As we came out of the lanes into the Piazza Navona, Martin caught me up. His voice was accusing. ‘So you know her.’
‘What if I do?’
‘Master, I haven’t followed you God knows how many miles to see you play the fool now. A fine parcel of folk you’ve fallen in with.’
I turned on him. ‘Listen to your impudence. You think because I forgave you for being my mother’s spy, you have the right to say anything.’
He fell silent, and trudged on a pace or two behind. ‘Stephen Cage,’ he muttered. ‘A pilgrim! He’s not that, whatever else he may be. Of course, you don’t want to listen to what I have to say.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Or what I’ve found out?’
I stopped. Angry as I was, I knew Martin had sense, and long ears for gossip. ‘Well, if you know something, then tell me it.’ I dodged as a devil-faced masquer flung a volley of comfits at us.
Martin leant close. ‘Very well, then. While you were showing off your wares, I got friendly with their man Fenton, the chamberlain. None of them know what Mr Stephen’s doing here. But he sees the Pope almost every day, and after every meeting he comes away in a sourer temper than the one before.’
I shrugged. There was nothing to trouble me in that. On the contrary: it only went to prove that Mr Stephen was a man of real standing, whatever he might say to deny it. I said, ‘Then he is some sort of ambassador to do with the war. More secret and trusted than Sir John Russell, but with the same mission.’
Martin lowered his voice. ‘But Russell is in the best of humours, they say. He’s delighted at having stopped them from making peace without his agreement.’
I looked at Martin with surprise, and new respect. He saw more deeply into politics than most Italians, who had complete faith in our King’s desire for peace. ‘Yes,’ I granted. ‘The more Pope Clement and the Emperor squabble, the greater the power of King Henry.’
‘So if Mr Stephen is on the same business as Russell,’ Martin pursued, ‘what makes him so out of sorts?’
I did not answer. I thought of Bennet’s letter. The King has a new man in Rome. And that man, Wolsey thought, had something to do with the divorce. But Wolsey was working for the divorce himself. If this truly was Stephen’s business, why was it kept secret from the Cardinal, who was King Henry’s most trusted minister? And then there were Wolsey’s words: There is a web spread against me. I frowned, and quickened my pace.
The crowds were growing thicker. Cellini was calling from ahead. We caught him up, and soon came to the Corso, longest of all the streets of Rome, reaching straight as an arrow nearly a mile out to the city walls. Every window and balcony was filled with people, and the houses were hung with tapestries and bundles of pine boughs and paper flowers. Looming over us was the Palazzo San Marco, a vast residence belonging to the Pope, where Clement himself sat in state on a balcony, in a scarlet mantle and skullcap. Round the square beneath the palazzo were wooden scaffolds draped with heraldic banners of the noble families of Rome. I saw women in masks, their silk gowns cut away to the waist to show their bare breasts beneath numerous ropes of pearls. Courtesans: or perhaps not. Just as the courtesans ape the manners of fine ladies, so ladies in turn copy the courtesans; so that these women might just as easily be among the highest-born in Rome.
Cellini pointed to a pavilion bearing the black on white of the del Bene family, from which Alessandro called out to us. I climbed its wooden steps and bowed. Seated in a row, with tapestries behind them and a pan of hippocras steaming over a low brazier, were the Cages. They were dressed, all of them, in black capes. Mr Stephen had in his hand a white mask in the form of an owl’s face. He rose to take my hand.
‘Mr Richard! How very pleased we are you have come. Take a seat, do, between me and my wife.’
I pressed behind Alessandro and Mr Stephen. Mrs Grace tilted her head for a polite kiss on the cheek and sat down again. Beyond her sat Susan and then Hannah. Mrs Grace’s chair blocked the narrow passage, taking away all possibility of a kiss of greeting with Hannah. I sat down, displeased, between the two elder Cages, and peered to the left on the pretext of leaning out and craning for a view of the Pope, high up in his balcony. Susan was glancing all round with an air of bitter boredom, and returned my glances with a glare. Beyond her, Hannah held in one hand a mask of moulded wax, covered in gold leaf and shaped like a cat’s muzzle with slit-eyes. A strand of black hair wound down from her hood across her cheek, and her mouth curved in a smile. Our eyes met for a moment, and then her lips pouted and she lifted the mask to her face. I sat back again, fuming.
Mr Stephen turned to me with a jovial air.
‘Now tell me about your ambitions. Your jewels: this is no common trade you are engaging in. They are fit for a king.’
I looked back at him levelly. ‘I believe so too.’
‘But kings are hard to see, for young merchants.’
‘True enough.’ I held my breath. He had seen right into my deepest needs. He held me in the palm of his hand.
Stephen smiled. ‘Well, I dare say when we are all home in England we can do something about that. Now tell me about your uncle. Bennet Waterman. Has he been with Cardinal Wolsey long?’
So there it was: the chance of that longed-for introduction at Court, and, along with it, the price I would have to pay. I answered warily, ‘About five years.’
‘A secretary, did you say?’
‘A lawyer, in origin.’
Stephen took a sip of hot wine, his pebbly eyes fixed on me. ‘Indeed? Tell me more.’
I hesitated. I did not like to be squeezed for information in this fashion. If Stephen was who I suspected, then I should be learning his secrets to feed to Bennet. Instead was I to tell Bennet’s secrets to Stephen? But he was Hannah’s father, and my route to the King.
I said, ‘He has been helping the Cardinal to dissolve a number of smaller monasteries, which he needs to fund his new college at Oxford.’
‘I know that,’ returned Stephen, rather too quickly. ‘And does your uncle take part in any of the Cardinal’s more … confidential business?’
I looked back at him, my heart beating fast. Here, I guessed, was the question of the divorce. I knew little; less, I presumed, than Stephen himself. But it would not do to admit that. Mr Stephen had to believe he needed me. I said, ‘He takes on any work that is asked of him.’
Stephen returned my gaze. ‘What an extremely valuable man.’
‘You should see the horse I have entered,’ Alessandro said to Cellini. ‘I’ve staked a hundred ducats on it. Wild as a lion! They say no man has ever managed to mount it.’
I turned to peer out over the street, relieved to seize an opportunity to turn the subject aside.
‘Surely,’ I commented, ‘a serious defect in a racehorse?’
Alessandro caught Stephen’s eye, and both smiled.
‘Ho!’ said Mr Stephen. ‘He will see, won’t he?’
At that moment we heard the loud report of a cannon, and a distant roar from the crowd far up to the right along the Corso. Galloping towards us came a confused mass of horses. Not a single one of them had a rider. They stampeded forward, bucking, twisting, shying off in the direction of some side street, colliding and going down on the stones in a confusion of flying manes and squealing, foaming mouths and then picking themselves up and running on. The din of the crowd was building, and the horses were careering closer. I could not conceive how they could be made to run in the right direction, until I saw men in blue livery darting out from behind the canvas with pots of steaming pitch, and ladles with which they flicked the boiling liquid on to the horses’ haunches, driving them into a fresh, crazed charge. As if this were not enough, each horse had a ball tied to its flanks set with spikes, that acted as a kind of spur as it ran.
‘Minotauro! Minotauro!’ yelled Alessandro, as the first three horses dashed into the square, then turned at bay and bolted this way and that. ‘Where are you?’ Several more ran in after them, bumpi
ng and falling together. ‘The devil,’ shouted Alessandro. ‘Look at him, tumbling in the dust, after eating my gold.’ Men ran out, darting round the whinnying, stamping horses and snatching at their bridles to catch them. I heard their shouts as they tried to keep clear of those hoofs, and the screams of others as they were thrown down to the ground.
‘This is the Recapture,’ said Stephen. ‘The finest part of the race. Also the most dangerous.’
I glanced along at Hannah. She was holding her mask by its edge, tapping its golden rim against her chin. Her face was rapt with wild excitement. I cursed my luck that I was not sitting at her side.
‘Over too quickly,’ said Stephen. ‘But there are more races to come.’
‘Horse races?’ I asked.
‘I believe they are races of … other sorts.’
‘They are hardly proper,’ said Grace. ‘Persons of quality watch the race of the Berber horses, and then they go.’
For a moment husband and wife looked at each other. Tension flared between them. Mrs Grace’s eyes, dark like Hannah’s, shone above her pinched nostrils, while Mr Stephen drew in his breath, his lips parted from his teeth. Then Stephen looked down with a grunt. ‘Hm. Indeed. In fact, I do have some papers to read. But we shall meet again, Mr Richard. No doubt of it.’
Grace turned to me, brushed back a wisp of her black hair and smiled her exquisitely elegant smile. This was my dismissal, it seemed. I rose and bowed, and climbed back down the wooden steps to the street, where Martin fell into pace behind me. The sun was close to setting, and a chill, misty air was creeping through the city with the twilight. But I did not have the heart to return to my inn. I was nervy, ill-tempered, wound to breaking point with disappointment, and turning over in my mind how I could contrive to get back to see Hannah. And so I wandered the city. The streets were still filled with rowdy masquers, calling out to each other from behind the faces of foxes or goats, guessing at one another’s names or hurling comfits. Without a mask I felt strangely naked and without defence.
‘Messer Dansey!’ It was a woman’s voice, hailing me from behind, almost drowned by the music and shouts of the masquers. But surely, surely I could not be wrong. I turned and scanned the crowds, black-cloaked or particoloured, in turbans, crimson hoods or silver paper crowns. The groups parted, revealing for a moment a stationary figure in a black cape down to the ground, and a golden mask shaped like a cat’s muzzle with slit-eyes. A strand of black hair wound down from her hood across it. I sprang after her, but a group of acrobats dashed across my path, doing handstands and high leaps into the air, followed by a troop of buffoons on stilts. When they were out of my way, the cat mask had gone.
‘Mr Richard!’ She was standing across the street this time, in the shadow of a colonnade. We were in the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the street of the dark shops that are all built into the ruined foundations of an ancient theatre. I darted over the road and ran along the overhanging wall with its dingy orange stucco dropping off the ancient stone, peering into every one of its green, mossy recesses. Martin stood still, watching me with a frown.
‘Don’t stand there!’ I snapped at him. ‘Help me to look!’
‘Mr Richard!’
I spun round. She was over the street again, calling from the colonnade of a palazzo. This time I ran straight across to her, caught her by the arm and pulled down the mask. I was staring into Hannah’s mocking smile. She was alone: wherever her parents and their grand household were, Hannah had somehow given them the slip.
‘Where were you hurrying off to?’ she teased me. ‘All the amusement is back at the Corso.’
‘And you came to fetch me?’
‘Why not, Mr Richard?’
‘My dear Mrs Hannah. So something about me is worthy of your notice after all.’
‘Do you think so?’ Her smile took on a gleam of danger. ‘Anything is possible. But really I simply hate to see anyone go trudging home like a whipped dog when the best part of the entertainment is just beginning.’
She glanced at my hand where it touched her gown. Then she lifted the mask back to her face, becoming infinitely wild, a golden beast in a black pelt. I told Martin, ‘You may go back to the inn.’
Martin, however, was immovable. ‘Master,’ he murmured. ‘If you had heard the way those men of the Cages talk about you and your jewels, you would not wish to be out alone. You’re the man made of diamonds, the man with a million ducats round his neck.’
‘Go back,’ I snarled at him. ‘I’ll be safe enough.’ He looked as if he were about to argue, but I turned my back. Together, Hannah and I pressed on through the crowds. It was almost dark now. Along the Corso hundreds of torches flamed, making an alley of fire. Hannah turned to me and lifted her mask.
‘The horse race was the tame one,’ she said. ‘If you want to see something truly wild you have to stay up for it.’
From the northern end of the street we heard the roaring of many men, together with a tremendous animal bellowing. Suddenly we saw rushing towards us in the torchlight a dozen wild bulls, each as black as night, tossing their long, curved horns this way and that. Hannah came forward to the very edge of the roadway where the canvas barrier had been torn down beside an ancient column, watching fearless as the bulls came rushing towards us. I was proud then to be standing at her side, just as motionless as she was. They were nearly upon us, when a single bull broke away and began bucking along the edge of the street, tossing its horns, looking for someone on whom to take out its rage. Still Hannah did not move. Its rolling pink eyes picked us out. At the very last moment I took her by the shoulders and pulled her back behind the column. As the bulls thundered past, I pressed her against the stone. The noise of their hoofs was deafening. Her face was alight and alive, with just a slight smile of mockery, maybe, that I had been the first to draw back. I leant towards her and pressed my lips against hers. She was surprised; her wide open eyes stared into mine. Then they slowly closed. The sound of the bulls’ hoofs diminished. I could feel her lips soften, and as my tongue pressed they parted, and a little flick of her tongue darted out against mine. The touch of it enflamed and astonished me. If I had never loved her before, I loved her then. But even in that same instant there was a doubt. What if that lick was a tease, a taunt? I could not say if she had truly abandoned herself, and if this was a moment of shared intoxication and delight. There is only one cure for these kinds of doubts. I put my arm behind her back and ran it up into her hair. I felt her mouth beneath mine twist into a smile, and she stepped away from me to one side. I moved closer, putting my arm round her again. She wagged her finger at me in reproof.
‘Dear Mr Richard! Before you take any further liberties you ought really to tell me who is my rival.’
The word stopped me dead.
‘Rival?’
‘The lady who is to have all those jewels. Or are you telling me you really are just a tradesman? You buy, you sell, you make a profit?’ That face of hers, so close to mine, was maddening: the slow pucker of her cheeks, the spreading smile, the dance of those deep brown eyes.
‘Oh, I shall make a profit. Never fear.’
All about us the crowds were surging northwards along the Corso. Hannah swung herself round the pillar and set off after them. I ran to catch up. She cast me a disdainful look over her shoulder.
‘And you put all that passion merely into making money? How you disappoint me.’
I hesitated. Since arriving in Italy I had kept my plans secret from everyone save Cellini. But how could I let her see me either as a dirty tradesman, or as a lover of anyone but her?
‘No,’ I said. ‘You are right. There is a lady who is to have them.’
‘Aha!’ She smiled. She had me now, she thought: she could tease me without end for wooing her while I bought gems for another.
‘But the lady is not mine. She is the King’s.’
Hannah clapped her hands and laughed with glee. ‘So that is it! What a very clever man you are, Richard Dansey. And if I know
the lady in question, she will be exceedingly well pleased.’
I stood rock still and swung her round to face me. ‘You know?’ I whispered. ‘You know who she is?’
There it was: everything was out now, not only my innermost ambitions, but the appalling fact of my ignorance as well. Hannah’s eyes opened wide, she put her hands to her mouth and she drew in her breath as if she had just heard the most tragic news of her life. ‘Oh, my poor Richard Dansey.’ Then she laughed out loud, doubling her body over at the waist. ‘And you really, truly do not know? But everybody knows who the King’s new love is!’
‘Who is it?’ I asked urgently. ‘Hannah, tell me who it is.’
Still she kept laughing and wiping her eyes. ‘Mercy. No more. You will kill me with laughter.’
I took her hands in mine. I kissed those hands, three, five times. ‘Dear Mrs Hannah, sweet Mrs Hannah. Tell me who she is.’
‘What,’ she said, mastering her laughter a little and looking into my eyes, ‘betray a secret? Oh, no.’
I clenched her fingers. ‘But you said yourself it was no secret at all.’
She leant her soft, teasing face close to mine so that our noses almost touched. ‘Everyone may know,’ she whispered, ‘but no one is supposed to tell.’
I gazed at her: astonished, enraged, and loving and desiring her all the more for the way she tormented me. Feet raced past us. Dimly I heard voices shouting, ‘The dwarfs! The dwarfs!’
Hannah put her finger on my lips, and slipped past me and out on to the Corso. With a glance back she called, ‘Quickly, Mr Richard! We cannot miss the dwarfs.’
I followed her, steaming with impatience, until at last we reached the Piazza del Popolo. The crowds were thicker than ever here. The city wall ran along the far side of the square, with a strongly fortified gate set in it; beside it was the handsome church of Santa Maria with its slender bell-tower, that had been paid for by all the people of Rome. In the middle of the square were gathered forty dwarfs, dressed in the liveries of their masters: for there is not a noble house in Rome that does not keep one or two. Hannah was standing already at the front of the crowd.
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