‘What is to be done to take this fellow?’ he asked.
It was his way to seek advice of all men, yet never following any but such as jumped with his own wishes. And where no man’s advice consorted with his own notions, he acted upon his own notions none the less.
The gaunt-faced monk looked up, almost startled by the suddenness of the question. Knowing the Duke’s way, and knowing that Corella had been sent for, Fra Serafino put two and two together, and presented the Duke with what he conceived to be the total sum.
‘Send ten lances to fetch him from Pievano,’ he replied.
‘Ten lances — fifty men...Hum! And if Pievano were to throw up its bridges, and resist?’
‘Send another twenty lances and a gun,’ said Fra Serafino.
The Duke considered him, smiling faintly.
‘You prove to me that you know nothing of Pievano, and still less of men, Fra Serafino. I wonder do you know anything of women?’
‘God forbid!’ ejaculated the monk, utterly scandalized.
‘Then are you worthless as a counsellor in this,’ was the Duke’s conclusion. ‘I had hoped you could have imagined yourself a woman for a moment.’
‘Imagine myself a woman?’ quoth Fra Serafino, his deep-set eyes staring.
‘That you might tell me what manner of man would be likeliest to delude you. You see, Pievano is a rabbit warren. You might conceal an army there, how much more easily a single man. And I do not intend to alarm the Count Almerico into sending to earth a guest whom we are not absolutely sure that he is harbouring. You see the difficulty, I trust? To resolve it I shall need a man of little heart and less conscience; a scoundrel who is swayed by nothing but his own ambition, who cares for nothing but his own advancement; and it is an inevitable condition that he should be of an exterior that is pleasing to a woman and likely to command her confidence. Now where shall I find me such a paragon?’
But Fra Serafino had no answer. He was lost in an amazed consideration of the crooked underground ways by which Cesare burrowed to his ends. And then Corella clanked in, booted, bearded, stalwart and stiff, the very type of the condottiero.
The Duke turned, and considered him in silence at long length. In the end he shook his head.
‘No,’ he said, ‘you are not the man. You are too much the soldier, too little the courtier, too much the swordsman, too little the lute-player, and I think that you are almost ugly. If you were a woman, Fra Serafino, should you not consider him an ugly fellow?’
‘I am not a woman, Magnificent...’
‘That is all too evident,’ the Duke deplored.
‘And I do not know what I should think if I were a woman. Probably I should not think at all, for I do not believe that women think.’
‘Misogynist,’ said the Duke.
‘God be thanked,’ said Fra Serafino devoutly.
The Duke returned to the consideration of his captain.
‘No,’ he said again. ‘The essence of success is to choose the right tools for the work in hand; and you are not the tool for this, Michele. I want a handsome, greedy, unscrupulous scoundrel, who can both ply a sword and lisp a sonnet. Where shall I find one answering that description. Ferrante da Isola would have been the very man, but poor Ferrante died of one of his own jests.’
‘What is the task, Magnificent?’ ventured Corella.
‘I’ll tell that to the man I send to do it, when I have found him. Is Ramirez here?’ he asked suddenly.
‘He is at Urbino, my lord,’ Corella answered. ‘But there is Pantaleone degli Uberti, who seems in some way such a man as you describe.’
The Duke considered. ‘Send him hither,’ he said shortly and Corella bowed stiffly, and departed on that errand.
Cesare paced slowly back to the fire, and stood warming himself until Pantaleone came — a tall, handsome fellow this, with sleek black hair and bold black eyes, martial at once in bearing and apparel yet with a certain foppishness not unbecoming to his youth.
The interview was short. ‘From information that I have received,’ said Cesare, ‘I will wager a thousand ducats to a horseshoe that Matteo Orsini is with his uncle at Pievano. I offer that thousand ducats for his head. Go and earn it.’
Pantaleone was taken aback. He blinked his bold black eyes. ‘What men shall I take?’ he stammered.
‘What men you please. But understand the thing is not to be done by force. At the first show of it, Matteo, if he is there, will go to earth like a mole, and not all your questing shall discover him. This is an affair for wits, not lances. There is a woman at Pievano who loves Matteo, or whom Matteo loves...But you will see for yourself what opportunities there are, and you will use them. Corella thinks you have the wit to accomplish such a task. Afford me proof of it, and I will make your fortune.’ He waved his hand in dismissal, and Pantaleone stifled a hundred questions that were bubbling in his mind, and departed.
Fra Serafino stroked his lean nose thoughtfully with his quill. ‘I would not trust that fellow with a woman, nor a woman with that fellow,’ he delivered himself. ‘He is too full in the lips.’
‘That,’ said Cesare, ‘is why I chose him.’
‘In a woman’s hands he will be so much wax,’ the monk continued.
‘I am stiffening him with a thousand ducats,’ said the Duke.
But the friar’s pessimism was nothing lessened. ‘A woman’s arts can melt gold until it runs,’ said he.
The Duke looked at him a moment. ‘You know too much about women, Fra Serafino,’ he said, and under that rebuke the monkish secretary shuddered and fell silent.
II
Pantaleone degli Uberti arrived at Pievano on the wings of a snowstorm that swept across the Perugian foothills, and he arrived alone. Within a couple of leagues of the little town he had parted company with the ten knaves he had brought with him from Assisi. He gave them orders to break up into groups of twos and threes and thus follow him to Pievano, each group seeking different quarters and pretending no acquaintance with the others. He concerted signals by which at need he could rally them to himself, and arranged that of the group of three who were to take up their quarters at the Osteria del Toro one at least should remain constantly at the inn where at any moment Pantaleone could find him.
Messer Pantaleone, you see, was a man of method.
He bade them, further, dissemble their true estate, and, himself adopting this course which he imposed upon his followers, he staggered some hours later over the drawbridge into the courtyard of the citadel on foot, a bedraggled, footsore man who seemed to be upon the point of utter exhaustion. Admitted by a groom, he reeled into the presence of the lord Almerico Orsini and gasped out as if with his last breath an urgent prayer for sanctuary.
‘I am a hunted man, my lord,’ he lied. ‘That bloody despot Valentino clamours for this poor life of mine to swell his hecatomb.’
The old lord of Pievano’s white hands clawed the carved ebony arms of his great chair. From under shaggy brows his piercing dark eyes were bent upon this visitor. He knew well what was the hecatomb to which Messer Pantaleone referred; no need for him to ask; absorbed though he might be in his studies and removed in mind, as in body, from all worldly turbulence, yet, being an Orsini, it was not in human nature that he should remain ignorant of and indifferent to the shedding of Orsini blood. And since here was a man who, as it seemed, was come straight from the scene of strife, he was to be welcomed as one bringing news on matters closely touching the lord of Pievano.
Yet it was as characteristic of old Almerico Orsini as it was anomalous in his day — when life was cheap and the misfortunes of others troubled men but little — that his first thought should be for this stranger’s condition. Seeing him so piteously bedraggled, so white and haggard, swaying like a drunkard where he stood and breathing with obvious difficulty — in short, a man who had reached the uttermost limits of endurance — the lord Almerico made a swift sign to the groom who had admitted him. The lackey thrust forward a rush-seated chair, an
d into this Messer Pantaleone sank limply yet gratefully, dropping his sodden cap upon the marbled floor and loosening his great red cloak so that his soldier’s leather harness was revealed.
He looked at the lord Almerico with a faint smile that seemed to express his thanks, and then his bold eyes, seeming very weary now under their heavy drooping lids, passed on to the lady who stood beside her father’s chair. She was a girl, no more, of a willowy, virginal slenderness, very simply clad in a wine-coloured gown cut square across her white young breast, and caught about her slender waist by a silver girdle with a beryl clasp. Her blue-black hair was held in a clump behind by a net of golden cord; her eyes, of a blue so deep that they seemed almost black, considered him piteously from out of her pale face.
Thus Messer Pantaleone first beheld her, and since his taste in women was of the rude sort that craves for swelling amplitudes of form, his questing glance passed on without reluctance to rake the shadows of that noble chamber, looking for another who was not present.
‘Why are you come to me?’ Almerico asked him with inscrutable simplicity.
‘Why?’ Messer Pantaleone blinked as though the oddness of the question afforded him surprise. ‘Because you are an Orsini, and because my cause is the cause of the Orsini.’ He proceeded to explain himself. ‘Paolo Orsini was my friend.’
‘Was?’ The question came sharply from Madonna Fulvia.
Pantaleone fetched a deep sigh, and sank together like a man in the uttermost depths of dejection. ‘I see you have not heard. Yet I should have thought that by now such evil news had travelled o’er the face of all Italy. Paolo was strangled yesterday at Assisi, and with him was strangled too the Duke of Gravina.’
The old man uttered a sharp cry. He half-rose from his seat, supporting himself upon trembling arms; then, bereft of strength, he sank back again.
‘God’s curse upon me who am the bearer of ill-tidings,’ growled the crafty Pantaleone savagely.
But the old man, recovering from his momentary collapse under the shock of that news, reproved him for his words, whilst Madonna Fulvia stood immobile and rigid in a grief that was after all impersonal, for, although they were her kinsmen, she had known neither of those whose death this fugitive announced.
‘That is not yet all,’ Pantaleone pursued, as if defending himself against the Lord Almerico’s reproof. ‘From Rome comes news that the Cardinal is in a dungeon of Sant’ Angelo, that Giangiordano is taken, together with Santacroce and I know not whom besides. We know what mercy the Borgia will display. The Pope and his bastard will never rest as long as in the House of Orsini one stone remains upon another.’
‘Then will he never rest indeed,’ said Madonna Fulvia proudly.
‘I pray so, Madonna, devoutly do I pray it — I who was Paolo Orsini’s friend and who to my undying shame have served the Borgia tyrant with him. For that — because Valentino knows that if I served him it was but because I served Orsini and that I am to be reckoned as of the Orsini’s family — I am now proscribed and hunted, and if I am taken I shall perish as Paolo and Gravina perished and as men say that Matteo Orsini perished too.’
In nothing perhaps does the craft of the man appear so starkly as in this probing statement. As he spoke these words he watched father and daughter closely, seeming but to consider them with eyes of concern and pity. He saw the sudden movement of astonishment that neither could repress. Then came the girl’s question, laden with a sudden and betraying eagerness.
‘Do men say that?’ she cried, her eyes kindling and her bosom quickening in her faint excitement.
‘It is the common talk,’ said that swindler sorrowfully. ‘I pray God and the saints it be untrue.’
‘Indeed...’ Almerico began gravely, as if to reassure him, and then caution supervening, he abruptly checked. Unworldly and guileless though he might be, yet some knowledge of his fellow-man had come to him with his years, and this fugitive inspired him with little trust, awakening in him an unusual caution. Obeying it, he altered the tone and current of his phrase. ‘I thank you, sir, for that prayer.’
But Pantaleone accounted himself answered; concluded that Cesare Borgia’s suspicions were correct, and that Matteo Orsini was in hiding here at Pievano or hereabouts. He reasoned syllogistically. The woman who loved Matteo Orsini would not have received the news of his death with such equanimity had she not been positively assured that he was living. Such assurance in such times nothing short of the man’s presence at Peivano could afford. The very eagerness with which she had received the rumour Pantaleone had invented of Matteo Orsini’s death showed how welcome would be a tale that might diminish the hunt for that proscribed fugitive.
Wearing outwardly his mask of dejection, Messer Pantaleone’s treacherous heart rejoiced in this assurance that he was hot upon the trail, and that soon Matteo Orsini and a thousand ducats would be his.
But now he had to submit to questionings from his host. Almerico’s mistrust demanded to know more of him.
‘You are from Assisi?’ he inquired.
‘From the lord Duke of Valentinois’ camp there,’ answered the emissary.
‘And you fled incontinently when they strangled Paolo and Gravina?’
‘Not so.’ Messer Pantaleone saw the trap. In a game of wits he was a match for any ten such recluse students as the lord of Pievano. ‘That, as I have said, was yesterday — before Cesare Borgia had proof of my devotion to the Orsini. But for that same devotion and the need to act upon it, I might have remained a captain in the tyrant’s service. But it happened that I knew of Valentino’s designs upon Petrucci at Siena. I attempted to send a letter of warning to Petrucci. That letter was intercepted, and I had but time to get to horse before the hangman’s grooms should come to fetch me. I rode that beast to death a league from here. My notion was to get to Siena and Petrucci; but, being unhorsed and in hourly danger of capture, I bethought me that I would turn aside and seek sanctuary here. Yet, my lord,’ he ended, rising with elaborate show of physical pain and difficulty, ‘if so be you think that by my presence I shall draw down upon you Valentino’s vengeful justice, then...’ He gathered his cloak about him, like a man about to take his leave.
‘A moment, sir — a moment,’ said Almerico, hesitating; and he put forth a hand to stay the soldier.
‘What matters Valentino?’ cried the girl, and quick anger blazed in her eyes, transmuting them into fiery sapphires. ‘Who fears him? We were base indeed did we let you suffer for your generous impulse, sir, to turn you hence who have been our kinsman’s friend. While there is a roof on Pievano you may sleep tranquilly under it.’
Don Almerico shifted in his chair and grunted as she brought that impulsive speech to its conclusion. His daughter went too fast, he thought. Whilst himself he should have been reluctant to have driven out this man who came in quest of sanctuary, yet Madonna Fulvia outstripped him altogether in the matter of hospitality.
He spread a white transparent hand to the blazing logs, and with the other stroked his shaven chin cogitating. Then, looking squarely at the stranger:
‘What is your name, sir?’ he asked him bluntly.
‘I am called Pantaleone degli Uberti,’ said the adventurer, who had enough worldly wisdom never to make use of lies where truth could be employed with safety.
‘An honourable name,’ the old man murmured, nodding as to himself. ‘Well, well! I will leave it, sir, to your discretion not to tarry at Pievano longer than need be. I think not of myself.’ He shrugged and smiled deprecatingly, a smile of singular charm that illumined as with a light of lingering youth within the venerable old face. ‘I am too old to weigh the paltry sum of life remaining me against a service due to an honourable man. But there is this child to consider, and the risk of your discovery here...’
But at that she interrupted him, breaking in with the impulsiveness of her generous youth and womanly compassion.
‘Who runs great risks may disregard such lesser ones,’ she cried, whereat Ser Pantaleone became all
ears.
‘By the Host! not so,’ her father answered. ‘We dare add nothing at present to draw attention upon ourselves. You see...’
He checked under the suddenly tightened curb of reawakening caution, and his eyes flashed keenly upon his visitor.
But Pantaleone’s face was dull and wooden, a mask betraying nothing of his inward satisfaction. For his quick wits had without difficulty completed the lord of Pievano’s broken sentence, and found it confirming the assurance he had already formed of Matteo Orsini’s presence there.
Seeing himself scanned with mistrust, he chose that moment to stagger where he stood. He reeled sideways, one hand to his brow, the other groping feebly for support. Thus he crashed against a bronze table that stood near him, sent it slithering a yard or so along the marble tiles, and, missing its resistance, he fell heavily beside it and lay at full stretch upon the floor.
‘I am spent,’ he groaned.
They sprang to him at once — all three: Almerico, his daughter and the groom, who had remained in the background awaiting his dismissal. And whilst her father went down on his old joints to lend immediate aid, Madonna Fulvia issued orders briskly to the gaping lackey.
‘Fetch Mario, quickly,’ she commanded. ‘Bid them bring wine and vinegar and napkins. Run!’
Pantaleone raised his lolling head and supported it against Almerico’s knee. He opened dull eyes, and babbled incoherent excuses for thus discomposing them. This manifestation of concern for them at such a moment touched them profoundly when coupled with his condition: it melted the old Orsini’s lingering mistrust as snow upon the hills is melted by the April suns. The man’s extremity was dire and obvious — and what could have produced it but the tribulations of which he told?
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 442
