If that proved to be their intention she would have the whole of the coming day in which to endeavour to find him. She must already be worried by his non-return. First thing in the morning she would go to the Pitti and insist on seeing Monsignor Ricci. The probability was that Zucchino had never made the appointment at all. In any case it would come out that his intending visitor had never arrived there. If the Minister showed indifference to the matter, however reluctant Isabella might be to let her aunt know of her presence in Florence, the odds were that her acute anxiety would drive her to do so. There would be no necessity for her to disclose the fact that he was her fiancé; she could enlist her aunt's aid immediately by telling a part of the truth—that he was the bearer of a despatch from Queen Marie Antoinette to the Grand Duke, had saved her from attack upon the road, and given her his escort as far as Florence. The Contessa would at once go to the Grand Duchess, who, on account of the letter, if for no other reason, would report his disappearance without delay to the Grand Duke. Then the whole of His Highness's secret police would be put on to the job of finding him.
Whether they would succeed in doing so before nightfall remained problematical. But even then, if Isabella had secured the protection of either Monsignor Ricci or the Contessa, she would inform them of any message she received, and they would have her followed; so instead of her failing into a trap, she would lead the forces of law and order to his prison.
The more Roger thought the matter over the more inclined he became to stand firm and put his trust in Isabella's succeeding in rescuing him. But one thing remained a puzzle and defeated all his efforts to solve it. How had de Roubec managed to secure the assistance, of the Holy Office?
De Roubec was the agent of the Due d'Orleans, and His Highness was the supreme head of all the Freemasons in France. The Masons were freethinkers and revolutionaries, so regarded by the Church as its bitterest enemies. Yet the Chief Inquisitor had actually used the words when speaking of his prisoner to de Roubec: "Are you quite certain that you have made no mistake, and that this is the man that you required us to arrest?" To "require" signified to "order", and inexplicable as it seemed that de Roubec should have persuaded the Holy Office to help him, the idea that he was in a position to give it orders appeared positively fantastic.
At length Roger gave up the conundrum as, for the time being, insoluble, and consoled himself with the thought that it was into the hands of the Holy Office, and not into those of the Masons, or their associates the Rosicrucians, that he had fallen. He knew the latter to be quite capable of murder to protect their secrets or achieve their ends, whereas he felt convinced that even a branch of the Holy Office that had been driven underground would never lend itself to actual crime from political motives.
In the more backward Catholic countries the Inquisition was still permitted to carry out public witch-burnings—and for that matter witches were still burnt from time to time by Protestant congregations in Britain, Holland, Sweden and Germany—but the Holy Office had long since given up any attempt to adjudicate on cases other than those which involved a clear charge of sacrilege or heresy. It was such powers they were still striving to retain against the mounting wave of anti-clericalism ; so it stood to reason that, even in secret, they would not risk torturing or killing anyone outside their province, from fear that it might come to light later and provoke a scandal most prejudicial to their whole position.
Roger admitted to himself that at the time, when the Chief Inquisitor had spoken to him of the oubliette and threatened to use torture, he had been badly scared; but now he had had a chance to think things over quietly he felt certain that the hooded spokesman had been bluffing, and simply trying to frighten him into producing the letter without having to resort to further measures which might attract the attention of the police.
In spite of the warmth of the summer night outside it was cold in his cell, and as the chill of the place sent a slight shiver through him he leaned forward to warm his hands at the flame of the candle. While he was doing so they threw huge shadows on the walls and ceiling, and when his hands were warmer he began to amuse himself with the old' children's game of making the shadows into animals' heads by contorting his thumbs and fingers. He had been occupied in this way for about five minutes when he noticed some writing scratched on the wall opposite him low down near the floor. Moving the candle closer he bent to examine it.
The inscription was not cut deeply enough to catch the casual glance, nor was it of the type that take prisoners many weeks of patient toil to carve. It was in German, many of the characters were so badly formed as to be almost illegible, and it had the appearance of having been done hurriedly—perhaps in a single night. Roger's German was good enough for him to understand such words as he could decipher; and it ran, clearly at first, then tailing off into illegibility when the writer had grown tired or weaker, as follows:
May God's vengeance be upon the Grand Orient. I have suffered horribly. Both my legs are broken. They have decreed death for me tonight. I am glad . . . my end. I... to escape them . . . Italy. Carlotta .. . betrayed... Milan ... Florence ...
The inscription ended with two lines in which Roger could not make out a single word, then a signature that looked like "Johannes Kettner" and underneath it a plain cross with the date 10.XI.'88.
Another shiver ran through him, but this time it was not caused by the chill of the cell. The inscription had led him to a terrifying discovery. He was not, as he had supposed, a prisoner of the half-moribund Holy Office, but of the vital and unscrupulous Society of the Grand Orient.
As the unnerving truth flashed upon him de Roubec's puzzling relations with the tribunal were instantly made plain. The Rosicrucians and their kindred secret societies had, in the past quarter of a century, spread from Germany all over the continent. The Due d'Orleans was Grand Master of the Grand Orient in France, so his agent would know where to find its associated Lodge in Florence. A request from the agent of such a high dignitary in the Freemasonic hierarchy would be regarded as an order, so it was no wonder that the hooded men had arranged for the abduction of de Roubec's quarry—as, no doubt, they had acted on the request of some Masonic Master in Germany to abduct and take vengeance on the unfortunate Johannes Kettner.
At the thought of the wretched man lying there, his legs already broken by torture, on the last day of his life, painfully scratching out the inscription while waiting to be dragged to the oubliette, and thrown down it into the dark waters below, Roger felt the perspiration break out on his forehead. And that foul murder had taken place only the previous November—less than six months ago—so everything pointed to the very same hooded men before whom he had stood that night being responsible for it.
As he bent again to verify the date, he found himself staring at the little cross. Had he needed further evidence that he was not in the hands of the Holy Office, there it was. He knew that in every cell of every
Roman Catholic prison, however bare the cell, a crucifix was nailed to one of its walls, but there was not one here. And from what he had read of the Inquisition he knew that behind the tribunal of the Inquisitors a much larger cross, bearing a great ivory figure of Christ, was always in evidence as though to sanctify their deliberations; but there had been no such perverted Use of the emblems of Christianity made by the hooded men. The only cross he had seen in this sinister Florentine dungeon was that scratched by the hand of their condemned prisoner and enemy.
Without a moment's further hesitation he set about readjusting his ideas. The threat to torture and perhaps kill him had not been bluff; it had been made in all seriousness; so any chances he now took would be at his dire peril. Only one thing remained in his favour. Unlike France where people were tending more and more to defy the law, Florence was ruled by a strong and capable sovereign with an efficient secret police at his disposal. Evidently, here, the members of the Grand Orient were frightened of drawing attention to themselves. Therefore they were averse to using strong measures unless forced to it; and, rather than risk an enquiry following his disappearance, were prepared to release him unharmed if he would hand over the Queen's letter.