“Are you feeling quite well, Johnnie?”
John nodded. “My body is fine, but my heart; my heart… My God, look what they’ve done, Owen. The Spanish bastards. First, playing us as fools for years, and now this. Look at all the burned houses, the broken walls. It will be years-no, decades-in the fixing. Damn us, damn me, that I ever served the Spanish. If I could do it over again-”
“Calm now, Johnnie. As Isabella said, not all the Spanish meant to mislead us. Just as I doubt many of the Spaniards arrived in Rome thinking they’d do this-” He glanced in the direction of the decapitated bulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo.
“No, maybe this wasn’t what they intended, or even what they wanted, but they did it right enough anyhow, didn’t they?
Owen shook his head as the barge bumped to a stop against a row of hawsers and the warm-weather stink wafted down to them from where the effluent of the Cloaca Maximus dumped the city’s wastes into the Tiber. “Can’t say that we always made much better distinctions than the Spanish did during our own campaigning, Johnnie. I’m sure enough regretting things we did in the Provinces. Orders notwithstanding. Might well have been the same here.”
“Maybe,” said John, watching a half-dozen morion-helmeted occupiers stagger off in the direction of the Borgo, bottles of wine dangling loosely in their fingers. “But I’m not exactly sensing an undercurrent of regret.” He hopped over the low gunwale of the barge. “Have the men gather their gear and be ready.”
“Are we in a rush, John?”
“Aye. We need to find lodging, rest, and then move as soon as possible.”
“Why?”
“Why?” John looked around at the sagging skyline of Rome, the almost empty streets. “Because that damned battle-axe Isabella was right about something else: if the Spanish did this to a lovely old city, who knows what they might do to a lovely old priest like Luke Wadding?”
Once the door closed behind the invariably sour doctor, Frank turned to Giovanna. “See? I told you my fever was gone.”
Giovanna-small, dark, curvaceous, part-Madonna, part-hellion, and just starting to show-pouted. As only she could. “So. Very well. Maybe he is right.”
“He is a doctor,” Frank pointed out.
“He is a Spaniard and a tool of the Inquisition,” Giovanna countered.
“Okay, so he’s one of the bad guys, but he seems pretty conscientious. And besides, I think they want me well enough so they can move us again.”
She eyed the valises and chests that had been brought in during the doctor’s visit. “Because they gave us some containers in which to put our clothes?”
Frank shrugged. “That. But only partly. I was thinking more of the good doctor’s visits. Four in the past week, one of which was yesterday, and then today’s. That’s not just medical prudence; that’s a detailed assessment of our readiness to relocate. That’s why he wanted to examine you, too.”
“The pig. As if I would let-”
“I don’t think the Spanish brought any midwives with them, Gia. And I don’t think they’re going to permit any contact between us and the locals. They’ve created what we used to call an information firewall.”
Giovanna’s wonderful, alluring pout was back. “What does this mean, an ‘information firewall’?”
“It means that they are making sure that there’s no communication between us and the outside world. I’ll bet even the guards are specially selected for this duty: probably bunked apart from the others, so that there’s no word of us even in barracks gossip-which frequently winds up repeated in bordellos.”
Giovanna’s head rose to a condemning (if modest) height upon her shoulders. “And how would you know what transpires in bordellos, husband?”
“I read about it. In books. A long time ago. Before I hit puberty. When I was thinking of becoming a priest.” She couldn’t help but smile. “Is that okay, then?”
“Just barely,” she allowed, and then curled up against him like a cat that has decided to use its favorite person as a private cocoon.
After they had enjoyed that closeness for a few minutes, Frank stirred a bit. “Hey. I’d better start packing.”
“You? And what makes you think you are ready to pack chests and valises?”
“Gia, I’m not a cripple-”
“No, but you could be!” She got off him like a cat, too: one fast jump and she was four feet away, glaring down, hands on hips. “You will not put weight on your leg. Not yet. No, do not argue. This is not open to discussion.” And with that, she turned her back on him sharply and set about the task of packing their sparse belongings with an energy that would have put a sugar-infused ten-year-old to shame. After a time, once her histrionic ire had abated a bit, she asked over one hurrying shoulder. “Why do you think they are moving us again?”
Frank shrugged and put his arms behind his head. “Not sure.”
“Do you think it is to make us harder to find? Are they playing a version of-what have you called it? — the shell game?”
“Yeah, but every time we get moved, it calls attention to us. And why move us during the day?”
“I do not know. Could they mean to advertise our presence in Rome?”
“I don’t know.” Frank sat up, feeling irritability attach itself to him like a small dog that had affixed itself to his trouser leg. “Damn it, I just don’t know anything, sitting here. Which is the worst part of being a prisoner. It’s not so much that you can’t get out, but that you have no knowledge of what’s going on out there-” he waved a hand at a wall “-and no way to let them know that you’re in here. Wherever ‘here’ is. It makes me feel, well-I don’t know: helpless.”
“Well, you are not helpless. You must be strong, so first you had to regain your health. And you have accomplished that. Almost.”
“Yeah, well I’m not as strong as you, yet.”
“Of course not. You never will be. I am a woman. Except for your arms and chest, we are in all ways the stronger sex. We can endure far more than you can.”
Frank discovered that the way she said it-gaze imperious, head and shoulders back, and therefore, other anatomical highlights thrust forward-had been at least as arousing as it had been informative. Almost before he was aware of it, Frank’s body pushed forward its own, suddenly awakened anatomical highlights.
Giovanna noticed the reaction with a smile. “We can endure more of that, too. Much more.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Stop! Stay where you are! You will not move! Not without your crutches. And if you are very cooperative, I may agree to test your-endurance-tonight. All in the interest of ensuring your return to health, of course.”
“Of course.” He loved it when she smiled that way: the sweetness of an angel infected by the leer of a demon. And a hotter temper than the two put together. But it wasn’t just temper: it was passion. Passion “Frank! No! And I mean it! Now, we must think what to do after you have made your recovery.”
“What to do?” He looked at the walls. They were clean, with some reasonably comfortable pieces of furniture pushed up against them. But they were still prison walls. “I think it will take us a pretty long time to tunnel out of any prison. Hey, maybe that’s why they move us, to make sure we don’t make too much progress digging our way out with the soup spoons we’ve cleverly hidden from our warders…”
Giovanna grinned widely and Frank decided, for probably the third time that day, that he really did love her wide, full, lips. “Very funny, Frank. You do have a way with words.” She thought. “Which is probably the next thing you should be doing.”
“What?”
“Writing. For the cause.”
Frank stared at her. At times, she was very much activist Antonio Marcoli’s daughter: passionate, charismatic, and wildly impractical. “Uh…Gia, assuming I could even get writing materials, just how do you expect me to get the word to the waiting masses?”
She ignored his gentle facetiousness, rode over it with a raised chin. “The greatest revolutionary tracts have often been written by person unjustly imprisoned by an oppressive state.”
