The nightmare continued. He lapsed into Italian now, his Tuscan accent strong.
‘Holy Fath—, uh, your eminence. It was buried before I was born. In France. I do not know where. Only three people do.’
‘And they are?’
There was nowhere to hide in a nightmare.
‘My mother and father. And one other man. If they are still alive.’
It sounded like the plea it was. Leave me alone! They’re dead. My past is dead!
‘And why would they not be?’
‘They are in Siena. So many have died there, they …’ He broke off. Suddenly he realized he wasn’t telling this man anything he didn’t know.
‘Ah, yes. Siena.’ The Cardinal’s thin fingers dug into the flesh at Gianni’s neck, forced him to take his old weight. ‘Then we have found your mission, my son. You will go to Siena. You will find which of these people is alive. And you will get them to lead you to the hand. Then you will take it to England. For the greater glory of God.’
At least, even in the worst of nightmares, there was a chance of waking up. He stuttered again. ‘My … Jean Rombaud, Most Holy. He survived terrible torture for this … this witch. And my mother … she would never betray him and his cause.’
‘And the third witness? You mentioned three.’
Another image. Gianni saw again that third person, the kind and gentle Fugger, his one hand waving in the air as he declined some Latin verb, as he coached the gifted child Gianni in his studies. He remembered then a part of the saga, shaming the Fugger when it was mentioned. He had broken his vow, betrayed Jean and Anne Boleyn once, but then had redeemed himself, saving Jean’s life at the last. But now, all these years later, what power of coercion could make him break his vow a second time?
For a moment, Gianni despaired. Then another vision came, clearing away all the others. A playmate sat beside him at his lessons. A playmate who did not want to learn Latin or Greek, but whose inattention only drew a caress from her indulgent father’s one hand.
Maria. Daughter. Beacon in his dark. The only person the Fugger loved more than Jean Rombaud.
‘I think, Holy Father, that I might have thought of a way.’
Carafa beamed. He would not correct him again on the title. It would be his soon enough, anyway.
‘My son, I never doubted you that you would.’
Gianni watched the Jesuit approach the throne, bow, kiss the ring. He had recognized the Englishman as soon as he saw him in the antechamber. Thomas Lawley had taught him when he’d first come to Rome three years before. It was hardly a surprise he wasn’t recognized in return; he had been one of a hundred in that intake of boys. But he remembered Thomas as being typical of his order: kind, patient, tolerant, the lessons imparted more with caresses than the beatings Gianni had been used to at Montecatini Alto. At first he had relished it and had thrived. As he grew older he recognized it for what it was: weakness. It was why he left early, seeking the more rigorous discipline of the Clerks Regular under Carafa, who was known for his loathing of the Jesuits. With them, he could think less and act more. Much more.
After the shock of Carafa’s words, Gianni realized that there was no mission he would more willingly undertake. It was as if his whole life had been aimed at this point, like an arrow seeking its target. It had the inevitability of pre-destination. The sins his father had committed in his mistaken zeal for a heretic’s cause had hurt the One Faith badly. He had thwarted a chance to fight back when Protestantism was still a fledgling bird. He had even killed a Prince of the Church. Who better than his son to right those wrongs? That six-fingered grip rested heavy and evil upon his whole family. He, Gianni, would remove them from its grasp. Only he could redeem the name of Rombaud.
The Cardinal’s conference with Thomas was brief, swiftly reading the letter the Englishman delivered. In a moment, he was beckoning Gianni forward.
‘Brother Gianlucca.’ He used Gianni’s full name. ‘Brother Thomas.’
The two men each inclined their head.
The Cardinal continued. ‘The Imperial Ambassador has spelled out here the necessity before us. There must not be any hindrance to this, for the arrival of the relic in London will greatly aid our cause there. You need not know why, merely believe it to be so.’
The two men bowed, waited.
‘Our friend of the Society of Jesus’ – Both could hear the distaste as Carafa spoke those words – ‘has papers for the Imperial forces at Siena, power to speed you into the city. Once inside, it will be our servant here who seeks out those to fulfil our quest.’
‘Once inside, your eminence? Has the city fallen then?’ Thomas’s tone was gentle, his eyes unfocused and aimed somewhere between the Cardinal’s, his hands clasped easily before him. It was a technique all Jesuits learned, especially with men of authority.
The Cardinal recognized the manner, no softness in his voice now.
‘Siena agreed terms on the seventeenth of April, yesterday. Those who wish it will be allowed to march out with full military honours on the twenty-first. Should give you time to get there and enter in triumph with the conquerors.’
He had been perched on the front of his throne. Now, he leaned back and passed a hand before his face, looking every year of his great age.
‘Go now. My servant here has money, good men already hired, horses prepared. Go! And may the Lord guide you in everything.’
The shaven man barely allowed them their amens, sweeping them out of the chamber. Another flunky, to great dismay, announced the end of audiences for that day.
As angry priests and courtiers surged around them, Thomas said, ‘Well, young man. Shall we be about our work?’
‘God’s work, Jesuit.’
Thomas merely smiled at the venom of the reply. ‘Of course. Ad Majoram Dei Gloriam. Always.’ His voice was gentle, his look unfocused somewhere between the boy’s eyes. ‘Shall we ride for Siena?’
THREE
HANDS OF THE HEALER
It was the realm of the dying and the dead. Of those who had fallen into the abyss and those still on its edge. Entwined on the floor, on the few stained mattresses, fevered flesh mingled with the already cold.
It was the realm of voices, pleas for cure, for husband, child, priest, prayers for confession, salvation, for the merest touch of a cool cross on a hot brow. But priests rarely came to the House of the Incurables; in a city about to die, there were plenty of excuses to be elsewhere.
It is my realm, thought Anne Rombaud. Three floors of it and this top one the worst. Furthest from the street, from life, from hope.
Standing in the doorway, she tried to steady her breathing, to accept the rank smells that assailed her, for they would multiply as she made her way across. She chose such path as she could see through the twisting limbs. On the far side of the room, bodies were stacked, rising to the roof, awaiting their flight through the door to the goods’ yard below. Those closest to that growing pile were the ones destined next to join it. They were the ones who needed her most.
As she started across, the yelling began. A woman’s hand fastened around her ankle and she bent to listen, to a list of names – saints, parents, lovers. Gently, she prised each finger away, a word of kindness for each of them, squeezed a sip of water into the mouth from the skin she carried; the woman spluttered, sank back, a momentary quiet. There were more stops, more whispers, more water to drop on swollen tongues, before she was against the far wall, turning her face away from the wall of the dead to the barely alive.
He was still there, still breathing, just, the one she looked for first. He had entered the house three weeks before, had begun lower down, where there was a little hope. But the poultices she applied to his sores had not drawn his sickness out, the fever consumed him from within and the ration allotted to the living sick, a tithe of the tiny ration that the healthy survived on, even that was soon withdrawn, on the orders of the Captain-Physician, D’Ambois. Anne knew why this prioritising had to be. But something about
this old man had touched her; maybe his similarity to Grandfather Abraham, whom she had also watched die. She had tried to feed him a little of her own scraps. But he moved up the floors anyway, every day closer to the wall of death. Soon, even she saw the need to dispense the little she could not spare, but did, elsewhere. To her mother, not least, two floors below and deadly sick herself. The only thing she could do now was see that this old man, Guiseppe Toldo, carver of icons, did not die alone.
He was so near his time, his breaths a series of shallow gasps, a pause making her look to see if he had gone. Then there would be another gasp, more air sucked in, and the series would begin again. All along, his eyes would flutter, struggle to open, as if to hold onto this world by seeing it again. But they never made it wide enough.
She knelt by him, in the little space between him and the next shallow-breathing body, took one of his hands, used her other fingers to put a little moisture on his lips. The drops sat there, the effort required to take them in too much.
‘It’s all right, Guiseppe, I’m here. Anne is here. Be at peace.’
There was a cessation of breaths, a long, long pause, and then a mighty gasp before the breath came again. The eyelids struggled harder to open, his fingers clenching on hers. Suddenly, they fluttered up and he was staring at a point high above him, through the ceiling, beyond the room, to his native skies. Anne’s eyes closed and she saw him there, not the man she had known these brief, tortured weeks, but the man she knew he’d been, the worker of wood, proud artist and artisan, husband, father, grandfather. She saw him step out of that husk he’d inhabited and gaze upwards to where she now gazed too, where a door was forming, flame-edged, solid, bright even within a cornflower Tuscan sky.
Behind her eyes, in the world they had stepped into, the world they shared, Guiseppe Toldo bowed to her and smiled. Walking with assured steps, he reached the threshold and then, even as the door was closing upon him, turned back. Something fell from his hand toward her in a shower of light. She caught it but did not look at it, preferring to watch the door flame brightly in the sky, like the silhouette of the sun disappearing behind a mountain. It vanished; her eyes opened. She was back in her own world, in the realm of the dead, holding a dead man’s hands.
She didn’t remember taking the second one and she looked down at it in some surprise, loosing herself from the grip. As the hands parted, she felt something roll into hers. Looking down, she saw a carving nestled there, no longer than her smallest finger, about half as wide again, yet heavy for its size. It was a falcon, wings folded, sharp beak turned to the side, hooded eyes half-open to scan from its perch on a tiny, detailed branch. It was carved from some dark wood, as if growing out of the tree it rested on.
The wailing had returned four fold and it took a while to realize that the voice beside her was not a part of it. Only an insistent shaking of her arm made look up.
Maria Fugger was there, a fair, pretty, plump girl of sixteen whose curves the privations of siege had done little to reduce. Maintained, Anne always suspected, by the half-shares taken by the two doting men in her life: her father and Erik. Even in these surroundings, Anne couldn’t help but smile when she saw Maria’s round and freckled face, bursting now to tell some news or gossip. And this had to be more important than most because she was struggling to contain it within lines of unused seriousness.
‘Your mother, Anne. Your mother. She has woken up!’
Pausing only to close Guiseppe Toldo’s eyes, Anne allowed herself to be dragged across the room of bodies and down the flight of stairs. As she came down to the lowest level, the level of some hope, Anne saw a familiar figure standing in the entrance to the building. Familiar, yet strange too, for she could never get over how changed her father was. The siege had wasted the strength of many and the weight had indeed dropped off his powerful frame – but he had lost more than that. Some part of him had been hurt inside, had not healed like the wound she’d tended nearly a year before. He leaned heavily on his stick, his gauntness accentuated by the strong sunlight that silhouetted him.
She touched his arm. The face that was raised to her was streaked with tears. Another change, for in all her life with him she’d known him cry but once – the day her brother Gianni, cursing Jean Rombaud for an atheist and a tyrant, ran away to Rome.
‘Anne.’ The rare smile she loved so well, the way it lit his eyes, made him seem younger again, for a moment. He sniffed, took both her hands; finding the carving, he raised it into the sunlight.
‘Pretty. A present from an admirer?’
It was a game he played, for he knew she encouraged no one, never had.
‘In a way.’ She put the falcon away in the pouch at her waist. ‘Father, she’s awake.’
‘I know. I was there.’
‘Then let us go and—’
‘You go. She’ll want to see you so much.’
‘And you too. Come—’
‘Ah! She has seen me and that is why I am standing here.’ A slight smile played again into the sadness on his face. ‘She can certainly bear a grudge, your mother. One of the things I always loved about her.’
He turned back to his observation of the street. Unable to think of anything to say, she looked past and noticed all the activity. People were scurrying around, wheeling carts, carrying burdens of weapons and goods. Many were weeping openly.
‘What is it, Father? A big attack?’
He did not turn around. ‘You have been busy with your admirer. There’ll be no more attacks. The French, and such Sienese as will join them, march out today for Montalcino. They will carry on the fight from there, so they say.’
It was true, she had been busy with her charges, her mother, Guiseppe Toldo, all the rest. The war to her was something almost distant, had just brought pain and suffering to many, including her kin. But Siena, fallen?
‘What does that mean for us, Father? Do we go? Are we safe here?’
She barely heard his reply.
‘I wish I knew.’
Then she remembered that beyond this uncertainty there was joy, a mother awake, returned from the border of death. She squeezed then released his arm and went back into the building.
Jean blew his nose on his sleeve, straightened as a French officer he knew made a brief salute while running by, slumped back again. The weariness he felt was nearly overpowering. He knew he should be making plans, seeking some safety for those he loved. The coming day could bring myriad new dangers. Right now, he couldn’t think beyond the feeling of spring sunlight on his face. The taste of the wind reminded him of all the things he should be doing in his vineyards.
There was a man standing at the end of her mother’s low cot – the cot being the privilege accorded those Incurables with at least some tiny chance of survival. He was dressed expensively, in the dark tunic and cloak of a gentleman-physician, smiling modestly, while his two, slightly less well-attired attendants were simpering their approval of everything he said.
‘Ah, Mademoiselle Rombaud. I was just telling my colleagues here not to talk about miracles. Science! Pure science in the best tradition of Galen. We owe this dear lady’s life to the combination of the weapon salve and the purest Theriac distilled by my own hand.’
‘And the power of prayer, Monsieur D’Ambois, of course. Mother Mary has listened to our appeals and granted them.’ She had found the best way to fend off the esteemed doctor’s groping was to keep up the idea most men had of her anyway – that she was halfway to becoming a nun.
‘Of course, of course. Prayer is some help but science …’ Disconcerted by Anne’s closeness while pushing past him to her mother’s side, D’Ambois began to back away, sweeping his sycophants with him. ‘I will return later, Madam, to aid your recovery further. I have a tonic that may well be of effect.’
The hand gripped Anne’s with a strength surprising in one just awoken from a fever.
‘If you had not driven him away,’ said Beck, ‘I think I would have stuck this up his pompous arse.’
She raised the crossbow bolt that Anne had removed from her back. ‘He said he “anointed this with a combination of purple gentian and veraine and thus the cure was effected”.’ Her voice had adopted the blocked nasal tone of the Frenchman, and Anne and Maria both giggled.
‘Ah the weapon salve! Much beloved of these French doctors. Anoint the instrument that caused the harm with its corresponding plants and it will draw the poison from the wound.’
‘And this “Theriac”?’
‘A panacea containing eighty-one ingredients including grated gallstones and dog droppings.’ She watched Beck shudder. ‘I prefer other methods. We shall have to see if they have worked. How do you feel, Mother?’
‘Like a thousand horses have ridden over me.’
‘But can you move your arms and legs?’
Beck tried, moaning as she did, but each limb responded.
‘Let us see if the infection has cleared. You might not want to look at this.’
Rolling her mother carefully over on her side, she unwound a bandage. As she pulled it away, a dozen, fat maggots wriggled out.
‘Ugh!’ Maria turned away, retching, and Beck, who had been unable not to glance, let out a cry.
‘What have you done to me, girl? Am I already in my grave that I am worm’s meat?’
Anne gathered the little creatures, trapping them in a piece of cloth. ‘I saw a horse on the farm once whose wound healed after a week because of these creatures. And when the alternative was dog shit juice and …’
She stopped at Maria’s pleading. She was pleased, more than that, relieved, at the pink health of Beck’s skin near the wound. It had been a chance she’d had to take, for she’d long since run out of the healing herbs she might have used outside the city’s walls. Maggots were plentiful in a city of the dead; especially since the spring warmth had returned to the land.