It was a moonless night in June, with lowering clouds and a threat of distant thunder echoing from the far mountains.
A crowd was gathering, low-voiced and eager, in the Piazza San Nicolò: a crowd chiefly of the people, and the faces and costumes of many races came out grotesquely under the spasmodic glare of the torches which flared about the standard of Cyprus, in the centre of the square—the standard was tied with mourning and wreathed with cypress. There were many women—here and there a peasant with a child slumbering in her arms, or clinging sleepily to the tawny silk scarf woven under her own mulberry trees. Here and there, with the fitful motion of the wind, the light touched the fair hair of a chance peasant from the province of La Kythrea into gleams of gold that a Venetian patrician might envy, or brought into sudden relief the smothered passion of some beautiful, dark Greek face. But the women were chiefly of the lower Cypriote peasant-type, heavy-featured and unemotional. There was a sprinkling of monkish cowls and of the red fez from the Turkish village of Afdimou which lay in seeming friendliness of relation close to the village of Ormodos, whose population was wholly Greek.
In front of the long façade of the palace of Famagosta a cordon of soldiers stood motionless, while before them the mounted guard paced slowly to and fro; and across the Piazza, with that impatient, surging crowd between, was faintly heard the steady footfall of the sentinels, measuring and remeasuring with unemotional precision their narrow beat before the entrance to the world-famed fortress of Famagosta.
A group of nobles in eager, low-voiced converse crossed the square, pressed through the cordon of soldiers and gave the password and the great door was opened to admit them and closed again.
Two burghers picked out a face among them, as the torches of their escorts flared.
"That was Marin Rizzo, Counsellor to the Queen; a man of power—unscrupulous."
"And more a friend—I have heard it whispered in Nikosia—to Naples than to Cyprus."
"Hast evidence for thy speech?" the other questioned eagerly in a lower tone.
"It is for that we must watch; the time is threatening."
"But Messer Andrea Cornaro was with him: he will know how to guard the interests of the Queen, having been so great a favorite with our Janus, and one for management, despite his courtly ways! Without our Messer Andrea, his niece had never been our Queen."