A Dancer in Darkness Page 23

  The Cardinal might have his nightingales, his bravos and violent men, but the Commandant rode hard on a posse of vultures. That is a harder and more exhausting game. He did not sleep easily. His name was d’Avalos. He was a rusty fifty. He had to talk to someone and trusted no one. Therefore he made a friend of Bosola. He liked to watch. Bosola was a new specimen, who filled him with curiosity.

  Bosola saw the matter differently. For the first time in his life he had others at his mercy. He almost liked that. There are times when it was a pleasure to be vile. Any man who has ever been a prisoner longs to be a guard. Children like to re-enact the crucifixion. Rejected lovers dream of murder. The tortured are fascinated by the rack. In their sleep the humbled pull down whole towns.

  He watched the Duchess narrowly. Here, stripped of the trappings of authority, she was not much. Beauty cannot survive a prison pallor. Authority has shallow roots. Rip it out of its natural environment, cut off its nourishment, and it withers and dies.

  Yet something kept him from tormenting her. He could not know what it was, for it was personal authority, and to him authority was never personal, nor was human dignity innate.

  Her conduct made him suspicious. He could not know why she did not whine or why he could not pull her down. Her face seemed calm with hope. Often she would pace down the barren corridors, open to the sea and spotted with moss, to a broken window looking towards the blue cliffs of Sorrento. At such times her face would have a curiously withdrawn sweetness. Antonio was there.

  Bosola saw only that she was untouchable. He began to hate her, just for that. He suspected she knew of some plot, and so he spied upon her. Yet he could discover nothing. In chagrin he vented his spleen upon Cariola. Her he followed, too. Her conduct puzzled him.

  It puzzled Cariola no less. She had betrayed herself and him, and yet she was still here. Only as the boat put in under the citadel had she given way to panic. For the rest she felt numb. She felt condemned. Even her mistress could not give her comfort, for she had betrayed her mistress. She did not understand anything. She did not know why she had spoken out. It only meant that she had lost even Bosola. Yet part of her was still detached and reasonable. She fought down panic, knowing that should she give way there would be no one to help her. But her frightened eyes watched everything. She could not sleep. She suffocated when she tried. She became a night wanderer.

  Indeed there were many things to be afraid of in that place. The guards did nothing to impede either the Duchess or herself, so long as they did not penetrate as far as the tunnel gate. So little by little she found them all out, pursed her lips, said nothing, and fled on.

  The Castello served many purposes. It was an oubliette, a place to which inconvenient relatives were sent to be forgotten. In cells hewn out of the naked rock, along dusky corridors, fifteen or twenty men sat out their lives. The Duchess was lucky to be housed above them and so well.

  The Commandant had shown off his charges by torchlight, and Bosola had made a point of learning their half-forgotten stories. And here, one aimless day of that endless two weeks, Cariola had wandered by accident.

  Here was Count Piccola, who blubbered when he tried to speak. A nephew had coveted his garden. He was chained to the wall. There were others. The stench was peculiar. She knew now what the verb to moulder meant. It made her grateful to be kept a prisoner upstairs. Death is darkness. Life is light. She fled.

  But light without freedom was horrible. She wandered again. At dusk Bosola found her in a section she had not visited, her skirts caught in the brambles of a wild artichoke, in a narrow ruined alley. This section he avoided himself. It was too noisome and too clamorous.

  He went forward to rescue her. At evening the din was terrible, for it was feeding time. As his shadow darkened the end of the alley, she gasped and sobbed.

  He came forward and freed her skirt.

  “You should not be here.”

  It was the first time he had spoken to her since she had betrayed him. She wanted to keep him there. It was unfair that she should be hated only for what was her duty.

  “You didn’t want to do your duty. You wanted to save your own neck. Why are women so devious?” he demanded.

  She drew away from him. “Are we to die?”

  He threw back his head and laughed at her. How could he do otherwise? He grabbed her arm and shoved her ahead of him, to an opening broken away from the wall. “There. Look.”

  She drew back.

  “Look!” he told her, and pushed her so that she half-stumbled, and caught at the ragged edge of the wall. A light came out of the hole.

  Fascinated, he looked himself. He came here sometimes now, to think. He could not help it. Something drew him.

  The room into which they looked had a floor twenty feet below them, and was vast. It was the old hospital. Naked men with greenish skins capered around the walls. Others, the more virile, rushed towards the centre of the room. They had scarcely a garment among them, and lived in filth. Two gaolers stood on a flight of steps, their backs to a bolted door, and threw down chunks of rancid meat. There was a stewpot steaming on the floor, a large, rusted cauldron. This was what the inmates were screaming and fighting for. It was the madhouse. Here Naples sent those too violent to keep in the city, and here they thrived, though sun and rain beat through the ruined roof above their heads.

  Cariola drew back. Bosola had seen this scene before, at the convent of San Severo, with his sister. He was used to it. But unlike Sor Juana, Cariola was a woman. She evoked pity.

  “Why did you show me that?” she asked. She was quiet now. It made her intelligent. “Is that why you want to kill me?”

  “I do not want to kill you. I do not kill women.”

  “Then you will help us?”

  “Help you?” He glanced back towards the hole. “Help you for what? You are despicable.”

  He left her and hurried away into the shade.

  For a moment Cariola looked after him. Then, picking up her skirts, she hurried up through the ruins, back towards the citadel itself. She felt encouraged, and she could not bear to be alone. She went straight to the Duchess.

  At least he had spoken to her. Whatever he might say, he was not so hard as he seemed. And the two women had had so little news, and were in such suspense, that that seemed news indeed. She had some vision of herself, seducing Bosola into giving them their freedom. Of the Commandant she was not even aware.

  The Duchess was at the window. Not even Cariola knew that Antonio was not in Milan. Therefore she only thought her mistress was mooning by the window in the early dusk. As darkness fell the cliffs of Sorrento loomed larger, only to vanish as the stars came out. At night the Bay of Naples was haunted by the ghosts of Greek and Roman triremes, which seemed to move swiftly to and fro, under the moonlight, in the water mist.

  Often, now, the Duchess must think one of those silent vessels might be real. She only had one hope, and so, perforce, she thought that hope was true.

  Cariola hesitated. She did not know how to speak to her mistress now. She came over to the window and stood behind her. The Duchess sighed.

  Cariola blurted out that she had seen Bosola. He was not a cruel man. He might help them. That was the substance of what she said.

  “Were you in love with him?” the Duchess asked gently. “Is that why you did not speak sooner?” She sounded very far away.

  Cariola was confused.

  “Love is nothing to be ashamed of. And perhaps he is not to blame for what he has done. You must have been lonely sometimes. Was that it?”

  “I don’t know. It was so long ago. He never cared for me.”

  “That didn’t make any difference, did it?”

  Cariola was silent. To her surprise she found that it had not. She had not thought of that before.

  The Duchess smiled. “We are alone now,” she said. “It is foolish to quarrel. We may not have much time.”

  “But he might help us.”

  The Duchess shook her head.
“No, he will not help us. Even if he could, I have nothing with which to reward him. You know that. He knows it too.”

  “I don’t want to die!”

  Night had fallen over the bay and blocked it out. The moon was delusive and the peaks shadowy. The Duchess left the window and walked up and down the room.

  “Is death so bad?” She watched Cariola narrowly and saw she was on the verge of hysterics. That would be too much. Her nerves were too frayed to deal with hysterics.

  “Oh no,” said Cariola, and drew back against a wall. She looked up at the Duchess beseechingly. “Do I have to die?”

  “Antonio will save us if he can.”

  “Antonio is in Milan.”

  The Duchess started to speak, and then thought better of it. “He will save us if he can.”

  “But how do we know he is alive?” asked Cariola. Her eyes seemed to see something the Duchess could not see.

  “What do you mean by that?” The Duchess whirled around and advanced towards her. “What have you and that miserable man talked about? What does he know?”

  “Nothing,” sobbed Cariola. “I don’t know. What are we to do?”

  The Duchess sighed. As gently as she could she drew Cariola into the next room and saw her to bed. The woman was shivering, and fear was not pretty. She stayed with her until she fell asleep. Then she left the room.

  What Cariola had said had bothered her. She knew the confines of her prison now. Without bothering to take a light, she let herself out into the corridors. At the far end they were ruinous. There she stood in a cold breeze that had sprung up, gazing towards the mainland again. He was there somewhere. He must be.

  But Cariola had only spoken her own doubt, and now it was spoken she knew she could not sleep. She went down the shallow stone stairs, and let herself out into the night. There was no one up at this hour to challenge her.

  She walked down the stepped path that wound towards the chapel.

  The chapel roof had fallen in. Frescoes flaked off into the rubble. In the cloister was a graveyard. The stones were set as flagstones. Disconsolately she walked over the effaced names of the nuns. Brambles and weeds overgrew the abandoned fountain in the middle.

  What Cariola had said had upset her. She was confronted with the thought of death, and did not like it. For when we think of death, it is not really death we think of. Really to think of death requires a mental effort too great for us. We think only of our attitude towards it. It is the same with love, or hate, or rage. Once experienced, they make a mockery of our thoughts about them. Well, she had been in love. But no one who has died can think about death afterwards. Death has no afterwards. And though we know we have to die, few of us believe it.

  Death was voluptuous. Death was erotic. Death was the ultimate embrace. The music of the age confirmed it. Lasciate mi morire sang the aristocracy, burst into tears, and took an orange girl to bed with them. Io moro. O come, come, come, come, I love you, my sunshine, my light, sang the Venetian nun Philomela Angelica. Whether she meant death, Jesus, or desire, no one could say. She gasps. She sighs. She heaves and tosses in a rumpled bed. God, Jesus, love and death were all the same.

  But pacing up and down the cloister, the Duchess wondered if they were. In adolescence death rears up before us like a public monument, a lover’s tomb, like that of Romeo and Juliet, the final testimony of how wonderful we were. Once dead and the world shall know.

  Antonio could not be dead. But dead or alive, he beckoned to her from the farther shore, he stretched out his hands. She must join him. But maturity is more cautious. If death is the utter extinction of consciousness, how could she join him then? God has no right to take our bodies away from us. In Heaven, they say, we find another kind of joy. But why should we have to purchase it with the extinction of the only pleasure we can know? God, they said, was love, but He was also a eunuch. Love was not God. Love was Antonio.

  So she paced in the darkness. She came to an opening in the wall. She went within. The darkness was three steps down. She was in a narrow crypt. Along each wall stood a series of stone chairs. Here, in past times, when the nuns were about to die, they were carried down, and sat on the chairs until they were dead. Here they mummified.

  Each chair had a drain-hole drilled in it. This was to catch the post-mortem ichors, which then drained away through the rock into the sea. She had often heard of that. Now she saw it. She fled back into the light.

  If this was death, she would not die this way. She was a Duchess. She had dignity. She would die with dignity. Death is the extinction of consciousness. So is the act of love. But in the act of love we die in each other’s arms. Why should death not be so?

  If he was dead, he was waiting. Then why should she not go to him? She looked around her with a smile. He was here. He would be there. She was calm. She had got back her dignity.

  And besides, he was not dead. He was safe in those hills. She looked up. The stars are not constant. Man is not constant. Nothing is constant. Only the heart conceives of constancy

  III

  In Naples Ferdinand had himself announced to the Cardinal. It had taken him some time to ferret his brother out, but he could not move up and down impotently along the shore. He was driven from within. He had to act. He had followed the Duchess across Italy and had seen her embark. He knew that his brother’s hand was in this. He knew his brother had cheated him. Antonio, they said, was in Milan. Now it was his turn to cheat the Cardinal. Physical insanity is a tyrannous thing. It led him to confront his brother as otherwise he would not have done, for the body has its own cunning.

  But as always he waited until night. Then, with Marcantonio and two guards, he stormed the palazzo the Cardinal occupied, made his way angrily up the stairs, and burst through the doors leading to the Cardinal’s apartments.

  The Cardinal was writing at a desk, by the light of a five-branch candelabrum. He looked up irritably. His ambitions had scooped him out like a melon. There was no one left inside him to be taken by surprise. But he could be annoyed.

  “What have you done with her?” demanded Ferdinand.

  The Cardinal saw Marcantonio and did not like him. Marcantonio had a sick swagger and big ears. He was stupid enough to be dangerous, and violence sweated his hands like a fever. “Send them away,” he said.

  Ferdinand told his guard to wait in the anteroom. They clomped out. Then he strode forward and planted one enormous soft-booted foot on a chair, glowering down at the Cardinal. The foot was like the paw of a St. Bernard, but a St. Bernard foaming at the mouth. The Cardinal looked at it and then at Ferdinand.

  “I have not done anything with her.”

  “Then where is she?”

  “I see no reason why I should tell you that.”

  “So.” Ferdinand kicked aside the chair. “Do you think I don’t know what you are up to? Do you think you are the only one with spies? You want Amalfi for yourself.”

  For a moment the Cardinal wondered if this was quite true. He did not think it was. It was merely that events had all moved one way, and he meant to have it. He had not thought of the matter personally at all. But he knew that Ferdinand was capable of irrevocable acts, and the Cardinal squirmed away from irrevocable acts. He wondered if he dare temporize.

  Ferdinand smashed his fists down on the desk. “Where is she?” he screamed.

  “She is on Ischia, at the Castello.”

  “And her paramour?”

  “At Milan, but I do not believe it. Perhaps he is trying to rescue her.” He eyed Ferdinand speculatively. Surely the man was mad. So now the thing must happen. Nor would he have Ferdinand interfere in Amalfi. Fastidiously he laid his conscience aside, took up new instruments, and looked at Ferdinand much as a surgeon would look at a patient with the stone.

  “And if he succeeded, what then?” he asked softly.

  “She shall not lie with him again. She shall not lie with anyone.”

  “Why not? She has conceived by him. She is married to him, so they say.”r />
  “Where is he?”

  “I do not know.”

  Ferdinand prowled up and down the room. The Cardinal shifted in his chair. Ferdinand returned to the desk.

  “Write me a pass to the Citadel.”

  “I cannot do that. You have no business there.”

  “Write.”

  “No.”

  A shudder came over Ferdinand. He snatched across the desk, and took the Cardinal’s hand. He would not let it go. The Cardinal’s eyes widened. He exerted his strength. So did Ferdinand. He tugged and twisted at the hand, bending the fingers back. He wrenched the apostolic ring off its finger, and shoved the Cardinal back into his chair. For a moment they eyed each other, suspended. Then, shouting for Marcantonio, Ferdinand hurled himself out of the room, leaving the doors flapping and ajar.

  Left to himself the Cardinal rubbed his hand. He blinked. No one had dared unbidden to touch him in his life, not even his mistresses. He touched them. He looked at his finger with disbelief. He knew now what must be done with Ferdinand, and for once he would have such an act done gladly.

  Suddenly, irrationally, he screamed for lights.

  On the Bay of Naples it was dark. An hour later a low skiff put out towards the islands, its sails furled, its oars creeping along the water like a wounded centipede. No one aboard that vessel spoke. Marcantonio lolled on a pile of canvas, whittling at the gunnel with his knife. The moon was down. Ferdinand sat in the prow, and watched the slightly phosphorescent, green-tinged water. The apostolic ring would get him in.

  Towards four the rock of the castello rose abruptly before them. The light running surf was restless. The sky was mackerel. There was no sign of life. The boat bumped against the causeway and was still.