Sitting still by the light of a couple of dozen candles were six or seven men. They wore plumed hats, and by their sides were laid down harquebuses and pikes. They sat like a row of seamstresses, with the gigantic Flemish tapestries draped over their knees, picking away at the cloth with needles. It was an incongruous sight. Then I understood. They were stripping from these priceless works the lengths of gold thread, winding them on to spools as they went. They had been working at this in silence, and so I had passed them unawares. One of them stood up swiftly and pointed his gun at me. The monkey scampered round them and off down the stairs.
‘And what manner of man are you?’ He spoke in Spanish.
‘A soldier.’
I had answered in the same tongue. But I knew I could pass as no native speaker, in a still room, when I was afraid. ‘An Italian,’ I added. ‘A friend of the Empire.’
‘What Italian? Roman?’
I spat. To be a Venetian came easiest to me; but the Venetians were the deadliest enemies the Empire had. ‘I am of Genoa.’
He took a few steps towards me, still pointing the gun. ‘Where in Genoa.’
‘Maddalena, where the rope-makers work. The French took all I had. In Siena I joined up and marched with Bourbon.’
‘Kill him,’ advised one. ‘He is a liar.’
Another of the men stood up. He spoke in Italian, with the accent of Siena. ‘Prove it.’
My hands were sweating. Fear clawed at me, but I forced my mind to go back to that bright January evening when the Speranza had pulled out from the Mole bound for Rome, and the sailors had sung as they hauled at the ropes. I sang, ‘We are of Genoa, we are of Maddalena, we shall never marry, as long as there’s another man’s wife in the world …’
By the time I finished they were laughing, and then I sang it again, done into Spanish as well as I could manage. Their leader beckoned me over.
‘You have bought your life, and a share of bread and wine besides. The Germans we took them from no longer need them.’
I took the crusts hungrily, and sipped at the sour wine. ‘My thanks. And if the beast had not escaped me, you would have been welcome to a share of my monkey.’
‘Ah!’ The leader wiped his mouth. ‘That is the very creature that led us to this house of death. Believe me, there is someone hiding here.’
My heart beat hard. ‘No, after all these days it is impossible.’
The man who had called for my death fixed me with a dark, unblinking eye. ‘Not if someone was helping them.’
I shrugged.
‘I heard something.’
‘My own footsteps,’ I offered.
‘Voices. I would swear to it. Women.’
At the word every man looked up. Faces hardened into lines of cruelty and lust.
‘If only there were,’ I laughed. ‘Gentlemen, I have business of my own. If I am successful, I shall invite you to a banquet of monkey.’ I stood up and walked out of the sala on to the landing. Then I passed quickly through to the loggia and ran up the stairs. My whole air must have breathed suspicion. Where was my soldier’s greed? My demand for a share of their gold, my insisting that the monkey, at least, was mine? I was sure they would be after me in moments. In the closet I hissed to Susan to let me up. When she lifted the hatch I grabbed the harquebus and ran up the ladder. Then we pulled it up after us. From down below footsteps sounded on the stairs.
‘Quiet,’ I commanded. Beneath us the men kicked through the bedchambers, clattering under beds with swords, overturning cabinets and chairs. Then we heard them stamping through into the closet. There was a pause; then a voice came in triumph.
‘Up there. There’s an opening.’
I whispered, ‘Is there any other way out?’
Susan shook her head. There was the sound of furniture being dragged into the closet. The Spaniards would soon be up. I looked all round the attic. The walls were solid. Through the cracks in the tiles above us the sky was beginning to show the first grey light of dawn.
‘Quickly!’ With my arm I knocked a hole in the tiles. They went skating noisily down the roof to shatter far below on the ground. There was the crash of a harquebus going off, and a ball burst up through the floor between Hannah and Grace. Splinters of wood sprayed over us. Hannah let out a cry, and as she cowered towards me there was blood on her face.
‘Up!’ shouted Susan. Together we lifted Hannah through the hole. She crouched on the roof, an arm stretched down to help us, and we next dragged Grace standing. Two more shots rang out, and holes opened further off, missing us. Grace was smiling serenely.
‘Where must I put my foot, Mr Richard? Forgive me, but you see this is entirely new to me.’
We hefted her up through the roof and Hannah took her hand. They teetered upright for a moment, black shapes against the sky, and then both of them slid down with a rattle over the tiles, screaming. I yelled, and there were answering cries from the Spaniards, sure of their prey. Another shot rang out behind Susan, and a rotten beam collapsed, shedding a shower of tiles over her head. She shrieked and fell. I pulled her upright, and together we wallowed over the wreckage on to the roof. ‘Hannah,’ I was murmuring in my grief. ‘Hannah.’
‘Here!’ She was clinging to the sloping tiles, her feet caught on the jagged moulding that ran along the roof edge like a miniature battlement. Behind us I could hear the Spaniards climbing through into the attic. I leant over to the hole we had made in the roof and fired my harquebus. The cry from below told me I had hit home. Susan pulled me away from the hole. We slid down the tiles to join the others. I took Hannah’s hand and we set off, scrambling along the parapet. Grace followed too, lifting the hem of her gown and looking round in dismay. Susan was first to reach the corner of the palazzo, where the roof turned back for the other wing.
‘Where now?’
Down below us, perhaps twelve feet lower, was the roof of the neighbouring house. To reach it would mean jumping over a narrow alleyway. Further off still, and about another fifteen feet down, were the roofs of the shops along the Via Giulia. Susan looked at my face.
‘You think we can’t do it.’
‘I know we can’t.’ I looked back. Grace cowered back against the tiles, vaguely smiling. Hannah, her face bleeding, clung to her mother. Round the corner of the sloping roof ridge was a row of dormer windows. There was no other choice. We would have to re-enter the palazzo. The Spaniards were on the roof: a shot rang across our heads. They must be almost out of shot, I thought, unless they had had the wit to leave a couple of men behind to reload. One by one we climbed round the ridge, with the dizzy drop before us, until we came to the first of the dormers. I smashed the window shutters and dropped into the chamber with my sword before me. A woman lay dead in the middle of the floor. ‘Quickly!’ I handed Susan, Hannah and the smiling Grace through the window and we set off at the run. The layout of this side of the palazzo matched the other. Down to the bedchambers, down again to a loggia, and then out on the balcony above the grand stairs. I heard a shout: a man stood outside the Cages’ sala, fumbling to reload his gun. We ran on down the stairs, and burst out into the square. Ten or so soldiers were running towards us from the Via Monserrato, attracted by the shots. I pushed the three women into the shadows and shouted in Spanish, ‘Inside! The Germans are murdering us!’ My cloak and my gun marked me as a soldier, and the natural hatred between the two branches of the army did the rest. The Spaniards ran into the palazzo. I heard more firing from inside, and we ran on, down to the Via Giulia, and turned right, heading north. Susan caught me up.
‘Where in the Devil’s name are you taking us?’
Until that moment I had not thought. Our only safe hiding place in the city was behind us. But I saw in my mind’s eye the figure climbing the rope down the bastion. It was our only chance. Briefly I explained.
‘And he will be there? He will take us inside the Castle?’
‘He must.’
We were at the old Banchi, perhaps halfway to the bridge. Hannah
and Susan were swaying on their feet, their legs weak after days of hiding. Suddenly Mrs Grace slid to the ground.
‘Forgive me, I do not know how it is …’
I pulled them aside into an alleyway. Hannah lay down against a house wall. Blood crusted one side of her face. She smiled: and it was a smile of such beauty that it made me shiver.
‘Please,’ I begged her. ‘We must keep going. But no more running. We are getting too near the bridge.’ Wearily they stood up. ‘Hands before you as if bound,’ I urged them. ‘Heads down.’ I had seen lines of captives marched about Rome like this, many a time. In the dim light no one would see they were not tied with ropes. We set off again, slowly. We had come perhaps two hundred yards from the palazzo. Behind us we heard another shot. How long before the two bands of Spaniards joined and came after us?
Up ahead I could see the barricade before the bridge and soldiers moving in front of it. Beyond, rising through the grey twilight, was the gallows the Germans had put up right where the bridge began; here the Cardinals were made to stand every day in view of the Pope. As we came nearer my heart was pounding. The officer at the barricade turned to us and held up his hand. We stopped. He called out something in German. Behind me the three women huddled close together. I spoke in Spanish: hostages, to be made to stand on the gibbet. He smiled. Cruelty was a common language; he waved us through.
We were almost at the bridge. Mist rose from the river and blew round us in swirls. Before us was the Castle: grim, gaunt, unsurrendering. Smoke puffed from one of the many embrasures in its great drum tower, and away to the left in the Borgo a cannonball crashed home. Gunfire replied from the Imperials. We walked slowly round the gibbet, its beam and noose hanging above us like death. Hannah glanced up, and nearly fell.
‘Don’t look,’ I warned her. ‘Keep going.’
Before us stretched the bridge, its paving stones broken up by shot, stones and bodies lying scattered. I led the Cages out from the gibbet into the open. Here over the river the mist was thicker. I prayed it would screen us from the Germans. We passed the first stone pier with its broken statues, then reached the ruins of the chapel halfway across. Still no one had seen us. Then came the third pier, the fourth. We were nearly up to the Castle. The outer wall lay before us, with the portcullis where I had parted from Martin and Cellini. To the right was the round corner bastion where I had seen the rope. But there was nothing there now. We were horribly exposed. And sunrise was not far off. It was late: too late for a prudent spy to be returning. I motioned to the women to duck down below the parapet, just as a shot chipped the stonework by our side. It had come from the Castle.
‘What now?’ whispered Susan.
‘We wait.’
Hannah looked white as death. Grace, crouched behind the stones, was trying to pat her hair back into order. I would not betray to them how desperately we were placed. We would be trapped here in the growing light. Perhaps we could crawl down beside the bridge to the riverside. But to stay hidden all day, with the eyes of both the Imperials and the Castle on us: it was more than I could ask of my luck.
‘And what, in the name of all mad and unlikely things, are you poor fools doing here?’
The voice came in a whisper, from just beyond the parapet. I peered round it in disbelief.
‘John?’
‘The same.’ There was his open, smiling face. I had never been more glad to see him. He was dressed in black, with a black cape. His tall frame was like a shadow: a shadow, I guessed, that passed spider-like down a rope and silently into the city. He scuttled round the parapet to join us where we were hiding. I said, ‘And so you are still trading in the same sort of goods. But I thought you were the Emperor’s man.’
‘These days His Holiness pays higher. And the Empire has a nasty habit of killing its friends along with its enemies. Mrs Grace! How delightful.’ Grace took his hand and they kissed. ‘And Mrs Hannah and Mrs Susan. Enchanting.’
Susan glared at him. ‘You might have told us we were trusting to him for this rescue.’
‘Susan,’ her mother rebuked her. ‘Do not be churlish. Mr John, after we have rested I believe we may walk a little further. You will join us?’
John peered round the parapet. The mist was a thick white veil over the bridge; but from the Castle we were an easy mark.
‘We are late,’ he murmured. ‘Follow me quickly.’ He set off running, bent double, round the foot of the Castle. Another shot glanced off the stones, coming from the far bastion. I urged the Cages to their feet and we hurried after John. Round the angle of the Castle wall we were safe from that lone marksman. We leant against the wall, which reached high above us through the mist to the overhanging battlements. John whistled softly. Like sorcery, the slender line descended. He grasped the end of the rope.
‘I am sorry, but I must go first. Anyone else they would kill. I will make my explanations and then pull you all up. I am valuable to them: they will not say no.’
He jumped and clung to the rope, and was swiftly hauled up and out of sight. We waited in the silence. Above us the mist blew in wreaths. Suddenly the rope dropped out of the whiteness and hung, swaying. I said, ‘Mrs Grace must be next.’ I tied a loop in the rope’s end for her to sit in; but Grace was shaking her head.
‘Oh, no. If we go up there Mr Stephen will never find us. When we have had our walk, we must go back to the palazzo.’
‘Mother,’ Hannah begged. ‘You must go. Mr Richard knows what is best.’
A heavy silence hung over Rome. We could hear the rushing of the river against the bridge piers, and a distant cry from a prison. Suddenly there was shouting back across the bridge: Spanish voices and German. Our pursuers from the palazzo, I guessed, were at the barricade.
‘You go,’ said Grace. ‘I shall wait here for Stephen.’
She sat down on the ground. I knelt swiftly at her side.
‘My dear Mrs Grace, if Stephen returns to Rome, and he has the power, the Castle is the very first place he will visit.’
Grace looked up. ‘Do you really think so?’
‘I know it.’
‘Very likely he’s waiting for us inside.’ This was from Susan.
Grace looked at her in suspicion. ‘If Mr Richard says we must enter the Castle …?’
‘I do,’ I said, helping Susan to seat her in the loop of rope. I gave it a tug, and she rose up into the mist.
Hannah was slumped against the Castle wall. I said, ‘The two of you must go together.’
Susan looked at me with her grave, pale eyes: so different from the laughing depths of her sister’s. ‘You surely don’t trust him? That man is no true friend of yours. If we go first, you will never see the inside of the Castle.’
‘I will follow you. Go!’
The mist was parting in strands. The tower of the Palazzo Altuiti, a Spanish outpost just downstream, glowed yellow as it caught the early sun. Susan stepped into the loop of rope and put her arm round her sister. Then the two of them rose swiftly up through the clearing fog. I saw where the rope vanished into a narrow window just below the ramparts, perhaps twenty feet up. Susan and Hannah were within a man’s height of it when shots rang out from beyond the bridge. Bullets chipped the stone around the window, where arms reached out to pull Hannah inside. Susan hung for a moment, glanced down at me, and then leapt for the window as a shot grazed the sill. They were in.
I waited, my eyes on the window. The moments passed. Soon I would be helpless, a mark for every sharpshooter on the riverbank. I fretted with anger, dread, amazement. Susan could not be right. And yet I was learning that those pale eyes very often saw true. It began to seem possible: John would leave me to die. He had Hannah, and he had no need of his friend. He would explain with tears in his eyes that it was too dangerous to let down the rope yet again; that it would be a breach of his duty to the Pope; that he would regret it for the rest of his days, and do all he could to comfort the bereaved and charming Mrs Hannah.
On the bridge the broken torsoes
of the statues were becoming visible through the blowing mist. There was a slap from up above, I turned, and there at last hung the rope. I leapt for it and began climbing at the same time as it pulled me upwards in a series of jerks. In an instant I was above the mist, the sun shone clear and from over the river came the crash of gunfire. Bullets hit around me, and chips of stone stung my face. I looked up. The window was still some feet above my head. I pulled myself higher up the rope. Another shot landed in the stonework next to me, and a lump of rock hit me on the shoulder. My hands slipped. I swung for some moments in the air. Just above my head, I saw Susan at the window. Then the rope jerked upwards. As another shot hit beside me, Susan reached out and pulled me roughly in over the sill. I fell forward and dropped against the wall. Beside me Hannah lay motionless. Her gown was soaked in blood.
23
I grabbed her hand, wiping it clean, weeping, touching her face and hair. She answered me with a ghost of her old teasing smile.
‘I am not quite dead yet, Mr Richard.’
She gestured to where a barrel-chested soldier lay with a gaping wound in his neck. He was dead. Blood was pooling round him on the floor. ‘They hit him just as he was pulling us in.’
John threw down the rope and knelt before us.
‘My friend! Thank God. When Matteo here was shot I had not a notion how I could pull you up alone. It was fortunate Mrs Susan was here to help me. Come!’
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