“Why Count Spigno was dressed, I cannot say. My own condition was the result of accident. I had been to court last night. I returned late, and I was tired. I fell asleep in a chair, and slept until the uproar aroused me.”
Bellarion fancied that the Regent’s glance approved him. But the Podestà slowly shook his head.
“A convenient tale,” he sneered, “but lame. Can you do no better?”
“Can any man do better than the truth?” demanded Bellarion firmly, and in the circumstances impudently. “You ask me to explain things that are outside my knowledge.”
“We shall see.” The tone was a threat. “The hoist has often been known to stimulate a man’s memory and to make it accurate.”
“The hoist?” Bellarion’s spirit trembled, for all that his mien preserved its boldness. He looked again at the Regent, this time for succour. The Regent was whispering to Messer Aliprandi, and almost at once the Orator of Milan leaned forward to address the Podestà.
“My I speak a word in your court, my lord?”
The Podestà turned to him in some surprise. It was not often that an ambassador intervened in the trial of a rogue accused of theft and murder.
“At your good pleasure, my lord.”
“With submission, then, may I beg that, considering the identity claimed by this prisoner and the relationship urged with his magnificence the Count of Biandrate, the proceedings against him be suspended until this identity shall have been tested by ordinary means?”
The ambassador paused. The Podestà, supreme autocrat of justice, had thrown up his head, resentful of such very definite interference. But before he could answer, the Regent was adding the weight of his support to the Orator’s request.
“However unusual this may be, Messer de’ Ferraris,” he said, in his quiet, cultured voice, “you will realise with me that if the prisoner’s identity prove to be as he says, and if his present position should be the result of a chain of unfortunate circumstances, we should by proceeding to extremes merely provoke against Montferrat the resentment of our exalted friend the Count of Biandrate.”
Thus was it demonstrated to Bellarion how much may hang upon a man’s wise choice of a parent.
The Podestà bowed his head. There was a moment’s silence before he spoke.
“By what means is it proposed that the accused’s pretended identity shall be tested?”
It was Bellarion who spoke. “I had a letter from the Abbot of the Grazie of Cigliano, which this Lorenzaccio stole from me, but which the officer …”
“We have that letter,” the Podestà interrupted, his voice harsh. “It says nothing of your paternity, and for the rest it can prove nothing until you prove how it was acquired!”
“He claims,” Aliprandi interposed again, “to come from the Convent of the Grazie of Cigliano, where Messer Facino Cane placed him some years ago. It should not be difficult, nor greatly delay the satisfaction of justice, to seek at the convent confirmation of his tale. If it is confirmed, let one of the fathers who knows him attend here to say whether this is the same man.”
The Podestà combed his beard in silence. “And if so?” he inquired at last.
“Why, then, sir, your mind will be delivered at least of the prejudice created by this young man’s association with a bandit. And you will be in better case to judge his share in last night’s events.”
There, to the general disappointment, ended for the moment the odd affair of Bellarion Cane, which in the disclosures it foreshadowed had promised such unusual entertainment.
The Regent remained in court after Bellarion’s removal, lest it be supposed that his interest in the administration of justice had been confined to that case alone. But Messer Aliprandi withdrew, as did most of those others who came from the palace, and amongst them, pale and troubled, went the Princess Valeria. To Dionara she vented something of her dismay and anger.
“A thief, a spy, a murderer,” she said. “And I trusted him that he might ruin all my hopes. I have the wages of a fool.”
“But if he were what he claims to be?” Monna Dionara asked her.
“Would that make him any less what he is? He was sent to spy on me, that he might discover what was plotting. My heart told me so. Yet to the end I heeded rather his own false tongue.”
“But if he were a spy, why should he have urged you to break off relations with these plotters?”
“So that he might draw from me a fuller revelation of my intentions. It was he who murdered Spigno; Spigno the shrewdest, the most loyal and trustworthy of them all. Spigno upon whom I depended to curb their recklessness and yet to give them audacity in season. And this vile creature of my uncle’s has murdered him.” Her eyes were heavy with unshed tears.
“But if so, why was he arrested?”
“An accident. That was not in the reckoning. I went to see how they would deal with that. And I saw.”
Madonna Dionara’s vision, however, was less clear, or else clearer.
“Yet I do not understand why he should murder the Count.”
“Do you not?” The Princess laughed a little, quite mirthlessly. “It is not difficult to reconstruct the happening. Spigno was dressed, and so was he. Spigno suspected him, and followed him last night to watch him. The scoundrel’s bold appearance at court was his one mistake, his inexplicable imprudence. Spigno taxed him with it on his return, pressed him, perhaps, with questions that unmasked him, and so to save his own skin this Bellarion slew the Count. Why else are the others all
