Of Love and Evil - By Anne Rice Page 0,20

visited on my last adventure, who for all their passion had not had his hot southern Mediterranean blood.

“You realize I don’t know your name?” he asked.

“Toby,” I said. “Now let’s go to see your patient. While I play the lute, I can listen and I can watch and I can see if in fact this man is being poisoned.”

“Oh, but that’s not possible.”

“I don’t mean by you, Vitale, I mean by someone else.”

“But I tell you, Toby, there is no one that does not love him, no one that could bear to lose him. Therein lies the dreadful mystery.”

We found the same crowd in the street, but this time the Jews had been joined by some onlookers and some of the rougher sort and I didn’t like the look of it.

We pushed through without speaking a word, and as we made our way through the thick press of the alleyway, Vitale was whispering to me.

“Things are good here now for the Jews,” he said. “The Pope has a Jewish physician and he’s my friend, and there are Jewish scholars in demand everywhere. I think that every cardinal must have a Hebrew scholar on his staff. But that could change in an instant. If Niccolò dies, the Lord have mercy on me. With this dybbuk I will be accused not only of poison but of witchcraft.”

I nodded to this, but was mainly trying to make my way through the press of passersby, peddlers and beggars. The cookshops and taverns added their scents and swell to the narrow street.

But within minutes, we had arrived at the house of Signore Antonio, and were admitted at once through its huge iron gates.

CHAPTER SIX

IMMEDIATELY WE ENTERED A HUGE COURTYARD, FILLED with potted trees, arranged at random around a glittering fountain.

The bent and withered old man who opened the gate for us was shaking his head and very forlorn.

“He’s worse today, young Master,” he said, “and I fear for him, and his father has come downstairs, and will not leave the bedside. He waits for you now.”

“That’s good, Master Antonio is out of bed, that’s very good,” said Vitale immediately. He confided to me, “When Niccolò suffers, Antonio suffers. The man lives for his sons. He has his books, his papers, his work for me all the time, but without his sons, there’s nothing really for him.”

Together we went up a very broad and impressive stairway of shallow treads and polished stone. And then proceeded down a long gallery. There were spectacular wall hangings everywhere, tapestries of wandering princesses and gallant young men at the hunt, and great sections of the wall painted in brilliant pastoral frescoes. The work looked as fine to me as if it had been done by Michelangelo or Raphael, and for all I knew some of it had been done by their apprentices or students.

We passed now into a chain of antechambers, all with marble tiled floors and scatterings of Persian and Turkish carpets. Magnificent classical scenes of nymphs dancing in paradisal gardens adorned the bare walls. Only an occasional long table of polished wood stood in the center of a room. There were no other furnishings.

Finally the double doors were thrown open to a vast and ornate bedroom, darkened, except for the light that came in with us, and there lay Niccolò, obviously, pale and bright-eyed against a mound of linen pillows beneath a huge red-and-gold baldachin.

His hair was blond and full and matted to his damp forehead. In fact, he looked so feverish and so restless that I wanted to demand someone bathe his face immediately.

It was also plain to me that he was being poisoned. I could tell that his vision was blurred and his hands were trembling. For a moment he stared at us as if he couldn’t see us.

I had the sinking feeling that the poison had already reached the fatal level in his blood. I felt a slight panic.

Had Malchiah sent me here to know the bitterness of failure?

Beside the bed sat a venerable gentleman in a long burgundy velvet robe, with black stockings and slippers of jeweled leather. He had a full head of near-lustrous white hair, with a widow’s peak that gave him considerable distinction, and he brightened at the sight of Vitale. But he didn’t speak.

On the far side of the bed stood a man who seemed so deeply moved by all this that his eyes were wet with tears and his hands were shaking almost as badly as the patient’s hands