The French Executioner (50 page)

Beside him, on the table, sat the hand, its fingers resting on their pads, the palm raised slightly. He reached out and touched
it. It was strange how he’d been unable even to look at it before and now he needed it always within sight. Obviously, it
was to do with how he felt. There was less blood around when he had it near, less coughing, and this alone told him it was
the key all alchemists had been seeking. He just needed Apollonius to open the door with it. The door to life eternal.

Apollonius! His real name, Cibo remembered, was Hans Dreschler, a cobbler’s son from Breslau. But somehow this child of ignorance
had become one of the greatest authorities on the hermetic sciences. Even Abraham, with a mind unopiated, could not rival
him. And Wittenberg had long been the centre of esoteric knowledge. It was said that the ancient ways of power, lines of potent
energy, met in that place as nowhere else on earth.

However, Apollonius was not a man to be rushed, and he exemplified the national characteristic of dourness. Though Cibo had
been in touch with him over the years, exchanging knowledge and modes of experiment, his arrival and this new element he sought
to introduce had not provoked the wonder and instant action he was expecting. Its six fingers, and the fact it had survived
unblemished the death of the body, caused the German merely to shrug. That it had once graced the arm of an infamous queen
simply made him nod, and then only once. He’d asked the exact time and place of death, and had then told Cibo he would do
some astrological calculations and speak to him when they were confirmed. As for Cibo’s prisoner, he did not know what questions
to ask him yet. Once again, he would contact him when necessary.

Giovanni, the brothers’ steward, had failed to wile away the wait. He had gone into town and returned with the best whores
the place had to offer – large, lumpen creatures of vast
stupidity and no invention. Franchetto had had three, one after the other, and had not cared that they yawned continually
as he bent to his task. The Archbishop had taken the smallest, who still had mountains of flesh he found distasteful in the
extreme; but she knew nothing of pleasure or pain, had hurt without thrill for him and had not even been able to pretend she
enjoyed being hurt back. He had longed for Donatella, his Sienese mistress, and her exquisite technique. And he had beaten
Giovanni with no restraint to encourage him to do better next time.

The brothers awaited him now, shivering before the smoking, heat-free fireplace; so when the door opened they were disappointed
to see a scrawny youth.

‘A messenger from Apollonius,’ announced Heinrich von Solingen.

The youth was pimply, no more than nineteen, with the thick, wheaten hair of the region. He stooped, had a slight lisp and
an insolent look in the eye, and the Archbishop instantly understood why Apollonius had displayed no reaction to the remains
of the famed seductress of England, Anne Boleyn.

‘Hans … I mean my master, sends his respects, and this.’

He handed over a small scroll of parchment, then stood close to the fire, picking at his face.

Giancarlo Cibo unrolled the paper and glanced swiftly down the list of questions written there. They were all to do with the
actual moments of the execution, those few vital seconds when death and life conjoined. Only one man could answer them.

‘Thank your master. Will you take some wine with us?’

‘Better not.’ The youth swallowed a yawn. ‘He doesn’t like it when I am away too long.’ He ambled to the door, turned back.
‘Can I tell him when you might have the information?’

‘Soon,’ said the Archbishop, looking at Heinrich. ‘Very soon, I think.’

‘Oh, he will be pleased.’ The boy smiled briefly and was gone with another yawn.

Cibo gestured to his bodyguard. ‘These are the things we need to know.’

Heinrich read them, then grunted. ‘He will not want to tell us.’

‘How boring for all if he did.’ Giancarlo smiled at the German. ‘Break him, Heinrich. Break him, body and soul.’

‘With pleasure.’

The German left the room. They could hear his footsteps fading away on the cellar stairs at a slow and even pace.

Jean also heard the footsteps, the steady, deliberate tread of them, and knew it was about to begin. In a strange way, he
was glad. In the five days of waiting he’d had nothing but his regrets for company. These ate into his mind more than the
cords did into his ankles and wrists, burnt his throat with a gall fouler than the soup they poured down it twice a day, chilled
his heart more than the dankness of stone could his body. Now at last he would be out of limbo and into hell. No matter how
much the priests had tormented his childhood with visions of the eternal flames reserved for sinners, he’d always felt they
were preferable to the endless nothing set aside for those who had done nothing with their lives. At least he had something
to atone for. Perhaps, in the way he dealt with the hours to come, he could seek that atonement.

There were voices beyond the thick oak, then the searching of a key in the lock. When the door swung open, Jean blinked and
turned his head away, keeping his eyes open but down to take in the light a little at a time. In the complete darkness of
his cell, even the small flicker the lantern gave out was sharp as sunshine reflected off the sea.

The lantern was set down and a brazier fetched from outside to place beside it. Within their now tolerable glow, Jean gazed
up at his captors. There were the two who fed him every day, hefty, muscled brutes with the permanent half
beard and broken-nosed look of the Tuscan. And there was Heinrich von Solingen. From the wound of his face, his eyes shone,
as if he was about work he loved.

He set down the sack he was carrying and metal clanked on metal within it. He turned towards Jean, an approximation of a smile
upon what used to be lips. A whisper slipped through them.

‘I am going to destroy you, Frenchman.’

‘You are going to try … Scarface.’

The word was added quietly, as an afterthought, almost a dismissal, with no hint of insult in the timbre to colour it. Its
very simplicity produced the reaction. The German swung back his boot and kicked hard at Jean’s face. Limited though his movements
were, he was able to turn just enough to take the blow on the shoulder, on top of bruises from beatings at Munster, causing
agony to rip through him. Yet with the agony he felt a sudden triumph. He now knew what sort of torturer Heinrich von Solingen
would make. An angry one. Calm torturers were more effective, for anger was a weapon to be turned back at whoever felt it.
As it was the only weapon to hand, Jean grasped it gratefully.

‘Tie him to the wall!’ cried the German, and his assistants grabbed Jean, slipping off the wrist straps and stretching his
hands to rebind them to the two iron rings embedded in the stone, once used to hang sacks of provisions beyond the gnawing
of rats. His feet were splayed, ropes lashed around his ankles, then around the two heavy barrels that were the only furnishings
of this cell.

‘Strip him,’ came the guttural command, and the meagre cloth that had covered him since the dungeon in Munster was wrenched
off.

‘Shall we start below or above? Or in the middle? Any preference, Frenchman?’ A slight quaver in the voice contradicted the
studied calmness of the German’s words.

This is a man who finds it hard to master himself,
Jean
thought. But he did not reply. Words, he could see now, were blades he could cut with. And they would only stay sharp if he
used them sparingly.

He did not know what they would ask him. He did not know much anyway. He only knew he would tell them nothing, for this little
was all he could still do for Anne Boleyn. And he was discovering there were different ways not to tell something. The first
way, Jean decided, was to stare above the man approaching him, above the glint of lantern light on metal. There, on the stone-flagged
walls, he could see a courtyard in Montepulciano and the dark eyes of Beck looking up at him from beneath her close-cropped
hair.

Her dark eyes flashed every time the door of the merchant’s house opened. They did not really expect anything other than the
Archbishop’s servants. But there was always that little hope that they would try to move Jean. Anyway, every face noted was
an enemy recognised. A youth had gone in two days before and Haakon had trailed him back to the university, more to stretch
his legs than anything. The night before that, Giovanni, the Archbishop’s steward, whom Beck had recognised from Siena, had
taken in four laughing women who had emerged an hour later sombre and quiet, the smallest among them weeping inconsolably.
The steward had soon developed a vivid black eye and his rare excursions had become increasingly agitated. Of the Cibo brothers,
though, there was no sign.

Yet Beck did not blame them for not stirring out onto this street. Winter seemed to have bypassed autumn but the only effect
here was the cold, because the roofs of the houses were so tightly linked above that no light or liquid penetrated. If any
chill rain had fallen it might have done something to wash away the foul-smelling channel that clogged the roadway’s centre,
muck thrown out to join it from every window. They had been fortunate, though, for the last of her gold from Venice had bought
them what passed for luxury in Wittenberg,
a room just bigger than the plank bed into which she, Haakon and Fenrir squeezed together. Most importantly, its window gave
a view of the doorway behind which they knew Jean was imprisoned.

It was Haakon who had managed to stop her first and every subsequent impulse to storm the place. Where he had learnt such
sense, he was not sure. He would gladly throw himself into the thickest part of any fray, howling his Norse battle cries,
and if it was just his own life he was risking he would not have hesitated. But his death would lead inevitably to the death
of his friend. However glorious, such an end was mere vanity if, in the dying, he did not secure Jean’s survival.

And the survival of this boy who, in a way he didn’t understand, Jean loved.

‘We wait, we watch, and we find another way,’ he said gruffly each time the lad reached for slingshot and knife.

He kept them both occupied getting information. They would listen in on the conversations of those men-at-arms who were allowed
out in twos and threes to inn and brothel, Haakon, familiar with that world, chatting to the whores, Beck pretending to doze
over a mug of beer while the guards spoke in their native Tuscan which they thought no one else could understand.

Between them, they learnt of the cellar where the prisoner was kept, and of the thrice-daily visits paid by their commander,
from which he would emerge, sometimes swiftly, sometimes less so, always his distorted face mottled further with rage. They
learnt of the frustrations of the brothers, the ceaseless bickering, the anger deflected onto hapless servants. And they heard
many tales of Giovanni, trying to conjure entertaining gold from the dross metal of Wittenberg life. It was a town centred
on the learning of the university and Luther’s steady construction of a new religion.

‘You’ll find more sin in a Neapolitan nunnery … and twice as good-looking whores!’ wailed the steward that
evening, drawing sympathetic laughs from the three soldiers at the table.

Beck had come downstairs to eavesdrop when she saw the Italians enter. Haakon was scouting the back of the merchant’s house
again, hoping he’d missed something there. Despite his restraining of her, she knew he was growing more agitated by the hour
with their inaction. He was as desperate to find a way in as she was.

‘If you don’t mind whores with beards!’ one of the soldiers declared.

‘They all have beards,’ said another. ‘You’ve just got to look at the right face.’

More laughter, but Giovanni was not to be put off his whining so easily.

‘I tell you, if the prisoner doesn’t break soon’ – nausea swept over Beck – ‘then I will end up with no part of my body left
to bruise. Did you see what that beast Franchetto did to me this morning?’ He raised a sleeve to reveal the marks where fingers
had gripped and squeezed. ‘Entertain us, they say. Tease and entice us. But the dancers I find just clump, and the whores
just yawn. In Siena, I have to turn away the entertainers, the standards are so high, the competition so fierce. Here, a drunken
song is the best they can manage.’

The rest of the whining faded into the background hubbub of the inn’s main room, for Beck’s thoughts had suddenly been caught
by something within all the complaining. Her mind whirling, her eyes fixed on the table before her, she nearly missed Giovanni’s
leaving. She sprang up and followed the Italian steward as he picked his way among the foul deposits of the street.

‘Signore! Signore!’ she called after him. Once he had stopped and let her catch up, she carried on in Italian. ‘Excuse me,
but I couldn’t help overhearing you in the inn back there.’

‘Jesu preserve me, a countryman!’ Giovanni exclaimed, trying to scrape something off his shoe onto a doorstep. ‘What ill wind
blows you here, young master?’

‘The same as you, I think. I serve another who has business here. Though by the sound of it, my master treats me a little
better than yours treats you.’

This produced another wailing account of the miseries he had to endure. Beck listened, nodding in sympathy, then, when the
steward finally paused for a second’s breath between lamentations, cut in, ‘But my master has not your problems. He brought
his own entertainer with him from Bologna.’

‘Ah!’ cried Giovanni. ‘God be praised for the sense of the Bolognese. And what does this entertainer do?’

Beck tucked her neck further into her collar, affecting embarrassment. ‘Well, this entertainer is my sister, sir, and she
is a … uh, dancer, I think, would be the best way of putting it.’

‘A “uh, dancer”?’ The Italian’s eyes gleamed. ‘And does she have a “uh, speciality”?’

‘Oh yes, sir, most certainly. Her speciality is, is …’