A Dancer in Darkness (17 page)

By the time they reached the end of the orchard, there were two apricots left in the basket. It was there, by the wall, that the Duchess turned pale and sat down on the rim of the fountain.

Bosola looked at her with a mixture of interest and clinical pity in which there was no compassion. She had been rude to him. She looked up at them like a fox trapped in a burrow. Bosola saw something milky in her eyes as they held his for an instant before they flickered on. The instant was enough. He knew, and she knew he knew.

He waited reluctantly to see how she would get out of it. He had forgotten that he could not very well leave at once, and indeed her appearance alarmed him. He had not meant to bring on labour pangs.

The basket fell from her lap into the fountain. The apricots separated out and bobbled near the jet. The napkin sank.

Cariola put her arms round the Duchess, and she and Antonio helped her rise. The Duchess could not withstand pain. Her head lolled sightlessly like that of a snake. Bosola made no attempt to follow them, and was jealous of how rapidly they had shut him out. He had found out what he wanted to know. That was enough.

At the gate in the wall, Cariola and Antonio whispered for a moment, and Antonio turned back.

It had grown dark very quickly, with the rapid night of the south. Bosola could not see clearly, but there was something ominous about Antonio’s figure. His white face was stern, and his eyes burned out of the darkness. He passed Bosola and retrieved the apricots.

“If the Duchess
has
been poisoned, you’ll answer for it,” he said.

It was clearly a story they had made up between them, but something in his tone made Bosola panic. Suppose it was true? He had not inspected the apricots himself.

Antonio held one out contemptuously. “Eat it,” he said.

Bosola did not dare.

Antonio threw the fruit against a tree, where it smashed into an ugly blur.

“Was it?” he asked.

Bosola half choked. “If it was, I knew nothing of it. I swear I did not.”

“But you would not eat it.”

“I was afraid,” said Bosola simply.

Antonio eyed him angrily. “Where did you get them?”

“From a dealer in the square.”

“Which dealer?”

“Piero Amici.”

“One of the Cardinal’s agents,” snapped Antonio. His fingers clicked nervously, like crickets. He shifted from toe to toe.

Bosola broke into a sweat. He had not known about Amici, so poison was possible. He had been lax, and the Cardinal did not trust anyone. Perhaps he had plotted to remove him in this clever way, and the Duchess too. Or Amici himself might have thought of it, out of jealous rivalry.

Some of this must have shown in his face. Antonio watched him disdainfully. “Get out,” he said. “Right or wrong, I do not care, but get out. You do not know what damage you have done.”

Bosola could not think of anything to say. It would do no good to cringe. He turned and limped rapidly out of the garden, his only thought an agony to hide, he scarcely knew from what.

That night the palace was full of a peculiar bustle. Though you did not see it, it was everywhere. Domestic women came and went from the Duchess’s apartments. Cariola let none of them enter. She stopped them at the door.

Bosola went to speak to her, but she would not even look at him. She merely gave him a glance, and shut the door in his face, but the glance was enough.

All had turned against him. Nor could he afford to change his plans, for the only ones who can afford to lose the world are those who have it in their keeping. Lesser men must keep what soil beneath their feet they can.

He had not known that he had an enemy down in the town. Proud of his position at court, he had treated Amici haughtily. One did not dare to treat anyone haughtily. Whether it was poison or not, and Bosola did not think even now that it was, Amici had not only the means but the will to destroy him. It was terrible for a weak man to have an enemy. The thought was unendurable. Amici might have written to Rome already to denounce him.

He paced up and down the silent corridors. Torches burned low in their sockets. He heard footsteps and drew back.

It was Antonio, pacing the yard below, with a nervous,
helpless
, tethered tread. Bosola could not help but watch. Antonio reached the end of the yard, stood against the rusticated wall, and looked up towards the Duchess’s apartments. The
moonlight
fell full on his face. From those eyes, beseeching the moon, Bosola drew back.

Then he moved swiftly across the paving and into the palace by a door Bosola had not seen him use before, one that should have led him up to the loggia, but which did not. Nor, though Bosola waited, did any light go on in Antonio’s rooms.

From down the corridor came a muffled scream, followed by tingling silence. Bosola hurried to his own rooms.

He hesitated before beginning his dispatch to the Cardinal, but he had to forestall Amici, and he was sure he was right. The pen drove across the paper, and he followed it willy-nilly. He had been foolish to feel secure, for the Cardinal’s influence
extended everywhere, and the spies he set upon his spies were multiple. Bosola wrote everything, dwelling much on his own cleverness, and promised to send further news at once. He wrote of the new house at Arosa, and of the church there, together with his own conclusions. He was even ready to name the Duchess’s lover, though he was not absolutely certain as yet of that. Just why he held back he was not sure, unless it was to have one secret in reserve, as ransom for himself in case of need.

He sealed the letter, took it himself through the nocturnal streets to the messenger he kept always waiting, and then returned like a shadow to throw himself on his miserable bed. He saw now that Cariola had liked him only out of policy. That bed could not be too narrow for him now.

When he woke it was day. He sensed at once that something had changed. The messenger would be half-way to Rome, and there was still much for him to ferret out, if he was to defeat Amici. He dressed and went to the household offices, not daring to ask any questions openly, though knowing privately he must.

He was working there when a shadow darkened his desk. He looked up and saw Antonio.

The two men eyed each other warily. By now Bosola was sure he had fallen into some kind of trap, whether Amici’s, the Cardinal’s, or that of another made no difference. All morning he had been waiting to be denounced.

Now something in Antonio’s manner caught his attention, and relieved his fears. Antonio seemed not only embarrassed, but still severely worried, and his stance was the brusque one of an honest man about to tell a lie.

Antonio walked around the room, avoiding Bosola’s gaze.

“I come from the Duchess,” he said at last, awkwardly.

Bosola’s eyes narrowed, as he considered the possibilities.

“I wronged you. She was not poisoned,” said Antonio simply. With some effort he lifted his eyes to Bosola’s. “It was merely the apricots. Her Grace’s stomach is delicate.” It was the wrong word, and provoked the wrong idea. Antonio frowned, and then smiled with that awful insincerity of the basically sincere trying to make a good impression. He shifted
hastily away from the subject. “The Duchess offers her apologies. So do I.” He held out his hand.

Bosola took it, but inwardly he snarled. They were afraid of him and had come to bribe him, knowing he had seen too much and would have to be placated. Their words meant nothing.

But Antonio had more to say. “If you can watch the man Amici,” he said, “we would be grateful.” Bosola breathed easier. That meant he himself was not suspected of being the Cardinal’s man. If it were not merely a clever deception. Apparently to Antonio the Cardinal could have only one man at a time. Also it meant that Cariola had not spoken out, even now.

It was difficult to believe that any man could be so innocent as Antonio appeared to be, yet Bosola was half willing to believe that he was. Antonio only saw the world from the front, and so, apparently, did the Duchess. It made them both vulnerable to anyone who moved backstage.

Her apologies he did not believe for an instant. For Antonio he felt compunction. But his letter was in Rome by now, and the comedy must be played out.

All the same he was glad that he did not have to look too long at Antonio. There was a pathos there that made him flinch.

We do wrong to despise the ambitious and dispassionate as cold and bloodless. They suffer as we do, though not in the same way, for they have small finite emotions too delicate for us to measure. Great storms and rages are no part of true pride. True pride is worn away only by the small, steady trickle of regret.

The Cardinal had a mistress called Julia, a woman of good family and a little dull. He ignored her, gave her jewels, and saw her when he would. She was only a piece of voluble
furniture
, and she would last perhaps a year. Then there would be another. He slept with her seldom.

Yet what he needed in her was the echo of a voice he had never heard and the touch of a flesh he had never tasted, for
the intelligent, cut off from humanity, live by parellels. Long ago they learned that their true feelings would be derided if they showed them, and so they find an outlet in pretence.

All men live this way, but some have the hope that the
pretence
may become real. For a few it does. But the intelligent know better. For them it never does, for they can be easy only with others of the intelligent, who are in the same plight as themselves. But this does not mean they do not feel. It merely means that they have learned that saddest of all lessons, that they can survive only at the ruthless suppression of all feeling. A little practice and emotion is no more than a passing twinge. But the twinge is painful all the same.

And really it does not matter, for if one must learn to turn a deaf ear to oneself, then the pretence does just as well.

The Cardinal had just dismissed Julia, and the year had almost gone. At such times he almost gave way to panic, the way a man does who is locked in a corridor between two rooms with the doors jammed. He knows such feelings are irrational, but for a moment he cannot help it. Despite himself, the
Cardinal
remembered all the other times that he had had that feeling, and foresaw all the future times that he would feel it. For a moment he almost called her back, but that, he knew, would be unwise, for he did not really like her any more, and she had never really liked him. Insincerity, too, has its
limitations
. We can put up with it from someone only for so long, and then we must have it from somebody else.

It was at this time that Bosola’s courier arrived. The letter was brought straight to His Eminence. And it was for these and other reasons that His Eminence found himself singularly reluctant to read it.

Finally, tapping it nervously on his desk, he shrugged and opened it. When he had read it he sat in the half darkness for a long, long time, until at last he became conscious of the coldness and the silence of the room.

For like most of the ambitious he had no real awareness of the bloody ruthlessness of his own plans, and so now he felt a sense of shock. He had no real grudge against his sister. As a child she had been a pretty, harmless thing, stubborn and wilful it was true, but he was rather fond of that.

He had plotted against her automatically. He had not
intended
, perhaps, that the matter should go this far. But since it had gone this far, he had no course but to go on with it, for if it was true that she was actually in this condition, then she would meet her fate whether he profited by it or not. It was for this reason he felt abruptly sad, for he realized that ambition does not plot against the foolishness of others. It is merely compelled to take advantage of the webs they weave around themselves, for it knows that if it does not, then others will, and that life has no other law. But still he hung back from showing the letter to Ferdinand. He could not bring himself to do so until next day, and that night he took a double sleeping draught.

Nor would he go to Ferdinand. He wanted some control over the situation, if that were possible, so instead he
summoned
Ferdinand to him.

He had not seen Ferdinand for months, and was encouraged by his brother’s solemn manner. He misjudged it. Ferdinand was merely tired, sullen, and irritable after a joyless debauch.

But the Cardinal was pleased to see Ferdinand so seeming calm, for though he did not want to call him off, he did want to restrain him. He debated what to say, and then instead threw Ferdinand the letter, sitting back with interest to watch his brother’s face.

To his surprise Ferdinand was tautly calm. “Why did my agent write to you?” was all he asked.

“Let us say we share him.”

Ferdinand scarcely listened. The letter shook in his hand. “Is it true?” he demanded.

“If it is not, we shall soon know; if it is, we shall know even sooner.”

“Who is the man?” demanded Ferdinand. He was angry now. He put his hands on the desk, and glowered down at the Cardinal.

“You will do nothing hastily,” the Cardinal said curtly.

“Who is the man?”

“Lower your voice. I do not know who the man is. Neither apparently does the agent. He has a woman down there, and took some prodding.”

“What woman?”

The Cardinal shrugged. “It’s no concern of ours,” he said.

“You know who he is.”

The Cardinal had been prepared for Ferdinand’s temper. He had not been prepared for a cyclone.

Ferdinand tapped the paper furiously. “No doubt this priest knows something.”

“I do not know what, or from whom.”

“I’ll get it out of him.”

“You will do nothing,” snapped the Cardinal sharply. “He is a priest under oath to protect the privacy of the confessional, in my diocese, and under my protection.”

It was the worst thing he could have said. That his brother had more power than he had, and secret information besides, drove Ferdinand furious, and always had.