Rosa vanished. They were standing there, then they were gone.
`My God!' Maria Louise said. `Did you see the lust-on that girl's face?'
`That was real, yearning love not lust,' the marchesa answered sharply.
`They look very much the same to me, then.'
`It's all in the mind, dear, of course. Love is actually ' more subjective than lust, although it may be the other way round: What shall you wear tonight?'
`The very, very low bodice, I think.' I coughed lightly to remind them that, a cardinal of the Church was in the room with them; but they carried on as if I were not.
`Excellent,' her mother replied. `Sigismund is a painfully obvious man. His father passed it on.'
As they dressed for dinner with Sigismund, the marchesa said,
`Tonight you must be the Ice Queen.'
`Yes, mama.'
`It is the only way to hold his attention which is so easy to get. Be friendly – in the way you would show respect to a poisonous snake – but he must understand that you are as attracted to him as a man as you might be to a plate of four-day old fish.'
`Knowing that one day he will turn me into a volcano,' Maria Louise grinned.
`Not with this one. You stay solid ice for ever with Sigismund. It's the only leverage: He is a fool.'
`What else is he like?'
'He isn't like anything. He is a fool. Tall, quite vain, about forty-five. The same age as Cossa. All you do is stay as beautiful as you are, play the Ice Queen, and we'll have him trussed up before the night is over.'
Maria Louise had forsaken blondeness so effective in Italy, when she moved to Germany. Now she wore silver hair arranged as chastely, as money around her lovely bold-boned' face, which grouped itself for greatest effect around the thrusting nose that all the marchesa's daughters had received from their mother, and a soft swollen mouth which seemed preoccupied with the uses of lovemaking. Her body like her mother's; created myths in the minds of men. She was her mother's work of art.
A captain of the Fourth Hungarian Hussars arrived promptly to take us to Sigismund; He was tall and spare, heavily rouged and tightly corseted. As we rode out to meet the king, the captain told them how he longed to see Italy. He had heard so much about Italy, he said, that he did not think he would be able to control himself when he finally got there.
`You appreciate fine sculpture, then?' the marchesa asked.'
`Yes. Ah, I know what you mean.'
`You speak good German for a Hungarian.'
`We must, you know. Very soon, Sigismund will rule the empire.' `You will be a colonel before you know it.'
He smiled from deep, below his moustache. `I would rather be in Italy before I know it.'
Rosa and Pippo Span were seated on either side of the ladies when the king entered the room, because he had decided he wanted to be able to single out Rosa at once and observe her, a glow from having abandoned herself to Pippo. It was a rather small sitting room even for a lodge. Sigismund was dressed in leather with great boots and many straps and a short jacket. His hair was straw-blond, his beard parted, and he balanced such moustaches that the marchesa remarked later to Maria Louise that she feared hunting falcons had made nests within them. The heroic moustaches distracted somewhat from the mottle of his pudding face, drew attention away from his ever-shifting eyes and the constant licking of his purple pendulous lips.
I sat slightly apart from the others as a matter of duty to my station. The king charged, across the room to greet me, all at once laying the heavy courtier ready to prostrate himself before a representative of holiness. I extended my ring. He kissed it like a lover, then gazed perfervidly into my eyes, saying, `My life shall be given to Christ's work.' Having observed the routine social requirements, he turned to the ladies, arms outstretched, fingers fluttering with eagerness. `How enchanting that you have made your way across the Alps to let us see you,' he sang. `The mother and sister of our dearest friend's own beloved.' The ladies' curtsied with stately balance, while Maria Louise did stare at him as if he were a plate of four-day-old fish. The effect on Sigismund was dynamic. He hovered over them. Maria Louise ostentatiously shook him off, rewarding him with a glare of pale distaste. It was aphrodisiac to Sigismund.
We were served a dinner which balanced massive portions of Hungarian, Bohemian, Austrian and Swiss food. There were many kinds of dumplings, Tokay wine, smoked meat soup, segedinsky gulas loaded with lard, sauerkraut and flour, then cokoladovy, arechovy and darazsfeszek, because the king had a famous sweet tooth. I didn't think the food was at all bad. Rose and Pippo Span were careful to eat none of it. The marchesa held to what etiquette and he; figure demanded. The king gorged himself Maria Louise treated all the food as disdainfully as she regarded the king, as if it were covered with ants.
`You don't like Hungarian food?' the king asked her.
`Oh, yes.' From her look, she pitied him that-he could think this proper Hungarian food.
`This was cooked by the great Georgi Marton, the magician of Buda.''
She refused to comment lest toads, pour from her mouth.
`But tonight there has also been Bohemian food and delectable Austrian food.' He could not fathom this woman such a sensually beautiful woman, the kind of a woman who should have lifted her skirts and reclined on her back when the turnings of life's byways had brought her to a monarch who was so deliciously a man.
`Delicious,' she repeated, as if reading his thoughts, as if trying g not to gag. To the king, the hopelessness of it was that he could not be sure whether it was the food or himself which had almost made her gag. Perhaps in order to regroup before attacking again, the king fell into conversation with me, directly across the table.
`Well, Eminence. What is our pope going to do about John Hus?'
`I will inquire about that,' I said.
`Well! The man is a brigand of the Bohemian church, one might almost say a heretic, don't you know. His statements concerning the archbishop are really seditious and I really do think the Holy Father is advised to silence the man. He is causing unnecessary problems in Prague. This concerns me because any moment now I shall be crowned King of Bohemia.'
`His Holiness is studying the Hus case closely, Majesty,' the, marchesa said. `And you may be certain of the outcome.' She glanced at me in a way which, had I been John Hus, would have had me packing and fleeing.
`Pippo tells me that you are a close- uh -adviser to His Holiness,' Sigismund said to the marchesa.
`Hardly that, Majesty. The pope is very much his own man, but because he is such a devoutly religious person, one might say immersed in the spiritual meanings and theology, as is in, the nature of the greatest popes because I travel so much and he does not travel at all – he sometimes asks me to bring to him my impressions of people I have met and what they, have told me.'
`What will you tell him about me, dear lady?'
`I shall tell him how deliciously handsome you are.'
Sigismund attempted to chuckle, thinking with satisfaction that this beautiful woman's response proved he had not been turned into a turd as her daughter would have it. To, present yet another facet of his multi-hued person, he fell at once into gravity, at the mention of the Church, and it blotted all intelligence out of his expression. `I am so terribly concerned about the Church, Eminence. My father – as history shows us – set his life upon reuniting the Church with the Greeks. The goal of one church has been my grail. My father is gone from history but the seamless garment of Christ is rent by heinous schism. It is my sworn task to shatter that schism, to unite Christensdom under one pope.'
When Pippo Span had told him that the marchesa and I were close to Pope John: Sigismund being an instinctive opportunist, had automatically determined to make the political maximum out of meeting us so he had gulped down some Tokay and become instantly pious.
`His Holiness is one with you, Majesty,' the marchesa assured him. `The Holy Father would gladly give his life to banish the schism from the Church.'
Sigismund blinked at her. `He would?'
'A very pleasant climate here at Chur, don't you think, Majesty?'
`Climate? My dear marchesa' You imply that I was feigning concern about the schism! Please, let me assure you that, if it is necessary to convince you of the icy seriousness of my intent to destroy the schism, I will open a
