The Malice of Fortune Read Online Free PDF

arch above the door where you entered a moment later, Pinturicchio had painted the Holy Madonna displaying her Child to the adoring saints. Your grandfather’s people had already dressed you in a little hunting costume, with a padded jerkin and red morocco boots that reached to your knees. In your arms squirmed a dear Tenerife almost identical to our precious Ermes, licking at your face.
    “Mama! Mama! Look!” you cried out like a carillon of tiny bells. An angel’s voice. “I have met my nonno at last and he has given me Ermes’s brother! In the morning we shall go back to our house and get Ermes and mend the cut those evil men gave him! I’m going to stay here with the dogs while you are away and receive instruction in fencing and riding!” You bounded into my lap and the fluffy Tenerife now licked madly at my face, eager for the salt in my tears. “Mama, nonno says we are all going to live here when you get back!”
    I had hardly composed my sobs when I observed that your nonno had returned to stand behind you. His Holiness’s fleshy lips trembled as they drew a tauter line. “Now you understand why I have every conviction you will go to Imola and do as I say.”
    “I understand,” I whispered, “that you have made your own grandson hostage to my obedience in this errand.”
    Your grandfather nodded at Beheim, who gently tugged you from my embrace. At once I felt the pain of birth, when a mother first parts with the child of her womb. Yet I knew that if I clung to you, I would only frighten you.
    It is through love, Plato said, that all conversation between God and man is conducted. Thus the vow I whispered to you was for God’s ears as well as your own. “I will come back and hold you again, my most precious darling. Soon. As soon as I am able. Until then you will be brave and do what you are told. And whenever you think of me, you will know that I am thinking of you and how I adore you more than the love that turns the stars, and that is when you must smile for me.Even if it is a hundred times every day. Even if it is only once. Each time you smile, my heart will know it.”
    You had no sooner left my arms than you offered me the first of those winsome smiles, sly and a bit sad at once, reminding me of your father. You turned and offered the second as you passed beneath the immense gilded arch that framed the Madonna and Child, the little dog in your arms peering back at me as well, his wide eyes lingering longer than yours.
    Your grandfather did not witness our farewell. Instead, again he stared up at his own lost son. For the first time that night, I was alone with him. And I cannot say why, but I felt between us a communion so powerful that I sobbed, as though we were the last two mourners standing at Juan’s bier.
    “The Orsini and the Vitelli are no longer in my employ.” The pope’s voice was hollow. “Last month the condottieri met in a secret conclave at the fortress of La Magione and declared an armed rebellion against Duke Valentino, the Holy See, and our entire enterprise in the Romagna. Vitellozzo Vitelli has already attacked our garrisons in the same fortresses and towns I paid him so liberally to secure for me only months ago. Impicatti . The Orsini and Vitelli have betrayed their Heavenly Father no less than their duke, their pontiff, and the pledges they gave us.”
    “So the condottieri are no longer useful to you,” I replied. “And now I am.”
    The pope remained fixed on Juan’s image.
    “Five years, Your Holiness. That is how long you have husbanded your hatred, every day putting away a bit more, like wine in your cellar. But it will be a sour vintage if you believe I had anything to do with those men. Perhaps this unfortunate woman had a connection with the condottieri . Most likely she did.” My sigh was weary. “But if I ever knew her, it was not because of some mutual association with the Orsini or the Vitelli.”
    The pope spun about, his eyes as glaring as black glass