The Spy of Venice

by Benet Brandreth

  Tintoretto watched the boy emerge into the street.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said.

  Isabella emerged. ‘What now?’ she asked.

  ‘You are asking me?’

  ‘Who else?’ she said. ‘I daren’t ask myself. I have had proof my own powers of reasoning are not engaged. I’ve wasted time on this boy and his master while Prospero stands ever closer to his object and I still unknowing how he intends to achieve it.’

  She hammered her fist onto the anvil of her palm with frustration.

  ‘The lad could offer no help?’ asked Tintoretto.

  ‘His honesty is its own defence against any charge of complicity with Prospero,’ said Isabella. ‘He’s an innocent. Thinks only of lovemaking. I turned him away.’

  ‘Turned away love. Are you so rich in that virtue that you scorn it when it’s offered?’ said Tintoretto.

  ‘It was such love as lambs offer,’ replied Isabella. ‘All fresh faces and cold noses pressed where least desired.’

  ‘Yet he had promise.’

  ‘Past doubt,’ she said. ‘You spoke with him?’

  ‘As you asked me to. I held him long enough?’ asked Tintoretto.

  ‘You did. I had time to think,’ said Isabella.

  Tintoretto peered at her through his brows. She acknowledged the question written in his face.

  ‘Yes, Jacopo,’ she said, ‘and to arrange myself to suit the light. The effect was, I think, a good one. Now, what did you think of him?’

  Tintoretto gave the matter thought. ‘Clever enough and a fair face,’ he answered.

  ‘Good eyes,’ said Isabella.

  ‘I saw,’ said Tintoretto. ‘And thought him no innocent nor any man with eyes such as those.’

  ‘He writes poetry.’

  ‘These days not to write poetry is the only matter of remark.’

  Isabella shrugged and walked over to Tintoretto’s painting to look at it.

  ‘What does it matter?’ she said. ‘I am too old for toys, even pretty ones. He would be the diversion of an idle hour when every minute presses Prospero on me. I must not be distracted.’

  ‘ “Too old” is already dead, if you ask me.’

  Tintoretto waited but Isabella made no response.

  ‘Even if he is not of Prospero’s party can he not assist you in finding out more of Prospero’s intent?’

  Isabella looked up at the painting Tintoretto had been working on while she was above with the English steward, The Slaughter of the Innocents. She thought about the price of redemption for past sins. Then she turned to Tintoretto.

  ‘Jacopo, another favour,’ she said.

  The old man sighed.

  William walked along the narrow street from the church towards Rialto. He had scarce passed some hundred paces when the sound of feet behind him announced the arrival of the mad old man from the Scuola di San Rocco. William cast his eyes about for refuge and found none. The old man pulled to a halt before him and held a ring up pinched between finger and thumb.

  ‘Your ring, sir,’ Tintoretto said.

  ‘Forgi— I beg your –’ God, let us not begin this again thought William. ‘It is not mine, sir.’

  ‘The lady bid me return it to you,’ Tintoretto said.

  ‘The lady? You mean Isabella Lisarro?’

  ‘My God, sir. How many women have you given rings to this day? Of course, Isabella Lisarro.’

  ‘You are mistaken, sir, I gave the lady nothing,’ William replied.

  ‘Come, sir, you gave it her and she now returns it to you.’

  The old man threw it to William, who snatched it from the air and stared at his prize.

  ‘It’s none of mine,’ he said.

  ‘Then leave it lie here for whosoever chooses to make it his,’ Tintoretto said.

  ‘Good father, take back the ring.’

  ‘If you wish it returned do so yourself. I am no servant to fetch and carry at a stranger’s command.’

  Tintoretto made to leave.

  William protested, ‘I don’t know where the lady lives to make return of it.’

  The old man had gathered his coat to him and was pacing away. He made reply over his shoulder. ‘Then, if you have no better thought, I can suggest only that you try the place and time again where last you met her.’

  Tintoretto rounded the corner and was gone from sight.

  Such comings and goings, William thought. It is no wonder that my head spins with it all. I gave her no ring. Why sends she me this? That man was no more mad in speech now than I am. Yet he spoke very strangely to me before.

  William looked at the ring, thick gold inset with red cornelian stone and the image of a spear cut in it at the diagonal. Past question, it was Isabella’s. He had seen it flash on her hand and thought how heavy it seemed on her delicate finger. He peered closer, the head of the lance resembled the tip of a pen.

  With what great state

  Oldcastle had a bloody mouth.

  He smiled at William. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Mutton roasted to perfection. Happiness is found again.’

  He turned and clapped the back of a grey fellow, thin as a bookmark. ‘My good Master Purvis, you shall find that this kindness is not quickly forgot,’ he promised through teeth still clacking at the remaining flesh on the little bone.

  Oldcastle sat at a table on the piano nobile of the House of the White Lion. Before him were seven merchants whose spare appearance put William in mind of Pharaoh’s seven lean kine. William crossed to join them.

  ‘This is my steward, Fallow, good gentlemen,’ Oldcastle said.

  He looked down at the now empty plate before him. A shadow fell across his face at the sight.

  ‘Now, if you will be so kind as to excuse me,’ he said. ‘Fallow is my man of business and will make sure to record the issues the English merchants would have me press with the Doge. When he is at last elected.’

  He rose and the others rose with him. There was clearly some intention to protest his sudden departure, but Oldcastle forestalled it by striding wordlessly through the crowd and disappearing up the stairs. William looked at the seven hungry faces. They began to speak to him all at once.

  It took him an hour to rid himself of them for their worries and questions were many. They spoke of the threat to trade with the Netherlands if Antwerp fell to the Spanish, whether the alliance between the Catholic League and Philip of Spain threatened England directly and whether there had been further attempts on Queen Elizabeth’s life by the zealous for whom papal edict provided the excuse and Philip of Spain the reward. On these matters William had little comment to make save what he had gleaned from Sir Henry and the earlier overheard gossip of Marco Venier and Faustina. Had William not been already worn from the events of the morning it would have been a tiring hour. As it was, he was broken. When the last of the merchants had been ushered out he made his weary way to the English embassy’s room.

  Oldcastle watched him slump on the truckle bed.

  ‘Finally, your heavy looks match my mood,’ he said.

  For answer William merely groaned.

  ‘An audience could not be denied forever,’ said Oldcastle. ‘When I heard that they had brought with them good mutton, “to aid the English Ambassador’s recovery”, I knew the moment had come. I do not think I will ever regain Salarino’s good regard. He watched me eat as if he saw Cerberus at his dinner.’

  Oldcastle gave a little smile at the memory of it, and went on, ‘These English merchants will demand an answer when we have seen the Doge. What answer can we give?’

  Oldcastle stared out at Venice from the balcony. He turned back to William. ‘I wish we had never left England,’ he said. ‘I am as a tree uprooted from its mother soil. All my strength lay in that grounding and now I am fit for nothing but the axe and the fire.’

  ‘Patience, Nick,’ said William. ‘The letters delivered, we are gone. We have a duty. To Sir Henry. To England. To our own safety.’

  ‘You say we must make deliv
ery of these letters for our own safety but the delay creates its own danger,’ Oldcastle answered. ‘This agent of the Signoria, if such he be, who now demands we provide them with the names of papal agents in Venice. We cannot deliver our side of the bargain. We must be gone before he calls again. What if we are exposed? Death comes in so many guises.’

  William dared not tell Oldcastle that he must meet Iseppo da Nicosia that night.

  Oldcastle snorted. ‘You say we must deliver these letters because it is our duty. What’s duty but a word? What’s a word but breath? What’s breath to the dead? Nothing. To the living? They must live to utter it.’

  He gestured about him. ‘And this is not living. I am dead already, entombed within this room. Fed pasta, black as the soil that buries me. Offered wine thick and cloying as my congealed blood. You fly free like some spirit of the air to view the city, but I do not. I have no more freedom than this window gives.’

  William said nothing as Oldcastle argued to the night. He watched the heavy man move to kneel by him with hands clasped in supplication.

  ‘We have waited long enough,’ said Oldcastle. ‘Let us go.’

  William, lying on his back at the end of a day of disappointments and difficulties, stared at the ceiling. He had no answers to the questions Oldcastle posed, to the problem of the names, to the dangers of delay. He heard the long speech from his friend, saw the pitiful gesture, and could do no more. Everyone can master a grief but he that has it. William would have to find another way to fulfil his duty to Sir Henry.

  ‘Very well then. Let us go,’ William said.

  A dateless bargain to engrossing death!

  Behind him William heard the first chime of the bells that signalled midnight. The building was shrouded in shadows. Only the light of a small candle at one of the shrines, the ancone, that stood at the corner of the passage revealed its presence. Cursing the darkness that seemed to breed peoples on his imagination, William ventured in.

  It was one thing to declare themselves for departure, quite another to achieve it. There was much to attend to, passage to England had to be procured, but not from Venice. William and Oldcastle would have to leave that city as the Ambassador and his man and arrive in their port of departure as plain players again. Some way of passing the letters to the new doge, at least at second hand, had to be considered. And one last matter for William alone to attend to. How then to find the time when Iseppo demanded that he meet that very night?

  It had come to him as he lay on his truckle bed, listening to Oldcastle’s snores as the minutes till midnight passed, desperate for a way through the thicket. Blame Sir Henry’s truculence for the refusal to give the names. Promise Iseppo that he would work at the old man. Give me but two days and I shall deliver to you the names, he would say. It sounded a fragile thing even to his own ear. What other choice had he?

  Now, in the darkness of the passage, he wished again for a better answer but still had none. Ahead the darkness of the passage that ran beneath a row of houses was broken by a thin light that came from a candle in the window beside the promised door. William knocked. No answer came. He heard the last chime of midnight and wondered if Iseppo had tired of waiting. He knocked again and tried the handle. It opened.

  William entered. The small hall beyond was empty.

  ‘Good Iseppo,’ William called. His voice was loud in the silence of midnight.

  A door led off to his right and he tried it. The room beyond was as empty as the hall. Another door in the hall proved locked. He called for Iseppo again. Still no answer came. Enough. Iseppo had not waited till the midnight hour but sought his bed thinking William would not come. The thought of bed seemed welcome to William too. If, by this delay, he had bought more time then that was all to the good. He could truly answer that he had come and within the promised time. If Iseppo lacked patience it was not England’s fault.

  Luca crossed himself as he passed the ancone. There was a quality to the darkness of this night that provoked strange fancies. He pushed on into the passage. His fear of ghosts and the forces of Hell was great, as befitted a God-fearing man. His fear of old Antonio, captain of Vittoria Accoramboni’s guard, was greater still. The captain had set him to discover what the Englishman was about. The captain was not a man to disappoint.

  Among those that the captain had set on the Englishman, Luca had drawn the night’s watch. Luca had counted himself lucky it was so, seeing the English in their beds before dusk. Now he counted himself among the less fortunate. Towards midnight the young man had emerged from the House of the White Lion and struck out across Venice with Luca following as close behind him as the quiet of the night allowed.

  He had seen the Englishman hesitate by the same ancone where he now sought the blessing of the Virgin. Then seen him stride into the darkness. Luca had crept to the edge of the passage and peered along it. He had seen the Englishman knock at the door fifty yards away and, after a moment, enter. He heard a muffled call of greeting from within. Then he waited, not wishing to be caught in the narrow passage should the Englishman suddenly emerge.

  After several minutes had passed Luca had summoned the courage to advance when the door opened and the Englishman appeared again. Luca scrambled back to hide himself in a doorway beside the entrance to the passage. He watched as the Englishman made his way back through the Campo San Toma in the direction of the House of the White Lion.

  Luca followed him till he was sure the Englishman walked in the direction of his lodging and would not return, then he went back to the passage to view the house the Englishman had entered. The captain would not take kindly to an incomplete report of what had passed and who it was the Englishman had greeted.

  Luca’s gut twisted as the door swung open at his approach, but no one came forth. After a breath the door swung again. Unlatched, it moved with the slight wind. He crept closer and peered within. The hall beyond seemed empty. He pushed the door open and entered. There was a small room to his right that could be seen to be empty through the open door. Ahead lay another door, also open, from which spilled a dark shadow across the hall. Luca crept closer.

  In the deep darkness of the night it took him a minute to understand the shapes and shadows of the room. He saw the line of the body. Then the great rent where the throat should be, and last he understood that it was a head that twisted up to stare with sightless eyes at him.

  What tidings, messenger? Be plain and brief

  William felt the painful passage of every hour before he and Oldcastle must leave Venice and how few remained. He brooded over breakfast, twisting Isabella’s ring in his hand, making it appear and disappear, and left without saying a word to Oldcastle. It was shortly after William had left the House of the White Lion that the messenger arrived for the English Ambassador.

  ‘But, my lord, you cannot refuse the messenger of the Duchess of Bracciano,’ pleaded Salarino, whose lower lip quivered at the horror of it.

  ‘Can, will, do,’ replied Oldcastle.

  Oldcastle had found a new vigour in the prospect of departure. Of one thing he was determined, there should be no delay to his leaving. He should have known that storm-tossed crossing of the Channel for the ill omen it was. Nothing good had come since leaving England. As the demigod Antaeus had been deprived of his strength by being lifted from his grounding on his mother the Earth, so he had been weakened by being taken from England.

  ‘Back to mother,’ he sighed in his mother tongue.

  ‘Excuse me, my lord, I did not understand you,’ Salarino said.

  Salarino’s hands were grinding together with such force that, if Oldcastle had wished it, he could have used the little man as a nutcracker.

  ‘I tell you, send him away,’ Oldcastle said as he turned again to packing his satchel for departure.

  Far from Salarino’s dismissal this command resulted in a flight of Latin from the man’s lips that rushed at Oldcastle like a flock of birds startled from a bush. Oldcastle sought to wave them down. When the messenger was
first announced it had taken him ten minutes to slow Salarino’s Latin to the walking pace of Oldcastle’s comprehension. Now it ran past his understanding leaving only glimpses. Oldcastle snatched ‘grave insult’, ‘political consequences’ and ‘ill-omened’ from the racing phrases. He held up a hand imperial.

  ‘Very well. I shall tell this messenger myself.’

  Oldcastle stared at the velvet-lined box wherein the ruby brooch nestled, then snapped it shut.

  ‘Of course, this is but a token of the Duke’s esteem,’ the messenger said as he unfolded from his bow.

  As with all the servants of the House of Bracciano, he was uncommonly beautiful. Only his slight sneer lent him ugliness.

  ‘The Duchess requests the pleasure of your company that she might properly present England with her goodwill and discuss matters of business,’ said the messenger.

  ‘What? Now? It can’t be now,’ said Oldcastle.

  In his confusion he spoke in English. In his breast greed warred with fear of discovery. There was never any doubt of the victor.

  ‘I should be delighted to attend Her Grace,’ he said as his hand tucked the box away in his doublet.

  The beautiful boy smiled. He gestured to the canal entrance where the gondola lay. Then he looked round with a frown.

  ‘Your steward, my lord?’ he asked.

  ‘Out,’ Oldcastle answered.

  Let’s not wait for him, Oldcastle thought. He will only counsel caution, and look where his caution has left us. Let the English Ambassador attend and receive his reward for agreeing whatever the House of Bracciano desires. There was no danger and much profit in such a course. If this English Ambassador caused offence or failed to deliver on his promises, well, thought Oldcastle, this English Ambassador was certain to die and be reborn in a different form a day from now come what may.