Kit laughed prettily and fluttered her hands. ‘My lord, all these questions! I expect a catechism from my priest, not from a great general! Come, you must tire of my prattling; tell me of your adventures in the Veneto.’
‘Good. And if they persist?’
She pressed her lips together, and her eyes filled easily. ‘Forgive me; my husband so lately dead; my spirits are quite overcome.’
‘Excellent. No true gentleman will press you further.’
Kit’s confidence rallied a little, but one gaping hole in her education troubled her.
‘Fitzjames?’
‘Christiane?’
‘How did my husband die? The vicomte, I mean? And when?’
‘All in good time.’
On the day before Kit’s planned sortie into the French court at Mantova, Ormonde gave her a purse of gold nobles. ‘What is this? My pay?’
He smiled. ‘Not yet. You will get your diamonds when the task is concluded; it is not yet begun. No, this is to ease your path – bribes, my dear Christiane, bribes.’ He closed her hand over the purse. ‘You are there for one reason and one reason only; to find something out with which I can break the stalemate. Once you know something – any hint that is dropped, the slightest intimation of what their strategy shall be from hereon in – you will need to engineer your extraction.’
‘How?’
‘That is up to you. Contrive to send me a message, or Panton – that is where the money comes in.’
She had an idea. ‘Can I take Flint?’ Flint would carry her away from danger, and towards Ross’s horizon.
Ormonde stroked his chin. ‘Has he ever been in a team?’
‘He is a she. And no – she has always been a cavalry horse.’
‘Hmm. I was going to suggest matching her into a four and having her pull the coach. But we cannot risk that. We need speed at your arrival.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you will be pursued.’
Kit grew cold. ‘By whom?’
‘By Panton and his division.’
She sat bolt upright. ‘What?’
‘Christiane. We have to sell them the story. You will arrive at Mantova pursued by Alliance troops.’
‘But …’ she blustered. ‘I didn’t know this.’
‘Because I didn’t tell you,’ he said calmly.
‘But … you cannot just thrust new gambits upon me!’ she protested. ‘It is the day before I go to Mantova!’
‘At this point in the game,’ said Ormonde smoothly, ‘you will be told as little as possible about your infiltration. That way you will react to the situation with perfect conviction.’
‘What will they be pursuing?’
‘Christiane …’ Ormonde’s voice held a warning.
‘What will they be pursuing? Me?’
‘Your passenger,’ he said, ‘and the dispatches he carries.’
‘My passenger?’
‘All in good time.’ He spoke soothingly, as if she was a child.
She was silent for a time. Then: ‘Fitzjames?’
‘Christiane.’
‘Can I trust you?’
There was a pause. ‘You asked me that once before.’ He smiled his buccaneer’s smile. ‘I refer you to my earlier answer.’
‘Can I?’
‘Trust this. Your life is as precious to me as it is to you.’
She looked doubtful. ‘Truly?’
‘Well … almost.’ The smile again. ‘Let us say that I want this deception to work as much as you do. I will not fail you in this.’
She said nothing.
‘Now go to Mezzanotte. He is waiting in the music room. Your last music lesson, remember?’
Kit rose unhappily and descended the staircase. The parrot, spying her, clambered up his bars with aid of beak and claw and screamed: ‘Like rats in a trap!’
‘Quite,’ replied Kit soberly.
The night before her departure for Mantova Kit sat down at her dressing table to write two letters. She wrote to Bianca Castellano, to thank her for giving her sword to Captain Ross, to enquire after the health of Christiana, and to send a few gold nobles from Ormonde’s purse for the baby’s care. She had made an undertaking to support the child, and she would continue to do so. Then she wrote a letter of blithe falsehoods to Aunt Maura, telling her that all was well, and she would see her soon. Then she wrote a letter of terrible truths to Signora Chiara Walsh, 17 Via Ranier, Rovereto, to tell the widow that Richard was dead. Then she took to her bed, to lie wakeful for the rest of the night.
At the grey dawn, hollow eyed, Kit allowed herself to be dressed in her travelling clothes, a gown of holly green crape, with a matching cape and a tiny tricorn hat to perch upon her powdered hair. She had left off the Rockingham mantua, but it was to travel with her in her trunk. She said her farewells to Lucio Mezzanotte and she put three letters in his long white hand. ‘Will you see these conveyed? In the name of friendship?’
He looked at the three fat little packets. ‘Only if you swear that there is nothing in these dispatches that will compromise Fitz.’
‘I can promise you that,’ said Kit. She had to admire such loyalty, however misplaced. ‘I am merely putting my affairs in order.’
The castrato shuffled the letters like the cards they had so often played together. ‘You think you will not return?’
‘Who knows?’ she said.
There seemed nothing else to say, so they embraced. She nodded at the parrot, her other erstwhile companion. ‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘Damned Jacobite,’ said the parrot.
Kit did not have the spirit to converse with Ormonde on the way to Mantova; and he too seemed little inclined for conversation. Kit was preoccupied with the danger she would face in the French court, but Ormonde too seemed jumpy and nervous on his own account. He seemed changed; as changed as his carriage. The coach had been freshly enamelled in blue and gold and gilded with the invented cognisance of the St Hilaire family and the fleur-de-lis of France. When the carriage finally stopped after many hours of travel Kit’s stomach gave a sudden lurch. She glanced out of the carriage window, but did not recognise the little town. There was no great citadel, no lake. ‘Are we there?’
‘No,’ said Ormonde, breaking his long silence. ‘This is Castellucchio, just outside Mantova.’
She looked at him sharply. ‘Why have we stopped?’
He did not quite meet her eyes. ‘We are here to pick up your passenger.’
The passenger. ‘Who am I to convey?’
‘This is where I leave you. Bonne chance, Christiane.’
‘Wait!’ She clawed at his sleeve. ‘Who is to be my passenger?’
But Pietro helped the duke down the steps and shut the door smartly. Ormonde turned and answered through the open window. ‘Your husband,’ he said. ‘Who else?’
She gaped at him in horror; but he smiled faintly, nodded and turned away. ‘Fitzjames?’ she called. ‘My lord duke?’ But he was walking off across the little piazza before the church, scattering pigeons as he went.
She forced the door of the carriage, and made to get down, but a gloved hand held the door closed, a broad torso in a red coat blocked the light. Her jailer stooped and dipped his head in the window.
It was Brigadier Panton. ‘I’m to ask you to sit tight, Comtesse,’ he said. ‘Not long now.’ And he turned his back to her, the broadcloth of his coat blocking her sight, deaf to questions.
She tried the opposite door of the coach but it was locked, and besides the carriage was parked so flush to the city wall that the door would not have opened anyway. Like rats in a trap. There was nothing to do but wait as she’d been instructed, fuming. A pox upon Ormonde; she’d always known at heart he could not be trusted. She wanted to kick the doors open, and knew she could do it too; but she forced herself to sit still and listen.
She could hear a commotion in the square, a man screaming in protest. Then heels dragging on cobbles, a sword drawing, a slash and a thud. Then the
light streamed in the window again, the carriage door was opened, and a figure bundled in. But it was not Panton.
The passenger wore a uniform of French blue, complete with gold buttons, white stock and polished boots. He was of middle height and middle age. He was also very, very dead.
Kit scrambled from her seat, and pressed herself to the other side of the coach.
The brigadier appeared at the window again. ‘Comtesse, meet the vicomte,’ he said, with his characteristic sneering laugh. ‘My company will pursue you to the gates of Mantova, and our artillery will lay down some covering fire.’ He must have seen her face. ‘Do not upset yourself. My men have been instructed not to hit you. With the will of God and a following wind, the French will let you into the citadel.’
‘But …’
‘No time for discourse. Ormonde drilled you, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, but …’
Panton slammed the door. ‘Yah!’
At his shout the coach and four took off, hurtling through the piazza and the town gate, and towards the lake with the city floating upon it. She passed the plains where she had buried Richard, and, holding herself braced against the sides of the carriage through the careening, speeding chase, allowed herself to look at her second dead husband.
He lay slumped in the corner of the carriage, his side slashed through his coat and through his skin to show the shambles of his innards tangled like blue snakes. His face was a dreadful greenish white. His lifeblood, leaking from his side, made no impression at all on the red velvet of the seat as it was the same colour. She looked at the dead face, the eyes as brown as hazelnuts. Was this man perhaps thirty? Younger? Did he have a wife and child back in France? Was he even French, or was he some poor English foot soldier who’d been selected to die for Ormonde’s scheme? She reached out in the rattling, lurching carriage, and as carefully as she could closed his eyes. The eyelids were still warm beneath the pads of her fingers. She put a hand to his heart. There was no beat. But there had been, till a moment ago. He was still warm. The slash, the thud. They’d killed him just now, in the street.
She hunched as far away from the corpse as she could, and gazed from the opposite window.
The gates of Mantova’s great castle came closer and closer. Now she could see the drawbridge, and the blue blobs on the battlements and at the vast studded gate resolved into soldiers. From somewhere behind, Panton’s thundering cavalry began to fire, the muskets deafening. The sound woke her up, as if she’d been in a dream. You are a soldier, she told herself. She sprang into action. Steeling herself and choosing the moat-side window in the lee of the gunfire, she leaned from the carriage as far as she could. She shouted in French: ‘For God’s sake, let me in! My husband is dead and they will kill me too!’
The soldiers now had faces, white blobs with gaping mouths, shouting and gesturing. The gates remained shut. She tried again. ‘In the name of King Louis and the Duc d’Orléans, open the gate!’ And then a miracle: the gates opened for her. Panton’s men ceased their fire, fell back and wheeled away to safety on the other side of the lake. The gates clanged closed behind. She was inside the citadel of Mantova.
Chapter 35
And we have no desire strange places to see …
‘Arthur McBride’ (trad.)
On a grim October day, in the driving rain, a funeral procession crossed the rain-silvered piazzas of Mantova.
The procession was heading to the funeral of the Vicomte Richard St-Hilaire de Blossac, a noble fellow with a promising military career, who had been tragically killed in the company of his young wife, before he could join the French generals at Mantova. The sun dared not show his face – even the heavens were hung with black.
There were few mourners for the unfortunate vicomte; just a few military men, their voluminous black rain cloaks parting occasionally to reveal glimpses of their uniforms, splitting the dark, blue like lightning. To be truthful it was hard to notice them, for at the head of the cortège walked his widow. Of all the dreadful consequences of the vicomte’s untimely death – that he would never again see a sunset, or hear an aria, or taste a Chablis – the most grievous was surely that he had quitted the company of his young wife. She was a rare beauty dressed all in black, her waist greyhound slim, her plain satin gown scattered with jet and bejewelled with raindrops. Her hair was high and powdered white, a single long ringlet twining down the full décolletage. A tiny black veil, embroidered with tiny black stars, both concealed and revealed a face of transcendent beauty.
Erect and dignified, the widow St-Hilaire de Blossac led the small cortège from the Palatine church of Santa Barbara across the green grass of the Cortile della Cavellerizza, under the Porta Nuova and through the fractured rain-sheer reflection of the Palazzo Ducale, in the direction of the Castillo di San Giorgio.
The comtesse looked devastated by grief, but in actuality her grief was spent for the moment. Now she had but one concern uppermost in her mind – to reach the shelter of her new apartments before the rain washed the powder from her red hair.
Safe in her chamber Kit sank down on the chaise before the mirror, exhausted. It did not matter that the spots of rain had mottled her powder and given her russet spots, like an African cat. But still, she took up the powder and the horn and puffed at the rusty patches herself. She could not be easy showing her red hair any more – she associated it so much with Kit Kavanagh. The Comtesse Christiane had white hair, always immaculate. Only when she was satisfied that her hair was white once more did she survey the ruin of her face in the looking glass.
She’d been taken by surprise at the strength of her own grief. At the counterfeit funeral, she had collapsed entirely. She had listened, initially, to the priest’s intonation in formal Catholic French and Latin, but the words of the funeral service took hold of her, jostling with the other words in her head, the names of the generals at her shoulder, their wives, their sons, their birthplaces. Kit did not have her fan with her, so was relying on her overcrowded brain, and it was easy, at first, to keep her dignity. But the words of the funeral service insinuated themselves into her ears, and the altar boy who had been given a silver franc to sing the Te Deum had a sweet and soaring voice, recalling Lucio Mezzanotte to her mind. At the paternoster, she slid the wedding band from her finger, the mock wedding ring she had worn only for the last three months, and laid it on the cold marble tomb. And then she gave in.
She forgot about the Comtesse Christiane, and was suddenly herself, crying, really crying, sobbing uncontrollably. She cried for the unknown soldier, the corpse from the carriage and for his mother his sisters and his daughters and all those who had loved him; those that did not have a grave to visit and would likely not even be told about his secret and necessary death. Then she was crying for Richard, and she could see him as she’d known him, back in Dublin, when she’d loved him without reservation. She cried for the days when the handsomest maid in the village married the handsomest boy, when words meant what they said, when dances were hot and inexact and sweaty and bore no resemblance to the stately minuet. Feeling wrung out, and empty of tears, she took a deep breath. She felt, oddly, that it was Richard who had been given the rites he deserved. She felt much better, but looked much worse. She took up the alum paste and then set it down again. There was no profit in her trying to repair such a wreck herself – she had no skill with face-painting. She rang a silver bell for her maid.
Kit had been given a small, comfortable apartment in the Castillo di San Giorgio, one of the oldest parts of the Ducal Palace set upon the edge of the glassy green lake. As well as the many smooth and silent servants who were at her disposal she had been given a dedicated maid to wait upon her, a minor Mantovani noblewoman with good French named Livia Gonzaga.
As Livia painted and powdered, Kit thought over the events of the last week, unable to believe she had already been in Mantova for seven days. After her dreadful, precipitate arrival she had been helped from Ormonde’s carriage by a brace of guards and taken to t
hese very rooms. She had been fed and rested, by a kindly Mantovani nun who gave her a black gown and the news that her husband was indeed dead. Placid now, and genuinely numb, she had allowed herself to be cleaned and dressed, and then a man came to her rooms, an erect and impressive man of middle years who introduced himself as Louis d’Aubusson de La Feuillade, Duc de Roannais and Maréchal de Camp of the French Army.
Louis d’Aubusson, she recited to herself; joined the French Army at aged fifteen, raised his own regiment of horse and fought in the Nine Years’ War, all before he reached his majority. Knows everything there is to know about the army. Be careful.
Gently, he asked her about her husband, his family and his service record, and she was able to reply in detail and with a quiet dignity. He nodded throughout, and then he said: ‘And now, the delicate matter of your husband’s funeral. I implore you, Comtesse, to understand that in no way would I address you on such matters if the vicomte’s family were at hand. But as they are so far away in Poitiers the unhappy task falls to me to ask you about certain particulars. I assure you, madam,’ he went on, ‘that even though your husband passed away on foreign soil, he will be given all proper rites. The medals that were pinned to his chest – would you like to keep them or is it your will that they be buried with him?’
In the carriage she had barely noticed the medals pinned to the corpse as if it were a tailor’s dummy. Ormonde had been thorough indeed. But she was not put out of countenance – Ormonde had laid it down that Richard St-Hilaire would wear the Order of St Louis and had won the St Martin medal at the Battle of Catinat.
‘It is my will that he be buried with them,’ Kit said. Who knew where Ormonde had got them? Stolen, stripped from another poor corpse? Let that unknown soldier keep them to honour him in his cold grave.
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