Absolute Honour (30 page)

He’d also learned to think, not one move ahead, nor three, but seven, at the least, yet always prepared to adapt, as an unexpected
riposte changed his course. Yet thinking only got one so far. The real skill, he had discovered, was not to think at all.

He lunged, low, a reach for the groin, flicking around the blade that dropped to meet him and immediately launching for the
face. The man gave ground, swinging his point out wide, offering his inner arm. Jack didn’t fall for it. Instead he attacked,
covered ground and got inside where the close work began. It looked like impetuosity, and it was meant to; it carried a risk
and Jack took it.

Swords flashed through late-afternoon sunbeams, steel beat on steel. Ubaldi tried to regain his distance but Jack wouldn’t
let him, driving the man back till he was again almost touching the wall. The Italian’s ‘role’ was swiftly dropped. He was
fighting now for the hit, executing, with his immense skill, complex combinations of parry and riposte.

And then the hit came. A slipped parry, a turn of the wrist, a thrust from underneath. ‘Hah,’ cried Jack, as his sword tip
touched flesh. Ubaldi was ‘dead’.

A grunt came, an acknowledgement and the only praise Jack ever received. He had learned to distinguish between the man’s grunts.
This one was almost effusive.

Both men straightened.

‘Again?’ Ubaldi said.

‘No, thank you,’ he replied in Italian, the one other skill he’d part-developed over the months. ‘It’s late.’

Another grunt. ‘We practise the move?’

Jack shook his head. Every master had his own, special moves. Tricks almost, deadly ones, that drew pupils once their effectiveness
had been proven on the duelling grounds. Ubaldi’s was indeed ingenious, and Jack had been made to practise it relentlessly,
almost every day, for months now. It was awkward, so it had to become second nature. He was sure that if he didn’t have it
by now he never would.

‘Tomorrow,’ he replied, reaching out his hand, sad in the lie. This man was the closest thing in Rome to a friend Jack had,
the only man, other than the uncommunicative guards, that he saw. But if all went well, this would be the last time that they
met.

Ubaldi collected his weapons. Even blunted ones, tipped in cork, were forbidden by the Roman Inquisition whose prisoner Jack
ultimately was, favouring the Jacobite Cause just as the Pope did, even down to holding the Old Pretender’s enemies. ‘Tomorrow,’
he said, bowing, then went to the door and hammered upon it. It took only a few moments for the grille to be pulled back,
the guard to see Jack standing, arms spread innocently wide, in the centre of the room. Bolts were shot, the door opened,
il maestro
left and Jack glimpsed the guard before the door slammed shut. It was Lorenzo, as he hoped it would be. Not because he was
a pleasant man – the reverse, he was the surliest, the one most ready with petty cruelties – but because he was the only guard
Jack had ever seen drunk and then, on those two occasions, the only one who had failed to check Jack every hour of his watch.
The Roman Inquisition terrorized its servants to do their duty well. But a man’s Saint’s Day came, after all, but once a year,
and tonight it was Lorenzo’s.

Jack looked around him. As prisons went, this was sure to be one of the more comfortable, reserved for the elite of
offenders against the Catholic Church and Papal States – or their favoured allies. He had a bed and changes of linen, adequate
food, unlimited wine, even if he was abstemious with that on all but a few occasions. He could have had women, and some nights
he’d been tempted. But a woman had brought him to Rome and, sullied though she was in his memory, he knew he would not forget
her with drunkenness and whores. There was only one way to achieve such oblivion, and that was beyond this pretty cage, at
a sword’s point.

He ate, slept a little, awaking with each tolling of the bell of the nearby monastery. At two in the morning, with the grille
bolt just slammed and the guard’s slurred singing receding down the stairs, Jack rose and dressed swiftly. He’d accustomed
his eyes to such light as there was but anyway had practised everything relentlessly in this darkness for weeks. He had only
not filled his satchel before in fear of one of the frequent searches. Now he did, with a change of clothes and his eating
knife. The Jacobites, despite their searching, had not found Jack’s last reserve of
scudi,
three gold coins woven into the hair of his wig. These he transferred to a pocket. Then he pulled his chair over to the wardrobe
and clambered on top of it.

His fingers found the slight ridge where his plasterwork joined the decoration of the ceiling. The whole piece gave. In truth,
he’d always been somewhat amazed that his construction had never tumbled in, that no guard had spotted a trail of gouged plaster
on the floor, a lick of glue around a rococo flower. His request to have a book of classical sculptures and the wherewithal
to copy them had been at first refused, then, with persistence, granted, though the results were extensively mocked – he was
no artist, the busts and heads around the room testimony to that. But this corner of moulding was a piece of art! Admiring
it more than he had any work of Michelangelo, he lowered it carefully to the floor.

He thrust his head up into the attic space, breathing in the musty, dust-heavy air and listened. Nothing moved in the room
below, the one next door to his that had been unoccupied now these two months. Heaving himself up, he edged along the beams,
relying again on the experience of doing this again and again ever since he’d first broken through the ceiling. He came to
the area near the far wall that he’d chosen as suitable and, taking out his knife, began to gouge out the plaster between
the beams.

It took longer than he’d hoped and there was noise he could not help. Balanced on the two beams, sweat began to run from him,
dripping from his nose and chin into the expanding hole. Whether it was the dry plaster’s soaking, the hydration of the horsehair
with which it was threaded, or Jack’s increasing effort he could not know, but suddenly, a section the size of his fist gave
way and fell, followed by one even larger. It reverberated in the room below, like a shout in a confessional. Panicked, Jack
scrambled back across the beams, out of the hole and onto his wardrobe. He heard running footsteps in the corridor as he dropped
to the ground, landing hard on his fake plaster moulding, shattering it. Covering himself with a sheet from the bed, he ripped
the head off one of his latest efforts, a bust of Caesar, and laid it onto the floor, just as the grille in the door shot
open.

Eyes reflected the light of a lantern held out there. ‘Eh, what are you doing? What happened?’ Lorenzo the guard said in Italian.

‘I went for a piss,’ Jack replied. ‘I knocked this over.’

‘What? Come over here. What you say?’

‘Piss.’ Jack approached slowly. ‘Broke this.’

The guard eyed the shattered statue. ‘This make noise?’

‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘See?’ He dropped the head and it landed with a reasonable thud on the floor. ‘Thus fell Caesar,’ he smiled.

The man was obviously no classicist. ‘Good. Ugly thing,’ he said, his face relaxing.

Jack pressed his nose to the grille so the man wouldn’t be able to see too much else. This close he could tell Lorenzo had
definitely been celebrating his Saint’s Day. ‘Good wine?’ he asked, but the guard merely grunted, stepped back and slammed
the grille, nearly trapping Jack’s nose. He waited till he heard feet descend the stairs before he pushed away from the door.
He wanted to lie down but somehow he forced his legs to follow his previous route.

Holding himself between the wooden roof beams, he slowly lowered himself into the next door room, bending his legs to land
on stockinged feet. Retrieving his boots and satchel, previously dropped, he tiptoed to the door of the empty room, paused
and listened. Nothing! Putting on his boots, he reached for the door handle, then pulled.

The door did not give. He pulled harder. Still it did not budge. He jerked, tugged, all to no avail.

They had locked it! They had locked the door of an empty room and all Jack’s plans were as shattered as the plaster on the
floor around him. On the floor in his room, too, he suddenly remembered. He had a hole the size of a man in his ceiling and
he’d crushed the thing that concealed it. Wherever he looked, discovery lay.

Glancing around the room, surprise replaced panic for a moment as he realized he could see. Moonlight was coming in through
half-open shutters. It lit a room in disarray, not just from the shattered ceiling. This room was not occupied because it
was being worked upon. Tools lay about. A large iron grille was on the floor …

He looked up. One of the windows was still barred but the other wasn’t. In three strides he was across, edging onto the deep
sill, pushing the shutters fully open. He looked down upon a courtyard and took his first breath of freedom.

Joy lasted a mere moment. He was still three storeys up. A swift, vertigo-inducing glance told him that, should he even have
the courage, there was nothing to place his feet upon on the wall’s smooth face, no way down … unless …

It took him but a moment. With the help of a workman’s trestle, he was once more in the attic. For the fourth time he shimmied
along the beams, slid through the hole and lowered himself into his own room. Rapidly gathering up all his sheets and blankets,
he forced them ahead through both holes and returned, yet again, the way he’d come.

He thought the trestle, wedged under the window, would hold his weight. He was less sure of the knots. A sailor aboard the
Sweet Eliza
had tried to teach him knot-craft but he had obviously failed to pay sufficient attention for every hard pull seemed to separate
the cloths. Finally he settled on the simplest knot and tugged and tugged to test it. It seemed well enough. Yet he knew the
real test would only come when he was dangling from the ledge.

Shuddering, he threw the material out the window. It did not touch the ground, though from his height Jack could not see how
large the gap was. As he tried to ascertain it, the monastery bell tolled again. Three o’clock. He hoped that Lorenzo was
downstairs, comatose from honouring his namesake saint. But even if he wasn’t, even if he was already approaching Jack’s door,
there was nothing to be done now. Try to escape, they’d told him, and your ease is over, perhaps even your life. The Roman
Inquisition brooked no insurrection.

With the satchel flung over his shoulder, a last grimace and a determination only to look up, Jack lowered himself over the
edge.

The sheet gave a lurch as his weight pulled the trestle snug to the window. One hand shot up, gripped the crumbling stone
above him; one held to cloth. He clung for a minute,
poised to scramble back up at the slightest ripping sound. But when none came, still reluctant, he put his second hand upon
the sheet.

‘Come on,’ he muttered, ‘the quicker, the better.’

Sweat poured down his face and he found it hard to ungrip his hand each time he had to reach. Then he placed his feet together,
snagging cloth between them and the strain eased just slightly. He reached the next sill down, stood for too long breathing
deeply, then began to lower himself again.

He was halfway to the next floor when he felt a slight giving; the next moment, shrieks came – his and the sheet’s – as the
material parted. He slipped, his feet encountering the stone of the sill below, and he flung himself forward, hands scrabbling
at the shutter. One slid off, the other reached, while his kicking legs, seeking the stonework, caused the shutter to swing
out from the window. Desperate, he grabbed the shutter, held on, and dangled there, looking between his feet at the sheet
coiled into a spool far below him. The drop was twenty feet at the least.

He was not a praying man but he prayed then, even as he tried to swing his legs towards the sill. But as he did, the shutter
lurched outwards and he looked up to see one of its hinges coming away from the wall. He stopped moving, kept praying, stared
as if sight could force screws back into stone. For a moment, the shuddering of the shutter stopped. And then, beyond the
rushing blood in his head, he heard another noise – someone was opening the outer door of the courtyard, coming in.

‘Shite,’ he muttered, looking again to the screws, then over the top of his shoulder to the sound of the door being opened,
shut and relocked, and footsteps moving across the courtyard toward the main building – the man’s route bound to take him
directly under Jack.

There was a muttering, but the words were drawled; the man was obviously drunk. Jack reached out a toe to the sill,
felt the shutter shudder again, saw another screw pop out. He froze, looked between his feet …

The man was just passing the fallen sheet. He even took a step beyond it. Then, with the slowness of the drunk, he looked
at it, then away, then back again. His head began to tip up …

The screws came loose. The top half of the shutter ripped away from the wall, the bottom half following fast. Jack fell, heavier
than the shutter so slightly faster. His feet struck the man as if he were trying to land on his shoulders, and he had the
absurd impression of some Italian acrobatic act he’d seen in the theatre, one man leaping to stand upon another. But the man
below him was no acrobat for he collapsed with a sharp cry, Jack smacking into the stone a moment after, the shutter striking
both of them as it landed.

They lay there, the Italian groaning, the Englishman with not enough air to. When he could breathe, Jack lurched up, kneeling
beside the man whose eyes popped wide, panicked. Reaching, Jack found the set of keys, just as he heard another one turning
in the internal door of the courtyard. Up and staggering, he made for the outer door, praying again that he chose the correct
key of the five on the link.

The door behind opened, a man stepped out, clutching a lantern. Lorenzo’s slurred voice came. ‘Who’s there? What’s happening?’