Thorn

Chapter Nineteen

Helen was garbed in much poorer clothing than the elegant garments in which she had departed our Pisan cottage. She was shivering with cold, and her rags, like those of the traveling poor of any century, were marked with the dust of the road. Her face looked thinner than I remembered it, and her hair had returned to the condition in which I had first seen it. Otherwise her appearance had changed very little in the two years since her desertion. She was leaning one hand on the wooden doorframe now, and the knuckles of the hand were white, as if she felt it necessary to grip something to keep from turning and trying to run away again.

I remember that as I looked at her my first reaction was only a curious numbness: all right, she is here. I looked past her then, and nodded a dismissal to the soldier who had brought her to the house. He went out behind her, and closed the door.

"Come in," I said. But of course she was in already.

My wife and I considered each other in silence. I saw now that she had rags wrapped around her feet in place of shoes. Her shivering arms folded now beneath her breasts, she stood there waiting. I thought I could see in her face something of the same numbness that I felt myself.

"So." That was my next attempt to start. The truth was that in recent months I had no longer spent much time dreaming of revenge. I think now as I look back, I really think, that the first feeling I began to have was a simple, uncomplicated relief—that I could now settle the thing between us, somehow, and after that I would no longer have to stay near Venice and work for Colleoni.

Helen asked: "Have I your permission to sit down?" She was almost swaying on her feet, I saw. Certainly she sounded tired, or rather as if she had just been beaten, though I could see no bruises. Her voice had changed more than her appearance.

I gestured, and she sank into a chair, hands covering her eyes. "I am giving myself up into your hands," she said.

"I can see that."

"Because I am too tired to run any longer. Too tired even to try to bargain with you. Just giving up, that's all."

"I see." But really I did not, and I puzzled over the matter for a few moments in silence. "But what is there to bargain about? And why come to me at all? You are still young, still attractive. Surely you could find some protector who would take you in."

Helen at first slumped in her chair. Then she straightened, raising reddened eyes. "All right, Vlad. Maybe you really do not know. But I am too exhausted for any . . . so I am going to tell you. Perugino is one of the hostages your men have taken here. Now maybe I have damned both myself and him to hell by coming to you. I don't know. I can't tell any longer what I should be doing. I'm too tired and weak and hungry to know anything. I'm giving up."

"Ah. Perugino." I leaned back in my chair. The name had a strange sound on my lips; it had been a long time since I had spoken it. Actually I had never really looked at the hostages, only glimpsed the huddled gray mass of them from a distance. I suppose I had not wanted to look at them closely. My men had informed me how they were being held, under close guard in an otherwise empty barn just across the road from my borrowed house. There were a lot of empty barns in the country now. And now I wondered if I would have recognized Perugino had I seen him. My memory could no longer give me a clear image of what he had looked like, and anyway he might well have changed.

Helen spoke again, in the dead voice that was now hers. "We have been on the move almost constantly. We have run from the soldiers, yours and others, and we have looked for work. Artisan's work, peasant's work, anything. From Rome to Venice, even to Milan. There I saw Sforza once, by accident. We were quite close, but he looked right through me without seeing, as if I were a ghost. Then we moved back to Venice again. Then out here. We have been living in the next village down the road." Suddenly she put out a hand to grip my writing table's edge; she looked pale, as if she might be about to topple from her chair.

"You will need some food," I said. And instead of calling in a servant, whose presence I did not want just then, I got up and began to look around for some myself.

"Yes, some food please. I need some. It was not easy for me to come here, Vlad. Vlad? I ask you to let him go."

In a rucksack I found some bread, and brought it to her. It was dark bread, and stale as I recall, having been for some time left in the pack forgotten. We soldiers had enough. Helen took a couple of bites with animal hunger. Evidently her teeth were still good. I sat down again and watched her eat. Whatever vengeance I decided to pronounce upon her and her lover, it would have been foolish to try to gloat over her with it as she lay on my floor in a dead faint.

Chewing, she asked: "The hostages are all going to be hanged, aren't they?"

"So it would seem. No one has yet come to us with the names of those who killed the mayor."

"Is that why the hostages were taken? We did not even know."

"Bah. You really expect me to believe that?"

"We in the next village, I mean. That is where Perugino and I have been living. The soldiers just came through, rounding up all the men that they could catch."

I looked at Helen closely, decided that she was telling me the truth, and made a small sound of disgust. The village I was in, now that I thought about it, did look small to have provided so many hostage bodies. I was going to have to take some disciplinary action, hoping to instill in my squad leaders some glimmerings of intelligence.

Helen went on: "There is always hanging, butchery of some kind, going on in these villages. I wonder that the people manage to grow any food at all." When I did not answer, she was emboldened, and pressed on: "You could let him go. It will not matter to you, will it, if there are twenty bodies hanging, or only nineteen?"

I thought to myself that it was hardly going to matter if there were twenty or none at all. Except of course to the twenty themselves, and to their families. And to leave the men alive might work a benefit to the land at large. But my words through some bitter perversity followed a different path than my thoughts.

"Maybe," I said, "I will be doing them all a favor by hanging them now. If I let them go, they will have a few more years of suffering in this Godforsaken country and then die anyway. Will Perugino be better off or worse off if I let him go?"

"I don't know, Vlad." And I believed that she did not. But then she began to weep, sobbing so that she had to stop chewing on her bread. "I don't know. But let him go. Please, please, let him go on living."

"You still ask me not to hang him."

"If you put it that way—then you are going to do something to him even more horrible. Oh, I knew it, I should never have come to you." Yet hunger made her try to bite the bread again; she choked on it and went off into a fit of coughing. I got up from my chair again, to dipper some water for her from a pail.

"And suppose—just suppose—that I should let him go, entirely free? What would you do then? Assuming that for some reason you were given a choice."

Helen drank, and choked again, and drank a little more, and put off answering. Later she was to tell me that at this point in our interview she felt sure that I was only playing with her, mocking her, that at any moment the horrors would be announced, that I would call out for the torturers to enter. But I was not playing. I was much less certain than she was of what was going to happen next.

It occurred to me that what I really ought to do was hang Perugino, who was demonstrably guilty of something, and let the nineteen innocent clods go free. But then the guilty man's troubles would perhaps be over—a church-painter like him would be sure to make his peace with God before he reached the gallows—whereas the nineteen would be doomed to who knew how many more years of suffering. Well, that was the kind of mood that I was in.

The reader doubts, perhaps. I have and had a bloody reputation. How is it possible to prove today that I did not torture a certain wretch to death in 1467? Well, can the reader himself prove himself innocent of all crimes committed in that or any other given year? But, the reader protests, in 1467 he was not yet born. Let him prove that, too, say I. If I can live so long, then why not he or she?

Forgive me, gracious Mina. I am overwrought, with reliving things that have more power over me than I guessed they would, when I sat down to write.

Let me put it this way. Though it was claimed even then that I had ruled too harshly in my own land, I had never gone so far as to hang nineteen men who were not even suspected of any crime. And if, in the time when I was Prince, some officer of my realm had reported to me that he was carrying on an investigation in such wise, depopulating my land of healthy industrious peasants to no purpose, his own carcass might soon have been observed in a position higher and more uncomfortable than that afforded by any ordinary scaffold.

Something in my face must have inspired Helen to new hope. "Vlad," she burst out suddenly, "I know that I have already made wedding vows with you, and broken them. But they were forced and I did not consider that they bound me. I will make them again, if you would have me still. The position you hoped to gain can still be yours—you will be the brother-in-law of a powerful king—if you will let Perugino go free. I will never see him again. I will, I swear it to you by whatever you like, be a faithful wife to you, whatever you choose to do to me."

Now it seemed to be an effort to think about her at all. I rubbed my face, and suddenly felt tired, and angry—an anger on the level of irritation, as if my wife had been nagging me for days. "Quiet," I said, and as if to demonstrate her new talent for obedience, Helen broke off some renewed plea before its first word was fairly out. I sat there looking at the papers on the table as if I were eager to get back to them, as if Helen's coming had interrupted some delightful task.

"Where did you first meet Perugino?" I asked her. "I have often wondered about that."

Helen was silent for a few moments, trying to compose herself. Then she said: "It was when I was in the convent—the first time, I mean, the convent near Milan. I was staying there while the final arrangements were being concluded by my brother, for me to marry the Sforza. Perugino was working in the convent chapel. He had been hired to make paintings on the walls."

"Which Sforza were you to marry?"

"Galleazzo Maria himself. The negotiations were all secret. Matthias badly wanted an alliance with Milan."

"Ah. Small wonder His Majesty was so angry at you when you thwarted him. Tell me more. I suppose the bridegroom-to-be was perturbed also?" If Galleazzo Maria Sforza's reputation has now fallen behind mine—I should say remained above it—it was not always so.

"There was a delay in the final arrangements. The Sforza was away on some business or other, I was never told what. So of course there I was, waiting in the convent, as the only proper place for me to stay. And in the chapel a young painter was at work. I was consumed with quiet anger at my brother, at what he was doing with my life for the sake of politics. As if I were only a soldier, to be used up in battle at the commander's will."

"That is the way of battles. And of life."

"I tell you I . . . not of my life. Or so I thought. It began, with Perugino, as a way of getting back at Matthias. But Perugino was the first man I had ever had, and it became . . . great love. The two of us ran away together. And we have been together ever since, as much as we could be. We thought we would be quickly caught, so at first we lived with a kind of . . . raging joy. Do you understand? To do just as we liked, to fear nothing. I wanted to leave scandal wherever we went, to get back at my brother and at the world. For what they had tried to do to me.

"Then later, it was . . . later it began to be no good. I have sold myself, to get food when we were starving. Again to get shelter, when Perugino was ill. When I was sick, he . . . I don't know what he did, but he stayed with me. Now to save his life I will do anything you like."

"Why did you leave that dagger on my pillow?" Helen did not seem to know at first what I was talking about. I drew it from the sheath at my belt and held it up by the tip of the blade. The steel was still lightly notched where I had used it once to cut through a small chain. "This very dagger, here."

At last she remembered. "That? It was meant to show you that I did not hate you, you were not my enemy. Otherwise I would have killed you before I ran away."

"I see." I looked at the weapon, and restored it to its sheath. "And where have you been living? Just now?"

"As I said. In the next village down the road."

I had one more question. "Does Perugino know that you have come to me now?"

Helen took thought, then shook her head. "I don't see how he could."

"I want to talk to him, before I decide anything." Helen wanted to speak, but I put up a hand and she was silent. "I am going to have him brought over here now. I want you to step into the other room, and listen from there. As you value his life, keep hidden and silent, no matter what you hear, until I tell you to come out."

* * *

Perugino's beard, if he had ever in fact shaved it as Leonardo had once informed me, had long since grown back to greater length. There was gray in it now; though he was still in his twenties, probably a decade younger than I, his face was already becoming that of an old man. Still, I was quite sure that I would have known him, had I ever gone to look closely at the hostages.

"I recognize you, Perugino," I announced, when the soldiers who had brought him had gone out of the house again, leaving the two of us together. "Do you know me?"

I honestly do not believe that he did know me, at first. He was shivering worse than Helen had been, and I believe a good part of his shivering was due to fear.

"Come. In your position you have nothing to lose by admitting it. You know that we met at Verrocchio's studio."

Gradually it dawned on him. He almost met my eyes, and then would not. His hands were bound behind him, which made it hard for him to find the least refuge in a pose, or in gestures.

"Well, speak up, man. Answer."

"Yes, signore, I think I do know you. I'm sure of it, in fact." Perugino's voice was so low that I could scarcely hear it. There seemed to be no resistance of any kind left in him; there had been some in Helen, despite her continued claims that she was giving up.

"Good," I said cheerfully. "Good, I am glad. Then the chances are that you remember my wife as well."

Despite the cold, Perugino stank of sweat. Old sweat, fear-sweat. The stink grew now a little fresher. His face sicklied over with an attempted smile. He shook his head a trifle, not knowing what I wanted of him, how much I knew, or what if anything he ought to try to say.

I tried to imagine him impaled on a high stake. He would stink even worse that way. The image brought me nothing but disgust. I sighed. It was hard to imagine that this creature before me had at one time been truly young, and good-looking, and brave enough to play at games with the betrothed of Galleazzo Maria Sforza inside high convent walls.

I said: "I am in no mood to play games with you, man. I know that you and she have been together. The thing is this. We have taken some women hostages, too, at the next village. And it happens that Helen was among them."

Perugino's expression hardly changed. Perhaps he had no extremes of reaction still unused. It was at this point that I finally decided what I was going to do.

"Now, are you listening to me, artist? I have orders from Colleoni to hang thirty people here, to make an example of this place. But I find that some of my soldiers cannot count too well. The total of hostages, men and women included, is now thirty-one. Are you following me?" The lies came to me quite easily as I went along, and they were of a kind to be readily believable to any inhabitant of that region. As for Perugino, I think I could have told him that the key to the pearly gates was in my pocket, and he would only have nodded agreement with that same sickly, insanely hopeful smile.

"Listen to me further, wall-painter. I tell you that I have sworn a great oath—never mind why—that my vengeance shall not fall upon both of you, but on one only. Therefore I am compelled to set one of you free. I will then hang the other—after some preliminary punishment. Now the question is, which is it to be? The guilty wife, or her seducer? Which goes free, and which one suffers?"

I think, looking back, that I was wasting my inventive powers. I think that of it all he heard and understood almost nothing but those two words, "goes free." The moment I was silent, he fell on his knees in supplication.

"You will set me free? Lord, sire, you are a great lord, a blessed man. My aged mother will bless you. Her prayers and mine will go with you from this day forward, to the hour of your death . . . I swear that I will never bother anything of yours again. My gratitude will be eternal . . ."

I do not remember now the whole catalogue of these absurdities he babbled. But it went on and on, perfectly disgusting. I cut it short: "What of the woman's fate? Does that mean nothing to you at all?"

"The woman. Ah. You will know best about that, sire. I swear to you that I am never going to look at her again. I swear . . ."

I was as good as my word to Perugino. A few minutes later he was walking out the front door of my borrowed house, his hands cut free of their bonds by my notched dagger. His pass with my signature on it was in his hand, and one of my soldiers was with him to escort him to the edge of town.

Now I can hear the gentle reader murmuring again. What would the infamous Dracula have done, had the man proved as self-sacrificing as the woman? Well, it is my theory that Helen in coming to me was really not all that altruistic—she was tired, as she said, and took what she saw as the best chance, obeying an almost suicidal impulse—to get out of an intolerable situation even if it should mean death. On the other hand, if Perugino had proven himself ready to sacrifice himself for her—I did not think he would, but if he had—well, I should probably have taken him up on the offer.

As matters actually went, I walked into the room as soon as Perugino was gone. I stood there silently confronting Helen, who had sat down on my bed.

"But he is no longer a brave man," she murmured, staring at my boots. "If he ever was. So much has happened . . . what did you expect?" Then her eyes lifted. "Tell me, are you going to have him killed now after all? Stabbed to death somewhere down the road? Tell me now if it is so."

I had considered some such plan, but had decided against it. I half-expected that the fog of war was likely to carry out the postponed execution without any active effort on my part, local conditions being what they were. This was a faulty expectation, as we now know; Perugino's lifeless paintings done after 1467 are still to be seen covering a great deal of wall space in a number of Italian churches.

"It is not so," I assured her. "I do not mean to have him killed—unless he should come near you again. Then I will kill him, but only as an annoyance, not as a matter of honor. Do you understand?"

Helen tried to look agreeable, but I could see that she did not understand. She could not, perhaps, or she did not care.

So I explained it to her, once. "That man is already dead."