dying in my service, you falsified my vision, you
masked him—either at his own and at my
brother’s bidding, or else out of the malignancy
of your nature—in a garb that should render
him agreeable in my eyes. Do you realise what
you have done? Does not your conscience tell
you? You have contrived that I have plighted
my troth to a man such as I believed the Lord Giovanni
to be. Mother of Mercy!” she ended, with
a scorn ineffable; “when I dwell upon it now,
it almost seems that it was to you I gave my heart,
for yours were the deeds that earned my regard—not
his.”
Such was the very argument that I had hugged to my
starving soul, at the time the things she spoke of
had befallen, and it had consoled me as naught in
life could have consoled me. Yet now that she
employed it with such a scornful emphasis as to make
me realise how far beneath her I really was, how immeasurably
beyond my reach was she, it was as much consolation
to me as confession without absolution may be to the
perishing sinner. I answered nothing.
I could not trust myself to speak. Besides,
what was there that I could say?
“I summoned you back to Pesaro,” she continued
pitilessly, “trusting in your fine words and
deeming honest the offer of services you made me.
Now that I know you, you are free to depart from
Pesaro when you will.”
Despite my shame, I dared, at last, to raise my eyes.
But her face was averted, and she saw nothing of
the entreaty, nothing of the grief that might have
told her how false were her conclusions. One
thing alone there was might have explained my actions,
might have revealed them in a new light; but that
one thing I could not speak of.
I turned in silence, and in silence I quitted the
room; for that, I thought, was, after all, the wisest
answer I could make.
POISON
Despite Madonna Paola’s dismissal, I remained
in Pesaro. Indeed, had I attempted to leave,
it is probable that the Lord Filippo would have deterred
me, for I was much grown in his esteem since the disclosures
that had earned me the disfavour of Madonna.
But I had no thought of going. I hoped against
hope that anon she might melt to a kinder mood, or
else that by yet aiding her, despite herself, to elude
the Borgia alliance, I might earn her forgiveness
for those matters in which she held that I had so
gravely sinned against her.
The epithalamium, meanwhile, was forgotten utterly
and I spent my days in conceiving wild plans to save
her from the Lord Ignacio, only to abandon them when
in more sober moments their impracticable quality was
borne in upon me.
In this fashion some six weeks went by, and during
the time she never once addressed me. We saw
much during those days of the Governor of Cesena.
Indeed his time seemed mainly spent in coming and going
’twixt Cesena and Pesaro, and it needed no keen
penetration to discern the attraction that brought
him. He was ever all attention to Madonna, and
there were times when I feared that perhaps she had
been drawn into accepting the aid that once before
he had proffered. But these fears were short-lived,
for, as time sped, Madonna’s aversion to the
man grew plain for all to see. Yet he persisted
until the very eve, almost, of her betrothal to Ignacio.
