He still calculates distances like a mercenary, by forced march, she thought, as she watched him limp on down the path.
He moved quickly now, spurred on by the closeness of the goal, and it was not till the edge of the forest, under a copper beech that had once been one of her thrones, that she caught up with him. He had rested his shoulder against the trunk, his head angled around it. She knew his eyes were not for the long sight, that the building he stared at on the next rise was more blur than structure.
‘The Comet,’ he said, and the hope in his voice made her throat tighten.
Let it be as he wants, she prayed, Holy Mary, let him have his reward.
She did not usually conjure the names of the Church. She knew so little about it, despite all her brother’s efforts to save her. But a mother and her suffering son she understood.
They left the shelter of the wood and began to move cautiously into the vineyard. The light was still pale but it was enough for Jean to see what was wrong.
‘Look at the roses, Anne. They have not cut them back. How will they give warning of disease?’ He pulled at one, sucked at the finger that bled. ‘And look at the vines. Unpruned, since we left. And the weeds!’ He swished at some with his stick and she could see his excitement. ‘Lots of work when we get back. Come, let us see what they have done to the Inn. If it is as neglected as the fields, then no one will be there. We can move straight back in.’
They had covered half the ground, were fifty paces from the building when the side gate banged open. They froze, had not even the time to sink into the red earth, before a man emerged and began relieving himself against the wall. He was singing and even though Jean could see the gawdy clothes he was wearing he didn’t need his eyes to tell him what the man was. The tune was familiar, even if the words had changed a little since Jean’s day.
The farm lass, the weaver’s trull
They both will bend for me.
For I am he, who’s fit for she
Who craves the Mer-cen-ree.
A mongrel dog began barking an accompaniment to the song and ran from the gate, pulled up a pace out of it by the chain around its neck. He continued barking, his muzzle toward the watchers, until the soldier voided himself on its head. It yelped and ran back inside, to be followed by the laughing, yawning man fumbling at the ties of his breeches.
When she turned back to him, Jean’s eyes were downcast, his body shaking slightly. ‘We have seen enough.’ His tone was flat, dead. ‘Let us return to the city.’
‘Father, we don’t know how many of them there are. He may be alone.’
‘Mercenaries are never alone.’
‘You were.’ She put a hand on his arm, felt the shudder within it. ‘Father, rest by that broken wall, by the pine there. I will take a closer look.’
‘You will not.’ The voice quavered. ‘I forbid it. These are dangerous men.’
‘And we live in dangerous times.’ She squeezed his arm. ‘Wait for me over there, Father. I will not be long.’
And she was gone, walking swiftly around the corner of the outer wall. Jean took a step after her, cursing. But his legs did not seem to want to work properly and it took an effort to make his way even the short distance to the broken wall. Falling behind it, he wondered for a moment why he had never knocked it down. Crouching, his heart seemed to beat loud enough to echo around the crumbling brick, the sound bringing another echo, a memory, called up by the resiney scent of the overhanging pine. For the flash of that moment, the dawn light faded, the moon came up, he was gazing down at Beck’s naked body, striped by silver beams and realizing he had never seen anything more beautiful in his whole life. They had made love here the first time and later, when his vow to Anne Boleyn had been fulfilled and they came back here to live, when his body had recovered from all the torments it had been put through, they had made love here again, often. That was why he had never knocked down or rebuilt this wall, never altered any part of it. Their love had been moulded here, of pine needles and brick dust. Their children were conceived here, form of their joined forms.
And as he thought on them, the memory flashed away, replaced by his concern for one of them. Raising his head cautiously, he stared at the corner she’d disappeared around, and tried to draw his daughter back.
They’d approached from the rear of the inn, so Anne now moved to its front, facing the road that led to Montepulciano. Half the gate hung by one hinge, while all that remained of the other were the brackets that had held it. Peeking round, Anne could see up the drive to the house. It was unrecognizable from the gravelled path that had welcomed travellers to what had reputedly been the finest tavern in Tuscany. The small cypresses that had lined the path were gone, mere hollows in the ground now. Lemon, bergamot and olive had filled the yard with their fragrance, but these too had been torn up, fed to the insatiable flame of the fires that smouldered all around. Bodies sprawled before these blackened patches, heads resting on saddles or field packs, plumed hats covering faces, hands stretched toward the flagons and cups that had rolled away from them. In this, the dawn hour, the soldiers’ sleep was heavy with snores and the occasional muttered phrase.
There were fifty at least and that meant there were even more within the house, though looking up, Anne realized that the roof would not give better protection than the sky, as most of it was gone. So a hundred men – and their camp followers, for skirts were dotted among the breeches – now called the Comet home, though no one would do to their own home what these scavengers had done to hers.
She began to turn away from this desecration, tears in her eyes, when something made her pause. It sounded like a voice, though she was sure it did not come from one of the soldiers or their concubines. No more than a whisper, yet it carried from beyond the yard. The voice was sexless, timeless and it said, distinctly, ‘Come.’
There was no reason for her to enter. There were perhaps a hundred and more reasons why she should not. She had seen all she needed, a ravaging of her childhood home, the end of her father’s hope. Only further despair awaited within the danger. Yet the voice was compelling and somehow did not seem to threaten her. Taking a deep breath, she entered.
The path was as occupied with bodies as the lawn and she picked a wandering path between the clumps. When she was halfway across, a soldier, younger than the rest, threw aside the thin jacket spread to part cover him, grabbing at her ankle with a little cry.
She froze there, waited. He held her, squeezing tight, muttering some plea or prayer and so she bent down to him, drew the jacket back up to his neck, touched his hot forehead with her cool hand. She whispered, ‘Sleep, child. Be at peace.’ The boy calmed, a smile came, and he released his grip on her. She moved on. When she reached the main door, she hesitated. The courtyard was to her left, the place where she had first heard the tale of the woman, the Queen, for whom she was named.
It drew her. She moved inside, passed more bodies to the entrance there. The door to the courtyard was gone, taken to feed some soldier’s fire. As she stepped through the gap she saw the magnificent chestnut tree had gone the same way, whittled down to a stump that reached blackened spars waist high from the cracked tiled floor. It was like a broken barrel, could only be empty, yet she stepped forward to look within it.
Something glinted in the charred depths. She stretched a finger to it, rubbed the ash away. A tiny cross lay there, but she did not pick it up immediately. She knew it, though it was grimy now, its silver tarnished with the years, blackened with the smoke which must have passed over it as they burnt the tree around it. Its twin cross struts made it unique, something their father had brought from France. He had given it to Gianni one day, and the boy had loved it wholly and utterly from the first moment.
It had been hard between them for a while, as she knew it often was between fathers and sons. Erik had chafed under Haakon’s strict rule. But between Gianni and Jean it was different; especially after Gianni had returned from the monastery where Jean and Beck had reluc
tantly allowed the God-loving boy to go and study. He brought back not only an increased, almost fanatical devotion to God, but a pain lodged in his eyes. And his father’s godlessness now obsessed him. The cross had been Jean’s last attempt to reach his son with love.
She touched it now, let her fingers close over it, and the night filled with blossom and old smoke, the tiles under her feet became whole, and her mother was preparing food in the kitchen as Anne laid out the platters and knives on the table. But her mother was not singing and her father had gone to town, to trade he said, to hide, she’d said. And Gianni came to her, crying, the first time she’d seen that in years for he was near a man now. And he took her hand and pulled her up into the tree, leading her, climbing with one hand, holding her with the other, as if the two of them were one person, climbing like they used to, like they hadn’t done since Gianni came back from the monastery.
High up the branches, they heard their mother call them and he begged her with his eyes to stay silent. When Beck went inside again, he held the cross up before his tear-run face and said, ‘This will wait for me, Anne. I will come back for it one day. To prove that once he loved me.’ With swift strokes from a little hammer, he tacked the cross to the tree. And then he was gone, the supper growing cold for him, the cold spreading between her parents. And there was nothing Anne could do to warm it.
As the memory faded, she gasped. The cross was burning the centre of her palm, but she could not let it go, for the pain brought a vision of her brother, as he was now, the boy’s face hardened into a man’s. Determination was there, as it had always been, but cruelty was there too and something else – a zealot’s desire. She cried out as the metal scorched her but more because she looked into the vision’s eyes, her brother’s dark eyes, and knew he was about a great evil.
Then a voice suddenly spoke from beside her, the vision was snatched away and the cross slipped to the ground. Anne started, blinked and the voice spoke again.
‘There’s not enough work for us. We don’t need no new recruits.’
Anne turned to a woman, her skirt torn, its rear muddied, a ragged shawl around bony shoulders.
‘What?’ she whispered.
‘You heard!’ The woman’s voice was as hard as metal, the eyes dull and dead, the pox scars livid on her cheek. ‘Pretty thing like you? Think they’ll look at us after? Thought you’d cash in, eh? Leave now. Or I’ll do for you myself.’
The woman lifted her skirt, fingers moving to where steel gleamed. Anne stepped around her, bending to scoop up the cross from the ground. As she brushed past, the woman reached out, gripped the wrist that held it.
‘Heh, what’s this? What do you have here?’
The voice was louder now, and it brought mutterings from within, so Anne hit the woman as her mother had taught her to hit men, with the heel of her hand, striking up to the point of the chin. The woman’s head snapped back and Anne caught her before she fell, their faces close, sour breath from the woman’s lips, lowering her to the ground. Since voices came from the house now, she turned away, brushed past the stump, leapt and scrambled up and over the wall of the inner courtyard. The soldiers still slept beyond it and she threaded between them, leaving at the side gate, joining her father who rose anxiously from his hiding place.
‘By the Wounds, Anne, you were so long. I heard noise …’
‘Come. They have woken up.’
As she led him at a run through the vineyards, she heard a screech and then shouting from the house. They would be awake soon, all save the woman who could tell them what had happened. She would be unconscious a little longer, long enough for them to be deep within the forest.
As she ran, Anne opened her pouch and dropped the cross into it. She heard a clink as it nestled next to Guiseppe Toldo’s falcon.
Oh Gianni, she thought, what deeds are you about now?
They made Montalcino just after midnight, for Jean would barely rest and it was now Anne who struggled to match his stride. She had told him only a little of what she’d seen but it was enough to drive him forward, widening the distance between himself and his shattered dream. It had been such a little hope and, now it was crushed, there was only movement, pushing through his constant pain, the journey from despair to desired oblivion.
The gates were barred and the guards there did not recognize him, would not let him in. Fortunately, Giscard, Blaise de Monluc’s adjutant, was making his rounds, heard the argument, and intervened.
‘You must forgive them,’ the young officer drawled, ‘they are of this town and have not yet heard the story of the last triumph of Siena before its fall. The defence of the bastion at the Porta San Viene, the blowing of the tunnel, your sally to rescue your men! Quite brilliant, Monsieur. It was an honour to be there.’
He had climbed the steep streets with them, the final stretch to his billet sapping the last of Jean’s strength. For his status, he had been given a singular privilege – a whole room for himself and his family, in a house next to the monastery of San’ Agostino. He leaned against its door now, as the officer removed his plumed hat to bow.
‘The General expects you at the war council tomorrow. The call has gone throughout the land and men will soon be gathering around our standard. Siena may have fallen but the Republic lives on. We will need your skills and courage again. Captain Rombaud. Mademoiselle.’
He bowed, reserving an especially gallant smile for Anne, and departed.
Jean did not even have the will to mutter a curse. ‘Get me in, child,’ he said.
But there was no rest beyond the door that Haakon flung open.
‘Rombaud!’ he bellowed, enveloping the Frenchman in his huge arms, lifting him across the threshold. ‘You made good time, man. And you arrive just when the action begins, as always. Come, they have wine here, real wine, not like that vinegar we were drinking in Siena. Montalcino won its siege, so they have wine!’
Anne went straight to the back of the room, where blankets served as curtains over a bed. She did not even pause when she saw a bright-eyed Erik and the Fugger sat at the table. There was a more important question to ask first.
‘Mother, how are you?’
Beck’s eyes were open, if somewhat dull, her head was cool enough, her heartbeat steady. There was no mistaking the firmness in the hand that gripped Anne’s.
‘Well, child. Better than I have been in an age.’ She nodded past Anne to the room beyond. ‘They have brought me news of my Gianni.’
Anne started when she heard her brother’s name, felt a burning in her hand. She looked down. The outline of a cross was still there, its twin crossbeams clear.
Beck struggled to raise herself, Anne placing rolled blankets behind her. ‘Open the curtains. I need to hear what they are saying there. So do you.’
The Comet was disposed of in a few sad sentences, Jean summing up what Anne had told him. She had not mentioned her encounter in the courtyard. She had not been able to find words to describe it.
‘Well,’ Haakon grunted, ‘if the Sienese and French can win their fight, they will kick those Florentines out for us and we can go back.’
‘Is that the action you are so excited about, Haakon?’ Jean asked wearily, gulping wine. ‘Haven’t you had enough of this war?’
The Norseman’s eyes gleamed. ‘I have. They don’t pay enough. No, the action I speak of is more personal. You will think so too, when you hear what the Fugger has to say.’
Jean was tired. He hadn’t even noticed the fact that the companion he’d mislaid in the fall of Siena had returned. He looked at him now through drooping eyes. He thought he would fall asleep at the Fugger’s first words, sleep and never wake. What sort of bliss would that be, an endless, dreamless sleep?
But the Fugger’s speech woke him in an instant.
‘I have seen your son, Jean. More, I have seen the evil he is about. Such evil that it has raised the dead.’
The Fugger told the story swiftly, sparely. Beck, who had only been told that her son w
as alive, slipped back lower onto the bed as she listened. Anne sat unmoving beside her, rigid, as the vision of Gianni returned, stronger now his purpose was revealed. Jean stared, first at the speaker, then above him, finally across the room at Beck, whose eyes would not meet his.
It was Haakon who spoke next. ‘This is the action I spoke of, Jean. The two actions, though they are linked. Fighting on two fronts is never good strategy but I believe there is no choice. We’ – he gestured to his son and the Fugger – ‘are going to Rome. We will swiftly find a way into the Lateran prison and we will free Maria. Then we’ll come after you, to aid you on your front.’
Jean’s mouth seemed unable to make enough spit to speak. He took a sip of wine, said, ‘And where will I be?’
Haakon laughed, his son echoing him. ‘On the trail of your son, of course. You heard, Anne Boleyn’s hand will be unearthed. Why, man, do you not see?’ The Norseman thumped the table. ‘The quest begins anew.’
In the silence then, Beck finally met his eyes. Held them, while she made one clear motion of her head. No.
Haakon didn’t see it, went on with the same enthusiasm in his voice. ‘It should not take us long. With the Fugger’s mind and our strong arms, what chance do these Roman dogs have? But while you wait for us, you won’t be alone.’ His voice deepened, some emotion quivering there. ‘You will have another old friend to look after you. Erik?’
He gestured and, with a shy smile, the young man reached behind him, picked something up, placed it on the table before Jean.
‘I was doing mine anyway,’ he said. It was no trouble.’
Jean’s sword lay on the table before him, the pommel toward him, the bottom third of the blade protruding from a new soft leather sheath, a different weapon than the one Jean had seen, ragged with un-care, as they fled Siena. The grip was once again wrapped tight with green leather straps, as good a binding as Jean had ever done. The guard and apple-sized pommel both gleamed with the lamplight bouncing off their polished surfaces. And he could see, even before he leaned forward and ran his finger over the bright cutting edge, feeling the slightest of cuts there, how keen the blade was.