by Matt Rees
‘I’d have thought you could find people who’d torture for nothing. For the pleasure of hearing a man scream.’
‘No doubt. But I prefer to know that the only one who relishes the struggles of the prisoner is Our Lord, so that He may soonest bring down the revelation of confession. Everyone else in here merely does his job, does God’s work.’ He signalled for the African to be lifted.
The torturers gripped the wheel and cranked the hoist. The African screamed to the Virgin as he swung off his feet.
‘Who’s after this one?’ the Inquisitor asked the notary.
The clerk raised his voice to be heard over the African’s cries. ‘A Maltese whose neighbour says he saw him eat pork during Lent.’
The Inquisitor gestured for a further crank on the strappado. The African bawled. ‘Good. If the fellow can afford pork, he can afford a little something for us.’ Della Corbara twirled his fingers like a cutpurse and winked.
As he rushed away, Caravaggio imagined the exhausted face of Lena the way he had painted her as the Madonna in Our Lady of Mercy, looking down with resignation. The African could bellow to her all he wanted, it was Caravaggio she heard.
Wignacourt’s eyes were restless, drawn to his blond French page, Nicholas, who posed beside him holding a helmet and a knight’s surcoat. He seemed ready to reach out for the boy.
At his easel, Caravaggio watched from behind his curtain. He understood that the Inquisitor wanted him to testify that the knights were pederasts. That’d give him the power to extract anything from these men – all their influence and wealth. Even to destroy them, as their Templar brothers once were.
He told himself to concentrate on his work. This nervous wheedling face on the verge of a forbidden seduction wouldn’t do for the Grand Master’s portrait. It’d be as if I gave evidence just as the Inquisitor wishes, and the knights would know it too. God help me if I cross them. ‘Your Serene Highness,’ he said, coming from behind the curtain. ‘Who are you? A Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. A noble of Picardy and France. A battle veteran of the naval confrontation at Lepanto. An administrator, a man of God. A warrior, a commander. Which?’
‘All of these. What do you mean?’
‘No, these things are what you are. I asked who you are.’
Wignacourt clapped his hands impatiently. ‘Make yourself clear, man.’
‘I may show what you are by the suit of armour, the baton of office, the knight’s surcoat that your page Nicholas holds. But I may show who you are only by the expression I paint on your face.’ He approached the Grand Master, his gaze locked onto the watery blue eyes. ‘You must show me the man who inspires his soldiers. Imagine you stand before the knights in the moment of battle. Who’s the man who leads them? What qualities do they see when they look at you? Why do they allow themselves to be led by you?’
Wignacourt raised his head and took a long slow breath. Stern and rough, inspired. Pompous, too.
That deals with the Inquisitor. Caravaggio took the Grand Master’s chin between two fingers and turned it to the left. And that takes care of the wart on his nose. Let’s get to work.
A Maltese kitchen boy from the Inn of the Italian Knights modelled the Grand Master’s suit of armour. The boy’s younger brother sat in the shadows grinding pigments.
The details of the metal would take more than a week – its glowing highlights, the curve of the breastplate, the overlaying joints. Caravaggio painted a glittering dash of greyish white light onto every tiny link in the chainmail over the groin between the hip plates. He was glad of the opportunity to work in silence, without having to comport himself before the Grand Master. If he made this man happy, he might be redeemed by knighthood. And beyond that, perhaps, he could be reunited with Lena. But until he was a knight he would be unworthy even of painting her. He was ashamed, fearful, lonely, loveless. As a killer deserves to be.
He threw down his palette. He waved to the kitchen boys that he was finished for the day. They started unstrapping the armour.
A killer whose every thought was of death, no matter how much he attempted to turn his thoughts to love. He saw Ranuccio, dead at the point of his sword. The stab wounds that killed Prudenza. Anna, expiring of syphilis. Lena, alone. What would have become of them if he had never entered their lives? I’m like a rotten delicacy, he thought, seducing you with sugar on your tongue and then corrupting you from within.
He stood before his painting of the Grand Master and felt scorn. It was well made, but distant from his own soul. There was only one thing he could paint, no matter who peopled his canvases. From now on, it must be death, he thought. Until death is purged from me – or until it takes me.
Wignacourt entered, flushed from the hunt. Martelli and Nicholas the page were at his side. Roero waited in the doorway with a hawk on his gloved hand. His sallow skin glimmered with a sickly sweat, like a man with a fever. The Grand Master bent to examine the helmet Caravaggio had painted in the page’s hands. ‘By God, it looks as if the boy’s holding a severed head,’ he shouted.
Caravaggio’s features were stricken and aggressive.
‘Made the lad into a blond Salome, Maestro.’ The Grand Master pointed at Nicholas.
‘Perhaps, Your Serene Highness, beheading is on our friend Caravaggio’s mind,’ Martelli said, ‘subject as he is to execution in the Papal lands.’ He laid a comforting hand on Caravaggio’s back. The artist flinched as though stuck with a dagger.
‘What d’you think, Nicholas?’ Wignacourt said.
The young page glanced at Caravaggio. ‘The Maestro has captured your heroism, Sire.’
The Grand Master’s jaw firmed, stirred by his own image. He reached out absently to touch the boy’s neck. His fingers lingered in his short blond hair. ‘And you, Nicholas, see how handsome you are beside me.’
The boy dropped his glance to the floor. Caravaggio felt a shudder of alarm. In the portrait, Nicholas seemed almost to be painted on a different plane to the Grand Master. Beside the stiffness of Wignacourt’s armour, the page’s clothing was soft, his lace cuffs delicate, his pantaloons rich as they dropped to his scarlet stockings. He stood out, as if he were the true subject of the work, carrying a message in his knowing glance.
I saw the danger, but I’ve still drawn too much attention to the boy, Caravaggio thought. The painting is almost as clear as the evidence the Inquisitor asked me to give. You just had to show what you saw, didn’t you, Michele.
Caravaggio searched Roero’s face. I’m scared the guard dog won’t like my work. Roero was as still as the hawk on his wrist.
Wignacourt bounced on his toes with excitement. ‘Martelli, what do you make of it?’
The Florentine’s examination of the figure of the Grand Master was cursory. He ran his tongue around in his cheek, considering the painting of the page.
‘Well?’ Wignacourt said. ‘He has me?’
Martelli folded his arms over the cross on his surcoat. ‘He does, Sire. He has you exactly.’
7
The Beheading of St John the Baptist
On Fridays, as a token of humility, the Grand Master and his senior knights attended to the people they called Our Lords the Sick. Violent Mediterranean sunlight striped the main ward of the hospital through the high windows. Here the best and worst of the knights’ pastimes were banned. There was neither gambling nor reading aloud. But for the groans of the dying and the ramblings of the delirious, the long ward was silent.
Martelli led Caravaggio into the hospital. At the head of the aisle, Wignacourt ceremoniously stripped himself of the tokens of his power with the aid of the noble knights gathered around him. He laid aside his chain of office and handed Fabrizio the purse representing the Grand Master’s charity, as he took on the role of an ordinary penitent ministering to the patients.
Beside him, Roero rolled a trolley of broth and vermicelli. He filled a silver bowl and, with a grave nod, handed it to Wignacourt. The man whose titles included Guardian of the Poor of Jesus Christ carri
ed the food to a wretch babbling under stained sheets, as every Grand Master had done since the crusading knights founded their first hospital in Jerusalem five centuries before.
Martelli took a dish and stepped towards one of the beds. Caravaggio lifted the patient onto his elbows. Martelli fed the soup through parched lips, his murmurs of compassion barely audible above the desperate slurping of the sick man.
‘The Grand Master liked your portrait,’ Martelli whispered to Caravaggio. He laid the invalid’s head back on his pallet.
‘I’m most gratified.’
‘He has sent messages to the Pope requesting your pardon.’
Relief shivered in Caravaggio’s chest.
‘You see,’ Martelli said, ‘no one’s beyond redemption here.’
The patient under Wignacourt’s care choked on his soup and his face shaded a bright purple. The doctors from the Jesuit medical school rushed to the Grand Master’s aid.
‘Almost no one,’ Martelli said.
Roero held out a pewter dish of broth. Caravaggio hesitated, then took it. ‘That one over there,’ Roero said. His bloodshot eyes wept pus.
Caravaggio went towards a young blond man who lay very still. His shoulders were bare, his chest bandaged all around. Martelli glared at Roero and Fabrizio muttered something under his breath, but the knight only dabbed at his eye and filled another bowl.
The man in the bed took in Caravaggio with a blank look. When he saw the pewter dish, he tried to rise and spoke in a guttural tongue Caravaggio didn’t recognize. The patient dropped back onto his bolster and broke into a sweat.
‘Who is he?’ Caravaggio asked.
‘A German knight.’
‘Then the bowl is of the wrong metal. A knight must have silver.’
‘Roero did it deliberately. The pewter is a signal to this poor fellow. That’s why you’d like to protest, Brother Jobst, isn’t that right?’
The German’s gullet worked in desperation. Martelli soaked up the man’s sweat with a cloth.
‘What happened to him?’ Caravaggio asked.
‘Wounded in a duel.’
He watched the man struggle. ‘His opponent?’
‘Was a French knight.’
‘Was?’
Martelli cooled the German’s forehead with water. ‘But is no longer.’
‘Then, the punishment—’
‘To be tied in a sack and dropped into the sea – and to be shamed. Such matters of honour are more important to a man like Roero than life itself.’
The breath from the German’s nose was slow and loud, as if it were squeezed from an empty wineskin.
‘It’s not for nothing that Roero chose you to serve this man,’ Martelli said. ‘Though Jobst is a nobleman, his offence strips him of all nobility. He’s condemned as if he were a commoner.’
Caravaggio spilled broth on his wrist. He cursed and wiped it on his breeches. ‘Roero wishes me to witness what happens to those who don’t follow the rules of the Order.’
‘Perhaps.’ Martelli whispered a prayer over the German knight. ‘I think it more likely that he just wanted you to see a man die.’
He closed the German knight’s eyes.
Fabrizio paced the small grove of orange trees at the rear of his residence. For his two-year term, the Admiral of the Galleys was accorded this pleasant house down the hill from the Grand Master’s Palace. Five rooms deep and two wide, it was mostly given over to the administration of the fleet. For his private use he kept a tiny chapel dedicated to St Gaetano, where, that morning, he had prayed for a way to protect Caravaggio. He understood the threat to his friend in the cruelty with which Roero watched him when the German knight died.
The scent of the oranges in the heat shrouded the agitation of his spirits as if it were a foul odour. Even the air I breathe has to be sweetened, he thought. Will I never be able to bear reality? He kicked gently at the base of a murmuring fountain. No, I know life with a clarity few attain. That’s what makes it insufferable. He had killed a man, run him through in a duel. That murder cemented his kinship with Caravaggio. They had shared so much as boys. Now they had partaken of the most dreadful mystery, the snuffing out of a man’s being. But death had created their bond in the first place. The loss of Michele’s father had brought them together, when Costanza took the boy into her household. It perturbed Fabrizio to realize that mortality had always been the link between him and his oldest friend. What will break this chain? he wondered. Will it have to be another death? He pulled an orange from the nearest branch and pressed its rind to his nose.
‘It’ll rot soon enough.’ He tossed the fruit into the corner of the courtyard.
Glancing at the sun, he fretted that even the walk from the Italian Inn to the Admiral’s house put Caravaggio in danger. Roero could pick a fight with him any time. He squeezed his fists together. Fabrizio had disappointed his mother in so much; he couldn’t now fail to guard the man who had been like a son to her.
To guard him just as Michele had watched out for him. Fabrizio had been about nine that first time, an open guileless child. In the midst of a game with his older brothers, he had failed to see that the competition of hide and seek had transformed into a hunt with a vicious edge. His eldest brother Muzio had cornered him and thrashed him with a cane. The wickedness in his brother’s laughter had been a betrayal much sharper than the pain. Michele came to his aid and assaulted Muzio, dragging him away from Fabrizio. Their father whipped Michele for his offence against the hierarchy of the household.
His eyes stung with tears of regret. That’s what you remember of your childhood, he thought. The feeling of loneliness in your own family home. And now you’re alone again with the knights – alone, except for Michele.
He straightened up when he heard footsteps inside the house.
Caravaggio came across the flagstones of the courtyard. He kissed Fabrizio’s cheek and sat at his side on the stone bench.
‘You know my duty to my mother . . .’ Fabrizio hesitated. He feared Caravaggio would shut him down, as soon as he mentioned Roero.
‘It’s no less than my own duty to her.’ Caravaggio raised a finger and smiled. ‘Ah, you’re anxious about this Piedmontese bastard.’
‘Roero’s a vicious character.’
‘Are you worried for me? Or is it only that you want to please your mother, the Marchesa?’ Caravaggio lifted his chin. ‘I’ve no reason to fear Roero.’
Fabrizio shook his head. Honour must be upheld, even between two men who are as brothers. ‘Be careful. You know why he contends with you.’
‘Do I?’
‘It’s your birth, Michele.’
Caravaggio puffed out his cheeks. ‘He’s not the first nobleman to think me low-born.’
‘And look what happened last time.’
Caravaggio stroked his beard. The gesture was meant to indicate his lack of concern, but there was tension in the fingers, as though he was about to rip at the hairs in despair.
‘Come and live here,’ Fabrizio said. ‘You’ll be safe and we’ll be together as we were in our youth.’
‘I’m happy at the Italian Inn,’ Caravaggio snapped.
Fabrizio recoiled. Does he think I want him in my bed? ‘You’re at risk there. Here you have my protection.’
‘I’ll lock my door.’
‘But the company you keep —’
‘The knights? What’s wrong with them?’
‘They’re killers.’
‘Whereas you and I . . .’ Caravaggio let his remark hang. Fabrizio clicked his tongue. For a moment, he had forgotten that he had done a man to death. Caravaggio laid his hand on his leg. ‘You don’t have the space here for me to work. There’s another commission coming from the Order.’
This was what Caravaggio couldn’t give up, and Fabrizio knew it. His painting would be the payment Wignacourt required for the knighthood, and this honour would free him from a death sentence. But in accepting the knighthood, Caravaggio would make himself a target of the no
ble knights who wished to preserve the purity of their Order. Fabrizio remembered the taunts of his brothers and the way they had enraged Michele when he was a poor fatherless boy. A man like Roero couldn’t know what a profound sadness and rage he awakened in Michele. Or perhaps everyone knows it, except Michele. He still thinks there’s a way out of the trap fate has set for him on Malta.
Fabrizio clasped his head. ‘I’m sorry, Michele.’
‘What do you mean?’
Fabrizio was exhausted by the new responsibilities of command, by his concern for his old friend, by the fear that he would let his mother down after she had secured his release from his prison cell. ‘I’m alone, Michele.’ His voice quivered, fragile and faint, like the light of a single candle in a dark hall.
‘Not so. I’m just along the street.’ Caravaggio rose and ruffled Fabrizio’s hair. ‘I have work to do. I’ll see you soon, Admiral.’
The forced bonhomie in Caravaggio’s words stung Fabrizio. It was as if he had exposed his feelings to a distant uncle, not a man he had loved. He watched him disappear into the darkness of his house. He frowned at the trees. He could no longer smell the oranges.
Wignacourt invited the knights to admire his portrait in the Sacred Council chamber. He wore a steel collar and shoulder armour. His cloak was trimmed with sable and a violet cap set off his sun-beaten face. He beckoned Caravaggio, who came to kneel at his feet and kiss his hand.
‘A great adornment to our Order and our island, Maestro,’ he announced.
The knights circulated before the portrait. Wignacourt acknowledged their admiration.
The Inquisitor pushed to the front. Staring at the portrait, he gave a knowing chuckle. He edged through the crowd of knights to Caravaggio. ‘How do you do it?’
Caravaggio made a puzzled face.
‘How do you get such a likeness?’ della Corbara said. ‘Is it pure genius? Did you wake up one day and discover that your childish sketches had become masterful representations of life?’
