Eneko smiled. 'I asked him that same question myself. A most interesting answer he gave me. 'You must remember the mother, most of all.' '
'I don't understand,' said Diego, frowning.
Eneko placed the miniature on his little writing desk. ' 'Old Fox,' indeed,' he murmured. 'I shall keep the portrait here at all times. To remind me that both boys had the same mother.' He turned back to his companions. 'And what was she, brothers? An evil woman or a good one? Or simply a mother?'
Diego stared at the portrait, still confused. But Pierre nodded. 'Indeed so. The portrait is a reminder to us. A warning, perhaps--of the danger of pride.'
'She was indeed a proud woman, by all accounts,' mused Diego.
Eneko shook his head firmly. 'You misunderstand. The duke was warning us of the danger of our pride.' He smiled grimly. 'Canny old man. That is indeed the downfall of theologians.'
His eyes went back and forth from Pierre to Diego. 'We will do nothing with this knowledge, for the time being. That, too, the old man made me swear. The children are safer for the moment with their identity concealed, obviously. But when the time comes--remember, brothers. There were two sons, produced by the same mother.'
'God works in mysterious ways,' said Diego solemnly.
'Oh, nonsense!' chuckled Pierre. 'Not in this instance. Any Savoyard can tell you the trick. Always keep a second string for your bow.'
PART IV March, 1538 A.D. ==================================
Chapter 43 ==========
Humiliation, Marco was learning, was a very different thing from shame.
Shame gripped your gut and made you sick. Humiliation made you wish you were dead. Shame had made him run. Humiliation made him hide. He hid at his job behind a facade of the drabbest clothing in his wardrobe and a bulwark of work. He was fast becoming one of the most put-upon clerks in the office, because he courted, volunteered for, the most tedious and boring tasks available. And he hid after work anywhere but home, once he made his check to see if Caesare had a job for him. He visited his friend the art student as much as he could without becoming a nuisance, which actually wasn't that difficult at the moment. When Rafael wasn't studying, he needed models to draw from, and Marco had absolutely no objection to stripping down to his smallclothes and holding still until he turned blue, so long as no one was teasing him about Angelina.
And when he wasn't visiting Rafael, he hid in books, or, increasingly, in the tiny church of Saint Raphaella-- and somehow the confluence of names seemed appropriate. He didn't seek out the priest, Brother Mascoli, and he didn't let the priest catch sight of him. He simply sat in the back, and thought, until it was almost dark, and only then did he go home.
Here, at least, his thoughts weren't so much about humiliation as humility itself, and not at all about Angelina.
Over and over he thought about what the priest had told him, and tried to come up with counterarguments. He couldn't. Moreover, the more he saw of the militant Pauline faction, the less he liked them. They were arrogant, the most of them, and pride was arguably the most deadly of the sins, since it led to so many of the others. And oh, they were angry--he scarcely ever saw a Sot or a Knot without a frown on his face--and that was not only another deadly sin, but one that led straight to murder and mayhem. You couldn't keep that much anger pent up for long without it boiling over, and when it did, someone always got hurt. Perhaps the Petrines were soft, and perhaps they were inclined to another deadly sin, that of sloth, but at least no one was ever hurt by a slothful layabout with a deadly weapon.
The Paulines were right about one thing: there was such a thing as real evil, and oft times the Petrines preferred to pretend there wasn't in the hopes that it would get bored and go away. But not all Petrines. Not the priest here, for instance . . . no, that sort of thing was the besetting sin of those whose wealth and power allowed them to insulate themselves from the rest of the world. The ones who scoffed at the stories of the canal monster because no one they knew had been attacked by it. Well . . . except for the financier killed the previous summer. But that had been months ago, and most of Venice's elite seemed to have convinced itself that his murder was the work of a simple maniac. A disgruntled debtor, no doubt. Only ignorant and superstitious peasants would credit such a thing as 'magical murder' or a mysterious monster in the canals.
But, being honest with himself, Marco could not be at all certain that Paulines sufficiently insulated by wealth and position from their sweating peasants would not have said the same thing, had the monster prowled the back alleys of Milan instead of the canals of Venice.
So, on long afternoons before darkness fell, Marco sat on a bench in the darkest corner against the wall at the rear of the church and looked at the crude statue of Saint Raphaella, and wondered what he should do. He didn't want to ask for a sign--who was he that a saint should give him a sign? He blushed to think that he had asked one of Saint Peter--Saint Peter!--those months ago in the swamp.
He'd come here again after another day of making triplicate copies of tedious documents, knowing that his
