Secretum

Someone had entered the Vessel. Or, said I to myself, had gone out from there.

As we were crossing the hall on the ground floor, we heard the notes of the music which had greeted us on our first visit, the folia. I, meanwhile, had inevitably been besieging Atto with further questions.

'Pardon me, but why do you think that Capitor's gifts are here?'

'That is partly a matter of concrete fact, partly deduction, but there are no two ways about it.'

Capitor's obscure prediction, Atto explained, circulated at lightning speed through court. No one had the courage to record it in writing, for it was said that the Cardinal had been terrified by it. Even the most meticulous of memorialists preferred to pass over the matter in silence, for their memoirs were made to be circulated and read at court, not to remain clandestine.

Yet, silence was not enough. Mazarin was already obsessed by the problem of how to retain power at the expense of the young King Louis who was bound, sooner or later, to cause him problems, and this he knew full well. After Capitor's dark prophecy, the Cardinal was beset nightly by new, black phantasms.

'As I have already told you,' Atto stressed, not without irony, 'the Cardinal had always been sure that his life would be long, very long.'

Desperately attached to worldly glories, like a mollusc to its rock, he had ended up by confusing that rock with life itself, while it was life that gave him the strength to close up his shell.

'Remember, my boy, great statesmen are like mussels attached to a reef. They look upon the fishes darting here and there and think: poor wretches, they're both lost and aimless, without a fine rock to bite into. But if the thought should once come to them that they may have one day to become detached from the rock, they are terrified. And they are utterly unaware that they are prisoners of their rock.'

Obviously, those words did not express the thoughts of a faithful servant of Mazarin, as Atto had been forty years before. Nor did they fit in with that natural tendency of his to hunger and thirst after glory, a tendency with which I was so very familiar. These were other cogitations, those of one who has come to the last stage in life and who is measuring himself up against the same problem as that which beset Mazarin until his last hour: whether the bivalve's shell must open up and let go of the rock.

'Was that you?' said he.

'Signor Atto, what do you mean?'

'No, you are right, it came from outside,' said he, moving towards one of the windows giving onto the entry courtyard.

I followed him and looked out too: there was nothing to be seen.

'It was like… someone running and kicking up gravel, or dirt,' said Atto.

Then, almost merging into the notes of the folia, I heard it too. It was just like footsteps running down an avenue, the avenue whence we had come. They came and went. Then they ceased.

'Shall we go out?' I proposed.

'No. I do not know how long we can remain in here. Before leaving, I must be sure of one thing.'

We took the winding spiral staircase that led to the first floor.

Meanwhile, Atto continued his tale. Mazarin could not bear that miserable state for long. He had lost the omnipotent confidence which had guided and sustained him ever since he had defeated the Fronde revolt. He feared the future: an unfamiliar and ungovernable feeling. In his hands, he held those objects, Capitor's gifts, and everyone knew that. Almost as though these were stolen goods, getting rid of them would be far from simple. In order not to have them always before his eyes, he had them stowed away in a chest.

Of that tale, he had spoken with no one. He did not want to think of it; yet, he thought of it unceasingly. He had never paid much attention to the evil eye, despite his Sicilian ancestry, but if anything was under a curse, he thought, those three trinkets were.

At length he came to a decision. If they could not change owners, the three presents must at least disappear, be sent as far away as possible.

'He entrusted them to Benedetti. He instructed him to keep them here in Rome, where Mazarin never went. Moreover, His Eminence was adamant that he did not want these gifts to remain on any property of his.'

'Would it not have been simpler to destroy them?'

'Of course, but in such cases, you never know how matters will end up. And what if one day he might wish to employ a necromancer to disperse the magic power of the three objects? If he were to destroy them there could be no going back. The story was absurd from beginning to end, but Mazarin did not care for risks, not even the most insignificant ones. The gifts must remain accessible.

'So Benedetti kept them here,' I deduced.

'In reality, when the Cardinal gave him his instructions, the Vessel did not yet exist, as I've explained to you. But now I am coming to the point.'

The Cardinal was so beset by the memory of that visionary madwoman, Capitor, and by that absurd business of the three presents, that to the bitter end he remained undecided as to whether to keep them or send them away. After deciding to entrust them to Benedetti, his anxiety was still too great. So the Cardinal took a second decision which would, in other circumstances, have been unthinkable for a worldly-wise man like himself, who dealt with things hard and fast and cared nothing for superstition or charms to ward off the evil eye.

'Not knowing whether he had taken the right decision or not, he had their portrait painted.'

'How could that be? Did he have a picture of them made?'

'He wanted at least to keep the image of them. It may sound stupid to you, but that was how it was.'

'And who painted the… portrait of the three presents?'

'There was at that time a Fleming in Paris, a painter. He made fine things. As you may know, the Flemings are very good at painting still lives, tables laden with food, flower compositions and suchlike. The Cardinal arranged for him to paint a quick portrait of the gifts. I personally have not seen it. But I have seen the presents themselves, including the Tetrachion,' he concluded, implicitly confirming that we were visiting the Vessel in order to find it.

'The idea would never have come into my head to have a portrait painted of three inanimate things and, what is more, how can I put it…'

'With a spell on them? Of course not. But the Cardinal had learned from the Bastard that he too had done the same thing. In Antwerp, before leaving for Paris, he had for his pleasure had a picture made of the gifts, but with the celestial globe instead of the terrestrial one, which was still in the goldsmith's workshop waiting to be attached to the solid gold pedestal.'

Thus, having entered that villa for the first time on the traces of three cardinals and their secret meetings in preparation for the next conclave, I now discovered it also to be the depository of another triad: Capitor's gifts.

The great change in Atto's words at that crucial juncture could not and did not escape me. He had returned to Rome, declaring that his intention was to remain there until the next conclave, in order to watch over its proceedings on behalf of the King of France. At the same time, he had (and this was truly singular) passed over in silence the other great event of the moment: the political and dynastic struggle for the succession to the Spanish throne. This, however, was exercising him in no uncertain manner, as I had learned from reading his correspondence with the Connestabilessa. Now, at last, the Abbot was also beginning to betray his secret interest in his speech. It was no accident that, no sooner had I mentioned the mysterious Tetrachion in connection with the Spanish succession than he had reacted like a wounded animal, since when he had had no other thought than to drag me to the Vessel in search of traces of the missing object. Always assuming that it was indeed an object, as I myself observed.

'Pardon me, Signor Atto, but there is something that is not clear to me. The chambermaid at the Spanish Embassy spoke to me of the Tetrachion as the heir to the Spanish throne, thus of a person. In your view, however, it is an object.'

'I know no more than you,' he cut me short.

That answer did not satisfy me, and I was about to query it when it was I who started at a noise. I had heard it distinctly, quite separately from the faint sound of the music.

'Was it you?'

'No, you know perfectly well it was not.'

The time had come to look around us and to find out what was going on in our neighbourhood.

From the central window in the salon, one could see them rather well. They were down below, in the garden.