a sudden feeling that I would burst. My body seemed too small, too imperfect an enclosure for all I knew and felt. My head throbbed. I wanted to lie down, but before that I had to see Riccardo. I had to find him and the older boys.
I had to.
I went walking through the house until I came to them, all gathered for a lesson with the young lawyer who came from Padua only once or twice a month to begin our instructions in the law. Riccardo saw me in the door and motioned for me to be quiet. The teacher was speaking.
I had nothing to say. I only leant against the door and looked at my friends. I loved them. Yes, I did love them. I would die for them! I knew it, and with a terrible relief I began to cry.
Riccardo saw me turn away, and slipping out, he came to me.
"What is it, Amadeo?" he asked.
I was too delirious with my own torment. I saw again the slaughtered dinner party. I turned to Riccardo and wound him in my arms, so comforted by his warmth and his human softness compared to the Master, and then I told him that I would die for him, die for any of them, die for the Master too.
"But why, what is this, why vow this to me now?" he asked.
I couldn't tell him about the slaughter. I couldn't tell him of the coldness in me that had watched the men die.
I went off into my Master's bedchamber, and I lay down and tried to sleep.
In late afternoon, when I woke to find the doors had been closed, I climbed out of the bed and went to the Master's desk. To my astonishment I saw his book was there, the book that was always hidden when out of his sight.
Of course I could not turn a page of it, but it was open, and there lay a page covered in writing, in Latin, and though it seemed a strange Latin, and hard for me, there was no mistaking the final words:
How can so much beauty hide such a bruised and steely heart, and why must I love him, why must I lean in my weariness upon his irresistible yet indomitable strength? Is he not the wizened funereal spirit of a dead man in a child's clothes?
I felt a strange prickling over my scalp and over my arms.
Is this what I was? A bruised and steely heart! The wizened funereal spirit of a dead man in a child's clothes? Oh, but I couldn't deny it; I couldn't say it wasn't true. And yet how hurtful, how positively cruel it seemed. No, not cruel, merely merciless and accurate, and what right had I to expect anything else?
I started to cry.
I lay down in our bed, as was my custom, and plumped the softest pillows to make a nest for my crooked left arm and my head.
Four nights. How should I endure it? What did he want of me? That I go forth to all the things I knew and loved and take my leave of them as a mortal boy. That is what he would instruct. And that I should do.
Only a few hours were allowed to me by fate.
I was awakened by Riccardo, who shoved a sealed note in my face.
"Who's sent this?" I asked sleepily. I sat up, and I pushed my thumb beneath the folded paper and broke the wax seal.
"Read it and you tell me. Four men came to deliver it, a company of four. Must be some damned important thing."
"Yes," I said unfolding it, "and to make you look so fearful too."
He stood there with his arms folded.
I read:
Dearest darling one,
Stay indoors. Do not on any account leave the house and bar any who seek to enter. Your wicked English lord, the Earl of Harlech, has discovered your identity through the most unscrupulous nosing about, and in his madness vows to take you back with him to England or leave you in fragments at your Master's door. Confess all to your Master. Only his strength can save you. And do send me something in writing, lest I too lose my wits over you, and over the tales of horror which are cried out this morning in every canal and piazza for every ear.
Your devoted Bianca
"Well, damn it," I said folding up the letter. "Four nights Marius will be gone, and now this. Am I to hide for these crucial four