Poison: A Novel of the Renaissance (20 page)

“You are well known,” I said to Morozzi, keeping my voice very low.

He nodded. “I have taken pains to be. What is familiar and customary raises no suspicion.”

We continued on, past the immense statue of Hadrian, little more than a crumbling shadow of its former self after being badly damaged when the Visigoth Alaric sacked Rome. The emperor appeared to glare down at us, the descendants of those who had failed to safeguard his legacy. Ahead lay the vast spiral ramp built by the ancients to coil around the entire cylindrical fortress and give access to the upper levels. Torches in wall brackets lit our way as we began to ascend over the broken black-and-white-tiled floor, past crumbling marble columns that whispered of another, greater era.

I knew, as did everyone in Rome, that the first floor of the fortress contained prison cells. I saw no entrances to them, adding weight to the claim that prisoners were lowered by rope into these living tombs. The thought would have filled me with horror had not the events of the day left me almost numb. As it was, I was very glad of David’s quiet presence beside me.

The next level housed the military quarters and armories. Here at last there was open air in the form of large courtyards, but before
we could reach them, we had to pass through the windowless crypt where the imperial remains had been interred. There was nothing left of them, of course, again the result of long-ago looting, but the oppressive sense of death still lingered.

I breathed a little more easily when we stepped out into the Courtyard of Honor. The
castel
being a military fortification as well as a prison, the courtyard housed several impressive cannon that could, if need arose, be pointed out over the city to repel attackers. The quarters of the officers and troops faced inward onto the courtyard. I had to hope that no one, happening to glance out a window, would question our swift passage.

Just before we left the courtyard, I glanced up at the statue rising above the
castel
. The Archangel Michael in all his glory, sheathing his sword to proclaim the end of the plague that had devastated Rome almost a thousand years before. With its passing, the castle had been renamed to his glory and ever since his image, or various incarnations of it, had ruled over the Roman sky. I saw him now in silhouette against starlight, and I said a silent prayer that his might and fury would protect us.

Beyond the courtyard, we entered the officers’ hall, furnished with large tables and benches, the walls painted with appropriately martial scenes and hung with banners. Several captains and lieutenants were there, drinking at their leisure. They looked at us as we passed but again, no one challenged us.

I had time to think that the
castel
was well designed to force invaders who managed to breach its walls into the very heart of its military strength, where they could be picked off one by one. The Courtyard of Honor itself would provide a convenient killing zone in which to trap any enemy luckless enough to enter it.

Morozzi increased his pace once we were through the officers’
hall. I assumed he was as anxious to reach our destination as I was, and followed swiftly after him, as did David. Catching up to him, I asked, “Is it much farther?”

His face looked flushed and his eyes were hard as he shook his head. “We are almost there.”

I nodded, trying to gather myself for what was about to come. Very soon, I would have to tell Morozzi what I truly sought. I had to find the boys being bled, more particularly I had to locate the blood so that I could substitute what I had brought. If a physician or anyone else was present, that person would have to be dealt with. I did not relish the thought but I understood the necessity for such action. Any cry of alarm, any signal that something was amiss and the entire garrison would descend upon us.

We went through one room, then another. Before the third, Morozzi stopped and raised a hand. Carefully, he stepped forward alone and peered into the chamber. What he saw must have satisfied him, for he gestured for us to go ahead.

David went first, I followed. Just as I passed Morozzi, he reached out and yanked the locket from around my neck. In the same moment, he pushed me into the chamber.

“What are you doing—?” I gasped but in some way I already knew. Our passage had been too easy, our path too smoothed. What I had wanted to believe was the favor of God for our enterprise or merely good luck was in fact betrayal.

Morozzi grasped a lever in the wall to the side of the entrance and yanked it down. At once, an iron portcullis descended, trapping us within.

“Deus vult!”
the priest cried, his face transformed with religious fervor. God wills it! The cry of every crusader and inquisitor. The excuse for every atrocity done in the Redeemer’s name.

David made a dive across the room, trying to get under the portcullis before it completed its descent. He almost made it and for just an instant, Morozzi looked terrified that he would. But the heavy metal lattice thudded into place before David could squeeze under, leaving him sprawled on the floor at the priest’s feet.

Morozzi threw back his head in exaltation. “First Giordano and now his witch of a daughter and a Jew to boot! I will bring your master down, destroy him utterly, and at the same time raise the fury of all Christendom against the betrayers of our Lord. You—”

My hands clamped on the bars of the portcullis, I confronted the mad priest without regard for anything other than the sickening suspicion roaring through my mind. From the moment I stood before the medallion man and heard the confession tortured from him, I had entertained doubts. But never had I imagined the truth.

“What do you mean, first Giordano? Did Innocent order my father’s death . . . or did you?”

“Innocent?” Morozzi all but spit the name. “That disgusting old man can do nothing but weep over his sins and beg me to tell him how he may yet escape the damnation he so richly deserves.”

A chill enveloped me. Even twisted by hatred, the priest still had the face of an angel, but one who, now I saw, wielded a terrible sword.

“What did you tell him?” I demanded. “That he could be saved by condemning all the Jews to death?”

“God’s will is made manifest in me!” Morozzi proclaimed. “I am His messenger. All the slayers of Christ must die for what they did to our Lord!”

David had heard enough. He hurled himself at the priest, who jumped back from the portcullis just in time to avoid being seized through it.

“God protects me!” Morozzi shouted. “I do His holy work!”

Have you noticed that those who murder in the thousands invariably claim divine favor, while those who kill on a far more modest scale, myself included, know in our hearts that God weeps for our sins?

Morozzi carried no such burden. Having trapped us, he darted away—I presumed to summon the guards—leaving us to face the torments shortly to come.

The stark horror of what awaited us when Morozzi returned stripped the protective cloak of numbness from me and spurred me to action.

“Quickly,” I said, my voice echoing faintly off the stone walls. “We have to find a way out of here.”

Remarkably, David already had a plan. “Go left,” he said. “I’ll go right.”

I spared a moment to be grateful that if I had to be trapped in such a place, it was with a man who could keep his head. We spread out in opposite directions, feeling along the walls of the dark, windowless room. My hands were cold and slick. Morozzi would be back within minutes and he would bring help. He would have witnesses to our being in the
castel
in disguise, and he had my locket with the poisonous lozenge. Nothing we, or Borgia, said would explain any of that away.

I was hoping to find a door, a passage, anything that might help us, but I reached a corner of the room and continued on without finding anything but stone wall.

“I think I know where we are,” David said in the darkness. To my great relief, he sounded entirely calm.

“Where?” My own voice shook slightly.

“This is the room where prisoners are lowered into the cells. I just stumbled over one of the trapdoors set in the floor.”

So there was a way out, but it would leave us entombed, exactly as Morozzi intended.

“There has to be another door,” I insisted. “A way to reach the chambers beyond this one.”

“There could be other passages leading to them,” David said. “This place is a warren. It’s been built and rebuilt for centuries. Rooms have been sealed up, walls shifted, whole floors dropped or raised. I doubt anyone knows the whole of it.”

I feared he was right. A person would have to live in the
castel
for years, free to explore it at will, in order to have any real grasp of everything it contained.

At that point, the dark thought descended on me that we would not get out. I tried to push it away but it clung remorselessly, forcing me to confront what could not be denied. While I did not question David’s courage and I thought I possessed a fair measure of the same, I feared that either of us could be made to talk under torture. Certainly, I could not withstand such torment as I had seen in the torture chamber beneath the palazzo.

When I talked—not if but when—the Jews of Rome would be doomed. Sofia, Benjamin, all the rest would die. The horrible truth was that Morozzi was right. Once he could present evidence of the plot to kill Innocent, the mob itself would rise up against the ghetto
and destroy everyone in it. But it would not stop there. With the edict or without, Jews would face attack across Christendom.

Do not mistake me, I value my own life as much as the next person. In my anguish over my father’s murder, I was willing to risk everything to avenge him, but that, in its own way, was a selfish act driven by my own need. This was different. If the Jews died, what was it to me? They were, for the most part, faceless, anonymous people to whom I felt no connection. Or did I?

I stopped moving along the wall and let my hands fall to my sides. Carefully, as befitted a situation in which my soul hung in the balance, I considered my course. Suicide is a mortal sin, so Mother Church tells us. Because all that comes to us in life is by God’s will, the act of suicide places the human above the divine. This violation of nature makes it the ultimate offense against God.

Too vividly, I remembered Boccaccio’s writhing visions of Dante’s Seventh Circle, where suicides are transformed into thorn bushes and trees. For all eternity, they are torn at by the Harpies, the winged death spirits. So unforgivable is their sin that alone among all the dead, only they will not be resurrected at the Final Judgment.

And yet . . . what if the decision to end one’s life was not a purely selfish one? What if by that act, thousands and more might be saved? Surely God would count the weight of one life as a feather against the lives of so many?

Within the great well of my sorrow, a light glimmered. Quietly, I asked, “Do you have a knife?”

In the darkness, I could barely make out David’s shape nearby, but I heard him clearly. “Have you found something?”

“No.” Only that, nothing more. He was an intelligent man; he knew the situation as well as I did. I trusted him to understand me.

Silence followed before I heard his reply. “I have a knife.”

My chest was tightly constricted. I wrapped my arms around myself to try to stop the shaking that seized me. The poison in the lozenge wasn’t pleasant but at least it wouldn’t have involved blood.

“We have very little time,” I said.

Silence again before David asked, “Have you ever heard of Masada?”

I thought he was trying to distract me and was grateful for it. “Is that in Lombardy?”

He laughed, he actually did, before enlightening me. “It was a fortress on the top of a hill in the Holy Land. A group of Jewish rebels held out there for years. Right as the Roman general sent to crush them was about to overrun the stronghold, they committed suicide.”

“What, all of them?” Was not suicide also a mortal sin for the Jews? There was so much about them I did not know.

“All of them,” David said. “They drew lots among the men. Those chosen killed all the others, including the women and children, and then killed each other. The last man left took his own life.”

My heart hammered painfully against my sore ribs. I could not imagine what it must have been like to go among those you loved, killing them one by one. Did the children cry out in fear? Or did their mothers lull them into the final sleep first before baring their own throats to the knife? And what of that last man? How long had he stood on the silent hilltop among the dead before ending the nightmare that life had become?

God grant him forgiveness and good rest in the light of the Lord.

“Do you want to draw lots?” I asked with, I admit it, great trepidation as to how I would manage if he agreed and it fell to me to do.

Without hesitation, David put his arms around me. With equal certainty, I hugged him back. We were two human beings in the
darkness, on the verge of the abyss, giving each other what support we could.

“No, Francesca,” he said softly. “It will be all right.”

Perhaps I am a coward after all, for relief flooded through me. Relief and gratitude for the burden this good man was willing to take on himself.

Even so, I said, “I need a moment.”

To pray? To try to bargain with God or to rail against him? I’m not sure, but I think I tried to do all three at the same time.

And was still trying when a voice from above said, “Finally! I’ve been looking all over for you.”

You may mock my foolishness but for just an instant, there in the darkness on the brink of death, I was overwrought enough to think that I heard the Almighty and that He was not remotely what I had been taught. Far from the omniscient majesty before whom we must tremble in blind adoration, He sounded a caring, if somewhat exasperated shepherd who went in search of us, His straying flock.

Of course, I know I was wrong. And yet I know no such thing. The thought lingers: Surely the God who created Heaven and Earth can speak through the mouth of a man? Indeed, how else would he speak to men? Or, for that matter, to one particular woman?