Veritas (Atto Melani) (46 page)

There began a feverish back-and-forth with the English allies, but the imperial forces were adamant: the Prince of Savoy could not travel so far from Austria. Eugene had to put up with it, and
hold his peace.

The silent war was repeated in autumn 1710. Once again there was a plan to send Eugene to Spain, but His Caesarean Majesty was still opposed to it, and it came to nothing. Eugene gave vent to
his feelings among his friends, using allusive, indirect words. “Could it be that Stahremberg has not done all that was expected of him?” he asked ironically. And he revealed that with
his own eyes he had seen Joseph arrive at the conference of ministers holding the paper nominating Eugene as commander in Spain, but he had rejected the idea without even referring to it. Joseph
was not wrong: he was thinking of the safety of the Empire.

Twice with Landau, and twice again with Spain, Joseph had trampled over the pride and ambition of Eugene of Savoy. The loser had kept silent and obeyed; he had no choice in the matter. But what
would happen if the secret competition, evident only to the two rivals, continued always to the advantage of one of them? And what connection was there with the strange coin that Cloridia had come
across so fortuitously in Eugene’s palace?

“That coin is the symbol of Landau,” concluded Atto, “the first serious defeat that Eugene had to swallow. And it shows that the Prince of Savoy has not forgotten the affronts
that Joseph has inflicted on him. Not a single one.”

Caressing the coin in his fingers, Atto gloated. Once Joseph read Eugene’s treacherous letter, the path to peace would be very short.

“If only we could get close to that little Pálffy woman,” he grumbled impatiently, while he was seized by a great yawn, urging him to slip once again under the blankets, into
the arms of Morpheus.

Back home, on the other side of the convent, Cloridia came to greet me.

“My love,” she said, stretching her arms out to me, “it’s been a terrible day.”

“You don’t know the whole of it.”

“What do you mean?”

I told her what had happened. At the end we stood there, both trembling, appalled at the violence that had broken out around us. I told her about the coin of Landau as well.

“I’ve a story connected with that.”

“Really?”

“You’re not the only one who’s had a bad experience. Today at Prince Eugene’s palace I was followed.”

“Followed? Who by?”

“By that monstrous fellow who stole the coins of Landau. I kept coming across him. I would go to the kitchen and see him following me at a distance. I would go back to the first floor, and
he would turn up from some nook or corner. I would go away and then find him just a few minutes later behind me. I’d go here, and so would he; I’d go there, and so would he. It was
enough to drive me mad. If you could only have seen him . . . The last time he even walked in a half-circle around me, and then showed me his sharp brown teeth in a frightful smile. Ugh! –
like a hellish dream. At that point I ran back home.”

“But who is he, what does he want?” I exclaimed in agitation. “He promises the dervish a decapitated head, then he stares at you, follows you around, steals Prince
Eugene’s coins . . . What’s the link between all these things?”

“All I know is that a man with a face like that is capable of anything. Including what they did to Hadji-Tanjov.”

But we still had not heard the most serious news of the day.

To cheer ourlseves up we went into the cloisters to see our little boy playing there, and then we went into the convent church. Unnerved by all the evil that had been unleashed around us we felt
the need to collect our thoughts in prayer before the Most High and to plead for grace and protection.

As soon as we stepped within its cold, incense-laden half-light, we found the church full of the nuns of Porta Coeli. They had all gathered together to recite the holy rosary. We were a little
surprised: that late hour was certainly not a time of prayer at the convent. We made the sign of the cross and, settling in a corner at the back, we joined fervently in the oration, supplicating
divine help and praying for the souls of the two poor murdered students.

After the holy rosary came the moment to implore the Blessed Virgin of Porta Coeli. We gradually realised that an indistinct murmuring was acting as counterpoint to the nuns’ litany, and
we soon made it out as the sound of sobbing. Our eyes wandered in search of its source and fell upon the Chormaisterin, prostrate beneath the statue of the Blessed Virgin of Porta Coeli, to the
left of the altar, her breast shaking convulsively. Our feeling of puzzlement suddenly turned to utter incredulity and bewilderment.

“
Pro vita nostri aegerrimi Cesaris, oramus
,” we heard the nun who was leading the prayers cry.

Those words struck us like a gust of icy wind: “Let us pray for the life of our Emperor, gravely ill,” the nun had said. I hoped for an instant that I had misunderstood, but the
grief and anguish with which Cloridia lifted her hand to her forehead sadly confirmed that I had heard correctly. So the Emperor was ill? The Most August Caesar, our beloved and radiant Joseph the
First, was in mortal danger? What had happened? And how on earth had we not heard anything? But there was no way for us to find out any further details at that moment: we had to wait until the end
of the oration. Those moments that separated us from a fuller explanation seemed interminable. And then the church emptied at last and Camilla, rising to her feet, turned towards us. As soon as she
saw Cloridia she embraced her.

“Camilla . . .” murmured my consort on seeing the young face disfigured by grief.

She motioned us to follow her: she had to put out the candles. The tiny flames were mirrored in Camilla de’ Rossi’s tear-streaked cheeks, and she continued to clutch Cloridia’s
hands in a vain effort to repress her sobs.

In town everyone had been talking about it since that morning. At first it had circulated as a vague rumour, then the word had become more insistent, until, like a bolt from the blue, orders
were issued for public prayers to be offered every hour and for exposition of the blessed sacrament both in the public Caesarean chapel and in the Cathedral of St Stephen. In the Caesarean chapel
the various members of the court had followed upon one another from hour to hour: the tribunals, the ministers, the grandees, the cavaliers, the dames and other people of noble rank. And similarly,
in the cathedral, orations had begun in the afternoon attended by Monsignor the Bishop Prince in person and the chapter of the cathedral; and then the religious orders, confraternities, schools,
arts, trades and hospitals had come in procession, with great throngs of the common people, who, with anguished devotion and zeal, had implored divine intercession.

Prayers had been going on in all the other parish churches inside and outside the city. Special couriers had even been sent throughout the Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns, to
announce the Oration of the Forty Hours, so that – as the public announcement stated – His Divine Majesty might be pleased to grant longer Life and happy Government to this Most Clement
and Most August Monarch of ours, for the consolation of his faithful Peoples, and for the benefit of all Christianity in these grave and dangerous circumstances of War, which involved the whole of
Europe.

Even Ottomans and Jews residing in the Caesarean city had called for extraordinary days of prayer and fasting and had distributed special alms.

The Emperor was ill. For some days he had been in bed, isolated from everything and everyone; no one could approach him. And not because Joseph the Victorious was unable to hold a conversation,
or to preside over the conference of ministers, but because his illness was contagious. And mortal. The doctors’ diagnosis seemed clear: smallpox.

“Like Ferdinand IV . . . just like him,” sobbed Camilla.

Within my breast, as on a racecourse trampled by the hooves of maddened horses, dire portents were galloping towards their own incarnation.

My thoughts ran to Ferdinand IV, the young King of the Romans carried off by smallpox fifty years earlier. The firstborn of Emperor Ferdinand III and elder brother of Leopold, he had suddenly
died at the age of just twenty-one. I had read the story of Ferdinand, a child prodigy, in the books I had bought on my arrival in Vienna. It was on his magnificent gifts that his father had set
his hopes of reviving the Empire after the ill-fated Thirty Years’ War. This blow had fallen at such a delicate moment that the House of Habsburg had even risked losing the imperial crown.
France had immediately taken advantage of the situation to block Leopold’s election as Emperor and he had been forced to pay out huge sums of money to the Protestant princes to get himself
elected, and had had to renounce solemnly before them any intention of going to assist the Habsburgs in Spain in their war against France. And so the French-Spanish war had ended with the defeat of
Spain and King Philip IV had been forced to give the hand of his daughter Maria Teresa to Louis XIV rather than to Leopold. And it was that very marriage that had given the French their right to
the throne of Spain, which was at the root of the present War of the Spanish Succession. In short, if Ferdinand had not died so prematurely and unexpectedly, the Bourbons of France would not have
become related to the Habsburgs of Spain and so the war of succession would not have broken out.

The young Ferdinand, despite enjoying excellent health and rare good looks, had been swiftly carried off by smallpox. When the older people recalled that bereavement of the imperial family,
which had led to so many other past and present bereavements, they trembled: Joseph was not yet
geblattert
– which is to say he had not yet had smallpox.

Now it had happened.

“The first symptoms began five days ago. Until today the thing had been kept secret. I myself only heard about it last night,” said the Chormaisterin, her voice still hoarse from
weeping.

And so we learned that on Tuesday 7th April Joseph the Victorious had dined with his mother and had been affected by a slight headache. A minor nuisance, which disappeared the next day, so that
on Wednesday morning the young Emperor had decided to devote himself to his usual hunting trip. On his return he had complained of a strong constriction in his chest, trouble in breathing and
strange pains all over his body. Suddenly he had been seized with a fit of vomiting, expelling a considerable quantity of pituitary matter. The doctor had been summoned, and he had attributed the
sickness to excessive eating during the Easter celebrations, and for that evening he had prescribed shredded hyacinth with some species of buds.

The night had been troubled. The morning of the next day, Thursday 9th April, Joseph had been seized with another violent fit of vomiting, regurgitating viscous, ill-digested matter, followed by
pure bile in quantities equivalent to several spoonfuls. The slight headache had returned, but above all he was afflicted with great pain shifting between the abdomen and chest, and finally
settling in his loins. Joseph the Victorious, a young man, robust and vigorous, a most courageous soldier, was to be heard screaming like a child. Fortunately, his urine and pulse were normal, and
so an enema had been applied – an insufflation of water and salt, which had proved highly beneficial. But the pains had continued until the evening, together with the screams. The enema had
been repeated, bringing on copious bilious excretions, and an eye powder had been prescribed (in accordance with Aristotle’s well-known instructions), as well as a powder of native cinnabar.
In the evening his pulse had begun to quicken, and at one in the morning he had begun to grow decidedly feverish.

While Camilla talked, like a lugubriously tolling bell, a date was thrumming in my mind: 7th April. On that day Joseph’s illness had begun, but also the Turkish Agha had come to Vienna.
And that was not all: the next day Abbot Melani had arrived in the city.

“Are you absolutely sure it’s smallpox?” I asked Camilla.

“That’s what they’re saying at the moment.”

“How is the Emperor now?”

“Nobody knows. All information about the last three days is kept strictly private. But . . . where are you going?”