Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini

by Rafael Sabatini

  “Be welcome, Charles,” he hailed Durazzo. “I am not the man to forget those who have stood my friends whilst my power was undecided.”

  “For your own sake,” said the smooth Charles, as he stepped back from that brotherly embrace, “I trust you’ll not forget those who have been your enemies, and who, being desperate now, may take desperate means to avert your coronation.”

  The pale eyes of the Hungarian glittered.

  “Of whom do you speak?”

  Charles smoothed his black beard thoughtfully, his dark eyes narrowed and pensive. There must be a victim, to strike fear into Giovanna’s friends and stir them to Charles’s purposes.

  “Why, first and foremost, I should place Giovanna’s counsellor Isernia, that man of law whose evil counsels have hurt your rights as king. Next come—”

  But here Charles craftily paused and looked away, a man at fault.

  “Next?” cried Andreas. “Who next? Speak out!” The Duke shrugged.

  “By the Passion, there is no lack of others. You have enemies to spare among the Queen’s friends.”

  Andreas paled under his faint tan. He flung back his crimson robe as if he felt the heat, and stood forth, lithe as a wrestler, in his close-fitting cote-hardie and hose of violet silk.

  “No need, indeed, to name them,” he said fiercely.

  “None,” Charles agreed. “But the most dangerous is Isernia. Whilst he lives you walk amid swords. His death may spread a panic that will paralyze the others.”

  He would say no more, knowing that he had said enough to send Andreas, scowling and sinister, to sow terror in hearts that guilt must render uneasy now, amongst which hearts be sure that he counted Giovanna’s own.

  Andreas took counsel with Friar Robert. Touching Isernia, there was evidence and to spare that he was dangerous, and so Isernia fell on the morrow to an assassin’s sword as he was in the very act of leaving the Castel Nuovo, and it was Charles himself who bore word of it to the Court, and so plunged it into consternation.

  They walked in the cool of evening in the pleasant garden of the Castel Nuovo, when Charles came upon them and touched the stalwart shoulder of Bertrand d’Artois. Bertrand the favourite eyed him askance, mistrusting and disliking him for his association with Andreas.

  “The Hungarian boar,” said Charles, “is sharpening his tusks now that his authority is assured by the Holy Father.”

  “Who cares?” sneered Bertrand.

  “Should you care if I added that already he has blooded them?”

  Bertrand changed countenance. The Duke explained himself.

  “He has made a beginning upon Giacomo d’ Isernia. Ten minutes ago he was stabbed to death within a stone’s throw of the castle.” So Charles unburdened himself of his news. “A beginning, no more.”

  “My God!” said Bertrand. “D’ Isernia! Heaven rest him.” And devoutly he crossed himself.

  “Heaven will rest some more of you if you suffer Andreas of Hungary to be its instrument,” said Charles, his lips grimly twisted.

  “Do you threaten?”

  “Nay, man; be not so hot and foolish. I warn. I know his mood. I know what he intends.”

  “You ever had his confidence,” said Bertrand, sneering.

  “Until this hour I had. But there’s an end to that. I am a Prince of Naples, and I’ll not bend the knee to a barbarian. He was well enough to hunt with and drink with, so long as he was Duke of Calabria with no prospect of being more. But that he should become my King, and that our lady Giovanna should be no more than a queen consort—” He made a gesture of ineffable disgust.

  Bertrand’s eyes kindled. He gripped the other’s arm, and drew him along under a trellis of vines that formed a green cloister about the walls.

  “Why, here is great news for our Queen,” he cried. “It will rejoice her, my lord, to know you are loyal to her.”

  “That is no matter,” he replied. “What matters is that you should be warned — you, yourself in particular, and Evoli. No doubt there will be others, too. But the Hungarian’s confidences went no further.”

  Bertrand had come to a standstill. He stared at Charles, and slowly the colour left his face.

  “Me?” he said, a finger on his heart.

  “Aye, you. You will be the next. But not until the crown is firmly on his brow. Then he will settle his score with the nobles of Naples who have withstood him. Listen,” and Charles’s voice sank as if under the awful burden of his news; “a black banner of vengeance is to precede him to his coronation. And your name stands at the head of the list of the proscribed. Does it surprise you? After all, he is a husband, and he has some knowledge of what lies between the Queen and you—”

  “Stop!”

  “Pish!” Charles shrugged. “What need for silence upon what all Naples knows? When have you and the Queen ever used discretion? In your place I should not need a warning. I should know what to expect from a husband become king.”

  “The Queen must be told.”

  “Indeed, I think so, too. It will come best from you. Go tell her, so that measures may be taken. But go secretly and warily. You are safe until he wears the crown. And above all — whatever you may decide — do nothing here in Naples.”

  And on that he turned to depart, whilst Bertrand sped to Giovanna. On the threshold of the garden Charles paused and looked back. His eyes sought and found the Queen, a tall, lissome girl of seventeen, in a close-fitting, revealing gown of purple silk, the high, white gorget outlining an oval face of a surpassing loveliness, crowned by a wealth of copper-coloured hair. She was standing in a stricken attitude, looking up into the face of her lover, who was delivering himself of his news.

  Charles departed satisfied.

  Three days later a man of the Queen’s household, one Melazzo, who was in Duke Charles’s pay, brought him word that the seed he had cast had fallen upon fertile soil. A conspiracy to destroy the King had been laid by Bertrand d’Artois, Robert of Cabane, Count of Evoli, and the latter’s brothers-in-law, Terlizzi and Morcone. Melazzo himself, for his notorious affection for the Queen, had been included in this band, and also a man named Pace, who was body servant to Andreas, and who, like Melazzo, was in Charles’s pay.

  Charles of Durazzo smiled gently to himself. The game went excellently well.

  “The Court,” he said, “goes to Aversa for a month before the coronation. That would be a favourable season to their plan. Advise it so.”

  The date appointed for the coronation was September 20th. A month before — on August 20th — the Court removed itself from the heat and reek of Naples to the cooler air of Aversa, there to spend the time of waiting. They were housed in the monastery of Saint Peter, which had been converted as far as possible into a royal residence for the occasion.

  On the night of their arrival there the refectory of the monastery was transfigured to accommodate the numerous noble and very jovial company assembled there to sup. The long, stone-flagged room, lofty and with windows set very high, normally so bare and austere, was hung now with tapestries, and the floor strewn with rushes that were mingled with lemon verbena and other aromatic herbs. Along the lateral walls and across the end of the room that faced the double doors were set the stone tables of the Spartan monks, on a shallow dais that raised them above the level of the floor. These tables were gay now with the gleam of crystal and the glitter of gold and silver plate. Along one side of them, their backs to the walls, sat the ladies and nobles of the Court. The vaulted ceiling was rudely frescoed to represent the open heavens — the work of a brother whose brush was more devout than cunning — and there was the inevitable cenacolo above the Abbot’s table at the upper end of the room.

  At this table sat the royal party, the broad-shouldered Andreas of Hungary, slightly asprawl, his golden mane somewhat tumbled now, for he was drinking deeply in accordance with his barbarian habit; ever and anon he would fling down a bone or a piece of meat to the liver-coloured hounds that crouched expectant on the rushes of the floo
r.

  They had hunted that day in the neighbourhood of Capua, and Andreas had acquitted himself well, and was in high good-humour, giving now little thought to the sinister things that Charles of Durazzo had lately whispered, laughing and jesting with the traitor Morcone at his side. Behind him in close attendance stood his servant Pace, once a creature of Durazzo’s. The Queen sat on his right, making but poor pretence to eat; her lovely young face was of a ghostly pallor, her dark eyes were wide and staring. Among the guests were the black-browed Evoli and his brother-in-law, Terlizzi; Bertrand of Artois and his father; Melazzo, that other creature of Charles’s, and Filippa the Catanese, handsome and arrogant, but oddly silent to-night.

  But Charles of Durazzo was not of the company. It is not for the player, himself, to become a piece upon the board.

  He had caught a whisper that the thing he had so slyly prompted to Bertrand d’Artois was to be done here at Aversa, and so Charles had remained at Naples. He had discovered very opportunely that his wife was ailing, and he developed such concern for her that he could not bring himself to leave her side. He had excused himself to Andreas with a thousand regrets, since what he most desired was to enjoy with him the cool, clean air of Aversa and the pleasures of the chase; and he had presented the young King at parting with the best of all his falcons in earnest of affection and disappointment.

  The night wore on, and at last, at a sign from the Queen, the ladies rose and departed to their beds. The men settled down again. The cellarers redoubled their activities, the flagons circulated more briskly, and the noise they made must have disturbed the monks entrenched in their cells against these earthly vanities. The laughter of Andreas grew louder and more vacuous, and when at last he heaved himself up at midnight and departed to bed, that he might take some rest against the morrow’s hunt, he staggered a little in his walk.

  But there were other hunters there whose impatience could not keep until the morrow, whose game was to be run to death that very night. They waited — Bertrand d’Artois, Robert of Cabane, the Counts of Terlizzi and Morcone, Melazzo and Andreas’s body servant Pace — until all those who lay at Aversa were deep in slumber. Then at two o’clock in the morning they made their stealthy way to the loggia on the third floor, a long colonnaded gallery above the Abbot’s garden. They paused a moment before the Queen’s door which opened upon this gallery, then crept on to that of the King’s room at the other end. It was Pace who rapped sharply on the panels thrice before he was answered by a sleepy growl from the other side.

  “It is I — Pace — my lord,” he announced. “A courier has arrived from Naples, from Friar Robert, with instant messages.”

  From within there was a noisy yawn, a rustle, the sound of an overturning stool, and, lastly, the rasp of a bolt being withdrawn. The door opened, and in the faint light of the dawning day Andreas appeared, drawing a furlined robe about his body, which was naked of all but a shirt.

  He saw no one but Pace. The others had drawn aside into the shadows. Unsuspecting, he stepped forth.

  “Where is this messenger?”

  The door through which he had come slammed suddenly behind him, and he turned to see Melazzo in the act of bolting it with a dagger to prevent any one from following that way — for the room had another door opening upon the inner corridor.

  Instead, Melazzo might have employed his dagger to stab Andreas behind, and so have made an instant end. But it happened to be known that Andreas wore an amulet — a ring that his mother had given him — which rendered him invulnerable to steel or poison. And such was the credulity of his age, such the blind faith of those men in the miraculous power of that charm, that none of them so much as attempted to test it with a dagger. It was for the same reason that no recourse was had to the still easier method of disposing of him by poison. Accepting the amulet at its legendary value, the conspirators had resolved that he must be strangled.

  As he turned now they leapt upon him, and, taking him unawares, bore him to the ground before he could realize what was happening. Here they grappled with him, and he with them. He was endowed with the strength of a young bull, and he made full use of it. He rose, beating them off, to be borne down again, bellowing the while for help. He smote out blindly, and stretched Morcone half senseless with a blow of his great fist.

  Seeing how difficult he proved to strangle, they must have cursed that amulet of his. He struggled to his knees again, then to his feet, and, at last, with bleeding face, leaving tufts of his fair hair in their murderous hands, he broke through and went bounding down the loggia, screaming as he ran, until he came to his wife’s door. Against that he hurled himself, calling her.

  “Giovanna! Giovanna! For the love of God crucified! Open! Open! I am being murdered!”

  From within came no answer — utter silence.

  “Giovanna! Giovanna!” He beat frenziedly upon the door.

  Still no answer, which yet was answer enough.

  The stranglers, momentarily discomfited, scared, too, lest his cries should rouse the convent, had stood hesitating after he broke from them. But now Bertrand d’Artois, realizing that too much had been done already to admit of the business being left unfinished, sprang upon him suddenly again. Locked in each other’s arms, those wrestlers swayed and panted in the loggia for a moment, then with a crash went down, Bertrand on top, Andreas striking his head against the stone floor as he fell. The Queen’s lover pinned him there, kneeling upon his breast.

  “The rope!” he panted to the others who came up.

  One of them threw him a coil of purple silk interwrought with gold thread, in which a running noose had been tied. Bertrand slipped it over Andreas’s head, drew it taut, and held it so, despite the man’s desperate, convulsive struggles. The others came to his assistance. Amongst them they lifted the writhing victim to the parapet of the loggia, and flung him over; whilst Bertrand, Cabane, and Pace bore upon the rope, arresting his fall, and keeping him suspended there until he should be dead. Melazzo and Morcone came to assist them, and it was then that Cabane observed that Terlizzi held aloof, as if filled with horror.

  Peremptorily he called to him:

  “Hither, and lend a hand! The rope is long enough to afford you a grip. We want accomplices, not witnesses, Lord Count.”

  Terlizzi obeyed, and then the ensuing silence was broken suddenly by screams from the floor below the screams of a woman who slept in the room immediately underneath, who had awakened to behold in the grey light of the breaking day the figure of a man kicking and writhing at a rope’s end before her window.

  Yet a moment the startled stranglers kept their grip of the rope until the struggles at the end of it had ceased; then they loosed their hold and let the body go plunging down into the Abbot’s garden. Thereafter they scattered and fled, for people were stirring now in the convent, aroused by the screams of the woman.

  Thrice, so the story runs, came the monks to the Queen’s door to knock and demand her orders for the disposal of the body of her husband without receiving any answer to their question. It remained still unanswered when later in the day she departed from Aversa in a closed litter, and returned to Naples escorted by a company of lances, and for lack of instructions the monks left the body in the Abbot’s garden, where it had fallen, until Charles of Durazzo came to remove it two days later.

  Ostentatiously he bore to Naples the murdered Prince — whose death he had so subtly inspired — and in the cathedral before the Hungarians, whom he had assembled, and in the presence of a vast concourse of the people, he solemnly swore over the body vengeance upon the murderers.

  Having made a cat’s-paw of Giovanna — through the person of her lover, Bertrand d’Artois, and his confederate assassins — and thus cleared away one of those who stood between himself and the throne, he now sought to make a cat’s-paw of justice to clear away the other. Meanwhile, days grew into weeks and weeks into months, and no attempt was made by the Queen to hunt out the murderers of her husband, no inquiry instituted. Bertran
d d’Artois, it is true, had fled with his father to their stronghold of Saint Agatha for safety. But the others — Cabane, Terlizzi, and Morcone — continued unabashed about Giovanna’s person at the Castel Nuovo.

  Charles wrote to Ludwig of Hungary, and to the Pope, demanding that justice should be done, and pointing out the neglect of all attempt to perform it in the kingdom itself, and inviting them to construe for themselves that neglect. As a consequence, Clement VI issued, on June 2d of the following year, a Bull, whereby Bertrand des Baux, the Grand Justiciary of Naples, was commanded to hunt down and punish the assassins, against whom — at the same time — the Pope launched a second Bull, of excommunication. But the Holy Father accompanied his commands to Des Baux by a private note, wherein he straitly enjoined the Grand Justiciary for reasons of State to permit nothing to transpire that might reflect upon the Queen.

  Des Baux set about his task at once, and inspired, no doubt, by Charles, proceeded to the arrest of Melazzo and the servant Pace. It was not for Charles to accuse the Queen or even any of her nobles, whereby he might have aroused against himself the opposition of those who were her loyal partisans. Sufficient for him to point out the two meanest of the conspirators, and depend upon the torture to wring from them confessions that must gradually pull down the rest, and in the end Giovanna herself.

  Terlizzi, alive to his danger when he heard of the arrest of those two, made a bold and desperate attempt to avert it. Riding forth with a band of followers, he attacked the escort that was bearing Pace to prison. The prisoner was seized, but not to be rescued. All that Terlizzi wanted was his silence. By his orders the wretched man’s tongue was torn out, whereupon he was abandoned once more to his guards and his fate.

  Had Terlizzi been able to carry out his intentions of performing the like operation upon Melazzo, Charles might have been placed in a difficult position. So much, however, did not happen, and the horrible deed upon Pace was in vain. Put to the question, Melazzo denounced Terlizzi, and together with him Cabane, Morcone, and the others. Further, his confession incriminated Filippa, the Catanese, and her two daughters, the wives of Terlizzi and Morcone. Of the Queen, however, he said nothing, because, one of the lesser conspirators, little more than a servant like Pace, he can have had no knowledge of the Queen’s complicity.