It was not until well along in that afternoon’s divertimento that Ilaria gave the cue for us to join our main instruments, and we played all’unisono, and the music rose in crescendo to an unbelievable climax of tuti fortìsimi. Then we kept on bringing it back up to that peak, again and again, during most of the rest of the afternoon. Then we played several codas, each a little more diminuendo, until we were both fairly drained of music. Then we lay quietly side by side, enjoying the waning tremolo after-echoes … dolce, dolce … dolce …
When some time had passed, I thought to make gallant inquiry: “Do you not want to jump around and sneeze?”
She gave a slight start, looked sideways at me, and muttered something I could not hear. Then she said, “No, grazie, I do not, Marco. I wish now to talk of my husband.”
“Why darken the day?” I objected. “Let us rest a little longer and then see if we cannot play another tune.”
“Oh, no! As long as I remain a married woman, I shall remain a ch-chaste one. We do not do this again until my husband is dead.”
I had acquiesced when she earlier set that condition. But now I had sampled the ecstasy that awaited, and the thought of waiting was insupportable. I said, “Even though he is old, that might take years.”
She gave me a look and said sharply, “Why should it? What means do you propose using?”
Bewildered, I said, “I?”
“Did you intend j-just to go on following him, as you did last night? Until perhaps you annoy him to death?”
The truth finally began to filter through my density. I said in awe, “Do you seriously mean he is to be killed?”
“I mean he is to be killed seriously,” she said, with flat sarcasm. “What did you think we have been talking about, asenazzo, when we talked of your doing me a service?”
“I thought you meant … this.” And I shyly touched her there.
“No more of that.” She wriggled a little away from me. “And by the way, if you must use vulgar language, try at least to call that my mona. It sounds a little less awful than that other word.”
“But am I never to touch your mona again?” I said wretchedly. “Not until I do that other service for you?”
“To the victor the spoils. I have enjoyed polishing your stilèto, Marco, but another bravo might offer me a sword.”
“A bravo,” I reflected. “Yes, such a deed would make me a real bravo, would it not?”
She said persuasively, “And I would much rather love a dashing bravo than a furtive despoiler of other men’s wives.”
“There is a sword in a closet at home,” I muttered to myself. “It must have belonged to my father or one of his brothers. It is old, but it is kept honed and bright.”
.“You will never be blamed or even suspected. My husband must have many enemies, for what important man has not? And they will be of his own age and standing. No one would think to suspect a mere—I mean a younger man who has no discernible motive for taking his life. You have only to accost him in the dark, when he is alone, and make sure of your strike so he does not linger long enough to give any description—”
“No,” I interrupted her. “Better if I could find him among a gathering of his peers, those who include his actual enemies. If in those circumstances I could do it unobserved … But no.” I suddenly realized that I was contemplating murder. I concluded lamely, “That would probably be impossible.”
“Not for a g-genuine bravo,” Ilaria said, in the voice of a dove. “Not for one who will be rewarded so bounteously.”
She moved against me again, and continued to move, tantalizing with the promise of that reward. This aroused in me several conflicting emotions, but my body recognized only one of them and raised a baton to play a fanfare of salute.
“No,” said Ilaria, fending me off and becoming very businesslike. “A music maistra may give the first lesson free, to indicate what can be learned. But if you wish further lessons in more advanced execution, you must earn them.”
She was clever, to send me away not completely satiated. As it was, I left the house—again by the servants’ door—throbbing almost painfully and lusting as if I had not been satisfied at all. I was being led and directed, so to speak, by that baton of mine, and its inclination was to lead me back to Ilaria’s bower, whatever that might require of me. Other events seemed also to be conspiring toward that end. When I came around from the back of the block of houses, I found the Samarco piazza full of people in a buzzing commotion, and a uniformed banditore was crying the news:
The Doge Ranieri Zeno had been stricken by a sudden seizure that afternoon in his palace chambers. The Doge was dead. The Council was being summoned to start voting for a successor to the ducal crown. The whole of Venice was bidden to observe a three-day period of mourning before the funeral of the Doge Zeno.
Well, I thought as I went on my way, if a great Doge can die, why cannot a lesser noble? And, it occurred to me, the funeral ceremonies would entail more than one assemblage of those lesser nobles all together. Among them would be my lady’s husband and undoubtedly, as she had suggested, some of his enviers and enemies.
8
FOR the next three days, the late Doge Zeno lay in state in his palace, being visited by respectful citizens during the days and being watched over by the professional vigil-keeper during the nights. I spent most of that time in my room, practicing with the old but still worthy sword until I became quite adept at slashing and stabbing phantom husbands. What I had the most trouble with was simply carrying the sword about, because it was nearly as long as my leg. I could not just slip it naked under my belt or else, when I walked, I might impale my own foot. To carry the thing anywhere, I should have to carry it in its scabbard, and that made it even more unwieldy. Also, for concealment of it, I should have to wear my all-enveloping long cloak, which would not permit any quick draw-and-lunge.
Meanwhile, I made cunning plans. On the second day of vigil, I wrote a note, most carefully drawing the characters in my schoolboy hand: “Will he be at both the Funeral and the Installation?” I regarded that critically, then underscored the he so that there should be no mistaking whom I meant. I painstakingly drew my name underneath, so that there should be no mistaking the note’s author. Then I did not entrust it to any servant, but carried it myself to the casa muta, and waited for another interminable time until I saw the he leave the house, dressed in dark mourning clothes. I went around to the back door, gave the note to the old hag doorkeeper, and told her I would wait for a reply.
After another while, she returned. She bore no reply but beckoned me with a gnarled finger. Again I followed her to Ilaria’s suite of rooms, and found my lady studying the paper. She looked flustered, somehow, and neglected to give me any fond greeting, saying only, “I can read, of course, but I cannot make out your wretched writing. Read this to me.”
I did, and she said yes, her husband, like every other member of the Venetian Grand Council, would be attending both the funeral rites for the late Doge and the installation ceremonies of the new one when he had been selected. “Why do you ask?”
“It gives me two opportunities,” I said. “I shall try to—accomplish my service—on the funeral day. If that proves impossible, I will at least have a better idea of how to go about it at the next gathering of nobles.”
She took the paper from me and looked at it. “I do not see my name on this.”
“Naturally not,” I said, the experienced conspirator. “I would not compromise a lustrìsima.”
“Is your name on it?”
“Yes.” I pointed with pride. “There. That is my name, my lady.”
“I have learned that it is not always wise to commit things to paper.” She folded and tucked the paper into her bodice. “I will keep this safe.” I started to tell her just to tear it up, but she went on, sounding peevish, “I hope you realize that you were very foolish to come here unbidden.”
“I waited to make certain he left.”
“But if someone el
se—if one of his relatives or friends was here? Listen to me now. You are never to come here again until I summon you.”
I smiled. “Until we are free of—”
“Until I summon you. Now go, and go quickly. I am expecting—I mean, he may come back any minute.”
So I went home and practiced some more. And the next day, when at sundown the pompe funebri began, I was among the spectators. Even the least commoner’s burial in Venice is always dignified by as much pageantry as his or her family can afford, so the Doge’s was splendid indeed. The dead man lay not in a coffin but on an open litter, dressed in his finest robes of state, his stiff hands clasping his mace of office, his face fixed by the pomp-masters in an expression of serene sanctimony. The widowed Dogaressa stayed always beside it, so draped in veils that only her white hand was visible where it rested on her late husband’s shoulder.
The litter was first laid on the roof of the Doge’s great buzino d’oro, at the prow of which the gold-and-scarlet ducal flag hung at half staff. The bark was rowed with solemn slowness—the forty oars seeming scarcely to move—up and down the main canals of the city. Behind it and around it were grouped black funeral gòndole and crape-hung batèli and burchielli, bearing the members of the Council and the Signoria and the Quarantia and the city’s chief priests and the confratèli of the arti guilds, the whole retinue alternately singing hymns and chanting prayers.
When the dead man had been sufficiently paraded on the waterways, his litter was lifted off the bark and onto the shoulders of eight of his nobles. Because the corteggio then had to wind up and down all the main streets of the central city, and because so many of the pallbearers were elderly, they changed places frequently with new men. And the litter was again followed by the Dogaressa and all the other court mourners, now on foot, and by bands of musicians playing doleful slow music, and contingents from the flagellant brotherhoods lethargically pretending to whip themselves, and finally by every other Venetian not too young or old or crippled to walk.
I could do nothing during the water-borne procession except watch it from the banks with the rest of the citizens. But by the time it came ashore, I decided that good fortune was attending my scheme. For there also came in from the water the twilight caligo again, and the obsequies became even more melancholy and mysterious, shrouded by fog, the music muffled and the chants lugubriously hollow.
Bracket torches were lighted along the route, and most of the marchers took out and lighted candles. For a while I walked among the common herd—or limped, rather, since the sword along my left leg forced me to swing it stimy—and gradually eased myself to the forefront of that throng. From there I could verify that almost every official mourner was cloaked and hooded, except the priests. So was I well covered, and in the thick mist I could be taken for one of the guilds’ artists or artisans. Even my size was not conspicuous; the procession included numerous veiled women no bigger than I was, and a few cowled dwarfs and hunchbacks smaller than I was. So I edged my way imperceptibly among the court mourners, and ever farther forward, being challenged by nobody at all, until I was separated from the litter and its pallbearers only by a rank of priests yammering their ritual pimpirimpàra and swinging censers to add smoke to the fog.
I was not the only inconspicuous marcher in the procession. What with everybody being so shrouded in cloth and in the almost equally woolly mist, I had a hard time picking out my quarry. But the street march was long enough that, by moving cautiously from side to side and peering sharply at the little of each man’s profile that protruded beyond his cowl, I at last was able to perceive which was Ilaria’s husband, and thereafter I kept my eye on him.
My chance came when the corteggio finally debouched from a narrow street onto the cobbled embankment of the city’s north shore—on the Dead Lagoon, not far from where the boat children’s barge lay, though that was invisible in the fog and the now near-dark. Alongside the embankment was the Doge’s bark, which had circled the city to get ahead of us, waiting to ferry him on his last voyage—to the Isle of the Dead, also invisible far offshore. There was a milling of the mourners, as all the men nearest the litter tried to help its bearers hoist it aboard the bark, and that gave me the opportunity to mingle in with them. I elbowed until I was right beside my quarry, and in all the shoving and bustling no one remarked the struggle I had to make to unsheathe my sword. Fortunately, Ilaria’s husband did not manage to get his shoulder under the litter—or the dispatching of him might have meant the Doge’s getting dropped into the Dead Lagoon.
What did get dropped was my heavy scabbard; somehow my fumbling had unhooked it from my tunic belt. It clattered heavily onto the cobblestones and kept on noisily proclaiming itself as the many shuffling feet kicked it about. My heart bounded into my throat and then almost popped out of my mouth as Ilaria’s husband bent down to pick up the scabbard. But he made no outcry; he handed it back to me with the kindly comment, “Here, young fellow, you dropped this.” I was still right next to the man, and both of us were still being buffeted by the movement of the crowd around us, and my sword was in my hand beneath my cloak, and that was the moment to strike, but how could I? He had saved me from immediate discovery; could I stab him in return for the favor?
But then another voice spoke, hissing beside my ear, “You stupid asenazzo!” and something else made a rasping noise, and something metallic glinted in the torchlight. It happened at the edge of my vision, so my impressions were fragmentary and confused. But it appeared to me that one of the priests who had been swinging a golden censer had abruptly swung something silvery instead. And then Ilaria’s husband leaned into my view, and opened his mouth and belched a substance that looked black in that light. I had done nothing to him, but something had happened to him. He tottered and jostled against the other men in the bunched group, and he and at least two others fell down. Then a heavy hand clutched at my shoulder, but I yanked away from it, and the recoil took me out of the center of the tumult. As I struggled through the outer fringe of people, and caromed off a couple of them, I again dropped my scabbard and then the sword as well, but I did not pause. I was in panic and I could think of nothing but to run fast and far. Behind me I heard exclamations of astonishment and outrage, but by then I was well away from the massed torch and candlelight and well away into the blessed darkness and fog.
I kept on running along the embankment until I saw two new figures taking form before me in the misty night. I might have shied away, but I saw they were children’s figures and, after a moment, they resolved themselves into Ubaldo and Doris Tagiabue. I was ever so relieved to see someone familiar—and small. I tried to put on a glad face and probably put on a ghastly one, but I hailed them jollily:
“Doris, you are still scrubbed and clean!”
“You are not,” she said, and pointed.
I looked down at myself. The front of my cloak was wet with more than a soaking of caligo. It was splotched and spattered with glistening red.
“And your face is as pale as a tombstone,” said Ubaldo. “What happened, Marco?”
“I was … I was almost a bravo,” I said, my voice gone suddenly unsteady. They stared at me, and I explained. It felt good to tell it to somebody unconcerned in the matter. “My lady sent me to slay a man. But I think he died before I could do it. Some other enemy must have intervened, or hired a bravo to do it.”
Ubaldo exclaimed, “You think he died?”
“Everything happened all at once. I had to flee. I suppose I will not know what really happened until the banditori of the night watch cry the news.”
“Where was this?”
“Back yonder, where the dead Doge is being put aboard his bark. Or maybe he is not yet. All is turmoil.”
“I could go and see. I can tell you sooner than a banditore.”
“Yes,” I said. “But be careful, Boldo. They will be suspecting every stranger.”
He ran off the way I had come, and Doris and I sat down on a waterside bollard. She regarded me grave
ly, and after a while said, “The man was the lady’s husband.” She did not frame it as a question, but I nodded numbly. “And you hope to take his place.”
“I already have,” I said, with as much of boastfulness as I could muster. Doris seemed to wince, so I added truthfully, “Once, anyway.”
That one afternoon now seemed long in the past, and at the moment I felt no arousal of the urge to repeat it. Curious, I thought to myself, how anxiety can so diminish a man’s ardor. Why, if I were in Ilaria’s room right now, and she was naked and smiling and beckoning, I could not …
“You may be in terrible trouble,” said Doris, as if to shrivel my ardor utterly.
“I think not,” I said, to convince myself rather than the girl. “I did nothing more criminal than to be where I did not belong. And I got away without being caught or recognized, so no one knows I did even that much. Except you, now.”
“And what happens next?”
“If the man is dead, my lady will soon summon me to her grateful embrace. I will go slightly shamefaced, for I had hoped to go to her as a gallant bravo, the slayer of her oppressor.” A thought came to me. “But now at least I can go to her with a clear conscience.” The thought brought a little cheer with it.
“And if he is not dead?”
The cheer evaporated. I had not yet considered that eventuality. I said nothing, and sat trying to think what I might do—or might have to do.
“Perhaps then,” Doris ventured in a very small voice, “you might take me instead of her for your smanza?”
I ground my teeth. “Why do you keep on making that ridiculous proposal? Especially now, when I have so many other problems to think about?”
“If you had accepted when I first offered, you would not now have so many problems.”
That was either female or juvenile illogic, and palpably absurd, but there was just enough truth in it to make me respond with cruelty, “The Dona Ilaria is beautiful; you are not. She is a woman; you are a child. She merits the Dona to her name, and I also am of the Ene Aca. I could never take for my lady anyone not nobly born and—”