“What! doesn’t your Excellency recollect Ludovico, one of the Duchess Sanseverina’s coachmen? At Sacca, the country house where we went every year, I always got fever, so I asked my mistress to give me a pension, and I retired. I am rich now, for instead of the pension of twelve crowns a year, which was the very most I could have expected, my mistress told me that to give me leisure to write sonnets (for I am a poet in the vulgar tongue) she would allow me four-and-twenty crowns; and the signor count told me that if ever I was in need I had only to come and tell him. I had the honour of driving monsignore for a stage when he went to make his retreat, like a good churchman, at the Carthusian monastery at Velleia.”
Fabrizio looked at the man, and began to recall him a little. He had been one of the smartest coachmen at the Casa Sanseverina; now that he was rich, as he affirmed, his only garments were a coarse, tattered shirt and a pair of canvas nether garments, which hardly reached his knees, and had once been dyed black. A pair of shoes and a very bad hat completed his costume; and further, he had not been shaved for a fortnight. Fabrizio, as he ate his omelet, chatted with him on absolutely equal terms. He thought he perceived that Ludovico was his hostess’s lover. He soon despatched his meal, and then said to Ludovico in an undertone, “I have a word for you.”
“Your Excellency can speak freely before her; she is a really good woman,” said Ludovico, with a tender glance.
“Well, then, my friends,” said Fabrizio at once, “I am in trouble, and I want your help. To begin with, there is nothing political about my business. I have simply killed a man who tried to murder me because I was speaking to his mistress.”
“Poor young fellow!” quoth the hostess.
“Your Excellency may reckon on me,” cried the coachman, with eyes that shone with the most fervent devotion. “Where does your Excellency desire to go?”
“To Ferrara. I have a passport, but I would rather not face the gendarmes, who may know something of what has happened.”
“When did you put the fellow out of the way?”
“At six o’clock this morning.”
“Is there no blood on your Excellency’s clothes?” said the hostess.