The pride of the place was the library, a spacious square chamber in one of the rectangular towers that rose at each of the four corners of the castle. The floor was of coloured mosaics, figuring birds and beasts, the ceiling of ultramarine star-flecked in gold, and along the walls was ranged a collection of some nine hundred manuscript parchment volumes bound in velvet and damask, or in gold and silver brocades. Their contents contained all that was known of theology, astrology, medicine, music, geometry, rhetoric, and the other sciences. This room was the favourite haunt of the lonely, morose, and studious boy, the great Gian Galeazzo’s younger son, Filippo Maria Visconti, Count of Pavia.
He sat there now, by the log fire that hissed and spluttered and flamed on the cavernous hearth, diffusing warmth and a fragrance of pine throughout the chamber. And with him at chess sat the Lord Bellarion Cane, Count of Gavi, one of the newfound friends who had invaded his loneliness, and broken through the savage shyness which solitude and friendlessness had set about him like a shell.
The others, the dark and handsome Countess of Biandrate, the fair and now almost ethereal Princess of Montferrat, and that sturdier counterpart of herself, her brother, were in the background by one of the two-light windows with trefoil arches springing from slender monials.
The Princess was bending low over a frame, embroidering in red and gold and blue an altar-cloth for San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro. The Countess was yawning over a beautifully illuminated copy of Petrarch’s “Trionfo d’Amore”. The boy sat idle and listless between them, watching his sister’s white tapering fingers as they flashed to and fro.
Presently he rose, sauntered across to the players, drew up a stool, and sat down to watch the game over which they brooded silently.
A crutch lay beside Bellarion, and his right leg was thrust out stiff and unbending, to explain why he sat here on this day of late December playing chess, whilst the campaign against Malatesta continued to rage in the hills of Bergamo. He was suffering the penalty of the pioneer. Having already demonstrated to his contemporaries that infantry, when properly organised and manoeuvred, can hold its own in the field against cavalry, he had been turning his attention to artillery. Two months ago he had mounted a park of guns under the walls of Bergamo with the intention of breaching them. But at the outset of his operations a bombard had burst, killing two of his bombardiers and breaking his thigh, thus proving Facino’s contention that artillery was a danger only to those who employed it.
The physician Mombelli, who still continued in Facino’s train, had set the bone, whereafter Bellarion had been carefully packed into a mule litter, and by roads, which torrential rains had reduced to quagmires, he had been despatched to Pavia to get himself mended. His removal from the army was regretted by everybody with two exceptions: Carmagnola, glad to be relieved of a brother captain by comparison with whose military methods his own were constantly suffering in the general esteem; and Filippo Maria, when he discovered in Bellarion a chess-player who was not only his equal but his master, and who in other ways won the esteem of that very friendless boy. The Princess Valeria was dismayed that this man, who out of unconquerable prejudice she continued to scorn and mistrust, should become for a season her fellow inquiline. And it was in vain that Gian Giacomo, who in the course of his reformation had come to conceive a certain regard for Bellarion, sought to combat his sister’s deep-rooted prejudice.
When he insisted that it was by Bellarion’s contriving that he had been removed from his uncle’s control, she had been moved to vehement scorn of his credulity.
“That is what the trickster would have us think. He no more than carried out the orders of the Count of Biandrate. His whole life bears witness to his false nature.”
“Nay, now, Valeria, nay. You’ll not deny that he is what all Italy now proclaims him: one of the greatest captains of his time.”
“And how has he made himself that? Is it by knightly qualities, by soldierly virtues? All the world knows that he prevails by guile and trickery.”
“You’ve been listening to Carmagnola,” said her brother. “He would give an eye for Bellarion’s skill.”
“You’re but a boy,” she reminded him with some asperity.
“And Carmagnola, of course, is a handsome man.”
She crimsoned at the sly tone. On odd visits to Pavia, Carmagnola had been very attentive to the Princess, employing all a peacock’s arts of self-display to dazzle her.
“He is an honest gentleman,” she countered hotly. “It is better to trust an upright, honest soldier than a sly schemer whose falsehood has been proven to us.”
“If he schemes my ruin for my uncle’s profit, he goes about it oddly, neglecting opportunities.”
She looked at him with compassion. “Bellarion never aims where he looks. It is the world says that of him, not I.”
“And at what do you suspect that he is aiming now?”
Her deep eyes grew thoughtful. “What if he serves our uncle to destroy us, only so that in the end he may destroy our uncle to his own advantage? What if he should aim at a throne?”
Gian Giacomo thought the notion fantastic, the fruit
