The Assassin of Verona

by The Assassin of Verona (retail) (epub)

  The corporal closed with him and drew alongside.

  ‘Sir Nicholas,’ he began, his moustaches pulled back in concern. ‘You have a plan?’

  ‘Well of course I have a plan, man,’ said Oldcastle indignantly.

  ‘Please, Sir Nicholas, disclose it to me.’

  ‘All in good time, my man, all in good time,’ bluffed Oldcastle. ‘Is secrecy not one of the six precepts of war? First let us to the woods and make camp. Then we will hold counsel.’

  He circled his horse and, more carefully now, set his heels to its side to make it walk on.

  ‘Sir Nicholas,’ called the corporal to his back.

  Oldcastle sighed and pulled the horse round.

  ‘Enough, man. We must be about our business.’

  The corporal shrugged and signalled his men on to follow. Oldcastle in the van felt sweat running from beneath his heavy helm despite the morning’s cold.

  ‘Sir Nicholas?’ Dionisio called.

  He would have to think of some kind of plan soon enough.

  ‘Sir Nicholas?’

  If it could be so devised, let it be a plan that allowed him to ditch this company and make for freedom. Dionisio pulled alongside him on his pony.

  ‘Sir Nicholas?’

  ‘Oh yes, Dionisio,’ said Oldcastle, the quiet voice at last penetrating a mind distracted by the thought of freedom.

  ‘Sir Nicholas,’ the little man said, ‘the woods, Sir Nicholas, lie on the other road.’

  Oldcastle looked down at the man.

  ‘The other road?’

  ‘To the east, Sir Nicholas,’ said Dionisio with an apologetic smile.

  Oldcastle looked down at the round face of his servant. Was the man gulling him? He’d ever been kind in his attentions to Oldcastle and his face was open and honest now. They carried on along the road for a quarter of an hour more. Then Oldcastle halted and turned his horse about and rode to the corporal.

  ‘I think that should suffice,’ he declared.

  The corporal looked at him, confused. Oldcastle nodded sagely.

  ‘Yes, if there be pursuit or spies among the Duke’s servants our riding in this direction will have been enough to confound them. Have the men turn about and take us to the east road and the woods.’

  The corporal looked at Oldcastle for a moment and then wheeled away to order the troop about and they all set off again back in the direction they had come. At the rear rode Oldcastle and Dionisio. Neither looked at the other or said another word until the woods hove into view.

  Our revels now are ended

  The Veneto

  Hemminges woke to find William already looking over him, knees pulled up and circled by his arms, his cloak wrapped about him like the old hermit of Prague. Hemminges pulled himself upright and leaned against a tree trunk while the blood crept back into his extremities from a cold night spent amidst the roots in the hollow of a tree. He looked about; they were alone and beyond the earshot of others.

  ‘Where are Sebastian and Valentine?’

  ‘Gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘Aye, gone. Though I am certain they will return,’ said William to the strained note in Hemminges’ voice. ‘Well, almost certain. The tall bristle-bearded woman to the North, the smooth-cheeked boy to the East. Perhaps each went to find a quiet place to bathe? Not much for bathing are our brothers here, save Orlando, who must scrub and scrub at himself until he is pink as a prawn. Still he cannot wash out the stain upon himself.’

  ‘What stain is that?’

  William ignored the question, looking instead in the direction that Sebastian had gone.

  ‘Your Sebastian has the look of a bather. Pray Jesu she do not scrub away disguise. Or cause it to be asked why pissing in the brook as the other men do is not good enough.’

  ‘William, what happened in Venice after we left?’

  ‘Little enough.’

  ‘William, I am your friend, be open with me. What passed between you and Isabella?’

  William shook his head, muttering, ‘Open with you? Open such a box to make of me another Pandora.’ His eyes not meeting Hemminges’ questing ones, he answered.

  ‘What passed? Little enough and yet a whole world.’ He sighed deeply. ‘Out went the light and, then, out went the light.’

  Hemminges began to rise to go to give his friend comfort, but a look on William’s face as he at last returned his gaze made him pause. He sat back down again. There’d been a rockiness in William’s eyes that shunned consolation: the soft flesh on the fruit of William’s happier days was stripped away to leave behind only the hard and bitter stone.

  ‘I would I could give you a good answer, John, but I’ve no answers to give, no understanding at all. My days now seem to me to lack all shape and sense. I cannot find a place or reason for her death. I cannot see why I should be given such a love and have it taken away within a year.’

  ‘It is a tragedy.’

  ‘I would it were, John,’ said William with venomed voice. ‘Yet it cannot be so for the Philosopher tells us Tragedy must have reason, that the last act must be explained by the events of the first. There is no explanation here. This is not Tragedy but Comedy, or so I take it, for all there is seems to me absurdity. She’s gone and all that was best and brightest of her gone too. All’s cheerless, dark and deadly now.’

  ‘Come, Will, if there is no reason there can you not make one?’

  William’s answer was a gesture, a player’s mummery, a hand that reached and tried to grasp and finding air only, fell limp. Hemminges watched him for a long while. William seemed to feel no urge to conversation and Hemminges, never one to speak where silence would suffice, had no easy words to give him. His own mind was a turmoil. He thought of Aemilia and of his own madness in thinking of one who was so far beyond him. By turns her actions drew his desires on and sent them away again. When she showed herself brave and eager, then he thought her the most beautiful creature in the world. When she showed herself wilful, when she seemed to think only of her own concerns, then he thought her base for all her noble blood. He had no thought for what he wanted of her. Sometimes he thought of asking her to follow him to England. In the same instant he railed against the madness of the idea and thought only of returning her to the safety of her father’s court. His mind was not still when it touched on Aemilia. He’d had a calm once that had been his strength and a strength to others. It was lost to him now.

  ‘I am glad to have found you, Will,’ said Hemminges at length. ‘I need your wits.’

  This comment provoked a burst of laughter from William. ‘I am mortal sorry then, for I have quite lost them. At least I think I have. Of my five wits four at least are gone. They’re not there when I look for them. I wish the fifth were gone too. What is the riddle that you bring me? Perhaps if they’re still living you will lure my wits back with the right bait.’

  ‘I pray it is the thornier tangles that your wits find most to their taste,’ Hemminges sighed, ‘for between our duty to England and to our friend Nick Oldcastle we are caught in such roots and creepers.’

  ‘Duties on duties,’ said William. ‘Like a watchful god, howsoe’er I run still I remain in their grasp.’

  He signalled for Hemminges to go on with a lift of his chin and Hemminges set out the trouble in short swift strokes: how he and Oldcastle came to be disguised, how imposed upon, how they must hurry to England and pass on the deadly burden of these names before they caught a death of them, how he had come to escort Valentine and his page Sebastian in their exile.

  ‘We all must go to England.’

  ‘All?’ asked William.

  ‘Yes all. For if the one of us be taken, all having knowledge of the names, then will the extent of that intelligence be known. So may the Pope make plans.’

  ‘What care I for that?’

  Hemminges looked shocked at William’s reply.

  ‘You? Who have been pursued by the Pope’s man? Whose joy in his last days of love was constraine
d, curtailed, confounded by the Pope’s machinations? You most of all have motive strong to discomfort him.’

  ‘And so another plan springs forth from the death of the first. And so and so. I have lost the understanding of it. Here’s a riddle for you, John: who is it builds things that last longer than a Pope’s plans, a Queen’s wishes or a lover’s desires?’

  Hemminges shrugged his ignorance.

  ‘A gravedigger, for what he builds lasts till Judgement Day.’

  Hemminges’ intended sharp response to William’s playing was cut off by the return of Aemilia and Valentine. Hemminges need not have worried that Aemilia would forget herself and her disguise. He looked in surprise at her head, no cowl or cap covering it: she had hacked at her hair to make of it a man’s length. Indeed, Valentine’s hair was now its better both for length and lustre. Only a softness to her skin threatened to give away her true nature. They nodded to Hemminges and William as they made their way to the cooking pot to scavenge what pottage remained from the meagre amount there was in opening.

  Once passed, Hemminges leaned again towards his friend: If not for spiting the Pope then do it for your friends. Oldcastle cannot keep up his forged appearance and when he is discovered he will be killed, and not quickly either.’

  ‘She might pass, she’s very plain,’ said William, eyes still on Aemilia. Hemminges, despite his frustration that William would not let the problem bite with his wits’ gears, bristled in her defence.

  ‘She may not have the gilded outward show that Isabella had, Will,’ said Hemminges, ‘but the soul inside is as fair. Have a care for others. Yours is not the only suffering in the world.’

  ‘John, you remind me of what I should already know. Love looks not with the eye but with the mind and’ – he broke into song -

  You that choose not by the view,

  choose as fair, choose as true.

  The sudden catch ended, he looked from Hemminges to his Sebastian: ‘Even a leaden casket may hide a jewel within.’

  ‘It is not my choosing but Valentine’s,’ said Hemminges a little too sharply.

  ‘Now it is you, I think, has lost his wits to try and gull me so,’ said William.

  ‘You’re not so out of your wits that you did not see at once through her disguise,’ began Hemminges, his frustration building. William held up a hand to stop Hemminges’ further protestations.

  ‘Nor you so certain that I am in my wits that you would admit as much at first. Besides,’ he went on, you promised me good meat to feed my all too shrivelled wits and yet you give me nothing but leavings that would insult a dog. There is no riddle to unpick if what you say be so. Leave the woman here, she is with her lover where she wants to be, and you and I shall take us to the Duke, tell where they are and then depart to England with Oldcastle in our train.’

  ‘That’s the counsel of betrayal,’ answered Hemminges. ‘She will be discovered and...’ He gestured about him at the knavish company in which a young woman should find herself alone. ‘Is your best thought that we should sell them to the Duke?’

  ‘What’s she to me or, by your pleading, you? Our cause is England and Oldcastle, is it not? She is a small price to pay for Oldcastle. Why by the size of her next to Oldcastle, pound for pound the exchange is nearly all profit.’

  ‘Must we exchange one for the other? Can you not think how we might save both?’

  William shook his head. ‘So much pleading for one you claim to think nothing of. I think you have a care for this Sebastian and doubt the quality of her lover. So be it. My proposal solves that too. Let him be taken with these rest and her restored to her father.’

  Hemminges shifted in his seat with annoyance. Where was the William of careful planning and cunning thought? He wished he had the power to make his own plans, but he was a blunt instrument and ever had been. His wisdom had always lain in chaining himself to others who might do the greater thinking for him. Now his joy and relief at finding William were curdled by discovery that the old William, whose stratagems had in the past woven selfish desire together with thought for others into a tapestry, had died with Isabella and left only a self-regarding husk behind. He needed William, not singing songs and cursing God, but here and now, his tricksy wits at their most cunning. He had no thought of his own for how to resolve the strands that bound him.

  ‘I can’t go and leave the girl here,’ he said.

  ‘There’s an argument I have heard before.’

  ‘You made it to your own persuasion then, work that same rhetoric now.’

  ‘No.’ William’s answer was a curt shot of sound. ‘No. It persuaded you not then, just as it finds no purchase on me now. Your simple syllogism now lacks a premise, Hemminges. What carried me then was love and that is now dead.’

  Where shall we take a purse tomorrow, Jack?

  Valentine was reciting a verse as he and Aemilia walked back to the outlaws’ camp: a paean to his love that listed out her features and made comparison of them to the stars, the moon, the sky above and cited the hope of seeing them as all that kept him living in the dark woods of the world. William, seeing this, patted Hemminges on the leg.

  ‘Here comes young love now.’

  He sprang from his seat on the ground and strode towards them. ‘Oh ho,’ he said as he approached.

  Valentine’s voice trailed away as mad Adam bore down upon him.

  ‘Nay,’ William said, waving him on with a smile on his face. ‘Go on. It is a fair piece and reminds me of another.’

  Aemilia laughed. ‘A poem of your own, sir?’

  Valentine cursed and wondered that she encouraged his madness. William’s attention was now wholly on Aemilia.

  ‘Not my own. No, no, a ballad that my father taught me, or was it my grand-dam? No matter. It is about a young man whose lover is lost to him by a curse, transformed into a willow tree. The young man now walks the woods, full of woeful sighs and ballads of his own.’

  And with this introduction William began to declaim. Each line began as that of Valentine’s but ended in comparison of parts most unseemly, concluding with comparison of his mistress’s eyebrow to the beauteous eye of a calf. Aemilia’s laughter at it scraped at Valentine’s pride and he was glad when commotion from across the camp drew them away.

  ‘You’re up, my boys? You’ve ginger in you?’ cried Orlando.

  Some of the outlaws scowled for answer but all gathered closer to discover what had put their leader in such good humour on such a grey day.

  ‘We all know that luck has not been with us these last few days,’ he said. He ignored Zago’s cluck of disgruntlement at this statement and spoke on. ‘Well luck is like a tide, it ebbs and flows. It’s a foolish sailor that thinks the tide will not turn. Ours has. While you were at your beds I was up and about and so were others. Not an hour from here there strides along the road four fat pilgrims, satchels fat with offerings.’

  This was news and the faces of the starved and wretched outlaws shone with anticipation, all save that of Petro. The priest was a younger brother’s second son and, as such, fortunate to have been given a vocation in the Church and not abandoned to such fortune as the world might gift him. It was not, however, a role to which he was by temperament suited; he was at root too choleric in temper and too temptable. His oaths daily grated on him and were, as he was wont to say when in drunken remembrance of those days, more visible in the breach than in the observance’. Yet he had in him the fear of God and would have been in office still were it not that one morning, when his brother friars had sought to rouse him from a drunken stupor to join in Matins, he had growled and raged and at last struck the abbot of the monastery. He’d fled the promised penance and made his way to the woods, falling in with the outlaws and at last finding in their fellowship a spiritual role that had been lacking in more pampered circumstances.

  I’ll none of it, ‘tis not godly to rob pilgrims,’ the former priest declared.

  ‘As you wish,’ said Orlando. At this rate you’ll be facing St
Peter sooner than the rest of us. Those that do not share in the adventure cannot share in its rewards.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Petro, whose stomach had always held greatest sway over his conscience. ‘I see it is the parable of the talents. Though we should have a care to let them pass on unharmed.’

  ‘Brother Petro,’ declared Orlando, ‘they shall leave us the better for our meeting. For did not the Lord tell us that those that feed and clothe the hungry and the naked shall be rewarded in heaven?’

  Petro nodded. ‘That is so, Brother Orlando, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25 it is so written.’ He had not expected to be catechised in this manner but added it to the growing list of things he had not expected in his life and yet had come his way.

  ‘I think he also said,’ whispered William behind Hemminges, ‘“Put up your sword for those that live by the sword shall die by it.” How rarely that verse finds expression in these days.’

  Hemminges did not look round.

  ‘We three shall stay and guard the camp,’ said Hemminges.

  ‘Oh ho, you shall not,’ said Zago, laughing and shaking his head.

  ‘All in, all one,’ said Orlando. ‘It was not us that sought your company but you ours.’

  ‘These lads are not yet ready for a fight,’ protested Hemminges, pointing at Aemilia and Valentine. Valentine set to vigorous nodding but Aemilia bristled and set her shoulders and would have spoken in her own defence but Orlando spoke first.

  ‘They lack experience,’ he said. ‘And shall gain it now. Four fat pigeons and so many foxes? No danger, no danger at all. Come Ludovico, do not dawdle at the rear with these new men but lead and show your worth. Come, men, to arms, to arms.’

  If he by chance escape your venomed stuck

  Verona

  ‘I will have admittance,’ Thornhill demanded.

  ‘You shall not,’ answered Rodrigo. ‘By His Grace’s command he will give you no audience. He bids you be grateful that he leaves you and your men with lodging. Your actions to date merit a harsher measure. Ask for nothing more.’