“All this is madness—madness! You were best away, best in Pesaro. Indeed, you cannot safely show your face in Rome.”
“That is why I go masked. That is why I come to you, my lord, for shelter here until—”
“Here?” The Cardinal was instantly alert. “Then you think I am as mad as yourself. Why, man, if so much as a whisper of your presence in Rome got abroad, this is the first place where they would look for you. If you will have your way, if you are so set on the avenging of past wrongs and the preventing of future ones, it is not for me, your kinsman, to withstand you. But here in my palace you cannot stay, for your own safety's sake. That page who brought you, now; I would not swear he did not see the arms upon your ring. I pray that he did not. But if he did, your presence is known here already.”
Giovanni was perturbed.
“But if not here, where, then, in Rome should I be safe?”
“Nowhere, I think,” answered the ironical Ascanio. “Though perhaps you might count yourself safe with Pico. Your common hate of the Holy Father should be a stout bond between you.”
Fate prompted the suggestion. Fate drove the Lord of Pesaro to act upon it, and to seek out Antonio Maria Pico, Count of Mirandola, in his palace by the river, where Pico, as Ascanio had foreseen, gave him a cordial welcome.
There he abode almost in hiding until the end of May, seldom issuing forth, and never without his mask—a matter this which excited no comment, for masked faces were common in the streets of Rome in the evening of the fifteenth century. In talk with Pico he set forth his intent, elaborating what already he had told the Cardinal Vice-Chancellor.
“He is a father—this Father of Fathers,” he said once. “A tender, loving father whose life is in his children, who lives through them and for them. Deprive him of them, and his life would become empty, worthless, a living death. There is Giovanni, who is as the apple of his eye, whom he has created Duke of Gandia, Duke of Benevento, Prince of Sessa, Lord of Teano, and more besides. There is the Cardinal of Valencia, there is Giuffredo, Prince of Squillace, and there is my wife, Lucrezia, of whom he has robbed me. There is, you see, an ample heel to our Achilles. The question is, where shall we begin?”
“And also, how,” Pico reminded him.