‘And now we have eaten our bread, and the sweetmeats are finished too,’ said Susan. ‘Hannah?’
‘I know there are more, down in the stillroom.’
‘Be sure to bring us some of the candied pears,’ put in Grace. ‘The ones that were a gift from Cardinal Ceci. But I really think we should wait for Stephen downstairs. He will never find us up here.’
I struggled to raise myself. ‘I must be the one to go out. I can pass as a Spaniard. Promise me you will not leave here.’ My head throbbed, and I fell back against Hannah’s shoulder.
Susan frowned. ‘He is right. If he can walk.’
Hannah brushed my hair from my brow. ‘Later. First you should sleep.’ Already I was drifting into a dark blank. Fire, screams, running feet, the cannons and the drums; they beat round and round in my head, growing fainter, until all that was left was Hannah’s gentle breathing, the soft warmth of her body. As I slipped asleep we were passing together through France, laughing at the horrors of Italy, just a few days’ travel from home.
I woke suddenly. It was after dawn. A white light penetrated the chinks between the roof tiles above us. Hannah lay asleep on her side. Grace, slumped at the end of the chamber, looked old and drawn; as if only in sleep could she grasp the true dread of our position. I lifted myself on one arm. I felt weak, but my head no longer throbbed. Susan crouched at the end of the chamber closest to the trapdoor. She whispered, ‘There is someone down below.’
I listened. There was the patter of feet, a rummaging, and a scratching sound. I held my breath. Then there came what sounded like a baby’s whimpers, and low animal squeaks. Susan turned to me with an impish grin.
‘Beelzebub!’
She pulled back the trapdoor, and the monkey danced up and down, baring its teeth and chattering.
‘We must get him away,’ I hissed. ‘He will betray us.’
‘Kill him is best,’ said Susan.
‘No!’ Hannah sat up. She leant forward fiercely. ‘That is what you always wanted.’
‘What if it is?’
‘Girls!’ put in Grace. ‘We shall let Mr Richard decide.’
I was buckling on my sword and taking up the harquebus. ‘Stay here,’ I warned them. Susan let down the ladder. I descended quickly, and watched the trapdoor close again above me. Then I turned to look for Piccolino. He could so easily be the death of us, if soldiers returned to the palazzo. But the beast had gone.
I walked out through the chambers that smelt of death, down through the sala, listening all the way. A few sweetmeats would not keep us alive. I had to find some real nourishment. Out in the square a damp fog hung, the same as the day before. Through it came the muted sounds of the Sack, cannonfire from the Castle, gunshots, screams. I pulled the Spaniard’s short cape round me and ran north. Along the Banchi, I saw Spanish and German officers trying to gather up their men. But with Bourbon dead, the soldiers simply laughed. ‘We have no master now.’ There were Italians in the Imperial army too: Neapolitans, Sienese, Romans who belonged to the vast clan of the Colonnas. His Holiness had burnt their villages and driven away their flocks. Now these men were back. They killed with as much fury as the rest, and where they went they daubed on the walls the single word, VENDETTA. Vengeance.
I passed by the house of Juan Perez, the Imperial ambassador, and of Don Martin too, whose palazzo everyone had thought so strong. The doors stood open. Those cannon on Don Martin’s roof had not saved him. The dead lay everywhere, new corpses falling across the old. Soldiers squatted in the streets, playing dice over their piles of gold crucifixes and bags of ducats and jewels, and even bound prisoners, a handsome woman or a rich-looking merchant. Some lost all they had in a few throws, and went back to the churches and palazzi for more. The flow of treasure seemed without end. It was an hour, or two or three, before I gathered my senses together, broke into a row of abandoned shops off the Piazza Navona and snatched up sausages and bread and wine. As I was coming back past the little church of Santa Maria in Vallicella, an officer in a crimson sash stopped me and demanded something in German. I tried to push by, but he repeated it. There was no one else in sight. I swung the harquebus from my shoulder and shot him. I murmured to myself, ‘Vendetta.’
When I got back, the Palazzo del Bene was as still and quiet as a charnel house. Flies settled on the bodies, and rose in buzzing swarms as I hurried up the stairs. In the closet I whispered to Hannah and Susan to let down the ladder. Back up in the dimness of the attic I began to shake. There was triumph, exhilaration in being back in that strange pocket of femininity, with not only my Hannah but the other two women relying on me utterly. Mrs Grace smiled. With what looked like a great effort she said, ‘Tell us the news in the city.’
I paused before I answered, ‘Not good.’
‘You must tell us the worst,’ said Susan. ‘Does anywhere hold out?’
‘Only the Castle.’
‘You can lead us away from here,’ Hannah said. ‘You can smuggle us through a gate, or over the city wall? Can you not, dear Mr Richard?’
Her voice was bright and wheedling, just as if she were teasing me into letting her watch the dwarf race, or finding her a second cup of wine. Slowly I shook my head. I had been out as far as the walls, and I knew that beyond the heart of the city the army still behaved like an army. They had patrols, and regular changes of the guard. They meant to make sure no relief could come to the Pope.
‘In that case,’ Susan said, ‘we must get into the Castle.’
I said nothing. To break into Sant’ Angelo: if it was beyond the power of thirty thousand besiegers, it was clearly beyond ours.
‘But you will think of something,’ Hannah said. ‘Of course you will.’
Day by day I crept down from the attic out into the square. First, I always made my way north to the river and gazed across to the Castle of Sant’ Angelo. Squat and immoveable it crouched, with its square outer battlements and corner turrets, its massive drum tower, and the taller tower rising inside that. From the top the Papal banner still flew. The cannon thundered, their shots falling on the Pope’s own city. As yet the Imperials had no cannon of their own. Soldiers returned fire with harquebuses from the shelter of house windows, but they were no challenge to the Castle’s power. His Holiness refused to negotiate, trusting in the Duke of Urbino and the League. Between the Imperial marksmen and the stark castle walls was a bleak region of burnt-out buildings and corpses, the snaking river and the deserted bridge of Sant’ Angelo. I saw no hope in that direction.
I turned and hurried into the city on my daily search for food. Some days I did well, and came back with a good supply; some days I found nothing. On the third day Prince Philibert of Orange, who claimed to be general of the army now that Bourbon was dead, ordered the looting and killing to stop. But the soldiers only pillaged all the more, broke into the Apostolic Palace, which the Prince had claimed as his personal residence, and emptied it of all its barrels of wine.
Amid the horror, there were odd islands of normality. Some shops were open, and sold bread for coins; boys hurried through the streets to visit their fathers in the soldiers’ many prisons, and cashed bills for ransom money at the banks, until they too were sacked. The brothels were decidedly open for business. I saw a group of Spaniards driving in a column of nuns, their hands bound, and heard the nuns’ cries of ‘Pietate, pietate!’ Pity, pity. At the door, a grinning old bawd took them in and handed the soldiers a purse of gold.
Shooting still rang out, houses burned, and fresh bodies fell on the piles. But the soldiers were discovering that Romans could be more useful alive. The city was full of hiding places, they reasoned: secret tunnels, catacombs filled with hidden treasure. How were they to find these out, except by rounding up the citizens and exercising the arts of persuasion? Certain houses turned into grisly torture chambers. I saw men and women hanging from towers by their arms, and the screams from inside spoke of torments worse by far. The poor Cardinals Piccolomini, Araceli and Ceserino, who had always b
een such friends of the Empire, were led in chains through the streets every day, beaten and mocked by the soldiers. Then they were made to stand on a gallows in sight of the Castle. The Germans swore they would hang them unless the Pope surrendered. But after each day’s ordeal they were dragged back to their prisons.
Up in the dark of the attic we sat for long, long hours, unspeaking. There was a kind of intense but chaste closeness; I shared with Hannah the touch of a hand, the sound of our breath. Breaking the silence came the screams of the poor prisoners. To distract our thoughts, I unlocked my casket and passed round my treasures. They had not seen my garden before, with its green diamond meadow and the nymphs’ shimmering pool formed by the white sapphire. Grace took it in her hands with a long sigh. She closed her eyes and felt the outlines of the figures with her fingers. She was thinking of other days, perhaps, days at Court while King Henry was still young, and Stephen came wooing her with gifts; gifts almost as rich as the one in her hands. Her face creased and she began to weep. Hannah took her arm.
‘We will get home, Mother,’ she promised. ‘We have Mr Richard now.’
Susan was holding up the Ship. In the splintered light through the roof tiles its diamonds glittered and the chrysoprase glowed like an eye. ‘Look!’ she said. ‘A stormy sea. Very pretty.’ She pointed to the sapphires with their white flaws and blurs. ‘Like mine.’ From her neck she drew a chain, from which hung a single blue-white stone.
‘So you had it set,’ I said. ‘Benvenuto could have done it better.’
‘Benvenuto was busy. And those diamonds: stars?’
I was growing testy. ‘Yes.’
‘Then it’s night. And yet your sea is blue. At night the sea is grey, or black.’
I snatched the brooch back from her hands. I had been so very proud of the thing, the conception of it, the choice of stones and Cellini’s work. I had never once seen the incongruity. I said, ‘Does it matter?’
‘No,’ said Susan. ‘Not in the least. It’s all fantasy anyway. I told you: it’s pretty.’
‘Pretty enough to make my name,’ I growled. I glanced at Hannah, annoyed. She was smiling, relishing the battle just as she had that first day at dinner when Susan goaded me over my manners.
‘Fantasies,’ Susan murmured. ‘What would I give to see a real meadow, or a real ship either.’ Suddenly she sat up and turned to her sister. ‘Hannah! Show Mr Richard the gift John gave you.’
I looked at Hannah in astonishment. I had dismissed all my suspicions concerning her and John. Susan, surely, was concocting another of her malicious tales. But Hannah merely tossed her head. ‘If he wishes to see.’
She turned back the lace of her collar to reveal a brooch. The gold of it was thin and ill-crafted; the stone at its centre a showy, red-orange cornelian, semi-transparent. It was a paltry thing, worth not more than twenty crowns, and yet more than I thought John could afford. Indignation made me speechless. She met my eyes with cool defiance, as if she were the injured one, not I. In the end I said, ‘You took this – this thing from John? After refusing from me a diamond?’
Hannah tossed her head. ‘You were so very high and mighty that night. And poor John: such a hangdog look he has. He was in need of encouragement.’
‘Encouragement!’
I had raised my voice. Susan leant forward and hissed, ‘Quiet! Do you two want to see us killed?’
I looked at Susan, her bright, penetrating eyes glinting like a pair of flawed sapphires. Her letter had perhaps not been so mistaken after all. Suddenly I felt Hannah pressing herself up against my arm. ‘I was wrong. Will you forgive me?’
I turned to her and kissed her, there before her mother and sister. I would forgive her anything, over and over. The warmth of her body at my side was proof enough she was still mine.
‘You do right to make amends,’ Grace announced grandly, as if she were giving her daughter sound advice in private. ‘I told you Mr John was no fit match.’
As Hannah drew back with another of her mysterious smiles, I looked beyond her to Mrs Grace. This, I thought, cast yet another light on what might have happened while I was in Florence. I pictured Grace pressing Hannah to accept me, the rich jewel merchant; and Hannah, resenting her mother’s meddling, throwing herself at John out of spite. It gave me a little more comfort. But I could not so easily forgive John.
‘Christ and all his saints,’ muttered Susan. ‘You sit here cooing and squabbling and drawing up love-matches. What are we going to do? Just what are we going to do?’
I gazed into the darkness. I had racked my wits for seven days, but I had no answer.
22
Still the Sack continued, and the soldiers grew all the time more cruel and desperate. They dug up graves in their wild search after treasure and flung out into the streets decaying skeletons and skulls. They even shovelled their way down into the cesspits and threw barrow-loads of excrement out over the corpses and the blood: sure that if they only searched deep enough they would unearth secret bags of gold. Rats scuttled through the lanes. Already there had been the first cases of the plague. I had seen the old plague-gravedigger going about from house to house, and the doors of infected houses marked with chalk. Day by day it was growing harder to find food. The shops were stripped bare. Men who had fought one another a few days ago over diamonds and gold murdered for a sack of rye. They would steal bread from the hands of a man half-dead with the plague. The poorest in Rome ate the straw and wool from their bedding and dead human flesh: the only commodity of which there was no shortage at all.
And the screams from the prisons. As the booty diminished, the soldiers clung all the harder to their prisoners: as if more tortures, more pain could wring from them a corresponding amount of gold. The officers, hoping to make their troops obey orders, massacred whole prisonfuls of captives. Some of the lucky ones, who managed to pay their ransoms, were captured again by other bands and forced to pay twice; and that only convinced the soldiers they must be men of wealth, and so they demanded more, and tortured them again. When they judged at last they could squeeze out nothing more, the soldiers dragged their captives into the markets and put them up for auction, and other bands bid for them and led them away to more torments still.
For long hours every day I lay on a rooftop by the riverbank, not far from the Papal Mint, just upstream from the Bridge of Sant’ Angelo. The building beneath me had been a spicer’s shop; the scents of precious cinnamon and pepper drifted up from the smashed jars, mingling with the pervasive stink of death. It was a dangerous post. The soldiers had barricades at the near end of the bridge, and there was always a troop of them there, watching the Castle and taking occasional shots at it. To them that Castle was a treasure house. The Pope and his gold were in there, and some hundreds of wealthy cardinals, merchants and nobles. It would be the last great prize to fall into their hands. But Sant’ Angelo was not quite ready to fall yet. The cannon still fired, and smashed into neighbouring houses whenever the defenders saw signs of movement. I looked across at those bleak walls hungrily. Inside was safety, food, beds; a life without fear or horror. There had to be a way of getting in, and I was determined I would find it.
One night I stayed on later than usual. Just as I was about to slip away from the rooftop and head back to the palazzo I saw a movement, like a spider descending against the castle wall. It touched the ground and scuttled across to the foot of the bridge, where I lost it in the shadows. But a little later there it was again, halfway along the bridge coming towards me, climbing smoothly over the cannon-pocked ruins of the little chapel where condemned men used to be taken to pray before they were hanged. It was gone again. Then another movement, a shadow vanishing along the Banchi into the city. I scrambled down from the roof and ran after it, casting down this street and that: but there was not a soul to be seen. In frustration I turned back to my watching post, and gazed and dozed until dawn. Just as the sky began to grow lighter I saw a movement once more on the bridge, and that slender figure dodging from s
hadow to shadow. The mist was gathering, but I could just make out the line of the rope once more let down from the corner bastion of the Castle, and the man pulled up and in. Whoever it was had come and gone.
The next night I kept watch again. It was nearly midnight when I saw that slender line down the Castle wall, and the spider-figure descending it. I climbed swiftly back through the ruined shop. The spy, quick and almost invisible, was already on the near side of the bridge. He padded lightly past the Mint and into the maze of streets. I hurried after him. I saw him dart out into the Piazza Navona, where on the night of the moccoli candles had burned from every balcony, and the boys and girls had laughed and thrown water and flour. Now the houses were dark. Stones, planks, bodies lay everywhere. On the corner of the square I stood and gazed round on the empty scene in dismay. It was no use: I had lost him.
I ransacked a baker’s shop for food. I found a rat-chewed end of bread that the soldiers had missed, and turned back towards the palazzo. I was in a filthy temper. In the upstairs closet I whispered to the girls. Susan’s face appeared at the trapdoor, and she began to let down the ladder. Just then, a scuffling sound in the corner made us both freeze. Out into the dim light hopped Beelzebub. He had something in his paws; it took me a moment to recognise it as a severed human hand. The monkey bared its teeth and tore off a bite. I caught Susan’s eye and nodded. At least I could rid of us of that damnable monkey. I put down my harquebus and drew my sword. Beelzebub appeared to sense our intent. Taking the hand in his jaws he ran off through the doorway and away downstairs. I gave chase. Along the loggia he ran, up on the balustrade; then he jumped down and darted in through the half-open door to the sala. I pushed in after him, and stopped dead.
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