The Roman Tales. Susan Ashe
is not God’s will that I should in any way fail in the respect I owe the decisions of the courts of my lord the pope,’ Colonna replied.
At once his soldiers and all his followers were ordered to meet near Valmontone, a small town built on a rocky outcrop whose ramparts were formed by an almost vertical precipice sixty to eighty feet high. It was in this town, belonging to the pope, that the Orsini partisans and government secret police had managed to capture Bandini. Among these partisans were Signor de’ Campireali and his son Fabio, who were distantly related to the Orsini. Giulio Branciforte and his father, however, had always been of the Colonna faction.
In circumstances where Prince Colonna felt unable to act openly he resorted to a simple ruse. Most of the rich Roman farmers, then as now, belonged to one or other group of penitents. The penitents always appeared in public with their heads covered by a hood that hid their faces and had holes for the eyes. When the Colonna forces did not want it known that they were involved in an exploit, they persuaded their adherents to join them wearing the penitent’s costume.
In due course, it transpired that the removal of Bandini, which had been the talk of the town for a fortnight, would take place on a Sunday. That day, at two o’clock in the morning, the governor of Valmontone had the tocsin rung in all the Faggiola forest villages. A large number of peasants obeyed the summons.
As each little group of armed peasants left their village and disappeared into the forest, their number was halved. Colonna’s partisans were making for the meeting place set up by Fabrizio. Their leaders seemed convinced there would be no fighting that day, and the men had been ordered to spread this rumour. Prince Fabrizio crossed the forest with a picked band of supporters mounted on half-broken colts from his stud farm. He made a cursory inspection of his various detachments of peasants but he did not speak to them. A single word might have given all away.
The prince, a tall, spare man of unusual strength and agility, was barely forty-five, but his hair and moustache were a striking white. This incongruous feature made him recognizable in places where he would have preferred to remain incognito. As soon as the peasants saw him they cried out, ‘Evviva Colonna!’, and pulled on their hoods. The prince himself wore his hood hanging round his neck so that he could slip it on the moment the enemy was sighted.
They did not have to wait long. The sun was rising as nearly a thousand men of the Orsini faction entered the forest three hundred yards from Fabrizio Colonna’s force, who threw themselves to the ground. After the Orsini advance guard passed, the prince mustered his men. He decided to attack Bandini’s escort a quarter of an hour after they entered the woods. Here the forest is strewn with boulders fifteen or twenty feet tall. These are lumps of lava, some old, some newer, which the chestnut canopy covers completely, almost cutting out the daylight. As these rockfalls, eroded by the weather, make the ground very rough, to spare the highroad from endless ups and downs the lava has been dug away and in places the road is three or four feet lower than the forest floor.
Around Fabrizio’s planned battle site was a grassy clearing crossed at one end by the main road. Thereafter the road re-entered the forest, which here was thick with brambles and thorn bushes, making the undergrowth all but impenetrable. Fabrizio placed his peasants a hundred yards into the forest on either side of the road. At a signal from him, each man drew on his hood and positioned himself behind a tree with his arquebus at the ready. The prince’s soldiers hid behind the trees nearest the road. The peasants had express orders not to fire until the soldiers fired, and the soldiers were not to fire until the enemy was twenty paces away. Fabrizio had twenty trees hastily felled, so that their branches completely blocked the narrow road. Captain Ranuccio, with five hundred men, shadowed the Orsini advance guard. Ranuccio had been ordered not to attack until he heard the first gunshots from the barrier of felled trunks.
When Fabrizio Colonna saw that his soldiers and peasants were well placed, each behind his tree and braced for battle, he left at a gallop with his mounted men, among them Giulio Branciforte. The prince took a path to the right of the main road, which led to the end of the clearing.
They had barely set off when a large troop of riders appeared on the road from Valmontone. It was the secret police and Orsini’s horsemen escorting Baldassare Bandini. In their midst rode the prisoner, surrounded by four executioners dressed in red. They had been ordered to put Bandini to death if they thought Colonna’s partisans might be about to rescue him.
Colonna’s cavalry had just reached the edge of the clearing when the prince heard the first gunshots from the ambush he had set on the main road in front of the barricade. At once he and his cavalry charged towards the four executioners who surrounded Bandini.
The battle lasted but three-quarters of an hour. Taken by surprise, Orsini’s followers scattered in all directions. In Colonna’s advance guard, brave Captain Ranuccio was killed, a misfortune that had tragic consequences for Branciforte. As he fought his way towards the executioners, Giulio came face to face with Fabio Campireali.
Mounted on a foaming horse and clothed in a gilded giacca, Fabio shouted, ‘Who are these wretched creatures? Let’s slash their masks. Watch how I do it.’
A sword caught Giulio Branciforte across the forehead. The blow was so skilfully aimed that his hood slipped down and he was blinded by blood. So as to catch his breath and wipe his face, Giulio tugged his horse aside. Anxious to avoid an encounter with Elena’s brother, he had retreated a few paces when he received a sharp sword thrust to the chest. Thanks to his giacca the point did not penetrate, but he was momentarily winded. Almost at once he heard a cry in his ear.
‘Ti conosco, porco! Swine, I know you! This is how you earn the money to replace your rags.’
Sorely angered, Giulio forgot his first resolve and turning to Fabio he shouted, ‘Ed in mal punto tu venisti! You’ve come at a bad moment.’
Several exchanges of sword thrusts shredded the garments which covered their mail. Fabio’s armour was gilded and sumptuous, Giulio’s plain.
‘Fom what sewer did you scavenge that giacca?’ shouted Fabio.
Just then, Giulio saw his opportunity. Fabio’s splendid coat of mail was loose round his neck, and Giulio’s sword found a gap. Its point sank half a foot into Fabio’s throat, and a great jet of blood spurted out.
‘Impudent fellow,’ shouted Giulio, and he galloped towards the men in red, two of whom were still on horseback a hundred paces away. As he approached them, one fell, but just as Giulio reached the last remaining executioner, the man, finding himself surrounded by more than ten horsemen, fired his pistol point blank at the unfortunate Baltassare Bandini.
‘There’s no more we can do here, my friends,’ called out Branciforte. ‘Let’s carve up the cowardly police who ran off.’
His men followed him.
When half an hour later Giulio returned to Fabrizio, the prince addressed him for the first time ever. Giulio thought Prince Colonna would be greatly pleased by the victory, which was total and due entirely to his own skill, for Orsini had nearly three thousand men and Fabrizio only fifteen hundred. But Colonna was drunk with rage.
‘We have lost our true friend Ranuccio,’ he cried. ‘I have just laid my hand on his body. It’s already cold. Poor Baldassare Bandini is mortally wounded. So we’ve really lost. But the shade of brave Captain Ranuccio will appear before Pluto well accompanied. I’ve ordered all these prisoners, this scum, to be hanged from the trees. Do not fail in this, men!’
He galloped off to where the battle of the advance guard had taken place. With the remnants of Ranuccio’s band Giulio followed the prince, who found the body of the old soldier surrounded by more than fifty enemy dead. The prince dismounted and once more took Ranuccio’s hand. Weeping, Giulio did likewise.
‘You are very young,’ said the prince to Giulio, ‘but I see you are covered in blood. Your father was a brave man who was wounded more than twenty times in the service of the Colonna family. Take command of Ranuccio’s band and bear his body to our church in La Petrella. Remember, you may be set upon along the way.’
Giulio