Among the men behind him was Valentino. And Stefano.
“I hope you aren’t looking for a place to play cards,” Nicholas said. The night was cold and dank; he shivered in his dressing gown and low house shoes. He avoided looking at Stefano. “And I’m fairly out of wine.”
Miguelito leaned down from his horse to speak into Nicholas’s ear. “We only came to tell you that my master will see Gonsalvo here in one week’s time. You will arrange it with Gonsalvo. Go back to bed.”
“In a week? He may not have the opportunity.”
“Arrange it.” Miguelito swung his horse around, and the other horses skittered and wheeled in the close quarters, manes and cloaks fluttering. Stefano rode well, to Nicholas’s surprise, who had never seen him near a horse.
Valentino caught him staring at Stefano. Valentino reached out and palmed Stefano’s shoulder. “See how he pines for you. Go give him a kiss.”
The prince was in his teasing humor. Nicholas turned quickly to the gate.
“Leave off,” Stefano muttered.
“Give him a kiss!”
The other men were laughing. Stefano’s horse jumped, its jaw pressed open by the rider’s hard hand on the reins. “By Cock, leave off!” Stefano cried.
“Bah.” Valentino spurred his horse, which leapt sideways, and with a backward sweep of his arm knocked Stefano out of his saddle. The prince galloped away down the street, his followers streaming after him; with their dark cloaks spread on the wind of their passage they seemed like a flight of bats.
Falling, Stefano had kept hold of his reins. His horse plunged, fighting to run with the others. Stefano struggled to make it stand and when it stood, bounded into the saddle.
“Damn you!” he shouted at Nicholas. He raced his horse away down the street after Valentino.
Nicholas drank the last of his wine and set the glass down. Juan, standing behind him, held out the linen napkin so that he could wipe his lips.
“You must not be here tonight,” Nicholas said. He dropped the crumpled napkin on the table beside the remains of the bread. “Have you somewhere you might stay?”
“When may I come back?” Juan asked.
“Tomorrow morning. I will give you some money, if you need it.”
“No—I can stay at the church,” Juan said. He began to gather the dishes and silver from the table.
“Let me give you a purse. You could go to an inn.” He imagined Juan sleeping on the stone floor of a church, head to foot with a painted saint.
The old man was shaking his head; his stoop curved his head and shoulders forward over the clutter of dishes. “I would rather stay in the church than in some filthy common bed. What will you do—are you staying here?”
“Yes.” Nicholas hitched himself up on his left ham and pulled his purse from under his belt. He counted a hundred carlini onto the table. “Here—at least you can have some wine.”
“This is business of those other people,” Juan said.
Nicholas did not answer. Juan, superstitious as a child, would not bring Valentino’s name to his lips.
“You should not be here then either,” Juan said. He started away with the dishes.
Nicholas made a rude noise with his tongue against his teeth. “You sound like Bruni. Tell me the stars foretell disaster.” He pushed at the table, rattling the legs against the floor, to cover the old man’s answer. “Take this money and get out of here. I will expect you back tomorrow to serve me a cold breakfast.” Rising, he went across the room to his bedchamber. When he came out again a few moments later with his good coat in his hands, Juan and his money were gone. Nicholas put his coat on by himself.
Now, alone in the house, he fell into a whirl of impatience. He went around the room twice, moving one chair an inch, and sliding his hand over the scarred front of the cabinet in an effort to hide its flaws. He went into the kitchen to put the wine into the jar and found that Juan had done that, and even set out half a dozen glasses on the sideboard. Nicholas grunted, displeased. Living in his imagination, the old man was taking of late to acting on what he imagined as if it were perfectly real, which set Nicholas’s teeth on edge. As he came out again from the kitchen into the main room, the gate bell sounded.
He went out into the late twilight and opened the gate for two men wrapped in cloaks and hoods. They were on foot. Halfway down the path through the trees to the house, Valentino put back his hood and stopped.
“He has not come?”
Nicholas said, “Not yet, Magnificence. He sent to me that he would come by sundown. He wanted a guide through the city and I sent him des Troches.”
Valentino hawked as if he were peeling off the sides of his mouth and spat white into the shadow under the trees. “Why des Troches?”
“Of late he has pestered me often to do me small favors.”
“You should have gone yourself. Des Troches will get him lost.” Valentino made an impatient face. “Still, it works out well, for me. When he comes, meet him, sit him down and give him drink, and draw him into talk. Is there somewhere in your house where I can listen secretly to him?”
“The bedroom,” Nicholas said.
“The kitchen would be better,” Miguelito said.
They had been speaking in Italian but Miguelito used Spanish, and henceforth they spoke in that language.
He went on, “There is a way out from the kitchen—when you wanted to join the captain-general, you would only have to go around the house and enter by the front door.”
Valentino was already moving toward the house again. “Excellent,” he said.
Nicholas followed him in through the front door, and when Valentino hesitated, directed him toward the kitchen. Dark as an imp in his black cloak, Miguelito followed his master. The gate bell rang again.
On the stone threshold of the kitchen Valentino said, “Des Troches will be with him—you can trust des Troches to help you draw him out.”
The door shut. Nicholas went out to the gate, his armpits wet.
Again, two cloaked men waited for him; these men led horses by the reins. Nicholas stood aside to let them pass by him. He considered what his neighbors were thinking of this gathering. An orgy, perhaps. He circled after the newcomers, avoiding their horses, and spoke in Spanish.
“Excellency, let me thank you for allowing me the honor of sheltering you once again.” He bowed to the burly man on the left. “Unfortunately, I have no groom to take your horses, but if you will tether them under the trees—”
“Allow me the honor,” said the slender man, and taking the reins of both horses led them away into the shade.
The heavy-set man facing Nicholas drew his hood back and opened his cloak. Smiling, he said, “The pleasure belongs to me, Señor Dawson, and the happy anticipation of entertaining you once more, as well.”
Nicholas could not hold the older man’s sharp eyes. He said stiffly, “I am at Your Excellency’s disposal,” and bowed and held out his hand toward the house.
Gonsalvo da Cordoba laughed under his breath. “Well, we shall not speak of it.” He started toward the door. “Has my young friend arrived?”
Nicholas, following at his heels, was filled with the suspicion that the Spanish captain-general knew that Valentino lay in wait for him. He held the door. Des Troches was tramping through the high grass toward them, his cloak over his arm.
“No,” Nicholas said to Gonsalvo. “He has not arrived yet.”
Gonsalvo nodded his head once and went into the room. Three strides inside the door, he stopped and exclaimed.
“You have painted out your mountains.”
Nicholas said, “They bored me, Excellency.”
Gonsalvo faced him, moving like a dancer on the balls of his feet, his tufted gray eyebrows up. “You found them more boring than plain white walls?”
“They fix the imagination,” Nicholas said. �
�Against white walls, I can see what I please.” He smiled at Gonsalvo, who was exactly his own height, eye to eye with him; he had remembered him much taller. “Actually, I am trying to accumulate enough money to have them painted again.”
“With what?”
Des Troches had come in. Nicholas glanced at him. “There is wine in the kitchen, there,” he said, and pointed to the door. Des Troches left them.
“I don’t know what I shall put on the walls.” A gesture of his hand offered Gonsalvo a chair; they both sat down at the same moment, half-facing one another. Nicholas crossed his legs at the knee. “Perhaps scenes of your victories in Naples?”
Gonsalvo pushed his boots out in front of him. “Not by Italian artisans.”
“It would require the talents of a Perugino, at the least.”
“The Italians hate me. Hate all Spaniards, even—” he paused to take a glass from des Troches, who had come back from the kitchen—“our divine Cesare. Is that not so?”
Des Troches burst into speech. “Not so! All Italy rings with praise of my lord’s virtue and good fortune.”
“Besides,” Nicholas said, “my lord Valentino is half Italian.”
Gonsalvo put the glass down untasted. “All the same, one hears the most bitter words of him, from some men.”
Des Troches had left the kitchen door halfway ajar. Nicholas touched the bell of his glass with his fingertips. Gonsalvo was saying nothing that Valentino wanted to hear.
Des Troches had leapt into words again like a greyhound. “Those whom he has destroyed may speak against him, but many more, whose lives he has restored, will sing his praises.”
Nicholas lowered his glass. “Guidobaldo da Urbino was much loved, and how many of his people rose to defend him? You see him hounded over Italy. You yourself, my lord—your image in little hangs over very few Italian hearths.”
“I do not seek power here for myself,” Gonsalvo said.
“What you do not seek you may receive. You are the king’s vicar in Naples. You have driven out the French completely, now—”
“They still hold Gaeta. This is a fine wine, Señor Dawson, but I recall you have fine appetites.”
Nicholas met the other man’s pale direct stare a moment, and Gonsalvo smiled again, showing teeth below his grizzled moustaches. What he meant was clear: if Nicholas pushed him, he would mention Nicholas’s visit to him, a hard thing to explain to Valentino.
Des Troches was saying, “Gaeta! Who doubts the Spanish pennant will fly from its walls before summer?”
“I doubt,” Gonsalvo said, “until I see it.”
Des Troches leaned forward, his smooth face earnest. “Most excellent of captains, your caution graces your reputation. Yet surely you are waiting only for the proper moment to give the French their final humiliation.”
“I only wish I could agree with you, señor.”
Nicholas could not hold his tongue any longer; he felt Gonsalvo’s unspoken threat like a challenge. He said, “Yet you are certain enough of the power of your rule in Naples that you left your army to return to Spain—last month, I understand, and for some time.”
Gonsalvo’s eyes half-closed. “When my king summons me, I go.” He reached for his glass on the floor by his boot.
“And of course the defenders of Gaeta know that the French king is bringing an army to their relief,” Nicholas said. “Which surely accounts for their resolve.”
Des Troches cleared his throat in the racket of a stuttering cough. “The French will be no match for the battle-hardened veterans of Spain.”
Nicholas was staring intently into Gonsalvo’s face. “The French army,” he said, “will be the largest to invade Italy since the hordes of Attila.” Let Gonsalvo see that Nicholas feared neither him nor Valentino.
“Attila also failed,” Gonsalvo said mildly. “You are well informed, my dear Dawson.”
“My post with Florence gives me access to much French information.”
“As your post with my lord Cesare gives you access to information on the other side?” Gonsalvo did not look angry; the webs of lines around his eyes were crinkled, as if he suppressed a smile.
“I do what I can,” Nicholas said.
That pomposity brought Gonsalvo to laughter. He raised his glass in a satirical salute. “I am sure of that.”
Nicholas felt Gonsalvo laughing at him; like an ass he had let the Spanish captain lead him deftly into revealing how seriously he took his own part in this. His ears burned when he remembered Valentino listening. Des Troches leapt into the spreading silence with a flurry of words.
“King Louis loiters in France. Who knows if he will even come to Italy? What use to spend more French blood in pursuit of a fantasy?”
There was a knock on the door, and des Troches jumped straight up from his chair. Nicholas relaxed down to his heels. He leaned over the arm of his chair and put his wine on the floor.
“Let them in,” he said to des Troches.
The other man sped away across the room. Nicholas sat back, his shoulders slumping, and found Gonsalvo’s eyes on him.
“Señor Dawson, a draw, I think.”
Nicholas could not answer that. The door creaked; Valentino came into the room, Miguelito at his side, and des Troches behind him.
For several moments no one spoke save the two great men, smiling at each other, and giving one another compliments and assurances of love. Nicholas, des Troches, and Miguelito stood around them, motionless. Nicholas found himself drawn to the differences in the two men—Valentino taller by a head, young, and fair as the sun in its glory; and Gonsalvo, weathered more than aged, square-set and solid. Valentino stood with his head thrown back, and every motion of his hand caught and held the eye like the gestures of a magician.
They sat. Nicholas and des Troches went to bring them wine.
“What think you of our Spanish captain?” des Troches said, in the kitchen.
Nicholas poured the red wine into a glass. “He loves the contest.”
“Pah! He is a soldier, that is true of the breed.”
Nicholas thought not. The soldiers he had experience of all loved to win, and avoided even the threat of a test. He put the tall Venetian glasses on a tray and took them out, des Troches going ahead to hold the door.
In his chair by the fire Valentino was talking of some feat of arms; Gonsalvo sat hunched to one side listening, his chin in his hand. Nicholas took the wine in between them. Valentino took a glass and drank and plunged back into the recital of his deed, but Gonsalvo’s gaze strayed, and he held the wine up to the light.
“Excellent,” he said, when Valentino had come to the end of his story, “most excellent, and your successes show how well you know your craft. For myself, I would be proud to own such fortune as attends you.”
“Fortune,” Valentino said. “I have shaped my destiny in my own hands, señor el capitan, and whatever becomes of me, I shall neither blame nor thank fortune.”
Nicholas went to the hearth. A damp chill was creeping into the room, and he sank down onto his haunches and put a log on the rails and stuffed tinder under it. Behind him, Gonsalvo was asking questions of the country north of Rome—how the French army would have to march south. While Nicholas was scraping the flint over the steel in his tinderbox, Miguelito knelt beside him.
“Here—you are ruining my nerves,” He took the box and struck sparks into the tinder flax. As they knelt over the fire, he said, “You seem to know one another—you and Gonsalvo.”
“What?” Nicholas said.
“Oh. You are so fiery with him. I have marked it in you, Nicholas—you are mild as a mouse on first meeting, it’s only later you show teeth.”
“My lord said—”
“I heard.” Miguelito rose and leaned himself up against the wall again, his face turned away. The fire was glowing in the tinder; Nicholas
bent down to blow on it.
After a while he took the empty glasses and filled them in the kitchen. The two men by the fire talked back and forth; Valentino talked most, while Gonsalvo spurred him on with questions.
“Of the French army,” Gonsalvo said at last, “what do you know of their commanders?”
“Less than I know of yours.” Valentino smiled. His hands, which had been busy with gestures, suddenly fell still on his knees. “Among whom I would number myself, if we can agree on the terms of the contract.”
Nicholas lifted his head, alarmed. It would not help Valentino’s cause with Gonsalvo to bargain. Gonsalvo sat motionless for a moment, his gaze on Valentino, and his face smoothed clean of expression above the masking beard. Finally he held out his empty glass to Nicholas.
“The Italian condotta is something foreign to me—I do not understand the principle or the practice. What terms do you require?”
Reluctantly Nicholas went to fill the glass, his ears straining behind him to hear what they said. Valentino spoke lightly, almost carelessly. “I must protect my territories. After all, my domains lie between the French king and you. I will be placing myself in mortal jeopardy. The situation is delicate. My father’s very safety may be at stake.”
“These are your terms?”
Nicholas had come to the kitchen door and had to go in after the wine. He heard nothing more. The door swung shut behind him. One of the candles in the kitchen had gone out and the long narrow room was gloomy as a church. He found the wine jar empty and took it into the pantry to fill it again. Valentino knew Gonsalvo little, to put a base price on service to him. Pouring the wine into the glass, he took it out again to the front room, where Valentino was saying, “—Florence, of course.”
“My superiors rather favor the de’ Medici.”
Valentino sat unmoving as an Egyptian king in his chair. “I said my terms were high.”
It was Tuscany he wanted. Nicholas put the glass into Gonsalvo’s hand, rough as old wood.
“Then there is the matter of Venice,” Valentino said.
Gonsalvo sipped the wine. He licked his lips with the tip of his tongue and brushed his damp gray moustaches back. He said, “Under the circumstances, my young friend, I think we can stop with the matter of Tuscany.”
City of God Page 24