The Assassin of Verona

by The Assassin of Verona (retail) (epub)

  ‘Oh,’ was all the Duke said as he fell to the floor.

  Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature

  Thornhill looked across at the Count Claudio. The Count had his blade out already and he took a step back. His men backed toward him as those of Thornhill did to the priest. The dead Duke’s few men stood in shocked knots of one or two about the church, swords out, eyes wide, hearts hammering, terrified into inaction. Three sets of armed men eyed each other. Thornhill did not move.

  ‘I have not congratulated you on your promised wedding to the Duke’s daughter,’ said Thornhill to Count Claudio.

  ‘You seem to have put something of a difficulty in the way of marital bliss,’ said the Count. ‘There will, I think, need to be a funeral before a marriage.’

  Aemilia was staring open-mouthed at her dead father as if to cry out at the horror of it, but all her screams had been spent on Valentine’s death. She could not comprehend it. The speed with which she’d come to dwell in hell had taken thought from her. Thornhill’s mind was not so clouded. He saw with the clear swiftness of a hawk.

  ‘I don’t see why it should be so,’ said Thornhill. ‘Why not a wedding and a funeral in one instant? Let the wedding song be a dirge. You are betrothed. I am a priest. Let the wedding be performed. I will testify to its lawfulness as will His Holiness. We shall add this to the bargain we have already made, Count Claudio.’

  ‘No.’ Aemilia at last regained her voice. ‘No. All contracts were broken when my father was murdered, priest. I am his heir now and I will not marry.’

  Claudio looked at Thornhill to ask his answer to this claim. The priest shrugged his reply and then turned to Arrigo, who commanded his guard.

  ‘God has willed it so,’ was all he said, but Arrigo understood. He turned to one of the dead Duke’s guards who stood nearest, knocked aside the man’s sword with his own and thrust the point up into his throat. His men took their cue and those few the Duke had brought with him were cut down within a minute of their master. The church was become a charnel house.

  ‘The hour is late for a wedding,’ said the Count Claudio with a calmness that made a mockery of the bloody slaughter about him.

  ‘Let it be on the ‘morrow then,’ said Father Thornhill. His own calmness was marbled through with the thought of the inquisition of the English that was to come. It was to them he looked now. Hemminges looking on him with fury written in his brow, Oldcastle staring in horror at the blood that had fallen across his boots, and William, who appraised him, smilingly.

  ‘You smile now, English spy, but you will not smile when I have you back in Count Claudio’s new palace.’

  ‘You are wrong on every count, Father Thornhill.’

  ‘You know my name?’

  ‘I know a great deal,’ said William. ‘Most especially how grievously you have erred.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I am no more English than you are Roman,’ said William. ‘We serve the same master, Father Thornhill, and His Holiness will be most displeased that you have interfered in my work.’

  ‘And who are you?’ said Thornhill with a solicitous smile on his lips.

  ‘Ask him,’ replied William with a nod to Orlando.

  Thornhill looked over at the outlaw’s chief, who groaned on the floor with his arm pressed over the quarrel sticking out of his shoulder.

  ‘Him?’

  William nodded. Thornhill shrugged as if to say that he would play this little game a while longer and walked over to where Orlando lay at his brother’s feet.

  ‘Who is this man?’ he asked.

  ‘Go to hell, priest,’ spat back Orlando and cried out when his brother kicked his shoulder in answer of his own.

  ‘Keep civil, Brother,’ said Count Claudio. ‘You speak to the priest who will marry me to Duke Leonardo’s daughter.’

  ‘Damn you.’

  Count Claudio put his foot on his brother’s bloody shoulder and leaned his weight on to it. Orlando cried out in pain.

  ‘Stop, stop,’ he babbled as the agony increased and his brother ground his foot against the quarrel’s shaft.

  ‘The name?’ asked Thornhill.

  ‘Adam, Adam,’ cried out Orlando.

  ‘Is that all?’ said Thornhill, looking over to William with disappointment. William gestured with his brow that he should ask again. Count Claudio obligingly dug his heel once more into the wound.

  ‘Pray Jesu, stop, dear God, stop,’ cried out Orlando. ‘His name is Prospero, Giovanni Prospero.’

  Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face

  Count Claudio laughed at this strange answer but his laughter cut short when he saw the priest had turned pale.

  ‘Is it so?’ demanded Father Thornhill, but he spoke neither to Orlando nor to William. He had turned to Ludovico. His spy shook his head.

  ‘I know not, Father. He was called Adam among the outlaws but there was always something false about him. That Adam is not his name is certain. What his name truly is I do not know. I thought him mad. Yet there was a purposefulness to his actions. He stood apart when battle came yet I have seen him work a knife, and heard report of how he is the very devil with a blade. He spoke to me once in a manner that made me wonder if he knew who I truly was. He is no ordinary man. He and this one,’ Ludovico gestured to Orlando, ‘were often in secret commerce on some matter.’

  ‘Was he not a friend to these two others?’

  Ludovico thought a moment before answering.

  ‘He spoke with them, truly. Yet I did not see in them the closeness of friendship. More than that I cannot say.’

  William spoke up. ‘Two marks I will show you, Father Thornhill, in proof of my claim.’ He got slowly to his feet and held out his bound hands before him. There, glittering on his finger, sat the golden ring with its deep-cut sigil. ‘Look on this ring. Is this the ring of a poor outlaw? Do you know the seal?’

  Father Thornhill’s pale face had turned paler still at the sight of the ring. ‘And the second?’

  ‘For that we must have private speech for it pertains to the tasks our master, His Holiness, has set us.’

  Father Thornhill nodded. He gestured to two of his men who took William by his bound arms and dragged him after the priest as he walked up the nave.

  Behind them Count Claudio still loured over his brother.

  ‘Well, well, fortune favours the bold, Brother,’ he said. ‘Since you live still, you shall live a little longer yet. It will serve me to have your execution publicly made, as a warning.’

  He pointed to one of his own men. ‘Bind up his wounds and then bind up him and put him with the others.’

  ‘And the Lady Aemilia? And these two, my lord?’

  ‘The knaves put with the others under guard. The Lady Aemilia too. She is a dog that does not yet know her master. Till she does, she must be leashed.’

  Aemilia blazed at him. ‘Cur! Devil! A beast that wants discourse of reason would not behave as you.’

  ‘Aye, leashed and muzzled too,’ said Count Claudio, his grin again upon his face as he looked at the railing Aemilia. ‘Tomorrow, when the wedding vows are made, then shall I teach you to love, honour and obey.’

  Rather than hold three words’ conference with this harpy

  William returned from his conference with Thornhill to find the church quiet. Claudio’s men had cleared it of the bodies of the dead, which lay in a tumbled heap outside the broken hole in the wall where once a door had been. A fire had been built in the nave around which sat Claudio’s men and some of Thornhill’s soldiers. The outlaws sat, bound, in a shivering huddle in the chancel, their backs to the broken altar.

  Thornhill had questioned him in his guise as Prospero, the Pope’s assassin, and William thanked fate that he had found that monster fascinating enough to learn all that he could about him from Isabella and others who knew him. It gave his answers credence. William had seen Prospero, spoken to him, set his mind to understand him that he might wreak his defeat. He took from
that understanding and inhabited him now, his manner, his arrogance, his delight in the destruction of others. Thornhill had not met Prospero but he had heard of him – who had not heard report of the Cardinal Montalto’s living instrument of vengeance and of his manner? This was the report made flesh. Even the difference in their age William had disguised: his griefs gave his face the weight of years and he’d muddied over the rest with blood from a cut he’d given himself outside the church when he’d realised they were surrounded and disguise needed. All that, when taken with the other signs – the ring, Orlando’s naming of him as Prospero, his own spy Ludovico’s doubts that he was one of the English party, his seeming madness now explained as a disguise – had been enough for Thornhill, despite his doubts, to grant him a measure of freedom. He had been returned to the others, his bonds cut.

  In truth, William thought, it was Thornhill’s own belief that this Pope would layer conspiracies on plots on stratagems that made him willing to believe that William was Prospero. We think others as we are ourselves and see in them our own thoughts. Thornhill had remarked on William’s coldness at the death of Valentine and Duke Leonardo and seen in that further proof that William was the assassin that he claimed to be. Within himself William wondered at the truth of what Thornhill had observed, for he had felt little at the two men’s death. That was a meditation for another day.

  William had told Thornhill that he too was sent in search of the English spies and their precious cargo of intelligence, names that would unlock all the Pope’s plans for crushing heretic England. William told how he had tracked them to the forest but that the third was missing, separated. Thornhill’s gleam of delight at the thought of the imminent questioning of Hemminges and Oldcastle had shone out. William had answered that it could not be here, when so many unknown ears were close to listen. It must be done in private, at the palace of the old Duke Leonardo. Thornhill had licked his lips, dry with desire for the inquisition to come, and grudgingly agreed.

  William could barely keep his revulsion from showing itself in that moment. Thornhill’s desires were so clear to him though the priest himself saw them not. Thornhill acceded to William’s logic because it was in that obedience to cold and calculating thought that the priest restrained his vile passions. Here was a man whose bent knees, cold and sore on hard floors hour after hour, had kept the darkness within from spilling out. Here was a man that looked on the passion of others with jealous eyes and saw in their expression of that passion, be it in rage or in joy, the loosing of that dangerous fount of humours that lay also within him and which he must curb, repress, deny. Did you pull the wings from flies as a boy? William wondered. Did you look with lust on the local maids and find in their revulsion at your clammy touch an echo of your own self-hate?

  It mattered not the cause. William saw and understood the man he spoke with and turned him with his words to match his will. He felt he’d understood him from the moment that Hemminges had first spoken of him. Oldcastle’s stories had clothed the figure that Hemminges had first sketched. This meeting had only proved a confirmation of the character that William’s imagination had already written from his friends’ words: this was a man who wanted a purpose, to believe himself part of something greater, something meaningful, more fool him. There’s no meaning in this life save that we give it, but I shall give you purpose, though it serve my ends not yours.

  Behind William, Thornhill re-entered the church with the rest of his men. Claudio greeted him from his place beside the fire.

  ‘I have set the watch. Too late now to ride for the palace and too dangerous to be abroad in the dark with these bandits about.’

  Thornhill nodded and pursed his lips in thought.

  ‘Well, well. We sleep. The morning brings a wedding and then we ride for the palace. Where is the Lady Aemilia?’

  Count Claudio gestured to the altar. ‘With the rest. A cold night will remind her of the pleasures of a warm hearth.’ He laughed but it was not a sound of joy but of cruel pleasure. Thornhill’s lip curled with distaste but he said nothing. He looked instead to William and his head bent in the scantest of nods. William, seeing it, walked over to the outlaws and sat down beside them. Oldcastle gazed up at him hopefully. William looked about him – he was out of earshot of all save those bound before him.

  ‘Listen, fellows, mad Adam has a plan.’

  She looks for night, and then

  she longs for morrow

  Aemilia heard Adam speak and hope grew in her heart. Over his shoulder she could see the shadows outside the church, one of which was made by her father’s body. How angry she had been with him, how furious, the rage within her had seemed too much for mortal frame to bear. Then in a moment he had been slain and all her anger had to sorrow changed. Their last moments on this earth had been filled with fury and with hurtful words hurled at the other in an attempt to break through to the other’s understanding. She wept again to think of it. And of that poor boy, Valentine, who she had lured to his death. Was it not so?

  ‘Do not give in to it,’ she heard Hemminges whisper to her.

  Her head lifted and she met his gaze.

  ‘Do not yield.’ He looked from her to William, now walking back towards the fire where Claudio and Thornhill sat. ‘It must be so. Sorrow without hope leads on to madness.’

  Hemminges wished he had William’s gift of words to speak his heart to this woman. He felt the press of Oldcastle’s leg on his own and how the old man’s thigh trembled with cold or fright. He wished he had that skill some men had to lift up spirits by their words, but it was not his gift. Beside him Aemilia seemed to hear his thoughts.

  ‘Your actions, Master Russell, are my copy and teach me courage. I would I had the words to thank you for your schooling.’

  A little part of Hemminges flared with heat despite the cold of night. Ah, but a man can be content, even bound and waiting for his fate. He looked across to William again, a man from whom contentment seemed to have fled. What did it mean that the William who had cast all hope of plans and stratagems in his face when he had begged for them in the woods now spoke of them in the church? Hemminges feared the bargain that the lad had struck with Thornhill and with his own grief.

  Oldcastle’s mind turned over like a wheel. Here I am again, bound and awaiting the torturer. I should really consider a different course, such wealth of experience is too costly bought. His eyes followed William and he thought of the aimless and immature youth he’d encountered in London. We are all much changed by our journey, but you most of all. Something nagged at Oldcastle’s remembrance and the travel of his mind went round and round that missing object hoping to discern its shape. Fear is my axle I doubt not. He tried to still the shaking of his leg and while he thought on it alone it stilled, but his mind turning off again the shaking began again. Oh God, why should an old man’s want of comfort bring him over and over again to suffering? What lesson have you, Lord, for one such as I? What I would not give for a cup of sack and a capon.

  His thoughts turned to the servant Dionisio who had been with them in the church and had not been seen since the warning of the Duke’s approach was given. Has he fled? And safely too? Or is he dead and stacked like cordwood with the others by the door? God’s blood, will I wish tomorrow that death had been my fate? He shivered again at the thought of the fevered eyes of the priest. Father Thornhill was not one to care for the body’s suffering if he thought the soul was purified by it. I am but a humble, mortal man, thought Oldcastle, what care I for these heavenly matters that I should find myself so tangled in them? He moaned again and looked to William with hope and looking at him felt again the press of that unseen, unremembered thing that nagged at his memory, a thing of vast importance or so his feelings told him, but it was as distant from him as a ghost. Would that I could sleep; sleep would bring it to me. Sleep was far from all of them.

  As plain as I see you now

  In a story, thought William, a hero might wrestle with a giant and throw him, were that hero
half divine, and the Bible might speak of mighty Samson wreaking bloody havoc with no more than an ass’s jawbone or bringing down the temple on his tormentors by simple feat of strength. Such is the golden world of heroes, but the iron world of ordinary men calls for more mundane tools to make a fight of things.

  Those within the church, all save William, were bound and all, William among them, had their weapons taken from them. No assault from without could hope to save those within before their captors had time to slay them. They must be freed and armed to make defence of themselves. All this William had foreseen, from Valentine’s betrayal – captured in the urgency of his speech with the Duke’s corporal of horse – to the imminent moment of its revelation at the church, foreseen in Valentine’s desperate plea that he and Aemilia be married before it was too late.

  William had begun to see clearly again, clearer than before, his horizon heavenly in its sweep. The muddy waters of his grief had cleared to crystal clarity of understanding. He felt his reason noble, his faculties infinite, his apprehension like a god. He felt all this but it brought him no delight, for what had fallen from his eyes to give him this clear sight was pity, pity and hope.

  When William had seen Valentine and Aemilia making from the outlaws’ camp he’d followed, fearing that Valentine planned to betray Aemilia and them all. Encountering Dionisio, Oldcastle’s servant, at his morning business as he passed he’d spared no time for explanations but made him go to rouse Hemminges and Oldcastle and give chase. He’d returned to the lovers’ trail – the skills acquired in his time poaching in the forest near Stratford had not been lost to him in a year of travel: Valentine and Aemilia travelled slowly and without fear of pursuit and he had tracked them easily.

  When he found that Valentine brought her instead to a ruined church, then he had divined the man’s purpose, a wedding. William would know more of this: why Valentine thought Aemilia willing and why now? Always there were more questions to which he would have answers. To that end he’d made his presence known, that he may hear their talk.