"You honor me." Domenico yawned. "But I am a poor judge. I can see beauty" — his eyes lingered on my face—"only in one thing at a time."
Amerighi's curving brows lifted. "I do not ask you to judge its beauty, cousin, only its value. You said earlier, as I remember, that only that which is prized to the full has any true value—I would like your confirmation that this treasure of mine is worth the store I set by it."
Domenico shrugged. "As you will."
"Then, lady," Amerighi turned to me, "will you go with my cousin into the gallery there? The servants should have set everything in readiness—I will bring my treasure to you there. I crave your pardon if I am an unpracticed host," he added dryly, "but I am a creature of habit, and my solitude has been a long habit."
I rose to my feet and murmured something as his lips, dry and warm, lingered on the palms of my hands. As he straightened, Amerighi's eyes traveled past me and widened slightly; but before I could turn, Domenico had come up behind me and his fingers gripped mine hard.
"Felicia, come."
Unaccountably I shivered and saw a smile, half-sly, half-amused, settle on Amerighi's face.
"Felicia? Is that what Marcello is called when he is not Marcello?"
I looked back from the archway, and his expression was grave again. "Yes, Your Grace."
He nodded. "It fits you," he said quietly and vanished out of the circle of candlelight.
There were lamps, silver and glass, burning the whole length of the gallery, making it nearly as bright as day. The moment we were out of the duke's earshot, Domenico gripped me by the shoulders and spun me around to face him.
"You are grown great with my monkish cousin."
I answered in a tight voice, "Why, should I spurn his courtesy? Heaven help your embassy, then!"
"Take care it does not go beyond courtesy," he retorted and released me with a brutal little shake.
I clutched savagely at the edges of the blue cloak. I knew that this was only a spurt of the anger he had had to hide from Amerighi, but the grimness on his face was frightening. I said hesitantly, "Your Grace..." but he cut me short.
"You cannot call me that any longer. I am not Duke of Cabria until I have won Cabria back again. You must force your stubborn tongue around the syllables of my name or else leave me nameless as well as all the rest."
"I cannot call you by anything but your title!"
"You must learn. I am not the only duke here, remember— unless you call me by my name, I and my cousin will answer you in a perpetual chorus."
"Your Grace..."
"Domenico. The word is not poisoned. Say it."
I shook my head. I was trembling, and I stared at the floor to avoid his gaze, fiercely studying the black and white slabs at my feet.
At last he said dangerously, "Would you rather beg the freedom of my cousin, then? He would be glad to have you so familiar, I do not doubt, and spare you this confusion."
"I could not even if I wished to—I do not know his name, except his surname."
"It is Niccolo," a grave voice said from the doorway, "and I beg you to make use of it if it pleases you. I, too, have been wondering how to avoid this throng of graces. Do you dislike my cousin's name, lady?"
"No. But it would be wrong for me to use it." I could not say that uttering his name would be the symbol of my last defeat, an admission of the love he would despise if he knew it. Instead I said, "Or yours either, Your Grace. What is fitting that I could call you?"
He came forward, his charming smile lighting his cadaverous face. "You can 'my lord' me if you wish," he responded dryly. "I think my consequence will bear it."
I laughed, and beside me Domenico drew a sharp breath. After a moment he said lightly, "Is that the treasure you spoke of, Cousin?"
"Yes." Niccolo Amerighi's fingertips caressed the carved surface of the silver casket he held. "In a moment I will show it to you—forgive me your poor entertainment this evening." His gaze swept the empty gallery. "It compares but ill with all I hear of the revels at Fidena. You must blame my monkishness."
Domenico's fingers flexed slightly, but he made no other movement; the elder man watched him a moment and then laughed.
"I will tease you no longer. Will you hear my decision on the request you made to me?"
The bright head came up sharply, and a hiss like a cat's broke from Domenico.
For an instant Amerighi gazed as though hypnotized at the blazing beauty confronting him, then he said in an unemotional voice, "I find I am strangely loath to do you favors; I will not lend you my army out of love, but I will give you the chance to win it from me. What will you hazard for it?"
Domenico's tautness relaxed and he shrugged, the smile on his lips a sneer of self-mockery. "Cousin, I am indebted to you for the clothes I stand up in!"
"And it irks you to be indebted to me."
Domenico gave a small, choking laugh. "Faith, yes!"
"So you will not go to hazard to regain what you have lost?"
"What will you take?" The lips smiled, but the black eyes were bitter. "My stable? Or the Great Seal of Cabria? I have nothing else of value."
"You underestimate your worth."
"I know your army to be worth more than my whole estate." Domenico's voice frayed, and I saw the tight rein he was keeping on his temper. "Must I be plainer?"
"But what is worth, my dear cousin? I might ask half your dukedom as a stake or set my army against a piece of silk ribbon. The army would be unchanged. But it would be worth as much, or as little, as I would demand and you could give. Suppose I set a value on something of yours that would counterpoise the worth of my army?"
Domenico took a step forward, and I saw him start to draw off his ring.
"I propose that we each stake what the other deems most valuable." Amerighi's face was judicially calm. "In your case you will require me to stake my army; in my case—what pleases me."
"And on what are we to hazard?"
"On a game of chess." I had to bite my lips to contain my hysterical laughter as Amerighi answered. "Black against white, a game of subtle strategy not unlike the one we are playing now. It should appeal to you, Cousin—you were taught to play when you were a child, were you not?"
Domenico nodded. There was a white look around his mouth, and Amerighi smiled.
"I thought so. And for my part, I have played whenever I had the means and the opponents, since I was a boy. I played against my sisters until they married and left my father's palace— but no matter. You are agreed that chess shall be our game?"
A little of the nightmare look faded. "It will serve."
"Good." An expression—it might have been triumph—flickered over Amerighi's face and left it calm again, faintly cunning, intent. "Then you Will play for my soldiers, to win back your dukedom for you. And I..."he broke off.
"Well?" It was curt with a boy's impatience.
"I will play you for your mistress. She is yours, I take it?"
I thought the silence would last forever; I know I swayed where I stood. When Domenico spoke at last there was a queer tremor of laughter in his voice.
"Certainly, Cousin! What should she be else? I bought her from her fat hog of a brother for thirty pieces of silver. It seemed apt," he added sardonically.
"A bargain." Amerighi's hazel-green gaze ran over me.
"A very fair bargain. I got her for the price of the brother's deafness when my men brought her away, and his dumbness thereafter. Either he did not know what a treasure he possessed, or being her brother, could find no use for her this side of damnation."
The light, cruel words jerked Amerighi's speculative gaze away from me with a look that was furtive, almost alarmed. "Then you are content to stake her?"
"Content, no, but I will do it." The white hand flashed out with the speed of a snake striking and gripped Amerighi's pale fingers. "Now I cannot change my mind without perdition."
"True, you cannot." Amerighi looked down at the clasped hands. "And neither ca
n I."
I was not listening as they talked quietly together; my thoughts were circling with a sickened, dazed fascination around the abominable fact that I had been bought. Bought like a heifer or a mare to fill the Duke of Cabria's bed. No wonder Antonio had not searched for me when I disappeared. No wonder he had seemed to be asking my forgiveness the night he was brought to the Palazzo della Raffaelle—he must have thought I knew then, my loving brother who told me he had made a fine profit in his bargain with the stranger.
And now it was too late for the knowledge to make any difference, for Domenico was weary enough to let me go. I might have held him for a night or two longer, but the Duke of Ferrenza's private army was more important to him now than any woman, and all I could do for him was to acquiesce and let the luck of a game decide my future—whether I stayed with him on sufferance until he married his Savoyard duchess or lay with the Duke of Ferrenza for his sake and kept his bargain for him.
Amerighi had put down the silver casket on a writing desk by the wall and was scribbling rapidly on a piece of paper. Domenico's fair head was bent, watching him, but as I looked, his eyes lifted to my face, and I caught a glimpse of an extraordinary blaze in them. The white lids drooped again swiftly, but I was shaking as though I had seen into hell.
Niccolo straightened and smiled his charming smile as though he had done nothing out of the ordinary. "My deed of gift, Cousin; yours, if you win the game. It gives you the command of all my forces, to be maintained at my cost, until you are reseated in Cabria. Does this suffice you?"
"Amply." The fair face was like a mask. "Do you also require a deed of gift?"
"I will trust your promise. The lady is here: If I beat you, I have only to reach out and take—the White Queen." He finished with an odd note in his voice.
"Well, it is done!" Domenico turned sharply away. "Let us make an end of this quickly."
"Wait!" Amerighi's thin hand checked him. "I have not yet shown you my treasure of treasures."
Domenico halted, curiosity warring with impatience in his face. "Later, good Cousin. I would be done with this folly."
"I will not play until you have seen this." Amerighi picked up the casket and put it into Domenico's hands.
With tightened lips, Domenico flicked the catch, put back the lid, and drew out the casket's contents. It was a sheaf of papers, slightly yellowing, the corners dog-eared as though it had been much read, closely written in a cramped, somehow hasty hand.
Amerighi's voice quivered when he spoke. "You do not recognize the hand?"
Domenico shook his head, scanning the lines. "No." "Read on, then, and you will."
The silver-fair head bent as Domenico's eyes ran cursorily over the writing, and suddenly he froze, expression draining from his face, leaving it blank as a dead man's. Then slowly, as though he feared the movement might break some spell, he raised his head and looked unbelievingly into Amerighi's fanatically bright eyes.
"Yes," the beautiful voice said gently, "my sister Isabella. She wrote that document the night she died, and your creature della Quercia sent it to me—for a keepsake. I have treasured it for eleven years."
"I will not read it." Domenico's voice was a threadlike whisper. "I will not."
"But you must." Amerighi sounded like a schoolmaster reasoning with a willful child. "It much concerns you and your father. Begin .there." The thin ringless hand flicked a leaf where the corner was turned down, and I thought suddenly, he knows it all by heart. Domenico turned the page, and as he looked, a strange little sound of pure animal revulsion tore from his throat; then he stood immobile, a look of terror growing in his face as he read.
I wrenched my gaze away and turned to Amerighi, who was watching with a smile on his lips and pure, malign triumph flaming green in his eyes.
"My lord..."
He answered without moving. "Do not interrupt me, lady. I have waited eleven years for this moment."
"But I do not understand." In desperation I moved towards him, interposing myself between him and Domenico. The green eyes flickered, wavered, and then rested on my face. "What has this writing to do with your wager?"
Amerighi smiled. "It is quite simple. I want my dear cousin—my nephew, to speak more exactly—to know why I will do him no favors. He drove my dearest sister to kill herself." His voice twisted. "And damned her soul, so that now I shall not see her in heaven. Should I let him think I have forgiven him that?"
I faltered, "Your sister... Isabella?"
"Yes." The duke's thin mouth twisted for an instant. "The sweetest sister who ever drew breath and the dearest lady to me. I thought my heart would break when she was married to the Duke of Cabria, but I did not know then that I was bidding her good-bye for ever. She swore when we parted that she would never love another man as she loved me, but I feared for her faith if her swinish husband proved kind—I never thought to fear the lust of her stepson."
Domenico did not move. Only his hand clenched on the manuscript, tighter and tighter.
"But you are mistaken," I protested. "The duchess Isabella was murdered by a Lutheran fanatic...."
"... in her chapel, was not that the story? I know it was the tale that devil's priest invented to hide the truth, but I did not think even Cabrians would believe it—why should the Lutherans kill my sister, who was sweet and God-fearing, when they should strike at that lecherous Antichrist, her husband?"
"I do not know, but it is true—a man was hanged for the murder."
Amerighi said levelly, "What is a man's life to a della Raffaelle? Any of them would hang twenty men to prove one lie: The Lutheran did not murder my sister; he was hanged as a scapegoat for the Raffaelle pride."
I fought the conviction that he spoke the truth, but I knew that pride. Even now it kept Domenico unmoving, his face set in lines of rigid endurance, bearing a waking nightmare without a change of expression. I turned back to Amerighi almost desperately. "How do you know?"
"Because Isabella was planning to kill herself when she wrote that... confession, she called it. She dared not tell her father confessor what had happened: She was ashamed. When she had written the whole story in that document, she went back into the chapel and stabbed herself. Well, Cousin." He looked around as Domenico raised his head. "Are you proud of you conquest now?"
Domenico's eyes were like stones. He said in a sweet, spine-chilling whisper, "It was late, and I thought everyone was abed until I heard her voice; I had taken a torch to go back to my own chamber, and I heard her as I passed the chapel door. I went in, and she was kneeling in front of her precious Holy Virgin with her back to the door, and she did not see me at first. I thought I would stay and hear her prayers, to learn if such a dry stick of a woman could want anything—she was always a poor, bloodless creature, with nothing but her beads and her pride for company. And I heard her praying for deliverance" — his voice festered suddenly — "from the sin of loving me — she had preached to me of purity and chastity until my head was ringing with texts; she had even banished some waiting wench of hers I had gotten with child, and all the time she only wanted me to take her... my father's wife! She could not endure it, she said. She would rather die than live without me if the Holy Mother would not purge her of her sin. All I thought was that she was not so pure after all; it seemed too good a jest to let go. So I spoke to her and told her she could have what she desired, and she looked at me as though..."
"As though?" Amerighi prompted insistently.
"As though she had seen a ghost."
One white hand reached blindly towards me, and I caught it between both mine. The fingers curled over, tightening, leaving livid marks where they gripped, but I hardly noticed the pain; I only knew that at last I would learn why Domenico's sleep was broken by Isabella's unhappy ghost.
Amerighi moistened his lips. "And then?"
"I took her, there on the floor of the chapel, and silenced her sermons. She was like every other woman, clinging and whining for more, like a bitch in heat."
I felt suddenly cold, and my fingers were lifeless in his.
He said, still in that icy breath of a voice, "I left her there, just as she was—there was no love in it, I told her so; she must be content with that once—and I thought no more of it. But when I went back the next day to see how she fared, she was still lying there."
"As though she had not moved all night," I said softly. Domenico's face wore the look of nausea it had had in the throes of his worst nightmares, and his eyes were like black wells of nothingness.
"I thought she was sleeping until I saw the floor..." His voice choked in his throat. "All red..."
Amerighi drew a long breath. "She would not have spared herself. But she could have spared me."
Domenico looked up sharply. "No. It was the work of a creature who hated women. I had the slave's hands cut off for it before my face."
Amerighi responded, watching him. "It might be that my sister hated her own womanhood... then."
Domenico did not answer. His expression did not alter by the flicker of an eyelash, but the hand in mine was suddenly so still that I expected all its living warmth to ebb away.
"Lady," Amerighi said reprovingly, "you must not cling so to my good cousin. You anticipate the ending of our game."
It was then that I realized how much a sham was his unnatural self-control. Under the assumed calm his thin body was quivering with excitement; his greedy gaze clung like a leech to Domenico's face as it searched for the smallest sign of pain and to the tiny involuntary flexing of Domenico's fingers as my hand fell away from his. I was reminded of a man prodding at a pain-drugged leopard. On Amerighi's set face was a look of craving which spoke strangely of the love he had borne his dead sister. As he watched my hands fall slowly to my sides, he gave a tiny chuckle, like a gleeful schoolboy.
"Come now, to our business."
Chapter Eleven
The chessboard was inlaid in a tabletop, squares of gold and silver set in shining marble. The table stood at the far end of the gallery, a chair on either side, and from a drawer beneath it Amerighi produced the men and set them out, black against white, gold against silver, in gleaming precious ranks.
Denys, Teresa Page 35
