After Hannibal by Barry Unsworth Read Free Book Online

But in its nature there was nothing particularly to distinguish it from a multitude of such incidents in the sanguinary history of the city. Why, then, did it exercise such a spell on his mind?
    Perhaps Biordo had been bemused, softened by his youthful bride. Slackened all the sinews of war. So happy in abandonment that for those moments he saw the world as a field of love. Giovanna di Bertoldo Orsini, his wife of five months. He had risen from her side and walked out to his death. The Orsini were a Roman family, by turns allies and foes of the Pope …
    Monti sat forward. Could the wife have somehow had a hand in it? She could hardly have kept his weapons from him, but a woman can do much in the way of persuasion. He would have been in haste to return to her. He would not have detected the taint of treachery in her kisses. Any more than I did after all the years. She was the same in appearance and manner as she had always been, no less loving, no less kind. The time-hallowed jokes of people who live together—his absentmindedness, her habit of making lists and drawing up programs. She had even seemed happy. On her face sometimes a look of remote inquiry, as if she were tracking some elusive thought. This wild thing she had done, where was it to be seen, what intimations had there been in twelve years of wifedom? He knew himself to be often preoccupied, unobservant of his surroundings, subject to habit in domestic matters. There might have been signs that another man would have seen, but he had seen none. She had reminded him to wear his scarf, she had continued to take an interest in his work. Things could have gone on like this for a long time if they had stayed in Turin—it was the move here that had done it. She had come in good faith, she had intended to stay, she had arranged for a leave of absence from her teaching job. But the voice of her need had been too strong.
    This was his chief suffering now, not the technical act of infidelity but this urgency of her love for another. Following upon this, unavoidable, the anguish of imagining their bodies together. He could not feel anger, only the sickness of the blow. He knew himself to be mild, to be lacking in aggression. None of the Baglioni men would have borne it patiently. Can it be this, he wondered,that draws me so to the story of blood that is Perugia’s history?
    No one, as far as he knew, had followed up the Orsini connection. He felt a stirring of excitement. Such a line of investigation could lead far beyond that morning of the poisoned knives, perhaps shed new light on papal policy in the period, in all its ruthlessness and duplicity.
    The Guidalotti, at any rate, had not profited from their crime. Monti thought about the extraordinary error of judgment that the family had made, more extraordinary in some ways than their victim’s reckless trust. They had apparently thought that by killing Biordo they would raise the city in their favor and be brought to power on a popular movement; not seeing, in their arrogance and stupidity, that the murdered man had been regarded by the common people with veneration, as restoring through his conquests the ancient grandeur of the Perugian state.
    It was a mistake that cost them dear. A manhunt for members of the Guidalotti family was immediately instituted throughout the city. Perugian manhunts always took the same form: the incensed mob slaughtered anyone they could lay their hands on who was in any way connected with the Guidalotti, including any persons unfortunate enough to be encountered in the vicinity of their houses. The houses themselves were given over to pillage and fire.
    Valuable houses on prime sites. Among those who had set on the mob, some would have been interested in political advantage, others would have had an eye on the real estate. Irrespective of rightor wrong, causes just or unjust, there were always people in the wings, with their eye on the main chance. And they were always the same