Absolute Honour (25 page)

It was about that very place that he now spoke. ‘By the way, lad. The Anglican service at the Palazzo. I have obtained permission
for you to attend.’ He dug in a pocket of his waistcoat, produced a silver token, a cross wreathed in Stuart
oak leaves upon it. ‘So long as you do not disgrace yourself there …’ Watkin let out a large belch. ‘Oh, pardon me! You may
use this to return again and again to your devotions.’

Jack, assuming what he hoped was a look both rapt and religious, took the token. To win over the Protestants – a large part
of his following – the Catholic James had obtained permission from the Pope to have a Protestant chapel with a daily service
– the only one in Rome. As soon as Jack heard of it, he knew he must have one of the precious tokens. It meant entry to the
palace itself, surely the place that Red Hugh would come for his orders when he eventually reached Rome.

‘Oh, too wonderful!’ he exclaimed. ‘Will you be able to accompany one, Watty?’

‘As you know, my adorations are made elsewhere.’ Pounce’s sausage fingers made an elaborate crucifix in the air before they
reached for his mug. Wine was again slurped noisily. ‘And speaking of adorations,’ he continued, a handkerchief dabbing at
the flood on his face, ‘tell me once more of the love that you were forced to leave behind. For in your sorrow I see the very
portrait of mine own.’

On their first night together, even matching half glass to full bumper, Jack’s tongue had run somewhat fast. He’d remembered
to change Laetitia’s name in the telling, as well as her country, the full complications of their wooing and the manner of
their parting. But, fuelled by wine, he’d been unable to hide the extent of his hurt, and his passion had stirred up an equal
one in Watkin, who, it transpired, had forsaken his own first love to serve his King.

‘I’d rather hear again of yours,’ said Jack. ‘Her name, if I recall, was Rosamunde?’

‘Rose of the world, she was indeed.’ Pounce’s lips shook, a ripple that went through all his flesh. ‘I was but sixteen when
we first met …’ a thick wrist was waved, ‘… thirty years younger, ten stone lighter …’

*

Jack staggered down the Via Columbina, trying to stop twenty stone of slick Jacobite sliding into the street. Pounce had reached
his height even later than was customary, the 8 a.m. bell just sounding as they emerged from the Angelo tavern. Fortunately,
it was a short stagger to his lodgings and his one room was at street level. Jack knew he’d never get him up stairs.

There was another advantage to what had become a daily ritual, the guiding of the man home. The route took Jack past the one
building Turnville had ordered him to look at every day for his signal. It was an ancient palazzo, long since deserted by
its noble occupiers, now a tenement with a family in every room. Twice each day he would pass, between eight and nine, four
and five, looking up to the right-side window just below the peak of the roof. So far it had always been open and empty. Today,
however, a striped red sheet hung from it.

‘At last,’ he murmured.

Pounce, who had been leaning ever more heavily upon him, jerked his head up to stare blearily about. ‘There already?’

‘Nearly, sweet Knight. Just a little further.’

Glancing just once more at the striped sheet, Jack guided the man across a busy junction, between two carts, their drivers
conducting a shouting argument over right of way.

‘We are here, sir, and I must leave you.’

‘Come in.’ The little eyes barely opened in the large face. ‘Think I have a bottle … somewhere. Yours!’

‘Alas! I must sleep. I have to look my best for the Opera tonight.’ Jack was trying to disengage the man’s weighty arm, to
lay it upon the stone railing.

‘Opera! Ah, the divine Tenducci!’ He bent to Jack to whisper. ‘Thought I’d sing myself, once. But duty called!’
He tried to tap the side of his nose, succeeding on the third attempt.

‘Music’s loss, the Cause’s gain.’ Jack managed to lower Pounce upon the step. He’d make his own way in eventually.

He went the opposite way to the dangling sheet. It could have gone now anyway, as his contact might have noted him observing
it. Turnville had told him he would be reached by this method. Now he had. Jack knew that he would not meet the fellow, his
‘scoutmaster’, but the signal meant that he had information for Jack. And he’d been told where he had to go to collect it.

Watkin Pounce’s lodgings were quite close to the Piazza di Spagna and from that square there was an entrance to the gardens
on Monte Pinchio, his destination. But after that first night in the Hotel de Londres, Jack had moved lodgings and strictly
avoided that piazza. Though he was fairly certain he was not followed – the craft he’d learned in the forests of Quebec when
fighting the French made him hard to stalk even on cobbles – where the English gathered in Rome was dangerous ground for ‘Pip
Truman’. Turnville had been right: the city was awash with young Englishmen on the Grand Tour. Jack had no doubt that many
an Old Westminster was among them, schoolfellows all too delighted to bellow out, ‘Jack Absolute!’ He risked the sights because
he always went between ten and noon, when no self-respecting Westminster would be up. Strangely, despite his alcoholic appetite,
Pounce always was, and often accompanied him, an entertaining guide.

Jack made a wide circuit, cutting across the Piazza Barberini, ducking up a small pathway that ran alongside the palazzo of
the same name. This cart track came to a fence, easily climbed, into the gardens on Monte Pinchio. These were open to the
public, a kindness of the Borghese family who owned them. It was a favourite walk of Romans and their guests; for water flowed
here, and trees gave a little
shelter from the oppressive sun, though Jack, who had been there once before on Pounce’s advice, again thought that the gardens
themselves were poor compared to those of England. There were no rolling, lush lawns, only square rectangles of brownish,
parched earth. Some of the walks were pleasant enough for their trees but people walked beneath them on sand, not gravel,
while the occasional hedge was tall and poorly trimmed. Flowers grew not in the sweeping beds of the London parks, but in
rows of earthen pots. It was all so regimented, with none of the artificial naturalness, the rustic simplicity, that so pleased
the eye in England.

Still, Jack was not there for the views. He moved down the avenues a little quicker than most of the early strollers but not
so fast as to draw attention. In his previous visit, he had traced at least half the route. So when he came to the plantation
of pine trees – some four hundred, it was said – he began to move more slowly, to look for the signs.

A statue of a dryad, arms inevitably lopped, marked a side avenue to the right. He took it, looking for a dip after about
a hundred yards, and noticed it by sound not sight. Voices came, laughter, hidden from his sight, as if they were beyond a
ha-ha. He slowed, till he could peer over the slight crest. A couple were down there, a young fellow of dark complexion and
in want of a shave, trying to put his arm about the waist of a buxom girl, dressed in the apron of a maid, she laughing and
half-fighting him off. Then, as he watched, the youth grabbed at her wrist, pulled her up the slope and on down the avenue.
A bend took them from sight, their laughter lingering.

Jack descended into the dip. Just at the point where it began to rise again, he looked left. The pines, perhaps six in each
row and spaced about a dozen feet apart, descended to another parallel path below. He looked closer, to the nearer trees.
There! A carving, two sets of initials within a laurel wreath. He passed the tree, scrunching over pine cones,
counted four trees in, halted. He was quite well hidden in there, but he looked around to be sure. In the distance, he heard
more laughter.

At head height, a bole had been hollowed out by some creature, then abandoned. He reached up, grabbed the paper lying there,
then marched swiftly on, down to the next avenue, turning along it in the opposite direction to the way he’d come. He left
by a different gate, mingling swiftly with the mob.

Jack had taken a small room in the eaves of the crumbling Palazzo Cesari, its principal advantages being the breeze that occasionally
blew through his ever open shutters, and its proximity to the Palazzo Muti, the heart of Jacobitism. It also had an ancient
caretaker whose gender Jack had never settled upon due to the swathes of cloth he/she sported day and night. He suspected
that this personage was a member of the Cesari family itself, now impecunious. Families lived in the larger rooms below; only
himself and one aged servant above. But the door had a stout lock, the window sills so decayed they would require an ape’s
skill to shimmy along, and the sexless caretaker, who lived directly below, possessed a dog of tiny size and loud yap. No
one could approach Jack without his being forewarned.

As the dog’s yelps began to subside, Jack sat on the bed and unfolded the piece of paper. A series of numbers, in groups of
three, were scrawled upon it. Prising up a floorboard and pulling his copy of Herodotus from the hole, he began to decode
them. It was the simplest of codes, but impossible to crack unless you had this particular edition of ‘Lame’ Littlebury’s
translation, which only he and his scoutmaster did. Then it was simple. The first line of numbers read: ‘323 122 896’.

Jack flicked to
page 323
, found line 22, and, ignoring the first two numbers of the last group, counted six words in.
The word he landed on was ‘stag’. He wrote it down, then went on to decode the rest in the same fashion until he had the whole
message: ‘Stag leaves Paris twenty-seven.’

‘Stag’ was their quarry, Red Hugh McClune. So he’d left Paris on 27 June, three weeks ago. If he came directly through France,
he would probably take a felucca from Nice to Genoa. But Turnville had said there were other courts he could visit en route,
other people from whom to collect donations to bring to his King in Rome. If he was in Bavaria, he would come through the
Tyrol and over the Brenner Pass. If via Vienna …

It doesn’t matter, Jack thought suddenly. He couldn’t guess which route the man had taken nor how soon he would be there.
He’d been told that travel through Italy could be swift enough if you were lucky with postillions and horses. Many weren’t.
He couldn’t know, as he’d taken the sea route via Gibraltar to Leghorn, his passage there, and on through Tuscany and into
the Papal States, remarkably easy. But the journey wasn’t the import of this message. Red Hugh was on the move, that was all
that mattered. Besides, whoever had brought the news had reached the city in three weeks. And if they could …

Jack looked up, out of the window, into the sky. He
could
be here already.
She
could be here.

Taking his flint and strike light, he dropped sparks into a little copper bowl of dried leaves. The paper with the code caught
fire easily and he held it, enjoying the flames, till a little pain came and he dropped it. The smoke rose before him but
he did not notice it, looking once again into an orange Roman noon, wondering if she were looking at it as well.

‘Letty!’ He breathed her name out, as he’d done in Bath, as he continued to do every day. If it did not conjure the pleasure
it had when first he’d uttered it, if it carried a weight now, compounded of the lies they’d both told each
other, the shock of their revelation, the pain of her disappearance, what of it? Jack had had plenty of time on his journey
to remember each touch, each word. He had been sent to Rome to identify Red Hugh, the enemy of England; but he had also come
to discover if Laetitia Fitzpatrick still loved him as much as he still loved her.

Jack peered down from the uppermost gallery of the Teatro Argentina. He thought his nose might commence bleeding. Not even
an amply provided spy could secure a ticket in the pit or boxes; they were the prime places in Rome to observe and be observed.
The audience did not draw attention to themselves, as a London crowd would, by their wit; they relied solely on their person.
Jack had been very pleased with his own ensemble of dove-grey suit and emerald waistcoat. The buckles on his gleaming shoes
shone, the horsehair wig was exquisite. Yet he would have been drab down there, not only in cloth but because he sported no
jewellery. The huge chandeliers, which made the ones in the Assembly Rooms in Bath seem like reed candles, reflected their
thousand flames off a dazzling array of decorations and medals on the men, while the women glimmered in diamond tiaras, topaz
rings, sapphire brooches. Their hair was piled up to extraordinary heights, which must have required the sacrifice of a horse
apiece for their glue and the attentions of coiffeurs from dawn. They towered, and that was presumably why everyone sat so
still. More than mild applause would have set up a vibration that may have brought an edifice crashing down; and if one fell,
no doubt all would, one into the next, like a row of dominoes in an English county tavern.

The immobility was aped on the stage, where singers as well dressed as their audience faced front and warbled. Their voices
were fine, undoubtedly; even Jack, who preferred songs in plain English and preferably accompanied by a dance, could tell
that. But there was little drama. And as for
anything alluring, well, female singers were not allowed in the Papal States and men dressed as women, howsoever fine their
voices, did not stir him. He knew how those voices had been produced, and it gave him the wrong sort of feeling in his groin
just watching them.

Two galleries of boxes were below him. Jack had squeezed onto a bench-end at the extreme left of the house and so was able,
by craning around and over, to watch the three central boxes. These had been described for him by Watkin Pounce but there
was no mistaking them anyway. The crest of the House of Stuart and the royal crest of Britain sat in two immense gilt shields.

‘Alas for you, our King just yesterday removed himself to his villa at Albano to avoid the summer heat,’ Pounce had said.
‘But he leaves his boxes to those who, of necessity, must stay in the city. A reward for their services. You may see some
of the most ardent defenders of the Cause there each night.’ The fat man had sighed. ‘I was invited once but alas …’ He’d
gestured down at his coat, so stained and patched, and sighed again.