“What should I hide from your Excellency?”
He dared not enlighten me on that point, for should his suspicions prove unfounded he would have uselessly betrayed himself.
“If you are honest, why do you lie?”
“I?” I ejaculated. “In what have I lied?”
“In that you have told me that you left Pesaro at the first hour of night. At the third hour you were still in the Church of San Domenico, whither you followed Madonna Paola’s bier.”
It was my turn to knit my brows. “Was I indeed?” quoth I. “Why, yes, it may well be. But what of that? Is the hour in which I quitted Pesaro a matter of such moment as to be worth lying over? If I said that I left about the first hour, it is because I was under the impression that it was so. But I was so distraught by grief at Madonna’s death that I may have been careless in my account of time.”
“More lies,” he blazed with sudden passion. “It may have been the third hour, you say. Fool, the gates of Pesaro close at the second hour of night. Where are your wits?”
Outwardly calm, but inwardly in a panic—more for Madonna’s sake than for my own—I promptly held out the hand on which I wore the Borgia ring. In a flash of inspiration did that counter suggest itself to me.
“There is a key that will open any gate in Romagna at any hour.”
He looked at the ring, and of what passed in his mind I can but offer a surmise. He may have remembered that once before I had fooled him with the help of that gold circlet; or he may have thought that I was secretly in the service of the Borgias, and that, acting in their interests, I had carried off Madonna Paola. Be that as it may, the sight of the ring threw him into a fury. He turned on his horse.