Candles were lit. Barley put another log on the fire, the substantial branch in his hand appearing as a twig. The long oaken table was set with silver dishes which the maid fully expected would leave in the pedlar’s pack when the food was eaten. This food was as good as the wine, more of which was brought up by one of the men from the kitchen, inquisitive to see the strangers. He, on his return, admitted that the maids and cook were innocent of exaggeration as regards the red-haired giant, but that the blond boy looked no better than a girl. Even a kitchenmaid could have twisted a knife out of his hand.
Angelo’s skills were under discussion at the table also. Barley described some of his own activities since he last saw his friend Martin; how, recovering from wounds that for a time made him unable to hire his sword out, he had led a vagabond life, even joining a troupe of performers who journeyed from city to city, dancing, singing, selling ballads, doing a bit of juggling, fortune-telling and wrestling. It was in this troupe, whose members came and went like summer clouds, that he had met Angelo. Over the pork and cabbage soup, he described with large explanatory gestures an act they had great success with. For Barley it had involved wearing a bearskin — and from the expressions of his audience they appreciated how convincing this must have been — and wrestling with Angelo, who each time eventually vanquished and led him, in triumph, round the crowd collecting money. Angelo could sing like a bird, like a cathedral chorister… and dance! Barley leant across the table to seize his friend’s sleeve.
‘I tell you he is the best dancer in the world. He can trip it like a whoreson fairy. Up, Angelo!’ Barley swept a vast hand above the dishes. ‘Up and show them!’ He wagged his red beard at them all, looking round, and then assured his hostess, ‘Don’t fear! He’ll not touch a dish nor break a glass.’
Angelo, whose eyes had remained as modestly downcast as any nun’s while he was praised, submitted to the general encouragement. One foot on his bench, one on the table and he was up, and began, to Barley’s handclap and deep singing of an estampie, to dance among the dishes and flasks and glasses, the spoons and pieces of bread, on the table. The companion, who was now very flushed, beat her hands in rhythm as loudly as anyone, and was reminded in a muddled way of having heard how angels dance upon the point of a pin. Even the nun clapped her hands. Sigismondo waited until Angelo had leapt down and had accepted another glass of wine from the admiring widow. Then, as Barley had done to him, he leant across the table and seized not the sleeve but the breast of the young man’s tunic, bunching it in his grasp.
‘You have a tale to tell me, Wild Man.’
Chapter Fifteen
For a moment grey eyes stared into brown and then the table witnessed the resurrection of the viper; a knife glinted in Angelo’s hand from nowhere. Sigismondo released Angelo’s jerkin and clamped onto his wrist, Barley uttered a roar and jumped up knocking over the bench, the companion shrieked shrill as a whistle and the maid, carrying in a dish of baked onions stuffed with ham and cheese, dropped it and hared for the door. Sigismondo repelled Barley with a punch to the chest that sent him over the upturned bench into the onions, and gave such a twist to Angelo’s arm that the knife fell spinning onto the table, chipping a glass his dance had not touched.
‘Peace. I’m your friend. All I want is your story, man!’
Angelo, snarling and gasping, Lucifer after the Fall, glared unconvinced at Sigismondo from where he was held down on the table. The companion had closed her eyes the better to concentrate on screaming.
‘My oath on it, I mean you no harm,’ Sigismondo repeated above the noise.
‘You’ve not come to kill me?’
Sigismondo released Angelo’s wrist and began to laugh. Barley, asprawl among the debris on the floor, joined with a bass bellow of enjoyment.
‘Kill you? Didn’t you come here to kill me?’
Angelo, rubbing the wrist still white from Sigismondo’s grasp, began reluctantly to smile. He stood looking at Sigismondo, who made no effort to impound the knife or to rise. The deep voice, however, was now serious.
‘If you think your life is in danger, it is for the same reason that Barley was sent to kill me. There’s a mystery here and we need your help too, to unravel it.’
Angelo took up his knife and sheathed it, docile again. Barley, sampling an onion close to his hand, was still chewing and brushing cheese off his jerkin as he righted the bench so that they might sit. The Widow Costa put down the napkin she had been holding tightly to her lips; the nun shifted her hold on her ivory-handled knife to a less aggressive one, and Sigismondo, by clapping the companion on both cheeks and then taking both hands in his and warmly kissing them, made her open her eyes and stop shrieking.
‘Dear lady, all is well again.’ Taking the nearest wine jug, he topped up her glass and folded her fingers round its base. ‘It is time for another story.’
‘First things first,’ the widow said, rising. ‘I must see what is to replace the onions.’
‘We owe you apologies,’ Sigismondo said, also rising.
‘Nothing very wrong with the onions,’ Barley protested. He, and the other men, had certainly eaten food far worse than that to be retrieved from a well-kept floor. He was at that moment removing an onion, very much the worse for his weight, from the rear of his jerkin. He spread his napkin over the tapestry of the bench to protect it from what remained.
Their hostess, however, was picking her way towards the door when it opened boldly to admit Benno with a meat axe, followed, not readily, by two farm men with more of the cook’s armoury.
Benno lowered the axe on seeing his master genially at ease, and the reported assassins seated, not threatening — one of them chuckling still.
The widow gave orders about the onions and about her dishes, and came back to the table. She said, ‘Truly, Hubert, no apologies are due. I’ve not had so interesting a time since Federico, rest his soul, left this earth.’ She sat down and, settling herself in the big chair, said, ‘And now, this story.’
‘We are going to hear the tale of how a Wild Man danced for a Duchess and who set him to do it.’
‘That, I can’t tell you.’ Angelo’s voice was soft but definite. ‘I saw his face but I don’t know who he was.’
‘Or for whom he worked? Was he a man of rank, perhaps?’
‘No; a servant, but not in livery.’
‘Tell from the beginning what happened.’
Angelo accepted Sigismondo’s own glass, full, and drank consideringly. The widow leant forward to this was news even the citizens of Rocca had not heard.
‘Barley and I were in Rocca for the wedding, along with a crew of others.’
‘Everyone knew there’d be pickings,’ Barley interrupted, stretching a long arm to take the wine jug from Sigismondo, and pouring for his hostess and the pretty nun, whose eye he had been quite unable to catch. ‘We went to the Palace to see if the Festaiuolo would take us on.’
‘So everyone knew you were together?’
Angelo and Barley exchanged a glance. Barley shook his head. ‘There was a whoreson great crowd, dwarves and all, waiting to show their acts, and Angelo got called out alone because they wanted a special dancer. I was hired too.’ He threw out his chest and looked around. ‘I was to have been a giant. The Festaiuolo thought I would look well with the dwarves at the end. Then you wrecked it all.’ He gave Angelo a friendly shove that nearly sent his golden head into the companion’s bosom.
‘I was supposed to do as I did! Those were my instructions: to dance along with the dwarves, to mime, to offer the heart to the Duchess, to spill wine onto her dress. It’s not easy, sending wine to spill where you want it to go.’