Q, Luther Blissett [children's ebooks online .txt] 📗
- Author: Luther Blissett
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I kiss Your Lordship’s hands, and beg Your Grace’s continuing favour.
Ferrara, 13th of June 1547
Your Lordship’s faithful servant
Q.
Letter sent to Bologna from the city of Viterbo, addressed to Gianpietro Carafa, dated 20th September 1547.
To the most illustrious and reverend Giovanni Pietro Carafa.
My most honourable lord, the news of the murder of the Pope’s son, Pier Luigi, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, has reached us here, giving Your Lordship’s servant some cause for concern.
Indeed I think that the rumours attributing this misdeed to Gonzaga are not misplaced. Furthermore it is not difficult to weave this murder into the intricate web of events taking shape before us; if we bear in mind the fact that Ferrante Gonzaga governs Milan on behalf of the Emperor, and that for some time he has had an expansionist eye on Piacenza, it is not difficult to imagine the shady exchange that has taken place: the elimination of Pier Luigi Farnese favours Gonzaga as much as it does Charles V, and it gives the Emperor the chance to pose a serious threat to His Holiness Paul III.
I believe that this is the imperial warning in response to the tentative signals given by His Holiness to the new French king.
But Charles has no intention of missing out on the valuable opportunity that fate has prepared for him: in a single year two of his oldest enemies have died, the schismatic Henry VIII of England and the bellicose Francis I of France. To this we might add the imperial army’s victory over the Schmalkaldic League in M�hlberg: the Protestant princes suffered a severe defeat there, and this has done much to reinvigorate the Emperor.
So we should not be surprised that the Habsburg is returning to the attack in Italy as well. What he could not achieve with diplomacy at the Council of Trent he might be able to obtain by placing his own papal candidate upon the Holy Throne, the man Reginald Pole whom Your Lordship would prefer to see banished from Italy once and for all.
Now more than ever we must proceed with due care, in order to ensure that the damage done is not irreparable.
Now I shall report on the most recent developments concerning the task assigned to me by Your Lordship.
Thanks to the references supplied to me by Your Lordship, I have been in epistolary contact with the police authorities and the Inquisitors in some of the major cities in Italy. As a result I have been in a position to ascertain that the sphere of activity of the distributors of The Benefit of Christ Crucified is widening: ten days ago two hundred copies of the little book were found in Naples. This is the most notable of the six confiscations so far. In two of these we have found that as cover for the transport of the books there was business related to the wealthy Sephardic Mendesi family, and we can now be more than certain of their involvement in the operation.
The local authorities have prepared for me an initial list of names of people I think it would be better to keep watch on from a distance.
Simone Infante, in the Kingdom of Naples; Alfredo Bonatti, for the Duchies of Mantua, Modena and Parma; Pietro Perna, in the Duchy of Milan; Nicolo Brandani, in Tuscany; Francesco Strozzi and Girolamo Donzellini in Venice.
These people are: a supplier to the court of Naples, a favourite courtier to the Duke of Mantua, an itinerant bible-seller who exchanges books with exiles from Basle, a member of the Florentine wool corporation and two men of letters who have fled the city of Rome.�
These people tell us much about the uses to which The Benefit of Christ Crucified might be put in Italy. They are cultivated men, close to the courts of their rulers and in a position to carry ideas between the nobility and the members of the mercantile and artisanal classes. Little fish who could become dangerous with the passing of time.
My advice, should it prove impossible to interrogate the powerful Mendesi family, is that it might be useful to began with the last links of the chain so that the Sephardis might feel the Holy Office breathing down their necks.
All that remains for me to say is that I await orders from Your Lordship, implore that I may remain within Your Grace’s favour.
Viterbo, 20th day of September 1547
Your Lordship’s faithful servant
Q.
Venice, 2nd January 1548
Dusk, in a drawing room in the Miquez house. Beatrice, now standing before me, in silence, outlined against a window that faces the setting sun. Lit from behind, her features now hazy and diffuse. Sitting on an ottoman, I am drinking Greek wine. They call it retsina. Aromatic wine, flavoured with resin of the maritime pine.
I was called to the house an hour ago, a message brought to me by a little boy. I thought something might have happened, but there’s no sign of Jo�o, or his brother, or Duarte Gomez, there’s no one. Even the servants were dismissed when I arrived. Once I had opened the door, two steps beyond the threshold: Beatrice, smiling.
Faint sounds, far-off voices come to me as I sip this wine — which Perna has never mentioned to me — among tapestries, paintings, objects and colours whose like I have never seen before, not even in Antwerp.
A peace one cannot have experience of in the midst of the alleyways and catacombs that I have been walking down every day and every night for ever. A peace that takes me somewhere far from this winter, from all winters. Not what I have to do, but the way things might be.
With this woman, unlike any woman I have ever met.
Her musical way with the Flemish tongue, something no Fleming could ever manage; free of all asperity, assembled from sibilants, elongated vowels and phonemes that are all quite new to me. Echoes of various Nordic and Romance languages, with hints now of Greece, now of Africa, along with fragments from the Levant and the Orient, resonate down my spine. Perhaps one day all men and women, in the four corners of the continent, will modulate these same notes, a quiet pan-European singsong, rich and polyphonic, with a thousand local variants.
Her smile. Alone. Alone here with me. The Queen Mother of the Miquez dynasty, a woman who deals with aristocrats and merchants, a protector of artists and learned men. A queen in a city of panders and courtiers. The poets whom she patronises dedicate their works to her. I flick through a book by a certain Ortensio Lando: ‘To the illustrious and most honourable Beatriz de Luna’. She laughs, not with embarrassment, but with amused commiseration.
She asks me about the Caratello, about its management, about the girls. She sits down next to me. This woman who is not anxious to know what I have been, not desperate to know how many rivers of blood I have waded through. This woman who is not concerned about all my many names. This woman who is curious about me now. About me in the present. This woman who is now talking to me about my humanity, telling me she feels challenged by me, telling me she can sense my humanity beneath the carapace that I have worn for too long, beneath the resistant substance that I have made of my skin, to avoid being injured again.
Another sip of wine.
This woman. This woman who wants me.
Beatrice.
How things could be.
Now.
Po Delta, 26th February 1548
Along the branch of the Po that links Ferrara to the coast, with five hundred copies of the Benefit of Christ Crucified loaded on to the two boats supplied for the purpose by the Usques. The sun is high over the muddy waters, which are studied by birds hunting for food above our heads and in the clefts of the river. Beneath our heavy woollen capes we are paralysed by the damp cold.
I notice it too late
The boat carrying the first half of the load suddenly swerves ahead of us: the prow sweeps to the right, to avoid a barge that has suddenly emerged out of the reeds, making for the middle of the river. Behind me, the helmsman curses. A moment later the boat disappears into a secondary canal, its opening invisible through the dense vegetation. The barge immediately behind it, with three silhouettes on board, crouching low.
I instinctively shoulder my hackbut and take aim, but they’ve already disappeared. To the navigator: ‘After them!’
An abrupt change of course so as not to be left behind. We hear shouts and the sound of something splashing into the water. We slip into the narrow canal, only to bump into two floundering boatmen. Both barge and boat are moving away. We pull the two men aboard. One is bleeding from a temple, his face smashed in. �
‘Don’t lose them!’
Sebastiano the Hunchback curses and plunges his long pole into the river-bed, driving us forward.
As I wrap the injured man’s head in a cloth, I turn to the other survivor: ‘Who the fuck are they?’
He answers in a breath: ‘Bandits, don Ludovico, it was an ambush. Godless bandits. Look what they’ve done to him!’
I too grab a pole, over by the prow, to negotiatean unknown bend in the river. The cavernous voice of the Miquez’ boatman: ‘Worse than a maze, Lordship. Twists and turns and marshes, for miles and miles. No one ever comes back.’
I protest: ‘They’ve got more than half the load on that boat. I have no intention of losing it.’
I glimpse the stern of the boat, they’re not travelling too fast. Perhaps they didn’t expect to be followed. Another bend to the left, and then the mouth of another very narrow channel, which makes us lose our bearings. Midday, the sun at its zenith, the horizon out of sight: no landmarks. We’re a couple of miles from the river now.
I push the pole with all my might, reflecting that I only came to Ferrara to pick up a cargo. If I allow myself to dwell on where I am and what I’m doing I almost start laughing, but I manage not to, with Sebastiano standing behind me spitting, cursing and dripping with sweat as he plunges his pole into the river-bed.
I see the two boats disappearing before me, as though swallowed up by the water. I try to spot a detail, a landmark on the bank of the canal so that I can remember the exact spot where I lost sight of them. A dead tree, its branches submerged.
‘Faster, faster!’
Sebastian’s curses supply a rhythm to our thrusts. There’s the tree. I nod to the Hunchback to stop. I search the opposite bank with the pole, until a discover a spot where the reed-bed thins out slightly. It doesn’t look like a navigable route, but it’s the only place they can have gone.
‘In there!’
Sebastian insists: ‘Lordship, listen, we’re never going to get through there.’
A glance at the injured man. The blood’s stopped flowing, but he’s passed out. The other boatman looks at me with determination and picks up a small oar: ‘Let’s go.’
I clear a path for the boat by pushing the reeds aside. They close over our heads and behind us. Using the pole I test the reed-bed inch by inch, a few yards beyond the prow. This forest of reeds could extend, compact and unchanging, for many miles around us. I’ve got to focus my concentration on the invisible waterway running through it, feeling for those spots where the vegetation offers least resistance. We advance cautiously, in complete
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