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When he comes to–and he is surprised that he comes to, a distant shock thundering beneath all the other shocks–it is to the sound of a woman screaming. Her voice is echoing through the arches and vaults, shrill and keening, and then from under and around that awful rabbit-death sound a wall of voices, Your Eminence, Your Eminence–
He is crumpled in the corner of the confessional of San Pellegrino, covered in blood. Through the open door a crowd is gathering, of clergy and common people. Peering in at him, shouting and calling. The distant clattering of Swiss boots and Swiss arms.
He screws his eyes shut, wishing that woman would stop screaming.
A hand reaches in toward him, and he feels it before he opens his eyes, like the softening of the air before a lightning strike, and swats it away. Struggles upright on his own, shouldering up the narrow confessional wall. He can barely parse what has occurred in the other side of the stuffy, ornate wooden box–only blurry fragments. The screen that separates confessor from penitent, shredded, curling. Two sprawled shapes stuffed inside. For a moment, by the color flashed and gored across the dark wood walls, he thinks it must be a pair of cardinals.
“Your Eminence,” an unfamiliar voice says, soft enough to reach him from under the clamor outside. He looks away from the carnage to see a young gold-furred Swiss, blocking the crowd with a firmly held halberd. The man’s garish tricolor hurts his eyes.
“Get me away from here,” he manages, and it comes out much less self-assured than he’d hoped–barely a gasp of his voice, hoarse and wrung-out and nearly hysterical.
The Swiss nods and takes his arm, which usually would offend him, but he does not think he could stand without it. When he steps off the bare lip of the confessional he feels the heel of one shoe crumple and snap to the side and nearly stumbles, but the Swiss holds him upright. He can feel the taut muscle in his arm.
They make it a few steps, together, away from the murmuring congregation and toward the blinding shape of the narthex’s open doors, before he has to stop. Out of breath though he has hardly moved. The Swiss stands patiently at his arm as he steadies himself.
He looks down at his person, at his cassock. Where the late morning sun is peering in and meeting his body the fabric is wet and shining and cold, like the slick of oil upon water.
This is no fit state in which to appear in public, he thinks numbly. He smooths down the front of his cassock and the pads of his hand come away dark and sticky.
He stares at them for a moment before the Swiss, very gently, tugs him on his way again.
The Swiss does not bother him with an introduction, for which he is grateful. As they step out into the suffocating heat of Rome in high summer, a trio of his colorful fellows fall into step behind, warning away anyone curious with glares and prickling weapons.
He does not know where the Swiss are taking him. He hasn’t been paying attention to their brisk, hurried route, out of the oratory courtyard and into the hushed, humid alleyways still warm with the leaving of the morning’s sun. He wonders why no one had called for a carriage. Wonders then if he should be afraid, alone in such places with four strange men, after–
“What happened?” he growls, under his breath, at the Swiss who still has cautious hold of his arm. Distantly he thinks that it is perhaps a foolish question to ask of a stranger.
He feels the soldier’s eyes looking him up and down, does not miss the hesitance in his voice when he speaks, the faint surprise in it.
“You were attacked, Your Eminence,” he says.
But he knew that already. He remembers now, and is hotly angry that the Swiss dared to answer his question, to explain to him the obvious.
He’d gone to San Pellegrino today–his favorite church in the city for one of his least favorite responsibilities–to take the sacrament of Reconciliation with Monsignore Sangiorgio, as he always did, once a week, performance more than penance, and the ancient monsignore had not greeted him through the screen in his familiar way as the confessional door closed behind him, and he had known–for only an instant–that something was wrong, before the stiletto punctured the screen and dragged a misplaced gash across his upper lip.
He curls his lip experimentally, and there it is: the sharp, starry sting. He thinks to touch it before he realizes his hands are shaking.
He’d flinched. Well-practiced in flinching, he thinks, wryly. He’d flinched just as the assailant had crashed through the screen, his weight too much for the fragile wicker, and before he’d known what he was about, he’d grabbed the would-be killer’s flailing arm, wrestled the stiletto out of his hand–
“Your Eminence!”
And that is a voice he recognizes–Vittorio’s, high and frantic, and the slapping of his soft-soled shoes on the cobblestones as he runs down the hill toward them. Somehow they have wound their way mere steps from his front gate. He had not realized where they were.
The blare of the sun on the white stone of Rome is too harsh, and he cannot look up at him. The Swiss tense immediately, but he flaps a hand at them, pulls his arm out from the grip of his helper. It is snatched up immediately by Vittorio, whose eyes are wide as coins.
Bless the boy, he does not ask questions. The other three Swiss melt away as silently as they had come, marching quick-time back toward the church. The first accompanies them up the road toward the welcoming walls of home, inside which are shade–cool rooms–something not soaked in blood to wear–
One of those sprawled shapes in the confessional had been the monsignore, he realizes, abruptly. He stops in his tracks, and Vittorio looks up at him nervously.
He stares at the blank surface of the wall that separates the courtyard of his villa from the winding street below. The perfectly-cast shadow of the lemon tree just within is wavering softly on it.
“Your Eminence,” Vittorio says softly, and he wishes to heaven that everyone would stop calling him that. “We should go in, off the road.”
He can feel Vittorio and the Swiss exchanging glances behind him. If they have something to say they should just say it. He is not made of glass.
He swallows thickly. “Go and draw me a bath,” he snaps, and Vittorio’s entire body tenses, his eyes dart toward the ground. He feels badly for that, and all the angrier. “What? And summon my physician–will you go?”
Vittorio ducks his head and hurries inside the low, dark wooden gate. He turns on the Swiss with his venom, then, watches him shrink back. Something about that makes him feel a little better. A little more in control of the pounding of his heart.
“I am obliged to stay, Your Eminence, until you are safe,” the man says, straightening his shoulders.
“Do as you like,” he mutters, and follows Vittorio in through the open gate.
He ignores the wide-eyed stares and hushed murmurs of his household as he goes up to his rooms, ignores the sound of the Swiss trailing at his heels. The soldier stands outside the closed doors as Vittorio undresses him, with his usual care, as if his clothes are not bound for the fire-pit. He tries not to look as each piece comes off, sticking and tugging on the fur of his arms, catching on the ruff of his neck. Vittorio murmurs a hundred apologies. His cassock lands in the empty wash-basin with an ugly wet sound. Someone comes in to hurry it away.
His physician arrives–Fiorensi–and examines him with a thoroughness that he appreciates and loathes in equal measure, hunting through the bloodstains on his arms and face in search of hidden wounds. He finds only the cut upon his upper lip, and pronounces it mild. A lucky thing, the physician says, crossing himself.
Fiorensi prescribes a sleeping draught in a low voice, and, to Vittorio’s nod, takes his leave.
By then his bath is prepared. He has hardly noticed the coming and going of his servants, is hardly cognizant that he is standing naked in the middle of the floor until Vittorio’s hand grazes his back and coaxes him toward the copper tub, draped inside with linens. The water is warm, but not hot, as he had been hoping. He had been hoping for near-boiling, scouring hot. Hot enough to burn.
He steps one foot in, shakes off Vittorio’s support, and it is only when he has sunk down onto his haunches in the tepid water that some part of it, finally, occurs to him, like a punch to the throat, and he draws his knees up and buries his snout between them so that Vittorio cannot see the wrenching of his expression.
He has been attacked. Not two hours ago. Attacked in the confessional of his favorite oratory, on an ordinary summer Saturday. He had woken this morning with no notion of what was about to happen. Monsignore Sangiorgio—he feels his heart climbing into his throat—that was him, wasn’t it? Crumpled in the confessor’s box, his vestments tangled and heavy with blood. And the other man, sprawled out across him—he can picture him now, in the red dark behind his screwed-shut eyes. Pale of fur, scrawny. Hungry. Curious pattern on his doublet—like narrow black eyes, gaping up toward heaven.
He must temper his breathing.
“Here,” Vittorio murmurs, and he hears him kneel down beside the tub. Vittorio touches his arm first, and he tenses—then relaxes, slowly, focusing on the swimming colors behind his eyelids, as Vittorio sets to his task.
With soaps and brushes and washrags Vittorio scrubs him to a fine pink lather, allowing him to remain sequestered between his knees until he needs access to his face. He is harsh, but not malicious—a fur as white as his will hold every stain, if he is not—and the scraping and prodding and the dousing of his head with buckets of rapidly-cooling water serve, at least a little, to bring him back to himself. His extremities are tingling with Vittorio’s attention and dissolving adrenaline, and by the time the bathwater is milky pink and very cold, he thinks he could fall asleep right there, struck down with the exhaustion of it all.
He sits wrapped in a length of linen while the bath is dragged out, the bloody water discarded, and new, fresh, hot water brought in, steaming this time. Vittorio is more gentle with him now, allowing him to rest the back of his aching head against the lip of the tub. He hunts like Fiorensi through the fur of his arms, between his fingers, through the ruff of his neck, for missed smudges of blood, his claws parting each layer of fur meticulously, methodically.
He hears the door open a crack, a murmur, and Vittorio leaves him, suddenly. When he opens his eyes he is alone in his rooms, in the milky water.
Through the gap between the door and its hinge he can see the Swiss guard’s tricolor, jewel-toned in the afternoon sun.
It is afternoon already.
Vittorio is not long in returning, his ears pulled back a bit, his jaw tight.
“What?” he says, feeling a nameless dread opening up in his chest. He sits up a bit in the bath, curling one hand around the edge.
“There has been an arrest, Your Eminence,” he says, returning to his place, to his methodial, meticulous examination. Vittorio will not meet his gaze. He strokes the pad of his thumb through a bit of fur that is still a little pinkish, the color of the flesh beneath, picks up a boar-bristle brush to buff it away. His big dark eyes flicker up, to his face, and then away just as quickly. He swallows. “Cardinal Carafa.”
“Carafa?” For an absurd moment, he cannot even picture the man’s face.
“The man who attacked you was hired,” Vittorio says, his voice tight, as if he is relaying information that is delicate, must be handled carefully. “A mercenary, from Naples. Carafa has already confessed. It did not require much persuasion.”
He sinks back into the water, looking dazedly up at the frescoed ceiling.
He’d hired some young genius to paint it, years ago, when he had first been given this house by His Holiness. Not for him the cloud-dazzled skies full of angels and saints. He’d wanted greenery—olive trees stretched over the canopy of his bed, the pale blue dome of heaven the exact color of a cloudless sunrise, still pricked here and there with the last farewell glances of the stars. He’d wanted something peaceful to look at.
Carafa? For the life of him he cannot imagine why the man would want to harm him, let alone kill him. Certainly there have been petty disagreements—there are always disagreements in the curia, on matters of state and theology, policy and politics, heresy and inquisition. He can hardly remember the last conversation he had with the cardinal. Is certain he would have remembered a real tension. Something worth hiring a man from Naples to ambush him in a confessional box. To slay his confessor and crouch there with his still-warm body, waiting for the door to open—
He turns his head toward Vittorio.
“The assailant,” he says, and Vittorio is a long time quiet.
“They tell me he was stabbed some eighteen times, Your Eminence,” he says, finally.
He is struck, slowly, by the way he says it. As if someone else had done it. As if there had been anyone else to do it, in that tiny box.
Not a pattern upon his doublet, after all.
He sits numbly through a supper delivered up to him, listening to the murmuring of Vittorio and the lingering Swiss just past his open door. He feels rubbed raw. As the sun sets, and the passing of its light over the frescoed ceiling blooms orange and then pink, he catches himself combing idly through the fur of his arm, looking for spots that Vittorio may have missed. Fooling himself with the color of the light. Forcing himself to tug down the sleeve of his robe and stop fidgeting.
There is no more news of Cardinal Carafa or the Neapolitan assassin. Vittorio convinces the Swiss, at last, to go away; and he convinces Vittorio, at last, to go away.
And then he is truly alone, for the first time.
On a more typical evening, he would enjoy a crystal glass or two of watered wine and retire early, hunting down sleep after the stresses of the day. Tonight should be no different, he thinks. Straightens his shoulders. As if Carafa and his assassin are watching from the eaves of the painted trees, hoping to see him crumble. He will not.
A cut upon the lip. What of it? None of the blood in his fur had been his own.
He pours himself a fine, tall glass of shimmering ruby wine, and drifts toward the open balcony door.
Outside, down beyond the walls of his villa courtyard, the city is hushed. Through the branches of his lemon tree he can see the inky sky, covered over in stars.
The branches of that tree do trend quite near his balcony, he thinks.
It is very quiet in his rooms.
He finds his eye wandering to the heavy brocade drapes to either side of the balcony door, which he can draw on too-brilliant mornings, to shield his sensitive eyes from the cacophony of the sun. Closed, they plunge his rooms into near-complete darkness, but he likes to keep them open of a summer night, to let the breeze in.
He shifts his glass to one hand and, with as much nonchalance as he can muster, twitches the drape back.
There is nothing behind it, of course, pressed up against the lime-washed wall. Waiting. He hadn’t really thought there would be. He clears his throat, lets the drape fall. Watches the wind stir the branches of the tree.
He had had the tree brought in from Sicily. Some half-hearted attempt at remembrance of his childhood, though he does not actually care to remember it. It has not fruited yet, despite the best efforts of his gardener. It has spread wide over the courtyard; in the winter its dropped leaves are like curls of gold.
He wonders how Carafa knew where he would be today. It is hardly a secret, his preferred time and place for the sacrament. Anyone could have told him. An innocent enough question to ask—no one in his household would have thought twice of it. His diligent gardener, for example, in between the movements of his pruning, his planting.
His laundress. His cook. The scullery maid. Vittorio.
He twitches aside the other drape.
Nothing.
He takes a long mouthful of wine.
He needn’t worry, after all. If this was Carafa’s best attempt at taking his life, it was a miserable failure—an assassin with no aim. Vittorio had said he’d confessed. Even now the fool is likely shivering in some dank cell, stripped of his scarlet, unable anymore to reach him with whatever bare power he’d ever had. He wonders if the Holy Father will be merciful. Probably not. His Holiness likes him. It is one of his points of pride.
It is one reason, he supposes, that someone might wish to remove him.
His throat feels dry. Perhaps too hastily he reaches forward to close the balcony door, to seal himself in away from the wind rattling through the branches of the tree.
The ambush in the confessional had been an opening salvo, directed by an idiot. But an opening salvo still heralds a siege.
He sets his wine down upon his writing-desk, and smooths down the front of his robe, and with clipped steps and a straight back he flings open the doors of his armoire, lifts the lid of the trunks at the end of his bed, even crouches to peer beneath its stead—nothing, no one, no more skinny Neapolitans. But he had not been thinking of assassins this morning. Had never imagined one lurking in the safety, the sanctity, of a confessional box. He might be overlooking anything.
He locks the door to the balcony, hauls the drapes over it. Looks and looks again, into every pool of shadow cast by his dim candelabra, in the space below his writing-desk, behind his heavy Venetian glass, until the thundering of the morning has returned to his head again, his lungs tightening in his chest, his panic welling up in his throat, squeezing past the stone of his heart lodged there. He had not stopped to wonder if he was safe, here. Carafa could have had men in reserve. And if he cannot even remember what slight it was he gave the cardinal, then what of the others he can remember—plotting ruined, favors revoked, his interference on behalf of His Holiness in all manner of doings among the curia?
A goodly handful of men who could easily want him dead. All with more means and more brains than the idiot Carafa. The seal has been broken, now. Open hunting.
He sits down heavily on his bed, suddenly bereft of breath, staring at the light glimmering through the dregs of his crystal glass of wine.
He needs a taster, he thinks, numbly. He needs to hire a taster, now, to stand behind him at all his meals. Someone loyal, not easily bribed. Guards, too. Not Swiss. Men he pays with his own coin, enough coin to keep them honest. And he must examine every person in his household—feel out their allegiances. All of them. Even kind-faced, attentive Vittorio. Isn’t it always, in the stories, someone just like that—some trusted friend who twists the knife?
The thought is too overwhelming.
He gathers his robe tight across his chest, looks down at his feet. Pauses—leans forward, lifts his right leg up into the light. Vittorio missed a bit of the Neapolitan’s blood, there just above the bone of his ankle, a dried smudge of rust.
He does not know how the assassin’s blood managed to wend its way beneath his cassock, his chasuble and tall shoes. He is too tired to think anymore. Vittorio has left him an ewer and basin of cold water, and he gets up, shuffles wearily toward them, wets a bit of cloth and crouches down to scrub.
It will not come out. He tries to pick and pluck at the stiffened strands of fur with his claws, tries to scrub harder, but it only turns his cloth a tinge pink—and he is suddenly so angry that he hurls the wet rag into a dark corner, storms to his writing-desk and hunts out his pen-knife there, collapses into his chair and lifts his leg and seizes the hank of bloody fur with one hand and begins to saw at the offending spot with the blade, angling toward the frescoed ceiling in which Carafa and his assassin’s ghost are lurking in the olive trees, sniggering down at him, at his panic and discomport, and then he slips and the blade catches the bone of his ankle, and his hands are wet with blood for the second time today.
He freezes. The pen-knife clatters to the floor, skipping droplets into the candle-light, and he watches as his fur grows dark and warm.
It could have been this, he thinks. Mine. Spilling out from beneath the confessional door, staining the floors of San Pellegrino.
If he had been a breath slower. If that stiletto had found his throat.
He sags back in his chair, heavy, so tired he thinks he could weep.
When he took the cloth, years ago, Vasco gave him a gift: a rosary. Its beads are formed of rose petals, still softly scented after all this time. He does not pray, generally, and when he does, it is never something so structured as a novena. But he likes the way it feels in his hands, cool as water. Meditative, to hold each bead in turn, warm it and pass it on. Scraps of prayer floating through his mind uncaught. Salve, Regina, mater misericordiae.
He lies awake with the rosary outlaid across his breast, wandering through the perambulations of his mind. The thousand things he must do come morning. The thousand things he must do every morning after that. The rolling of each bead between the pads of his fingers.
When Vittorio comes in, long after the sun has risen behind the brocade drapes, he does not say anything about the new blood that has dried on his master’s ankle, nor the stain it has left on the coverlet and linens, nor the weight of the sleepless night on his face.
He almost thinks to ask, as Vittorio gently brushes down his mozzetta. Was it you? Watching him make one last circle of his person in the glass. You would not harm me, would you?
Far and away the bells of the morning.