The Silver Devil

  HIS HEAD WAS PILLOWED ON MY HAIR, TRAPPING ME EVEN IN SLEEP.

  He looked almost like a boy, but there was nothing adolescent in the sprawled beauty of his naked body. Then, asT watched, a crease of tension marred his smooth brow. His head moved rest­lessly, and he began to shift and murmur in the grip of some nightmare. Sweat started out on his forehead and little animal sounds began to come from his throat; then he began to talk, and I realized he was talking to his dream.

  "You lie. . . . You are damned for what you did after. I only meant to silence you, to stop your eternal preaching. You said you loved me—why haunt me, then? It was a boy's trick, I tell you. . . . I did not mean you to be dead. . . . Let me alone. . . . Tell them. . . . For God's love, close your eyes!"

  It was the scream of an animal, and the sheet ripped under his clawing fingers as he shuddered into wakefulness. His hand groped across the bed as though to assure himself that this and not his dream was reality.

  "Felicia . . ."

  First published in Great Britain by

  Futura Publications Limited in 1978

  Copyright © 1978 by Teresa Denys

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  ISBN 0-345-28992-7

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  CLS 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  First Ballantine Books Edition: June 1984

  To Cyril and Alan

  without whom none

  of it would have

  been written

  Author's Note

  This book is set in the year 1605. The Dukedom of Cabria is, of course, fictitious, but it may be presumed to lie along the east coast of Italy, just north of the Kingdom of Naples, and to have formed part of the Papal States before the insurrection of 1555.

  At about this time the Papal Mint at Ancona was seized, and a member of the della Rovere family used it to produce his own coinage in defiance of the pope. This incident has been used as the starting point of the story that follows.

  Prologue

  The voice under my window was complaining of the heat.

  I must have been half-asleep when I heard it, for in the moment before my eyes opened, I thought I was back in my room at the Eagle. The thin, clear sound rising from the courtyard outside made me forget the stuffy chamber and the whisperings around my bed; for an instant I was back in the little room over the inn sign, and the chatter of guests and servants was rising from below like flies disturbed in summer.

  I lay listening—half-expecting to hear Celia bawl my name—then the tautening of my body disturbed the child so that it stirred again in my womb, and I groaned and opened my eyes.

  At once reality came flooding back. It was dark here, despite the sunshine outside; torches had been burning for hours around the bed, and the heat was almost unbearable. Lying flat on my back, I could scarcely breathe—no air penetrated the bed-curtains, and my hair clung to my wet forehead. The whisper­ing all around me sounded like the mockery of a breeze.

  As the voices below died away, I could sense the eyes watching me, waiting for the child to come, and I longed for them to leave me alone. The scent of them, musk and amber and civet to mask the rottenness, was stifling. I closed my eyes to try to blot them from my mind—to think of anything but their presence and the unendurable heat. . . .

  Chapter One

  It had been as hot as this the summer it began. All Fidena stank. The fetid smell from the bay, where ships lay beached and their cargoes rotted for want of men to unload them, mingled with human sweat and filth in the dust-laden air. Flies and maggots bred, and the wind was sickly with the expecta­tion of plague. Men lay down in the streets and died, and their neighbors would not touch the bodies, not even to drag them out of the all-consuming sun.

  It was the sort of heat that breeds discontent in men's minds, that slows a man's blood and quickens his temper so that the city simmers like a pot close to boiling. But I had scant leisure then to measure Fidena's temper, for that year my brother, Antonio, married Celia Danoli and my life began to change.

  There was little love in their marriage; they were as sharp with each other as they were with me, and they squabbled more like ill-matched business partners than like husband and wife. Antonio saw only the glory of being landlord of so fine an inn as the Eagle; Celia saw only the work and the money her labors might fetch her. They only united in two things—in their greed and in their dislike of me.

  Antonio had always been ashamed of me. When I was a child, I sensed it long before I knew why, and Celia loathed me from the instant she set eyes on me. She had matched beneath her in marrying an innkeeper, and my very existence irked her like an open sore. She was forever railing at me for my bastardy as though it were a witting crime; and, like Antonio, she never wearied of telling me how lucky I was to have been given a home after the way my mother used my foster father. No drudgery of mine, no humiliation, could ever repay that kindness. And because all they said held a kernel of truth, I had to bear it in silence.

  I never knew who my father was. At his coming, my mother had been long married to Battista Guardi, the keeper of an unkempt tavern under the city wall and a man too fond of his own wares to make a success of selling them. Her life with him had been a hard one, and I think that when Antonio was born after many fruitless births and showed every sign of growing up like his father, she quietly gave up hope of happiness. But however it was, when my father came and went in a single night and left her carrying a bastard child, nothing would make her tell his name. Perhaps she never knew it.

  Battista tried all he knew to make her tell—beatings, cursings, even hauling her before the priest—but she never spoke of it to anyone. She carried me uncom-plainingly, and after I was born she sheltered me as well as she could from the worst of her husband's animosity.

  The priest had persuaded Battista to shelter the fruits of his wife's sin, and while I was very young, I thought his black looks were disappointment that I was not a boy. It was not until my mother died that I heard the word bastard for the first time.

  Antonio took pains to explain to me, before my mother's funeral was well over, that I could no longer expect to be treated as a daughter of the house. With brutal simplicity he told me why I could claim no kinship with the man I called Father. He himself, he said roughly, was my half-brother and no more; if I did not want to feel his hand I was not to call him Brother from that hour. If I were humble and grateful and worked as hard as I could, I might stay on in the house— otherwise he washed his hands of me.

  I was not ten years old then and had no idea what the words meant—I only knew that my mother was dead and now I stood to lose the only home I had ever known. So, sobbing, I agreed to Antonio's terms and set myself to be humble and grateful.

  It was hard, but not so hard as learning to accept that my very presence was a shame to my father and brother—or, as I must learn to say, stepfather and half-brother. I was taught swiftly that I could never expect to be the equal of those who called themselves legitimate, and that if God hated one sin above all others, it was that of ingratitude—or so Antonio said. I kept my bargain, amply respecting the work, and did all I could to keep the squalid inn as clean as my mother had done. At first Battista paid a woman to cook for us, but as he began to drink more and the money declined, that t
ask, too, fell to me. There were nights when I dropped onto my straw pallet so worn out that not even his drunken snores could wake me.

  The burden of his loathing was the hardest thing of all to bear, and as I grew older, the injustice of it made me angry and frightened. It seemed at times that all my life I was to be blamed for something that was not my fault. He would watch me for hours at a time under scowling brows so that nervous­ness made me clumsy, and then the least fault was an excuse for him to use his belt on me. Once, smarting from an unex­pected blow, I demanded to know why he should hate me so, and if I had not been fleeter footed than he, I think he would have killed me. My mother had been dead for seven years when Battista broke his neck in a drunken brawl, and I felt nothing but a great relief when I knew he was dead.

  It was the next Christmas, when the household came out of mourning, that Antonio married Celia, the daughter of a pros­perous vintner. It was generally held to be a good match—Celia's shrewish tongue was said to have frightened as many wooers as were drawn by her rich dowry, but then Antonio was no Adonis, with his red fleshy face and drunkard's belly. Nevertheless I was amazed. I knew his taste ran to plump, dark women, like the apothecary's sister in the next street; Celia was square and sturdy, with a face to turn milk sour and hair that was a bright, unlikely butter yellow. But he seemed happy enough with his choice, and I understood why when he told me he had bought the Eagle with her marriage portion.

  The Eagle stood in the Via Croce in the center of the city, between the marketplace and the Cathedral of San Domenico, and it was one of the most prosperous businesses in Fidena. Antonio, I thought, must have been more than willing to abide the gold of his wife's hair for the sake of the gold in her marriage chest.

  I never knew what arguments he used to persuade her that I should stay with them, unless he appealed to her thrift and won her consent with the bait of a servant who would work without wages; when the bridal couple left the old house and took possession of the Eagle, I went with them, duly grateful for my good fortune. But the change which spelled prosperity for the Guardi family fortunes was to have consequences for me that I did not dream of.

  The changes came thick and fast. Celia's hatred of me was causeless, a thing that neither of us could help, and she tor­mented me as a cat will chase a bird, for no reason. We were barely installed in the Via Croce when the pattern of my days began to alter.

  I had thought I worked hard in the old house, but now my tasks multiplied past count. All day I was cleaning and scrubbing, scouring pans amid the stink of rancid cooking oil, or at work in the stillroom, out of sight of the Eagle's guests.

  At first I did not realize what was happening. I was so grateful to rest at the end of the day's labors that I paid no heed to the way the other servants looked at me, nor did I notice that they seldom spoke to me. It never entered my thoughts that I did not go among the guests as they did, that I was shut away from the general world like a leper.

  One morning in spring, I was in the kitchen, polishing Antonio's best platter and peering curiously at my reflection, bent and wavering in the hammered metal. It was a vague, pale shadow, with long black hair and queer gray eyes—like and yet unlike the image I remembered. I could not think what was different until my gaze dropped and I saw my bare arm next to Celia's at my elbow. My skin had grown as white as a cloistered nun's.

  Without thinking, I asked, "Celia, why do I never go out?"

  She had been chopping meat with quick, decisive movements, and the rhythmic clack of the knife hardly faltered when I spoke. When at last she paused, it was not at me she looked but at the platter in my hands.

  "Have you finished? You have been long enough about it!"

  "No, not yet. I . . ."

  "Then stop chattering and do not waste my time!"

  "I want to know why I do not go out."

  I stood stubbornly still, the platter held in front of me like a shield. I had never defied her before, and my heart was beating fast as she put down the knife and turned to face me. In that moment I saw she had been half expecting the question; there was no trace of surprise in her face, only a kind of wary hostility.

  "I do not know what you mean." Her voice was toneless.

  "You must know. I am not dreaming it!" I was almost stammering, but I struggled to speak steadily. "The only time I leave the house is to go to Mass—I never thought of it before!"

  "And what makes you think of it now?" Celia's mouth was hard; she was watching me as though I were an enemy.

  In answer I held out my hands, red and raw but without a trace of sunburning. "My skin was as brown as yours when we first came here—I have not gone freely into the sun since you wedded Antonio. Before we lived here, I ran errands for our neighbors—fetched wine to old man Fracci . . ."

  "That old sot!"

  ". . . but here I do not know who our neighbors are, and if any in the Via Croce know me, it is a wonder, for I never set eyes upon them. We have lived here for months and . . ."

  "Not three months yet, be quiet! What should we do then? Hold a grand feast and invite the rich merchants in the Via Croce to come and pay court to our precious bastard sister?"

  The blood stung my cheeks with the humiliation I could never control. "No, I did not mean that. But I never go outside for all that. I might as well be in a nunnery."

  "The best place for you!" Celia spoke with sudden venom, and I was startled by the spite on her face. "Rest assured that if one of the sisterhoods would have taken you without a fat dowry, you would have been chanting hymns by now. But we cannot squander good money on paying the nuns to take you, so here you stay until you find your way to the other sort! And that will be soon enough, I warrant."

  "I would not go to a brothel, if that is what you mean."

  "So you say, but blood will tell. Your mother was a whore, and God in heaven knows who your fine father may be. We do our best, I and Antonio, to keep you out of the bawdy house and get nothing but abuse for our pains. Well, go out if you are so hot to go—go and stay out, and ply your trade in the stews, where you belong! Never say I mewed you up against your will!"

  I hardly heard the last of what she said; I was trembling with anger.

  "My mother was not a whore."

  "Oh, I cry you mercy!" Celia put her hands on her ample hips, her light eyes hard and bright. "Do I wrong her spotless memory? For sure, she was a priceless piece of virtue, faithful and loving to her husband—that is why you look so much like Antonio that strangers think he keeps a drab!" The hatred in her eyes was terrifying. "Do you think I do not hear the questions? 'Doesn't Mistress Guardi care . . . ?' 'Is it true, so soon after the wedding . . . ?' I tell you, I have borne it long enough! You keep out of sight as long as I bid you, my fine madam, and thank God that I give you a roof over your head—I will not let the rich folk know that we lodge a by-blow in the house!"

  "I will not stay here if you do not want me." My voice was a dry whisper. "I will find a place. . . ."

  "You do not leave this house!" Her hand caught my cheek in a stinging slap, and the platter fell to the ground. "Lazy slut you may be, but I cannot spare a pair of hands. You would go soon enough if I let you, and leave me and your poor brother all unprovided. . . ."

  I shook my head, half-blinded with tears, but she did not heed me.

  "And you would go straight to the brothel, I know you—you are itching for a man. Fine talking that would be, Antonio Guardi's sister selling herself in a whorehouse."

  "Half-sister," I corrected bitterly, and she slapped me again.

  "Get out of my sight, and quickly! Pick that up." She pointed with her foot at the fallen platter. "And clean it properly. I will not have you whining to be let into the street like a bitch in heat—thank the saints I do not tell Antonio, or he would flog your backside raw!"

  Shaking more with anger than with fright, I picked up the platter and fled. I did not trust myself to speak, for my silence was not Christian meekness but a temper so violent that if I opened my lips
I might say something I would regret eternally. I fled into the scullery, and after one look at my face the chattering servingmaids fell silent and went diligently to work. It was not until I was safe in my bed at night that the tears came.

  After that I knew better than to complain for my liberty, and as the days wore on, I ceased to remember the lack of it. There was too much else to be done: the bleaching of linen to be laid up in the big presses, the plucking of fowls and the curing of fish, and the endless sweeping and scrubbing. The other ser­vants in the place saw well enough the dislike Celia bore me and would not risk her wrath by appearing friendly—there were days when no one spoke a word to me save Antonio and Celia. Even the carriers, trying to banter with me when they came with the Eagle's provisions, had her sharp rebuke for their pains.

  Then, so gradually that I did not notice it at first, the carriers came less often, and the goods they brought up from the harbor grew poorer and more expensive. When Antonio cursed, the men said simply that there were fewer ships in the bay; they could not bring stuff that was not there. What did he expect? A hot summer, unrest throughout the land, and Naples rumored to be preparing for war . . .

  Fidena's citizens were at first no more concerned than that. The duke had so many enemies that nearly every summer there was some warlike flurry that had to be put down. In winter, with the rivers in spate holding off Romagna in the northwest and Naples in the south and western mountains curbing the pope, who had once ruled Cabria and still gaped to retain it, and the tides surging against the Turkish pirates who haunted the eastern coast, Cabria's people felt secure. Even now, when the rivers were fast shrinking to a sun-dried trickle and Fidena made a fair mark for the king of Naples, the danger did not seem real. The days went by and the rumors took shape, and still the city seemed not to care whether they were true or false; of more concern was the fact that the marches were burned brown and the wine harvest in grave danger. Fresh food be­came more and more scarce, Antonio's scowl grew blacker as trade declined, and still the invasion was only a subject for idle gossip.