The Falconer's Knot

by Mary Hoffman

  Father Bonsignore sighed heavily. And now he must take on the additional burden of guiding the merchant’s widow in her business affairs. Strictly speaking, he could refuse but the guilt he felt that the merchant had died while under his protection made that an impossible choice.

  It seemed as if his thoughts had taken human shape when Ubaldo’s brother arrived at the friary. Umberto resembled his older brother but had an even grimmer countenance. He pointedly refused all refreshment and said he would ride on to an inn in Assisi. ‘Excuse me, Father Abbot,’ he said, ‘but I do not feel secure in the hospitality of the friars of Giardinetto. I hear there has been another death since my brother’s. A poisoning?’

  Bonsignore could not deny it.

  ‘I am sure the deaths are not connected,’ he said with as much composure as he could manage.

  ‘Not connected?’ said Umberto, his black eyebrows disappearing into his hairline. ‘You have so many murders here that you can afford to say that? Giardinetto must be a charnel-house indeed!’

  ‘It is just that the means were so different,’ said the Abbot. ‘I still believe that your brother was attacked by an intruder. The poisoning of a brother does look bad for all the rest, but this is a matter to be dealt with internally. The head of our Order, the Minister General, is on his way to investigate the case. Until then I can say nothing to you, except to repeat that I am sure your brother was not killed by a friar.’

  ‘But how much do you know about your friars?’ asked Umberto. ‘I mean before they joined the Order?’

  Bonsignore was very conscious of what he had recently found out about Brother Anselmo but he answered as confidently as he could. ‘It is not I who admitted them to the Order,’ he said. ‘They would have applied to the Minister General of the time and each man’s life and vocation would have been examined.’

  ‘Then it looks as if your Minister General has overlooked at least one murderer,’ sneered Umberto.

  The Abbot made no reply.

  ‘I am not satisfied that you are taking this seriously enough,’ said Umberto. ‘But, leaving aside the subject of my brother’s murder for a moment – and I don’t care whether the rest of you kill each other off till there is only one man standing – what is this nonsense about your acting legally for my sister-in-law?’

  ‘Monna Isabella has done me the honour of asking me to represent her in legal matters, yes,’ said the Abbot. ‘I took it as an act of trust, to let me know that she did not hold this house responsible for her husband’s death.’

  ‘The woman is a fool,’ said Umberto.

  ‘She struck me as very intelligent,’ said Father Bonsignore.

  Umberto glared at him.

  ‘And you will accede to her request?’

  ‘I can see no reason not to.’

  ‘Then there is nothing to detain me here. I see I can make no headway with you, Abbot. Perhaps your Minister General will be more interested in listening to me.’

  He left abruptly. The Abbot drew a deep breath and walked over to the window. He watched his unwelcome visitor walk towards the stable. But Umberto stopped to talk to a couple of friars he encountered on the way. The Abbot frowned. His eyesight was not good and he could not make out which of the friars were talking to Ubaldo’s angry brother. But since most knew of the rumours about the Colour Master, Bonsignore now had a new complication to worry about.

  Monna Isabella was surprised when she read the Abbess’s message about Chiara – Sister Orsola, as she insisted on calling her. Isabella had thought that Chiara would accept her offer in an instant. She had made inquiries in the town and found that the girl’s brother, Bernardo, was making a poor fist of handling the little of his patrimony that remained. Rumours were abroad that his debts were mounting.

  On the other hand, the townspeople could not praise enough the wealthy widow from Perugia who was setting up as a trader in Gubbio. It was regarded as a daring venture, even though Angelica had appointed a man to manage the business. People treated Isabella with respect and deference and even some warmth; she was more popular than her husband had ever been. But they were wary of talking to her directly about Angelica, fearing that she might be anxious about the competition.

  Isabella had not thought much about what would happen after her husband’s death apart from certain hazy dreams about finding Domenico again. Now that she had found him she dare not dream any more. She must have a plan for the future that didn’t involve him. And why not do the same as the little widow from Perugia? If a slip of a girl, not yet twenty, could run a business, and from another city, why should Isabella herself not continue with Ubaldo’s successful trade here in Gubbio? She already had a procurator in Abbot Bonsignore, who had accepted her request. All she needed to do now was appoint a manager.

  It would certainly take her mind off a middle-aged friar living in Giardinetto. But she would go there again soon to see the Abbot and try to have a private audience with the man they now called Brother Anselmo. She needed to resolve that question once and for all. She wished that she had a woman friend to confide in; it was a pity that Chiara was not coming to her, at least not yet.

  While the friars waited for the visit of their new Minister General, Michele da Cesena, they went about their business as usual. They said the Office, tended the garden, visited the sick, preached in the local parishes and heard confessions. Brother Anselmo ran the colour room as he always had and had soon produced their first batch of ultramarine. In spite of the cares and worries oppressing him, Silvano was enchanted by the heavenly colour. It seemed to promise a better time.

  Sister Veronica and the grey nuns next door had also made a batch and Anselmo proposed a joint trip to Assisi in the friary’s cart. It was what Silvano and Chiara had both longed for but they felt self-conscious when they were at last seated in the back of the cart. Anselmo was driving, with Sister Veronica beside him. She was a little deaf, so that it was safe for them to talk. Silvano doubted that Anselmo would mind but he spoke in a low voice anyway.

  ‘How are you, Chiara?’ he asked. ‘Are the sisters still afraid?’

  ‘I am not afraid for myself, Brother,’ said Chiara, uncertain how to address him but thrilled that he had used her real name. ‘And if I were to become so, I have a way of escape. But some of the younger women are nervous living next to a house which now seems so ill-augured.’

  ‘A way of escape?’ asked Silvano. ‘Are you leaving?’

  ‘I might,’ said Chiara. ‘Monna Isabella has offered that I should live with her in Gubbio, as her companion. Mother Elena has said I may go.’

  ‘But you are uncertain?’

  ‘I am still considering it,’ said Chiara in a way that closed the subject.

  ‘Have you heard we are going to have a visitation from the Minister General?’ asked Silvano.

  Chiara nodded. ‘The Abbess expects he will come to see us too. Normally it would be a cause for excitement, I believe. But everyone is jittery now. Suppose he disbands the brothers’ house at Giardinetto? What would happen to the Poor Clares?’

  ‘Disband the house!’ exclaimed Silvano. ‘Surely it won’t come to that?’

  Brother Anselmo turned slightly and put his finger to his lips.

  ‘We are all in fear,’ said Silvano quietly. ‘And some of the brothers fear myself and Anselmo most of all. You can see it in their eyes.’

  They travelled the rest of the way to Assisi in silence but they became more and more aware of each other’s presence on the journey. They were sitting on opposite sides of the cart – anything else would have been indecorous – but that gave them ample opportunity to look at each other.

  They kept catching each other’s eye and then one would turn away, embarrassed and develop an interest in the Umbrian scenery. But that gave the other a chance to study unobserved a curve of cheek or sweep of lashes. It only confirm
ed what they had both thought: that the object of their scrutiny was very pleasing to look at indeed.

  And Silvano now had to think that Chiara might not continue to be as out of reach as he had always thought her. She was not wealthy, certainly, but she came from a good family and she would have a respectable home if she chose to live with Isabella in Gubbio. He couldn’t imagine that his father would put any obstacle in his way if he said he was going to pay court to a merchant’s ward. He checked himself from letting his thoughts run away with him. It was only a matter of weeks since he had thought himself hopelessly in love with another woman.

  He looked into his heart to see how he felt about Angelica but had to admit that what he found there now was mostly hurt pride. If he was honest with himself, he found Chiara more attractive. And he was beginning to know her; they had exchanged far more words than he ever had with the widow of Perugia.

  For Chiara, it was less complicated. She had never seen a man to her liking before Silvano and his face now seemed familiar and the very type she imagined when she thought of love and romance. She shouldn’t have been thinking about either but she had never really believed that she could be a nun and now that she didn’t have to accept that destiny, she let herself indulge those imaginings.

  But something else was happening to her. Since living in the convent, contrary to what she had expected, her world had expanded. The riot of colour and form in the Basilica at Assisi had amazed her and meeting the painters opened her eyes still further. She had seen no art in her native city, except what was in the main church and had certainly never thought about how it got there.

  And there were the murders. It was horrific, of course, but the notion that danger lurked so near was stimulating. It had broken up the routine of both houses and nobody knew what each new day would bring. She was not really afraid for herself and she didn’t want to leave the convent with the mystery unsolved.

  Simone was surprised to see them and delighted with the ultramarine. As they visited him in the chapel devoted to Saint Martin, Chiara gasped. Her own face looked down at her from inside the entrance arch! The hair had been changed from brown to gold but it was certainly her face. It was a saint, with its halo already sketched in and waiting for Simone’s famous gold stamping. She stood holding a lily and separated from another female saint by a slender spiralled column painted so convincingly on the blue background that it was hard to believe it had no volume or substance.

  ‘I hope you will forgive me, Sister Orsola,’ said Simone, ‘for taking your likeness as my model for your patron, Saint Clare.’

  ‘She is not just the founder of our Order,’ said Chiara. ‘I was named for her. I was called Chiara.’ And shall be again, she thought.

  ‘Then you were well named,’ said Simone simply.

  Silvano smiled at the painter; so that was why he had studied the beautiful novice so carefully! He wished he could have a copy of Simone’s portrait of Chiara. If it were a miniature, he could carry it around with him.

  While he was daydreaming, Simone was explaining to Brother Anselmo and Sister Veronica that the other saint, dressed more luxuriously than the woman who looked like Chiara, in green and white, red and gold, was Elizabeth of Hungary.

  ‘She was a princess,’ Sister Veronica told Chiara approvingly. ‘And married at fourteen. But when her husband died she founded one of the first women’s houses for followers of Saint Francis. And gave all her money to the poor.’

  Married at fourteen, thought Chiara, younger than I am now!

  Simone had now finished the left wall and was working on the last picture on the right.

  ‘Here is Saint Martin renouncing arms,’ he explained when they came close to look at his work. ‘He is rejecting the earthly knighthood he accepted in the previous scene.’

  Silvano admired the painter’s skill in showing the different characters in the scene, but now he also felt that the Saint had chosen the harder way when he decided to stop being a soldier and follow the religious life instead. He looked at Saint Martin’s bare feet, no longer wearing the boots and spurs of his knighthood.

  No hawk and horse for him now, he thought.

  Chiara was looking up at the ceiling. Simone had painted it to look like the heavens themselves, deep blue and scattered with gold stars.

  ‘Is that ultramarine?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Simone. ‘That is azurite, but coarse ground to give the intense colour.’

  Chiara remembered Sister Veronica’s advice when she ground the vivid blue pigment herself at the convent.

  As Silvano’s gaze followed Chiara’s and then travelled down the left wall, he saw again the face that he had noticed on the first visit, the one whose down-turned mouth made him think of Simone himself.

  ‘Is that you, Ser Simone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I am sometimes so short of models to draw from that I must use myself,’ laughed the painter. ‘But only as a last resort. Still, I needed a sceptic for that painting so my suspicious looks are appropriate.’

  ‘What’s the story of that one?’ asked Silvano.

  ‘Saint Martin is reviving a dead child, whose desperate mother begs him for the life of her son,’ said Simone. ‘Some in the crowd can’t believe their eyes.’

  ‘And there is one of our Order.’ Sister Veronica pointed out to Chiara a nun in a grey robe.

  ‘But didn’t you say that Saint Martin lived hundreds of years ago?’ objected Silvano. ‘Long before Saint Francis or Saint Clare?’

  ‘He was born nearly a thousand years ago,’ said Simone. ‘That is why the chapel must be ready for his millennium celebrations. I admit I have taken a liberty in including a Poor Clare. There’s a Franciscan friar too, like you and Brother Anselmo. See, there at the back, gazing up at that tree. That tree is the miraculous one that Saint Francis caused to grow in Siena by planting his walking staff in the ground.’

  ‘But didn’t Saint Martin resurrect the child in the middle of a field, according to the story?’ asked Anselmo, his eyes twinkling. ‘Here he seems to be doing it in the city – your city, by the look of it.’

  Simone spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. ‘I am homesick,’ he said simply. ‘You have been to Siena, Brother, so you know what a jewel it is. I have been away a year and now that Pietro has joined me I miss my home more than ever. I want to get this chapel and the figures in the transept finished within the next few months so that I can see my native city again.’

  Silvano was silent, thinking of his own home in Perugia, and he saw that Brother Anselmo was thoughtful too. What did he think of as home? Would he say Giardinetto now or did he still sometimes long for Gubbio, the place where he had been young and in love? Silvano realised how little he really knew about the Colour Master.

  ‘Why did you make yourself the man suspicious of the miracle, Ser Simone?’ asked Chiara. ‘Don’t you believe in miracles?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Simone, light-hearted again. ‘It’s just that the painter is an observer, the man outside the scene, so if I put myself inside one, I still look sceptical.’

  ‘We could do with an impartial observer in Giardinetto,’ said Anselmo quietly, so that Sister Veronica would not hear.

  ‘There is no news then?’ asked Simone in the same low voice.

  ‘No,’ said Anselmo. ‘We are no closer to finding the culprit. And some of the brothers are whispering against Silvano and myself. I don’t know if we shall survive the visit of our Minister General.’

  ‘But that is terrible,’ said Simone. ‘Apart from anything else, I can’t lose my best pigment-grinders if I’m to get the frescoes finished. But I’m jesting, of course. We must see what we can do to find the real killer.’

  ‘We’ve tried,’ said Silvano. ‘We went through all the brothers and couldn’t come up with any reason for the same man to murder bot
h the merchant and Brother Landolfo.’

  ‘Then there are only two possible conclusions,’ said Simone. ‘Either there were two different killers and Giardinetto has been the victim of a dreadful coincidence . . .’

  ‘That’s what Abbot Bonsignore thinks,’ said Silvano.

  ‘. . . or, we are quite wrong to look for reasons and connections, and the killer is insane. The murders have been committed randomly by someone without motive or reason.’

  ‘But that means anyone could be next to die,’ said Chiara, fearful for the first time.

  ‘Then we must just make sure there is no next victim,’ said Simone. ‘This is more important even than my paintings. Tell me everything you know about every brother in the friary.’

  In an inn two roads away from where the painter discussed murder with the followers of Saint Francis sat Umberto, drinking deeply of the red wine poured for him. He was musing on what he had been told in the friary at Giardinetto.

  ‘Brother Anselmo,’ he said to himself, slurring the name. ‘Or should I say Domenico? You think you’ve got away with it, don’t you? You kill my brother, persuade his stupid widow to appoint your puppet Bonsignore as her representative. And then what? You suddenly discover that you have lost your faith? Leave the Order and after a decent interval – ha! What would be decent for a murderer and his drab? – you offer yourself to my brother’s widow. And who is her guardian and protector? That old fool of an abbot! And then you have everything that was Ubaldo’s – his house, his land, his business, his wife.

  ‘But you haven’t reckoned on one thing. Umberto will not leave his brother unavenged. You shall have none of it – not one scudo!’

  .

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Minister General

  Baron Montacuto was eating his midday meal with no relish at all. His wife, Margarethe, had always been pale, like their son, but now her face across the table from him was almost bloodless and no smile ever reached it. Their little daughters, Margherita and Vittoria, normally such a joy to him, sat silent as their parents, toying with their food.