A Name in Blood

by Matt Rees

  The sound of a scuffle above him awoke Caravaggio. He wondered what time it was. When the hatch opened, the night was at its darkest point. Roero has come to finish it. He let his hands fall and relaxed his body.

  ‘Michele, let’s go.’ Fabrizio slipped the ladder down to him.

  He climbed out. The slaves given him by the Grand Master crouched over the body of the guard. One of them prepared to club the fallen soldier’s head, but Fabrizio held him at the wrist.

  ‘I told these two you’d grant them their freedom if they’d help you.’

  The Africans watched Caravaggio like angry prey. They rolled the unconscious guard into the guva and shut the hatch.

  ‘I’d advise you not to write up their emancipation papers until they’ve rowed you to Sicily. Otherwise, they might just drop you in the sea.’ Fabrizio pulled him towards the battlements.

  A grappling iron anchored a rope to an empty sentry post. Fabrizio signalled for the Africans to climb over the wall. They went quietly into the darkness below, their forms indistinct against the foaming water on the rocks.

  ‘The Venerable Council is going to expel you from the Order, Michele,’ Fabrizio said. ‘The Grand Master will have no choice but to extradite you to Rome.’

  ‘This rescue – it’s a risk for you.’

  Fabrizio averted his eyes with the resignation of a man for whom all perils were past. ‘My mother has protected you all your life, Michele. I promised her I’d guard you in Malta.’

  Caravaggio slipped over the wall and held the rope. He gave Fabrizio a searching look. The nobleman smiled. ‘It’s like the games we played in my mother’s courtyard when we were children. Keep the memory of those times with you, even if our other intimacies are painful to recall.’

  ‘I wanted you just as much. I’ve tried to forget that, but I can’t.’

  ‘Nothing is ever forgotten, Michele. It’s the curse of the world.’ Fabrizio gripped Caravaggio’s wrist. ‘Hold the rope under your arm. Push out with both legs at once. Lower yourself down a few stones at a time.’

  Caravaggio sensed tenderness in the strong hold Fabrizio had on his arm.

  ‘At the bottom, follow the slaves to the head of the point. There’s a boat waiting there. One of my sailors will steer you to Sicily.’

  ‘I shan’t forget this, Fabrizio.’

  ‘Neither shall Roero. Keep that in mind and let it inform your conduct. You’ll have him in pursuit now, as well as the Tomassonis.’ Fabrizio checked to be sure the guards of the watch weren’t approaching. ‘When I was in prison, I plotted an escape. I wanted to run away from death. You, Michele, seem to pursue it.’

  Caravaggio’s hands rubbed raw, as he measured the speed of his rappel. The sea in the harbour below seethed as if it were greedy for him. He made it down and followed the silent Africans along the edge of the water. Behind him, he heard the grappling iron slap into the water where Fabrizio had tossed it.

  A high-sided wooden rowing boat bounced at the end of the walkway. The slaves glanced along the foot of the fortress to the barred caves where they had been captive.

  Fabrizio’s man prepared to cast off. ‘Get a move on, in the name of Christ,’ he hissed.

  The slaves settled at the oars. The sailor shoved off and took up the tiller. Caravaggio craned towards the battlements for a sight of Costanza’s son.

  Within an hour, the lantern lights of Malta and all the knights and the works he had painted there slipped beneath the horizon.

  III

  SICILY and NAPLES

  The Head of Goliath

  1608

  8

  The Flagellation of Christ

  In the Palermo dawn, he was alone. The early light glimmered off the tacks attaching his canvas to its frame. But no companion watched the sun cross his face.

  He lay on his front, fully dressed and with his arms outstretched, like a man who had been assaulted by an attacker approaching unseen from behind. In the heat of the summer, he had sweated through the night, clothed and armed for a quick getaway in case his murderer should come. Shapes moved in the shadows and he tracked them, holding his breath. The shutters creaked as the wood expanded in the heat of the first sunshine. Their every click and rasp made his heart thrash.

  Perhaps his killers would come today. I’d almost welcome the company.

  He imagined the saints in the dawn of the day of their martyrdom. They had consolations unknown to him. They were certain of the fate of their souls. But when he pictured their deaths, he saw the bodies they left behind. Slaughtered, bloodless meat.

  He leaned over his tray of pigments. ‘Good morning, my only friends,’ he murmured. The clay dug near Siena, filled with iron and making a yellow-brown oil, or burned in a furnace for the red-brown he loved to use; red ochre also from the Tuscan hills; St John’s White, made from quicklime by Florentine monks; green earth quarried near Verona; and the most expensive, ultramarine blue, ground from lapis lazuli that was mined in the land of the Khans beyond Persia – he touched them all. They were like a cooling salve on a wound.

  He descended the stairs to the kitchen. An old Franciscan monk laid a bowl of thin cabbage soup before him. ‘How’s our Nativity progressing, Maestro Michele?’

  ‘Almost done.’ Caravaggio had finished the canvas two days before. He lingered over it, fearful of what he might encounter if he were to leave his studio.

  ‘God bless you, Maestro. Where will you go when it’s completed?’

  The minced cabbage in the soup was sparse. He noted the skin of a bean floating in the broth, but when he trawled his spoon through the dish he found no trace of the rest of it. ‘I haven’t considered that, Brother Benedetto.’

  Only when he was working did he not feel as though he were heading downhill. He tried not to think about the future, because he knew the dangers and hardships he faced. He could hardly explain that to the monk. The Franciscans sought out mortification of the flesh among the poor. For all he knew, Brother Benedetto had skinned the bean and thrown away its meat when he made the soup. ‘Wherever I go, Brother, I’ll miss your cooking. Where else will I find these sumptuous delicacies?’

  Benedetto laughed. ‘You’re an odd one, Maestro Michele.’ He leaned on his knife to cut through a loaf of cheap spelt-flour. The bakeries gave the bread to the Franciscans when it was too stale even for a pauper to dip in his gruel. ‘Brother Camillo said you raged at him the other day, because he suggested you wash your clothes.’

  Caravaggio slurped his soup.

  ‘You told him they might come to take you while you were naked. Who’re they, Maestro?’

  ‘Innkeepers who wish me to steal your luxurious recipes for them.’

  He slouched up the stairs to his studio. He had painted this Nativity for the Oratory of San Lorenzo, intending to give the Virgin the face of Lena. But when he came to depict her gazing at the naked baby on the straw, he had been unable to clear his mind of her pale, perspiring, suffering face after she lost their child. He had painted the features of the Maltese girl from the Beheading instead.

  The few times he had been out into Palermo, suspicion had exhausted him. Every door through which he passed and every sentence he uttered seemed to be a trap, a means by which he might give himself away, make himself known to his murderers. He thought he had seen one of the Tomassoni brothers in the street. He chased after the man, but didn’t catch him. Then he fled, when he thought he glimpsed Roero outside the Spanish Viceroy’s palace. As he ran, he wondered if he had lost his mind. It makes no difference. They’ll come for me, even if I’m mad.

  In the middle of the day, he started to think that even the beanskin had been an illusion and that the soup had been nothing more than discoloured water. He touched the bones of his face under his beard and found them prominent. His ribs, too, pressed at his skin when he lifted his shirt to look. Hunger overcame his fear.

  He went out into the street and headed towards the Norman palace to find an inn. After so many days in the darkness
of the monastery, the sun seemed to penetrate his skull. Dizzy, he leaned against the wall outside a pie shop. His eyes blanked, everything was dark. The smell of the baking pastry made him desperate and weak. When his sight returned, the colours were bright and flat, like the first oils laid onto a painting before they were shaded.

  A dog scampered out of the pie shop with a sausage in its mouth. The piemaker chased it and cursed. A look at Caravaggio and he was silent. Clearing his throat he returned to his shop. A woman passed with her basket, averting her eyes. Caravaggio squinted into the street. Smiling people quailed when they glanced at his face. What do they see? he wondered. They’re repulsed. As if they caught sight of a wounded cat run down by a cart. They know my fate, and they don’t want to think about it.

  He followed the piemaker into his shop, laid down a coin, and took a filled focaccia. He stuffed the food into his mouth. His tongue rolled between the soft strips of calf’s spleen and lung and throat cartilage. From the entrance of the pie shop, he glanced across the street through the passing mass of carts and people. He saw a man in the red surcoat of the Knights of Malta.

  Roero was staring up at the Franciscan compound. Narrowing his protuberant eyes, the knight crossed the road and entered the Oratory.

  Caravaggio spat the wad of bread and sweetmeats from his mouth. He rushed into the courtyard of the Franciscans. In his studio, he took up a small sack. Into it, he shoved his brushes and the pigments he hadn’t yet ground. He strapped on his sword and took his money belt from the locked box of stamped Spanish leather where he had stashed it.

  He leapt down the steps and ran through the gate. From the corner, he spied on Roero as he left the Oratory and went up the staircase to the studio. Thankful for the hunger that had driven him outside, he whispered a blessing for Brother Benedetto’s thin broth.

  At the port, the next boat was a merchant galley bound for Naples. Once aboard, he crouched behind a barrel, watching for Roero. The sailors avoided him as they prepared to cast off. Gulls hovered over the deck until they chased after the departing sun. The boat put out to sea.

  The Prince of Stigliano’s palace at the edge of Naples overlooked Chiaia and the ellipse of the bay out to the grottoes of Posilippo. For the past several years, the Marchesa of Caravaggio had lodged with her cousin the prince so that she might attend to affairs of property and inheritance around the city. Costanza Colonna sat on a stone bench beside the garden fountain, as Caravaggio waited upon her. She flicked her fingers against two letters in her lap. Her nails were pale and grey. Something in the letters tormented her.

  ‘The Spanish Viceroy has heard of your arrival in Naples.’ Costanza cleared her throat. ‘He orders you to complete The Flagellation of Christ that you left unfinished.’

  Caravaggio’s assent was grudging. The picture for the Church of San Domenico had left him uninspired. He had been glad to drop it when he took ship for Malta.

  ‘Everyone wants something from you, don’t they?’ Costanza said.

  And you, what do you want? he thought.

  She raised her hand, reaching for him, but the fingers clenched and she put her fist back in her lap. She stood and slowly rounded the fountain. ‘Look at this balustrade. It’s engraved with the crests of some of the most powerful families in the Italian lands. The Carafa, the Stadera, Morra, Capua, Orsini. These clans guard you, Michele, as a service to me, because I’m related to all of them.’

  The fish darted in the brown bottom of the fountain.

  ‘We’ll get you back to Rome, back to Lena.’ Costanza held one of the letters out to him. ‘It’s from her. When you reply, remind her that Naples is where Boccaccio met his love, Fiammetta. The poet said that to enjoy love it must be sensual, illicit, sweet and difficult.’

  ‘He didn’t know the half of it.’ Caravaggio turned the letter over. On the back, above the seal, was Lena’s name. His excitement mingled with suspicion. Few knew where to find him, and Lena was illiterate. The letter could be a trap. His hands trembled. She’s alive, and I may hope.

  ‘I need you too, Michele. As she does.’ Costanza’s neck flushed. ‘For Fabrizio’s sake.’

  ‘And only for him?’

  She twisted the wedding ring given by her long-dead husband. Her voice rose, scolding. ‘You have always eaten the bread of my house. Do I now ask so much of you?’

  ‘You ask nothing, my lady, though I would perform any service for you.’

  ‘Brother Antonio Martelli writes to me from Malta.’ She lifted the other letter as if it were a diagram of all the shame she had ever felt. ‘A sailor was intercepted sculling back from Sicily in a wherry a few days after you escaped the knights’ dungeon. He was a crewman of The Capitana, Fabrizio’s flagship. The sailor was taken by a knight named Roero. He didn’t last long under Roero’s tortures, but while he lived he confessed that Fabrizio had rescued you from the guva.’

  ‘Fabrizio.’ He covered his eyes with his hands. ‘What’s to become of him?’

  ‘If this knight Roero had gone to the Venerable Council, Brother Martelli says Fabrizio would’ve been suspended for a few months. But Roero took some of his friends to arrest Fabrizio. You remember a Brother Giulio?’

  ‘A bit of a joker.’

  ‘The joke’s on him now. Fabrizio refused to go quietly. He ran Brother Giulio through with his rapier and killed him.’ Costanza’s voice shattered into a sob. ‘My son languishes in the dungeon from which he helped you flee.’

  Caravaggio remembered the penalty for killing a knight. The sack, sewn up and thrown into the sea.

  Just as Lena came closer to him with the letter he held in his hand, his oldest friend moved into mortal jeopardy. ‘All my prayers, my lady, shall be for Don Fabrizio, and all my works shall be for him too.’ He strained his eyes towards the Sorrento peninsula, as though he might spy his friend’s corpse borne on the currents from Malta. Out in the bay, the two jagged peaks of the isle of Capri were a hazy indigo.

  In the street, Caravaggio felt mauled, as if the throng that packed Naples was blind and made its way by touch alone. A pair of women quarrelled at a vegetable stand at the crest of the hill leading to the Spanish palace. Children with their noses running and their red eyes streaming jostled around the vendors. Their knees were skinned and scabbed, and their bodies were daubed in filth as if some moralist had tried to paint clothing over their nakedness with mud. The people were feral, reacting to all movement and approach with fear, poised to strike out and bracing to take a blow. They moved like cats – a few quick paces, then they would search around for the next safe spot, hurry there, and assess the threats again.

  I’m a murderer, Caravaggio thought, but I may be the most innocent man for miles around. He touched the letter inside his doublet. He knew at once where he would read it.

  He went towards the oldest part of the city. Since his return to Naples, he had yet to visit the church which held the greatest of his works there. He entered the narrow streets, parallel blocks just as the first Greek settlers had laid them out, and crossed the Spaccanapoli, the long, straight scar that cut the city in two.

  Outside the taverns, Neapolitans lifted long handfuls of maccheroni and lowered it into their mouths, their heads cast back as if they might feed it directly through their throats and into their stomachs like sword swallowers. The wailing of the zampogna cut through the noise of the crowd, a shrill melody and a low bagpipe drone that reverberated in his very ribcage.

  He slipped into a pew before the altar of the Pio Monte. Lena gazed on him with compassion. She was Our Lady of Mercy, the Virgin he had painted surveying the crowded streets of Naples. He unfolded the letter and read.

  Dearest Michele,

  I write to you in the hand of your friend Prospero Orsi. I tell you this so that you may trust what I tell you, and you must not think that anyone but I speaks the words you read. Prosperino wishes you well, as he takes down my words.

  For a long time, I dared not contact you. I believed you did not want me. One da
y you were gone and, though Prosperino told me you had fled because you killed Signor Ranuccio, I knew you were ready to depart, whatever had happened. I do not say you killed Signor Ranuccio to have an excuse to leave me, but I do say it was not difficult for you to go.

  This week I heard from Cardinal del Monte’s gentlemen as I worked at the Madama Palace that you have returned from Malta to the Italian lands. Perhaps you do not wish to know me. In that case, destroy this letter. Still I must tell you that I wish you had not left and I wish to hold you in the night – Prosperino pretends to blush, and I blush too because I have never been a wanton woman and I have not become so in your absence.

  I love you, Michele. If your travels have shown you that I am your love and that you were mistaken when you left me in Rome, then come to me.

  I cannot leave Rome, or I would come and find you even though the road to Naples is dangerous because of all the bandits. I must look after Domenico, who is weak with fever, and my mother, who has gone blind and cannot move the left side of her body.

  My own health is poor too, amore. My work is hard, because I must stand in the Piazza Navona with my vegetables and the Tomassoni women sometimes scorn me and beat me there. But Cardinal del Monte’s steward assigns me easy work out of regard for you, which gives me hope that at least the Cardinal believes you love me.

  Come to me, amore – Do not make faces, Prosperino – If you have forgotten me, Michele, do not write to tell me. But, also, do not return to Rome. I would not be in the same place as you and be without you.

  I go often to Sant’Agostino and I stand before The Madonna of Loreto. You were right: no one now pays attention to Maestro Raphael’s fresco. They come only to see your painting. Though I have stood there many hours, none has stopped to tell me that I look like the Madonna. My features are too tired perhaps, or these last few years have been unkind. But I think of those times when you painted me and when you showed me the finished painting and took me into your bed – Prosperino! – I am your Madonna, and I will be with your spirit wherever your work and heart take you. Let it be the will of God that they bring you home to me.