The Saracen: Land of the Infidel Part 73

Rachel felt a momentary excitement. Then she remembered how she was going to get the money. Her body felt colder than ever, cold as death.

This, she thought, must be the way that poor man they killed last week felt when he was waiting for the torturers to come for him. She shuddered and hugged her knees tight against her chest under the gauzy gown Tilia had given her to wear.

Tilia must have seen the sudden darkening of her mood. She moved over to the bed and sat down beside Rachel, making the frame of the bed groan alarmingly. She put a hand lightly on Rachel's arm.

"Listen, Rachel. I was raped. I will not be party to the rape of another. You do not have to do this. Just tell me that you do not want to."

A sudden heat rushed through Rachel's body. She was no longer cold. She burned with anger.

"Stop saying that!" she screamed. "Will you leave me alone?" Being reminded over and over again that she was doing this of her own free will was an even worse torture than imagining what the man would do to her.

_Oh, G.o.d, I am going to cry and make myself ugly, and he will not want me and I will not get the five hundred florins._

She pressed her hands against her face, trying to stop tears.

"I was asking you to think, not carry on," said Tilia reprovingly. "If you want to walk well in life, you had better learn not to burst into tears when you have an important decision to make."

Rachel took deep breaths to calm herself.

"I decided days ago that I could not do any better for myself than this, Signora Tilia. But I am so afraid. Perhaps the man will not want me when he sees how afraid I am."

Tilia grinned broadly. "Nonsense. The more innocent and timid you appear, the more you will delight him."

Rachel heard a light tapping at the door, and her heart beat so hard she thought it would burst.

Tilia rose, brus.h.i.+ng down her green satin gown. "The signal that he has arrived. I thought he would never get here. It's almost morning. I must go down and greet him, child. But remember, I will be watching everything."

_I do not really like that._

Tilia winked and pushed on what looked like a plaster panel between two gold-painted beams in the wall. It swung away from her and she squeezed through.

Rachel sat in the bed, drawn up into the corner of it that was farthest from the door, and waited. She played nervously with fingers that felt like icicles.

A short time later she caught a glimpse of Tilia pus.h.i.+ng open the door, but her eyes fixed on the man standing in the doorway.

She drew in a deep, gasping breath. She wanted to scream.

The man standing in the doorway was short and broad. He wore a long, brightly colored silk robe. His skin was brown, his eyes little black slits. A white mustache drooped below his flat nose. A thin white beard like a goat's hung from his chin.

She had seen this man once before, when she watched from the window of Sophia's room at Cardinal Ugolini's, the day he arrived in Orvieto in a great procession.

Rachel's breath, so long held, burst out of her in a moan.

The man who had come to take her virginity was a Tartar.

"It was as much by my choice as the cardinal's that I did not attend the contessa's reception," said Friar Mathieu, yawning. "How could a Little Brother of San Francesco stay up till all hours with people stuffing themselves with rich food and drinking wine? And gambling, and kissing each other in dark corners?"

The old Franciscan's eyes were watery with sleepiness, but the corners of his mouth quirked with humor under his white mustache. He sat on the edge of the cot, which, as he had insisted when he moved into the Palazzo Monaldeschi, was the only piece of furniture in the room. Simon paced the floor, unable to stand still.

Simon felt the barb in the mention of kissing, but he did not mind it.

When he routed Friar Mathieu out of his narrow bed in a remote corner of the palace, he admitted at once that he had been in the atrium with Ugolini's niece, Sophia, while David of Trebizond was so disastrously baiting the Tartars.

"I was wrong to pay court to the cardinal's niece." He could still feel her lips under his, still taste them, and his body tingled at the remembrance. "I am as much at fault as de Verceuil. But it was he who found that ignorant woman to replace you as interpreter, and then he went off to gamble--with David's servant, of all people--and left the Tartars alone and unprotected."

Friar Mathieu shook his head. "Yes, and drinking that wine of Montefiascone. I wonder why G.o.d chose to make those particular grapes so irresistible."

Simon pounded his fist into his palm. "We must confront de Verceuil, Friar Mathieu."

A deep crease appeared between the thick white eyebrows. "At this hour?"

Simon saw the fatigue in Mathieu's wrinkled face and felt guilty. "I am most heartily sorry for awakening you at this unG.o.dly time of night. It was just--"

"Just that you could not sleep yourself." The friar laughed. "But it is a most G.o.dly time of night. The fact is, I would have had to get up soon to say the first part of my office. Were I living with my brother Franciscans--as I wish I were--I would be up chanting lauds with them.

But I fear the cardinal will be neither willing nor able to talk to us if we go to him now."

"So much damage has been done, Friar Mathieu. The contessa is furious. I could not begin to reason with her. She went on and on, talking about murderers of babies. I would not be surprised if tomorrow morning she ordered us to leave her palazzo."

The old man raised a hand. "Pope Urban would not let her do that. It would be an insult to the amba.s.sadors."

"Cardinal le Gros told me the pope looked pale and shaken when he left.

He might not care whether the amba.s.sadors are insulted. We can have no more of de Verceuil's blundering."

_Or mine._

Friar Mathieu shook a finger at him. "What happened tonight is not the cardinal's doing. None of this is accidental. What happened tonight shows that Ugolini will do everything in his power to block this alliance."

"But Ugolini did nothing tonight. It was all that man from Trebizond."

"That is like saying that the axe chops the tree down, and not the woodsman wielding it. Ugolini brought David to the contessa's reception.

He brought David's servant, an accomplished gambler as well as a recruiter of brigosi. And he brought his niece, Sophia."

At the mention of Sophia a sharp pain went through Simon's chest.

_Sophia cannot be part of it. Not when I have just found her._

Was it possible that the pa.s.sion she had showed in their time together in the atrium was a sham? That would be too cruel. And yet, how could he prove that she was innocent?

"It is just a coincidence that Sophia is here in Orvieto now," he said.

"She is as undecided about this matter of the Tartars as the pope himself is."

_But is the pope still undecided_, Simon wondered as he spoke.

The wrinkles around Friar Mathieu's faded blue eyes deepened a little.

"Well, I would not expect you to say otherwise. A knight does not doubt the honor of a lady he has kissed."

Simon sensed Friar Mathieu's skepticism, but he could not bring himself to believe that Sophia had knowingly been the cardinal's agent. This woman had made Italy a place of enchantment for him.

Friar Mathieu went on. "We both agree, do we not, that the luring of Cardinal de Verceuil by David's man, Giancarlo, was planned by Ugolini?"