Thorn, Fred Saberhagen [bearly read books .txt] 📗

      Yet I was given what seemed to be special consideration by my hosts. Among the local people invited for dinner that evening was a man whose name I recognized as that of King Matthias’s official ambassador to the official government of Florence, which was a council whose deliberations passed for the most part without great public attention. Shortly after Morsino and I were introduced, we were politely given a chance to converse alone. And as soon as he had the chance, the ambassador began to question me delicately about my mission. It seemed that he, as well as his fellow Hungarian envoys to the several Italian states, had received secret instructions from the king to the effect that a secret agent of his would soon be in Italy on urgent business. The ambassadors were not told what the business was, though some of them may have guessed; but they were strongly enjoined to give me all the aid they could.

      There is a time for tight secrecy, and another time when full candor is required. I judged that the latter epoch had now arrived, and told Morsino plainly that I had been sent to find Helen Hunyadi, the runaway younger sister of our king. I did not discuss what I meant to do with Helen when I had found her, and Morsino did not ask. But he at once expressed his relief that I had arrived. Four days earlier a rumor had reached him, from two independent sources, of the presence in Florence of a woman who spoke Italian with a heavy accent that might well be Hungarian, and who had supposedly told someone that she belonged to the high Hungarian nobility. And if the stories regarding this woman’s disreputable behavior were even approximately true, and if her family in fact had even a clerk’s pretensions to respectability, then that family whoever they might be were in for trouble.

      What disreputable behavior? I naturally asked. Morsino glanced around to make sure that we were quite alone. As he had heard the tale, a young and attractive girl of diminutive stature had recently arrived overland from Ravenna, in the company either of a troop of strolling players, or an itinerant artist, or some low company of that kind. (As Morsino admitted, he had been somewhat infected by the notorious Florentine free-thinking attitude in matters of social standing. Still, even in Florence, there were limits.) On arrival in the city, the woman had reportedly engaged in business as a prostitute. And before Ravenna, so one version of her story went, she had been aboard a Venetian galley, traveling mistress of some adventuring scoundrel or other, perhaps one of the foreign mercenary soldiers who in the fifteenth century lived on the body of Italy, as numerous as fleas on a dog. Whoever he was, this man had grown nervous and rid himself of her when he had happened to learn her true identity.

      “And in your opinion, Signore Morsino, does she belong to the Hungarian nobility?”

      “I have not seen her. And I do not know how much truth is in all these stories … but the truth is, Signore Ladislao, in the form in which the story came to me, what scared off the adventurer was the woman’s claim to be none other than the legitimate sister of our blessed King Matthias himself.”

      “He must have found that claim convincing.”

      “Evidently so.”

      “And where is this young woman now?”

      Morsino shrugged. “That I cannot say. But I suppose it likely that she is still in Florence. Of course as soon as I heard these rumors I asked my local agents to quietly find out all about her. But they have not been able to pick up her trail.”

      I then asked the ambassador how far he thought we should take the Medici into our confidence. He considered, then gave his opinion that I ought to tell them as much as I felt I possibly could; the woman might be able to hide from Morsino and myself in Florence, but if she were anywhere in the city there was no way that she could hide from them. Even if she were here no longer, they might well be able to learn where she had gone. The goodwill of King Matthias would certainly be important to such far-traveling traders and bankers, and there was no reason to think our hosts were anything but well disposed toward our cause.

      Later that evening I had a chance to talk privately with Piero and Lorenzo, and took them almost completely into my confidence, telling them that the woman I sought was a relative of the Hungarian royal house, and that I had been sent to locate her with as little publicity as possible. Piero nodded thoughtfully and agreed to help. But when he asked me what the young woman looked like, I found myself at something of a loss. Matthias’s elder relatives, in the process of reading Helen angrily out of the family, had somewhat overshot the mark, unwisely burning the few existing portraits of her as well as effacing her name from all the written records they could reach.

      “She is short of stature, Signore Piero, and of a slender figure. Her face is said to be beautiful, her coloring moderately dark.” Piero looked at me, perhaps revising downward his estimate of my intelligence. But beyond that I had been given no real description, and could offer none.

      That very night, searchers were sent discreetly out. And in the middle of the next morning the report came in of what would now be called a solid lead. A young woman speaking a language that was very possibly Hungarian had been seen three days ago, modeling in the workshop of a rising young artist named Verrocchio—a man who could be expected to co-operate fully with me in my search; his career was blooming chiefly as a result of Medici patronage.

      I held a quick