The Historical Nights' Entertainment - Rafael Sabatini (chrysanthemum read aloud TXT) 📗
- Author: Rafael Sabatini
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“My God!” cried Pico. And then hoarsely asked, “And Antonia?”
Giovanni dismissed the question abruptly.
“She saw, yet she knows nothing.”
And then on another note:
“Up now, Pico!” he cried. “Arouse the city, and let all men know
how Gandia died the death of a thief. Let all men know this Borgia
brood for what it is.”
“Are you mad?” cried Pico. “Will I put my neck under the knife?”
“You took him here in the night, and yours was the right to kill.
You exercised it.”
Pico looked long and searchingly into the other’s face. True, all
the appearances bore out the tale, as did, too, what had gone before
and had been the cause of Antonia’s complaint to him. Yet, knowing
what lay between Sforza and Borgia, it may have seemed to Pico too
extraordinary a coincidence that Giovanni should have been so ready
at hand to defend the honour of the House of Mirandola. But he asked
no questions. He was content in his philosophy to accept the event
and be thankful for it on every count. But as for Giovanni’s
suggestion that he should proclaim through Rome how he had exercised
his right to slay this Tarquin, the Lord of Mirandola had no mind to
adopt it.
“What is done is done,” he said shortly, in a tone that conveyed much.
“Let it suffice us all. It but remains now to be rid of this.”
“You will keep silent?” cried Giovanni, plainly vexed.
“I am not a fool,” said Pico gently.
Giovanni understood. “And these your men?”
“Ate very faithful friends who will aid you now to efface all
traces.”
And upon that he moved away, calling his daughter, whose absence
was intriguing him. Receiving no answer, he entered her room, to
find her in a swoon across her bed. She had fainted from sheer
horror at what she had seen.
Followed by the three servants bearing the body, Giovanni went down
across the garden very gently. Approaching the gate, he bade them
wait, saying that he went to see that the coast was clear. Then,
going forward alone, he opened the gate and called softly to the
waiting groom:
“Hither to me!”
Promptly the man surged before him in the gloom, and as promptly
Giovanni sank his dagger in the fellow’s breast. He deplored the
necessity for the deed, but it was unavoidable, and your
cinquecentist never shrank from anything that necessity imposed
upon him. To let the lackey live would be to have the bargelli in
the house by morning.
The man sank with a half-uttered cry, and lay still.
Giovanni dragged him aside under the shelter of the wall, where the
others would not see him, then called softly to them to follow.
When the grooms emerged from Pico’s garden, the Lord of Pesaro was
astride of the fine white horse on which Gandia had ridden to his
death.
“Put him across the crupper,” he bade them.
And they so placed the body, the head dangling on one side, the
legs on the other. And Giovanni reflected grimly how he had
reversed the order in which Gandia and he had ridden that same
horse an hour ago.
At a walk they proceeded down the lane towards the river, a groom
on each side to see that the burden on the crupper did not jolt
off, another going ahead to scout. At the alley’s mouth Giovanni
drew rein, and let the man emerge upon the river-bank and look to
right and left to make sure that there was no one about.
He saw no one. Yet one there was who saw them Giorgio, the timber
merchant, who lay aboard his boat moored to the Schiavoni, and who,
three days later, testified to what he saw. You know his testimony.
It has been repeated often - how he saw the man emerge from the
alley and look up and down, then retire, to emerge again, accompanied
now by the horseman with his burden, and the other two; how he saw
them take the body from the crupper of the horse, and, with a “one,
two, and three,” fling it into the river; how he heard the horseman
ask them had they thrown it well into the middle, and their answer
of, “Yes my lord”; and finally, when asked why he had not come
earlier to report the matter, how he had answered that he had thought
nothing of it, having in his time seen more than a hundred bodies
flung into the Tiber at night.
Returned to the garden gate, Giovanni bade the men go in without him.
There was something yet that he must do. When they had gone, he
dismounted, and went to the body of the groom which he had left under
the wall. He must remove that too. He cut one of the
stirrup-leathers from the saddle, and attaching one end of it to the
dead man’s arm, mounted again, and dragged him thus - ready to leave
the body and ride off at the first alarm - some little way, until he
came to the Piazza della Giudecca. Here, in the very heart of the
Jewish quarters, he left the body, and his movements hereafter are
a little obscure. Perhaps he set out to return to Pico della
Mirandola’s house, but becoming, as was natural, uneasy on the way,
fearing lest all traces should, after all, not have been effaced,
lest the Duke should be traced to that house, and himself, if found
there, dealt with summarily upon suspicion, he turned about, and went
off to seek sanctuary with his uncle, the Vice-Chancellor.
The Duke’s horse, which he had ridden, he turned loose in the streets,
where it was found some hours later, and first gave occasion to
rumours of foul play. The rumours growing, with the discovery of the
body of Gandia’s groom, and search-parties of armed bargelli scouring
Rome, and the Giudecca in particular, in the course of the next two
days, forth at last came Giorgio, that boatman of the Schiavoni, with
the tale of what he had seen. When the stricken Pope heard it, he
ordered the bed of the river to be dragged foot by foot, with the
result that the ill-starred Duke of Gandia was brought up in one of
the nets, whereupon the heartless Sanazzaro coined his terrible
epigram concerning that successor of Saint Peter, that Fisherman of
Men.
The people, looking about for him who had the greatest motive for
that deed, were quick to fasten the guilt upon Giovanni Sforza, who
by that time was far from Rome, riding hard for the shelter of his
tyranny of Pesaro; and the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, who was also
mentioned, and who feared to be implicated, apprehensive ever lest
his page should have seen the betraying arms upon the ring of his
masked visitor - fled also, nor could be induced to return save
under a safe-conduct from the Holy Father, expressing conviction of
his innocence.
Later public rumour accused others; indeed, they accused in turn
every man who could have been a possible perpetrator, attributing
to some of them the most fantastic and incredible motives. Once,
prompted no doubt by their knowledge of the libertine,
pleasure-loving nature of the dead Duke, rumour hit upon the
actual circumstances of the murder so closely, indeed, that the
Count of Mirandola’s house was visited by the bargelli and subjected
to an examination, at which Pico violently rebelled, appealing
boldly to the Pope against insinuations that reflected upon the
honour of his daughter.
The mystery remained impenetrable, and the culprit was never brought
to justice. We know that in slaying Gandia, Giovanni Sforza vented
a hatred whose object was not Gandia, but Gandia’s father. His aim
was to deal Pope Alexander the cruellest and most lingering of
wounds, and if he lacked the avenger’s satisfaction of disclosing
himself, at least he did not lack assurance that his blow had stricken
home. He heard - as all Italy heard - from that wayfarer on the
bridge of Sant’ Angelo, how the Pope, in a paroxysm of grief at sight
of his son’s body fished from the Tiber, had bellowed in his agony
like a tortured bull, so that his cries within the castle were heard
upon the bridge. He learnt how the handsome, vigorous Pope staggered
into the consistory of the 19th of that same month with the mien and
gait of a palsied old man, and, in a voice broken with sobs,
proclaimed his bitter lament:
“Had we seven Papacies we would give them all to restore the Duke to
life.”
He might have been content. But he was not. That deep hate of his
against those who had made him a thing of scorn was not so easily to
be slaked. He waited, spying his opportunity for further hurt. It
came a year later, when Gandia’s brother, the ambitious Cesare
Borgia, divested himself of his cardinalitial robes and rank,
exchanging them for temporal dignities and the title of Duke of
Valentinois. Then it was that he took up the deadly weapon of
calumny, putting it secretly about that Cesare was the murderer of
his brother, spurred to it by worldly ambition and by other motives
which involved the principal members of the family.
Men do not mount to Borgia heights without making enemies. The evil
tale was taken up in all its foul trappings, and, upon no better
authority than the public voice, it was enshrined in chronicles by
every scribbler of the day. And for four hundred years that lie has
held its place in history, the very cornerstone of all the execration
that has been heaped upon the name of Borgia. Never was vengeance
more terrible, far-reaching, and abiding. It is only in this
twentieth century of ours that dispassionate historians have nailed
upon the counter of truth the base coin of that accusation.
XII. THE NIGHT OF ESCAPE
CASANOVA’S ESCAPE FROM THE PIOMBI
Patrician influence from without had procured Casanova’s removal in
August of that year, 1756, from the loathsome cell he had occupied
for thirteen months in the Piombi - so called from the leaded roof
immediately above those prisons which are simply the garrets of the
Doge’s palace.
That cell had been no better than a kennel seldom reached by the
light of day, and so shallow that it was impossible for a man of
his fine height to stand upright in it. But his present prison was
comparatively spacious and it was airy and well-lighted by a barred
window, whence he could see the Lido.
Yet he was desperately chagrined at the change, for he had almost
completed his arrangements to break out of his former cell. The
only ray of hope in his present despair came from the fact that the
implement to which he trusted was still in his possession, safely
concealed in the upholstery of the armchair that had been moved with
him into his present quarters. That implement he had fashioned for
himself with infinite pains out of a door-bolt some twenty inches
long, which he had found discarded in a rubbish-heap in a corner of
the attic where he had been allowed to take his brief daily exercise.
Using as a whetstone a small slab of black marble, similarly
acquired, he had shaped that bolt into a sharp octagonal-pointed
chisel or spontoon.
It remained in his possession, but he saw no chance of using it now,
for the suspicions of Lorenzo, the gaoler, were aroused, and daily
a couple of archers came to sound the floors and walls. True they
did not sound the ceiling, which was low and within reach. But it
was obviously
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