To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [118]
Then the Pope died. Life continued. Building continued. But now Jan remembered more clearly the other aspect of Rome which had been forced on him by his antiquarian father, who had dragged him remorselessly from Colosseum to Forum, from arch to pillar, from towering baths to underground tombs. Looked at thus, Rome was no more than a stackyard: a hilly wilderness of rough grass and cracked stone within a circle of walls far too big for it. Most of the ruins had been quarried, the shapes of theatre or temple half lost and the bricks exposed, thin and reddish under the marble. Incinerated marble offered a rich profit in lime: they had discovered as much in Alexandria.
From the heights, its towers foreshortened, its gardens concealed, the Eternal City looked neglected and pagan; a place of marshes and mounds choked with sanctified offerings, its surface pitted and pustuled with domes, circles and crescents; home to robbers and beggars, where packs of dogs strayed and animals rooted even as far as the old Ponte Rotto, and dead men were found every day. That was the country inside the walls, where rich men might wall off a vineyard or a well-protected villa near to the jetty for Ostia. For business, one had to stay in the crowded part, even though two riders could scarcely find room to pass in some of the unpaved, crooked lanes.
Strangers entering Rome, however, would see only what was impressive. Here, the wider roads, although only surfaced with dirt, led between tall houses whose porticos admitted glimpses of green, handsome courtyards. From time to time they would open into wide flowered spaces round a church or a monastery, or a piazza where the Cardinals’ houses were hung with paintings and tapestry, and the streets were laid with fine carpets on feast days. Once, it had seemed very fine. Now, he was afraid to think anything.
He delivered Patrick Graham and his servants to the Scots house and fled, as he had explained that he must, to the hospice of the French nation. It was untrue that he had arranged to live there: he had to pay extra before they would take him. His father had expected him to stay with the Bishop. He couldn’t stand any more. He wanted to speak the French they all spoke at home, a reminder of Paris, the happiest time of his life.
It was bitter, then, to find there no one that he knew; no one who had travelled as he had. The young men were moved to remark on his beard, the sacred mark of the pilgrim; two years in growing, and carefully kept to impress the late Pope’s nephew, the Cardinal Barbo. They asked, open-eyed, if sheeps’ eyes could be chewed, or gave you a fright the next day in the chamber pot. They enquired whether Arab wives kept their veils on before and during the act, and who shaved them. They wished to know how his cousin pissed, dressed as a boy. They put something into his ale, and after he had been sick, slapped his back and told him he was one of them now, and tried to take him off for a night in a bawdy house.
Sallow and shaky, he took his letters at first light to the wonderful Palazzo San Marco, and left them with the Cardinal’s chamberlain. He had hoped to be invited inside: his father had written already, and the Cardinal might have expected him. But His Eminence, said the chamberlain, was much occupied, and it might take some time to arrange an appointment. He trusted that Signor Adorno was in no haste to leave Rome.
It was dispiriting. He wandered about in the rain, avoiding the houses his father knew. When he had braced himself to return to the hostel, striding in and slamming the door like a magistrate, it was to find the parlour empty but for a well-built middle-aged man in fine clothes whose slanting eyes and classical cheek-bones he remembered at once. Jan Adorne froze.
‘I startled you,’ said the Banco di Niccolò’s notary Julius. ‘Look, don’t hold it against me. I’ve forgotten everything that happened in Venice; and anyway I