"Your treaticise corroborates a periculous and suspifect sapience," said he to Atto before leaving.
"What do you mean?"
"When they affabulate thereupon, the Maggiorenghi become tempestiphilious and agitabundant… almost neuromaniacal. Have a care, Your Enormity. And kindly refract from requestifying me to reference more and more news and ulteriorities to you: I don't want to end up with a broken colon-bone."
On our way back, I dared not so much as address a word to Atto. This was no time for such things. From what we could glean from Ugonio's tortuous account, the cerretani did not care one bit for what Atto had written in those pages. We gathered that they intended on Thursday to bring the matter to the attention of a mysterious Grand Legator. The latter would go and see Albanum, in other words Cardinal Albani, with a formal summons against Atto.
So, who was this Grand Legator, if not Count Lamberg? A person of such elevated lineage could, after all, only be referred to obliquely; just as the cerretani had done.
What would Albani then do? Would he in turn report Atto as a French spy? After the arguments which had flared up between the two at Villa Spada, nothing would be easier for the astute Cardinal than to denounce Abbot Melani, his political adversary (for as such he could now be described) and crush him, causing him endless trouble, including perhaps an immediate arrest for espionage and political conspiracy.
More and more questions beset us: what the deuce could the Sacred Ball be, in which, according to Ugonio, Atto's treatise was to be kept until Thursday, and where was it to be found? Sfasciamonti was silent: he too seemed quite unable to help us resolve the enigma.
"I was forgetting. Lamberg has agreed to receive me," announced Melani.
"How did he inform you?"
"Did you see me hand him a note when chocolate was being served?"
"Yes. I remember that he replied, 'Very well, very well.' So, in that little note, did you request an audience?"
"Precisely. Subsequently, I asked his secretary, and he arranged the appointment: I shall visit Lamberg on Thursday."
As he pronounced that last fateful word, the day on which Atto would perhaps learn the truth about his stabbing, I heard a slight tremor in his voice. Watching him as he rode his nag, I knew that his soul was weighed down by yet another great anxiety. He felt himself to be at the mercy of two giants, Count Lamberg, the Imperial Ambassador, and Cardinal Albani, the Secretary for Breves.
And to think that he had come to Rome (or so he had told me) to take the helm at the conclave and to make his mark on the fate of the papacy! The navigator had become a castaway; and destiny, which he had meant to tame, was crushing the barque of his soul as cruel Scylla had done with the ship of Ulysses.
Day the Seventh
13th J ULY, 1700
"Mistress Cloridia, I seek Mistress Cloridia! Open up at once!"
I know not for how long they had been knocking at the door of my little house. When I at last opened my eyes, I saw that it was still pitch dark. My wife had already put on her gown and was on her way to the door.
I dressed with all speed, while the sparkling freshness of the air suggested that we were in the hours immediately before first light, when the temperature sinks to its lowest. I rejoined Cloridia. In the doorway stood a little boy who had just alighted from a barouche; the wife of the Deputy Steward of Palazzo Spada needed her midwife: her waters had broken.
"Please hurry, quickly, Mistress Cloridia," the boy insisted. "One of the palace guards has paid me to come and fetch you. The lady's alone with her husband and doesn't know what to do. You're needed urgently."
"This we could have done without, we really could have done without," muttered my wife, stamping on the ground, while she gathered her equipment in a furious hurry. "Go and wake up the little ones," she ordered me, "and join us at once at Villa Spada."
"At Palazzo Spada, you mean," said I, correcting her.
"At the villa," she said. "We shall meet by the back entrance; and be sure to bring your big sackcloth cape with you."
"But I'm not cold."
"Do as I tell you and stop wasting my time," Cloridia retorted angrily, literally beside herself at my sluggishness in emergencies.
Still dazed and somnolent, I stared vacantly at my wife as she moved from side to side of the room, picking up a towel here and a jar of oil there. She stopped one moment to think, then took from the trunk a camisole and petticoat which she herself had worn when pregnant, wrapped them up in a bundle with a pair of clogs and other articles of clothing and in the twinkling of an eye leapt onto the barouche and urged the boy towards Villa Spada.
"The knitted stockings, too? Ah, no, that I cannot bear. Find another solution, Monna Cloridia."
"Do you want the Deputy Steward to ask me how it is that my assistant is wearing fine red abbot's stockings under her skirts?"
When I arrived at my appointment with Cloridia, I could not believe what the moon's grey reflection presented to my eyes: Atto, with his smooth, flaccid face half concealed under a white midwife's bonnet, and dressed in large women's clothes left over from my wife's last pregnancy, was mounting a last, vain resistance to Cloridia's expert hands as they lifted the skirts of his disguise.
Cloridia had dressed him well for the part of an old midwife and now, having discovered that under that attire the Abbot had secretly kept his favourite red stockings, was making him change them for a pair of knitted hempen ones of the kind worn by women of the people. It was these that had provoked Atto's rebellion. The old castrato, who had sung the most varied feminine roles in half the world's theatres, was not so ill at ease dressed up as a midwife; but, like a real prima donna, could not bear the vulgarity of those knitted stockings of the sort worn by any common woman.
"Would you rather go barefoot in your clogs, like a beggar woman?" Cloridia rebuked him impatiently.
"Good idea, you'd make a perfect cerretana," I interrupted, making fun of Atto by way of greeting, whereupon we exchanged winks.
While the barouche waited outside the gates, my consort rapidly summed up the situation. Unfortunately, her herbs had acted earlier than expected: Cloridia had counted on having the morning free in which to inform us about what she had been able to see and study at the palace the day before.
"So now we have no time," said she anxiously. "Anyway, I have learned that on the first floor there's a gallery, which is kept locked, and which Father Virgilio in person had built. It contains various objects, including the Flemish globe you mentioned to me yesterday. Perhaps you will find what you are looking for in that gallery. The Deputy Steward's lodgings are on the ground floor, on the right-hand side of the vestibule with its three small aisles; you'll find the stairs immediately after that. The rest I shall show you when we get there."
We moved towards the gates, followed by the little girls. During the ride, Cloridia explained her plan to me.
"I shall tell the Deputy Steward that, as his wife is fat, I have had to bring a trusty old midwife with me, as well as my daughters," and here she pointed at Atto, "because I need someone who, together with the husband, can hold the woman down while I induce her to give birth, while our two little ones look after the instruments, towels and all the rest."
From her little smile, it was, however, quite clear that Atto would need to make no great effort to mimic a woman's voice and movements more than convincingly.
Atto, then, was to pretend to be an assistant midwife; the thing was far from being without danger, even without considering the disgust which it caused the Abbot. How the deuce had Cloridia persuaded him to attempt this masquerade? I regretted not having been present when my consort was using her powers of persuasion.