Sheen on the Silk - Anne Perry [229]
“I’m staying,” Simonis cut across her, her black eyes fierce. “I do not desert because a battle is coming.”
“It’s not a battle,” Anna pointed out. “It’s death.”
Simonis shrugged. “Well, I wasn’t going to live forever anyway.” Her voice trembled a little, and that was the end of the conversation.
Anna took a brief respite from attending the sick to go again to the Hagia Sophia, not so much for the Mass as to look at the unique beauty of it while it was still there.
As she walked through its outer aisles and saw the gold of the mosaics, the exquisite, brooding, sloe-eyed Madonnas and somber figures of Christ and his Apostles, she thought of Zoe and was touched by grief far deeper than she would have expected. Byzantium was less without her. Life was grayer.
“Can’t make up your mind whether to be on the floor of the men or the women, Anastasius?”
She swung around and saw Helena standing a few feet away. She was magnificently dressed in a dark red tunic and a dalmatica of such a rich blue as to be almost purple, or as close as anyone dared come who was not of the imperial house. The gold borders on it and the reflection of the red made one look a second time to be certain.
Anna wanted to answer with some cutting reply, but all such thought was crowded out of her mind by the sight of a man behind Helena. Anna knew his face, although she had not seen him in at least two years. It was Esaias, the only other man, apart from Demetrios, who had survived the assassination plot unscathed.
Why was he here in the Hagia Sophia with Helena, and she dressed almost in purple? Helena Comnena, Zoe’s daughter to the emperor. She had not married Demetrios. If all she wanted of him was his imperial name, there was no point now. In a matter of weeks, the throne would be in the hands of Charles of Anjou, to give to whomever he wished—some puppet who would rule it at his behest.
Nicephoras had assumed it would be Charles’s son-in-law, but perhaps it would not! Could he have something different in mind, something to curb an ambitious daughter, reward a more trustworthy lieutenant, and at the same time buy from a troublesome people a degree of peace with a turncoat Palaeologus queen? What an exquisite betrayal!
She must not let Helena see the thought in her eyes. She must say something quickly, not a polite reply, which Helena would know was masking another truth.
“I was thinking of your mother,” Anna said, smiling slightly. “Watching Giuliano Dandolo clean the tomb of his great-grandfather. That was the one vengeance she didn’t achieve.”
Helena’s expression froze. “That was all a waste of time,” she said coldly. “An old woman living in the past. I live for the future, but then I have one. She hadn’t. What about you, Anastasia—is that your name?”
“No.”
Helena shrugged. “Well, no matter—whatever it is, you have no place here anymore. I don’t know what delusion ever brought you in the first place.”
Anna would have been stung had not her thoughts been racing as to what Esaias was doing with Helena. She remembered his part in the original plot. It was he who had courted the young Andronicus, with the intent of murdering him also.
If she was planning an alliance of some sort with Charles of Anjou, then was Esaias the one who carried word back and forth? Helena would never be fool enough to commit anything damning to paper. Nor would she travel herself. And she would not have trusted any of Zoe’s men.
Helena was waiting for a response.
“It’s over now anyway,” Anna said quietly. She knew Justinian was guilty of Bessarion’s death, in an act of loyalty to Byzantium, and in a few weeks, even days, it would no longer matter anymore.
Helena lifted her head a little higher and walked away. In dark, glowing reds, Esaias followed after her.
Anna walked slowly into one of the small side chapels and bent her head in thought close to prayer.
She lifted her eyes to the somber face of the Madonna above her, surrounded in a million tiny bricks of gold: If she could tell Michael something he did not know, something he believed