Death of a Duchess Read Online Free PDF Page A

disappointment obvious among the withdrawing courtiers. Unlike them, however, he had no intention of leaving; he had a strong confidence born of experience that having made himself invisible he would not be seen. Indeed, two ladies, discontentedly murmuring to each other as they passed, brushed his face with their gauzy head-veils without seeing him in the pillar’s dark embrasure.
    Finally, all had left except the Duke’s brother, a man with a clerk’s face Benno supposed to be the Duke’s secretary, the enemy lords, and Sigismondo. Pages and guards retired, closing the doors. Benno, for the moment holding his breath, had a strong and curious feeling that Sigismondo, though he had not turned his head towards him at all, knew that he was there.
    ‘My lords.’ Formally, the Duke bent his head to both; both bowed to him. Jacopo, deprived of supporters, looked oddly frail, but his energy returned in a rush when the Duke turned to him and said only ‘Your daughter—’
    ‘ Stolen! I accuse Ugo Bandini! There stands the man who has snatched my daughter from me! I demand justice from my Duke!’
    The Duke, who could scarcely be accustomed to interruption, frowned. His tone sharpened. ‘There are questions to be put to you, di Torre; why, if your daughter was snatched from her chamber, did she have time to dress and to take with her the slave girl and the dog?’
    Di Torre started an answer, failed in it and began a protest, stopped, and glared at Sigismondo.
    ‘You told our agent that her abductors must have come over the roof, yet there was no sign of disturbance, no tiles cracked, no plant broken. Nor did any dogs bark, so the men you say came either were no strangers to the household or they never entered.’
    Protest bubbled now on Jacopo’s lips but the Duke went relentlessly on, his voice ringing harshly in the room’s emptiness. ‘You yourself, di Torre, arranged for your daughter to go. You sought to disobey our decree that she marry Leandro Bandini. You sought to deceive us . And you have been terribly repaid.’
    He nodded to Sigismondo, who went out through the gold-hung doorway and reappeared bearing a blanket-wrapped form. At the foot of the dais he laid down and pulled the blanket away. The white-clad body with its swathed head rolled free, a hand hitting the floor, and the swathing fell partly aside disclosing a burnt cheek and ear.
    Sigismondo had let go the blanket and moved straight to di Torre so that he was behind him, catching him as he dropped. The Lord Paolo was just as quick, hurrying to a side table out of sight behind the dais curtains, and returning with a cup of wine. The clerk, on the Duke’s orders, laid the blanket over the girl’s body once more, turning his face from sight.
    Di Torre gasped and groaned, drank wine, and was helped upright. Lord Paolo was the only one showing concern. Bandini evinced a most dislikeable righteous distaste. The Duke looked as merciless as an animal before the jump that sets its teeth in its victim’s throat.
    ‘That is not your daughter, di Torre. It was her slave girl who, either in fear or in complicity, put on her clothes.’
    Jacopo was still working on some form of reply when the Duke turned his blue stare on Bandini. ‘And you, my lord. To maintain the feud between your two families, the feud that threatens our state, you have been ready to kill.’
    Benno had once seen a man walk off the edge of mounting block expecting a stair; the same change happened now to Bandini’s face. ‘Your Grace, I swear—’
    The Duke’s hand, flashing light from its rings, silenced him.
    ‘You took di Torre’s daughter from outside his house. There were signs of struggle in the road, our agent tells us, and blood upon the wall. You had her conveyed out of the city at dawn.’
    The words gave Jacopo his strength if not his senses. His hand fell to his dagger and he began to draw it. Sigismondo’s hand clamped down and rammed the weapon back in its sheath