The Roman Tales. Susan Ashe

anything concerning me or my soldiers. If at any time you are forced to speak and you do not see any point in lying, tell any sort of falsehood but refrain as from mortal sin from speaking the truth. You must understand that it could give away all my plans. I know of your little affair in the Convent of the Visitation. You can spend two weeks in Castro, but the Orsini will certainly have friends and even spies there. Go to my steward. He’ll give you two hundred zecchini. The friendship I enjoyed with your father’, added the prince, laughing, ‘makes me want to offer you some advice on the proper way to conduct your amorous skirmish. You and three soldiers will disguise yourselves as merchants. You’ll pretend to be angry with your companions, who will pretend to be drunk and will make many friends by buying wine for all the layabouts in Castro. Further,’ added the prince in a different tone, ‘if you’re captured and killed by the Orsini, do not let your real name be known. Above all, never admit you’re one of my men. I don’t need to tell you to give a wide berth to small settlements and always enter a town by the gate opposite to the direction from which you are travelling.’

      Giulio was overwhelmed by this fatherly advice, coming from such a normally stern man. At first the prince smiled at the tears he saw in the young man’s eyes. Then his tone changed. He slipped off one of his many rings. Taking it, Giulio kissed the hand renowned for so many illustrious deeds.

      ‘My father never spoke to me like this,’ the young man said fervently.

      Two days later, a little before dawn, Giulio entered the town of Castro. Five soldiers, also disguised, accompanied him. Two came separately and pretended not to know him or the other three. While approaching the town, Giulio had observed the Convent of the Visitation, a huge fortress-like structure rising above dark surrounding walls. He headed straight for the sumptuous church. The nuns, who were all from noble and mostly rich families and were full of pride and self-esteem, competed with each other to enrich the church, the only part of the convent open to the public. The custom was for one of these ladies, appointed abbess by the pope from a list of three names presented by the cardinal, protector of the Order of the Visitation, to make a very large donation in order to preserve her name for posterity. If her offering was smaller than that of the previous abbess, she and her family would be held in disregard.

      Astonished, Giulio made his way along the nave of the magnificent building, with its gilding and its marble statues. He had little thought for either. He felt as if Elena were watching him. The high altar was said to have cost more than eight hundred thousand scudi, but blind to its splendour he fixed his eyes on a golden grille nearly forty feet high and divided in three by two marble columns. Menacing in its size, the grille rose behind the high altar, separating the nun’s choir from the church.

      Behind this grille nuns and boarders sat during the services. There they could come and pray at any time of day. It was on this well-known fact that Giulio had placed his hopes.

      A huge black curtain covered the inside of the grille but did not conceal the boarders’ view of the public. Through the curtain Giulio could clearly see the windows which lit up the choir and he could make out even the smallest detail. Each bar of the magnificent grille bore a sharp spike turned towards the congregation.

      Giulio chose a conspicuous position in the best-lit area. Here he spent his time attending Masses. Noting that he was surrounded only by peasants and hoping he would be observed from the other side of the black curtain, for the first time in his life he tried to attract attention to himself. His plan was carefully thought out. He gave copious alms both on entering and leaving the church. He and his men showed interest in all the workmen and small traders who had business with the convent.

      It was not until the third day that he at last became hopeful of getting a letter to Elena. On his orders his men followed the lay sisters who bought some of the convent’s provisions. One of them had dealings with a tradesman. A soldier of Giulio’s, who had been a monk, befriended the tradesman and promised him a zecchino for each letter he delivered to the boarder Elena Campireali.

      ‘What,’ said the tradesman, when first approached, ‘take a letter to the brigand’s wife?’

      So fast does gossip travel that, although Elena had only been in Castro for two weeks, her fame was already established.

      ‘At least she’s married!’ the tradesman added. ‘How many of our ladies haven’t that excuse and get much more than letters from outside.’

      In his first missive Giulio gave a painstaking description of all that had happened on the fateful day of Fabio’s death. ‘Do you hate me?’ he finished.

      Elena replied, saying that without hating anyone she proposed to spend the rest of her life trying to forget him by whose hand her brother had perished.

      Giulio hastened to write again. After cursing fate he said:

      You wish then to forget the word of God revealed to us in the Holy Scriptures? God says, ‘A woman shall leave her mother and father and cleave unto her husband.’ Do you claim you are not my wife? Remember St Peter’s Night as dawn broke behind Monte Cavo, and you threw yourself at my feet. You were mine if I wished to take you; you could not hold back the love you then felt for me. Suddenly it seemed to me that, because I had often told you that a long time ago I sacrificed to you my life and everything I hold dearest in the world, you could have said, but never did, that all that sacrifice, unmarked by any act, could well be imaginary. A notion, to my mind cruel but basically just, struck me. I saw it was not for nothing that fate offered me the opportunity to sacrifice for you the greatest happiness I could ever dream of. You were already defenceless in my arms; even your mouth dared not refuse. Just then the morning Ave Maria rang out in the Monte Cavo Monastery, and, by strange chance, the sound reached us. You said, ‘Make this sacrifice to the Madonna, the mother of purity.’ The idea of this supreme sacrifice, the only real one I would ever have the chance to make to you, had already occurred to me. I found it curious that the same thought came to you. The distant sound of that Ave Maria touched me, I admit, and I gave in to what you asked. The sacrifice was not wholly for you; I wanted to place our future union under the Madonna’s protection. At that time I thought the obstacles came not from you but from your rich, noble family. If there had been no supernatural cause, how did that Angelus reach us from so far away, over the treetops of half the forest, stirred by the morning breeze? Then, remember, you fell at my feet; I took from my breast the cross I wear and you swore on it, by your everlasting damnation, that wherever you were, whatever was happening, as soon as I ordered you would be entirely mine just as you were when we heard the distant Ave Maria from Monte Cavo. Then we both devoutly said two Aves and two Paters. Well! By the love you had for me or, if you have forgotten it – as I fear – by your eternal damnation, I order you to receive me tonight in your room or in the convent garden.