Blood of the Knights, page 2
The pavement that served the wall was broad and stretched away in both directions. Nothing moved around him, except the weeds and grasses sprouting from the masonry that trembled in the faint salt breeze. Opposite the seawall, the internal face of the parapet was open, and the inner edge of the curtain wall tumbled away into a chasm. Beyond that yawning cleft rose a further level of fortifications where the lofty bastions of the true ancient castle abruptly jutted out of the rock itself. The fortress of Sant’ Elmo was hewn from a porous sort of honey rock, faced except where occasionally its mountainous solidity rendered this unnecessary. It was a stupendous work, and beautiful where the first tentative rays of the rising sun were beginning to gild the imposing summits of its blunt towers.
Vanderville saw that as soon as he stood he would be hopelessly exposed to view from the upper fort that overlooked the whole sweep of the lower enceinte walls. The only cover, and that partial, was provided by the sombre guns that waited at regular intervals. Feeling uncommonly conspicuous, he crouched with thudding heart in the lee of the dilapidated gun carriage, while he assessed his next play.
In other circumstances he might have enjoyed the freedom of his situation. Its profound stillness and solitude a welcome contrast after five days at sea on a crowded and malodorous frigate. But exposed as he was, he imagined the blank eyes of a thousand guards watching him from the upper fort, and the unseen presence behind them of a thousand men preparing to arrest his progress. Yet still no cries of alarm reached him; no sound at all, apart from the faint mewling of circling gulls.
He thought bitterly of Vassallo’s ill fortune – by leaping awkwardly from his position before the yardarm, instead of behind it like Vanderville, he had compromised their mission before it had properly begun. Worse, the renegade had refused to make a duplicate of the message he carried: it was not secure, he had argued, and closed the argument by invoking the bad luck attendant upon such an unnecessary precaution. Vanderville had backed down in the face of his intransigence, conscious that they needed all the luck they could muster if they were to accomplish the infiltration of the fortress in near darkness from a moving ship.
Vassallo had however unbended enough to share a scant few details of the assignation they were to effect, and although Vanderville felt helplessly exposed by the loss of a second set of eyes, and expert knowledge of the fort and city, he had been in worse scrapes, and the leap completed he felt that the worst was past. He had two vital pieces of information. He knew where he was supposed to go – to the Church of the Maddalena – and he knew that there he would be met by an agent known as Mayflower. Mayflower would be disappointed at the loss of Vassallo, but he would presumably be able to offer Vanderville shelter in a hostile city and so, with an eagerness to reach the church before the dawn woke the city of Valletta, he set out with determined stealth.
Moving crabwise down the inner face of the parapet he scuttled from gun to gun towards the juncture where the fortress walls met the curtain wall surrounding the city proper. As he went, he was startled to find hardly any gun was fixed properly on its carriage, and many of the wheels were broken or rotted away, while some of the many gun embrasures were empty entirely.
Whoever the unfortunate Vassallo had paid off to remove the sentries from the bastion wall had done their work well and, advancing from the cover of one gun carriage to the next, Vanderville found that he reached the juncture of the curtain wall overlooking the Valletta without encountering a single guard. He crouched behind the bastion wall in the lee of the rampart where it occurred to him that stealth could now be discarded. If he was being surveyed from the fort above, it was from a considerable distance, and assuming the upright posture of a sentry might serve him better under the circumstances than continuing his furtive movements. The resolution was easier to make than to follow. He felt intensely vulnerable as he uncrimped himself, and so he turned his back on the looming upper fortress to allay his sense of vulnerability. As he rose, his head cleared the parapet top and peering over the bastion wall, the city of Valletta was exposed to his gaze for the first time.
Chapter Three
The city lay on a promontory, surrounded on three sides by the sea with the main harbour on one side and the harbour of Marsamuscetto on the other. Across the isthmus that separated it from the mainland were further great fortifications, so that the whole peninsula was more like a fortified island, walled and inaccessible on all sides, except where there were landing places on the water. Even these were strongly guarded by platforms of guns.
The seawards tip of the peninsula was crowned by the rocky hill behind him, on which perched the fortress of Sant’ Elmo. He occupied a position on the curtain wall that separated that fortress from the city on the landward side. The wall, protected by huge and wide counterscarps, terminated below him in a wedge-like fissure, over which were placed draw bridges. Beyond the bridges was the city, roof after flat roof of it. He would have compared it to patchwork fields seen from a mountain top, were it not for the preposterous tumble of turrets, belltowers and gates that marked its quarters.
The subdivisions of the city brought to his mind Vassallo’s briefing of the night previous. Vanderville, to whom the islands of Malta were unknown, had drunk his words in with the same assiduity Vassallo and the captain applied to the brandy bottle.
‘You must know that the Order governs the island, and the Convent of Valetta is their stronghold and capital, ruled by His Eminence Prince von Hompesch who is their grandmaster. The knights of the Order are composed of nobles from a plethora of nations who all bring their peculiar defects and prejudices with them to Malta. They are organised into seven langues, each of which recruits from the lands who speak their tongue, and they operate here much as great noble houses, in constant competition for place and advancement for their own. Besides which, many if not most of them are initiates of rival fraternal societies, and in certain aspects of their personal lives are some distance from the monastic ideal. The result is a state of permanent infighting because of pride and envy.
‘Which is just as well,’ he added drily. ‘It suits our purpose to have them at each other’s throats. Each of the langues is headed by a military commander, or bailli, who are answerable only to the grandmaster. That elevated office of each langue is constantly seeking to gain for one of its own.’
Captain Dumanoir had interjected enthusiastically at this point. ‘Despite this parochial turf war, Valletta is a visionary place, a Civitate Dei, a City of God. The city is a marvel from a distant prospect and not less so on a nearer approach.’
Vassallo, the native, had snorted at this and expressed the antithesis – Valletta, he opined, was an earthly hell governed by an obsolete order of warrior monks who ruled the oppressed inhabitants of the islands of Malta with misplaced severity, and termed their fortress city the Convent, as if that disguised its purpose of intimidation.
Whether hell or heaven on earth, the city looked safe and peaceful enough to Vanderville. Gazing out over the bell towers, the orderly streets, and uniform ranks of fine stone houses glimmering in the dawn light, he was momentarily hard put to recall the urgency of his mission. And yet, somewhere down there was the Church of the Maddalene where he and Vassallo had been told to meet their contact, known only as Mayflower. If he could not find Mayflower, he would be alone and trapped inside the walls of a city that viewed all Frenchmen as enemies, potential spies of the Revolution to be hanged from the nearest lamp post. He cursed Vassallo’s incompetence again and took stock.
The renegade had told him that the church was one of those nearest to the landward ramparts of Sant’ Elmo, situated opposite the main gate of that fortress, in part of the complex of the Women’s Hospital. Because the houses were two or at most three storeys high, the churches of the city were easily made out from his vantage point. They squatted beneath old fashioned bell towers, and each bore similar crinkled pediments, furbelowed cornices and turretlets, like old-fashioned clock cases bedizened with many a scroll and a flourishing fart to adorn the apartments of the Pompadour. He thought he could make out a short bell tower in the area opposite the main fortress gate away to his left. According to his bearings that ought to be the Maddalene, so he began plotting a route.
He must first descend from the bastion to the city walls, and then find a way down from there to the shanty hovels that skirted Sant’ Elmo’s landward ditches. By hugging the fortress walls he could arrive in the piazza before the main gate and should be able to cross that area just as the sun came up, and even reach the church without entering the maze of streets behind it. Could he pass for a local? Vanderville assessed his breeches. Though grazed and dusted white from scrambling through the embrasure, they were still respectable, and he hoped that he would attract little attention in passing through the city.
He felt in his pocket for his watch and pulled it out to find its glass face cracked. The hour hand dangled uselessly – a casualty of the rampart walls. He sighed; the rendezvous with Mayflower was scheduled for six, and that could not be far off now. He pocketed the useless timepiece and set off.
At the end of the fort’s bastion, he scraped through a gun embrasure that overlooked the city, and dangling from his hands he dropped to the connected city wall. This accomplished without further damage to person or garments, he unslung his hat from the cords that held it, placed it on his head and trotted down a narrow stair leading into the city proper.
The greater part of the city slept still, though the working people were already about, and he saw them here and there in the distance silently going about their morning labours. There were few level streets because of the city’s hilly situation, but there were fine pavements faced with the same honey coloured stone as the flat roofed houses. In fact, there was no wood visible at all except for the closed shutters that fronted the balconies protruding from each house over the street.
He kept winding and turning about, from street to street and from alley to alley, until he arrived at the foot of the walls of Sant’ Elmo. The town petered out where it lapped the great walls of the fort and a noisy flight of starlings had just pitched on one of the fig trees in the fortress ditch. Their faint but massy chirpings were the only sounds that broke the morning stillness. No human form appeared at any of the windows around, no shout of alarm reached him, and no footsteps were audible.
A rough notice daubed on the side of a house identified the street in which he found himself as the Strada della Ficara. The serried ranks of the houses facing the fort on his right hand were elegant, but those on his left leaning against the ditch footings were squalid and downright derelict. Here there was no pavement, one walked on the bare rock, rutted, uneven, and full of holes, and before the nearest clump of huts was a wealthy dunghill, not at all offensive in the cool of the morning. A single sow was stirring there to bask in the coming sun, wending her way amiably among the wild fig saplings that sprouted from crevices in the fortress ditch and leaned out from between the shacks.
As he advanced, he saw for the first time the inhabitants of the city close-up. Two grubby shanty town children watched him pass, and although their dishevelment outmatched his own, he was aware of attracting their attention, and he read hostility in their glances. He hurried on with an affected air of nonchalance.
There was an end to the hovels as he arrived on the outskirts of the piazza before the fortress gates, and as he tentatively set foot on its pavement distant church bells started clamouring the hour. It was already six! The first chimes were picked up and repeated by others, and startled by the increasing din, Vanderville drew back into the shelter of a roofed devotional tabernacle adorning the corner of the house bordering the square. He shared this refuge with a goat who chewed disconsolately while staring aimlessly at the wall above his head, where a hand which betrayed the most casual acquaintance with letters had scrawled on a board, Piazza dei Forbici. A doodle of a pair of scissors had been added in case the meaning proved obscure.
From underneath the tabernacle Vanderville scanned the piazza as cautiously as he was able. It was an awkwardly shaped space composed of sweeping stone paving, studded with numerous low bollards. To his left the prows of two great ravelin bastions protruded from the fort towards the town, their sides pierced with innumerable loopholes and gun ports. The fortress gate lay between these twin scissor blades and was manned by two indolent guards. He felt that his route lay somewhere to the right, well away from the sentries, where a sodden filthy portico lined the opposite side of the piazza. Ramshackle market stalls roofed with flapping oilpaper were clustered under the littered passageway. Behind them, the few figures under the arches seemed absorbed in their business. Market traders, he thought, preparing their barrows for the day, and in confirmation the acrid smell of dried dung on cooking fires drifted across the piazza to reach him.
His stomach grumbling, Vanderville edged cautiously further into the shadow of the corner tabernacle beside the goat. Surveying the prospect carefully, his eye was drawn to a queerly authoritative figure swathed in draped cloths like an oriental passing through the market stalls. It was the pattern of the movements as much as the distinctive dress which drew his attention. The figure stopped here to resolve a problem between small boys drawing well water; there to buy green salad, before halting a young woman carrying bread in a basket on her head. He caught a flash of intense colour as the odd cloth the figure wore was swept back over one shoulder. Could it be a carpet? A shawl? He could not make it out at this distance, but as the person made their way along the arcade from one end to another, stooping occasionally to peer into the barrows and booths of the traders, he discerned that they were not one of the traders. An inspector? Police officer? No, one of the traders had just gesticulated in no uncertain terms and moved him or her on roughly.
Vanderville smiled. Despite being too distant to hear the words, the gesture was emphatically clear. Whatever, or whoever the solitary figure might be, they were not possessed of authority over the traders.
He had not anticipated so much activity in the piazza, but the bells had announced that the time of his appointment with Mayflower was nigh, and he must pass the piazza to get to the Church of Maddalena. He darted a quick glance behind him and caught a malevolent flash of bright eyes as a small dark head bobbed down behind a squalid hovel in the shadows. Seconds later, something skittered across the pavement by his feet. It was a piece of dried dung. The goat, trailing string, trotted hopefully after it.
The street urchins were stalking him. He shrugged – if thrown turds were the worst they could muster, so be it. On the other hand, it was better that they stayed silent as he crossed the piazza, so as not to attract the attention of the guards on the fort gate. He scowled at the nearest scamp who stared back unblinking. ‘A fig for these kids,’ he decided. They would be more scared of the guards than he was. Shards from another flung turd ricocheted from the wall above his head. ‘At least this one wasn’t soft,’ he considered gratefully. But sooner or later one might be. A lilting voice called out, ‘Franċiż misħut!’ in a dialect which passed all understanding. He did not know what that meant, but the tone indicated that it was no benediction. He smiled to himself and was struck suddenly behind the right ear by a turd in full flight. It was enough – he pulled his hat down over his eyes and strode forward boldly into the piazza.
The guards on the fort gate laughed boisterously amongst themselves as he set out and he felt their inquisitive eyes on him. With his shoulders back he allowed the bells to guide him diagonally right across the piazza, away from the fort and soldiers and towards the beckoning street corner that ought to lead him to the doors of the Maddalene, and Mayflower’s help. Ten more yards, five yards, to safety, with the catcalls of the children ringing through the dawn, and the hot holes in his back where he could feel the soldiers’ eyes boring into his spine. He inadvertently quickened his stride as he cut the corner fine and span smartly into the street…
In front of him, not far off, was a patrol of uniformed men marching as one in his direction. Midway between him and them lay the doors of a small church, its baroque flourishes morbid in the dawn air. He could see no other church on the street and if he were to reach the doors before the patrol, he must pick up his pace beyond anything discrete. He reached the door in an uneasy sort of a loping half run and pushed at the doors with his elbow. They did not give. With no time to spare, he tried his shoulder, but it bumped off helplessly. He dared not risk a glance at the patrol to his left, to his right he glimpsed the street children passing the corner towards him. He stepped back, pulling his hat lower and inclining his head away from the patrol, and heard the tramp of nailed boots almost upon him. And at that moment the church door swung open, and an owl-like sacristan bustled forth, clutching one withered arm to his chest. With the brusquest of nods, his face averted, Vanderville brushed him aside and passed swiftly into the church in two great strides. As he did, he pulled the door firmly closed behind him.
Once inside the church he slipped instantly into the cover of a pillar that flanked the entrance. The familiar and comforting smells of wood and wax swept over him, and he was reassured. The interior of the church was plain enough in comparison with the exterior facade, the proportions were just, and the simple arched roof was noble. What cheerfulness it had, it owed to a large window behind the altar that diffused a mild and solemn light equally over every part of the edifice.
He could see nobody in the nave, and he commenced a brisk circumnavigation of the side chapels to orientate himself, and to discover other entrances. In Mayflower’s place, Vanderville would have arrived early and waited outside watching the entrance. But any vantage point in the piazza was dominated by the great scissor blades of Fort Sant’ Elmo’s ravelins that flanked the fort’s gate. There was no secret space there, or in the street outside. Vanderville wondered if Mayflower would instead enter from the rear, where there were two low doors behind the high altar.
