'Pronged grubber.'
'Yes.'
'Dibber.'
'Yes.'
'Cannon.'
'Take it.'
He turned the tool around in his hands and stood up with a start.
'I don't believe it. 'Tis not possible!' he said to himself, biting on the knuckles of his right hand: I had made a mistake.
'But my boy!' he exploded, opening wide his arms and addressing me in the grave, commiserative tones of a priest lecturing a sinner. 'How many times must I tell you that this is an extractor, not a cannon, which is four times bigger?'
I durst not reply, conscious of the gravity of the misdeed.
'Forgive me, I thought…' I struggled to justify myself, hastily returning the extractor to the box and pulling out the cylinder for transplanting known as a cannon.
'No excuses. Let us attend to our work now. I see that you have already brought some pots with you,' said he, regaining his composure and preparing to extract the seedlings which he meant to transplant.
While Tranquillo dug up and replanted, delicately moving the soil, carefully watering the turf and lovingly positioning the new bulbs, I searched my mind desperately for ways of steering the conversation away from flowers towards what concerned me.
'Abbot Melani told me that you had an interesting and profitable conversation today.'
'Abbot who? All… you mean the gentleman from Pistoia; or
France, was it not? He quite appreciated the way in which I had placed colours in my flower beds,' said he, while cleaning the plants bordering the beds with a little brush and ridding them of the specks of earth scattered during the transplanting.
'Exactly, 'tis of him that I speak.'
'Very well, 'tis no surprise that he should have expressed such pleasure. One must always so arrange matters that colours respond symmetrically to one another, and that I have done, as we did in the good old days at Duke Caetani's gardens at Cisterna: each bed must be filled with at least two or three sorts of flowers, differing among themselves in nature and in colour, and so arranged, frontally or sideways, that those which resemble or are the same as each other, although separated, correspond with one another.'
'Precisely, and Abbot Melani said that…'
'But mind you!' he warned, brandishing the copper watering can severely. 'One can never, I repeat, never, mix ranunculus, Spanish jonquils and tulips, for that would produce disharmony and deformity. My grandfather, Tranquillo Romauli of blessed memory, who kept one of the finest gardens in Rome (ah yes, indeed, one of the few true exemplars of the art, such as are no longer to be found nowadays), as I was saying, my grandfather would always insist particularly on that point.' Here, he sighed with exaggerated melancholy.
'Ah yes, you are quite right,' said I, at the same time holding back another yawn, disappointed at my inability to break through the Master Florist's verbal wall.
A couple of servants passed behind us with as many baskets full of freshly killed and plucked poultry. They groaned, discreetly casting sardonic smiles of sympathy in my direction, for the Master Florist's terrible logorrhoea was well known at Villa Spada, and justifiably feared.
It only remained for me to risk my all.
'Well, Abbot Melani told me that he greatly appreciated his conversation with you,' said I as rapidly as I was able to, 'and he would be glad to renew the pleasure at your earliest opportunity.'
'Ah yes?'
He had at last responded: a good sign.
'Yes, you know, the Abbot is very troubled. Death is hanging over El Escorial…'
He looked at me pensively, without uttering a word. Perhaps he had understood the allusion: the King of Spain's sickness, the succession to the throne, the Tetrachion…
'You are well informed,' said he, speaking in unexpectedly grave tones. 'The Escorial is drying up, son, while Versailles… and now Schonbrunn too…' he hinted, leaving his sentence unfinished.
That was the signal, said I to myself. He knew. And he had also referred to the most famous gardens of France and the Empire, the two contenders for the Spanish succession.
'We have a heavy burden to carry,' he concluded enigmatically.
He had spoken of 'we'; he was probably also referring to others: the order passed on byword of mouth, as suspected by Abbot Melani. And now he wanted to free himself of the secret that weighed upon his soul.
'I agree,' I replied.
He nodded with a mute smile of secret understanding.
'If the Abbot, your protector, is truly so concerned for the fate of the Escorial, we shall surely have much to talk of, he and I.'
'That would be truly opportune,' said I, taking my tone from his last words.
'Provided that he is correctly informed,' Romauli made clear. 'Otherwise, it would all be just a waste of breath.'
'You need have no doubts,' I reassured him, without, however, having understood the meaning of his warning.
As I walked towards the great house, mentally repeating the conversation with the Master Florist, I had just turned a corner when I heard the sound of two persons' footsteps behind me on the gravel, accompanied by as many voices.
'… And what Abbot Melani dared to do was quite unheard of, on that point I am completely in agreement. But Albani's reaction was even more surprising.'
Someone was talking about Atto. The voice was that of an old man of high birth. I could not miss the opportunity. 1 hid behind a hedge, preparing myself to listen to the content of that conversation.
'So many suspected him of being excessively Francophile,' the voice continued, 'and yet he gave Melani a good drubbing. So now he passes for a moderate, equidistant between the French and the Spaniards.'
'Tis incredible how quickly a man's reputation can change,' echoed a second voice.
'Ah, yes. Of course, for the time being, it will not profit him much. He is far too young to be made pope. But everything is useful for keeping afloat, an art of which Albani is a past-master. Heh!'
I almost crawled behind the hedge, thus stalking unseen the pair who were out taking their morning walk. These were clearly two guests who had spent the night at the villa; they might, in all probability, be two cardinals, but their voices were, alas, not sufficiently familiar for me to be able to identify to whom they belonged. The reconnaissance was also made more difficult for me by the rustling of the nearby shrubs, which from time to time made perfect vigilance impossible.
'And what about the note they were passing to one another? Is what I was told yesterday true?'
'I checked and they told me that, yes, it was quite true. The parrot stole the message and went off to read it in his nest, heh! Albani did not show it, but he was desperate. He charged two of his servants with searching for the bird high and low, without showing themselves, for no one was to know how important the matter was. One of the two was, however, seen by the Major- Domo climbing up a tree in the garden and ingenuously explained to him what he was up to, so that the news was bruited abroad. No one knows where the bird is.'
Although I pricked up my ears as much as I was able to, I was unable to overhear anything else, for the hedge along which I was moving turned to the right, while the two turned off to the left. I remained a while crouching on the ground, waiting for the pair to move away. I was already recapitulating with secret euphoria all the urgent news to be reported to Atto: the Master Florist who had promised, however obliquely, to reveal to him all that he knew about the Tetrachion; Albani desperate at the loss of his note, which therefore did contain really precious information, for no one else's eyes; and lastly, the political speculation on the two altercations between Atto and Albani who, it seems, had, precisely as a result of this, rid himself of his uncomfortable reputation as a vassal of the French.
What I did not know was that I would not be telling him any of these things in the immediate future.
'… to read it in his nest, heh!'
