The Roman Tales. Susan Ashe
prove to you, if by chance you still doubt it, that a man can be poor but still have noble sentiments. I have something to confess. I would have no difficulty telling this to any other woman but somehow I tremble at the thought of revealing it to you. It could in an instant destroy the love you have for me, and no protestation on your part would satisfy me. I want to read in your eyes the effect this admission will have. One of these days, at nightfall, I will visit you in the garden behind the palazzo. That day, Fabio and your father will be away. When I’m sure that they will not be able to deprive us of an hour or so of conversation, a man will appear beneath your windows and show the local children a tame fox. Later, when the Ave Maria sounds, you’ll hear a gunshot in the distance. At that moment, go to your garden wall and, if you are not alone, sing. If you hear nothing, your slave will appear trembling at your feet and will tell you things that may horrify you. While waiting for this terrible day, I will risk giving you no more midnight posies, but at about two in the morning I will pass by singing, and perhaps from your balcony you’ll drop a flower picked from your garden. This may be the last signs of affection you will show your unhappy Giulio.
Three days later, Elena’s father and brother rode off to the lands they owned by the sea. They left just before sunset, intending to return at around two in the morning. But as they were about to start back not only their two horses but all the horses on the farm disappeared. Outraged by this daring theft, they searched for their animals, which were not found until the following day. They were grazing in a forest of tall trees beside the sea. The two Campireali men had to return to Albano in an oxcart.
Darkness that evening found Giulio at Elena’s feet, and the poor girl glad of the gathering dusk. For the first time she was face to face with the man she loved but to whom she had never spoken.
She uttered a word or two, which restored his courage. Giulio was paler and more shaken than she.
‘It’s hard for me to speak,’ he said. Several blissful moments passed while they looked at each other without a word. Giulio took Elena’s hand. She gazed at him closely.
He knew his friends, young Roman rakes, would have advised him to make advances, but the idea horrified him. Yet at the same time he knew that ecstatic state which only love can bring. Time passed swiftly. The Campireali men neared the palace. Honest soul that he was, Giulio realized that he would not find lasting happiness unless he made the terrible admission which would have seemed utter stupidity to his Roman friends.
At last, he said, ‘I spoke to you of a confession which perhaps I should not make.’ Growing pale, he added, ‘Perhaps your feelings for me, on which my life depends, will vanish. You think I’m poor, but that’s not the worst of it. I’m an outlaw and the son of an outlaw.’
At his words, rich man’s daughter that she was and with all the prejudices of her class, Elena felt she would faint.
‘How terrible that would be for poor Giulio,’ she thought. ‘He will think I despise him.’ Leaning against him, she sank into his arms as if in a swoon.
After this night many assignations followed. The danger she was running took away Elena’s remorse. Sometimes the dangers were extreme, but they only enflamed these two hearts for whom all feelings arising from their love were joyful. Frequently on the point of surprising the young pair, Fabio and his father were furious at finding themselves defied. Town gossip said Giulio was Elena’s lover, yet father and son could detect nothing. Fabio suggested that he be allowed to kill Giulio.
‘While he lives, my sister’s life is in peril. At any moment honour may force us to drench our hands in the blood of the obstinate girl. She has become so bold she no longer denies her love. You see how she answers our accusations with gloomy silence. Very well, this silence is Giulio Branciforte’s death sentence.’
‘Remember what his father was,’ replied old Campireali. ‘We could easily go to Rome for six months, during which time this Branciforte would disappear. But there’s the question of his father, who, despite his villainy, was a good and generous man – generous enough to enrich many of his soldiers while he himself stayed poor. Who knows whether he hasn’t still got friends either in the Duke of Monte Mariano’s company or in Prince Colonna’s, which often lies a couple of miles away in the Faggiola forest? In which case we’d be slaughtered without mercy – you, me, and perhaps your poor mother too.’
Several such conversations took place between father and son and were only in part kept from Vittoria Carafa, sending her into despair. In the end, the two men concluded that honour demanded they silence the rumours circulating round Albano. As it was unwise to have Branciforte removed, though he seemed to grow bolder every day and, what was more, now dressed in fine clothes to push his advantage, sometimes even speaking in public either to Fabio or to Signor de’ Campireali, they would have to undertake one or perhaps both of the following courses. Either the whole family would go back to live in Rome or Elena must return to the Convent of the Visitation in Castro, where she would remain until they found her a suitable match.
Elena had never confessed her love to her mother. Mother and daughter cared dearly for each other and were always together, yet not a word was uttered on the subject that was of almost equal importance to them both. The matter was only broached when the mother told her daughter that the whole household might be returning to Rome and Elena to Castro for a number of years.
It was rash of Vittoria Carafa to have spoken, and her affection for her daughter was no excuse. Elena, head over heels in love, wanted to prove to her lover that she was not ashamed of his poverty and that her confidence in his honour was boundless.
Unbelievable though it may seem, after so many bold assignations in the garden and once in her own room, Elena was chaste. Steadfast in her virtue, she suggested to her lover that she should leave the palazzo through the garden after midnight and spend the rest of the night in Giulio’s little house. They disguised themselves as Franciscan friars. Tall and slender, Elena looked like a novice of eighteen or twenty. The incredible fact – which confirms the finger of God – is that on the narrow path hewn in the rock that hugs the wall of the Capuchin friary, Giulio and his mistress met Signor de’ Campireali and Fabio, who, followed by four well-armed servants and preceded by a page carrying a lighted brand, were returning from Castel Gandolfo, a nearby lakeside town. To allow the lovers to pass, the Campireali men and their servants drew aside to right and left of the eight-foot-wide path. How much better it might have turned out for Elena had she been recognized there and then. She would have been shot dead by her father or brother, and her suffering would have lasted but an instant. But heaven ordained otherwise.
Another strange event occurred during the course of this unexpected encounter. Observing that the elder monk failed to greet either him or his father while passing so close, Fabio cried out, ‘What proud rascal of a monk have we here? God knows what he’s up to outside the monastery, he and his companion, at this late hour! I have a mind to pull off their hoods and see what they look like.’
At these words, Giulio clutched the dagger under his habit and stepped in front of Elena. He was less than a foot from Fabio, but heaven decreed otherwise and by a miracle calmed the fury of the two young men, who would soon meet each other just as close. At Elena de’ Campireali’s subsequent trial, this nocturnal excursion was cited as proof of her depravity. It was, however, the madness of a young girl aflame with love but whose heart was pure.
III
The Orsini, perennial rivals of the Colonna and pre-eminent in the villages around Rome, had managed to get the government courts to sentence to death a certain Baldassare Bandini, a rich farmer. Though most of the long list of misdeeds he was accused of would today be criminal offences, in 1559 they were usually regarded in a less severe light. Bandini was held six leagues from Albano in one of the Orsini castles in the mountains near Valmontone.
The chief of the Roman secret police, accompanied by a hundred and fifty of his men, travelled the highroad by night to fetch Bandini and take him to the Tordinona prison, in Rome. Bandini had appealed to Rome against his sentence. As he hailed from La Petrella, the Colonna stronghold, Bandini’s wife publicly confronted Fabrizio Colonna.
‘Are