`So you do think she is concealing something important. Why' should there be anything, to conceal? This is a routine state investigation. As her cardinal, I seek only to prevent the remote possibility of any censure by putting her true, past on the record.'

'Ah, well, then,' she said. `If it is only routine and for the state, perhaps you should put Palo onto it.'

His expression became deadly. `You refuse to do this?' he said.

She could read his eyes and his face. She knew he was ready to kill her or to have her killed by Palo. She. sighed. `I will do it.'

`I need time.'

`How much time?'

`People will need to be found and bribed. I'll have to travel. The ' marchesa is a brilliant woman, and if she chooses to hide her past it is possible that…”

He struck her heavily. Very slowly she regained her feet and stood before him again, betraying neither her hurt nor her hopelessness. He struck her again, then he smiled at her, that wonderful smile. `You have ninety days,' he said, `beginning now.'

Bernaba had stayed out of sight for almost a month when he summoned me to demand news of her. I was heavy and sullen. `In this whole world,' I told him, `we don't have another friend as good as Bernaba. But you not only struck her, you sent her on a wild goose chase. Where is she? What do you care? She could be dead.'

`I am a prince of the Church!' he; shouted. `I will not be talked to in this way by a slave. Are you a part of this conspiracy, or are you pleading with me to bring Palo into this, who will rip out eyeballs to get at the truth? I have had enough of this! I am going to send Palo after Bernaba.'

‘Cossa?'

“I will send you to the, slave market at Bari!'

'Cossa,' I said to him, `You must be insane or you would never say such things to your friends. You believe that, if you can learn terrible things, true or not, about the marchesa, you can break the spell you think she has put upon you and make yourself her master. But after you find out the worst you want to, know, even if you are reduced to having Palo deliver it to you as a fabric of lies, won't you, wish you were dead?'

'Franco, my friend, forgive me, please forgive me. But I have to know about her.'

'Then ask her.'

'How can I ask her? What can I say – are you a spy for Ladislas? Or – what was your life before you gave your body to Gian Galeazzo? Do I ask her – since you sold Milan to me so easily, will you just as easily sell me and the papal states to Naples?'

`if that is what you want to know, then that is what you must ask her.'

Cossa slumped into a chair. 'I could lose her.''

'If you will not ask her yourself, then only Palo can find out for you. After Palo is through with her, she will either be dead or you will banish her. She will be gone from you. And, as desperate as you are before me today, you will be more desperate trying to find her again. But if you must know, then you yourself must ask her – at least, that way, there is a chance for you, Cossa.'

The marchesa found him in the tower room of the palace. His face was grey. A-sheaf of papers lay on his lap. He looked up at her hopelessly as she came into the room as if, despite his love for her, she had forced him to destroy her.

'Cossa? Are you ill?' she asked.

' I know, Decima. I know everything about you. You sold whores in Rome. You dealt in boys with degenerates. You told fortunes as a heretical witch, made charms arid, amulets, and sold poisons to vengeful women:' He leaped to his feet scattering the papers. 'Don't deny it!'

She stared at, him with such contempt that he almost lost the certainty of his judgment. 'How can such things matter to you?' she asked him.

'How? You dare to ask me how?'

`You have taken money from the whores of Bologna for almost fifteen years and from the whores of the cities of the papal states for almost two.' She stared at him with distaste.

'Bernaba told you that! It is a lie! I helped her when I was a student and out of gratitude she set up those women to get me information to advance my position.'

'You took money from whores.' 'I was a boy!'

`You still take money from whores but you aren't a boy; you are a prince of the Church.'

We were talking about you, not me.'

'We will soon, of course, Cossa. But not yet. Let us talk instead about the night you murdered sixteen men to steal the pope's gold.' `Franco Ellera!' he screamed in pain.

`No one else living knew that.'

'Oh, yes, they did.'

`Who?'

'You.'

'Me?'

'Last; winter, when you were dying of fever after murdering that little boy at Rocco di Cento, you told, me everything. You ranted in my arms because, you told me, the men you had killed had come back to murder you.'

He held up his hands to make her stop speaking.

'I said to myself,' the marchesa went on, 'that, if that were the kind of man you are, then that must be what drew me to you. What else could the son of a pirate know to do? What else could be expected of a general of condottieri? I saw that, if you believed you owned a part of those whores, you had to take money from them because that was your share, as you saw it. You didn't need the money, but that is how a pirate or pitiless condottiere would think. Everything is a share in the loot which costs human bodies. You came from the sea. The pope's gold convoy was no different to you from a convoy of poorly armed merchant ships. You took the pope's gold then, as a natural conclusion for a brutalized man; you killed all the witnesses, your own people, because you feared the pope's vengeance. That explained everything to me, but it changed nothing. You are still a whoremonger and a pimp. You are still a thief and a murderer, which is rare enough work for a cardinal of the Holy Church: But we are what we become, Cossa, not what we think we are.'

His eyes became opaque with pain, trying to blind himself to this vile knowledge of himself. He wanted to find just enough light to show himself to himself as he had always seen himself. Deadly things lurked beyond such light. Because he could not shut out the truth of how she saw him and how he mast now see himself, he began to weep, sitting with his face clutched in his hands so he later confessed.

She knelt beside him and stroked his head. `I would have told you anything you wanted to know,' she said to him. 'If I couldn't conceal my life from myself, how could I hide it from you whom I love?' He reached out blindly to touch her cheek. 'Come" the marchesa said, – 'it is night. I have travelled a long way and I have been too long away from your arms.'

The marchesa had travelled over the mountains from Florence, where Cosimo di Medici had told her that his father had decided that the time had come to get the papacy for Cossa and end the schism in the Church. While the schism still existed, the Medici dream of getting one consolidated church banking account could never be realized. Giovanni di Bicci di Medici's plan was now the plan of the Marchesa di Artegiana because she was expected to execute it. She had had to be severe with Cossa about his boyish anxieties. He had to be, lifted into his saddle and sent off to his glory. There was a lot of money to be made.