The Fire. Katherine Neville

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СКАЧАТЬ from Byron’s Pisan palazzo and driven into that storm, to his death – all this could mean just one thing: Everyone believed that the chess piece had reached its appointed destination, that Byron had received it – everyone, that is, except whoever had escaped from Janina.

      And what had become of the missing Black Queen?

      Byron needed to get away and think, and to lay a plan before the others arrived aboard his ship with Percy’s ashes. It might already be too late.

      Byron crumpled in his hand the page containing the message. Adopting his customary expression of detached disdain, he rose from his seat and limped painfully across the hot sands to where Trelawney still tended the fire. The dark, wild features of the ‘Cockney Corsair’ were blackened further by soot from the blaze, and with those flashing white teeth and trailing mustachios, the man appeared more than slightly mad. Byron shuddered as he tossed the crumpled paper indifferently into the flame. He made sure that the paper had caught and burned before turning to speak to the others.

      ‘Don’t repeat this farce with me,’ he said. ‘Let my carcass rot where it falls. This Pagan Paean to a dead poet, I confess, has quite undone me – I need a bit of a sea change, to cleanse my mental image of this horror.’

      He went back to the shore – and with a quick nod toward Captain Roberts to confirm their prior agreement to meet afterward on the ship, Byron tossed his wide-brimmed hat aside, stripped off his shirt, and dove into the sea, cutting through the waves with strong and powerful strokes. The water was warm as blood already at mid-morning; the sun scalded ‘Alba’s’ fair skin. He knew it would be a short mile swim to the Bolivar – nothing to a man who’d already swum the Hellespont, but a long enough one that it would let him clear his mind to think. But though the rhythm of his strokes, the salt water lapping over his shoulders, helped to calm his agitation, his thoughts kept returning to one thing: No matter how he tried – and wildly improbable though it might seem – there was only one person Byron could think of to whom Percy Shelley’s message might refer, one individual who might hold the critical clue to the fate of Ali Pasha’s missing treasure. Byron himself had never met her, but her reputation preceded her.

      She was Italian by birth – a wealthy widow. Beside her vast riches, Lord Byron knew that his own considerable fortune would pale by comparison. She had once been world renowned, though she now was living in semi-isolation here in Rome. But in her youth, it was said that she’d bravely fought on horseback with guns for the liberation of her land from foreign powers – just as Byron and the Charcoal Burners were essaying to do right now.

      Despite this woman’s personal contributions to the cause of freedom, however, it was she who’d given birth to the world’s last Titan-like ‘solar god’ – as Keats had described it: Her son was an imperial tyrant whose short-lived reign had terrorized all of Europe, and then swiftly burned itself out. Like Percy Shelley. In the end, this woman’s son had succeeded only in replanting the virulent seed of monarchy back into the world in force. He’d died barely one year ago, in anguish and obscurity.

      As Byron felt the sun burning into his naked skin, he strove harder through the teeming waters to reach his ship. If he was right, he knew he had little time to lose in order to set his plan in motion.

      And it was no small irony to Byron that, had this son of the Roman widow lived, today, August 15, would have been his birthday – a day commemorated throughout Europe, in his behalf, those past fifteen years until his death.

      The woman whom Lord Byron believed might hold the key to locating the missing Black Queen of Ali Pasha was Napoleon’s mother: Letizia Ramolino Bonaparte.

      Palazzo Rinuccini, Rome

      September 8, 1822

       Here [in Italy] there are as yet but the sparks of the volcano, but the ground is hot and the air sultry…there is a great commotion in people’s minds, which will lead to nobody knows what… The “king-times” are fast finishing. There will be blood shed like water, and tears like mist; but the peoples will conquer in the end. I shall not live to see it, but I foresee it.

      – Lord Byron

      It was a warm and balmy morning, but Madame Mère had arranged to have all the fires flickering in the hearths throughout the palazzo, candles lit in each room. The costly Aubusson carpets had all been brushed, the Canova sculptures of her famous children had all been dusted. Madame’s servants were attired in their finest green-and-gold livery and her brother, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, would soon arrive from his nearby Palazzo Falconieri to help greet the guests to whom she always opened her home on this one day each year. For today was an important day in the holy calendar, a day that Madame Mère had vowed she would never ignore and always honor: the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin.

      She’d been performing this ritual for more than fifty years – ever since she had taken her vow to the Virgin. After all, hadn’t her favorite son been born on the Feast Day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven? That weak little baby whose birth had come so suddenly and unexpectedly early, when she – young Letizia, only age eighteen – had already lost two previous infants. So she’d made a vow on that day to Our Lady that she would always honor Her birth without fail, and that she would consecrate her children to the Blessed Virgin.

      Though the child’s father had insisted upon naming the new infant Neapolus after an obscure Egyptian martyr instead of Carlo-Maria, as Letizia herself would have preferred, Letizia had made sure to christen all her daughters with the prenom of Maria: Maria Anna, who would later be known as Elisa, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany; Maria Paula, called Pauline, the Princess Borghese; and Maria Annunziata, later called Caroline, Queen of Naples. And they called her Madame Mère – Our Lady Mother.

      The Queen of Heaven had indeed blessed all the girls with health and beauty, while their brother, later known as Napoleon, had given them wealth and power. But none of it was to last. These gifts had all dissipated, just like those roiling mists she still could recall surrounding her native isle of Corsica.

      Now, as Madame Mère moved through the flower-filled, candlelit rooms of her vast Roman palazzo, she knew that this world would not last either. Madame Mère knew, with a palpitating heart, that this tribute to the Virgin today might prove to be her last in a very long time. Here she was, an old woman left nearly alone, her family all dead or scattered, dressed in perpetual mourning attire and living in an environment so alien to her, surrounded only by transitory things: wealth, possessions, memories.

      But one of those memories may have suddenly come back to haunt her.

      For only this morning Letizia had received a message, a hand-delivered note from someone whom she had neither seen nor heard from in all these many years, throughout the rise and fall of the Bonaparte Empire – not since Letizia and her family had departed the wild mountains of Corsica nearly thirty years ago. It was from someone whom Letizia had come to believe, by now, must be dead.

      Letizia slipped the note from the bodice of her black mourning dress and read it again – perhaps for the twentieth time since she’d received it this morning. It was not signed, but there could be no mistaking who had written it. It was written in the ancient Tifinagh script, the Tamasheq tongue of the Tuareg Berbers of the deep Sahara. This language had always been a secret code used by only one person in communiqués with her mother’s family.

      It was for this reason that Madame Mère had sent urgently for her brother the cardinal to arrive here at once before the other guests. And to bring the Englishwoman along with him – that other Maria who’d just recently returned to Rome. Only these two might be able to help Letizia in her dreadful plight.

      For if this man СКАЧАТЬ