“Is he uttering threats?” Harold said. “I won’t proceed on that basis and they had better know it.”
“No, no.” Cecilia paused, listening. “No, it is his way of discussing things. He is saying, as far as I can make out, that whether the wall had foundations or not is completely beside the point.”
“Discussing things? The man is a complete savage. What does he do when he feels like shouting? How can it be beside the point when—”
“He says the point at issue is not the foundation but what caused the wall to collapse.”
The woman now spoke directly to her father in what seemed an attempt to silence him or tone him down. Cecilia had again the impression that the two of them were acting, improvising from moment to moment, following some instinctive, archetypal pattern.
The father fell silent and the daughter drew nearer to the Chapmans and spoke more quietly, glancing upward from time to time as if to take the skies as witness.
“She is saying mainly what she said before, that the wall, which was a very good strong wall and cost them three million lire to have built only four years ago, and God is her witness to this, was loosened by the vibrations caused by the repeated passing of heavily loaded lorries.”
“It’s a wonder to me the wall stood for so long.” Harold pondered for a moment or two. Money was what they wanted, of course—that was as clear as daylight. It might be better to spend a little money than to get on the wrong side of these people. As neighbors they might conceivably be useful. If they felt wronged they would certainly be vindictive and might find ways of doing harm. One heard horror stories now and again: pets poisoned, fences torn down, wells polluted in the night … “I suppose we will have to accept some responsibility,” he said to Cecilia. “After all, the road is narrow and the lorries must have been heavy-laden.”
“Oh, Harold,” Cecilia said, “I am so glad you think that, because it is exactly what I think too.” She was swept by pride at his magnanimity. Harold might seem unfeeling at times but his underlying generosity would come to the fore, however much he might try to conceal it. Radiant-faced, she turned back to the Checchetti.
“Don’t tell them what I said,” Harold said quickly. “Never admit liability, it’s always a great mistake. For heaven’s sake, Cecilia, think for a minute.”
He stared at his wife in reproof. She really had no idea of the world at all. One did not give ground to people free of charge, one did not render oneself vulnerable, one did not surrender an advantage. Now, as he looked at Cecilia, it seemed to him that this essential lack of grasp of hers found a parallel in the loosely flowing style of her attire, the full-skirted, unbelted blue dress, the pale hair escaping from the confines of her tortoiseshell combs. There came unbidden to his mind a sudden thought of his new secretary, Miss Phelps, blonded and permed, tight-skirted, high-heeled. A woman who was not afraid to look like a woman.
The Checchetti, sensing a turning point, had drawn closer together and maintained now a silence full of expectation. It was they, Cecilia thought, who had controlled the conversation from the very start, with their pattern of rage and appeasement, their calculated clamor and calculated hush. Avarice was written in the lines of their faces and a hostility that no requirement of tact or advantage could altogether mask. She looked over their heads at the hillside beyond, the strange sense of close order imposed by the rows of bare vines strung between pale concrete pillars. Rising steeply in rank upon rank, carefully terraced, they represented an enormous sum of labor; the yield in money, on such small holdings as these, could not be very great. Little wonder these people clawed for gain.
“Whatever is done will have to be done in legal form,” she heard Harold say. “I hope they don’t imagine we are just going to hand them a lump of money. Tell them we will see our lawyer this afternoon and try to work something out.”
Monti had no teaching until late afternoon. He had some student essays to look at but by eleven he was free for his own work. As usual he made himself coffee on a small hot plate in his room; he had avoided the common room as far as possible since Laura’s going. He was a stranger at the university, on a visiting fellowship. He had some acquaintances in the faculty but no friends, no one whose kindness he could take for granted; he shrank at the thought of having his humanity reduced, brought down to a single image of cuckoldry and loss.
His nature had always tended to the obsessive and in this period of loneliness the tendency became more pronounced, his studies were not so much a solace to him as a quest for encoded meanings. He was occupied with the relations between the Republic of Perugia and the Papacy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and more particularly with the rise of the Baglioni family of Perugia, a story marked throughout by the extremest forms of rapacity and violence.
At ease in his small room, with the ancient radiator creaking and occasionally uttering soft hisses, and the smoke from his cigarettes rising up toward the ceiling, he was considering the murder of Biordo Michelotti by the Guidalotti family in March of 1398, an event which for complex reasons had started the Baglioni on their road to power. He was seeking to establish some degree of complicity in this murder, or at least prior knowledge of it, on the part of the pope of the time, Boniface IX.
An impressive figure, Michelotti, soldier and politician both. One of the most gifted commanders in the history of Perugia. In effect he had been the first ruler of the city, though far too prudent to adopt official titles. Prudent he had been, yes, but not able—as no man of his time was able—to see any real distinction between the fortunes of the city and his own. He had dreamed of recovering for Perugia, and so for himself, those former territories which had ensured the Republic her wealth and power. And he had gone a long way toward succeeding: in a series of brilliant campaigns, he had taken Assisi, Castiglione del Lago, La Fratta and Montalto and subjected them to the Comune of Perugia.
Such a degree of success brought danger. These were territories that lay within the zone of papal expansion. There was evidence enough that Boniface had begun to find this gifted adventurer an obstacle to his plans.
The leader of the conspiracy, Francesco Guidalotti, was a churchman, Abbot of San Pietro. He had been in Rome in the December of the previous year, only some three months before the murder. Monti had not yet succeeded in unearthing any definite indications of a papal audience, but this must have presumably been the purpose of Guidalotti’s visit. The chronicles asserted that he had been promised a cardinal’s hat.
With an intensity that gathered and grew in that small room, amid the complaints of the antiquated plumbing, Monti began to run over again in his mind the events of that distant morning. Michelotti, only five months married, still in his bedchamber. The abbot arrives, accompanied by his two brothers Anibaldo and Giovanni. They ask to speak with Michelotti on a matter of great importance. He gets up from his bed, dresses, and without arming himself, goes out to greet them in the room where they are waiting. Why so trusting? This was a tried and experienced soldier, a man accustomed from early youth to the practice of arms. Moreover, he was a man of shrewd judgment, passionate perhaps, but not rash—all his career went to show this. Was it that he trusted in the gratitude of the Guidalotti? They had been expelled once from the city for conspiring against him and in his generosity of spirit he had pardoned them, allowed them to return. Those we have pardoned do we always underrate? Did he not know, this man of affairs, that where there is hatred it can only be increased by favors?
He had walked into the room where they waited. He had embraced Francesco in greeting, and while the abbot held him in the embrace, the two others attacked him from behind, stabbing him repeatedly with their poisoned daggers, first in the back and then, when he fell, in the chest and throat.
Monti stirred and sighed. It had been a deed of appalling treachery and cowardice, and momentous in its results, bringing back the noble families Michelotti had exiled, the violent and ambitious clan of the Baglioni among them. But in its nature there was nothi
ng particularly to distinguish it from a multitude of such incidents in the sanguinary history of the city. Why, then, did it exercise such a spell on his mind?
Perhaps Biordo had been bemused, softened by his youthful bride. Slackened all the sinews of war. So happy in abandonment that for those moments he saw the world as a field of love. Giovanna di Bertoldo Orsini, his wife of five months. He had risen from her side and walked out to his death. The Orsini were a Roman family, by turns allies and foes of the Pope …
Monti sat forward. Could the wife have somehow had a hand in it? She could hardly have kept his weapons from him, but a woman can do much in the way of persuasion. He would have been in haste to return to her. He would not have detected the taint of treachery in her kisses. Any more than I did after all the years. She was the same in appearance and manner as she had always been, no less loving, no less kind. The time-hallowed jokes of people who live together—his absentmindedness, her habit of making lists and drawing up programs. She had even seemed happy. On her face sometimes a look of remote inquiry, as if she were tracking some elusive thought. This wild thing she had done, where was it to be seen, what intimations had there been in twelve years of wifedom? He knew himself to be often preoccupied, unobservant of his surroundings, subject to habit in domestic matters. There might have been signs that another man would have seen, but he had seen none. She had reminded him to wear his scarf, she had continued to take an interest in his work. Things could have gone on like this for a long time if they had stayed in Turin—it was the move here that had done it. She had come in good faith, she had intended to stay, she had arranged for a leave of absence from her teaching job. But the voice of her need had been too strong.
This was his chief suffering now, not the technical act of infidelity but this urgency of her love for another. Following upon this, unavoidable, the anguish of imagining their bodies together. He could not feel anger, only the sickness of the blow. He knew himself to be mild, to be lacking in aggression. None of the Baglioni men would have borne it patiently. Can it be this, he wondered, that draws me so to the story of blood that is Perugia’s history?
No one, as far as he knew, had followed up the Orsini connection. He felt a stirring of excitement. Such a line of investigation could lead far beyond that morning of the poisoned knives, perhaps shed new light on papal policy in the period, in all its ruthlessness and duplicity.
The Guidalotti, at any rate, had not profited from their crime. Monti thought about the extraordinary error of judgment that the family had made, more extraordinary in some ways than their victim’s reckless trust. They had apparently thought that by killing Biordo they would raise the city in their favor and be brought to power on a popular movement; not seeing, in their arrogance and stupidity, that the murdered man had been regarded by the common people with veneration, as restoring through his conquests the ancient grandeur of the Perugian state.
It was a mistake that cost them dear. A manhunt for members of the Guidalotti family was immediately instituted throughout the city. Perugian manhunts always took the same form: the incensed mob slaughtered anyone they could lay their hands on who was in any way connected with the Guidalotti, including any persons unfortunate enough to be encountered in the vicinity of their houses. The houses themselves were given over to pillage and fire.
Valuable houses on prime sites. Among those who had set on the mob, some would have been interested in political advantage, others would have had an eye on the real estate. Irrespective of right or wrong, causes just or unjust, there were always people in the wings, with their eye on the main chance. And they were always the same people …
Blemish had things to attend to in Perugia and it was after midday when he headed back home. He was pleased with his morning’s business and especially with the way he had handled the Greens. They were a promising couple; he had thought so from the start. He saw them now in his mind’s eye, standing side by side at the top of the steps, gray-haired, blue-eyed and guileless, smiling in welcome. Once again it came to him that they were like the deserving couple in a folktale, the ones who treat the mysterious guest kindly and get the magic goose. Only the simple-hearted could convey an impression like that. Fools, in other words. He felt renewed ill will toward them. He had gone there on business and they had tried to make him share in their life. Well, this time it would be the mysterious guest who got the golden eggs. They were like Darby and Joan, he thought. The tune of the song came into his mind and he hummed it for a while then sang the few words he remembered in a cracked baritone:
And when the kids grow up and leave us
We’ll build a house on a hill-top high,
You and I,
Darby and Joan, that used to be Jack and Jill …
While still a mile away he saw the sight that always filled him with pleasure and pride: there it stood, huge, square-fronted, imposing, set on rising ground with low wooded hills behind and the campanile of the little town rising beyond it. His house, his and Milly’s, someone’s nineteenth-century extravagance, now their proud possession, vast, in style ecclesiastic-Gothic, with its narrow pointed windows, dilapidated balustrades, brick-built portico and crumbling terra-cotta moldings. There was an arcade of columns running down one side, like a cloister—it was this that had given them their idea for the medieval restaurant. Much of the roof of this had fallen in and the pavement of the walk was cracked and broken. There was a lot that needed doing; they were only at the beginning. But the Greens would make their contribution and with any luck it would be a substantial one.
He found Mildred, the companion of his life, in the kitchen preparing lunch. “What is it to be today, my love?” he said.
Mildred looked up from her pan. She made a strong contrast in physical type to Blemish, being thick-necked, sturdy and slow-moving, with a habit of lowering her head as if about to charge. She smiled at him now and the light of love was in her smile. “Green-pea pottage,” she said in her deep, reluctant voice. “I have used dried winter peas, as they used to do, and colored it with saffron. It was a favorite dish of Richard the Second.”
“Wonderful.” Blemish gave Mildred two approving pats, one on each of her broad buttocks. “I think we are in prospect of more cotto,” he said. This was a familiar code word between them. Large areas of their flooring needed to be redone; they had decided on traditional terra-cotta tiles throughout and so had fallen into the habit of measuring their gains in terms of these.
“New clients?” Mildred said, stirring slowly at the brew.
“I think so. An American couple. I have the strongest of feelings that they will want to enlist my services.”
Mildred smiled placidly. She left business to him. In spite of her bulk and gruffness she was wedded to the notion of female fragility. Men were the practical ones, the relevant lobes were more highly developed. Women were more creative. She herself, for example, was planning to write a medieval cookbook couched in medieval prose—the sort of enterprise that would never remotely have occurred to Stan.
“Ninety percent certain in my judgment,” Blemish said. “You get to know the look on people’s faces. Project management is as much a matter of psychology as anything.” He had a way, when pleased, of stretching his neck and raising his chin, and he did it now. “They are in difficulties with their house. I’ll get Esposito for the building. We understand each other—we have worked together before. If all goes well, we’ll be able to have the brickwork vaulting in the dining room restored.”
“That would be marvelous.” Mildred raised a thick-wristed reddish hand to her hair, dampened by steam from the pottage, which she was trying to bring to the right consistency. “You are so clever, Stan,” she said. “I know you will do it. That dining room will be the nucleus of our medieval restaurant.”
Blemish regarded her for some moments. He was touched, as always, by her loyalty, her unswerving confidence in his abilities. “We will have a fine house someday,” he said. “I promise you that, Milly. We will have ou
r medieval restaurant. It will be famous throughout Umbria. What am I saying? It will be famous throughout Italy. People will flock to come here, it will be the place. They will sit under our magnificent brickwork vaulting, at oaken tables, waited on by jolly serving men in doublet and hose, eating cabbage chowder and fried fig pastries, and quaffing ale. The floors will be covered with handmade cotto. The whole thing will be a vision of the High Middle Ages. We will make a fortune.”
In the afternoon the Chapmans drove into Perugia. Harold had made an appointment to see their lawyer, Dottor Mancini, who had been recommended to them through the foreign department of Harold’s bank and had helped them through the various hazards of buying their house. Dottor Mancini spoke English and was visibly prosperous and had shown himself to be wily and wise in the business of the house, and for these reasons Harold had confidence in him.
They were early and so took the opportunity of visiting the Church of San Severo, or rather the fifteenth-century chapel adjoining the church, which they were both keen to see as it contained the only certain work by Raphael to remain in the city. It was still early in the year, there were not many visitors yet, and Harold and Cecilia were alone there. They stood together in the chilly little place and gazed up at the fresco.
“Interesting,” Cecilia said, “the way it is divided horizontally like that into two sections. It is the upper one that is by Raffaello of course and the lower by Perugino.” She always adopted the same tone when talking to Harold about anything to do with art, not lecturing exactly—her nature was too mild and diffident for that—but gently pedagogic. “You can see the influences at work though, can’t you, when you look at them both together? Perugino was Raffaello’s teacher at one stage, you know.”
Harold nodded. He had read this in his book about the masterpieces of Italian art. “Pietro Vannucci,” he said, “known as il Perugino. His date of birth is disputed.”