‘I forbade them the Palace, try to take the life of one of them, and now I am to embrace them as my saviours! Has the world any more surprises for me today? No one is what they seem. Next you’ll be telling me that di Torre is hand in glove with the Bandini to uphold me in Rocca!’
Chapter Twenty-Four
It was a problem in tact. The Festaiuolo, ready packed to go home to Florence, unpacked everything and sat, with a flask of inspiration and a ragged bundle of old pageant notes, cobbling up and casting a spectacle which celebrated the triumph of Justice and Right, without personifying Wrong. He looked regretfully at Envy’s iron teeth in their little rush basket — wholly relevant to the late traitor but impossible to use. And that dancer who had caused so much trouble had presented himself again for employment, with the reasonable remark that nobody had seen his face last time… and it was too true that there was a lack of full-sized skilful dancers although a plethora of small people expected to be used; and no help to be got as before from those useful men of the Lord Paolo’s.
The Duke’s Marshal, dealing with these useful men, found those who were willing, and likely, to die before implicating the Lord Paolo in anything but an excessive philanthropy and a disinterested concern for justice; and those who were willing, and zealous, in implicating the Lord Paolo, their colleagues, friends, enemies, officers and grandmothers in corruption, perfidy, sodomy and treason. The Marshal did manage to establish that old Matteo di Torre, whose encounter with a dish of scallops had set off the feud, had certainly been sitting next to Ugo Bandini, but on his right had been the Lord Paolo. Hindsight is a marvellous clarifier of situations.
Sigismondo, escorting Leandro openly through the streets to his father’s house, delivered him at the door to an incoherent Ugo with the words ‘Tutum patrio te limine sistam,’ which reprise of the sortes Virgilianae did not strike either of them at the time; nor that in this promise of Venus to Aeneas, the Goddess of Love had assumed one of her more interesting disguises in the person of Sigismondo. Ugo embraced his son, embraced Sigismondo, re-embraced Leandro, and led them both in under the Titans who seemed today almost easily to support the Bandini arms. In the comparative privacy of his library Bandini, after a Herculean effort at breaking his son’s ribs in another embrace, wept and thanked Sigismondo and then, in a belated hurry, the Saints and the Trinity. He would have given Sigismondo half his wealth, he exclaimed, had he not disbursed it too recently to Il Lupo and his band. What was left, although it was negligible, was all at Sigismondo’s service. Sigismondo obligingly said that his satisfaction lay in restoring Leandro to, so literally he might have added, his father’s bosom. Ugo thereupon took off a massy gold chain, of a design amazingly complex, with plaques of enamelled allegorical beasts and lumps of jewellery, and put it on Sigismondo, across whose shoulders and chest it looked remarkably at home.
The feast a few days after the Duchess’s interment was private and unostentatious. The Duke had expected Ippolyto to leave after the funeral, but he stayed and went hunting with the Lady Violante so the feast had to include him. The Bandini and di Torre representatives were invited.
Cosima, not at all enjoying being back at home, was particularly bored at the prospect of dining yet again with her aunt when everyone was at the Palace. Her aunt had done nothing but ask questions ever since her return, exactly as if she suspected that Cosima had in fact spent a night alone with two men. She wondered what was to happen to her and if anything ever would. There was no likelihood of seeing Leandro again, and now he knew that she was a di Torre he would not think about her at all. It was true that Sigismondo had called the feud a false one, but feelings did not so quickly alter; that is, men’s feelings. What would he have said to her, that night, when Sigismondo stopped him from coming towards her? By now, of course, he would have had time to reflect how very unfittingly she had behaved. He’d taken it for granted that she must be a common girl hired by his father.
At least Sigismondo would not tell the Duke that her father and Bandini were prepared to be traitors. She need not fear that; but if her father ever found out what she, his sequestered and modest daughter, had really done, he would think a convent, in earnest, the only place for her. At least if he ever married her to someone she would have a married woman’s freedom and might actually see Leandro again. It would be much better if she could only stop thinking about him.
The elderly waiting-woman her father had supplied in place of poor Sascha came squawking in. ‘There’s no time to sit dreaming! Quick, quick! Your best dress. Come along, m’lady. Let’s have that gown off you.’
‘Why-’
‘Your father’s orders! What sort of thing is “Why?”, eh?’
Confused, Cosima pulled laces undone.
Il Lupo, with a handsome present from the Duke and a skinful of wine with the help of Sigismondo-Martin and Barley, rode off a little carefully, scarred and saturnine, at the head of his men, towards a promising war in the south. His men had picked up a Roccan ballad about Paolo the Bastard, and h dwindled into the distance now in the warm spring evening air.
When the evening came and the feast was prepared, several problems had been resolved. The Festaiuolo Niccolo had found a way in which Evil, so unfortunately individualised in the late Lord Paolo, could be happily diversified into the Seven Deadly Sins, which also offered an opportunity for Envy’s iron teeth. Faith, Hope and Charity were to triumph over the Sins and an angel with a flaming sword would finally banish them from the soil of Rocca. The three Virtues had been recruited from local talent, and it was to be hoped that no courtier and in particular no churchman was an habitué of the house where they worked; they might be taken exception to as Virtues. The Festaiuolo’s own virtue had been under critical strain when the opulent ravishing madam had pulled him off his bench in a sporting effort to be cast as Charity.
Only very few were aware of the adultery of the late Duchess, and the Festaiuolo was luckily unconscious that the Duke might discover an extra significance in the caperings of Lechery.
A fine effect was to be the flaming sword wielded by the angel at the finish. He had decided to use the dancer who had made such a hash of the Wild Man, since it was a pity to waste such a face. Certainly there was a risk, if the angel drank too much this time as well, of his setting fire to the Vices with the burning tow on the sword. There had been moments, rehearsing Gluttony who had thought it repeatedly amusing to shift his false belly round to his backside, that Niccolo’s heart had yearned after this satisfying spectacle.
Problems had been solved by people more important than Niccolo. Duke Ippolyto and the Lady Violante, with identical reasons for wishing to appear at their best while yet obliged to maintain the convention of mourning — one, for an adulterous sister and the other for a detested stepmother — each decided to lighten the mourning. Duke Ippolyto changed to a burgundy so dense that it quite, at first glance, deceived the eye as nearly black and then seemed to burn in its depths. He was about to enter negotiations through Cardinal Pontano for a dispensation to marry his brother-in-law’s daughter, for since he first thumped down on the scaffold beneath her and they had struggled for mastery of his sword arm, he found the idea of a very different kind of struggle with her wholly enticing. The Lady Violante was selecting deepest purple to set off her white skin and blonde hair. Turning over the jewels spread out on the table by her lady, she made a face at the mourning jewels of jet and pearls, and picked up a diamond and pearl cross, magnificent on her breast. Her lady had seen it somewhere before but did not recall that this had been on the bosom of the Duchess Maria, the gentle lady who had brought up Violante as her own.