The Scarlet Contessa. Jeanne Kalogridis

one mentioned this to me?

      I tried to push through the crowd and find the black-haired man who had given me Matteo’s saddlebag. He had traveled with Matteo; surely he would know if my husband had been poisoned.

      But the man was nowhere to be found, and Francesca and Bona pleaded with me to sit back down. His Grace was mistaken, they insisted. He was confusing Matteo with another man, another matter, but I did not believe them, and broke down sobbing.

      After a time, there were priests and Roman legates, public prayers and psalms, but there was no burial. For the first time in anyone’s memory, the ground was coated with a layer of solid ice; we could not lay him in the earth until it thawed.

      Matteo’s corpse was taken away—somewhere outside, I suspected, sheltered from animals but not the freezing cold; they were wise not to tell me where. Bona led me to a nauseating display of food in the common dining chamber near the chapel. I could not bear the sight of it, so her ladies returned me to Bona’s chamber, where I drank more of the wine laced with the bitter tang of poppies. For hours I stared into the glittering fire.

      Matteo had been murdered. Romulus and the Wolf had killed him in order to silence him, and they would kill Lorenzo next. And I was stripped of reason and will and could do nothing to stop it. Whom should I tell? Whom should I trust?

      When night fell, Francesca helped me undress and put on my nightgown. She offered me more bitter wine, but I refused and was taken to my little cot. When Bona arrived, she paused before climbing into her own bed to pray; I lay listening to her whispers and began to tremble with silent rage. I wanted to strike her, to tear the rosary from her fingers, to scream that she had taught me only lies: God was neither loving nor just, and I hated Him.

      I held my tongue and waited, anguished, until Bona fell asleep, until Francesca snored. By the light of the hearth, I rose and found my shawl and slippers, then slipped out into the loggia.

      I pattered downstairs, gasping at the freezing air when I hit the open hallway. I staggered in the blackness, twice almost slipping on the ice, and was shivering uncontrollably by the time I got to Matteo’s room. It was cold and dark and drafty; the fire had gone out and the flue was still open, but I did not bother to light it, as I did not care whether I caught cold or froze to death. I would have been pleased to die.

      I am unsure why I went to my husband’s chamber. I believe I meant to scream myself hoarse, though even with the windows shuttered, I would have been overheard. I only know that when I arrived and drew the bolt behind me, I spied Matteo’s quill upon the carpet.

      It must have been tangled in the bedding and fallen when I removed the sheets to clean him. I dropped to my knees before it and grief rushed out of me in a torrent. The sobs wracked me so that I sank down upon the carpet, the quill clutched to my chest.

      I wept a good half an hour. When I was done, my eyes, nose, and mouth were streaming, the poor feather crushed. Gasping for breath, I pushed myself up to sitting, and felt something small and metal brush against my breastbone, beneath my nightgown.

      Matteo’s key.

      Use it in case of emergency.

      I drew my sleeve across my eyes and nose, and stared across the room at Matteo’s writing desk and the secret panel next to it, hidden in the dark wooden wainscoting. Weak and trembling after the paroxysm of tears, I crawled on my hands and knees to Matteo’s desk, and pulled myself up into his chair to light the lamp. The oil was low, and the flame feeble; I leaned down and had to run my fingertips over the wall to find the tiny black keyhole.

      I slipped the leather thong over my hand, and put the little key into the lock.

      The door to the compartment popped open with a faint click. Behind the wood panel, a large stone brick was missing from the wall; in the gap sat a thick stack of papers the size of a library manuscript. I drew them out carefully, set them upon my husband’s desk, and pulled the lamp closer.

      On the very top was a tiny black silk pouch, tied with a red ribbon, and beneath that, a letter on fresh paper, folded into thirds, sealed with wax, and addressed For my Beloved. At the sight, I braced myself for the emotional upheaval to come as I opened the little black pouch. I thought it contained jewelry—a keepsake, perhaps, by which I could remember him, but it contained only a coarse grayish-brown powder.

      I turned to the letter, expecting to learn, at long last, why my husband had rejected my amorous advances.

      I did not expect to be frightened.

      It was not a heartfelt farewell letter but a diagram, in Matteo’s hand, of a circle with the cardinal directions marked—oddly, with east at the top of the circle instead of north, and west at the bottom. At each direction, he had put a five-pointed star, with arrows carefully indicating how it should be drawn, and beneath each star, a word in what I suspected was Hebrew; underneath these were written phonetic translations in the vernacular, but no meaning was given.

      Beneath this was a diagram of a second circle, again with the cardinal directions, this time accompanied by hexagrams and more barbarous words.

      It was magic, the same magic I had seen him work at night when I pretended to be sleeping in our bed, and I remembered snatches of our conversation the night I had first told him that I saw portents in the clouds and sky and stars.

      Bona would say this was from the Devil, I had said, and he had answered swiftly: Bona would be wrong.

      Beneath both circles were sets of instructions in Milanese describing the rites that accompanied each. I could not focus my shattered mind long enough to make sense of them, nor could I keep the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck from lifting when I set down Matteo’s diagram to examine the next page upon the stack.

      It was a piece of yellowed vellum, brittle with age, many times folded and in danger of falling apart. Gingerly, I unfolded it upon the desk. The ink was rust brown, faded, the handwriting ancient, unfamiliar; Bona had permitted me no Greek, though I recognized it readily enough, and understood most of the Latin translation written in a later hand beneath it.

      It was an invocation—of what, I could not fathom in my grief-addled state. I set it delicately aside; beneath it rested an unbound manuscript of text, consisting of several dozens of pages in Latin. The paper and the author’s hand were modern; the title page read De Mysteriis Aegyptiorium, Of the Egyptian Mysteries.

      Last in the stack of writing was a document written in Matteo’s careful, even script. The letters of the Latin alphabet were written across the page, in order, and beneath each letter was written a different, random letter, number, or symbol. The letter a for example, was represented by the number 9, the letter b by an x, and c by an l. At the very top of the document was written strike out every fourth. It was, I realized, a key—one Matteo must have used when encrypting secret correspondence.

      I propped an elbow on the desk and put my fingertips to my brow. “Why do you want me to have this?” I asked aloud.

      The impulse to cast it all into the dying fire overtook me. Magic had been no more able to protect wicked men from killing Matteo than had God. But another thought damped my anger: the memory of the gilded triumph card displaying the Hanged Man. Surrender to evil forces with the intent of sacrifice.

      I pressed the heels of my palms to my burning eyes and tried to make sense of it all. Matteo had clearly had a sense of his impending death before he left, else he would not have given me the key.

      He had sacrificed himself to me in marriage out of innocent love. Had he again sacrificed himself to protect me? Had he left all this behind to warn me?

      Had I not been furious with God, I would have burned it all. Instead I stared down at the meaningless tapestry of numerals and letters on the page and heard Lorenzo the Magnificent speaking.

      It was I, in fact, who recommended Matteo to the duke for employment.

      As if in answer, I heard Matteo in my memory.

      I was rescued in my youth by a wealthy patron. . . .

      Perhaps later we could go together