Lucifer's Shadow

55 Fugitive from all

Gobbo lunged up the stairs, his face an ugly, determined mask. I backed a step or two, waited, then drew up my right leg, retracted it, and kicked as hard as I might. My foot connected firmly with his face. He screamed with pain and tumbled backwards into the stairwell. A man must seize his advantages. I knew this house and the building next door intimately. Gobbo and Delapole were strangers. I could hide in places they might never guess at. Better still, when the opportunity arose, I could be out into the night and race fast into the Calle dei Morti, then be gone, into the labyrinth of alleys that is Santa Croce.

These thoughts flashed through my mind as I ran up the stairs to the second floor, then the third, planning my escape. Such foolish confidence…I should have thought of nothing more than fleeing, and engineered my route once I was out of that infernal house. Near the top of the last flight, a few short steps from my bedroom and that exit route I’d used before, there was a clatter behind me; a hand rose up and gripped my ankle. In one swift, agonising movement, Gobbo twisted my leg and brought me tumbling to the hard wooden stairs.

“Hurrah!” Delapole yelled from far below, hearing the noise. He was not as quick as his manservant and must barely have left the ground floor in my pursuit. Gobbo, for all the force of the kick I’d delivered to his ugly face, had recovered in an instant and chased me all the way until I was in his grasp. As I lay caught like an animal, a short, powerful arm turned me over. A little watery moonlight fell through the single window in the roof above. Blood ran from Gobbo’s eye where I had struck him. He gasped for breath. Yet there was something odd in his expression, too, a look of puzzlement, reluctance even, that it had come to this.

“Hold him, Gobbo,” the Englishman cried from below. “This will be my pleasure, not yours.”

Gobbo stared at me, as much with pity as contempt. “Why didn’t you listen, Scacchi?” he whispered, panting. “I have tried to guide you out of danger all along, and every time you do the very opposite of what I tell you.”

I moved my neck a little. His hands had me fast. There was no escape. “I follow where my heart dictates, Gobbo,” I answered. “As you would if you were your own master, not his lackey.”

“There you go,” he said mournfully. “Making it worse for yourself again.”

“Worse than Rome? And what he did to the Duchess of Longhena?”

His eyes narrowed. He was clearly amazed. “What do you know of this? He told me that he merely defended himself, and that the woman was mad.”

“He lies! I have spoken to the magistrate, Gobbo. Your master murdered that woman in the most fearful of ways, ripping his own child from her stomach and placing it by her butchered corpse. These crows come home to roost. That same magistrate arrives on the night ferry now with a warrant for your master’s arrest. You’ll be on the scaffold with him if you don’t look sharp.”

Those fat fingers relaxed a little round my throat.

“You lie.”

“No. It’s true. How else could I know her name? I will not let him do this to Rebecca.”

The sound of Delapole’s feet upon the stairs grew louder. He was beyond the second floor now, coming up directly beneath us in this last straight, single flight of steps.

“I’ll thieve and kill a man who asks for it,” Gobbo admitted. “Women have got no part in my game.”

“Tell that to the axeman,” I hissed at him, then saw, beyond his squat body, the first shadow of movement from his master below.

“You lie!” he snarled, and began to take from his pocket a short, slim blade stained black by my uncle’s blood. This was my final moment. I breathed in hard, then brought up my knee to his groin and pushed him back with my one free arm until the force of gravity threw his balance out of kilter. Gobbo was frozen there for a moment, hands flailing in the darkness, struggling to keep himself upright. I wriggled my right leg free, scissored it into my body, then pushed with all my force. He cursed me, fell backwards down the stairs, upon the ascending figure of his master, and both rolled down, shrieking, back to the second storey, where they landed in a tangled pile of limbs.

There would be no more opportunities. I cleared my head of all thought and rushed into my bedroom, climbed out of the open window and into the warehouse next door. From there I scuttled down the stairs four steps at a time, left the warehouse at water level, and then, fearing they might see me if I took the small bridge over the rio where the deliveries were made, slipped fearfully into the black slime of the lagoon.

In all my time in the city I had not entered this noisome liquid once. It was cold and had a viscous quality quite unlike the ocean. The smell was vile, that of the open sewer. Above me, through an open window in the house, I could hear Delapole and Gobbo discussing my disappearance and wondering how they might follow me. The Englishman was furious, bellowing without caring who might hear. “Either we find him, Gobbo, or incriminate him in his uncle’s fate. If we don’t have him in our hands these next five minutes, it’s off to the night watch for you, to tell them of this crime you’ve uncovered, and how the perpetrator ran off into the night.”

So I was condemned either way. The cold of this filthy dowsing did me one service: it silenced the cry of fury in my throat. I swallowed hard, then ducked my head beneath the surface, pushed with all my might, and, staying below the water for as long as my lungs allowed, swam towards the Grand Canal. When I struggled quietly upwards, I was by the small bridge that runs from the Calle dei Morti to the church. I took care to find the support on the northern side, away from Ca’ Scacchi, then pulled myself a little out of the water, gripping the stone, and listened. There was no movement close by. Gobbo had many exits from our campo to explore. The odds that he might choose mine were slender. I pulled myself from the slime, climbed over onto the narrow bridge, and ran like the wind into Santa Croce.

I knew the rules. I had heard Delapole set them out myself. If I was not his within five minutes, he’d be handing my name to the watch for the murder of my master. So I waited a good half hour, then doubled back, south of San Cassian, towards the Rialto, the only way I might cross and head for Cannaregio, where the boats from Mestre docked. My heart pounded as I wound through the straggle of villains and harlots who hung around that place. Gobbo could have easily caught me there. But he was a servant through and through, and now would be lying through his teeth to the idiots of the watch.

Dripping foul water, my jacket pulled up around my face, I crossed over the Grand Canal and followed that familiar route, which required only a short northwards detour to take me to the ghetto. I had no way of knowing where Marchese might spend the night, but it could not be far from the ferry jetty. If only I could locate him, I might begin to concoct some tale that could see us safe through the coming day.

All these possibilities ran through my head. And then were dashed by the ferryman’s grim news. He stared at my appearance, drenched, dishevelled, like a beggar, and muttered, “Rome coach is late. Won’t see no one from that till midday at the earliest. Lost a wheel outside Bologna, so they say, and went right off the road.”

I must have looked a sorry sight. When I asked him for some paper and a piece of charcoal so I might write a message for a friend, he walked into the nearest tavern and came back with both.

“What kind of simpleton are you, lad?” he demanded. “Asking a sailor for something to write with.”

I thanked him, then, penniless and starving, joined the other destitutes picking scraps from the remains of the Cannaregio market around the corner: a mouldy piece of bread, a half-devoured apple. I stole some oranges from a cart, and dashed into the darkness when the trader saw me. In an alley near the ghetto, I devoured what little food I had. Under the light of an illuminated alcove Virgin, I tore the paper into pieces and wrote — in a different hand, I hoped — a similar message on each. Then, exhausted and half-sleeping, I walked the city, into San Marco and beyond, finding each of those bronze lions’ mouths I could remember and making a small offering which might, I hoped, give the Doge’s men pause for thought when they read it, and provide us with a chink in the English armour.

The last I posted in the figure close to the palace itself, then, to remind myself of the stakes in this game, I walked close to the dungeon by the Bridge of Sighs, and heard the wails and plaints that drifted out of those high windows with their iron bars. In a dank doorway nearby, I spent the night, sleeping, dreaming. A dreadful dream, too, for in it I saw from behind the silken figure of Delapole stalking the slumbering Rebecca in a half-lit bedroom full of mirrors. He crept upon her stealthily, like some common criminal. Then, brutally, while she fought beneath him like a tiger, he took her by force, screaming like an animal all the while.

When this deed was done and he hung over her still, the saliva dripping from his mouth onto her white neck, he lifted his face and stared into the mirror. There I saw myself, in Delapole’s guise. I was the true perpetrator of this act in concert with this devil, who stood behind us both, having watched approvingly, and now applauded with foppish claps of his hands, as if it were some performance on the stage.

I woke with a start, these frightful images still in my head. With them came some lines I recalled from that English play I had once, in my innocence, thought the likes of Gobbo might have read.

The sun had barely risen. I trembled, still damp from my night adventures, although behind those shivers lay something deeper. In my dream I had, I felt, seen some glimpse into Delapole’s true identity. What was he in his own eyes? For want of a better word, the Devil. What did he seek? To hold others’ lives in his grasp, to do with and dispose of as he wished. What Delapole coveted, above all else, was title to that piece of a man or woman they thought their own. Beside this, lust and greed and deceit were but everyday sins, practised by the many. In his own mind Delapole wore these trophies as the primitives of Guinea sport the heads of the defeated upon their belts. The more the merrier. Rebecca was not the first; she would not be the last. His thirst was unquenchable.

I shook this miserable thought from my head and, looking every inch the ragged beggar, stumbled to the waterfront, not a hundred yards from La Pietà, thinking of my next move. The makings of a great day were already obvious. Hawkers were arguing over their pitches. The familiar scaffold which Canaletto used was being erected on the Arsenale side of the promenade, with the painter himself barking orders at the hapless workmen doing the job. Several completed canvases were being readied for show to attract commissions, among them, as I recognised from a distance, that work I had seen him begin when I was a boy, some months earlier. At first I dared not look at it too closely, for fear of all the memories it might provoke.

A soldier hammered a notice into one of the tree trunks used to tie up gondolas by the water’s edge. I waited until he had finished, then, to satisfy my curiosity — though in truth I knew what to expect all along — I wandered over and read the poster. It was a call for the arrest of one Lorenzo Scacchi, an apprentice of San Cassian, who had murdered his master most foully the previous evening. A description of the scoundrel followed, one that none seeing me then would begin to recognise. And there was the promise of a reward, from the city’s newfound English benefactor. If he could not take my head himself, Delapole would pay the Republic to do the job for him.

I damned him, damned Venice, too, and, in spite of my fears, walked over to see Mr. Canaletto’s canvas, taking care to observe that the artist himself was busy roasting a carpenter on the other side of his scaffold. The painting was magnificent, yet cold. Between this frozen moment in time and my present state lay entire chapters of sweetness and misery. All the artist offered was an exquisite testament to spectacle and grandeur. I glanced at the work a final time, then slunk back into the shadows to dream of our escape.