The Historical Nights' Entertainment by Rafael Sabatini (most important books to read .txt) 📖

Danvelt.

 

“The gaoler of Middelburg will tell Your Grace that he was hanged

already when I presented this. My woman Catherine, whom I have

with me, can testify to part. And there are some other servants

who can bear witness to my husband’s innocence. Captain von

Rhynsault had ceased to doubt it.”

 

He studied the parchment, and fell very grave and thoughtful.

 

“Where are you lodged?” he asked.

 

She told him.

 

“Wait there until I send for you again,” he bade her. “Leave this

order with me, and depend upon it, justice shall be done.”

 

That evening, a messenger rode out to Middelburg to summon von

Rhynsault to Bruges, and the arrogant German came promptly and

confidently, knowing nothing of the reason, but conceiving naturally

that fresh honours were to be conferred upon him by a master who

loved stout-hearted servants. And that Rhynsault was stout-hearted

he showed most of all when the Duke taxed him without warning with

the villainy he had wrought.

 

If he was surprised, he was not startled. What was the life of a

Flemish burgher more or less? What the honour of a Flemish wife?

These were not considerations to daunt a soldier, a valiant man of

war. And because such was his dull mood - for he was dull, this

Rhynsault, as dull as he was brutish - he considered his sin too

venial to be denied. And the Duke, who could be crafty, perceiving

that mood of his, and simulating almost an approval of it, drew the

German captain into self-betrayal.

 

“And so this Philip Danvelt may have been innocent?”

 

“He must have been, for we have since taken the guilty man of the

same name,” said the German easily. “It was unfortunate, but - “

 

“Unfortunate!” The Duke’s manner changed from silk to steel. He

heaved himself out of his chair, and his dark eyes flamed.

“Unfortunate! Is that all, you dog?”

 

“I conceived him guilty when I ordered him to be hanged,” spluttered

the captain, greatly taken aback.

 

“Then, why this? Answer me - why this?”

 

And under his nose the Duke thrust the order of gaol delivery

Rhynsault had signed.

 

The captain blenched, and fear entered his glance. The thing was

becoming serious, it seemed.

 

“Is this the sort of justice you were sent to Middelburg to

administer in my name? Is this how you dishonour me? If you

conceived him guilty, why did you sign this and upon what terms?

Bah, I know the terms. And having made such foul terms, why did

you not keep your part of the bargain, evil as it was?”

 

Rhynsault had nothing to say. He was afraid, and he was angry too.

Here was a most unreasonable bother all about nothing, it seemed

to him.

 

“I - I sought to compromise between justice and - and - “

 

“And your own vile ends,” the Duke concluded for him. “By Heaven,

you German dog, I think I’ll have you shortened by a head!”

 

“My lord!” It was a cry of protest.

 

“There is the woman you have so foully wronged, and so foully

swindled,” said the Duke, watching him. “What reparation will you

make to her? What reparation can you make? I can toss your filthy

head into her lap. But will that repair the wrong?”

 

The captain suddenly saw light, and quite a pleasant light it was,

for he had found Sapphira most delectable.

 

“Why,” he said slowly, and with all a fool’s audacity, “having made

her a widow, I can make her a wife again. I never thought to wive,

myself. But if Your Grace thinks such reparation adequate, I will

afford it her.”

 

The Duke checked in the very act of replying. Again the expression

of his countenance changed. He strode away, his head bowed in

thought; then slowly he returned.

 

“Be it so,” he said. “It is not much, but it is all that you can do,

and after a fashion it will mend the honour you have torn. See that

you wed her within the week. Should she not consent, it will be the

worse for you.”

 

She would not have consented - she would have preferred death,

indeed - but for the insistence that the Duke used in private with

her. And so, half convinced that it would in some sort repair her

honour, the poor woman suffered herself to be led, more dead than

living, to the altar in the Duke’s private chapel, and there,

scarcely knowing what she did, she became the wife of Captain

Claudius von Rhynsault, the man she had most cause to loathe and

hate in all the world.

 

Rhynsault had ordered a great banquet to celebrate his nuptials,

for on the whole he was well satisfied with the issue of this

affair. But as he left the altar, his half-swooning bride upon

his arm, the Duke in person tapped his shoulder.

 

“All is not yet done,” he said. “You are to come with me.”

 

The bridal pair were conducted to the great hall of the Prinssenhof,

where there was a great gathering of the Court - to do honour to

his nuptials, thought the German captain. At the broad table sat

two clerkly fellows with quills and parchments, and by this table

the Duke took his stand, Arnault beside him - in peacock-blue

to-day - and called for silence.

 

“Captain von Rhynsault,” he said gravely and quietly, “what you have

done is well done; but it does not suffice. In the circumstances

of this marriage, and after the revelation we have had of your ways

of thought and of honour, it is necessary to make provision against

the future. It shall not be yours, save at grave cost, to repudiate

the wife you have now taken.”

 

“There is no such intent - ” began Rhynsault, who misliked this homily.

 

The Duke waved him into silence.

 

“You are interrupting me,” he said sharply. “You are a wealthy man,

Rhynsault, thanks to the favours I have heaped upon you ever since

the day when I picked you from your German kennel to set you where

you stand. Here you will find a deed prepared. It is in the form

of a will, whereby you bequeath everything of which you are to-day

possessed - and it is all set down - to your wife on your death, or

on the day on which you put her from you. Your signature is

required to that.”

 

The captain hesitated a moment. This deed would fetter all his

future. The Duke was unreasonable. But under the steady, compelling

eyes of Charles he moved forward to the table, and accepted the quill

the clerk was proffering. There was no alternative, he realized.

He was trapped. Well, well! He must make the best of it. He

stooped from his great height, and signed in his great sprawling,

clumsy, soldier’s hand.

 

The clerk dusted the document with pounce, and handed it to the Duke.

Charles cast an eye upon the signature, then taking the quill

himself, signed under it, then bore the document to the half-swooning

bride.

 

“Keep this secure,” he bade her. “It is your marriage-gift from me.”

 

Rhynsault’s eyes gleamed. If his wife were to keep the deed, the

thing was none so desperate after all. But the next moment he had

other things to think of.

 

“Give me your sword,” the Duke requested.

 

Wondering, the German unsheathed the weapon, and proffered the hilt

to his master. Charles took it, and a stern smile played about his

beardless mouth. He grasped it, hilt in one hand and point in the

other. Suddenly he bent his right knee, and, bearing sharply

downward with the flat of the weapon upon his thigh, snapped in into

two.

 

“So much for that dishonourable blade,” he said, and cast the pieces

from him. Then he flung out an arm to point to Rhynsault. “Take

him out,” he commanded; “let him have a priest, and half an hour in

which to make his soul, then set his head on a spear above the Cloth

Hall, that men may know the justice of Charles of Burgundy.”

 

With the roar of a ‘goaded bull the German attempted to fling

forward. But men-at-arms, in steel and leather, who had come up

quietly behind him, seized him now. Impotent in their coiling arms,

he was borne away to his doom, that thereby he might complete the

reparation of his hideous offence, and deliver Sapphira from the

bondage of a wedlock which Charles of Burgundy had never intended

her to endure.

 

X. THE NIGHT OF STRANGLERS

 

GOVANNA OF NAPLES AND ANDREAS OF HUNGARY

 

Charles, Duke of Durazzo, was one of your super chess-players,

handling kings and queens, knights and prelates of flesh and blood

in the game that he played with Destiny upon the dark board of

Neapolitan politics. And he had no illusions on the score of the

forfeit that would be claimed by his grim opponent in the event of

his own defeat. He knew that his head was the stake he set upon

the board, and he knew, too, that defeat must inevitably follow

upon a single false move. Yet he played boldly and craftily, as

you shall judge.

 

He made his first move in March of 1343, some three months after

the death of Robert of Anjou, King of Jerusalem and Sicily, as ran

the title of the ruler of Naples. He found his opportunity amid

the appalling anarchy into which the kingdom was then plunged as a

result of a wrong and an ill judged attempt to right it.

 

Good King Robert the Wise had wrested the crown of Naples from his

elder brother, the King of Hungary, and had ruled as a usurper.

Perhaps to quiet his conscience, perhaps to ensure against future

strife between his own and his brother’s descendants, he had

attempted to right the wrong by a marriage between his brother’s

grandson Andreas and his own granddaughter Giovanna, a marriage

which had taken place ten years before, when Andreas was but seven

years of age and Giovanna five.

 

The aim had been thus to weld into one the two branches of the House

of Anjou. Instead, the rivalry was to be rendered more acute than

ever, and King Robert’s fear of some such result contributed to it

not a little. On his deathbed he summoned the Princes of the Blood

- the members of the Houses of Durazzo and Taranto - and the chief

nobles of the kingdom, demanding of them an oath of allegiance to

Giovanna, and himself appointing a Council of Regency to govern the

kingdom during her minority.

 

The consequence was that, against all that had been intended when

the marriage was contracted, Giovanna was now proclaimed queen in

her own right, and the government taken over in her name by the

appointed Council. Instantly the Court of Naples was divided into

two camps, the party of the Queen, including the Neapolitan nobility,

and the party of Andreas of Hungary, consisting of the Hungarian

nobles forming his train and a few malcontent Neapolitan barons, and

guided by the sinister figure of Andreas’s preceptor, Friar Robert.

 

This arrogant friar, of whom Petrarch has left us a vivid portrait,

a red-faced, red-bearded man, with a fringe of red hair about his

tonsure, short and squat of figure, dirty in his dress and habits,

yet imbued with the pride of Lucifer despite his rags, thrust

himself violently into the Council of Regency, demanding a voice in

the name of his pupil Andreas. And the Council feared him, not

only on the score of his over-bearing personality, but also because

he was supported by