Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [212]
“What on earth have you to say that cannot wait until morning?” Helena said irritably.
“I am very sorry indeed to tell you that your mother is dead,” Anna replied.
Helena’s dark eyes widened in momentary disbelief. “Dead?”
“Yes.”
“Really? At last.” Helena straightened her back and held her head a little higher. A slight smile touched the corner of her mouth, and one might have thought it was superb courage and dignity in the face of loss. Anna had the ugly thought that in fact it was an attempt to contain her victory.
She felt the tears for Zoe welling behind her own eyelids. Something of Byzantium was gone. It was more than an age that was past, it was a passion, a fury, a love of life, and its leaving took something irreplaceable from the world.
Ninety-one
PALOMBARA LANDED IN CONSTANTINOPLE WEIGHED DOWN by the bitter news he carried. The fleet of Charles of Anjou had sailed for Sicily, and from there it would leave for Constantinople. They could count the time until invasion in weeks.
Back again at the house he shared with Vicenze, Palombara found him busy in his study, writing a pile of dispatches. Vicenze, secretive as always, turned them upside down the moment he saw him in the doorway.
“Good voyage?” Vicenze asked politely.
“Good enough,” Palombara replied. He held out the letters the pope had sent Vicenze, still sealed.
Vicenze took them. “Thank you.” He looked at Palombara. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard yet, but Zoe Chrysaphes is dead. Had an apoplexy or something. Bishop Constantine said a requiem Mass for her in the Hagia Sophia, the hypocrite. Said she died reconciled to the Orthodox Church. Damn liar!” He smiled.
Palombara was stunned. It had seemed as if nothing could destroy Zoe. He stood still in the middle of the floor and was overwhelmed with loss, as if Byzantium itself had begun to die.
Vicenze was still staring at him, still smiling. Palombara had an almost overwhelming desire to strike him so hard that it would break his teeth.
“Perhaps it’s just as well,” he said as calmly as he could. “Charles of Anjou has set sail for Messina. At least she will be spared knowing that.”
He went to see Helena Comnena to offer his condolences. She had moved into Zoe’s house, and she received him in the room that had once been her mother’s. The view was the one Palombara remembered, but the colors were already different. The new tapestries were pale, intricately detailed. There were blues and greens, no warmth of the earth tones.
Helena’s perfectly balanced face, with its winged eyebrows, almost like her mother’s, was lovely. But he had no sense of the steel within. There seemed to be in her a hunger without joy.
“I am grieved to hear of your mother’s death,” he said formally. “Please accept my condolences.”
“Personally?” she asked. “Or do you speak for Rome?”
He smiled. “Personally.”
“Really?” She regarded him with dry, rather sour amusement. “I had not realized that you were fond of her. I rather assumed the opposite.”
He met her dark eyes. “I admired your mother. I enjoyed her intelligence and her infinite capacity to care about everything.”
“Admired her …” Helena repeated the words curiously, as if she found them inappropriate. “But surely she was nothing that Rome approves of? She had no humility, she was never obedient to anything but her own desires, and she was certainly very far from chaste!”
He was angry with her for not defending her mother. “She was more alive than anyone else I know.”
“You sound like the eunuch physician Anastasius,” she observed sourly. “He mourns her, which is stupid. She would have destroyed him without a thought, if it had been worth her trouble.” There was contempt in her voice and a sharp edge that Palombara recognized with surprise as resentment.
“You are mistaken,” he said icily. “Zoe admired Anastasius greatly. Quite apart from his medical skill, she liked his wit and his courage, his imagination, and the fact that he was not afraid of her, or of life.”
Helena laughed. “How quaint you are, Your Grace. And how terribly innocent. You know nothing.