by David Blixt
Pietro followed the Heir out. Cangrande made to pour himself another drink. Before it reached his lips, a phrase the boy had uttered bubbled to the surface of his brain. He smiled. “Indulge your enemies. I'll think I shall do just that. When is Tempesta arriving?”
“A week, I think. San Pompeius' Day, or thereabouts.”
“Pompeius. Fitting for a pompous puss like Tempesta. Tullio, tell those musicians to gather their fellow performers. They'll not lament their ill-usage by Verona's knights after this. How does Petruchio put it? I shall kill them with kindness.”
♦ ◊ ♦
PIETRO REACHED CESCO along the stairs, the sound of the revels at their backs. “Cesco. Please, talk to me.”
Cesco spun, balancing on his heels. “Why? Are you starved for conversation?”
“I don't think you see where all this is leading.”
“On the contrary, my eyes are unblinkered. It was earlier that I chose blindness. Unseeing, I fell into an obvious trap.”
The meaning was plain. “Love is not a trap.”
Cesco scoffed. “Says the man whose sole romantic love was a woman who lied, used, and manipulated him, all the while knowing she would never let him taste of her lips. I've known more women in the last fortnight than you have in your whole life.”
Pietro blushed. “That would not be difficult.”
“We both know I was not meant to be pure. If I am damned, I mean to enjoy it. I will indulge in all the arts of love until I can claim a laurel wreath.”
“I thought you said love was a trap.”
“You mistake love for passion, Nuncle.”
“You said love.”
“I said arts of love. Art is short for artifice. Fake. Unreal. Deceptive.”
“Don't let Manuel hear you say that. Is music false? Or poetry?”
“As false as the emotions they inspire. But perhaps I misspoke, Nuncle. I am not done with love. I am done with dreams. Now, if you'll excuse me…” He sauntered away, his step faltering slightly.
In no mood to rejoin the revels, Pietro exited the palace, reliving the conversation, wondering if he could have done better. Probably not.
Returning home, he saw the lamps lit in several windows that had been dark for over a week. Racing within, he discovered his brother had returned. “What's happened?”
Poco looked fit to burst with pride. “Brother! I have news.”
“Tharwat's not with you?” inquired Pietro.
Poco rolled his eyes. “Don't you trust me with even a message?”
“No. I mean, yes, of course. I was just concerned—”
“Tharwat is traveling on to Venice with the cripple. I don't think he wanted Girolamo about when you were told what we discovered. Tharwat says we should meet in Vicenza in a few days, where we won't be under as many eyes. You can say you're visiting Detto's mother. That way Morsicato can attend.”
Pietro waved his brother to a chair. “Very well. Tell me everything.”
Poco remained standing. “No, we're waiting on someone else. I don't want to tell it twice. She'll be here in a minute.”
It took Pietro only a moment to realize whom Poco meant. He protested, demanding the news now. But, reveling in his unaccustomed role of spy and informant, Poco was determined to milk it to the last drop.
A knock came, and Pietro admitted a muffled figure in grey robes. “Suora.”
“Brother,” said Antonia, eyes twinkling. “Brother.”
“Sister,” answered Poco. “Don't ever become an abbess. I don't think we could tolerate calling you 'Mother'.”
“If I keep leaving the convent, there'll be no danger of that. What's so urgent?”
“News from Padua. We found the house Cesco was born in, and the name of the man who owns it.”
Pietro gripped the back of the chair he was standing behind. “Well?”
“It was bought two years ago.”
“That isn't important,” said Pietro at once. “We need to know who owned it fifteen years ago, not who owns it now.”
“I think the current owner will interest you very much,” said Poco with maddening superiority. “It belongs to one Niccolo Fucarile.”
Gasping, Antonia's hands flew to her mouth. Pietro felt less awed, more angry. A coincidence? No – the name was far too similar to the late, unlamented Nikolas Fuchs to be chalked up to chance.
Antonia was as white as scraped parchment. “What on earth could – he – want with a house in Padua?”
Thinking about it the whole journey, Poco had an answer ready. “Buying it afforded Fuchs the opportunity to search it. And you can be certain that the money came from Mastino. They never did anything apart. Hip-joined, those two. Womb to tomb.”
Antonia shuddered. “Would it were so.”
Pietro was too busy grappling with the implications of the purchase to notice his sister's pallor. “He couldn't have visited it – he was too well-known in Padua as a Veronese.”
“Have it searched, then,” said Poco, helping himself to some roasted chicken. “It doesn't look lived-in. Shuttered, but with lit torches to keep thieves at bay.”
“So you didn't get in?”
“Oh, we got in,” answered Poco with sly pride. “On our third night I leapt the wall and opened the gate for Tharwat and Lamo.”
“Lamo?”
“Girolamo. Lamo. Lame-o. I could call him gimpy, but that's in poor taste.”
Pietro shook with an involuntary laugh. “Go on. What was inside?”
“Nothing of note. A few pieces of furniture in some of the rooms, whatever was too large to move. They had all been searched. Ashes of some papers in the fireplaces. Someone had even tried stripping paint from the walls to see if there were messages beneath.”
“Why did you bring this Girolamo with you?” asked Antonia. “He already knows more than he should about Cesco's past.”
“He was told where in the house the baby's room would be. Tharwat wanted him to lead us there.”
“And did you find anything?” asked Pietro.
“A crib. A small stuffed hound. Someone had split it open to see if there was a message inside. Its poor cloth guts were all over the floor. Tharwat said it was like an augury.”
Pietro felt a bitter disappointment. “So there was nothing.”
“Nothing at all. Except what Fuchs couldn't destroy.” Poco face burned. “The name of the previous owner. It was in the sale records.”
Alight with frustration, Pietro was ready to punch his little brother full in the face. “Yes?”
“The house belonged to a Signor Leonardino d'Amabilio, bought through a factor of a bank in Venice in the winter of 1313. December 10th,” he added in answer to Antonia's next question.
Antonia did swift math. “Seven months before Cesco's birth.”
Pietro held up his hands, staring into the space before him. “Hold. Amabilio, Amabilio… That name – it tickles something in my memory. Amabilio. Mab…” In a rush, Pietro realized where he knew the name. “That was it!”
“What?”
“For years I've tried to remember the name Katerina gave Cesco's mother. Amabilio. That's it! Mab. M-A-B…”
Now it was Poco's turn to be confused. “What are you talking about?”
“The Mab in the message Tharwat discovered. Amabilio!”
“What message?” asked Antonia, even as Poco said, “Tharwat found a message? He didn't say anything!”
Pietro's eyes were unfocused. “Amabilio. Leonardino d'Amabilio. Poco, you're certain?”
“That's the name on the deed,” repeated Poco. “Saw it myself.”
Pietro clapped his brother on the shoulder. “That's excellent, Jacopo! Truly well done! We have a name! And you said Tharwat is in Venice? He'll go to the Jew. If he doesn't, I'll go myself! This is too important to miss.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When Fuchs kidnapped Cesco's mother, Tharwat traced her to a shack in the country. He found blood. That's probably whe
re she was murdered. But before her death, the lady used the last of her strength to carve a message into the floor where she was bound. A coded message.”
“You never said!” cried Poco in outraged excitement. “What was it?”
“A series of letters forming a large 'M'.” Pietro withdrew a paper from his person, a piece of writing well-perused over the years, copied from the scene of the murder. He passed it across to his brother, and Antonia drew close to study it.
“MAB,” said Poco. “It's there, twice. What about the rest of it?”
“CAV, we think, is a warning. Cave – beware. For the rest, we're just guessing. But – something Cesco said tonight. MRC – Mercutio. That was what she called him. The little Mercury.”
“ 'Mercutio beware.' ” Taking the paper from Poco, Antonia raked it with her eyes. “VXD. Is that a number?”
“It is!” cried Poco. “It's from father's final writings – DXV, the five hundred, ten, and five! Father knew? Is that what this means?”
“I don't think so,” answered Pietro, who had wrestled with this code for two long years.
“It can't be a coincidence,” said Antonia warily. Here was a secret she and Pietro shared, that Poco did not. One that might hurt him, were he to discover it.
Understanding the question in her eyes, Pietro tried to answer obliquely. “I told her. I thought she should know what her son had done.”
“What?” demanded Poco insistently. “What?”
Pietro was silent. When his father had died seven years earlier – Lord, has it been seven years? – Cesco had been inconsolable. Not just for the death of the man he believed to be his grandfather, the greatest mind he ever expected to meet. The seven-year-old had wept bitter tears because the poet had died with his life's work unfinished. The great Commedia had had no ending.
That thought kept them all up nights, none moreso than Cesco. The idea of an incomplete life, especially a gifted one, troubled the lad beyond words. For weeks he'd been edgy and skittish, wary of his normal risks and larks, lest his life also be cut short before its zenith.
This had changed when Pietro finally dared to enter his father's study, two whole months after the funeral. There he found the notes. Asking Cesco and Antonia to help, they had turned up a wooden box containing scraps of paper, messages chalked on pieces of wood, and wax tablets with carved letters. Words, phrases, thoughts that had tickled the poet over the years, all jumbled together in a mish-mosh without rhyme or reason.
“I didn't know he kept these,” Pietro had observed at the time, marveling. His father's mind had always seemed a metal trap, containing all the effluvium of his creativity.
“Nor I,” Antonia had answered.
But Cesco had known. “He was afraid, he said, of losing his memory, as old men do,” the seven-year-old had explained with the disdainful pity of the young. Without more words, he began spreading the notes out across the tiled floor. When Antonia tried to raise one and read it, he'd waved her off. “It's a puzzle. A word puzzle.”
Sharing a long glance with his sister, they had both retired from their father's study. For weeks after, Cesco had laboured, his little brow furrowed, his mind bent to untangling the jumbled genius of the great poet. When at last he emerged, he had managed the unthinkable – he had crafted the last cantos of Il Paradiso, the close to the epic that had seemed so horribly unfinished.
They were not perfect – there were references Cesco did not understand, as well a couple understood only by himself. But with Pietro and Antonia poring over the pages with him – the scholar-knight and the de facto publisher who knew her father's work better than anyone – they finally got it as close to perfect as they dared.
The question was what to do next. It was already known that the great epic was unfinished. To appear after months with a completed manuscript would be suspect.
It was Cesco who hit upon the answer. Recreating the text in something like the poet's hand, they hid the pages in the bottom of a trunk and waited for Poco's next visit.
When, after three frustrating days of Poco not finding the treasure, days that tried everyone's patience to the limit, he finally went rummaging through their father's things and came up with the 'lost' cantos. He was so joyous, so proud in his discovery, that no one would suspect him of artifice. Pietro was mercilessly ridiculed for not finding the pages sooner, and Antonia was set to hiring copyists to publish the final third of their father's great epic.
And Cesco? Cesco had positively glowed. Returned to his carefree excesses and clever word games, he was once more the maddeningly troublesome child they knew and loved.
Now Antonia said to Pietro, “We have to tell him. It's time.”
“Tell who? Time for what? What's going on?”
Pietro nodded. “Poco – sit down. We have a confession to make.”
When they were through, their brother was justifiably furious. “You used me!” It was half an hour before he had stopped raging at them for their deception and they could return to the matter of the message.
Pietro had told Donna Maria of the role her son had played in penning the final part of Dante's Commedia. With that in mind, the lady might have used that knowledge to fashion her message. The VXD could alternately be read as DXV, a prophecy made towards the end of the epic poem. It was an ambiguous line, one not even they had understood. Some thought it alluded to a number – five hundred, ten, and five.
But the letters could also be transposed to read DUX – the Duke. Another name for Prince.
Antonia pressed the paper down upon the table, uncreasing the folds to lay it flat. “Why are the letters backwards, though?”
“Tharwat once suggested they were mirrored. That the message actually read MAB MRC CAV DUX DTT MST MAB.”
“DTT?” said Poco. “Did she mean Detto? Is she warning him against his best friend?”
Pietro voiced what he had long suspected. “I think we're all so used to his name, we forget what it actually means. Detto means 'also known as' – a nickname.”
“I know what it means,” snapped Poco, still mulish.
It was Antonia who read it out clear. “'Mercutio, beware the Prince known as Mastino.'” And bookending the message was his mother's true name – Amabilio. Mab.
It was a disappointment, to say the least. After so long, such a plain message. The lady was warning her son of the man who had ordered her kidnap and murder. A warning no longer of use. They all knew Mastino wanted to destroy Cesco. There was no help for Cesco in his mother's final message.
But at least they had a name. Another thread for them to tug upon to see what would unravel.
Twelve
IN THE BUILD-UP to the arrival of the Trevisian embassy, Cangrande attempted to keep his heir busy with civic duties. But somehow, even in the most innocuous task, Cesco could find some mischief to be made. Handed the dies to deliver to the town moneyer, he switched them and had instead his own image coined on the front, while the reverse side bore the words 'Il Veltro – Figlio d'un Cane'. The Greyhound – Son of a Bitch. On a second coin, he had an image of Padua and the words 'Miseri Mortacci', meaning Miserably Feeble Ancestors. A third held the image of the La Rosa Colta and the single, hideously offensive word 'Fottere' – Fuck.
Laughing, the city embraced the new coins, especially the Paduan ones, causing Cangrande more embarrassment with his new allies.
Ordered to decorate the public trees for the first Sunday in Advent, Cesco found fault with the apples, tearing them from the branches to pelt the nearest Paduans, making them run. “Faster, faster, for it is a fasting day!”
On another occasion, Cesco secretly rewrote the script for the Christmas mummers, whose duty it was to act out religious tales. In his version, Joseph and Mary became a bickering couple who never ceased arguing, back-biting and carping even as the Virgin gave birth to the Savior. Everyone was reminded of Lord Bonaventura and his mad wife, and there were several references to reinforce this – most especially the fact that Kate was
Paduan by birth. The city laughed itself sick as Joseph hinted at his wife's infidelity with God, saying Paduan women had been known to open their legs to far lesser men than the Lord. “Yes,” replied the labouring mother, “including you!” Petruchio laughed so hard he immediately hired the players to repeat their performance at his house on Christmas Eve.
Cesco could hardly step out of his house without drawing a crowd, as everyone wondered what devilry he'd think of next. This particular morning his devilry was not particularly devilish, though it threatened a fate similar to that of Lucifer – buried in ice. The weather had continued to grow cold, colder than any living Veronese could remember. For the first time ever there was a thin layer of ice across the Adige. Too thin to walk across, it was still thick enough to force boats to employ staves to break it apart before moving up and down the river. Trade was stunted, and everything slowed.
Which made the Adige the perfect place for a free-for-all quarterstaff mêlée fought across the boats stuck in the river.
Atop of a stack of timber being ferried south, Cesco fended off an attacker on either side, plus the occasional snowball from the cheering onlookers on the bridge above. Hortensio was his deftest opponent, sliding his staff from long-form to short and back with ease. Salvatore was another who showed skill, having knocked Barto into the water moments before pressing Cesco hard on his sinister flank. All around them were the clacks and clicks of wood striking wood. Two Rakehells had already dropped into the icy water, to be fished out and hurried to a fire before they chilled too badly. One of them was Thibault, who was heard to complain loudly that the quarterstaff was not a proper weapon for a man.
Detto was on the next boat over, having a spirited timber debate with young Petruchio, while Benedick hovered at the edges, waiting to see who lasted longest while keeping himself fresh. Cesco taunted him. “Get in, Ahenobarbus, or you forfeit and buy all the drinks tonight!”
Sighing, Benedick leapt into the fray, showering Yuri with a series of blows, some of which connected with flesh, not wood. Enraged, Yuri used his greater weight to slam into the red-headed Paduan and then sweep his feet from under him with a flick of his staff. He was busy laughing at the splash Benedick made in the chilled water when Rupert caught him a blow upon his shin and levered him over amid floating wafers of ice.