Over the hills a lemon sunrise cast a pale light on the walls of the villa, and on an opening shutter. As Sigismondo, heavily cloaked and hooded, settled himself in the grey gelding’s saddle, a hand waved from the open window. He raised an acknowledging hand in salute.
The wrought-iron gates were still open as they rode out and Benno, turning to look back, saw that his master was smiling. He also appeared, under the deep hood of his cloak, to be wearing a wimple.
Chapter Eleven
Benno asked no questions because he thought himself asleep, imagining things, but as they passed out of sight of the villa, descending the steep path between poplars, Sigismondo let his hood fall back.
Benno stared.
The strong jawline was disguised by the lines of the wimple, drawn over the cheeks to a point below the mouth, making a triangle with the low band to the eyebrows, a deliberately feminine triangle that showed only the dark eyes, the nose and the mouth. Benno noticed for the first time the thick sweep of eyelashes, and that one could see the sensual mouth as womanly. He had seen matrons on the Rocca streets with just as commanding. Sigismondo smiled, and his hood forward again over the black lawn veil, Biondello thrust his head out of Benno’s cloak to have look.
‘You serve a widow now, Benno: Donna Maria-Dolores, Spanish relict of a di Torre cousin. Ride beside me, and tell me all that you know about the childhood and relations of the Lady Cosima.’
Benno, at first of the opinion that he knew nothing of the subject, found that in pleasant converse with this weirdly female figure that he could tell a good deal. As time went by, the person beside him seemed to become more and more feminine, in bearing and behaviour. The voice modulated to a deep contralto, and, gradually, Benno began to see just such a woman as he had often met: big, somewhat masculine, but with a score of differences that Benno could not place but which made him all but lose sight of his master, and made him able to accept the transformation. He talked about family celebrations of the di Torre household, about gossip among the servants of the guests, and long arguments on winter evenings about such matters as the relationship of old Matteo di Torre to one of the Christmas guests, of Jacopo himself to the godparents of the little sons who had not lived; repetition, and Benno’s pride in the family he had served, had printed a good deal on his memory. By the time they drew off the road onto a sheltered spot under a contorted cliff, and ate and drank, the widow could say decisively: ‘Yes, I am Maria-Dolores de Cornuto, and I was married to that Venetian cousin. But you’ll offer no explanations to anyone. You’ll call me madam. And from now, until I tell you otherwise, in any company you’ll leave your mouth open and let nothing come out of it.’
‘So where are we off to, madam?’ They were not in any company, and the Widow Cornuto was in a relaxed mood. Benno remembered the laughter upstairs in the villa at dawn.
‘Do you know none of the roads round Rocca? Can you not tell our direction?’
‘I never was anywhere but Rocca and the villa. I’d like to see the world, like Kiev and Compostella and that.’
‘For now we’re going to the Benedictine house you spoke of. If nuns from that house came to see Ugo Bandini and, after he had seen them, he no longer led me to search for the Lady Cosima, it must be because he then knew where she is. And where better hide a young unmarried girl than in a convent?’
‘Who took her there, if it wasn’t the Bandini?’ The face so strangely feminised turned to him with raised brows that touched the linen browband. ‘When I find the answer to that, Benno, I may even tell you.’
They rode on in silence, Benno mentally digesting, had let Biondello stay on the ground for a run. The little dog kept close to the horses, uncertain of, but interested in, the roadside. He avoided a woodcutter who, muffled to the eyes in sacking and rags bound round his feet and legs up to the knees, met them, leading a donkey and not sparing the woman and her groom a second glance. Biondello learnt that most human beings kick or throw things, and he kept to the far side, safe behind his gods who did neither. They met an ox cart, creaking behind the two blond creatures who looked as if they walked in their sleep, their dewlaps aswing. Further back one of them had dunged the road, and a flock birds was pecking without much hope. Biondello saw them off.
‘Leandro Bandini, then.’ Benno, getting some answers, hoped to air a few more of his questions. ‘You really think he didn’t do it? Why’d he act like at the feast, then, giving his heart to the Duchess not the bride? Dancing about like that on the table?’
‘You thought he did it well?’
‘In and out the plates and cups, a tumbler couldn’t have beaten him at it. Until he knocked the wine over the Duchess. But then he must have meant to do that.’
The grey, going ahead on the path as it narrowed, picked its way carefully among the stones on the slope, and Sigismondo’s voice came back to Benno, ‘Quite the professional, as you say. Have you ever tried dancing on a table like that? There were two Wild Man costumes; Leandro could wear only one.’
Benno hurried forward to ride alongside as the road opened out again, and leant to scoop Biondello off the bank. He tucked the dog under his cloak against his body to warm the paws icy on his palm. ‘You think it was a tumbler killed the Duchess?’
The bewildering face was turned towards him again in amusement. ‘M’m-h’m-h’m. You could be right. It’s a thought, Benno. Some tumbler could have had a grudge against the Duchess, and sent the spare suit to Leandro with a false message, knowing he’d need a disguise, as a Bandini, to get into the Palace. It would be interesting to know where the tumbler is now. He could tell us something.’
‘Or he could’ve been paid to kill her. What about Poggio, though? He had a grudge; she’d got him kicked out of his job and the Palace. Why couldn’t he have killed her?’
They both crossed themselves as they passed a wayside shrine. The statue of the Madonna, her blue robe chipped at the edges, looked serenely down at a spray of ivy someone had put in a pottery jar at her feet.
‘It’s not impossible that Poggio did.’
‘But you let him go!’
‘I know where to find him,’ said Sigismondo, ‘and he’ll think he’s safe now. He’ll stay with that troupe unless he quarrels with them.’
Benno brooded for a while, his cloak twitching as Biondello got in a good scratch under one ear. ‘Did Poggio see anyone there, then, if he didn’t do it himself?’
‘He saw nothing to begin with, and then his mother persuaded him that to keep quiet would hang him quicker than the truth would. And my sword may have helped.’
‘Then he did see-’
Biondello, with a particularly ecstatic flurry of his hind leg, ejected himself from the cloak and landed in a surprised condition on the path. Sigismondo swerved the grey aside, and by the time Benno had dismounted and collected the dog, his master was ahead again.
‘Did he see someone?’ Benno was afraid that the indulgent mood might be over and the answers dried up, but the answer he did get earned him a mouthful of cold air. ‘The Lady Violante? What was she doing there?’
‘Come to take something she thought belonged to her, at a time when she was sure the apartment would be empty. A jewel promised her by the former Duchess. So she tells me. Equally, she might have gone there to kill the Duchess, or to take the opportunity of finding her asleep; the lady saw somebody going away, cloaked, whom she took to be the Duchess, so she says; it could have been anyone, male or female. Perhaps she came into the room, took the jewel, and then saw the Duchess and believed her theft had seen and killed her. She’s an impetuous young creature.’