Death of a Duchess (24 page)

Leandro said, ‘But he was going to—’

Cosima, surprised that he should speak, was not surprised when Angelo, in the language of the stables, told him to shut up.

Durgan stopped, and closed his lantern. Angelo at once closed his. They were in the dark once more until a door opened ahead. A veil hung there, it seemed, hiding lights. Then she saw it was tapestry, Durgan’s shape appeared against it, peering into the lit place beyond. He beckoned, lifting the cloth. They hurried, across a wide hall bright with flambeaux, Cosima could feel her pulse in her throat and every inch of her body seemed aware of its awful visibility. She expected a guard’s shout.

They hurried down a long straight stair on the other side, then, on a landing where two pillars rose either side of a statue, Durgan seemed to vanish. Sigismondo, sidling, got with his burden between the statue’s plinth and the pillar. Cosima saw that Leandro would have offered to let her go first, but Angelo stuffed him into the gap. He was the one whose presence could still betray what they were up to. A small door yawned behind the plinth and he ducked into it. Cosima followed, Angelo joined them and Durgan opened his lantern. They were at the top of a flight of precipitous broken steps, and must go down.

The steps started as dressed stone and ended as rock. Angelo’s lantern could give little help, there were shifting shadows. Once Sigismondo stumbled, and a rattling stone went down ahead of them into the dark. They were feeling their way foot after foot, and into an increasing foulness of air. Once more it was cold. When she slipped, Leandro took her hand to help her. His hand was strong and smooth; a Bandini ought not to have pleasant-feeling hands.

She wished she had thicker shoes. The raw edges of stone hurt her feet.

They had reached a level floor. The dwarf went forward and the smell told Cosima that once more they must be near dungeons. He had stopped and, raising the lantern, showed a round grating in the floor.

Sigismondo put down the body in its stained blue gown, and set to work. He had to wrap his hands in his sleeves to grip the rusty grating, and it took him a long few minutes to heave the metal from its bed, but no time at all to roll the body into the dark void. They heard, after a long pause, a thud far below.

Cosima feared — she would have sat down had the floor been dry, while Sigismondo put back the grid — that they would now have to go back the way they had come. Durgan, however, led the way on. A long ramp, that curved as if it went inside a circling wall, went upward. The stone was smooth as if it had once been used often, but their feet raised dust. The air freshened. Amazed, Cosima smelt incense. They came out onto the level, and Durgan opened a door that gave onto the vast marble floor and echoing space of St Agnes’s.

They were next to a side altar. Cosima hurriedly veiled herself. She saw Sigismondo bending to have a word with Durgan, then the door, shutting, became invisible.

People were leaving after Compline, in groups and singly crossing the great floor. Sigismondo gathered his group about him. Here they kept to the shadows, for here he and Leandro could not cover their heads. He put Leandro’s arm round Cosima and told him to lean his face over her as they walked, following him. He walked slowly, his cowl pulled high round his neck. She said, ‘Can’t we hurry?’

And Angelo, at her heels, muttered, ‘Yes, if you want people to stare.’

Outside the door — had she ever been so grateful for the dark? — the men put up their hoods. The dreadful shape of the scaffold loomed to one side. Then it was behind them. Sigismondo hurried his steps now. They entered the confinement of streets after the open square; Angelo allowed a crack of light to shine at their feet. Cosima felt the cold, and shivered. No one spoke. They stopped before a door whose threshold lacked a step — it was at knee height above the ground. Sigismondo rapped softly to a pattern. The door gaped into darkness. He turned, took her by the hips without ceremony and put her up into the doorway. She was steadied by someone unknown, then she smelt Benno. He drew her away from the door for the others were entering.

Then there were lights. They crowded up a small stair. She had to stop and put her veil back to see her footing. A landing full of crumbling plaster led into a big room lit by fat candles, where a large man was getting up from a chair by a brazier; she saw the incredulity on his face as he took a hesitant step forward. Leandro ran to him.

The pair embraced, exclaimed, held each other at arm’s length to look, embraced and kissed once more. At last they brought themselves to remember that they were not alone.

‘Ah, Father, here’s my fair saviour!’ Leandro came and seized her hand, very freely it seemed of a sudden in this domestic and social atmosphere, although on their adventures they had touched hands without question. He led her towards his father. ‘A courageous lady! She played her part perfectly. Whatever you paid her can’t be enough.’

Cosima stopped dead, making him turn, and dragged her fingers from his clasp; and with the word
paid
singing in her head she brought her hand across his face as violently as she knew how. He reeled, his eyes amazed, his cheek reddening. Bandini and Angelo began to speak but she forestalled them.

‘
I am a di Torre
!’

If they had been startled before, it was nothing. Ugo Bandini drew breath raspingly, his son became for a moment a caricature of a handsome young man surprised, straight from her father’s book of physiognomy.

‘I am Cosima di Torre.’ She reinforced their surprise. ‘I did what I did because I had been rescued and you had not. If you suppose for one instant that I, or any of my family, could be
paid
to do any service of any kind—’

‘Lady Cosima,’ Ugo Bandini’s voice, being male and powerful, unfairly made itself heard above hers, ‘be assured my son spoke in ignorance—’

‘I could not know.’ He touched his cheek tenderly and then flung his hands wide. ‘Lady, most admired, most worthy lady, I have been rescued by your means and with your valiant help. I beg your forgiveness. I understand nothing. The Duke’s agent—’ he turned towards Sigismondo, but Sigismondo was not there. Only Angelo stood douce and vigilant behind Cosima — ‘The Duke’s agent rescued me and my father’s trusted secretary tried to prevent my escape.’

‘Giulio? To
prevent
it?’

‘Yes, sir, there was no mistake. He would have laid hands on me to prevent it.’ He put the back of one bloodstained hand to his forehead, and his father took hold of him at once, looked at his hands in horror, began to pull at his bloodstained gown to get at suspected wounds he had but just envisioned. ‘I’m not hurt, sir. That’s Giulio’s blood. He tried to stop me, he would have called the guard.
She
killed him.’ He nodded at Angelo, who, as Ugo Bandini wheeled to see him, curtsied politely. Cosima, sinking onto the bench and wondering what had happened to her knees, thought that the Bandini, father and son, had had all the surprises that they could manage for the moment.

Apparently Fate disagreed, for the door opened and Cosima had her own surprise, ushered in by Sigismondo. Her father, his furred hood falling back as he came in, entered and stood, mouth open, staring from her to Bandini, who gaped back at him.

Cosima had risen to her feet at sight of her father, ready to sink into her filial curtsy, with an automatic smile of welcome as she waited for the joyous recognition, the embrace for a daughter restored, like the one Ugo Bandini had given his son. Her father stared, and her smile faded. He strode forward to shake a fist at the Bandini.

‘Traitor! Murderer! Is this your revenge, devils? To bring me here to show me my disgraced daughter?’ He swung on Sigismondo who stood behind him by the door, gravely attentive to all that passed. ‘You called yourself the Duke’s man but now I see the stories are true; you work for Duke Francisco. Spare me your excuses!’ — though Sigismondo showed no sign of making any — ‘The
evidence
,’ and he flung a pointing hand out towards Leandro, ‘is here! None but a traitor would free a murderer.’ He struck his brow with both fists, almost dislodging his fur cap. ‘But you have failed! I disown her!’ and a sweep of the arm at Cosima brushed her out of his life. ‘She is no daughter of mine. You have dishonoured her and she is no di Torre! Do what you will, give death for her shame, she is no longer mine!’ He was weeping as he shouted and Cosima, astonished and angry, thought:
Perhaps he cares about me after all
, and simultaneously,
I hadn’t realised he was so old.

‘Your daughter, my lord, since her abduction, by Duke Francisco’s men, was at first in the charge of the nuns of a convent in Castelnuova. She was then in the care of the Lady Donati, in whose sister’s house we are now. Everywhere, she has been suitably accompanied and her honour is unstained.’

‘Nuns?’ Sigismondo’s firm tone had carried conviction, and Cosima saw hope begin to dawn in her father’s face. The Bandini, father and son, had also made no protest against the accusations, but watched as though at a piece of theatre whose plot escaped them.

‘Nuns.’ Her father turned his head from Sigismondo to her again. ‘Nuns brought me her hair.’

‘They cut it off,’ she heard herself saying, putting her hands up and feeling the still unaccustomed shape of her shorn head under the folds of lawn. ‘I was a prisoner there.’
How pathetic I sound!
Leandro was regarding her with sympathy.

Her father’s face had changed. ‘Duke Francisco...?’ and he turned again, to Ugo Bandini. ‘Then you had no part in this?’

‘I swear it. On my son’s life.’

This, which seemed to convince di Torre, raised other questions. ‘Your son—’ di Torre pointed.

Sigismondo came forward, raising his hand magisterially. ‘My lord, that’s another story. Let it suffice that your daughter has behaved with all the courage and breeding of a di Torre.’

Jacopo turned once more towards her; she saw Sigismondo beckon and she at last sank into her curtsy. Her father came hurrying to her and as she rose she was clasped to his fusty furs. He kissed her, rubbed tears from his beard, and then started and whispered urgently, ‘Your veil, girl! Good God, have you forgotten there are
strange men
present?’

Cosima reached over her shoulders and brought her veil down. Sigismondo for a moment smiled and she, remembering how boldly she had thrown back her veil in the prison, began to blush, the confining lawn making her face feel hotter still. He was speaking, however.

‘Sirs: your children are, for this moment and in this place, safe; but you and they are in danger and so is all Rocca and the Duke himself. I think you know this. You know that Francisco of Castelnuova is about to attack — that his mercenaries under Il Lupo crossed the border and are encamped tonight on Roccan soil.’

Neither man showed shock. It was true. They had known. Ugo glanced down at his son as if to conceal any expression. Her own father, who had released her almost at once from his embrace, had a self-conscious air. It was Angelo who, smoothing his dress, remarked, ‘Artful bastard,’ and drew all eyes.

‘Well, he’s chosen his time, hasn’t he?’ Angelo spoke still in his upper register, as a girl. ‘The city’s steaming like a midden. They don’t like their Duchess getting murdered and they don’t like Ippolyto’s men either, swaggering about sneering. They don’t like the street-fighting that ruins their goods.’ He nodded at Leandro and showed a hint of the crooked teeth in the lovely face; ‘They’ll be pissed off properly at not seeing the colour of your guts tomorrow. Some of them’s connoisseurs.’

Bandini indignantly enveloped his son once more in a protective embrace, but Sigismondo addressed Jacopo di Torre. ‘You were given instructions, my lord: the price of your daughter’s life and safety.’

Di Torre tweaked at the veil on his daughter’s shoulder, as if arranging it were of importance.

‘What were those instructions?’

Cosima found her wrist taken by her father, who displayed her and spoke in a quick loud tone. ‘What was I to do? Could I let my child die? My only heir? A di Torre?’

An object, a possession, a pawn... Cosima found these thoughts, which she had entertained all her life, rising to the surface. Her father never looked at her as Bandini looked at his son. Leandro was an heir, but he would keep his father’s name, perpetuate his line. She struggled a little to free her wrist, and her father at once let go without looking at her. She was deadly tired, and her feet burned, but her young lifetime’s practice kept her upright, with the face of complaisance expected in a young girl.

‘Indeed, my lord. You could not let her die. Nature and your love for her demanded that you obey those orders. What were they? How were you to come to the aid of Duke Francisco tomorrow?’

Di Torre pointed once more at Ugo Bandini. ‘Understand, sir, that I believed these instructions came from you.’

‘We are quits there, sir. I believed that the mind behind all these machinations was yours.’

Sigismondo hummed genially. ‘So that both of you were prepared to sacrifice your Duke to save your children.’

‘I am no Brutus, sir, to send my son to death for my country’s sake.’ Ugo Bandini put out a preventing hand to Leandro who would have interrupted. ‘I too had no choice in the matter.’ He and di Torre were regarding each other now as if reassessing their enemy as a possible human being.

‘You must understand, my lords,’ Sigismondo’s voice gathered force, had an urgency that brought Cosima a sense of the danger still surrounding them, of an enemy not conquered, ‘you have been tricked, both of you and by the same person. Both of you have had spies in your house, the slave Sascha and the secretary Giulio.’

‘Sascha!’

‘You left the city unconscious in a litter. She left, wearing your dress and riding with one of the bravos; she let your dress be seen as he let the false Bandini colours he wore be seen. She was bitterly paid for her treachery.’

Cosima could only think, why did Sascha do that? Did I treat her badly? Did she hate me and I never knew?