cottage. She was shivering with cold, and her rags, like those of the traveling poor of any century, were marked with the dust of the road. Her face looked thinner than I remembered it, and her hair had returned to the condition in which I had first seen it. Otherwise her appearance had changed very little in the two years since her desertion. She was leaning one hand on the wooden doorframe now, and the knuckles of the hand were white, as if she felt it necessary to grip something to keep from turning and trying to run away again.
I remember that as I looked at her my first reaction was only a curious numbness: all right, she is here. I looked past her then, and nodded a dismissal to the soldier who had brought her to the house. He went out behind her, and closed the door.
'Come in,' I said. But of course she was in already.
My wife and I considered each other in silence. I saw now that she had rags wrapped around her feet in place of shoes. Her shivering arms folded now beneath her breasts, she stood there waiting. I thought I could see in her face something of the same numbness that I felt myself.
'So.' That was my next attempt to start. The truth was that in recent months I had no longer spent much time dreaming of revenge. I think now as I look back, I really think, that the first feeling I began to have was a simple, uncomplicated relief—that I could now settle the thing between us, somehow, and after that I would no longer have to stay near Venice and work for Colleoni.
Helen asked: 'Have I your permission to sit down?' She was almost swaying on her feet, I saw. Certainly she sounded tired, or rather as if she had just been beaten, though I could see no bruises. Her voice had changed more than her appearance.
I gestured, and she sank into a chair, hands covering her eyes. 'I am giving myself up into your hands,' she said.
'I can see that.'
'Because I am too tired to run any longer. Too tired even to try to bargain with you. Just giving up, that's all.'
'I see.' But really I did not, and I puzzled over the matter for a few moments in silence. 'But what is there to bargain about? And why come to me at all? You are still young, still attractive. Surely you could find some protector who would take you in.'
Helen at first slumped in her chair. Then she straightened, raising reddened eyes. 'All right, Vlad. Maybe you really do not know. But I am too exhausted for any . . . so I am going to tell you. Perugino is one of the hostages your men have taken here. Now maybe I have damned both myself and him to hell by coming to you. I don't know. I can't tell any longer what I should be doing. I'm too tired and weak and hungry to know anything. I'm giving up.'
'Ah. Perugino.' I leaned back in my chair. The name had a strange sound on my lips; it had been a long time since I had spoken it. Actually I had never really looked at the hostages, only glimpsed the huddled gray mass of them from a distance. I suppose I had not wanted to look at them closely. My men had informed me how they were being held, under close guard in an otherwise empty barn just across the road from my borrowed house. There were a lot of empty barns in the country now. And now I wondered if I would have recognized Perugino had I seen him. My memory could no longer give me a clear image of what he had looked like, and anyway he might well have changed.
Helen spoke again, in the dead voice that was now hers. 'We have been on the move almost constantly. We have run from the soldiers, yours and others, and we have looked for work. Artisan's work, peasant's work, anything. From Rome to Venice, even to Milan. There I saw Sforza once, by accident. We were quite close, but he looked right through me without seeing, as if I were a ghost. Then we moved back to Venice again. Then out here. We have been living in the next village down the road.' Suddenly she put out a hand to grip my writing table's edge; she looked pale, as if she might be about to topple from her chair.
'You will need some food,' I said. And instead of calling in a servant, whose presence I did not want just then, I got up and began to look around for some myself.
'Yes, some food please. I need some. It was not easy for me to come here, Vlad. Vlad? I ask you to let him go.'
In a rucksack I found some bread, and brought it to her. It was dark bread, and stale as I recall, having been for some time left in the pack forgotten. We soldiers had enough. Helen took a couple of bites with animal hunger. Evidently her teeth were still good. I sat down again and watched her eat. Whatever vengeance I decided to pronounce upon her and her lover, it would have been foolish to try to gloat over her with it as she lay on my floor in a dead faint.
Chewing, she asked: 'The hostages are all going to be hanged, aren't they?'
'So it would seem. No one has yet come to us with the names of those who killed the mayor.'
'Is that why the hostages were taken? We did not even know.'
'Bah. You really expect me to believe that?'
'We in the next village, I mean. That is where Perugino and I have been living. The soldiers just came through, rounding up all the men that they could catch.'
I looked at Helen closely, decided that she was telling me the truth, and made a small sound of disgust. The village I was in, now that I thought about it, did look small to have provided so many hostage bodies. I was going to have to take some disciplinary action, hoping to instill in my squad leaders some glimmerings of intelligence.
Helen went on: 'There is always hanging, butchery of some kind, going on in these villages. I wonder that the people manage to grow any food at all.' When I did not answer, she was emboldened, and pressed on: 'You could let him go. It will not matter to you, will it, if there are twenty bodies hanging, or only nineteen?'
I thought to myself that it was hardly going to matter if there were twenty or none at all. Except of course to the twenty themselves, and to their families. And to leave the men alive might work a benefit to the land at large. But my words through some bitter perversity followed a different path than my thoughts.
'Maybe,' I said, 'I will be doing them all a favor by hanging them now. If I let them go, they will have a few more years of suffering in this Godforsaken country and then die anyway. Will Perugino be better off or worse off if I let him go?'
'I don't know, Vlad.' And I believed that she did not. But then she began to weep, sobbing so that she had to stop chewing on her bread. 'I don't know. But let him go. Please, please, let him go on living.'
'You still ask me not to hang him.'
'If you put it that way—then you are going to do something to him even more horrible. Oh, I knew it, I should never have come to you.' Yet hunger made her try to bite the bread again; she choked on it and went off into a fit of coughing. I got up from my chair again, to dipper some water for her from a pail.
'And suppose—just suppose—that I should let him go, entirely free? What would
Helen drank, and choked again, and drank a little more, and put off answering. Later she was to tell me that at this point in our interview she felt sure that I was only playing with her, mocking her, that at any moment the horrors would be announced, that I would call out for the torturers to enter. But I was not playing. I was much less certain than she was of what was going to happen next.
It occurred to me that what I really ought to do was hang Perugino, who was demonstrably guilty of something, and let the nineteen innocent clods go free. But then the guilty man's troubles would perhaps be over—a church-painter like him would be sure to make his peace with God before he reached the gallows—whereas the nineteen would be doomed to who knew how many more years of suffering. Well, that was the kind of mood that I was in.
The reader doubts, perhaps. I have and had a bloody reputation. How is it possible to prove today that I did not torture a certain wretch to death in 1467? Well, can the reader himself prove himself innocent of all crimes committed in that or any other given year? But, the reader protests, in 1467 he was not yet born. Let him prove that, too, say I. If I can live so long, then why not he or she?
Forgive me, gracious Mina. I am overwrought, with reliving things that have more power over me than I guessed they would, when I sat down to write.
Let me put it this way. Though it was claimed even then that I had ruled too harshly in my own land, I had never gone so far as to hang nineteen men who were not even suspected of any crime. And if, in the time when I was Prince, some officer of my realm had reported to me that he was carrying on an investigation in such wise, depopulating my land of healthy industrious peasants to no purpose, his own carcass might soon have been
