More Italian Yesterdays

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

On returning to the Castel Nuovo, the Empress, having reported what had passed to the unhappy Joan, withdrew to consider her own plan of action in the struggle with Charles of Durazzo. At length she hit upon a scheme so truly infernal as to claim pre-eminence over anything that had preceded it in the long list of her iniquities. She would strike her enemy to the heart; she would kill his intellect and break him as surely as with an iron bar upon the wheel, through the one person that he loved and venerated in all the world—his widowed mother, the saintly Duchess Agnes of Durazzo.

Now it chanced that during those days Agnes of Durazzo lay sick of a lingering and mysterious malady, the nature of which it was beyond the ability of her physician to determine. In all probability the Duchess’s disease was one of an internal tumour; be that as it may, it was in every symptomatic particular only too well adapted to the unspeakable purpose of the Empress, who forthwith set herself to disseminating rumours destructive to the reputation of the good and gentle Duchess. Not satisfied with this alone, moreover, she contrived by a hellish stratagem to deceive even the Duchess’s doctor, so that he believed himself justified in imparting his opinion to Charles of Durazzo in person.

So that mad horror, as of a lost soul, took possession of Charles, and the desire of the Empress that his mind should become the prey of devils was fulfilled.

The luckless, blundering physician he dismissed curtly from his presence after their interview. An hour later the unfortunate man was discovered in a back street of Naples, stabbed to death—but not before he had written out, by Charles’s orders, the recipe of a certain draught to be administered to his illustrious patient; which thing was done in the evening of the same day.

Shortly afterwards Charles was hastily summoned to his mother’s bedside from the room in which he had spent the rest of that awful day alone with his thoughts after parting from the doctor. On entering that of his mother, her attendants withdrew, leaving the fast dying woman alone with the son who had destroyed her in the interests of the family honour.

What passed between them no man may say with any certainty; all that is absolutely sure is that, when a few minutes had gone by, the scream of a man in intolerable agony of soul rang out through the stone corridor; and the Duchess’s servants, rushing to her room, found her lying dead in the arms of her stricken son, who, himself, was entreating her frantically to come back to him, sobbing as though his heart would break, and imploring the mercy of Heaven for his misjudgment of her.

From that hour there was something very dreadful in the look of the Duke of Durazzo, as though he were afraid of his own thoughts, and were for ever struggling to free himself from their compulsion. The only person who understood a little of what was in his mind was doubtless the Empress of Constantinople, and, when she saw that the man was, for the first time in all his life, the prey of a hideous remorse, she became gradually afraid for herself and for her first-born, Robert of Taranto, for whom she was plotting to secure the hand of the Queen.

Towards the end of the time agreed upon between Joan and the Empress for the former to make public her betrothal to Robert, who was still living in the Castel Nuovo, and while the whole town was lamenting the mysterious death of the beloved Duchess Agnes of Durazzo, there came to pass a thing which utterly set at naught all the calculations of the Empress and of her eldest son.

It so happened that one day Robert of Taranto had gone out riding with Charles of Durazzo, whom the astute mother of Robert had, since the demise of Duchess Agnes, persuaded her son to conciliate by every possible means in his power. Now both Robert and his mother had overlooked, or were in ignorance of, the surpassing love that Louis of Taranto, the youngest of Robert’s two brothers, had for some years borne to Joan; which love Louis had kept in check to the best of his ability while Andrew of Hungary lived. But now that Joan was a widow and the prize of any man bold enough to snatch it from the rest, Louis of Taranto felt no hesitation in doing so when the opportunity offered.

Therefore it came about that, on his return to the Castel Nuovo, Robert found himself shut out. Despite his clamour to be admitted, as he termed it, “to his own house,” and his threats to exact bloody retribution from the sentries within for keeping him waiting, he received no attention from anybody until his mother came out to him, trembling and confused, to say that in his absence his brother Louis had effected an entry into the castle, and had compelled Joan to go through a form of marriage with him.