Caprice and Rondo

  He knew, as he moved into the room, how that memory had been induced. She had risen from Julius’s bed to come here. Julius’s dutiful bed.

  There was a handsome table in front of the window, with his own cup still standing upon it. He collected the wine and sat down gently behind it, on the flattened tapestry on the sill. The air blew on his cheek. She had chosen to remain where she was, in the shadows, framed by the embroidery of Rudolfo’s best chair. When she spoke, it was not easy to hear her, although he did. She said, ‘I can’t go home without you. That is why I have kept Julius in Russia. He wants to go back.’

  He didn’t know what to say. Finally, he said, ‘I’m glad you told me, for I think there is a misunderstanding. There is nothing here for you, Anna. You have been my good friend, but that is all.’

  ‘You would feel bound to lie,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not lying,’ he said. ‘And I don’t understand, really. It was you who wanted Gelis to come.’

  ‘Because I was afraid this would happen. I can’t live without you. I’ve tried. Come with me, Nicholas.’

  ‘Where?’ He tried to sound patient, and kindly, and sensible. He tried to sound as if never, in any conceivable way, could he desire her.

  ‘Anywhere. You wouldn’t be breaking my marriage to Julius. Whatever you do, I’m leaving him.’

  ‘But that’s nonsense,’ Nicholas said. ‘You’ve persuaded yourself that something exists, and it doesn’t. Go home. Forget me.’ And as she did not answer, he felt he must go further. He said curtly, ‘I’m afraid I told Julius what happened between us in Caffa. I’m sorry, but I owed it to him.’

  ‘He told me. He didn’t believe you,’ Anna said.

  She was unusually beautiful. Even as her fingers ran down the clasps of her gown, even as he prepared to forestall her, he felt the small lurch of the heart he always experienced when he saw her or heard her cool voice. But he could not let it go on. He said, ‘Stop, Anna.’ She had already pulled the gown down from her shoulder. The dying light, forsaking the statues, the flasks and the ewers, slipped past him to pool on the bare skin of her throat, then her breasts as she stood. He set his hand to the bell on the table and said, ‘I am sorry. I am going to ring. Rudolfo’s steward will come.’

  ‘He will be too late,’ Anna said. Something gleamed in her hand, against her fair skin. A knife.

  Nicholas said, ‘What good will that do?’ He had risen, so that the air flowed unchecked through the window, although the table still stood between them. Anyone, glancing in as they passed, would be able to see her with her gown pulled down about her, and her chemise wrenched asunder below.

  She did not care. She said, ‘Will you come with me now? Take me somewhere and love me. Julius would not try to hold me after that.’ The knife gleamed.

  ‘No,’ he said. There were people outside. He could hear distant voices.

  ‘Then I have nothing left to live for,’ said Anna blankly, and lifted her arm. Her eyes, supplicating, enormous, held his. Then she stretched her long, slender throat and looked up at the fruitless sprig, the lethal sliver she held poised above her.

  ‘You won’t do it,’ said Nicholas. He had not moved. His voice was perfectly even.

  She glanced at him, once. Then her eyes closed, and her hand swept down, hard.

  He had not believed she would do it. Perhaps because of that, she did. Her breath escaped with the swing of her arm. As the point of the knife entered her body she gave a small, surprised sound, like a residual grunt; but as the blade went on its way, slicing and sucking, she drew a great breath and screamed, loudly enough for the bustle outside the window to falter, and for a murmur of voices to break out somewhere inside the house. After that, she only whimpered, letting the knife fall to the ground and clasping her hands vaguely over the wound. She took one or two uncertain steps and pitched forward, striking the edge of the table at which he still stood as if frozen.

  He saw the blood, thick as good tournesol, welling over her skin, soaking into the edges of chemise and gown, flowing down to her lap. He could not see where it came from, but it was very like the first gush from the crossbow wound he had given Julius; her face and throat were untouched and lovely as ever. She sank down before him with her eyes fixed on his, as in prayer; unclasping one of her hands, she stretched out her glistening palm for a moment. Then it fell, and she slid to lie on the tiles, her cheek turned sideways under the loosened dark strands of her hair, her amazing violet eyes at last closed.

  Then the commotion outside spilled closer, into the house, with voices somewhere among it that he knew. He still had not moved when the door crashed open and men poured in, one of them limping. The first to enter, the first to see Nicholas at the window was Julius. He said harshly, ‘What have you done? Where is she?’

  ‘There,’ Nicholas said. A yellow light appeared somewhere and brightened: a lamp in the hand of Fioravanti, with Acciajuoli at his shoulder. The room’s small treasures gleamed once again, and the fair skin of a woman, lying in her half-naked blood on the floor.

  Julius knelt. When he rose, he held Anna’s knife in his hand, and his pallor was as extreme as on the day when this had occurred to him also. He said to Nicholas, ‘You tried to rape her, and stabbed her when she resisted you.’

  ‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘Look after her, and I will tell you what happened.’

  ‘Look after her! She is dead,’ Julius said.

  ‘No. Let someone look at her. It was an accident.’

  ‘An accident!’ Julius said. ‘You and she are alone in a room, and she is undressed and stabbed with her own knife. That is murder, you diabolical little savage. She was my wife. And now you pay for it.’

  His sword came out so fast that Nicholas almost took the blade in his shoulder. He swerved, and when the blade sang again he abandoned the window at last and flung through the room, overturning chairs in his wake as Julius attempted to follow him. Then the brief, furious explosion was over: men had thrown themselves on Julius and relieved him of his sword while Acciajuoli, taking Nicholas by the shoulder, pressed him into a chair and put a cup of wine into his hand. He accepted it in a daze, half rising again as the Gräfin Anna von Hanseyck was tenderly lifted and carried away. He could hear Julius shouting, and see tears of shock in his eyes. Now it was over, he had begun to feel sick himself. He had not thought she would do it. He had challenged her to do it.

  The voice of Fioravanti said, ‘You wish to go to your wife, Signor Julius. But before you are freed, notice that, as a matter of law, the man you have just attacked was unarmed, and you cannot be permitted to execute him. In any case, you have not heard what he has to say. And, really, it cannot have occurred as you describe. Your wife’s murderer would surely have one spot of blood on his clothes or his hands, and Niccolò has none. He did not move from the window — I would swear to that, I saw him from outside — and he could not have reached to stab her over the table. It must therefore, as he says, have been an accident.’

  ‘Then,’ said Julius, ‘I am waiting to hear, with interest, what sort of accident it could have been. Perhaps she disrobed and murdered herself?’

  ‘Later,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’ll tell you what happened later.’ He felt extraordinarily tired; as if he had endured a long day’s campaigning, and the end was not yet in sight. He began to experience anxiety, in case his attention faltered. His gaze sank to his cup.

  Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli said, ‘Are you feeling unwell? Perhaps you would be better in solitude until this whole affair can be examined by the authorities. I fear that our friend Julius will not let it lapse.’

  ‘Anna?’ asked Nicholas, with brevity. He did feel unwell. The room rocked and the face of Julius, lowering at him, was blurred.

  ‘She is not dead. She will do. Come,’ said the Greek sympathetically. ‘Leave the explanations to others.’

  ‘The wine,’ said Nicholas crossly.

  They were the last words he uttered that evening; and the last fragment he remembered, a
part from Acciajuoli’s cursory chuckle.

  ‘SO YOU FIND YOURSELF back at the Troitsa. My dear Nicholas, you would make Ahasuerus feel depressed,’ remarked Ludovico da Bologna.

  Nicholas flung up his hands and sat down again in his cell. He had had two days in which to establish exactly where he was, although no one would tell him why. Food was brought by one of the brethren. He had caught sight, once, of Brother Gubka, who had then glided quickly away.

  The Patriarch, in one of his tidier manifestations, was expressing modified derision. He looked well fed, and someone had cleaned up his crucifix. Rumour said that in the weeks since their original release, he had spent quite as much time in the monastery as he had in the foreign merchant quarter of Moscow. Nicholas had only met him on the rare occasions when he called on Rudolfo, when he seemed more interested in investigating his larder than the state of his soul. But with the Patriarch, as he now knew, appearances could be misleading. The Patriarch said, ‘In case you don’t know, the lady is not seriously hurt, merely in a state of discomfort.’

  The permanent millstone operating between his breastbone and his stomach slipped several times, and began experimenting with different rhythms. ‘So you know what happened,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘I imagine everyone but Julius knows what happened,’ the Patriarch said. ‘He says you raped her, and she says she can’t remember.’

  ‘So he is insisting on justice,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘Well, he was,’ the Patriarch said, glancing about. ‘But of course, they’ve gone, now.’

  ‘Gone,’ repeated Nicholas. He said, with an effort, ‘If you’re looking for food, there isn’t any.’

  ‘They’re bringing food. I was looking for platters. Yes, gone back home. Left Moscow yesterday. Moscow hasn’t time for petty disputes among Franks.’

  Yesterday. They would go to Novgorod first. ‘Who decided? Who sent them?’ said Nicholas.

  ‘It was left to the Latin community. They appointed their own judge. The Duke supplied the men to enforce the decision. They won’t be allowed to stay in Novgorod,’ the Patriarch said. The door opened and his thick face assumed an expression of expectancy.

  The meal that entered was better than any Nicholas had been offered so far. The serving monk laid it down and retreated. ‘And me?’ Nicholas said. ‘Why was I not sent off with them?’

  ‘The Adjudicator,’ said the Patriarch, helping himself, ‘did not consider it wise. The dispute between you would only have caused trouble by erupting elsewhere. Hence you will be held until it is known that Julius has passed out of the ducal domains, and possibly even after.’

  ‘How long?’ Nicholas said. He looked, with disbelief, at what the Patriarch was doing with the food. The Patriarch laid it all down and surveyed him.

  ‘As long as is necessary. Are you brain-soft? You couldn’t all stay. You couldn’t slaughter one another en route, so one party had to leave ahead of the other. And of the two, you are the one the Grand Duchess is paying to work for her.’

  ‘I want to leave now,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘You can’t,’ the Patriarch said. He opened his mouth and filled it with something.

  ‘Then I want to see the Adjudicator,’ Nicholas said.

  He waited. The Patriarch munched. The Patriarch swallowed, and picked up a small bird, and stretched his lips open again. Nicholas said, ‘You are the Adjudicator.’

  ‘Of course,’ the Patriarch said.

  EVEN IF IT DROVE HIM to the edge of his sanity, the violence with which Nicholas resisted this decree at least released part of the pent-up energy which had made the preceding weeks so tormenting. Now the torment was of a different kind. It was some consolation to discover, as he importuned everyone within sight, that he was not alone. Although they could not know his reasons, Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli was not unwilling to intercede for him with the Grand Duchess, and Fioravanti, against his own preference and interest, was ready also to petition that Nicholas should be allowed to go home. It surprised him, finally, to discover that the Adjudicator’s embargo had not been born of indifference or mischief. Father Ludovico had recommended to the Duke that Nicholas should be released after a week. The Duke had refused, and the Patriarch had not tried to insist.

  In the past, when inconvenienced by Ludovico da Bologna, Nicholas had expected to manipulate his way out of the difficulty, and had generally found the process enjoyable even if, surprisingly, he did not always win. He realised, by now, that he had never understood Father Ludovico nor expected to understand him. It was not until this long exile that he had begun to learn, largely through other men’s eyes, what impelled this gross caricature of a priest in his burst sandals, to inflict his criticisms and trumpet his impossible demands in the faces of scared monks and Imperial rulers alike. Josaphat Barbaro, speaking of him in Persia, had said, ‘One meets him everywhere, does one not, as one might expect to see the ubiquitous God? But what one meets is not God, but one’s own conscience.’

  He was not a man, therefore, to whom one took one’s petty concerns. What lay between Anna and Nicholas was a matter only for the two of them, and for Julius. The Patriarch already knew, very likely, about the danger from David de Salmeton. If he thought Nicholas despicable for not going home before this, he had never troubled to mention it.

  He had never mentioned, either, the obvious fact that Nicholas was once more seeking reassurance through his pendulum. It frightened him that he had felt nothing last summer, when de Salmeton’s attack on Jodi had been made. And yet, another time, months ago, here in the Troitsa, he had stood in the cathedral and experienced a sense of loss so vivid that his heart thudded, as if he were swimming against a great tide of death. But no one dear to him had died, that he knew of, and when the visitation of grief had occurred, there had been no one else in the church, except the lanky person of the youth Andrea Fioravanti, about to leave on a well-prepared trip to Milan. The boy had shown no previous interest in the ikons, but had presumably been told by his father to study them. A decent enough lad; he had talked about gerfalcons all the way home.

  Now, the cathedral in the Kremlin was beginning to rise. Tied by his invisible leash, Nicholas lived again with Fioravanti and helped him to build. He saw it in his mind’s eye as one day Fioravanti would see it in reality: stepping through the prodigious hooded door and standing in unimaginable space, between the tall painted pillars, and enclosed on three sides by the figured walls soaring up to the sky, and on the fourth by the heavenly plates of the golden iconastasis. One day, a son of Ivan would be crowned Grand Prince in this place, and would father another Ivan, perhaps, in his turn. Above, there were to be five golden domes.

  In theory, he could have escaped: concealed himself in a cart with money sewn in his dress and horses waiting outside the walls. In practice, he had to account for himself every night. And whoever helped him or overlooked his brief absence would suffer. He didn’t know what was happening in Bruges, but here at least he could show that he did not fail friends. And the loyalty bred loyalty, in its turn.

  Julius was long away, but not yet in Bruges when the slight commotion occurred at the Kremlin gates, and a troop of the Grand Duke’s guard cantered out of the castle and, surrounding a group of disreputable incomers, brought them to lodge in the fortified quarters of the Andronikov monastery. In the castle, a meeting of the Duma was called. The following day, the newcomers were transferred, under redoubled guard, to the Troitsa, and Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli gave himself the pleasure of calling at the house of Rudolfo Fioravanti, to take wine with Nicholas and tell him about the arrivals.

  ‘Travellers,’ the Greek explained, holding the goblet in delicate fingers and indolently crossing his good ankle over the other, both finely slippered below the magnificent double-cut gown. A jewel as big as a horse-brass flattened the folds of his florid, face-shadowing hat. Since the unexplained little crime passionel, the room had been rearranged, and the table-top leather replaced, although still avidly scanned by the several ladies who
came with their husbands these days in the hope of encountering Nicholas. The tiles had been simple to wash.

  ‘Refugees,’ the Greek now continued. ‘Or so the leader insisted on delineating himself and his companions. Certainly, they had not the appearance of men one would invite into one’s house, being attired in ripped, filthy clothes and tattered old lambskin jackets and caps, thick with grease, so that the merchants who allowed them protection held their noses and begged them to keep their distance, they said, all the way from Riazan in Moscow. And what a tally of woe! Sick in Fasso; immured in a cowshed in Tiflis; struggling to winter in Derbent, half drowned while being rowed up the Caspian; threatened and cheated and robbed by the Tartars at Astrakhan; starved in the wilderness; chilled and soaked on the Volga and the Don; and now penniless here, owing Tartar and Russian merchants and the ambassador himself for all the money loaned them, at interest, on the journey.’

  ‘The ambassador?’ Nicholas said.

  ‘Marco Rosso, the Grand Duke’s envoy to Uzum Hasan. He brought this wretched man and his party from Derbent. But for his explanations, they would never have been allowed into Moscow. It is still not quite certain, it seems, whether they are who they claim to be.’

  His voice was solemn. Knowing his nature, there was no need to believe all that he said. Nicholas believed most of it, because he had begun to realise, with a faint glow of shameful satisfaction, who the ragged refugee must surely be.

  ‘Contarini,’ he said.

  The Greek looked at him, affecting surprise. ‘Of course, you and the gentleman were at Tabriz together. Had you been at the gates, you might have identified him for the porters! The Magnificent Ambassador Ambrogio Contarini, of the Illustrious Signory of Venice. I understand the poor gentleman has a very weak head for drink.’