The Stargazer: The Arboretti Family Saga - Book One

by Michele Jaffe

  Tristan pointed to the clock behind his cousin, the clock Miles himself had made. “Unless all your work with timepieces has taught you some way to stop the hours from passing, I think that method is too slow. It is now almost five o’clock. If we are to get any evidence we’ll need to have it by this time tomorrow and there are probably five hundred goldsmiths in Venice alone. Not to mention those in Mestre, Firenze, Pisa, Milano, Napoli—” He gestured the infinitude of places with his hand.

  “Well, then, what do you propose? What can we do?” Miles asked, slumping back into his chair.

  “I should say that’s obvious.” Ian’s voice from the doorway startled all of them, but not as much as the look on his face when he entered the room. “We must break into the prison and free her.”

  “‘Obvious,’” Sebastian repeated tentatively after Ian, his blue eyes showing confusion. “I am not sure I am familiar with that use of the word.”

  “Don’t put on any of your linguistic airs,” Ian said with surprising good nature. “You know damn well what I mean. Crispin and Miles will create a diversion while Tristan undoes the locks and you and I disable the guards. The way I see it, we’ll be in and out in less than half an hour.”

  “Have you ever visited the cells in the basement of the Doge’s Palace?” Tristan, who had passed some time in one years back, regarded Ian skeptically and spoke slowly, as to one who is not mentally sound.

  “No, but you know your way around them, don’t you?”

  Tristan looked imploringly at Giorgio, who returned his look with a shrug, but Tristan was saved by Crispin from the agony of explaining that the prisons were a maze of unassailable locked doors.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to free Bianca by merely withdrawing your denunciation?” Crispin’s voice was cold, but color was rising in his cheeks. “Or are you too proud to do that, too stubborn to admit you made a mistake?”

  Ian shook his head at his brother piteously. “Come on, Crispin. I did not denounce Bianca. What kind of a monster do you think I am?”

  Crispin’s mouth opened to answer the question, but Sebastian shot his cousin a look that cautioned silence and spoke in his stead. “Even if you did not denounce Bianca, you still think she is guilty.”

  “Thought,” Ian corrected him. “I thought so until a few moments ago. But I am past that now.”

  “How do we know you won’t be past thinking she is innocent in a few minutes?” Miles challenged.

  “There is no question of her innocence. I have proof of it.”

  “Proof?” the others asked in unison.

  Ian nodded. “Not enough to produce before a court, but enough to satisfy me. That is why we must break her out of prison. There is really no time to lose.”

  It was Giorgio’s turn to look imploringly at Tristan. Tristan sighed, turned to Ian, and said simply, “That is out of the question.”

  For a moment Ian just blinked at him. Then he moved to a chair and sat. “It really is impossible? You aren’t just saying that to get back at me?”

  “Whatever my present feelings toward you may be,” Tristan eyed him, “my primary concern is to save the life of an innocent and much abused woman. If I thought there were any chance that we could break her out of the basement cells, I would already have tried.”

  “Then we will have to use our heads to have the denunciation withdrawn.” Ian grimaced. “And if my deductions are correct, the only way to do that is to find the murderer.”

  Heavy silence fell over the room until Miles decided to pursue his earlier theory. “Have you any idea who commissioned that dagger?”

  Ian nodded. “Yes, Giorgio found the man who made it. But it won’t help at all. It was ordered by Bianca’s brother.”

  Miles sank back into his chair, his theory crushed to bits. “No! That could not be any worse.”

  “I can’t really see it, but is it possible that Giovanni Salva is the murderer?” Giorgio looked around the table at the cousins.

  Sebastian and Tristan slowly shook their heads. Giovanni Salva was too preening and conceited to be a favorite with any of them, but they couldn’t see him as a murderer.

  “I guess you can never tell just by looking at someone whether they are a murderer.” Tristan conceded after a long silence. “Take Bianca, for example—”

  A growl from the end of the table interrupted Tristan. He would have gone on over Ian’s bestial protest, but he could not compete with the excited voice that followed it. “It wasn’t Giovanni. It could not have been.” Ian stood and began to pace the room. “Whoever killed Isabella also killed Enzo, her manservant.” He continued despite the questioning looks of his cousins. “And Giovanni certainly could not have done that, because he was not in Venice when it happened. I had that confirmed by our agent in Trieste.”

  In any other circumstances they would have showered him with questions and probed his conclusion about Giovanni’s innocence, but they hadn’t time. When Miles spoke, his voice was heavy with despair, his poetic soul stung to the core by his impotence to help a lady in distress. “Then we are back where we started, with the entire blond patriciate as our suspects, limited only by the dual requirement that the person be a friend of Giovanni Salva’s and an enemy of Ian’s.”

  The others nodded grimly, each calculating how much that reduced the pool. “That brings it from about three hundred to only a hundred men,” Crispin began, trying to sound relieved, “since Giovanni Salva has so few friends.” The unspoken but understood fact that all those men could have harbored grudges against the Conte d’Aosto was completely lost on the pacing Ian.

  He continued walking back and forth across the room, every now and then emitting a sigh or a snort, and occasionally a grunt. None of them could be sure if he was listening to their conversation, until suddenly he stopped short, declared, “We are idiots,” pulled another chair up to the table, and sat.

  “There are nowhere near a hundred possibilities,” he announced grimly, disgusted with himself for not seeing it earlier. “In fact, there are only four.”

  “Who?” Miles demanded, asking the question for all of them.

  “That’s the difficulty. I’ve no idea.” All eyes were on Ian as he continued. “Bianca invited six men to her friendly gathering at Tullia’s house and declared that one of them was the murderer. That alone would mean nothing if one of them had not shot at her, because only a cornered man would take the risk of shooting her in such a public manner. God alone knows how, but in some way she managed to shorten the list to those names. Two of them, Crispin and Valdo Valdone, we can ignore not only because I doubt if either of them would murder but also because they were not there to do the shooting. Although I did not get to ask her about it, I am fairly sure that she only included them to guarantee that I would be present, or at least interested in the proceedings. That leaves only four others.”

  “Four others who were masked,” Crispin said grimly.

  “Do you have any idea who they were?” Miles spoke to Ian, who just shook his head.

  “What about Tullia? The gathering was held at her house.” Sebastian’s hopeful suggestion perked them all up.

  “She might know,” Ian allowed, “but she certainly would not tell me. My lack of partisanship for Bianca seems to have earned me a whole new string of enemies.”

  “Oh, good,” Crispin said in a voice that had nothing good in it. “Let’s hope no more than half of them have homicidal instincts.”

  “One of the rest of us could call on her.” Sebastian spoke over Crispin. “We may not be clients of hers, but if the concern she showed for Bianca today before the trial is any indication, I am sure she would be willing to do all she could to help her.”

  Giorgio, who had been leaning against a wall in the back, cleared his throat. “There might be a faster way, though I doubt it will be easier. Bianca trusted Mar
ina’s nephew, Nilo, with most of her correspondence. Perhaps she had him—”

  “Yes!” The memory of Tuesday night seized Ian in a flash. “You are absolutely correct, Giorgio, she must have had Nilo make the deliveries. I’m sure he will remember the names. Bring him at once.”

  Giorgio was shaking his head. “I will try but I can’t promise anything. I think you might need to add him to your list of enemies. He is convinced that you betrayed Bianca.”

  “Damn it, this is no time to humor a young boy’s fantasy, Giorgio. Use your influence over him. You’re going to be his uncle, after all.”

  “Uncle?” Crispin repeated, and Giorgio blushed furiously.

  “Yes, Giorgio has decided to yoke himself to that woman with the baby named Cosimo,” Ian explained.

  “I think his name is Caesar,” Crispin hazarded, but Ian, too busy glaring at Giorgio to make him gone, did not hear.

  When Giorgio had left, Sebastian spoke. “I agree that it is a fine thing to have reduced our pool of suspects, but realistically we are no better off than before. We still don’t know who the murderer is, or even what drove him to murder.”

  Ian frowned for a moment, then let out a groan. “We do know the motive, at least I do. Bianca figured it out days ago, but at the time I discredited it. She guessed that Isabella had overheard some compromising information and was using it to blackmail someone into marrying her. I told her she was drawing conclusions from coincidences,” Ian admitted, grimacing at himself as he remembered his haughty tone, “but now it seems she was right.”

  “What kind of information did Bianca say she had?” Miles queried.

  “She did not know precisely. She just guessed that Isabella had been listening in on some clandestine meetings which Enzo told us were being regularly held at her house.”

  Tristan was shaking his head. “I can’t see Isabella sneaking around, listening at key holes. That was not her style.”

  “No, indeed, it was much more devilish than that,” Ian explained quickly. “There is a listening tube in her room that goes directly into the room below where the meetings were held. It is fashioned so that you can see as well as hear. Through that she would not have missed a single word or facial expression.”

  “That still doesn’t tell us anything about what she heard,” Miles said.

  “No, but perhaps with the names we—” Sebastian was cut off by the sounds of a scuffle outside the door. Rising to investigate, the Arboretti were confronted with a sight that at any other time would have been comedic. Giorgio had his arms extended, pulling with all his manly might on Nilo, who had planted himself like a hundred-year cypress tree in the middle of the floor and refused to budge. As the Arboretti emerged from the room, he could be heard reiterating his strong objections to moving.

  “I heard how he did not even wait to hear her sentence read and did not even look at her. I heard how he laughed in the middle of her speech and then left because he had a headache. And how he met in secret with the Senate today to make sure they would convict my mistress and then paid the judges twelve hundred ducats to find her guilty just in case that didn’t work. I will not talk to him. He is a traitor. I hate him, and I don’t care who knows.” His eyes flashed defiantly over the Arboretti as he spoke this last sentence.

  Miles turned to glare at Ian. “Is that true? Did you pay twelve hundred ducats to have them find her guilty?”

  “No, only five hundred. The other seven hundred must have come from someone else,” Ian responded dryly.

  “S’blood, Ian, this is no time to joke.” Crispin was insistent. “Did you bribe the judges?”

  “No!” Ian was equally emphatic. “I may be a monster, and I may even have left in the middle of the trial, but I certainly did not bribe any judges.”

  “And the Senate?” Sebastian regarded Ian narrowly.

  “No, damn it, I was trying to convince them to release her not condemn her.”

  “Even though you thought she was guilty?” Miles looked suspicious.

  “I didn’t really. I… I couldn’t. But all of this is immaterial because guilty or innocent she will be dead if we don’t soon take some action.”

  Giorgio had released his grip on Nilo, whose sad eyes had grown large as the cousins exchanged words. When they stopped talking he stepped forward and addressed Ian.

  “You swear you did not bribe the judges?” He was so solemn and melancholy-looking that Ian almost wanted to laugh.

  Instead, he responded with equal solemnity. “I swear. And I did not laugh in the middle of her speech.”

  “You did grunt,” Crispin put in, “be honest.”

  Ian rolled his eyes at his brother. “It didn’t have anything to do with what Bianca was saying. That was when I realized that Giorgio had denounced her.” Nilo had turned to Giorgio and looked ready to spit fire at him, so Ian rushed on. “He had not, of course, I simply thought he had. I tried to ask Luca when he was called to testify, but you all saw how successful that was, so I left the trial to find out another way. And that was how I discovered Bianca was innocent.” Ian turned to face Nilo directly. “Now I need your help to prove it.”

  The Arboretti stood motionless as Nilo studied Ian intensely. Ian could of course order the information out of him, but then there would be no guarantee of its accuracy.

  “What can I do?” the boy asked finally, as if accepting a difficult military commission for the state.

  There was a collective sigh of relief as the Arboretti returned to their meeting room, accompanied by both Giorgio and Nilo. Ian invited Nilo to take a chair next to his, then spoke to him.

  “We need to know the names on the invitations you distributed last Tuesday night. I already know two of them, Valdo Valdone and my brother, Crispin, but we must know the other four.”

  “I can’t tell you, because there were no names,” Nilo answered simply, then added, “They were addressed by initials only.”

  “Then tell us those,” Ian said impatiently, then caught himself. “They will serve just as well.”

  Nilo paused for a moment, then rattled off the four other sets of initials and addresses that had been printed on the cream-colored packages while Miles set them down on paper. When Ian thanked him and told him he could go, he was reluctant to leave but was finally persuaded by Crispin, who promised to alert him instantly if he could be of any further assistance.

  Alone again, the Arboretti and Giorgio studied the list that Miles had made. It took only a few moments to identify the men to whom the initials belonged, and then they found themselves again at an impasse.

  “We could go as a group and confront each of them. That way we would be less likely to get shot at,” Tristan suggested, only half in jest.

  “Yes, and equally unlikely to screw a confession out of any of them. At least not on the first try, and we don’t have time for seconds.” Ian pushed the list away from him toward the middle of the table. “We just don’t have enough information to threaten them with exposure.”

  Sebastian thought for a moment. “That may not be true. We have everything that Bianca had, maybe even more, and she posed a big enough threat to them to make her worthy of shooting. We must be overlooking something, something crucial.”

  “I’ve just been going over everything in my head,” Crispin said from the end of the table, “and I can’t think of anything. We know the motive, we know who commissioned the jeweled dagger, we—”

  Miles hit the table with his hand, unusually animated. “How many of the men Bianca invited to her gathering were also at the ball on Monday night?”

  “All of them,” Ian answered with interest. “Why?”

  Miles pushed his hair back and shook his head with resignation. “If they were all there then it doesn’t matter. I was hoping to eliminate at least one of them on the theory that the dagger, the real
dagger used for the murder, was put in that plant during the ball. But if they were all here, it doesn’t do any good one way or the other.”

  “Besides,” Crispin added, “we have no evidence that the dagger used to commit the murder was not already in the plant when it arrived.”

  Crispin’s words sent Ian into a daze. No one spoke as he stared, unseeing, into the room before him. He was no longer with them but had instead returned to the scene of the crime. He drew his mind back to the room, calling up the details he had absorbed in his quick view of it. What came back to him was not the visual image, but rather the sound.

  He had not fully returned to the meeting room when he finally spoke in a slow voice. “That plant was there at Isabella’s. I can’t picture it, but it had to be. I distinctly remember Bianca sneezing the whole time I was speaking with her.”

  “If the plant was there, then it is more than likely that the dagger was put in it right after the murder to hide it, so that the jeweled dagger could be found on the corpse and taken for the murder weapon. That would explain how the denouncer knew not only where the dagger was but also where the plant was. Whoever sent the plant must himself be the murderer.” Miles’s excitement was soon dulled by Crispin.

  “I don’t know who sent the plant,” Crispin explained miserably. “It just arrived the day before the party, wrapped in plain paper, no card, nothing. I thought it might be from one of our ships just returned from the East, but I asked around, and no one seems ever to have seen it.”

  “What about some other ship from the East? There are ships arriving from Constantinople every day,” Miles pointed out.

  “Like the ship Saliym came on,” Sebastian said quietly. “The ship that was to receive the shipment of gunpowder.”

  “Twelve hundred tons of gunpowder,” Tristan put in slowly, with dawning awareness. “Twelve hundred tons of gunpowder and twelve hundred ducats paid as a bribe. That is quite a coincidence.”

  “What are the chances,” Crispin asked, “that the conferences Isabella overheard were in fact the negotiations about this shipment of gunpowder? That the plant was given by the Turks as a ‘good faith’ at the conclusion of those negotiations?”