A Dancer in Darkness Page 24

  IV

  Those in the castle rose early. They were too bored to stay in bed, and the Duchess and Cariola were too anxious.

  The days of a prisoner soon become indistinguishable from each other. So do the days of a guard. Bosola found it difficult to keep busy, and longed for instructions from the mainland. No instructions came.

  The Duchess’s apartments he avoided. He knew he was not welcome there, and could not bear the thought of seeing either one of them. Cariola was merely pitiable. But the Duchess upset him. He was used to being despised, but disdain was even worse. He did not sleep well. The earlier he awoke the more empty were the days. He had nothing to do until it was time to drink in the evening with the Commandant. Nor could he watch that bay on which the fishing boats hovered like predatory moths. A life without events is the worst kind of life. He had seen too much of prisons to be at ease in them.

  For days now he had had the feeling that something was waiting to overtake him. Perhaps he was overtired. When he was alone, someone seemed to stand behind him. Such things cannot be dismissed merely by being named. Hallucinations are the shadows cast by strangers walking through our mind, on errands of their own.

  It made him jumpy. It also made him take long walks.

  Along one side of the cliff there was a narrow path. To the right the drop was sheer. To the left was a low bluff. At the end of the path was a small hexagonal chapel dedicated to St. Peter. He found himself there. Usually he did not go to such narrow places. He had a fearful impulse not to look behind him. In front of him was the closed door of the church. Irritated with himself, he looked around, and started violently.

  A figure stood on the path, boldly and suddenly. It blocked the way, and ground its knuckles together, smiling hungrily. He recognized it at once. It was Marcantonio. It advanced towards him.

  Bosola whirled towards the church. The door opened. Ferdinand beckoned him in. Bosola stood still. But Marcantonio came behind him and prodded him in the kidneys. He half-stumbled, and went into the church.

  Marcantonio clanged the door shut behind him.

  The church was small, close, and heavy with dust. Ferdinand wasted no time. Marcantonio kicked him and sent him sprawling back against the altar. Ferdinand grasped him by his doublet and shook him like a terrier, slapping him repeatedly in the face. Then he flung him back to Marcantonio. Marcantonio was clever at this sort of thing. Bosola fell chattering to the ground.

  “Lock him in,” snapped Ferdinand. The two of them went out of the church, and the key turned in the lock. Bosola was sure his ankle had been broken. He lost consciousness.

  When he came to it was late morning. The light hurt his eyes. From the floor he looked around the chapel. He knew he must get out before they returned. He did not know how. He dragged himself to the ledge of the unglazed window, pulled himself up, and looked down. His ankle hurt painfully, but was only sprained. The drop was five hundred feet to the sea. He looked left and right. The building was hexagonal, so between the ledge and the end of the cliff wall was a space of about two feet. If he was careful he might be able to reach it. Half an hour later he fell in a heap on the ground next the chapel door. Urgency gave him strength. Leaning against the bluff, he reached the end of the path, and left the cul-de-sac. He was in the shadows of the castello itself now.

  The light made him blink. It was so bright in that sun that it dazzled him with the effect of darkness. Lean, naked shapes seemed to flit through the trees, and there was a peculiar, sick restlessness in the air. There were murmurs, and groans, and screams, but all muted and unreal. It was as though someone had released a flock of ravenous parrots. Bosola wondered where the guards could be.

  He knew that he must reach the castello. He did not know why. The impulse was irrational. Skirting the shadows, he toiled painfully uphill.

  The forecourt of the castello had been elaborated fifty years before, in a Spanish taste. It was a narrow open place surmounted by an enormous Churriguerresque gateway of stone swags, ropes, rosettes, angels, and shields. Bosola slid rapidly across the open space and inside.

  The great hall was immediately within. From it rose the state stair to the private apartments. He shrank back. The hall was full of gibbering, half-naked figures, dancing and screaming up and down in the shadows. Someone had let the madmen out. They had swarmed here. Some carried stones. Some bits of rusty iron.

  At the head of the stairs stood the Duchess, erect and pale. The madmen tried to throw stones at her. They had not the strength. The stones fell harmlessly half-way up the stair. Bosola slipped. It attracted their attention. They advanced towards him. He turned and ran.

  V

  The Duchess had been alone with Cariola, in the bare chamber that served them for a common room, whose windows overlooked the gate. The two women glanced swiftly at each other when they heard the uproar, and then the Duchess went to the window and looked out.

  She was in time to see the madmen round the corner and pour into the castle yard. They had been kept down so long that their natural impulse was to pour towards the top.

  Cariola came to the Duchess’s shoulder and peered down. “What does it mean?”

  The Duchess thought she knew very well what it meant. She picked up her skirts and swept out into the corridor. By the time she had reached the head of the stairs, the rabble had swept into the hall, which was paved with black and white squares of marble, once highly polished, now dull. The madmen swept across this space like demented chessmen.

  Those who could see, saw her. Then they began to throw their stones. These clattered on the stairs, rocked, and rested there. The Duchess flinched. The hall was shadowy. She could not tell whether they meant her mischief or not. If they tried to mount the stairs she could not hold them back. Instinctively she knew they must not come close to her. They gibbered.

  “And how do you like my entertainment?”

  She whirled. Ferdinand leaned in the darkness of the landing, watching her. She went limp. “So you have come,” she said.

  “One might call it a charivari. A marriage chorus. You are married, aren’t you?”

  “What is that to you?”

  “Everything,” said Ferdinand. He looked down into the hall. “They sing well. Don’t you think they sing well?” He whistled. It caught the attention of the madmen. Their heads turned like the frightened heads of browsing buffalo. A sigh went up from them, and hesitantly, stark naked, and covered with filth, they began to mount the stairs, their vacant eyes all in a row, and somehow on the same level.

  Ferdinand put two fingers in his mouth and whistled again. Marcantonio and his two bravos came out of the corridor. “Hold them back.” The bravos leaped down the stairs, and began to cudgel the madmen. They did not seem to feel any pain. But they fell back, disappointed. The Duchess watched this with disbelief.

  “I suppose these games appeal to you,” she said.

  “You should not speak to me that way.” Ferdinand shoved his face close to hers and smiled. “You should beg me for your life.”

  “I beg no one for my life.”

  “Then how do you expect to keep it?”

  The Duchess said nothing. But something in her face must have infuriated him. He teetered from foot to foot, and then, grasping her roughly by the arm, hurried her into the ruined darkness of the corridor, shoved open a door, and dragged her into a disused room. Part of its far wall had fallen away into the sea. There, leaning against the door, he confronted her. She could still hear the madmen, and the thwack of the bravos’ staves.

  “Your lover cannot help you now,” he said, watching her narrowly.

  “I have no lover.”

  He snorted, reached into his pocket, and began to draw things out. He held up his hand. There was something in it, which, as he suspended it from his fingers, wavered to and fro in the dust.

  She watched it, fascinated. Her face became pale. “Where did you get that?”

  It was a long white baroque pearl, set in gold. It shimmered w
ith putrescent light, as baroque pearls do. It was the ear-ring Antonio had worn that night among the gipsies.

  Ferdinand smiled. With a jerk, he sent the pearl spinning through the broken wall, out over the sea. The light caught it for an instant and then let it go.

  “Antonio is dead,” he said. “Very dead.” He smiled at her.

  The Duchess folded her hands gravely. “He was not my lover. He was my husband.”

  “Your paramour.”

  “We were married. I had a child by him. I wanted to have his child.”

  “Why do you not get down on your knees and grovel? You should be ashamed.”

  “Ashamed? Ashamed of what? Should I have lain with you, or that corpse you married me to, instead?

  “Do you think I do not know what you have come here to do? But that will not make you forget what I have done with him. We lay together. We made love as you could never do. I would let him do anything with me. Over and over again. Whenever we could. We were young and alive. We were free. We had no use for you and what you call love.”

  “Be still.”

  “I will not be still. I would you had been there to watch. I know what you are. I know what you want. I know what you always wanted. Better than you do. I escaped from you. With him. Always with him. Shall I describe to you everything we did? Or how it felt to carry his child? It was born dead, but I carried it. I wanted to carry it. I wanted nothing of you or my brother the Cardinal. Shall I tell you how I laughed at you? How we both laughed at you? Even when you came to Amalfi, we were together. When you were in your room, he was in mine.”

  The Duchess advanced towards him, and he drew back. He tried to hide his face in shadow.

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes. Always yes.”

  “You will pay for this.”

  “Of course I shall. But it happened. And you will never forget that. That will drive you mad. Perhaps you are mad already. You are impotent, and laughable, and very sad to think about. Do you not think everyone knows that? Our brother the Cardinal does what he will with you. You were born to be cheated.” She watched him narrowly. She wanted it over. If Antonio was dead, why should she live?

  “We cheated you. But we did not cheat each other. We lived. We still do. We always shall.”

  “With that squalid stable-boy.”

  “With that man!”

  She watched his face with interest. It shifted so rapidly. Sometimes it was insane. Sometimes the face of a boy. Sometimes that of the damned. It was impossible to tell what he might do. He had not the strength to kill her. His violence was too spasmodic.

  He sobbed, grabbed her, and hurried her out of the room.

  They came to the staircase again. Marcantonio slouched against the balustrade, watching the madmen below. Ferdinand swept her down it and out into the air. She did not know where he was taking her or why.

  Marcantonio and the bravos fell in behind.

  They came to the cloister and that cell in which the nuns sat to die. He shoved her in, and stood in the doorway watching her.

  “There,” he said. “That is what it is to die!”

  She looked around her calmly. “I have seen it before. Will you have your men kill me here?”

  He blinked. She looked up at him. “He is dead. If you kill me, I shall only join him.”

  He lurched forward and put his fingers round her throat. They were horny and hard. They pressed. She felt her head turn blue with vertigo. Then they relaxed. He fell back against the wall, stumbling against one of the nuns’ seats.

  She stood there, getting back her breath. “You have not the courage to kill me,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Then you must have me killed.”

  He turned and ran out of the cell. She lingered there for a moment. Then, slowly, she climbed back to the cloister. She felt very weak. She knew now how it felt to be at the end. Or almost at the end. He would wait for darkness. He would need others to back him up. But the thing would happen now. She felt sober, but she did not feel sorry.

  Carefully she picked her way back towards the citadel, for she did not want to be alone, even though she must contrive to send Cariola away. She did not look back. If she had, she would have seen Marcantonio following her.

  VI

  Bosola had no dignity. He had only pride. He had the appearance with no knowledge of the reality. That is what destroyed him. That is what pulled all his efforts down. Having no dignity, he could not bear to be alone.

  Exclusive of the prisoners, there were perhaps thirty people in the castle. They spent an anguished morning rounding up the madmen, and then they disappeared. He knew better than to seek them out. They would not be kind. They had found him out, and so they had no use for him.

  With the last madman rounded up, the rock became ominously still. A lizard ran over a stone. It was earthquake weather, with that heat that seems about to burst. Bosola was afraid. He fled down to the dungeons and the wet rock corridors. Only there, he thought, could he avoid Ferdinand and Marcantonio. He knew they would find him eventually, for Ferdinand could not rest until he had silenced his servants by making them share his own guilt. The violent would have all men be as violent as they. If they cannot manage that, they cannot rest. But at least he could evade them for a while.

  At the same time he was excited. Death excited him. It made him feel voluptuous.

  Underground the air was hot and dense. He poured with sweat. He seemed to wander endlessly. Yet he knew where he was going. Something drew him as it always did. He had come to the Commandant’s playroom.

  In his own way the Commandant was a scholarly man. Prisoners and those left much to their own devices often become so. They raise canaries, study chess, or master the Pentateuch. They read up on the history of their profession and acquire a certain pride. They become proficient and antiquarian.

  He found himself, as he often did, in the torture-room. Here, to the oiled devices of an ingenious age, the Commandant had added all the machinery of the past. It had had little use, but still he kept it in repair. There was even an iron maiden, with adjustable spikes, to puncture the victim all over, to any depth one might wish.

  Other devices were more practical. Some men have a passion for the mechanical. They go to the ironmonger as a woman goes to a dressmaker. A beautiful saw fascinates them as much as a yard of cut Venetian velvet fills a woman with religious awe. Swords, daggers, helmets, cuirasses, are all very well, but they are only tools. They are inert without us. But a machine, even so simple a machine as a nut and bolt, is self-contained. It can do without us, and therefore we admire it. We serve it as we would serve a god. And torture is nothing but a game with the emotions. As statues of forgotten gods still retain the awe felt by their worshippers, so do torture machines retain the screams of the overwrought. They are emotional shrines. The empty graveyard and the nursery tell us what we will be and what we were. The torture chamber tells us what we are. It is the crypt of every church.

  There Bosola came, as ignorant and intuitive as an acolyte. As he bent over these machines, his face became as thoughtful and as sensitive as that of an ascetic. Cruelty makes us so. It even gives us a certain freedom. It allows us to forget the world. It makes us bigger and stronger than we are. And that, from time to time, we need to be. A lack of imagination makes all things possible.

  He wandered around the room. Here was a rack. There a thumb-screw. Elsewhere the apparatus by which a man might be pressed to death. Another where he might be tortured upside down. The room was shadowy. It was carved from the rock, with holes pierced to the cliffs. What light there was came from there. He twiddled with the bolts on the thumb-screw. Next it, on the bench, lay a similar device to crush the jaw.

  “You like it here.”

  The voice was ironic. Ferdinand stood over him. He must have slipped into the shadows unheard. Bosola had only to look up to see that he was dangerous. “Yes, it suits you very well.” Ferdinand had sought the darkness too. He was working hims
elf up. “It is almost dark up there. Come.”

  “What for?”

  “You know why we came here.”

  Bosola was frightened. He could feel his fear between his legs. This was what he was trying to avoid. He wanted no part of this.

  “I know nothing,” he said. “I prefer to know nothing.” Despite himself his eyes grew crafty.

  Ferdinand shrugged. “You will come. We need your help.”

  Bosola drew away. Ferdinand’s eyes narrowed. “It would not be wise to disobey me.”

  “I will have no part of this.” And he wanted no part of it. Executioners never escaped, even when those who employed them did. He shrank from any such final act. Besides, perhaps he felt pity. By choice he would have killed no one.

  “No?”

  Bosola shook his head.

  Ferdinand’s eyes glittered. He advanced towards Bosola, and Bosola backed away. Then he whirled to run.

  Directly behind him stood Marcantonio, grinning in his face, holding a torch in one hand.

  “Grab him,” shouted Ferdinand. He was quivering like a puppy.

  Marcantonio grabbed him. He was not gentle. The torch fell to the floor. Ferdinand looked around. “Put him on the rack.”

  The two bravos came forward. Bosola squirmed. It did him no good, and Marcantonio was laughing. There was spittle on his lips. He was happy.

  They flung him down on the rack. He tussled futilely. The two bravos tied his ankles and his wrists with coarse rope. The rope bit into his flesh, but they only pulled it the tighter. Ferdinand struck his body, so it quivered and bounced in the tension of the ropes.

  “You fool,” he said. “Whom do you think you serve?”

  Bosola did not answer. He could not.

  “How many masters have you? What has the Cardinal told you?”

  “Nothing.”

  The winch tightened. The ropes stretched in straight lines, the coarse hairs of their length standing up like wires. The pressure on his ankles pulled and tugged at his skin, and his blood seemed to turn solid at the extremities of his body.