills until last week,” Amadeo said. He signaled to a wine-boy to bring Nicholas a glass. The shadow of the grape leaves dappled the tabletop between them; heavy ripening cones of grapes hung down over their heads. “But a matter of money brought me back to Rome. For which I am most grateful—else I would not have heard so swiftly and so well of this newest triumph of our prince.”
Nicholas lifted his eyebrows. “Valentino?” he said smoothly.
“Yes—of course! The coup at Urbino—brilliant! The Borgia has grown in his mind. He has freed himself of the bonds of common opinion. Who would have thought it? But it was brilliant—brilliant.”
The wine-boy set a glass of deep red wine down before Nicholas, who touched his fingers to the stem; he was gorged on Amadeo’s praise and had no appetite for anything else.
He said, “There are those whom the act has shocked beyond anything the Borgias have done before.”
“Bah. Small-minded folk. I for one am willing to give our prince his due.”
Nicholas had to struggle to keep his face bland. He turned their conversation to other things, afraid Amadeo would detect something in his expression. For the first time in his life he did not feel smaller than the run of men.
On his way home that evening, he stopped at the inn where he had taken Miguelito’s horse, to pay for its keep, and found that the horse was gone, although the bill had not been paid. While he was waiting for the innkeeper to figure the difference between his coin and the amount due, he heard two men arguing in the nearby common room.
“Valentino is a devil!”
“He is savior of Italy.”
“It was the act of a barbarian.”
“He must do what is necessary.”
“He betrayed his ally.”
“Urbino belongs to him—he took it without a costly war. Is that worth nothing?”
His own arguments on the tongue of a stranger swelled his spirit again. He could not keep the smile from his face. The innkeeper paid money into his hand.
“Well,” the innkeeper said, “be pleased you have something to be glad over, Messer Dawson—and have pity on the folk of Urbino.”
“God have mercy on us all,” Nicholas said.
Juan was at work in his garden. Nicholas could hear him singing breathlessly beyond the trees and brush; he heard the strokes of the hoe. Miguelito was gone. The house was empty. Nicholas went to his chamber to put away his coat and shoes, dressed in more comfortable clothes, and crossed the main room to the kitchen for a glass of wine. The soup was simmering in the kettle and a large cheese rested on the wooden cutting surface by the basin; the cloth covering was peeled back a few inches from the edge of the cheese, revealing
the mellow white flesh.
Nicholas poured his glass full of the wine. Just an ordinary wine; he wished it were finer, a northern wine, perhaps, to celebrate his triumph. He had never won a victory before. He held the glass so that the light of the lamp shone through the wine, as red as the ruby Valentino had sent him. He sipped from the glass, imagining that he swallowed jewels.
Juan appeared in the door from the pantry. “There is someone at the gate.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know them. Several men, with horses.”
He lowered the glass half-tasted, all full of fluttery alarms, and reminded himself that now he was a man of consequence. “Wait. I will get my coat on.” He went back into the house and dressed himself and went out the front door.
In the street outside the gate three men on horses waited in a rank; a fourth man, dismounted, was standing with his reins in his hand. When Nicholas opened the gate, this man saluted him.
“Señor Dawson?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said.
“You are to accompany me, señor.”
Nicholas lunged back inside the gate but before he could slam it one rider leapt his mount through the gate and pinned him between the horse and the wall. The man on foot had drawn his sword. Nicholas put out his hands, trying to hold the horse back, his nose full of the rich animal odor and his eyes fascinated by the glitter of the sword.
“Come with me, señor.”
“I demand to know—”
The sword lifted, the broad blade darker at the edge, dulled with use. “Come with me, señor. Pedro—”
The horseman whose mount had Nicholas trapped against the wall reached down to grasp his arm. He recoiled, and the wall slapped into his back. The horse snorted, side-stepping. The sword tapped his arm. He thought he smelled iron, bitter as aloes. He let the horseman take hold of his arm and hoist him up onto the horse’s back.
They took him down half a mile toward the Lateran, and met a dozen more horsemen, leading an extra horse. They tied his hands behind him and put him up on the horse and led him off.
He tried again to find out who they were and where they were taking him, shaping his voice strident with indignation. “Do you know who I am?” Railing at them, he trotted along after them down the street toward the Lateran gate.
It was still early in the evening. The street was deserted; even the cats had gone in to their dinner. They passed below the Lateran Palace, and Nicholas again protested, hoping someone on the ancient crenelated battlement might hear him. The leader of the men carrying him off wheeled his horse around.
“Señor Dawson, keep still or I shall put my feedbag over your head.”
After that Nicholas said nothing.
A cart was coming in through the Lateran gate, high laden with hay, and they had to wait while the carter maneuvered his load through. Nicholas worked his hands inside his bonds. They were taking him out of Rome; he began to sweat at the thought of being at their mercy in a place he did not know. He looked from face to face of the men around him. They were of all types, broad and narrow, dark and fair, lively and taciturn. Their clothes wore no mark of their allegiance, no badge of prince or city. They were Spanish. Valentino’s men, perhaps, or from the Spanish army in Naples.
The oxen plodded by, dragging the high-piled hay after them. The horses around Nicholas’s horse moved off and his mount went with them. They rode out of the city.
He had always feared horses, and he had never learned to ride, not even the rudiments. Even at a walk he slid awkwardly around in his saddle, and he could not use his hands and arms for balance. As soon as his captors left the city, they put their horses into a quick trot. He bounced on his saddle, his spine stiff in anticipation of every jolt so that each one threw him higher yet, jarring his teeth in his head.
They seemed to ride on forever, passing dusty vineyards and villas with roofs of red tile. Nicholas’s legs ached; the ache progressed to a searing pain along the insides of his thighs and his groin. He bounced on his crotch and nearly fell off the saddle, half-swooning from the pain. One of the other men caught him and shoved him back upright.
They rode on into the darkness of the night. The country sky glowed overhead, so thick with stars his dazzled eyes saw shadows of light even in the dark. The soldiers turned into a lane bordered on either side with olive trees. At the far end was a villa whose long low wings enclosed a brick courtyard.
There the Spaniards took Nicholas off his horse and hauled him away. A man on either side of him, they had to carry him, his legs shaking and sore and useless under him. In a small room inside the main building of the villa they dropped him into a chair and left him.
He sat there, too exhausted even to wonder where he was, only relieved that the ride was over. His thighs were scraped raw and bleeding. With his fingertips he pulled the cloth of his hose away from the abused flesh. Now his gaze took in the room around him. It was small, and the only window was covered by a grille of wooden slats. The furniture stood close around the walls, square-cut tables crammed in between chairs covered with rugs in bright colors. Three candles burned in a brass floor standard by the door.
A man came in with a dish and a cup, which he put down before Nicholas, and left without speaking.
Nicholas sat still a moment after the door shut. Finally he leaned down and took the cloth away that covered the dish. A steamy fragrance of beans reached his nose. Suddenly he was mad with hunger; he snatched the bowl and spoon up and shoveled the food into his mouth and gulped the glass empty of its wine.
His stomach soothed, he went off in a circle around the room. The square furniture and the somber colors reminded him of the lodging where he had lived his years in Salamanca. Under such light as this he had learned to hate Aristotle and to love Theodosius. His first heart’s love had seduced him in a room like this. He stood absently fingering the blackened wood of the back of a chair. Behind him there was a footstep.
He turned his head. A man with a grizzled beard stood on the threshold of the door.
“So you are the man who has made a fox of the Borgia lion,” the grizzled man said, and smiled, and around his eyes the weathered skin pleated in a dozen wrinkles. “I am Gonsalvo.”
The Spanish general. Nicholas began to bow and remembered that he had been dragged off to this meeting. He squared up his shoulders.
“My lord, I protest—”
“Of course.” Gonsalvo settled himself in the chair opposite Nicholas. He wore a leather tunic over a plain shirt of linen, and might have been an ordinary countryman, except for the heavy signet ring on his left thumb. He said, “My men informed me that you suffered from the ride. That was my oversight—I never considered you might not know horsemanship.”
He smiled again, his eyes narrowed in their fans of wrinkles. Nicholas throttled his own impulse to pass the abduction off that lightly; he wanted more than that from this great man. He said, “One would think the servants of the King of Spain—”
“Do what serves their master,” Gonsalvo Said. His voice was soft but he did not smile. “You did not come when you were requested to come, and so we took you. I regret the necessity. Actually, I have been curious about you since the night I spent in your house in Rome, talking to my little lion Cesare.”
Nicholas sat down. “I am ready for answers.”
“Now recent events have made my interest more pressing. It was you who planned the taking of Urbino?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said.
“You speak most excellent Spanish.”
“I was born in Navarre,” Nicholas said. “I studied at Salamanca.”
“Indeed. You are of English parentage, by your name.”
“Yes.”
He realized that he was giving more answers than he was hearing; he touched his mouth with his hand and his gaze slid away from Gonsalvo. His legs hurt.
; “Tell me what you think of Cesare Borgia,” Gonsalvo said.
Nicholas lowered his hand to his lap, startled at that question; it was impossible for him to answer it without thinking more, and realizing that startled him again. He said, almost stammering, “He is my master, my lord captain.”
“Yet as I know him I cannot suppose he made you his servant by any fair means. Are you not still an officer of the Republic of Florence? I fear our gentle Cesare suborned you by wicked means.”
Nicholas was wrestling with his thoughts of Valentino. Gonsalvo might as easily have asked him what he thought of earthquakes, or nightmares. He had been too busy dealing with Valentino to pass a judgment of him.
“I desire,” Gonsalvo said, “to bring you into my own service, if that finds favor with you.”
“For what purpose? To spy?”
“Indeed. We have a bargain, he and I—he and my king. I mean to know even as he decides it if he will betray us.”
“I will not betray him,” Nicholas said.
“What! Have you not betrayed your city of Florence? Were they not your masters for enough years to bring a boy to manhood? Have you forged a stronger loyalty to Cesare in a matter of months?”
“Not in time,” Nicholas said. “In actions—in the taking of Urbino.”
He was determined not to yield to Gonsalvo. The Spanish captain touched his beard with his fingers, his eyes unblinking.
“Money will not sway you?”
“Valentino pays me excellently well.”
“Nor rank—the favor of Spain, your homeland?”
“My homeland is Navarre,” Nicholas said. “Sometime in the future, perhaps, the Aragonese will swallow up that land and people as he has every other space in the peninsula, but as of now, he has not.”
He had forgotten the pain in his legs; he sat up straight and stiff in the chair, cocked forward a little, aiming his words like blows at Gonsalvo. The man he refused glorified his refusal. He exalted in standing against Gonsalvo.
“Then,” Gonsalvo said, “will you not consider that Cesare Borgia is a cruel, treacherous man whose highest standard is his own untempered will? A man is only as good as him he serves, Señor Dawson.”
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