Lanza took her arm and, with the hapless girl wailing more loudly all the time, we ventured out into the night, where we fought our way through the gale and sleet, down the icy cobbled streets, struggling to remain upright. In spite of the weather a small crowd had gathered at the iron gates to the Longhena mansion, muttering darkly about murder and revenge. The night watch had yet to make their way to the scene. I announced my presence and pushed through. The house was very grand, on three floors, with a small Palladian entrance. The front door was open. From inside came the faint light of a small chandelier. With one hand on my dagger, I strode across the threshold and listened for activity. Some felons are late to quit the scene of their misdeeds. It is best to be prepared.
The great mansion was quite empty. Not a sound came from anywhere. Lanza followed on behind with the servant girl, who was now hiccupping and sobbing in that rhythmic way that sometimes betokens the onset of mania. If only I had listened more. Instead, suspecting intrigue (servants figure in crime more than one might expect), I turned upon her.
“Where are the rest of them, girl? The cooks? The servants?”
“All gone for the night, sir. Like the lady asked. She said she wanted me here alone when she met him, and I wasn’t to let on I was around, neither. Just hang about in case I was needed. And he was done so quick, I ran for my life!”
I have, I imagine, no need to tell you who this “he” turned out to be.
“Where is she, then?”
“No…!” She gazed terrified at the staircase, then fell to the floor in a huddle and covered her face with her hands. I have seen many a similar show from villains seeking to escape detection. Justice requires an iron hand if it is to be impartial. I ordered Lanza to drag her to her feet if necessary and follow me up the stairs.
Human blood smells like no other. We climbed two floors to the top of the house. When I reached the landing, I could recognise the stink. At the end of the corridor, in what I took to be the lady’s main bedroom, was a dim light leaking past a half-open door. On the icy draught of night air that came towards us — through an open window at the front, I suspected — was the stench of murder. I have seen enough dead bodies in my time to view this dread task with equanimity. Without another word I walked down the corridor. Lanza forced the girl to follow, her screams rising until, at the door, she fell to the floor and clutched my knees.
“I beg you, Signor Marchese. For the love of God, do not make me return to that place!”
I am the very cynic in these matters. I must be.
“If you are innocent, child, what do you have to fear? If your lady has been done a wrong, you should help us find the perpetrator, not stand in our way.”
Her face went rigid and there was the unmistakable cast of contempt in her eyes. “Find the perpetrator, sir? Would you lock up the Devil?”
“If I could throw my shackles round his ankles.”
There was a movement at her chest. I think it may have been the stirrings of grim laughter. “And you think he’d sit in your cell and await his fate?”
Her strangeness annoyed me.
“Come,” I ordered, and Lanza lifted her bodily, then the three of us entered the bedroom of the late Duchess of Longhena.
I have watched the axe sever a man’s head from his shoulders. I have attended the scene of the vilest of low crimes Rome has to offer. Nothing had prepared me for this sight. Lanza let go of the girl, went faint and pale, then dashed to the fireplace to vomit freely into the dying embers. The poor child knelt on the floor and buried her face in her hands, making the kind of howling sound one might expect of an animal coming face-to-face with the knife in the slaughterhouse.
She was right, of course. None should have entered that room and hoped to come out sane. The Duchess of Longhena, or what remained of her, lay naked on the bed like a small white whale beached in a sticky sea of her own blood. The woman’s throat had been cut from ear to ear, giving her face the appearance of a carnival clown sporting a false smile. Her belly had been ripped open from the breast to the groin, the fat flesh thrust aside to expose the internal organs, and these then torn from their fastenings and scattered around the bedroom much as an angry child might launch its toys at the walls of the nursery.
I remained calm in the face of the girl’s mad chanting and the continued heaving of Lanza in the corner, though this was a false show of reason. Somewhere at the back of my head, the real Marchese shrieked and howled along with her, as if in some locked room of my imagination. His was the true vision of this scene: a cruelty and violence that originated beyond the normal world we inhabit. Yet I must remain the magistrate always, and so contain my sentiments.
I took one step forward towards the bed. By the side of the mangled corpse lay something small and red, a familiar shape, though not in these circumstances. I bent and saw, on the bloodied coverlet, the tiny, perfect form of a human child, its head held forward as if in concentration, its eyes tight shut, tiny fists clenched, legs drawn up to its stomach. The cord still protruded from its belly. I took note of this scene, trying to calm my thoughts, and was aware of a hand upon my back. It was the girl, drawn to the bed, for all its horror. I looked at her crazed face and wondered how she might fare in the asylum. Our eyes returned to the collection of flesh upon the stained white satin and the tiny corpse there, surely the oddest victim of human brutality one might ever hope to find.
We stared at this still miniature of the human miracle for a moment, and then the universe turned turtle on us. For it moved. In one short, convulsive twitch, its limbs jerked into life, and the eyes, still covered with sheen, like those of a lizard, blinked briefly open. A bubble of mucus and blood emerged from its lips. Then the child, a male child, born of the Duchess of Longhena by some bloody parody of the Caesarean manner, died before our eyes.
I fell to my knees and found myself, without thinking, struggling in vain for prayer. Two lives had ended on these bedclothes: one tired and wasted, the other so short it was impossible to imagine how God’s grace had touched its brief, bloody blink of existence.
When I rose, my head a maze of conflicting thoughts, the girl stared at me, not weeping, not shouting anymore. Her face was full of hatred and I knew why.
“I did not… understand,” I stuttered.
“This is the Englishman’s doing,” she replied without emotion. “My lady called him here to tell him she was with child. She asked all but me to go away, wanting some solitude in which to break the news.”
“But why…?”
The room felt steeped in some mad, incarnate rage. It bore down on us all; its weight sat achingly on our shoulders.
She was looking at the bed again, no longer afraid. “I cannot have this poison in my head forever,” she said to no one in particular.
My mind was wheeling in too many directions. I did not see what was happening until it was too late. She walked over to the half-open window, threw up the sash, and, without a word, flung herself out into the night air, two storeys aboveground. I recall the nauseating sound of her body as it met the marble terrace below. It took all my resolve not to follow her. That night I stood in the presence of evil and its stain touched me. The irony was that I had met it many times before and never recognised its true face.
Lescalier had impregnated the Duchess, of course. He had, it transpired, been having a fairs all over Rome. A priest or some kind of doctor might be able to tell me why it was the news of the child which unhinged him. It could not have been planned, though my investigations proved beyond doubt that even without this casual murder, the Englishman would soon have departed Rome. His modus operandi seemed to be consistent with that adopted in the other cities where I traced him. First, he appears as a wealthy, innocent visitor, spreading around the riches he has stolen from his last port of call to gain some favour. Then, when he is embraced by all who matter, he becomes the thief and the rogue: borrowing, stealing, seducing at will, until the net of deceit becomes so broad and encircling that it begins to tighten around his neck. At this point, he flees, and a few weeks later another English aristocrat, with another counterfeit name, appears in society somewhere else in Europe. Curiously, in Paris and Geneva, too, he is thought to have killed, both pregnant women, one who was entirely innocent and merely happened to meet him in the wrong circumstances. What demon in a man’s topography could make him hate so much the notion of motherhood? I cannot begin to imagine. Faced with such horrors, I find the complexities of the human beast beyond my comprehension.