The Count of Monte Cristo (Unabridged Penguin) (86 page)

‘Ten minutes later, another man, this time on foot and wrapped in a cloak, opened the little door to the garden, which shut behind him.

‘I quickly went down. Though I had not seen Villefort’s face, I recognized him by the beating of my heart. I crossed the street and went up to a milestone at one corner of the wall, on which I had stood in order to look into the garden for the first time.

‘This time I was not satisfied merely to look. I drew my knife out
of my pocket, made sure that the point was sharp, and leapt over the wall. My first thought was to run across to the gate. He had left the key, taking the simple precaution of turning it twice in the lock. So, nothing impeded my flight in that direction. I began to study the place. The garden formed a long rectangle with a lawn of fine English grass running down the middle, at the corners of which were clumps of trees, bushy and mingled with autumn flowers.

‘To go from the house to the little gate or from the little gate to the house, according to whether he was coming in or going out, Monsieur de Villefort was obliged to pass beside one of these clumps of trees.

‘It was towards the end of September. There was a strong wind blowing and a few pale shafts of moonlight, repeatedly hidden by large clouds racing across the sky, lit the sandy pathways leading to the house, but were too feeble to penetrate the tufts of foliage among the trees, where a man could hide with no fear of discovery.

‘I concealed myself in the nearest of those that Villefort had to pass. No sooner had I taken up my position than I thought I heard, between the gusts of wind that bent the trees across my face, some kind of groaning. But as you know, Monsieur le Comte – or, rather, you surely don’t know – the person who is poised to commit a murder always thinks he can hear muffled cries in the air. Two hours passed, and several times during them I thought I heard these same groans.

‘Midnight struck. The last lugubrious, echoing note was still sounding when I saw a light in the windows looking out from the back stairway which we have just come down.

‘The door opened and the man with the cloak reappeared. This was the fatal moment, but I had so long prepared myself for it that I shrank at nothing. I took out my dagger, opened it and waited.

‘The man in the cloak came directly towards me, but as he approached across the opened ground I thought that I could discern a weapon in his right hand. I was afraid, not of a struggle, but of failure. When he was just a few yards away from me, I realized that what I had thought was a weapon was nothing more than a spade.

‘I had still not managed to guess why Monsieur de Villefort
should be carrying a spade, when he stopped at the edge of the clump of trees and started to dig a hole in the ground. At this point I noticed that he had something wrapped in his cloak which he had put down on the lawn, so as to leave his hands free.

‘Now, I must confess, my hatred was tempered by a dash of curiosity. I wanted to see what Villefort was doing there, so I stayed motionless, holding my breath, and waited.

‘Then something occurred to me which was confirmed by the crown prosecutor taking a little box out of his cloak, about two feet long and six or eight inches wide.

‘I let him place the box in the hole and cover it with earth; then he stamped on this freshly dug soil to cover the traces of his night’s work. At that, I leapt out at him and plunged my dagger into his breast, saying: “I am Giovanni Bertuccio! Your death is for my brother, your treasure for his widow: you can see that my revenge is more perfect than I could have hoped.”

‘I do not know if he heard me. I think not, because he fell without a sound. I felt his hot blood flowing out over my hands and spattering my face; but I was drunk, I was delirious: the blood refreshed me instead of burning. It took me a second to dig up the box with the spade. Then, to disguise the fact that it had gone, I filled the hole in again and threw the spade over the wall. I ran out of the gate, turning the key twice in the door from outside and taking it with me.’

‘Fine!’ said Monte Cristo. ‘It seems you committed a modest little murder, combined with robbery.’

‘No, Excellency,’ Bertuccio replied. ‘It was a vendetta, combined with reparation.’

‘It was a decent sum, at least?’

‘There was no money.’

‘Ah, yes. I remember. You said something about a child?’

‘Precisely, Excellency. I hurried down to the river, sat on the bank and, eager to know what was in the box, broke the lock with my knife.

‘A newborn baby was wrapped in a child’s fine cambric robe. The purple colour of its face and hands showed that it must have succumbed to asphyxiation caused by the umbilical cord wrapped around the neck. However, as it was not yet cold, I felt uneasy about throwing it into the stream by my feet. Then, a moment later, I thought I could feel a faint fluttering near the heart. I unwrapped
the cord and, as I used to be an orderly at a hospital in Bastia, I did what a doctor might have done in the circumstances: in other words, I energetically breathed air into its lungs and, after a quarter of an hour of considerable effort, I saw it start to breathe and heard it give a cry.

‘I also cried out, but with joy. God had not cursed me, I thought, since he has allowed me to give life back to one human being in exchange for the life that I had taken away from another.’

‘So what did you do with this child?’ Monte Cristo asked. ‘It was quite a tiresome burden for a man who had to escape.’

‘That is why I never once considered keeping it. But I knew that there was an orphanage in Paris where they took in such poor creatures. On arriving at the city gates, I claimed to have found the child on the road and asked directions. I had the box, which supported my story, and the cambric linen showed that the child belonged to rich parents. The blood which covered me could as well have come from it as from anyone else. No one protested. I was shown the way to the orphanage, which was at the far end of the Rue d’Enfer and, after taking the precaution of cutting the sheet in half, so that a piece with one of the two letters embroidered on it was still wrapped around the child, I put my bundle down at the gatehouse, rang the bell and fled as fast as I could. A fortnight later I was back in Rogliano and I told Assunta: “Sister, dry your tears. Israel is dead, but I have avenged him.” She asked me to explain this, and I told her everything that had happened.

‘ “Giovanni,” she said, “you should have brought the child back. We could have taken the place of its lost parents and we should have called it Benedetto. God would surely have blessed us as a reward for our good deed.”

‘In reply, I simply gave her the half of the sheet that I had kept, so that I could reclaim the child if we could ever afford it.’

‘What letters were on the cloth?’ Monte Cristo asked.

‘H and N, surmounted by the ordinary of a baron, tortilly.’

‘I do believe, heaven help us, that you are using terms from heraldry, Monsieur Bertuccio! Where the devil did you study that science?’

‘In your service, Monsieur le Comte, where one may learn everything.’

‘Carry on. I am curious to know two things.’

‘What are they, Monseigneur?’

‘What happened to the little boy… You did say that it was a little boy, Monsieur Bertuccio?’

‘No, Excellency, I do not remember saying that.’

‘Ah, I thought you did. I must have been mistaken.’

‘Well, you are not mistaken, because it was indeed a little boy. But Your Excellency said that he wished to know two things: what is the other one?’

‘The other one is what crime you were accused of when you asked for a confessor, and Abbé Busoni came to you in the prison at Nîmes in response to this request.’

‘The tale might be quite long, Excellency.’

‘What matter? It is barely ten o’clock. You know that I am an insomniac, and I suppose you too must have little desire for sleep.’

Bertuccio bowed and carried on with his story.

‘Partly to drive away the memories that plagued me and partly to provide for the poor widow, I returned eagerly to the profession of smuggling which had been made easier by the relaxation of laws that always follows a revolution. The southern coasts of France, in particular, were badly guarded because of the unending riots that took place, sometimes in Avignon, sometimes in Nîmes, sometimes in Uzès. We took advantage of the sort of truce accorded us by the government to establish relations on all parts of the coastline. Since my brother’s murder in the streets of Nîmes, I had been loath to return there; the outcome was that the innkeeper with whom we used to deal, seeing that we no longer came to him, had decided to come to us and set up a companion to his inn on the road from Bellegarde to Beaucaire, at the sign of the Pont du Gard. Near Aigues-Mortes, in Martigues or in Bouc we also had a dozen warehouses where we could deposit our goods and where, if the need arose, we could hide out from the Customs and the gendarmes. Smuggling is a trade that pays well when carried on with a measure of intelligence and some zeal. As for myself, I lived in the mountains, because I now had a double reason to fear the gendarmes and the Customs men, in view of the fact that my arraignment in front of a judge could lead to an enquiry, and every enquiry is an excursion into the past: in my past, now, they might come across something more serious than smuggled cigars or a few barrels of brandy being dispatched without the proper papers. So, preferring death a thousand times to arrest, I accomplished astonishing feats which,
more than once, proved to me that our excessive concern with the welfare of our bodies is almost the only obstacle to the success of any of our plans, when these demand rapid decisions and vigorous and determined execution. In reality, once you have made the sacrifice of your life, you are no longer the equal of other men; or, rather, they are no longer your equal, because whoever has taken such a resolution instantly feels his strength increase ten times and his outlook vastly extended.’

‘Philosophy, too, Monsieur Bertuccio!’ the count interrupted. ‘Have you then done a little bit of everything in your life?’

‘I beg Your Excellency’s pardon.’

‘No, no! It’s just that ten thirty at night is a little late for philosophy. But I have no other objection, particularly since I agree with your views, which cannot be said of all philosophy.’

‘My trips became more and more prolonged, more and more profitable. Assunta was a good housewife and our little fortune grew. One day, when I was setting off on business, she said: “Go, and you will have a surprise when you return.” There was nothing to be gained by questioning her; she refused to tell me anything, so I left.

‘The trip lasted nearly six weeks. We went to Lucca to take on oil and to Leghorn to load some English cotton cloth. We unloaded it all without any unpleasant incidents, took our profits and came back home, very pleased with ourselves.

‘When I entered the house, the first thing I saw, in the place where it was least likely to be missed in Assunta’s room, was a child of seven or eight months, in a cot far more luxurious than the furnishings around it. I gave a cry of joy. The only moments of sadness that I had felt since the murder of the crown prosecutor were due to my abandonment of the child. It goes without saying that I suffered no remorse for the murder itself.

‘Poor Assunta had guessed everything. She had taken advantage of my absence and, taking the half of the sheet with her, had written down the exact day and time when the child was left in the orphanage, so that she would not forget them. Then she set off for Paris and went herself to reclaim him. No obstacle was put in her way, and the child was entrusted to her.

‘Oh, Monsieur le Comte, I have to admit that when I saw the poor little creature in his cot, my heart filled and tears poured from my eyes.

‘ “Assunta,” I cried, “you are without doubt a worthy woman and Providence will bless you.” ’

‘Now that,’ said the count, ‘is less true than your philosophy. But, then, it’s only faith, after all.’

‘Alas! Excellency, how right you are!’ Bertuccio continued. ‘It was the child himself that God appointed to punish me. Never did a more perverse character become evident earlier in life, yet no one can say that he was badly brought up, because my sister-in-law treated him like the son of a prince. He was a handsome boy, with light-blue eyes, like the colour in Chinese porcelain that harmonizes so well with the milky whiteness of the background; but his strawberry-blond hair, which was excessively bright, gave a strange appearance to his face, heightening his vivacious look and roguish smile. Unfortunately a proverb says that redheads are either all good or all bad; it was right in Benedetto’s case: he was all bad from childhood on. Admittedly, his mother’s sweet nature also encouraged his natural bent. My poor sister-in-law would travel four or five leagues to the town market to buy the earliest fruit and the finest sweetmeats, while the child disdained Palma oranges or Genoese preserves, preferring the chestnuts that he could steal from the neighbours by climbing over the hedge or the apples that were drying out in their loft – when he had all the chestnuts and apples he wanted in our own orchard.

‘One day, when Benedetto was about five or six years old, our neighbour Wasilio, who, like all Corsicans, never locked up his purse or his jewellery, because (as Monsieur le Comte knows better than anyone) there are no thieves in Corsica – our neighbour Wasilio complained to us that a gold
louis
had vanished from his purse. We thought he had miscalculated, but he insisted that he was sure of what he said. That day, Benedetto had left the house early in the morning and we were very worried by the time he returned that evening, leading a monkey, which he said he had found chained to the trunk of a tree.