Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [264]
‘Then I have nothing left to live for,’ said Anna blankly, and lifted her arm. Her eyes, supplicating, enormous, held his. Then she stretched her long, slender throat and looked up at the fruitless sprig, the lethal sliver she held poised above her.
‘You won’t do it,’ said Nicholas. He had not moved. His voice was perfectly even.
She glanced at him, once. Then her eyes closed, and her hand swept down, hard.
He had not believed she would do it. Perhaps because of that, she did. Her breath escaped with the swing of her arm. As the point of the knife entered her body she gave a small, surprised sound, like a residual grunt; but as the blade went on its way, slicing and sucking, she drew a great breath and screamed, loudly enough for the bustle outside the window to falter, and for a murmur of voices to break out somewhere inside the house. After that, she only whimpered, letting the knife fall to the ground and clasping her hands vaguely over the wound. She took one or two uncertain steps and pitched forward, striking the edge of the table at which he still stood as if frozen.
He saw the blood, thick as good tournesol, welling over her skin, soaking into the edges of chemise and gown, flowing down to her lap. He could not see where it came from, but it was very like the first gush from the crossbow wound he had given Julius; her face and throat were untouched and lovely as ever. She sank down before him with her eyes fixed on his, as in prayer; unclasping one of her hands, she stretched out her glistening palm for a moment. Then it fell, and she slid to lie on the tiles, her cheek turned sideways under the loosened dark strands of her hair, her amazing violet eyes at last closed.
Then the commotion outside spilled closer, into the house, with voices somewhere among it that he knew. He still had not moved when the door crashed open and men poured in, one of them limping. The first to enter, the first to see Nicholas at the window was Julius. He said harshly, ‘What have you done? Where is she?’
‘There,’ Nicholas said. A yellow light appeared somewhere and brightened: a lamp in the hand of Fioravanti, with Acciajuoli at his shoulder. The room’s small treasures gleamed once again, and the fair skin of a woman, lying in her half-naked blood on the floor.
Julius knelt. When he rose, he held Anna’s knife in his hand, and his pallor was as extreme as on the day when this had occurred to him also. He said to Nicholas, ‘You tried to rape her, and stabbed her when she resisted you.’
‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘Look after her, and I will tell you what happened.’
‘Look after her! She is dead,’ Julius said.
‘No. Let someone look at her. It was an accident.’
‘An accident!’ Julius said. ‘You and she are alone in a room, and she is undressed and stabbed with her own knife. That is murder, you diabolical little savage. She was my wife. And now you pay for it.’
His sword came out so fast that Nicholas almost took the blade in his shoulder. He swerved, and when the blade sang again he abandoned the window at last and flung through the room, overturning chairs in his wake as Julius attempted to follow him. Then the brief, furious explosion was over: men had thrown themselves on Julius and relieved him of his sword while Acciajuoli, taking Nicholas by the shoulder, pressed him into a chair and put a cup of wine into his hand. He accepted it in a daze, half rising again as the Gräfin Anna von Hanseyck was tenderly lifted and carried away. He could hear Julius shouting, and see tears of shock in his eyes. Now it was over, he had begun to feel sick himself. He had not thought she would do it. He had challenged her to do it.
The voice of Fioravanti said, ‘You wish to go to your wife, Signor Julius. But before you are freed, notice that, as a matter of law, the man you have just attacked was unarmed, and you cannot be permitted to execute him. In any case, you have not heard what he has to say. And, really, it cannot have occurred as you describe. Your wife’s murderer would surely have one spot of blood on his clothes or his hands,