Carmagnola put himself in his way. “Ah, but wait, Bellarion …”
“Tomorrow,” Bellarion’s voice was hard and peremptory. “By then your wits may be cooler and clearer. If you will all gather here at noon, you shall learn my plans. Good night.” And he went out.
They gathered there, not at noon on the morrow, but an hour before that time, summoned by messages from Carmagnola, who was the last to arrive and a prey to great excitement. Belluno, da Tenda, Stoffel, and three other officers awaited him with the Princess and the Marquis Gian Giacomo. Bellarion was not present. He had not been informed of the gathering, for reasons which Carmagnola’s first words made clear to all.
When Bellarion did arrive, punctually at noon, for the council to which he had bidden the captains, he was surprised to find them already seated about the table in debate and conducting this with a vehemence which argued that matters had already gone some way. Their voices raised in altercation reached him as he mounted the short flight of stone steps, at the foot of which a half-dozen men of Belluno’s company were lounging.
A silence fell when he entered, and all eyes at once were turned upon him. He smiled a greeting, and closed the door. But as he advanced, he began to realise that the sudden silence was unnatural and ominous.
He came to the foot of the table, where there was a vacant place. He looked at the faces on either side of it, and lastly at Carmagnola seated at its head, between Valeria and Gian Giacomo.
“What do you debate here?” he asked them.
Carmagnola answered him. His voice was hard and hostile; his blue eyes avoided the steady glance of Bellarion’s.
“We were about to send for you. We have discovered the traitor who is communicating with Theodore of Montferrat, forewarning him of our every measure, culminating in last night’s business.”
“That is something, although it comes at a time when it can no longer greatly matter. Who is your traitor?”
None answered him for a long moment. Saving Stoffel, who was flushed and smiling disdainfully, and the Princess whose eyes were lowered, they continued to stare at him and he began to mislike their stare. At last, Carmagnola pushed towards him a folded square of parchment bearing a broken seal.
“Read that.”
Bellarion took it, and turned it over. To his surprise he found it superscribed “To the Magnificent Lord Bellarion Cane, Prince of Valsassina.” He frowned, and a little colour kindled in his cheeks. He threw up his head, stern-eyed. “How?” he asked. “Who breaks the seals of a letter addressed to me?”
“Read the letter,” said Carmagnola, peremptorily.
Bellarion read:
Dear Lord and Friend, your fidelity to me and my concerns saved Vercelli last night from a blow that in its consequences might have led to our surrender, for without your forewarning we should assuredly have been taken by surprise. I desire you to know my recognition of my debt, and to assure you again of the highest reward that it lies in my power to bestow if you continue to serve me with the same loyal devotion.
Bellarion looked up from the letter with some anger in his face, but infinitely more contempt and even a shade of amusement.
“Where was this thing manufactured?” he asked.
Carmagnola’s answer was prompt. “In Vercelli, by the Marquis Theodore. It is in his own hand, as madonna here has testified, and it is sealed with his own seal. Do you wonder that I broke it?”
Sheer amazement overspread Bellarion’s face. He looked at the Princess, who fleetingly looked up to answer the question in his glance. “The hand is my uncle’s, sir.”
He turned the parchment over, and conned the seal with its stag device. Then the amazement passed out of his face, light broke on it, and he uttered a laugh. He turned, pulled up a stool, and sat down at the table’s foot, whence he had them all under his eye.
“Let us proceed with method. How did this letter reach you, Carmagnola?”
Carmagnola waved to Belluno, and Belluno, hostile of tone and manner, answered the question. “A clown coming from the direction of the city blundered into my section of the lines this morning. He begged to be taken to you. My men naturally brought him to me. I questioned him as to what he desired with you. He answered that he bore a message. I asked him what message he could be bearing to you from Vercelli. He refused to answer further, whereupon I threatened him, and he produced this letter. Seeing its seal, I took both the fellow and the letter to my Lord Carmagnola.”
Bellarion, himself, completed the tale. “And Carmagnola perceiving that seal took it upon himself to break it, and so discovered the contents to be what already he suspected.”
“That is what occurred.”
Bellarion, entirely at his ease, looked at them with amused contempt, and finally at Carmagnola in whose face he laughed.
“God save you, Carmagnola! I often wonder what will be the end of you.”
“I am no longer wondering what will be the end of you,” he was furiously answered, which only went to increase his amusement.
“And you others, you were equally deceived. The letter and Carmagnola’s advocacy of my falseness and treachery were not to be resisted?”
“I have not been deceived,” Stoffel protested.
“I was not classing you with those addled heads, Stoffel.”
“It will need more than abuse to clear you,” Tenda warned him angrily.
“You, too, Ugolino! And you, madonna, and even you Lord Marquis! Well, well! It may need more than abuse to clear me; but surely not more than this letter. Falsehood is in every line of it, in the superscription, in the seal itself.”
“How, sir?” the Princess asked him. “Do you insist that it is forged?”
“I have your word that it is not. But read the letter again.”
He tossed it to them. “The Marquis Theodore
