The Fallen Angel Read Online Free PDF Page A

cast a long shadow across Rome because her story came to embody this
very human frailty in a way that allowed it to be expressed and exorcised, century after century.
    After her execution thousands had followed her coffin along the Via Giulia, across the Ponte Sisto, up the steep hill in Trastevere to the little church of San Pietro in Montorio at the foot of
the Gianicolo hill. There she was buried in an unmarked grave beneath the altar. Costa knew the church, though not well. This quiet little place was rarely visited except by those seeking
Bramante’s haunting little temple which was supposed to mark the site of St Peter’s martyrdom, not the last resting place of a childlike girl butchered as a common criminal. Even there
Beatrice found no peace. Local rumour had it that Napoleon’s troops, when they ran riot in Rome at the end of the eighteenth century, exhumed her famous corpse and played football with the
severed skull.
    For a few brief, agonizing months of his mother’s illness Beatrice was rarely from Costa’s head, a distraction and a nagging reminder of another approaching tragedy, one much closer
to home. He could still recall walking past the Ponte Rotto, the ruins of the imperial-era bridge stranded in the river near Tiber Island, which Beatrice had offered to rebuild from her own
fortune, if only the Church would let her family survive. It had seemed to his young mind utterly savage that the tyrant in the Vatican should have refused her offer and instead taken her life, and
those of her brother and stepmother.
    Beatrice was a victim, one transformed into a heroine by her indefatigable will and serene beauty, and her refusal to bend to the power of the Pope who, some sources claimed, pursued her for his
own reasons, among them the seizure of the valuable Cenci estates.
    Buoyed by popular stories and Reni’s portrait of a tortured innocence, her savage end came to touch people far beyond Italy. Painters had been drawn to it for centuries. Some had even
depicted Reni and the girl together in prison the night before she was beheaded, the artist at his easel, she sitting quietly, patiently, without fear, but with a muted sense of fatalistic
resignation that would be captured on canvas for eternity. On the opera stage and in the theatre, in the exquisite Victorian photography of Julia Margaret Cameron, the story of the virginal Roman
girl caught the imaginations of poets and writers and musicians. Alexandre Dumas had told her tale before moving on to The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers . The American
Nathaniel Hawthorne made her fate a focal part of the moral argument in his book, The Marble Faun .
    Fifty years before Hawthorne, the English poet Shelley had seen Reni’s portrait in the Barberini and set down a description of the doomed girl which, for Costa, summed up the general
conception of her character and its perennial appeal.
    ‘There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features; she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of gentleness,’ Shelley
wrote.
    Costa couldn’t shake from his head the idea that the selfsame words could so easily be applied to the English girl, Mina, doggedly staying by her dead father, eyes brimming with tears,
afraid, yet refusing to move until he agreed to her demand to carry the man’s broken body to safety.
    And the words of her brother, fleeing into the night after firing a gun, apparently at the building where they’d lived.
    She’s safe now.
    Safe from what? The collapse of the building above her? Or something else altogether?
    In the eyes of the world Beatrice Cenci was a righteous criminal, guilty of a just conspiracy to murder the father who oppressed, beat and raped her. A young woman guilty of the heinous crime of
patricide in concert with her brother, stepmother and two henchmen, who had hammered a nail through Francesco’s skull then – and this element troubled