1635_ Cannon Law - Eric Flint [116]
"Just watching the place," Benito said, looking worried.
Frank remembered that Benito had grown up in a far, far rougher neighborhood than Grantville, West Virginia, which while not exactly high society had been a quiet and decent place. He pretty much ought to know what trouble in the offing would look like.
"Okay," Frank said, thinking about it. They'd been driven out once, they were more than likely pissed about it, but most of them wouldn't want to come back in and get shot at. After a while, though, only the real diehards would still be out there. What would they do? A few unpleasant possibilities crossed Frank's mind. The building was brick, solid brick, but most of the internal floors and the furniture and fittings were wood. Extremely flammable wood. And all the lamps that made the place so bright and cheery at night were, from one point of view, simply fragile bottles of oil held up where they could shatter easily. "I figure we keep watches all night," he said after looking around the place. "Fire watches."
Benito nodded. He'd probably been thinking the same sort of thing.
It was a long, hot night. Uneventful, in the end, but long and hot.
Chapter 26
Rome
His Holiness stood at the open window. Very little of St. Peter's Square could be seen from that window—there was a builders' scaffold in the way—but the sounds of riot and disorder were very much to be heard. Much less than they had been in the hours after midnight, but still there.
Cardinal Antonio Barberini could just about hear the crackle of muskets, a sound he had only rarely heard before and never in Rome. Again, there was less than there had been the night before, when every militia commander and bodyguard captain in the city—and not a few concerned citizens—had shot at rioters in the streets. There would certainly have been fatalities, and it was too much to hope that all of them were of the blackest character and surely guilty of some heinous crime. Barberini had expressed that hope in the darkest hours, and been told by several of the gentlemen of his salon, more than one of whom had been condottieri in one small way or another in the course of their careers, that the chances of that were slim at best. Ringleaders in riots tended to lead from the rear; those at the forefront were the young, enthusiastic, stupid and drunk, and often all four in the same person.
He was not standing so close to the window—even if the pope is one's uncle there is a certain minimum level of etiquette to observe—as to see much other than sky. But there were columns of smoke visible, rising and spreading on the light breeze of early summer.
Barberini looked from the smoke to His Holiness and back again. Suddenly, the serene and dignified pontiff looked far more like his elderly Uncle Maffeo, who to a much younger Antonio had seemed like a kindly old man. And yet he had grown terribly old, without his nephew noticing, and seemed bowed this morning.
The night had been long and hot, and there had been rioting in the city. Antonio, who was no spymaster but had the native wit to recognize the need for a corps of paid informers and the contacts to find someone with the skills to run such a network, had had reports waiting for him before breakfast. And it had been an early breakfast. Cardinal Antonio Barberini was what a later age would call "Bohemian," for all that he was in theory a senior man in a hierarchy that vowed poverty, chastity and obedience. On an ordinary day, he would rise at a leisurely and civilized hour, on those nights when he took to his bed at all. This night past, he had retired late, slept little and risen early. The morning had an air of unreality about it.
Not least because the reports had been so conflicted, so confused. The rioters were chanting, by Barberini's rough count, fourteen different sets of slogans, attacking three different groups and were coming from a dozen different parishes. It was almost as if the citizens of Rome were looking for any excuse to engage in disorder. It was surely