The Accursed Kings Series Books 1-3: The Iron King, The Strangled Queen, The Poisoned Crown. Maurice Druon

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СКАЧАТЬ Guccio made his companion talk, who indeed desired nothing better. Signor Boccaccio appeared to have seen a good deal in his time. He had been everywhere, to Sicily, Venice, Spain, Flanders, Germany, even the Orient, and had survived many adventures with extraordinary presence of mind; knew the customs of all these countries, had his own opinion about the comparative values of their religions, held monks in some contempt and loathed the Inquisition. He was, too, extremely interested in women; he let it be understood that he had loved a great deal in his time, and recounted curious anecdotes about a great many of these affairs, both illustrious and obscure. He appeared to have no regard for women’s virtue, and his language, when he talked of them, was redolent with anecdotes that made Guccio pensive. Moreover, he seemed to possess as much audacity as cunning. A free spirit was Signor Boccaccio and out of the common run.

      ‘I should like to have written it all down if I had had the time,’ he said to Guccio, ‘the harvest of stories and ideas I have garnered upon my travels.’

      ‘Why don’t you do it, Signor?’ asked Guccio.

      The other sighed as if he were admitted to some unattainable dream.

      ‘Troppo tardi, one does not start writing at my age,’ he said. ‘When one’s profession is making money, one can do nothing else after thirty. Besides, if I wrote everything I know, I should run the risk of being burned at the stake.’

      The journey, in intimate companionship with an interesting fellow-traveller, across a beautiful green countryside, delighted Guccio. He breathed delightedly the air of early spring; the sound of horses’ hooves seemed to lend an accompaniment of joyous song to their journey; and he began to have as exalted an opinion of himself as if he had shared every one of his companion’s adventures.

      In the evening they stopped at an inn. The halts upon a journey tend to the making of confidences. As they sat before the fire, drinking cans of mulled ale, strong beer laced with Geneva rum, spices and cloves, while a meal and a bed were being prepared for them, Signor Boccaccio told Guccio that he had a French mistress by whom he had had, the previous year, a boy who had been baptized Giovanni.¹³

      ‘They say that bastard children are more intelligent and have more vitality than others,’ remarked Guccio sententiously. He had several admirable clichés at his disposal to make conversation with.

      ‘Undoubtedly God gives them gifts of mind and body to compensate them for the advantages of inheritance and position that He withholds. Or perhaps, more simply, they have a harder row to hoe in life than others, and do not expect to become famous but by their own efforts,’ replied Signor Boccaccio.

      ‘This one, however, will have a father who can teach him much.’

      ‘Unless he comes to owe his father a grudge for having brought him into the world in such unfortunate circumstances,’ said the commercial traveller with a slight shrug of the shoulders.

      They slept in the same room, sharing the same pallet. At five o’clock in the morning they set out once more. Wisps of mist still clothed the ground. Signor Boccaccio was silent; he was not at his best at dawn.

      The weather was cool and the sky soon cleared. Guccio saw about him a countryside whose beauty delighted him. The trees were still bare, but the air smelt of sap working and the earth was already green with young and tender grass. Ivy clothed the walls of cottage and turreted manor house. Fields and hillsides were criss-crossed with innumerable hedges. Guccio was delighted by the undulating wooded countryside, by the green and blue reflection of the Thames seen from a hilltop, by a group of huntsmen and their pack of hounds met at the entrance to a village. ‘Queen Isabella has a beautiful kingdom,’ he kept repeating to himself.

      As they passed on through the land, the Queen who was to give him audience took a more and more important place in his thoughts. Why should he not, he thought, try to please as well as to accomplish his mission? It might well be that through Isabella’s interest Guccio would reach that high destiny for which he felt himself designed. The history of princes and empires had many examples of stranger things than that. ‘She is no less a woman because she is a queen,’ Guccio told himself. ‘She is twenty-two and her husband does not love her. The English lords dare not court her for fear of displeasing the King. Whereas I am arriving as a secret messenger; to get to her I have braved a storm. I go down on my knee, I salute her, uncovered, with a deep obeisance, I kiss the hem of her robe …’

      He was already composing the phrases with which he would place his heart, his intelligence and his right arm at the service of the fair young Queen. ‘Madam, I am not of noble birth, but I am a free citizen of Sienna, and I am worthy of my condition of gentleman. I am eighteen and have no greater desire than to gaze upon your beauty and offer you my heart and soul.’

      ‘We are nearly arrived,’ said Signor Boccaccio. They had come to the suburbs of London without Guccio being aware of it. The houses had drawn closer together and formed long lines each side of the road; the fresh smell of the woods had disappeared; the air smelt of burning peat.

      Guccio looked about him in surprise. His uncle Tolomei had told him how extraordinary the city was, and he saw nothing but an interminable succession of villages, consisting of black-walled hovels and filthy alleys in which thin women, carrying heavy loads, passed to and fro with ragged children and ill-conditioned soldiers.

      Suddenly, amid a great crowd of people, horses and carts, the travellers found themselves at London Bridge. Two square towers marked the entrance, between which, in the evening, chains were fastened and huge doors closed. The first thing Guccio noticed was a bloody human head fixed upon one of the pikes which surmounted the gateway. Crows fluttered about the eyeless face.

      ‘The King of England’s justice has been enforced this morning,’ said Signor Boccaccio. ‘This is how criminals, or those who are named criminals in order to get rid of them, finish here.’

      ‘A curious sight to welcome strangers with,’ said Guccio.

      ‘It is a warning that they are not entering a town of light-hearted gaiety.’

      At that time, this was the only bridge across the Thames; it was built as a street over the river and its houses were of wood, one pressed close against another. Within them every sort of business was carried on. Twenty arches, each sixty feet high, supported the extraordinary structure. It had taken nearly a hundred years to build and Londoners were very proud of it. A strong current boiled about the arches; washing was hung to dry from the windows; and women emptied slops into the river.

      Beside London Bridge, the Ponte Vecchio at Florence seemed but a mere trifle in Guccio’s memory, and the Arno a brook compared with the Thames. He said so to his companion.

      ‘All the same we teach them everything,’ the latter replied.

      It took them about twenty minutes to cross the bridge because of the crowd and the stubbornness of beggars who seized them by their boots.

      Arrived at the farther bank, Guccio saw the Tower on his right hand, its huge, tragic mass standing out against the grey sky. Following Signor Boccaccio, he went on into the city. The noise, the coming and going in the streets, the strange rumbling of the city under a leaden sky, the heavy smell of burning peat lying over the town, the cries from the taverns, the impertinences of the women of the streets, the brutal, brawling soldiery, all seemed to Guccio at once curious and intimidating. Paris, in his memory, seemed suddenly to possess clarity and light, while London at midday appeared darker than night.

      Having progressed some three hundred yards, the travellers turned to the left into Lombard Street, where the houses of the Italian banks were marked by painted iron signs. СКАЧАТЬ