A Name in Blood (26 page)

‘That’s just linseed oil for thinning my paints.’

‘It’s the stink of secrets. But the reek doesn’t have to cling to you. Purification can be through pain or through fire. But also by simple confession.’ The Inquisitor
pulled him down the corridor to a narrow doorway. ‘The torture room.’

Caravaggio resisted the Inquisitor’s grip.

‘Don’t worry, it’s not for you,’ della Corbara said. ‘Not now.’

A pair of torturers held a manacled African. The notary was at his desk to record the questioning. On a stool in the corner, a doctor waited to repair the man’s shoulders after the coming
dislocation of the
strappado
.

The African stared at Caravaggio as though he expected rescue. When Caravaggio looked away, the man’s chin dropped to his chest.

‘I get a lot of Mussulmen like this in here, and Maltese witches. The Jews, of course, have money, so the knights keep them for ransom.’ The Inquisitor gestured towards the
torturers. ‘I pay these Maltese to come and work for me. The doctor gets five
scudi
, too.’

‘I’d have thought you could find people who’d torture for nothing. For the pleasure of hearing a man scream.’

‘No doubt. But I prefer to know that the only one who relishes the struggles of the prisoner is Our Lord, so that He may soonest bring down the revelation of confession. Everyone else in
here merely does his job, does God’s work.’ He signalled for the African to be lifted.

The torturers gripped the wheel and cranked the hoist. The African screamed to the Virgin as he swung off his feet.

‘Who’s after this one?’ the Inquisitor asked the notary.

The clerk raised his voice to be heard over the African’s cries. ‘A Maltese whose neighbour says he saw him eat pork during Lent.’

The Inquisitor gestured for a further crank on the
strappado
. The African bawled. ‘Good. If the fellow can afford pork, he can afford a little something for us.’ Della Corbara
twirled his fingers like a cutpurse and winked.

As he rushed away, Caravaggio imagined the exhausted face of Lena the way he had painted her as the Madonna in
Our Lady of Mercy
, looking down with resignation. The African could bellow
to her all he wanted, it was Caravaggio she heard.

Wignacourt’s eyes were restless, drawn to his blond French page, Nicholas, who posed beside him holding a helmet and a knight’s surcoat. He seemed ready to reach
out for the boy.

At his easel, Caravaggio watched from behind his curtain. He understood that the Inquisitor wanted him to testify that the knights were pederasts.
That’d give him the power to extract
anything from these men
–
all their influence and wealth. Even to destroy them, as their Templar brothers once were.

He told himself to concentrate on his work. This nervous wheedling face on the verge of a forbidden seduction wouldn’t do for the Grand Master’s portrait.
It’d be as if I
gave evidence just as the Inquisitor wishes, and the knights would know it too. God help me if I cross them.
‘Your Serene Highness,’ he said, coming from behind the curtain.
‘Who are you? A Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. A noble of Picardy and France. A battle veteran of the naval confrontation at Lepanto. An administrator, a man of God. A warrior, a commander.
Which?’

‘All of these. What do you mean?’

‘No, these things are
what
you are. I asked
who
you are.’

Wignacourt clapped his hands impatiently. ‘Make yourself clear, man.’

‘I may show
what
you are by the suit of armour, the baton of office, the knight’s surcoat that your page Nicholas holds. But I may show
who
you are only by the
expression I paint on your face.’ He approached the Grand Master, his gaze locked onto the watery blue eyes. ‘You must show me the man who inspires his soldiers. Imagine you stand
before the knights in the moment of battle. Who’s the man who leads them? What qualities do they see when they look at you? Why do they allow themselves to be led by you?’

Wignacourt raised his head and took a long slow breath. Stern and rough, inspired. Pompous, too.

That deals with the Inquisitor.
Caravaggio took the Grand Master’s chin between two fingers and turned it to the left.
And that takes care of the wart on his nose. Let’s
get to work.

A Maltese kitchen boy from the Inn of the Italian Knights modelled the Grand Master’s suit of armour. The boy’s younger brother sat in the shadows grinding
pigments.

The details of the metal would take more than a week – its glowing highlights, the curve of the breastplate, the overlaying joints. Caravaggio painted a glittering dash of greyish white
light onto every tiny link in the chainmail over the groin between the hip plates. He was glad of the opportunity to work in silence, without having to comport himself before the Grand Master. If
he made this man happy, he might be redeemed by knighthood. And beyond that, perhaps, he could be reunited with Lena. But until he was a knight he would be unworthy even of painting her. He was
ashamed, fearful, lonely, loveless.
As a killer deserves to be.

He threw down his palette. He waved to the kitchen boys that he was finished for the day. They started unstrapping the armour.

A killer whose every thought was of death, no matter how much he attempted to turn his thoughts to love. He saw Ranuccio, dead at the point of his sword. The stab wounds that killed Prudenza.
Anna, expiring of syphilis. Lena, alone. What would have become of them if he had never entered their lives?
I’m like a rotten delicacy
, he thought,
seducing you with sugar on your
tongue and then corrupting you from within.

He stood before his painting of the Grand Master and felt scorn. It was well made, but distant from his own soul. There was only one thing he could paint, no matter who peopled his canvases.
From now on, it must be death
, he thought.
Until death is purged from me
–
or until it takes me.

Wignacourt entered, flushed from the hunt. Martelli and Nicholas the page were at his side. Roero waited in the doorway with a hawk on his gloved hand. His sallow skin glimmered with a sickly
sweat, like a man with a fever. The Grand Master bent to examine the helmet Caravaggio had painted in the page’s hands. ‘By God, it looks as if the boy’s holding a severed
head,’ he shouted.

Caravaggio’s features were stricken and aggressive.

‘Made the lad into a blond Salome, Maestro.’ The Grand Master pointed at Nicholas.

‘Perhaps, Your Serene Highness, beheading is on our friend Caravaggio’s mind,’ Martelli said, ‘subject as he is to execution in the Papal lands.’ He laid a
comforting hand on Caravaggio’s back. The artist flinched as though stuck with a dagger.

‘What d’you think, Nicholas?’ Wignacourt said.

The young page glanced at Caravaggio. ‘The Maestro has captured your heroism, Sire.’

The Grand Master’s jaw firmed, stirred by his own image. He reached out absently to touch the boy’s neck. His fingers lingered in his short blond hair. ‘And you, Nicholas, see
how handsome you are beside me.’

The boy dropped his glance to the floor. Caravaggio felt a shudder of alarm. In the portrait, Nicholas seemed almost to be painted on a different plane to the Grand Master. Beside the stiffness
of Wignacourt’s armour, the page’s clothing was soft, his lace cuffs delicate, his pantaloons rich as they dropped to his scarlet stockings. He stood out, as if he were the true subject
of the work, carrying a message in his knowing glance.

I saw the danger, but I’ve still drawn too much attention to the boy
, Caravaggio thought.
The painting is almost as clear as the evidence the Inquisitor asked me to give. You
just
had
to show what you saw, didn’t you, Michele.

Caravaggio searched Roero’s face.
I’m scared the guard dog won’t like my work.
Roero was as still as the hawk on his wrist.

Wignacourt bounced on his toes with excitement. ‘Martelli, what do you make of it?’

The Florentine’s examination of the figure of the Grand Master was cursory. He ran his tongue around in his cheek, considering the painting of the page.

‘Well?’ Wignacourt said. ‘He has me?’

Martelli folded his arms over the cross on his surcoat. ‘He does, Sire. He has you exactly.’

7

T
he Beheading of St John the Baptist

On Fridays, as a token of humility, the Grand Master and his senior knights attended to the people they called Our Lords the Sick. Violent Mediterranean sunlight striped the main ward of the
hospital through the high windows. Here the best and worst of the knights’ pastimes were banned. There was neither gambling nor reading aloud. But for the groans of the dying and the
ramblings of the delirious, the long ward was silent.

Martelli led Caravaggio into the hospital. At the head of the aisle, Wignacourt ceremoniously stripped himself of the tokens of his power with the aid of the noble knights gathered around him.
He laid aside his chain of office and handed Fabrizio the purse representing the Grand Master’s charity, as he took on the role of an ordinary penitent ministering to the patients.

Beside him, Roero rolled a trolley of broth and vermicelli. He filled a silver bowl and, with a grave nod, handed it to Wignacourt. The man whose titles included Guardian of the Poor of Jesus
Christ carried the food to a wretch babbling under stained sheets, as every Grand Master had done since the crusading knights founded their first hospital in Jerusalem five centuries before.

Martelli took a dish and stepped towards one of the beds. Caravaggio lifted the patient onto his elbows. Martelli fed the soup through parched lips, his murmurs of compassion barely audible
above the desperate slurping of the sick man.

‘The Grand Master liked your portrait,’ Martelli whispered to Caravaggio. He laid the invalid’s head back on his pallet.

‘I’m most gratified.’

‘He has sent messages to the Pope requesting your pardon.’

Relief shivered in Caravaggio’s chest.

‘You see,’ Martelli said, ‘no one’s beyond redemption here.’

The patient under Wignacourt’s care choked on his soup and his face shaded a bright purple. The doctors from the Jesuit medical school rushed to the Grand Master’s aid.

‘Almost no one,’ Martelli said.

Roero held out a pewter dish of broth. Caravaggio hesitated, then took it. ‘That one over there,’ Roero said. His bloodshot eyes wept pus.

Caravaggio went towards a young blond man who lay very still. His shoulders were bare, his chest bandaged all around. Martelli glared at Roero and Fabrizio muttered something under his breath,
but the knight only dabbed at his eye and filled another bowl.

The man in the bed took in Caravaggio with a blank look. When he saw the pewter dish, he tried to rise and spoke in a guttural tongue Caravaggio didn’t recognize. The patient dropped back
onto his bolster and broke into a sweat.

‘Who is he?’ Caravaggio asked.

‘A German knight.’

‘Then the bowl is of the wrong metal. A knight must have silver.’

‘Roero did it deliberately. The pewter is a signal to this poor fellow. That’s why you’d like to protest, Brother Jobst, isn’t that right?’

The German’s gullet worked in desperation. Martelli soaked up the man’s sweat with a cloth.

‘What happened to him?’ Caravaggio asked.

‘Wounded in a duel.’

He watched the man struggle. ‘His opponent?’

‘Was a French knight.’

‘Was?’

Martelli cooled the German’s forehead with water. ‘But is no longer.’

‘Then, the punishment—’

‘To be tied in a sack and dropped into the sea – and to be shamed. Such matters of honour are more important to a man like Roero than life itself.’

The breath from the German’s nose was slow and loud, as if it were squeezed from an empty wineskin.

‘It’s not for nothing that Roero chose you to serve this man,’ Martelli said. ‘Though Jobst is a nobleman, his offence strips him of all nobility. He’s condemned as
if he were a commoner.’