The King's Diamond (20 page)

Grace cast her eyes towards the deeper parts of the palazzo, with an expression that mingled reverence and irritation. ‘Stephen is with Cardinal Campeggio. But I believe the girls are in the loggia.'

She led me into the sala. Even as I was nerving myself to meet Hannah, the name Campeggio sent my mind spinning. Though an Italian, he was Bishop of Salisbury by the gift of our King Henry, and Cardinal–protector of England. He was the man who stood between the Pope and the King, as mediator or ambassador; loyal to His Holiness, naturally, but also very much beholden to the King. Where his loyalties truly lay would be hard for any man to say. He was a powerful man, but a peaceful one; a man of deep understanding who had been married once, before he was a priest, and loved the delights of the table. I well remembered the stir in London when he had arrived to seek support for a crusade against the Turks some nine years earlier. I had been just twelve, and had gazed in wonder on his barge as it passed up the Thames with its scarlet banners and crosses
of silver. His presence here was yet another sign of the weightiness of Mr Stephen's business.

I followed Mrs Grace through a grand door beside the fireplace. Cool air blew against my face. We were in an arcaded gallery with a balustrade and a row of columns running along its edge, overlooking the garden with its marble statues. The walls and curved ceiling were painted with scenes of heroes, shepherds and misty seascapes and woods. I heard Hannah's laughter mixed with snarls and yaps. At the far end of the loggia three spaniels were running in tight circles, leaping up at a ball which Hannah held just above them on a string. Susan was sitting closer to me with an enormous viol cradled between her legs. Her knees and elbows stuck out in four grotesque angles; she held the bow in her palm, slanting back across the strings, and on her face was a furious scowl of concentration. The bow touched the strings, which responded with a dismal howl. At her feet Alessandro's dwarf, Morgante, was throwing sweets to the monkey, which caught them in its paws and grinned. Susan looked up.

I said, ‘Is the monkey really called Beelzebub?'

‘That's my name for it. Hannah calls it Piccolino or something such. The nasty beast.'

I frowned down at her. ‘Hannah, or the monkey?'

‘As you like.'

I walked past her. Hannah saw me, and her face broke into a smile which warmed and delighted me. She tossed the ball away in the direction of Susan, which sent the spaniels barking and jumping round her feet. Susan let out a cry of anger, stood up and began stamping at them and calling them every kind of Satan and devil.

‘Susan!' warned Mrs Grace. ‘Try to be a civil creature.'

Hannah glided towards me and offered her cheek for a kiss.

‘You will be with us for dinner?' said Grace. ‘Tomorrow will be Lent: this is the last night of the Carnival.'

At my side Hannah whispered, ‘And I hear it is the cruellest and wildest of all.'

‘But dinner is not for two hours,' Grace continued. ‘An awkward length of time, is it not? If we had longer, I might suggest a trip to the grottoes, or over the river to the Belvedere. His Holiness has made us welcome there at any time.'

Hannah said, ‘Perhaps Mr Richard would be diverted by a little game of cards.'

Her eyes on me were loaded with challenge. I said, ‘What a charming thought.'

Grace smiled. ‘Then let us go to the saletta.' She led the way to a door at the end of the gallery. Beyond was a room far more intimate in size than the sala. A single window looked out south-west across the Via Giulia to the river. The walls in here were painted a deep green, overlaid with swirling flowers of every kind, giving the impression that we were inside some rustic temple with a flowering wilderness all round. Three older women sat near the window with embroidery frames, workboxes and scissors round them. They looked up as we came in, and bowed their heads. These were gentlewomen, I took it, kept by the female Cages as companions. A door on the right must have led back into the sala; from another, on the left, came the murmur of voices, one of which I recognised as Mr Stephen's. That would be his anticamera, or studio, a place for receiving the most honoured of guests.

Mrs Grace went over to sit with the gentlewomen, and peered with bright interest at their work. Hannah led me to a small table with its legs carved in the form of naked-breasted sphinxes. A white cloth covered its top and three chairs stood round it. She motioned me to sit. One of the Cages' silent, impeccable servants set down wine. Susan came in, laid her instrument on a bench with a deep-voiced twang, and sat down at one of the chairs. She stared at me with a look of deep significance.

‘You don't mean that Susan is playing too?'

‘The game we are going to play is for three.' Hannah opened a chest and took out a stack of cards, which she set down on the table.
They were large, almost as long as my hand, and the stack was thick. I looked at them in suspicion.

‘What are these?'

‘They are Tarocchi. What the French call Tarot.'

I looked on, dismayed, as Hannah shuffled the cards and began to deal them out in batches of three. The game of Tarocchi was of notorious difficulty, played mainly by the aristocracy. It was of Italian invention, unknown in England; I had watched in Venice, but never played. Martin, of course, would not know it, and in any case I did not possess the requisite cards.

I said, ‘I shall play you at anything you please. But not Tarocchi.'

Hannah went on dealing. ‘You allowed me my choice.'

‘I trusted you to choose within reason.'

She gave me a look of indignation. ‘What did you think I would pick? Primiera, maybe? Even our servants are playing it. What do you take me for? Some wench in a tavern?'

Mrs Grace looked up from the embroidery frame which she had taken over from one of the gentlewomen.

‘I hope, my sweets, you will take care of those cards. They cost your father a good deal of money. They were made by Messer Padovano, the Michelangelo of card-makers.'

Susan sang back, ‘Have no fear,
madre mia
.'

She snapped up the cards as fast as Hannah dealt them, spreading them in her hand and peering at them with grunts of pleasure. Already I felt this game was slipping away from me. I said, ‘What does Susan get if she wins?'

Hannah lifted one eyebrow. ‘I hardly think that is very likely.'

‘But supposing?'

‘If she wins you, she can have you.'

Susan snorted, and darted me a look of utter loathing. Grace peered at us again.

‘You are not playing for high stakes, are you, my pet lambs?'

Hannah went on dealing. ‘Nothing of any importance.'

I looked across at her, the faint smile about her lips, the lifted brows and the intensity in her eyes. She was playing with me as a cat does with a mouse. Still the cards kept coming, with their plain light green backs, shot across the cloth by Hannah's quick white fingers.

I leant over and spoke in a whisper. ‘Dear, sweet Mrs Hannah, is this fair? To play me at a game I do not understand?'

‘Poor Mr Richard,' said Hannah. ‘It seems to me this is not the only game you do not understand. In the life you have chosen you will have to become a fast learner. Or are you saying you will admit defeat right now?'

Fuming, I threw myself back in my chair. ‘No.'

All the cards were out. I picked up the pile in front of me. As I spread them in my hand I saw that the face of every card was coated in gold leaf, with the designs richly painted over the top. There were the four familiar suits that all Italian cards share, coins and cups, batons and swords, though these cards were so ornate that they were not always easy to read. That pair of vine stocks, for example, with grapes hanging down from them and a fox reaching up to eat them, must be meant for the two of batons. Then there were the Triumphs, the winning cards. Each had a picture on it that was its own exquisite little work of art. I saw in my hand a naked woman holding a star; a man handing a flower to a woman, with a cupid hovering over their heads; a skeleton mounted on a horse grasping a scythe. They bore neither names nor numbers.

‘You must remember the pictures,' Hannah prompted me, ‘and which one conquers which.'

I hissed at her, ‘You are mad. I cannot remember what I have never been told.'

Susan said, ‘I suppose we ought to have a little pity on him?'

Hannah frowned, as if she were trying to judge just how great an advantage she was handing me. Then she said, ‘Well, we shall tell you: but not too much. There are seventy-eight cards, though we
only play with seventy-two. Twenty-one of them are Triumphs, that beat all the other suits. Highest of these is the Angel.'

‘They also call it the Day of Judgement,' added Susan. ‘Sometimes even God.'

‘Below that is the World.'

‘Then Sun, Moon, Star.'

‘The Devil and Death, and the Traitor.'

‘After him is Gobbo, the Hunchback: then the Virtues.'

‘Below those,' Hannah said, looking me in the eye, ‘is Love, and all the other troubles of life.'

‘Then Emperor and Pope, Empress and She-pope.'

‘Last is the Bagattino: we call him the Conjuror.'

‘We have forgotten some,' said Susan. ‘Oh! Shall we tell him about the Fool?'

Hannah shook her head. ‘Oh, no. Let it be a surprise.'

‘Good idea.'

‘I think that is all we have to say. Do you still want to play?'

‘And win,' I told them. Inside I was seething. They could keep me in ignorance if they pleased. I was going to beat them, no matter what it took.

Hannah took four of her cards and laid them aside, face-down. ‘Everyone else throws out one. Then we play.' She darted a glance at her sister. ‘You are first. And no helping the enemy.'

‘You are the enemy just as much as he is.'

Susan took a card from her hand and set it down. It bristled with swords: three curved blades interlocking with three more. I was next. I decided to begin boldly. I laid down a young man holding a sword.

Hannah immediately placed on top of it another youth wielding a sword, mounted on a horse. ‘Mine, I think.'

She pulled the cards in front of her, laid them face down and immediately played a new card. It was the king of swords. Susan played an eight. I held the three and the four. Most likely I was
expected to sacrifice one of these, and lose yet another trick to Hannah. But this appeared altogether too tame and obvious a course. Instead I chose out an old man in a hood with crooked shoulders, carrying an hourglass and a staff. This must be the Gobbo, I thought, the hunchback. I laid it down on top of the other two. Hannah creased her brows.

‘You must have a sword. I cannot believe you do not.'

‘What if I have?'

She leant forward and spoke in an angry whisper. ‘If you hold a sword, you must play it. You are not allowed to play a Triumph until your suit is bare.'

I said, ‘If you will not tell me the rules, you cannot be angry when I break them.'

Susan pointed at her sister, with a ‘Ha, ha, ha!'

Hannah frowned, then waved her hand in dismissal. ‘Take it, then. Five points for the king. The hunchback counts for nothing. But don't think you're going to win.'

After that we skirmished a little in the low-ranking batons, and I had some good success. I looked up at the two girls with a smile. But Susan shook her head. ‘You poor dupe,' she said. ‘Those cards are worthless, and the tricks only count one each. You will have to do better than that.' Then Hannah played a ten of cups on my three, and began pulling in the cards.

Susan's hand came down on hers. ‘Not so fast, big sister.'

Susan turned to me. ‘In cups and coins, the suits run contrary. A two beats a three, and a three certainly beats a ten.'

Hannah glared at her. ‘No, they don't.'

Susan laughed in astonishment. ‘By God, they do.'

‘Mr Richard,' said Hannah, ‘who are you going to believe? This little liar or me?'

I looked between them. Susan had her mouth open, the amazed and angry child, while Hannah wore on her face a look of deep and beautiful guile. ‘No contest at all. I believe Susan.'

Hannah pushed the cards at me in annoyance. ‘You've chosen a dangerous friend.'

‘My dear Mrs Hannah,' I said, ‘I will gladly surrender the game, if you only tell me the name of the King's mistress.'

Susan looked up sharply, eyes widening. ‘Saint Jennifer's arse! Is that what we are playing for?'

‘No,' said Hannah. ‘Because I am not going to lose. We are playing for Mr Richard, heart and soul.'

‘But you would not really think of telling him?' persisted Susan.

‘Don't be foolish. I told you, I am not going to lose.'

I turned to Susan. ‘You could save your sister a lot of heartache if you simply told me yourself.'

Susan snorted. ‘Why should I?'

‘Besides,' said Hannah. ‘Susan is so fond of telling lies.'

Susan opened her mouth in outrage. ‘Fine talk, coming from you. Oh, I shall enjoy this. Play on!'

Hannah took my ace of batons with the Emperor, and threw down a card bearing a great silver tower with lightning flashing round it.

‘The House of the Devil,' murmured Susan. ‘None can quench his flame.' She twisted her face into an ugly squint, peered at each of us, and then with a gesture of carelessness let fall a card. It had on it a man in a broad-brimmed hat, standing at a table with dice and a scatter of cards.

Hannah let out a whoof of indignation. Across the room, Mrs Grace looked up briefly from her sewing. Hannah turned to Susan and lowered her voice. ‘Dear sister, if I thought you were helping Mr Richard to win, I would do something extremely unpleasant to you.'

Susan sat back and folded her arms. ‘Think what you like. You know what a little fool I am at cards.'