The Historical Nights' Entertainment - Rafael Sabatini (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📗
- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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him.”
Charles screamed a moment, even as Andreas had screamed on that same
spot, when he found himself staring into the fearful face of death.
Then the scream became a cough as a Hungarian sword went through him
from side to side.
They picked up his body from the tessellated floor of the loggia,
carried it to the parapet as Andreas’s had been carried, and flung
it down into the Abbot’s garden as Andreas’s had been flung. It lay
in a rosebush, dyeing the Abbot’s roses a deeper red.
Never was justice more poetic.
XI. THE NIGHT OF HATE
THE MURDER OF THE DUKE OF GANDIA
The Cardinal Vice-Chancellor took the packet proffered him by the
fair-haired, scarlet-liveried page, and turned it over, considering
it, the gentle, finely featured, almost ascetic face very thoughtful.
“It was brought, my lord, by a man in a mask, who will give no name.
He waits below,” said the scarlet stripling.
“A man in a mask, eh? What mystery!”
The thoughtful brown eyes smiled, the fine hands broke the fragment
of wax. A gold ring fell out and rolled some little way along the
black and purple Eastern rug. The boy dived after it, and presented
it to his lordship.
The ring bore an escutcheon, and the Cardinal found graven upon this
escutcheon his own arms the Sforza lion and the flower of the quince.
Instantly those dark, thoughtful eyes of his grew keen as they
flashed upon the page.
“Did you see the device?” he asked, a hint of steel under the
silkiness of his voice.
“I saw nothing, my lord - a ring, no more. I did not even look.”
The Cardinal continued to ponder him for a long moment very
searchingly.
“Go - bring this man,” he said at last; and the boy departed, soon
to reappear; holding aside the tapestry that masked the door to give
passage to a man of middle height wrapped in a black cloak, his face
under a shower of golden hair, covered from chin to brow by a black
visor.
At a sign from the Cardinal the page departed. Then the man, coming
forward, let fall his cloak, revealing a rich dress of close-fitting
violet silk, sword and dagger hanging from his jewelled girdle; he
plucked away the mask, and disclosed the handsome, weak face of
Giovanni Sforza, Lord of Pesaro and Cotignola, the discarded husband
of Madonna Lucrezia, Pope Alexander’s daughter.
The Cardinal considered his nephew gravely, without surprise. He
had expected at first no more than a messenger from the owner of
that ring. But at sight of his figure and long, fair hair he had
recognized Giovanni before the latter had removed his mask.
“I have always accounted you something mad,” said the Cardinal
softly. “But never mad enough for this. What brings you to Rome?”
“Necessity, my lord,” replied the young tyrant. “The need to defend
my honour, which is about to be destroyed.”
“And your life?” wondered his uncle. “Has that ceased to be of
value?”
“Without honour it is nothing.”
“A noble sentiment taught in every school. But for practical
purposes - ” The Cardinal shrugged.
Giovanni, however, paid no heed.
“Did you think, my lord, that I should tamely submit to be a
derided, outcast husband, that I should take no vengeance upon,
that villainous Pope for having made me a thing of scorn, a byword
throughout Italy?” Livid hate writhed in his fair young face. “Did
you think I should, indeed, remain in Pesaro, whither I fled before
their threats to my life, and present no reckoning?”
“What is the reckoning you have in mind?” inquired his uncle,
faintly ironical. “You’ll not be intending to kill the Holy Father?”
“Kill him?” Giovanni laughed shortly, scornfully. “Do the dead
suffer?”
“In hell, sometimes,” said the Cardinal.
“Perhaps. But I want to be sure. I want sufferings that I can
witness, sufferings that I can employ as balsam for my own wounded
honour. I shall strike, even as he has stricken me - at his soul,
not at his body. I shall wound him where he is most sensitive.”
Ascanio Sforza, towering tall and slender in his scarlet robes,
shook his head slowly.
“All this is madness - madness! You were best away, best in Pesaro.
Indeed, you cannot safely show your face in Rome.”
“That is why I go masked. That is why I come to you, my lord, for
shelter here until - “
“Here?” The Cardinal was instantly alert. “Then you think I am
as mad as yourself. Why, man, if so much as a whisper of your
presence in Rome got abroad, this is the first place where they
would look nor you. If you will have your way, if you are so set
on the avenging of past wrongs and the preventing of future ones,
it is not for me, your kinsman, to withstand you. But here in my
palace you cannot stay, for your own safety’s sake. That page who
brought you, now; I would not swear he did not see the arms upon
your ring. I pray that he did not. But if he did, your presence
is known here already.”
Giovanni was perturbed.
“But if not here, where, then, in Rome should I be safe?”
“Nowhere, I think,” answered the ironical Ascanio. “Though perhaps
you might count yourself safe with Pico. Your common hate of the
Holy Father should be a stout bond between you.”
Fate prompted the suggestion. Fate drove the Lord of Pesaro to act
upon it, and to seek out Antonio Maria Pico, Count of Mirandola, in
his palace by the river, where Pico, as Ascanio had foreseen, gave
him a cordial welcome.
There he abode almost in hiding until the end of May, seldom issuing
forth, and never without his mask - a matter this which excited no
comment, for masked faces were common in the streets of Rome in the
evening of the fifteenth century. In talk with Pico he set forth
his intent, elaborating what already he had told the Cardinal
Vice-Chancellor.
“He is a father - this Father of Fathers,” he said once. “A tender,
loving father whose life is in his children, who lives through them
and for them. Deprive him of them, and his life would become empty,
worthless, a living death. There is Giovanni, who is as the apple
of his eye, whom he has created Duke of Gandia, Duke of Benevento,
Prince of Sessa, Lord of Teano, and more besides. There is the
Cardinal of Valencia, there is Giuffredo, Prince of Squillace, and
there is my wife, Lucrezia, of whom he has robbed me. There is, you
see, an ample heel to our Achilles. The question is, where shall we
begin?”
“And also, how,” Pico reminded him.
Fate was to answer both those questions, and that soon.
They went on June 1st - the Lord of Pesaro, with his host and his
host’s daughter, Antonia - to spend the day at Pico’s vineyard in
Trastevere. At the moment of setting out to return to Rome in the
evening the Count was detained by his steward, newly returned from
a journey with matters to communicate to him.
He bade his guest, with his daughter and their attendants, to ride
on, saying that he himself would follow and overtake them. But the
steward detained him longer than he had expected, so that, although
the company proceeded leisurely towards the city, Pico had not come
up with them when they reached the river. In the narrow street
beyond the bridge the little escort found itself suddenly confronted
and thrust aside by a magnificent cavalcade of ladies and gallants,
hawk on wrist and followed by a pack of hounds.
Giovanni had eyes for one only in that gay company - a tall,
splendidly handsome man in green, a Plumed bonnet on his auburn head,
and a roguish, jovial eye, which, in its turn, saw nobody in that
moment but Madonna Antonia, reclining in her litter, the leather
curtains of which she had drawn back that she might converse with
Giovanni as they rode.
The Lord of Pesaro beheld the sudden kindling of his brother-in-law’s
glance, for that handsome gallant was the Duke of Gandia, the Pope’s
eldest son, the very apple of the Holy Father’s eye. He saw the
Duke’s almost unconscious check upon his reins; saw him turn in the
saddle to stare boldly at Madonna Antonia until, grown conscious of
his regard, she crimsoned under it. And when at last the litter had
moved on, he saw over his shoulder a mounted servant detach from the
Duke’s side to follow them. This fellow dogged their heels all the
way to the Parione Quarter, obviously with intent to discover for his
master where the beautiful lady of the litter might be housed.
Giovanni said naught of this to Pico when he returned a little later.
He was quick to perceive the opportunity that offered, but far from
sure that Pico would suffer his daughter to be used as a decoy; far,
indeed, from sure that he dared himself so employ her. But on the
morrow, chancing to look from a window out of idle curiosity to see
what horse it was that was pacing in the street below, he beheld a
man in a rich cloak, in whom at once he recognized the Duke, and he
accounted that the dice of destiny had fallen.
Himself unseen by that horseman, Giovanni drew back quickly. On the
spur of the moment, he acted with a subtlety worthy of long
premeditation. Antonia and he were by an odd fatality alone together
in that chamber of the mezzanine. He turned to her.
“An odd fellow rides below here, tarrying as if expectant. I wonder
should you know who he is.”
Obeying his suggestion, she rose - a tall, slim child of some
eighteen years, of a delicate, pale beauty, with dark, thoughtful
eyes and long, black tresses, interwoven with jewelled strands of
gold thread. She rustled to the window and looked down upon that
cavalier; and, as she looked, scanning him intently, the Duke raised
his head. Their eyes met, and she drew back with a little cry.
“What is it?” exclaimed Giovanni.
“It is that insolent fellow who stared at me last evening in the
street. I would you had not bidden me look.”
Now, whilst she had been gazing from the window, Giovanni, moving
softly behind her, had espied a bowl of roses on the ebony table in
the room’s middle. Swiftly and silently he had plucked a blossom,
which he now held behind his back. As she turned from him again,
he sent it flying through the window; and whilst in his heart he
laughed with bitter hate and scorn as he thought of Gandia snatching
up that rose and treasuring it in his bosom, aloud he laughed at her
fears, derided them as idle.
That night, in his room, Giovanni practised penmanship assiduously,
armed with a model with which Antonia had innocently equipped him.
He went to bed well pleased, reflecting that as a man lives so does
he die. Giovanni Borgia, Duke of Gandia, had been ever an amiable
profligate, a heedless voluptuary obeying no spur but that of his
own pleasure, which should drive him now to his destruction.
Giovanni Borgia, he considered further, was, as he had expressed it,
the very apple of his father’s eye; and since, of his own accord,
the Duke had come to thrust his foolish head into the noose, the
Lord of Pesaro would
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