Death of a Duchess Read Free Page B

missing girl? I suppose it is the Bandini; although how they could have got hold of her is a mystery. Girls of good family are kept so close. What have you discovered?’
    Sigismondo smiled again, shrugged and spread his hands. ‘Nothing of use, my lord.’
    ‘What, then, that is of no use?’
    A page in green and white came running in, saw the Lord Paolo and approached him, bowing.
    ‘I’m waited for.’ Lord Paolo retreated towards the door. ‘His Grace isn’t patient. We must speak later.’
     
    Sigismondo found Benno where he had left him, but dogless. ‘You found a rose-bush?’
    ‘There was ever such a nice young gentleman that was being carried in a chair, and he stopped them when I was being thrown out and he asked me about the dog and he made his servant take me to the gardener with orders about the rose-bush. He’s the Duke’s nephew that’s a cripple, the Lord Paolo’s son. I never saw him before, he don’t go about the streets.’
    Sigismondo gave a hum of general assent. They walked down the wide cobbled ramp, and Benno began to speak but, looking up at the dark, somewhat monumental face, he stopped and trotted alongside in silence. They left the castello, coming out from the gatehouse tunnel and looking over the coral and gold patchwork, higgledy-piggledy, of tiled roofs, punctuated by the tall spires of churches and the towers of minor palaces. Beyond these were fields and the great encircling wall with its gates and turrets; beyond that lay farmland, brown patches of woods and the rising undulations of the hills. The river, which through the centuries had sliced through the hills to the north, had come up against the outcrop of Rocca in the course of its meanderings through the valley and, recognising an immovable object when it saw it, took a respectful loop round its base and dawdled off into the distance where, just visible, lay the sea.
    After a walk through the town, Benno found the answer to the question he had not asked. They reached the town’s east gate, not far from di Torre’s house, and Sigismondo fell into conversation with the guard.
    Benno might, on experience so far, believe geniality to be well beyond Sigismondo’s capability or even his wishes. Now, in easy conversation with the guard, he flowered into smiles. He told jokes. It could be observed that he had good teeth. In twelve minutes he had established that the guard indeed kept good watch for they were accountable to the Duke’s Marshal, a man in whom the milk of human kindness had long ago curdled. Because of the interest being shown in Rocca by the Duke Francisco of Castelnuova, they kept tally of who went in and out. No strangers this morning, no riders, only market people and the charcoal men; and the di Torre dungcart that went out as usual.
    ‘That one’s too mean to pay the city scavengers. All his shit has to go back on his own fields.’
    ‘Nothing unusual about that cart, eh? No escort of angels.’
    This went down so well that they almost neglected to tally-in a pigeon seller and a dwarf from up in the hills.
    Sigismondo left them, and asked Benno for the handiest way to the next gate. Benno closed his mouth and led Sigismondo through alleys and courts, down arched twittens between houses, through a church, two market gardens, a carpenter’s yard and a square full of washerwomen full of interesting suggestions as to their relationship as the linen was smacked on the troughs, and out onto a main street where Benno halted to smile up proudly. He received an approving hum on three descending major notes, and a grip on the shoulder.
    This gate was busy. It took longer, but Sigismondo leant on the wall in the sun, and bought almonds from a passing seller, and handed them round, and commented on the passers-by, the succulence of two girls who went up the street, and the ancestry of the Duke’s Marshal. Before long he was conversing.
    Out of this gate, which gave onto the road to another of the Duke’s towns, a