Her try at an apposite sound-effect was stillborn; the pedlar’s knife was at her throat. She stood, eyes wide, in grotesque imitation of the kitchenmaid facing her, a mirror image of terror. The cook clasped both fat hands over her mouth as if to cram back screams that would vomit forth. Her face was the exact colour of the turnips on the table, cream with a greenish tinge.
Angel-face, presented with another charge, repeated his assertion that a scream would precipitate the death of the kitchenmaid. To reinforce the notion, he permitted a drop of blood to flower, as if by magic, on her neck, and observed the silent jump all three performed for him.
The pedlar, having left the maid in hands so far from safe, once again vanished.
Upstairs, the Widow Costa had very cordially embraced both her guests, and Sigismondo had kissed the hand of the companion, who preened herself like a little elderly bird and hoped, though not aloud, that there would be exciting stories at dinner as before; and that such stories would not be muted by the presence of a religious. She was ignorant that she was about to become part of an exciting story herself.
Sigismondo did not immediately explain the nun, and the Widow Costa, seating the girl safely by her sister-in-law, drew him to a low-backed chair facing the window, so that she might watch his expression, while she sat herself with her back to it, being of that age where a woman prefers to be seen by candlelight than by winter sun. She leant to take the broad hands in hers and, patting them, began — not to question him about his journey or the nun, for she had been his friend long enough to wait for what he chose to tell her — but to amuse him with trivialities about life during his short absence. She was telling, with well-acted indignation, how her companion had discovered that two of her pilgrim badges, those of St Godelieve of Ghent and of her guest’s name-saint, Hubert of Brussels, were missing, when the door opened. She did not look up, expecting the maid with the wine.
If the companion and the nun had not looked, and uttered a simultaneous shriek, the knife might have found its mark in Sigismondo’s back. As it was, Sigismondo had dropped to a turning crouch and the knife stood juddering with the force of the throw in the wooden jamb of the window.
It was no loss to the pedlar, to whom the cook’s knife was merely fortuitous. His own was in his hand, longer and fully as sharp, and he leapt. Sigismondo’s chair met him halfway, jarring his arm so that the knife jumped from his hand. He wrested the chair aside and the men grappled. The Widow Costa and her companion clung together, holding breath in acute anxiety and terror, as the men trampled and then rolled about the room, the face of one muffled in the other’s sleeve as they struggled, Sigismondo to drive his knife home, the other to prevent him. The leather hat soared across the room like an ungainly fowl, the men grunted and the floor resounded. By a twist, Sigismondo emerged on top, forcing the knife down in a swoop that veered abruptly and embedded the blade in the floor. Both men, quite still, stared.
‘Barley. You scoundrel. You’ve grown a beard!’
‘Martin! You’ve lost your hair!’
The three women disbelieved what was happening as devoutly as they had disbelieved what went before. After a moment, each reacted: the companion remained rigid, pressed against a tapestry of Philemon and Baucis, and babbled a litany of prayer; the widow seized the chair Sigismondo had used against Barley, and stood ready to wield it; the nun had wrested the knife from the window jamb and waited her chance to plunge it into the man who could only be a Bandini.
The two opponents were busy helping each other off the floor, laughing, embracing, a bears’ reunion. Sigismondo retrieved his knife and sheathed it. They regarded one another with relish. Their lethal fight had plainly been a fillip to their taste for life, and had raised their spirits.
‘Who paid you to kill me, eh?’
‘Who’s a traitor to Duke Ludovico?’
Sigismondo put a hand to his shaven head and smoothed it down to the nape, humming thoughtfully. ‘Ah. That’s the way the wind blows now?’ He jabbed Barley in the chest, a chest that could take any jab not delivered by steel. ‘You’ll remember Federico Costa?’
‘I don’t forget a man I fought beside, God save his soul.’
‘Meet his widow.’
Sigismondo led forward Barley, now a bashful bear, to kiss the widow’s hand. She had lowered the chair, albeit watchfully, and looked at the men with growing anger, charged by her recent fear.
‘What’s the mystery here? You come to kill my guest under my roof, and you say you are my husband’s comrade? Is this the common usage among men of the sword?’
‘He is an Englishman.’ Sigismondo’s statement was an exoneration for all eccentricities, even with knives. Who could need more explanation? But Barley was aroused.
‘A Scot, man! I am a Scot. Take that word English off your tongue. You’re such a mongrel yourself, you understand nothing of these things; or so you pretend.’ A playful blow hit the chest as impervious as his own. It looked as if they had more wrestling to do before they could work off the pleasure of this meeting.
‘You are not a Bandini? Nor hired by one?’
Barley took in for the first time the young, frail-looking nun, with fierce eyes and a knife to match, with which she was suddenly threatening his ribs.
‘I’m no Bandini, Sister, nor have I taken money of one. I’ve come from Rocca, true, but on the Duke’s business.’
‘You lie! He told me he works for the Duke.’
‘No longer, no longer.’ Sigismondo deftly retrieved the knife from the nun’s hand. ‘Let us sit in peace and, with your permission, my lady,’ bowing to the Widow Costa with a warm smile, ‘drink some of your excellent wine.’ As he spoke, some dark thought flashed on him and he swung abruptly to Barley. ‘Are you alone?’
Both men thought of Benno. Barley also thought of Angel-face, who by now might have had a visitor in the kitchen looking, as Biondello had done, for welcome and food. Together they plunged from the room.
Nun and widow sank on chairs as if their knees had abdicated responsibility. The companion, in catatonic trance quite unbroken by anything yet said, remained pressed against the tapestry beginning another decade of Hail Marys, perhaps in the certainty that if she stopped, the sky, or at least the ceiling, would fall.
Benno, when he finished with the horses, whistled to Biondello, slung his bag on his shoulder, and strolled towards the kitchen, enjoying the spring sun. It glowed more warmly than of late, and he raised his face to it, anticipating, as Biondello had done, good food from the hands of the cook and with luck more than a kindly pat from the kitchenmaid. He did not notice that Biondello had prudently failed to come along.
He stood in the kitchen doorway, living up to the kitchenmaid’s unkind description of him, though to call his appearance half-witted at this juncture would have been generous. The urgent, frozen scene did not change though eyes moved towards him. Even the soft invitation from the angelic one to despatch the kitchenmaid from this world by an untoward move was the same. He had issued it effectively twice before and it should have been adequate for even the most clouded mind. Benno, however, had his priorities. He spared a sad thought for the kitchenmaid but he scrambled into a headlong rush along the gravel, to run round the house to the front. He understood danger, and his master was the man for that. He hoped that the great oak door had not been bolted. He even hoped that the lovely young viper with the knife would take time over cutting the kitchenmaid’s throat, but he doubted it. Something about the creature connoted speed. The house was much larger than he had thought. He fled along the front terrace, hearing the quick spirting of gravel behind him. Arriving with a thud against the oak door and struggling with the handle, he found it not bolted and shoved it open and flung himself inside yelling. At this moment Angel-face caught up with him and a vast red-headed man came running full tilt down the green staircase ahead of him followed closely by Sigismondo. Luckily for Benno, he then tripped.