Читать книгу The Secret Price of History - Gayle Ridinger - Страница 12

It is sunny and hot today; it is the day to bar the way of the French army. Goffredo, Sandor, and the others are setting up barricades. The tactic is the same across the city: against a line of carts they amass mattresses, chests, wardrobes, chairs, barrels, loose pavement slabs, rope spools, and the lacquered confessionals carried out of churches. By noon it is done, and the volunteers under Garibaldi retreat with their canons and animals across the Tiber. In a wayward formation, they begin to climb the sparsely inhabited hillock of Monteverde with its cowpaths and vineyards and pass through the lower gateway of the Janiculum Walls.

Along the stone ramparts of these old defense walls, the lookouts and sharp-shooters loyal to Garibaldi are already in position. Leaning on the tops of their tall rifles, they call out greetings to the arriving lines. The smell within the lines as Goffredo and Sandor go by is a mix of gunpowder, dirt, vegetation, animals, and unwashed men. A fellow with long, swinging side-locks and a sketch pad tucked under one arm passes the two on the left. They are already familiar with him: he is Gerolamo Induno, the painter from Milan who accompanies Garibaldi everywhere. In all honesty, his presence bothers Goffredo considerably. How can a man stay calm enough to draw a picture in the middle of a battle? Goffredo can't fathom it. In his town an old painter passes through every so often to paint Madonnas in courtyards and roadside chapels…Madonnas are one thing, but soldiers? Nothing could be more absurd.

Goffredo wonders when they will finally see Garibaldi. None of them—not he nor Sandor nor Laffranchi nor Swissman—have had a glimpse of the general yet. Once they've exited through Porta San Pancrazio, their regiment captain—with long hair and a long beard, like Garibaldi—tells them to disperse into the open countryside around Villa Pamphili. No general in sight here either. Their orders are to take cover in the hollows, in the blind spots in the winding paths through the grass and vineyards, or behind the farm cottages with their fringe of umbrella pines. They are told to throw themselves on their bellies in a sort of ditch and do so without understanding why. Or at least Goffredo doesn't know why. On his left Sandor lies completely still and on the alert; the last one to drop into position on his right is Swissman, who has just exchanged words with an officer and learned that the French are headed towards the Vatican walls below them.

Although nothing has happened yet, Goffredo's stomach is squeezed tight. What does he know about being a soldier? Nothing. The shock that Sandor is right. And that those perfect, interweaving formations in Campo di Marte in Alessandria, the county seat, during his boyhood were made up of real men who had learned to do things he had no idea about. Could he have really believed otherwise? Today is his lesson for having finished off his boyhood as an idiot.

"The Bluebacks think they have an easy job," Swissman says.

No one answers him. What does it matter what the French believe if Garibaldi is going to outsmart them? You'll see, today's arrivals have been told. There'll be no relying on artillery. Just surprise attacks. And man-to-man fighting.

Their officer passes over their heads, growling at them to be quiet. Goffredo's throat is parched, and there's no getting any water for who knows how long to come. The dust is rising, and with it, a dull pounding noise in the distance. He and the others lift their heads from the ditch for a look. Three or four hundred meters from them, there is a black funnel of smoke. The fire from their sharpshooters and cannons from up on the Janiculum walls is stunning the French in their orderly lines.

But of course the French have plenty of other soldiers, and these are marching up Monteverde for a headlong fight. Goffredo and his comrades wait in suspense, Goffredo with his cheek pressed against the dirt. When the first bullets pelt the grass by their hollow, he is sorely tempted to put his hands protectively over his head and curse his red shirt, but refrains. His eyes smart with the sting of sweat and he rubs them. The familiar smell of his hands momentarily eases the anxious knot in his gut... He is halfway into the strangely-calm thought that leaving this ditch could mean never seeing that beautiful girl, Eleonora, again—when suddenly, on their officer's shout, Sandor's hand grips his shoulder, and a force of will that is more than that of Sandor, or even of Sandor and him together, sends him up the dirt incline and into the gunfire.

He turns broadside to shield himself and lives despite the odds—the long moment of bullets passing without contact to either side of him. He coughs from the smoke. He sees sooty, incredulous, close French faces, their hands jabbing the loading rods down their muskets, their captains' indecision—consulting with each other on their rearing horses-- as to whether to defend their line from the left, from where Goffredo's comrades are pouring down from the wall.

He feels Sandor's arm round his shoulder. His legs accelerate in time to Sandor's. He begins trotting— Now they'll see how this army in rags knows how to fight!, trotting alongside Sandor, running on and into the heels of others. Smoke blinds him and he loses Sandor. He runs in the same direction. Thirsty. He's damn thirsty. He hears the horse before he sees it. A white stallion.

"The General's Marsala," someone calls out from a black cloud.

The good smell of gun powder. The orders from the mouths of bugles. The smoke that opens and lifts like fog. In one clear swatch, Garibaldi on Marsala—in a broad-brimmed black hat and his sword drawn —criss-crosses back and forth through their lines. Goffredo fires his musket, stumbles over a blue-clad body, reloads the musket in time with the thumping of his heart, and fires again, keeping track when he can of Sandor's position. A battle is not the clear-cut match between winners and losers but a blur of short skirmishes…and this tripping over the dead. A cannon booms at close range and he wonders, is it ours? Where are the drums? He hears some more barked words—in Italian—from another officer, not theirs. Sandor has disappeared. When Goffredo sees a fellow soldier mounting his bayonet, he does the same. And he grasps his musket like a spear now—a spear that slashes a hole in whatever or whoever rushes at him.

Twice he feels a splat of something on his hands: he presumes it must be blood but isn't his—not yet. The din of the cannons batters his hearing. But the blue lines of French soldiers are starting to move backwards. "Stand your ground," an officer shouts. "It's not over as long as we can look them in the face!"

I have to see their backsides.

The frenzied Frenchmen are unable to reload and defend themselves.

See how the army in rags fights?

The bluecoats are kicking up dust faster and faster.

Finally, Goffredo's realization: I don't see any more faces.

They were winning; the French were running away.

During their disorderly but jubilant march back into the city, they hear that Mazzini, as head of the civilian government, has ordered Garibaldi to let the enemy escape back to their ships.

"How can Mazzini say that peace is still possible? This only helps the French!" Sandor is so adamant in his gesticulating that some the grey gun powder covering his hair raises.

"Mazzini is a fool," Swissman interjects—then before Goffredo can join in with his own word of agreement, he exclaims, "Dear God--it's Laffranchi!"

There is a cart stacked with stretchers stopped on the right side of the road. Around the cart there are wounded men doubled over in some sort of contorted position, and a few more who are simply standing in a quiet daze. Swissman takes hold one of these men by the hand. It is Laffranchi. His left leg is smashed and in its place there is an oozing cylindrical paste of bone, blood and black cloth. And though his belt is fastened tight as a tourniquet around the top of what was his thigh, there is blood collecting in a pool under his boot.

"My glasses!" he gasps at the three of them.

His glasses, dangling by the rim from his breast pocket, are smashed.

"My glasses," Laffranchi insists.

Wordlessly Sandor places them on his nose for him. Swissman wraps Laffranchi's arm around his shoulder, so that he doesn't have to put weight on his butchered leg. Sandor and Goffredo negotiate with the medic in charge for a stretcher, and ease Laffranchi down on it.

Numerous hours later, Sandor and Goffredo lean, exhausted, against the railing of the bridge flanking the hospital on Tiber Island. It is dark, and the bells in the adjacent church tower have already struck ten. Eleonora comes out the main door towards them, shaking the rinse water off her hands. Her long white pinafore is splotched with red and dusted with sawed bone.

"They had to cut your friend's leg off. But if no infection sets in, he will make it," she says.

Seeing that Sandor seems to be under a spell and doesn't even give a tired nod the way Goffredo does, she adds, "I mean he'll survive. He'll live."

Sandor's eyes shut in thankfulness. "Good."

"What can we do for you?" Goffredo asks.

"For me?"

"For you," he repeats meaningfully.

"Not a thing. The night's far from finished for me, my friends. But you go and get some sleep."

Her gaze rests on Goffredo. His heart accelerates. Sleep? How can he sleep when she is—for the first time—making such a long visual search to discover what there is to be found in him?

"You be careful," she admonishes gently. "There are roaming bands of troublemakers out there. They're just criminals taking advantage of the situation. They have nothing to do with the Republic. Alongside the good, there's always some bad. Stay on your guard."

She looks at Sandor now, but never mind; Goffredo, taking in her loveliness, is elated. She cares. She is truly concerned about…about them. The question of who she will care about most is suspended in the night. Once their goodnights have been said, he and Sandor wander aimlessly through the Trastevere. Somewhere, an accordion starts up. Not all of Rome has retreated indoors by any means. There are still candles burning in windows and women standing in doorways talking.

"She said to go to get some sleep, but where?"

"I just saw an empty fountain. At least no rocks or dirt under our backs."

Backtracking, they find a big white basin at the feet of a Neptune whom the French have deprived of his liquid life source.

They stretch out in the basin.

"But what would you be doing tonight if you were their General Oudinot?" Goffredo asks as they gaze upwards at the stars.

"I'd call for fresh troops from France and study ways of stalling for time until they arrive."

"Maybe we won't let them stall for time. Maybe—" and here he makes a huge yawn, which ends things.

It has to be going on midnight, and these are the last snatches of consciousness. Goffredo's are spent in self dialogue. He knows very well that Sandor is right, that it was a big mistake not to pursue the French…but that is not a proper last thought when a man is about to fall to sleep. He requires a comforting notion…and Goffredo's comforting notion is that he has defended Rome today, and so even, one might say, defended Eleonora and this gives him a blissful, possessive feeling, which in turn gives him gives him Eleonora coming with him to Bassignana after the war and helping him to make cheese so many small cheese rounds…counting them.giving him sleep.

Though hard to believe, Oudinot keeps his word the next morning and maintains his army outside town, docilely waiting for reinforcements. A few days later, French President Louis Napoleon's representative, DeLesseps, hastily arrives from Paris to negotiate a cease-fire with the patriotic institutions of the Roman Republic.

"The French are shameful," says Sandor in soaring spirits. "They have been using thirty- year-old maps in battle, I hear, and yesterday forgot their scaling ladders for the Janiculum walls. Idiots!"

Goffredo laughs with him, a greased gun part in his hands. As soon as it was clear the truce was going to hold, Sandor and he moved from the fountain to 'sleeping quarters' in the ancient market ruins, where peasants have their shacks, kitchen gardens, and covered lean-tos for livestock. They wake up with the sheep, and then Goffredo 'sets up shop,' sometimes in return for food. He is spending eight or nine hours today fixing rifles and machinery, getting one firing mechanism to work again and then going on to another. Gun after gun until finally the hour comes when he and Sandor can go and meet Eleonora by her hospital at the island end of the Fabricio Bridge.

It is inebriating for Eleonora to feel her friends' interest and curiosity trained upon her during this unforeseeable truce. In this dusk of bird calls and moving river water, all cannons silent and friends and enemies at rest, it is impossible to entertain the thought that Goffredo might feel seriously jealous of the looks that Sandro and she exchange; idealists like themselves have different emotions—more complicated, more sublime—than jealousy. Her two magnificent friends don't know what pettiness or close-mindedness is; their souls can't fabricate an atom of that, unlike her family or the aristocratic scions she was raised with. Granted all that, she still thanks God for doing something to these French generals to make them tired of war, and protect her friends for bullets, for a while.

When the truce ends suddenly on May 31^st it happens with preposterous trick of fate. In the morning, there is reason to celebrate: DeLesseps pledges French protection for Rome against Austria as well as the hostile Kingdom of Naples, in return for quarters outside the city. In the afternoon, however, bands of young boys in the know begin making the rounds of churches and squares, tearing down the freshly-posted proclamation. It has been rescinded! DeLesseps has been stripped of his powers. Word of this farce spreads like wildfire. The Romans react violently. Riots start all over the city and word comes of bands of citizens and volunteer soldiers capturing French pickets, who then in turn join the cause. Sandor, Goffredo, and the other garibaldini, however, are disoriented. What are they to do? Where are their orders? The General isn't even in Rome at the moment but off fighting the Bourbon army in Palestrina. Anguished, they collect in squares, the simple soldiers with the officers, waiting for word to come. Even the most undisciplined and head-strong show at this time their common creed: one is here to obey; one is here to be part of a plan.

From the Fabricio Bridge, the two friends see smoke clouds at midday over the Trastevere neighbourhood. Buildings are going up in flames. The French against the patriots, the patriots against the French.

"You see that mill on the sandbank below us?" Sandor says. "The French will cut the water supplies, and this mill and the others will stop. Already tomorrow there will be no bread."

Eleonora hears him say that as she arrives; she has just spoon-fed the weakest of the patients in her ward and wonders if she'll be able to give them anything to eat tomorrow. "What happens next?" she groans, stretching her arms out towards the city.

"We listen for the bells," says Goffredo. He put his hands on his friends' shoulders. "Then we attack the French, the Austrians, all of them. We free Italy."

He is right about the bells, anyway.

Friday morning, June 1^st. The bells, first in Trastevere and then around Campo de' Fiori begin to peal: the French have crossed the Tiber to the south and occupied the Basilica of St Paul–without-the-walls. More and more bells ring and echo, ring, clang, and echo. Their ruckus slows the movements of the already stupefied people in the street, in their kitchen gardens, or at their windows. Unarmed French soldiers with white peace banners gallop into the principal squares and affix signs on the church gates which announce that the armistice between the Republic of France and the Republic of Rome has been terminated: 'By the power given him by President Louis Napoleon, Gen. Oudinot shall give all French citizens until June 4th to leave Rome, after which the attacks by the French Army will resume.'

They have three days.

It is reckoned in most piazzas that Oudinot now has, with his arrived reinforcements, twenty-thousand men camped within a mile or two of the city, together with six batteries of artillery. There are also, according to the eleven- and twelve-year-olds who form a loose band of camp spies, another ten thousand French soldiers due to arrive at fixed dates during the month.

Three days to get ready, and thank God Garibaldi has managed to get back to Rome.

Many things happen in a city which is suddenly and silently again at war.

Sandor knows that an upcoming battle is like a slowly rising flood. Its imminent happening encourages coordination, non-stop activity. It infuses a logical attitude and instilled cooperation…among those who stay. The fresh barriers that are going up every day, the Papal warehouses down the Tiber which have been raided for ammunition—all this proves that the battle is drawing near.

Two days.

Many foreigners are abandoning the city, together with the last of the old aristocracy close to the Pope. Eleonora happens by her old family palazzo; she knows how to read the signs of its 'closing up', she knows they have been gone already for some time. They would not want to witness any of the crude, uncontrollable reality, let alone the bloodshed to come. That's right. Run away, Mama, she thinks bitterly.

Sunday June 3^rd begins early—too early. There is the anticipated start to daylight typical of June, and there is something more: muffled cannoning in the distance and then bells, insistent early bells, far too early to be good news. Next to Sandor and Goffredo, lying asleep in their blankets under the lean-to, the sheep bleat and the goat stamps. The two friends sit up in a daze, which ignites into a fury of purpose in the time it takes for them to fathom the wagons rolling past their feet, the shouting boys, and then—close up—a shouting Pasquale, the peasant farmer who puts them up.

"Bastardi! Bastardi!"

The French have attacked a day in advance.

Lines of shuffling, trotting, half-dressed cursing men with rifles run through the streets of Rome—Sandor and Goffredo with them—heading for the river and for their comrades on that small precious hill.

They don't know it yet but they will try to defend the Janiculum against the attacking French for sixteen hours straight—six thousand of them against Oudinot's twenty thousand men and seventy-six cannons. In the parks of the 'country villas' of the noble families on the Janiculum, they chase down the French with bayonets, and they are chased down in turn by the French on the stairs and in the parlours of the same. Sandor and Goffredo get through these sixteen hours unscathed, but seven hundred of their comrades—those caught in the direct line of the cannon fire, including many young but already legendary officers—are not so lucky. Their desperate counterattack and slaughter do however prevent the French general from achieving nothing more than a precarious dominating position. At the same time, that cannon fire sends mangled men by the groves to Eleonora's hospital ward on Tiber Island.

It is two or three in the morning, and Eleonora has just come from the bedside of a man without an arm and part of his face, who has fallen asleep, a man who might or might not open his eyes again come dawn. She sees Margaret Fuller coming towards her, white-faced, her hands on her cheeks. Margaret is so horrified by all the amputated bodies that she can't function properly. "These men, these poor men," she whispers fiercely in Eleonora's ear. "I know each cannon shell I hear hits someone, injures someone, kills someone!"

"Margaret, please go and rest."

The American shakes her head. "I've already seen Ossoli."

Eleonora sees that her friend can't even take comfort from the short visit from her husband—or lover or whatever he was, her timid, affectionate, aristocratic, inarticulate 'Ossoli' (she likes to call him by his surname name)—on an hour's leave from the Civil Guard.

"Rome is as mutilated as these men," she continues frantically. "And it is impossible to write about the truth—impossible to break through the lies perpetuated by the French and the Austrians! Even in America, they are beginning to think of the Romans as 'ingrates.' Can you believe that, Eleonora? What by God has happened in the last month? France and Oudinot came here as self-proclaimed friends, as our protector, not as an enemy! All that is gone. This enemy army is here to crush every manifestation of generous and spontaneous life. The Roman Republic is abandoned unto itself," she rasps. "And where in all this, I ask, is America? Why aren't we helping?! Something must be done to alter public opinion. Something—."

She is interrupted by a soldier with a white binding over his eyes, who sits up in bed to yell in pain. Eleonora rushes to sooth him and Margaret goes to the cabinet for the whiskey.

The simple necessary way of things has stopped Margaret Fuller from arguing further; it makes Margaret Fuller, like anyone, comply.

On the evening of June 20^th, the two military lines are so close that each platoon or patrol can hear the voices of their counterpart 'enemy.' Against that background of sound from the men who might finish them off the next day, they are to rest, eat, drink, and sleep. Goffredo is too bothered by this and retreats towards the rear; surmising the reason, Sandor joins him. Along with a handful of other garibaldini, they had found themselves another dry fountain to sleep in—this time it has a monumental white granite gate inscribed with papal hats and keys; the Romans call it Fontana Acqua Paola. The two friends lie down spread-eagle, their eyes on the rising moon and the fiery line of cannonading by some French battery unit that just won't stop fighting, even in the twilight. The shelling comes from the direction of the Vascello, once a splendid villa carved to look like a ship, but now that Garibaldi has made it the center of his desperate defense line, it has been reduced to rubble.

"You know what I think, Sandor? "says Goffredo after some minutes. "Those shells should be pointed at our soldiers at the Vascello, not coming from there." He lifts his head to observe what reaction this is getting from the men with them. They are all too weary, or tending to their flesh wounds, to notice.

"Sandor?" He checks to see if his friend's eyes are open. They are.

After a long silence Sandor answers, "They want to bomb that church."

"Where?"

"Over there." He gestures.

When the bombs make more light, Goffredo can make out a forlorn grey building with bulbous extensions on one side and a square annex of cloisters, in the midst of the sloping trees where the hill begins its drop.

"You're right. The one the captain called San Pietro in Montorio. But why bomb an empty church?"

Sitting up and hugging his knees, Sandor squints hard at the horizon. "There is no sense to it. It can't be practice firing—too many days late for that. They must do it for a reason. It almost seems they want that we stay away from that church." He rocks reflectively in place, then adds, "That church has significance for them."

Even after the French cannons cease, Sandor remains in the grip of this thought for a long time. It really is strange. What might they be intending the church—or the ruins of the church—for? When he feels he can't bear lying there awake anymore, he climbs out of the empty basin. In amidst of what remains of the Garibaldi line between the church and Villa Spada—a trench in which a line of small night fires flicker—he thinks he can see several darting shadows. He hurries back to Goffredo.

"Whoever they are, they're trying to move in," he whisperes, shaking his friend awake. "But first they must go round our trenches. Being on this side, we can get to the church before them. We will choose a hiding place and see who they are and what they want."

"Sandor, wait a minute. Do we really want to do this?" Goffredo rubs his eyes. "I heard talk yesterday. There are noble Roman families selling antiques and masterpieces to strange characters called collectionists who come here from abroad. Maybe they're just vultures of this sort, no?"

Sandor's hand gives Goffredo's shoulder a firm, commanding slap. "No. They wouldn't bomb the church. These are soldiers. Enemies. Maybe spies."

Half an hour later, while the two of them are crouching inside one of the last curtained confessionals left in Rome, their patience is rewarded: three men with an oil lamp come bursting into the church with the tremendous echo there always is. Goffredo moves ever so slightly the red velvet in front of his and Sandor's faces. There's a short French officer with a moustache, a short French soldier with glasses, and—carrying the lantern—a big, portly Frenchman with an ugly birthmark on his cheek, in well-cut civilian clothes. As the lantern splashes light on the piled debris in the nave, on the pink-marble walls, on the gaping hole in the transept, on the two bronze angels between two columns lifting a suffering saint, on a dazzling white man in beard and gown reclining on a white sarcophagus, Sandor wonders why the enemy would expose themselves to the fire of their own troops in this way. Sandor hears the officer call the soldier "Foucher" and command him to use his spade on the tomb on the wall between the second and third side chapels. Foucher in turn barks at the civilian—"DesMoulins"—to hold the lantern up. The tomb is an odd flat black obelisk, topped by a tiny onion cap and mounted on two bronze turtles, under which there are the shelled marble fragments of a dedication plaque. Foucher shifts the debris with his hands and then with the spade. The officer at his side helps him extract a long white sack, covered in a powder of dust, which immediately splits open, spilling bones to the floor and with them a skull. Foucher obstinately reinserts the spade in the wall and stabs the space to the left and to the right; when DesMoulins cries, Voilà!, he pulls out a small red pouch. With DesMoulins hovering over him with the lantern, Foucher walks to the center of the nave and opens it. Sandor and Goffredo see a distinct yellow glimmer. Foucher holds up the golden object. It seems to be a medallion, a bit bigger than a horse's eye.

The officer beckons to him to hand it over. He says that it is property of the French government and he must take it back to Paris personally. And it's time to hurry because it's close to dawn.

"No, Audéoud, ça va pas!" DesMoulins slaps his chest, communicating that he will carry it back.

From the dark shadows under the fallen crucifix to left of the altar comes a male voice groaning in pain, a call for help in Italian. Sandor and Goffredo look at each other in alarm—they had believed the church empty. The three Frenchmen leap-frog their way over segments of the blasted communion rail, in the direction of the rasping body. Sandor and Goffredo see DesMoulins raise his light over what must be the wounded man's face. The growth on the Frenchman's cheek looks in the lamplight like a big black leech. Sandor hears him say that he doesn't want any witnesses, and he whispers this to Goffredo. DesMoulins and Audéoud stare each other down, then Audéoud orders Foucher to draw his bayonet, and inside the confessional Sandor nudges Goffredo with his elbow. The two react with the exchange of signals that they've used all month: Sandor will aim for the officer and Goffredo for the soldier—and whoever finishes first will capture the civilian. They charge out of their wooden box with their pistols, yelling at the top of their lungs. A moment of non-response and then Audéoud fires at them through the smoke. Before he manages a second shot, Sandor has shot him in the head. Goffredo trains his gun on his moving blue and gold target—Foucher's arm and the medallion—and when he's put a bullet through the Frenchman's chest, he sees DesMoulins escape empty-handed through the sacristy side door.

More moans and a feeble call come from the altar. Goffredo knees down next to the dust-covered figure in black—not a garibaldino but a severely wounded priest.

"Padre, is this your church?"

The priest groans at Goffredo, his mouth full of blood. Goffredo looks around for Sandor. He is bending over Foucher's body. The Frenchman is lying on his side, the medallion in a closed hand. Sandor pulls the medallion free by its chain. Engraved on one side is a creature—a fanciful lion of some sort. He flips it over and blinks at a grid of arching lines.

"Sandor," Goffredo calls. "He's a priest. He's dying."

"What does he say?"

Goffredo wipes the priest's mouth with the sleeve of his shirt. The priest's lips utter words.

"He says it's important to keep the treasure safe, not let it fall into the wrong hands."

"I'm coming."

Sandor goes only a few steps; the red pouch that Foucher pulled out of the wall tomb is suddenly lying at his feet. He stoops for it, noting its sort of embossed gold stem. Inside he finds a strange dark vial and an equally strange small gold instrument, v-shaped and with two pointed tips. These must go with the medallion. They are too puzzling to be anything but important. He deducts that by shelling the church at length the French believed they could be sure that no one was left alive inside, and they could take all the time they needed to locate their booty unobserved.

Goffredo has his ear over the priest's mouth, catching his last thick, slurred words. He thinks he catches 'If you're in mortal danger, show it to those where the Norman kings are buried.' The priest pats Goffredo's red shirt in an evident display of affection for the makeshift uniform. Goffredo and Sandor emerge from the church when the priest is dead and the sun is rising.

"What do you think he meant?" Goffredo asks.

"Norman kings were French," Sandor answers.

"Maybe a cemetery in France?"

Sandor frowns sceptically but doesn't speak.

The first round of rifle fire has just sounded for the day, and is followed now by the French cannons in new attempts to make a breach. The closest position along the Republican front line is by the Janiculum walls, and when the first platoon and officer come into sight, Sandor—without a word to Goffredo—makes right for them. Indeed, he approaches the officer as if he were an answer to a problem.

"Can I please have those for a minute?" he asks, pointing at the other's set of field glasses. His look is so urgent and commanding that the weary officer thrusts them his way.

After panning the French line and camp, he says to Goffredo, "Look quick, there's DesMoulins."

"You're joking." Goffredo takes the glasses and brings the hefty Frenchman into focus. "He's walking right by the French High Command without going in," he murmurs. "Very strange. There's a carriage waiting for him, he's getting in." Goffredo lowers the field glasses. He frowns like Sandor. "So it wasn't a military operation after all."

"That's right."

Sandor returns the glasses to the officer with a salute that betrays a bit of excitement.

"And if they weren't spies for Oudinot?" wonders Goffredo as they walk away.

"It means, my friend, they are working for someone else."