One of the row on the table, rapidly tying on his headkerchief, scrambled to his feet and said in a falsetto, ‘Ring for sale. Who’ll buy my ring?’ with out-thrust rear, and a dance step.
The outrage this time was from the women, and he was pulled off the table, but the tone of the assembly had changed. Linen flew as heads were covered, kerchiefs adjusted, a commotion of simpering was only hushed by a scandalised ‘Remember the Duchess!’ from somewhere. The inspection, now conceived as a turn of theatre, was accepted. Nothing could make it orderly. Sigismondo, whether recognising a force majeur or in dispassionate relish, did not try, but sat on a stone bench vacated by a line of dwarves as they precipitated themselves into the throng.
The steward and the guards organised something of a parade before the goldsmith. Kerchiefed faces were raised to his in turn, some bearded. Many came round for a second or a third time. They began to march.
Seeing panic burgeon in the goldsmith’s complexion, Sigismondo suggested that to hear a voice might be of use; but it is open to doubt whether the repetition of ‘My mistress wishes to sell this ring’ in every conceivable pitch, was truly an improvement. The goldsmith flung up his hands.
All he could be got to say was that most of them looked like the seller, which caused umbrage. The steward asked whether a further parade would not enable him to be certain, and the goldsmith, shaking his head very decidedly, said that, though he was afflicted to confess it, he could not, he really could not, identify the person.
The dwarves were permitted to disperse. Sigismondo, watching the steward trying to collect the kerchiefs he had issued, and being not only unable to halt those going out but being faced with an elderly matron wearing, she coldly informed him, her own coif, and trying to placate the distressed goldsmith, was addressed by the dwarf he had first spoken to, who leant patiently on the table as his companions boiled out of the room.
‘The Duchess had a great number of rings.’
‘This was one she always wore.’
‘That green one? A rich emerald, I suppose.’
‘Yes.’
‘Shortly they’ll seize some of us to be tortured until they find one who’ll confess.’ He was matter-of-fact.
‘Very likely. Were all of you present? What about the missing one?’
He received a very sharp glance. ‘Poggio? He’d been banished. In the fashion, along with di Torre and Bandini. It didn’t keep Leandro Bandini out.’
‘No.’
The man nodded significantly.
‘You are saying that banishment is ineffective.’
Another nod.
‘Where does Poggio live?’
Pushing himself away from the table, he passed Sigismondo on his way out. He said, ‘He was born in Altosta.’
Chapter Eight
The bitter wind from the mountains had been amusing itself all day, plucking at the roofs of stalls, and women’s skirts and coifs, blowing hoods and hats off heads, rattling shutters as though keen to come in by the fire and thaw the ice from its breath; sidling under doors to worry people’s ankles, and driving straw and dust everywhere. Now, rejoicing, it met Sigismondo and Benno on the road outside the city walls. As they bent before it, furling cloaks over their mouths, urging the horses on, the wind threw in a sprinkle of snow as an added caress, token of what lay ahead in the hills they rode towards.
Benno bore the journey with his habitual philosophy. His stomach was fuller than when he fed in Jacopo di Torre’s kitchens, there were provisions and wine in the saddlebags, together with the nicely maturing dove; the horse under him was a good one from the Duke’s stables, better than any he had been allowed to ride in di Torre employment. He just had to remember to keep his mouth shut when his master was thinking, as the wind was now helping him to do. The only pain in his existence was worry about the Lady Cosima; Sigismondo had assured him that it was in the interest of anyone who was holding her to ensure her welfare, and he was willing to believe it, yet still he worried; to distract himself, he went over the various things he had eaten the night before, savouring them again in imagination, and paying little heed to the rising track over the bare fields. After all, his master would certainly find the Lady Cosima; and God would protect her.
Altosta, as they wound up the hillside towards it, their horses slipping now and again on the great exposed slabs of rock powdered with snow, did not look much like a village. It more resembled a collection of ruins at which someone had flung birds’ nests. Roofs constructed of branches, turf, straw, anything which might keep out the weather, and weighted with slabs of rock, crouched low and welcomed the snow as an extra layer of warmth. Huts perched on unlikely slopes or crammed themselves among boulders as if hiding, the spaces between them rutted with cart tracks or blocked by frozen dungheaps.
A donkey’s bray rang out loud on a gust of wind, from some ramshackle stable. Nobody stirred, although smoke seeped grudgingly from more than one thatch. Benno had a conviction, located at the back of his neck, that they had not arrived unnoticed.
His master had dismounted and stood, so shrouded and sinister in his black cloak that Benno thought no one could be blamed for fancying he carried a scythe at his saddlebow, that Death was come. He got off his own horse, stumbled because his legs were so cold, and waited hopefully.
What came to greet them in the end was a dog; a small dog whose ribs showed through the dirty wool of its coat, who had one ear only but bore it bravely aloft, whose tail slapped its flanks as it twisted from side to side in an ecstasy of welcome. Benno thought once of his mistress’s beloved Biondello, but this dog had seen no more food than its own fleas for a week. It went to Sigismondo as a saint might go to Death, with joy and trust.
It received earthly reward in the shape of a lump of sausage from the saddlebags, which disappeared into its stomach in a gulp. Benno, watching this, said, ‘I thought there’d be more. Villages like this send out dogs to eat strangers.’
The dog now lay on its chin before Sigismondo, its rump in the air and its tail threatening to hurl it off balance.
‘Perhaps there haven’t been enough strangers,’ said ‘Sigismondo, ‘or perhaps they’ve eaten the dogs.’
Whether or not he was the only dog left, this one grateful to be alive. Sigismondo’s warning hand prevented Benno from giving him more to eat. ‘D’you want to kill him? His stomach has to learn what food is.’
The sausage brought the child. Tied into dirty rags from head to foot, it came steadily towards them and stood at Sigismondo’s feet by the dog, looking up much the same expression. Sausages that came the sky were worth such risk. Benno could hear a cautious unbarring of doors. A face appeared momentarily at a gap in a wall which a gross misuse of language might term a window. Another gust of wind brought wreathing acrid smoke as though the village been holding its breath and now let it out. A hen over a hurdle fence and began to peck, staring wisely sidelong at grain it imagined.
‘What do you want?’
Impossible to tell from where the voice came. It the village speaking. Benno stopped in the act of handing a bit of sausage to the child, and it snatched and ran, diving into a hut. The dog barked. Sigismondo spoke from under his cowl and, despite the efforts of the wind to carry it away, his voice rang out clearly to their invisible audience.
‘I come from the Duke to Altosta.’
Benno was not surprised at the ensuing silence; even the hen stopped pecking. Dukes were bad news in villages; anyone in power always wanted more of what villages were short of: money, food, men to fight for them. Dukes didn’t send free pigs to villages.