“You will guard my Bianca, Agostino,” he said to me, and I swore it fervently, as he bade me, whilst upon her knees beyond the bed, clasping one of his hands that had grown white as marble, Bianca was sobbing brokenheartedly.
Then the dying man turned his head to Galeotto. “You will see justice done upon that monster ere you die,” he said. “It is God's holy work.”
And then his mind became clouded again by the mists of approaching dissolution, and he sank into a sleep, from which he never awakened.
We buried him on the morrow in the Chapel of Pagliano, and on the next day Galeotto drew up a memorial wherein he set forth all the circumstances of the affair in which that gallant gentleman had met his end. It was a terrible indictment of Pier Luigi Farnese. Of this memorial he prepared two copies, and to these—as witnesses of all the facts therein related—Bianca, Falcone, and I appended our signatures, and Fra Gervasio added his own. One of these copies Galeotto dispatched to the Pope, the other to Ferrante Gonzaga in Milan, with a request that it should be submitted to the Emperor.
When the memorial was signed, he rose, and taking Bianca's hand in his own, he swore by his every hope of salvation that ere another year was sped her father should be avenged together with all the other of Pier Luigi's victims.
That same day he set out again upon his conspirator's work, whose aim was not only the life of Pier Luigi, but the entire shattering of the Pontifical sway in Parma and Piacenza. Some days later he sent me another score of lances—for he kept his forces scattered about the country whilst gradually he increased their numbers.
Thereafter we waited for events at Pagliano, the drawbridge raised, and none entering save after due challenge.
We expected an attack which never came; for Pier Luigi did not dare to lead an army against an Imperial fief upon such hopeless grounds as were his own. Possibly, too, Galeotto's memorial may have caused the Pope to impose restraint upon his dissolute son.
Cosimo d'Anguissola, however, had the effrontery to send a messenger a week later to Pagliano, to demand the surrender of his wife, saying that she was his by God's law and man's, and threatening to enforce his rights by an appeal to the Vatican.
That we sent the messenger empty-handed away, it is scarce necessary to chronicle. I was in command at Pagliano, holding it in Bianca's name, as Bianca's lieutenant and castellan, and I made oath that I would never lower the bridge to admit an enemy.