“Sainted Host!” he roared at last. “What trickery may this be?” And sidling his horse nearer he tore aside the curtains of my litter.
Out of faces pale as death the craven grooms looked on, to behold me reclining there, my cloak flung down across my legs to hide my boots, and my motley garb of red and black and yellow all revealed. I believe their astonishment by far surpassed the Captain’s own.
“You are choicely met, Ser Ramiro,” I greeted him. Then, seeing that he only stared, and made no shift to speak: “Maybe,” quoth I, “you’ll explain why you detain me. I am in haste.”
“Explain?” he thundered. “Sangue di Cristo! The burden of explaining lies with you. What make you here?”
“Why,” answered I, in tones of deep astonishment, “I am about the business of the Lord Cardinal of Valencia, our master.”
“Davvero?” he jeered. He stretched out a mighty paw, and took me by the collar of my doublet. “Now, bethink you how you answer me, or there will be a fool the less in the world.”
“Indeed, the world might spare more.”
He scowled at my pleasantry. To him, apparently, the situation afforded no scope for philosophical reflections.
“Where is the girl?” he asked abruptly.
“Girl?” quoth I. “What girl? Am I a mother-abbess, that you should set me such a question?”
Two dark lines showed between his brows. His voice quivered with passion.
“I ask you again — where is the girl?”
I laughed like one who is a little wearied by the entertainment provided for him.
“Here be no girls, Messer del’ Orca,” I answered him in the same tone. “Nor can I think what this babble of girls portends.”
My seeming innocence, and the assurance with which I maintained the expression of it, whispered a doubt into his mind. He released me, and turned upon his men, a baffled look in his eyes.
“Was not this the party?” he inquired ferociously. “Have you misled me, beasts?
“It seemed the party, Illustrious,” answered one of them.
“Do you dare tell me that ‘it seemed’?” he roared, seeking to father upon them the blunder he was beginning to fear that he had made. “But — What is the livery of these knaves?
“They wear none,” someone answered him, and at that answer he seemed to turn limp and lose his fierce assurance.
Then he bridled afresh.
“Yet the party, I’ll swear, is this!” he insisted; and turning once more to me: “Explain, animal!” he bade me in terrifying tones. “Explain, or, by the Host! be you ignorant or not, I’ll have you hanged.”
I accounted it high time to take another tone with him. Hanging was a discomfort I was never less minded to suffer.
“Draw nearer, fool,” said I contemptuously, and at the epithet, so greatly did my audacity amaze him, he mildly did my bidding.
“I know not what doubts are battling in your thick head, sir captain,” I pursued. “But this I know — that if you persist in hindering me, or commit the egregious folly of offering me violence, you will answer for it, hereafter, to the Lord Cardinal of Valencia.
“I am going upon a secret mission” — and here I sank my voice to a whisper for his ears alone— “in the service of the house that hires you, as for yourself you might easily have inferred. Behold.” And I revealed my ring. “Detain me longer at your peril.”
He must have had some notion of the fact that I was journeying in Cesare Borgia’s service, and this coupled with the sight of that talisman effected in his manner a swift and wholesome change. Had I, arrayed in the panoply of Mother Church, defied the devil, my victory could not have been more complete.
He looked about him like a man whose wits have been scattered suddenly to the four winds of Heaven.
“But this litter,” he mumbled, riveting his dazed eyes upon me, “and these four knaves — ?”
“Tell me,” I questioned, with sudden earnestness, “are you in quest of just such a party?”
“Aye that I am,” he answered sharply, intelligence returning to his glance, inquiry burning in it.
“And would the men, peradventure, be wearing the livery of the House of Santafior?”
His quick assent came almost choked in a company of oaths.
“Why then, if that be your quarry, you are but wasting time. Such a party passed us at the gallop about an hour ago. It would be an hour, would it not, Giacopo?”
“I should say an hour,” answered the lacquey dully.
“In what direction?” came Ramiro’s frenzied question. He doubted me no longer.
“In the direction of Fabriano I should say,” I answered. “Although it may well be that they were making for Sinigaglia. The road branches farther on.”
He waited for no more. Without word of thanks for the priceless information I had given him, he wheeled his horse, and shouted a hoarse command to his followers. A moment later and they were cantering past us, the snow flying beneath their hoofs; within five minutes the last of them had vanished round an angle of the road, and the only indication of the halt they had made was the broad path of dirty brown where their horses had crushed the snow.
I have been an actor in few more entertaining comedies than the cozening of Ser Ramiro, and a witness of nothing that afforded me at once so much relief and relish as his abrupt departure. I sank back on the cushions of my litter, and gave myself over to a burst of full-souled laughter which was interrupted ere it was half done by Giacopo, who had dismounted and approached me.
“You have fooled us finely,” said he, with venom.
I quenched my laughter to regard him. Of what did he babble? Was he, and were his fellows, too, so ungrateful as to bear a grudge against the man who had saved them?
“You have fooled us finely,” he insisted in a louder voice.
“That, knave, is my trade,” said I. “But it rather seems to me that it was Messer Ramiro del’ Orca whom I fooled.”
“Aye,” he answered querulously. “But what when he discerns how you have played upon him? What when he discovers the trick by which you have thrown him off the scent? What when he returns?”
“Spare me,” I begged, “I am but indifferently skilful at conjecture.”
“Nay, but you shall answer me,” he cried, livid with a passion that my bantering tone had quickened.
“Can it be that you are indeed curious to know what will befall when he returns?” I questioned meekly.
“I am,” he snorted, with an angry twist of the lips.
“It should be easy to gratify the morbid spirit of curiosity that actuates you. Remain here, and await his return. Thus shall you learn.”
“That will not I,” he vowed.
“Nor I, nor I, nor I!” chorused his followers.
“Then, why plague me with unprofitable questions? What concern is it of ours how Messer del’ Orca shall vent his wrath when he is disillusioned. Your duty now is to rejoin your mistress. Ride hard for Cagli. Seek her at the sign of ‘The Full Moon,’ and then away for Pesaro. If you are brisk you will gain the shelter of the Lord Giovanni Sforza’s fortress long before Messer del’ Orca again picks up the scent, if, indeed, he ever does so.”
Giacopo laughed derisively till his fat body shook with the scornful mirth of him.
“By my faith, I’m done with the business,” he cried, and the other three expressed a very hearty agreement with that attitude.
“How done with it?” I asked.
“I shall make my way back across the hills and so retrace my steps to Rome. I’ll risk my head no more for any lady or any Fool.”
“If you should ever chance to risk it for yourself,” said I, with unmeasured scorn, “you’ll risk it for the greatest fool and the cowardliest rogue that ever shamed the name of man. And your mistress? Is she to wait at Cagli until doomsday? If anywhere within the bulk of that elephant’s body there lurks the heart of a rabbit, you’ll get you to horse and ride to the help of that poor lady.”
> They resented my tone, and showed their resentment plainly. Messer Giacopo went the length of raising his hand to me. But I am a man of amazing strength — amazing inasmuch as being slender of shape I do not have the air of it. Leaping suddenly from the litter, I caught that miserable vassal by the breast of his doublet, shook him once or twice, then tossed him headlong into a drift of snow by the roadside.
At that they bared their knives and made shift to attack me. But I flung myself on to one of the mules of the litter, and showing them the stout Pistoja dagger that I carried, I presented with it a bold and truculent front, no whit intimidated by their numbers. Four to one though they were, they thought better of it. A moment they stood off, consulting among themselves; then Giacopo mounted, and with some mocking counsel as to how I should dispose of the litter and the mules, they made off, no doubt, to find their way back to Rome. Giacopo, as I was afterwards to discover, was Madonna Paola’s purse-bearer, so that they would not lack for means.
Awhile I stayed there, cursing them for the white-livered cravens that they were, and thinking of that poor child who had ridden on to Cagli, and who would await them in vain. There, on the mule, I sat in the noontide sunlight, and pondered this, so absorbed in her affairs as to have grown forgetful of my own. At last I resolved to ride on to Cagli alone, and inform her that her men were fled.
There was no time to lose, for as that rogue Giacopo had said, Ramiro del’ Orca might discover at any moment how he had been tricked, and return hot-foot to find me and extort the truth from me by such means as I had no stomach for enduring.
First, then, it was of moment thoroughly to efface our tracks, leaving no sign that might guide Meser Ramiro to repair the error into which I had tricked him. Slowly, says the proverb, one journeys far and safely. Slowly, then, did I consider! The escort was, no doubt, on its way back to Rome, and if I could but rid myself of that cumbrous litter, Ser Ramiro would find himself mightily hard put to it to again pick up the trail. I remembered a ravine a little way behind, and I rode my mule back to that as fast as it would travel with the litter and the other mule attached to it. Arrived there, I unharnessed the beasts on the very edge of that shallow precipice. Then exerting all my strength, I contrived to roll the litter over. Down that steep incline it went, over and over, gathering more snow to itself at every revolution, and sinking at last into the drift at the bottom. There were signs enough to show its presence, but those signs would hardly be read by any but the sharpest eyes, or by such as might be looking for it in precisely such a position. I must trust to luck that it escaped the notice of Messer Ramiro. But even if he did discover it, I did not think that it would tell him overmuch.
That done I resumed my hat and cloak — which I had retained — mounted once more, and urging the other mule along, I proceeded thus as fast as might be for a half-league or so in the direction of Cagli. That distance covered, again I halted. There was not a soul in sight. I stripped one of the mules of all its harness, which I buried in the snow, behind a hedge, then I drove the beast loose into a field. The peasant-owner of that land might conclude upon the morrow that it had rained asses in the night.
And now I was able to travel at a brisker pace, and in an hour or so I had passed the point where the road diverged, and I caught a glimpse of the four grooms, already high up in the hills which they were crossing. Whether they saw me or not I do not know, but with a last curse at their cowardice I put them from my mind, and cantered briskly on towards Cagli. It was a short league farther, and in little more than half an hour, my mule half-dead, I halted at the door of “The Full Moon.”
Flinging my reins to the ostler, I strode into the inn, swaddled in my cloak, and called for the hostess. The place was empty, as indeed all Cagli had seemed when I rode up. She came forward — a woman with a brown, full face, and large kindly eyes — and I asked her whether a lady had arrived there in safety that morning. At first she seemed mistrustful, but when I had assured her that I was in that lady’s service, she frankly owned that Madonna was safe in her own room. Thither I allowed her to lead me, at once eager and reluctant. Eager with my own eyes to assure myself of her perfect safety; reluctant that, since a man may not penetrate to a lady’s chamber hat on head, by uncovering I must disclose my shameful trade. Yet there was nothing for it but a bold face, and as I mounted the stairs in the woman’s wake, I told myself that I was doubly a fool to be tormented by qualms of such a nature.
Hat in hand I followed the hostess into Madonna’s room. The lady rose from the window-seat to greet me, her face pale and her gentle eyes wearing an anxious look. At sight of my head crowned with the crested, horned hood of folly, a frown of bewilderment drew her brows together, and she looked more closely to see whether I was indeed the man who had befriended her that morning in her extremity. In the eyes of the hostess I caught a gleam of recognition. She knew me for the merry loon who had entertained her guests one night a fortnight since, when on my way from Pesaro to Rome. But before she could give expression to this discovery of hers, the lady spoke.
“Leave us awhile, my woman,” she commanded. But I stayed the hostess as she was withdrawing.
“This lady,” said I, “will need an escort of three or four stout knaves upon a journey that she is going. She will be setting out as soon as may be.”
“But what of my grooms?” cried the lady.
“Madonna,” I informed her, “they have deserted you. That is the reason of my presence here. You shall hear the story of it presently. Meanwhile, we must arrange to replace them.” And I turned again to the hostess.
She was standing in thought, a doubtful expression on her face. But as I looked at her she shook her head.
“There is no such escort to be found to-day in Cagli,” she made answer. “The town is all but empty, and every lusty man is either gone on the pilgrimage to the Holy House of Loretto, or else is at Pesaro for the Feast of the Epiphany.”
It was in vain that I protested that a couple of knaves might surely be found. She answered me that such as were in Cagli were there because they would not be elsewhere.
The lady’s face grew clouded as she listened, for from my insistence she shrewdly inferred that it imported to be gone.
“There is your ostler,” quoth I at last. “He will do for one.”
“He is the only man I have. My husband and my sons are gone to Pesaro.”
“Yet spare us this one, and you shall be well paid his services.”
But no bribe could tempt her to give way, and no doubt she was well-advised, for she contended that there was work to be done such as was beyond her years and strength, and that if she sent her ostler off, as well might she close her inn — a thing that was impossible.
Here, then, was an obstacle with which I had not reckoned. It was impossible to send the lady off alone, to travel a distance of some ten leagues, and the most of it by night — for if she would make sure of escaping, she must journey now without pause until she came to Pesaro.
And then, in a flash, it occurred to me that here lay the means, ready to my hand, by avail of which I might boldly re-enter Pesaro despite my banishment, and discharge my errand to Lucrezia Borgia. For, surely, considering the mission on which ostensibly I should be returning — as the saviour and protector of his kinswoman — Giovanni Sforza could not enforce that ban against me. Next I bethought me of the other aspect that the business wore. In fooling Ramiro I had thwarted the Borgia ends; in rescuing Madonna Paola I had perhaps set at naught the Cardinal of Valencia’s aims. If so, what then? It would seem that because the lady’s eyes were mild and sweet, and because her beauty had so deeply wrought upon me, I had indeed fooled away my chance of salvation from the life and trade that were grown hateful to me. For back to Rome and Cesare Borgia I should dare go no more. Clearly I had burned my boats, and I had done it almost unthinkingly, acting upon the good impulse to befriend this lady, and never reckoning the cost down to its total. For all that the thing I had done, and what I might yet do, shoul
d offer me the means I needed to enter Pesaro without danger to my neck, I did not see that I was to derive great profit in the end — unless my profit lay in knowing that I had advanced the ruin of Giovanni Sforza by delivering my letter to Lucrezia. That at any rate was enough incentive clearly to define for me the line that I should take through this tangle into which the ever-jesting Fates had thrust me.
I was still at my thoughts, still pondering this most perplexing situation, the hostess standing silent by the door, when suddenly Madonna Paola spoke.
“Sir,” said she, in faltering accents, “I — I have not the right to ask you, and I stand already so deeply in your debt. Not a doubt of it, but it will have inconvenienced you to have journeyed thus far to inform me of the flight of my grooms. Yet if you could—” She paused, timid of proceeding, and her glance fell.
The hostess was all ears, struck by the respectful manner in which this very evidently noble lady addressed a Fool. I opened the door for her.
“You may leave us now,” said I. “I will come to you presently.”
When she was gone I turned once more to the lady, my course resolved upon. My hate had conquered my last doubt. What first imported was that I should get to Pesaro and to Madonna Lucrezia.
“You were about to ask me,” said I, “that I should accompany you to Pesaro.”
“I hesitated, sir,” she murmured. I bowed respectfully.
“There was not the need, Madonna,” I assured her. “I am at your service.”
“But, Messer Boccadoro, I have no claim upon you.”
“Surely,” said I, “the claim that every distressed lady has upon a man of heart. Let us say no more. It were best not to delay in setting out, although I can scarcely think that there is any imminent danger from Ramiro del’ Orca now.”
“Who is he?” she inquired.
“I told her, whereupon—”
“Did they come up with you?” she asked. “What passed between you?”
Succinctly I related what had chanced, and how I had sent Ramiro on a fool’s errand, adding the particulars of the flight of her grooms, and of how I had rid myself of the litter and the second mule. She heard me, her eyes sparkling, and at times she clapped her hands with a glee that was almost childish, vowing that this was splendid, that was brave. I allayed what little fears remained her by pointing out how effectively we had effaced our tracks, and how vainly now Messer del’ Orca might beat the country in quest of a lady in a litter, escorted by four grooms.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 114
