Were I to expose myself to a thousand deaths I shall employ every means, even the most dangerous, to introduce this parcel of cords into the citadel, in defiance, alas, of all my duties.
If my father comes to hear of it, I shall never see you again; but whatever may be the fate that is in store for me, I shall be happy within the bounds of a sisterly friendship if I can help to save you."
That same evening, by their nocturnal correspondence with the lamps, Fabrizio gave the Duchessa warning of the unique opportunity that would shortly arise of conveying into the citadel a sufficient length of cord.
But he begged her to keep this secret even from the Conte, which seemed to her odd.
"He is mad," thought the Duchessa, "prison has altered him, he is taking things in a tragic spirit."
Next day a ball of lead, thrown by the slinger, brought the prisoner news of the greatest possible peril; the person who undertook to convey the cords, he was told, would be literally saving his life.
Fabrizio hastened to give this news to Clelia.
This leaden ball brought him also a very careful drawing of the western wall by which he was to climb down from the top of the great tower into the space enclosed within the bastions; from this point it was then quite easy to escape, the ramparts being, as we know, only twenty-three feet in height.
On the back of the plan was written in an exquisite hand a magnificent sonnet: a generous soul exhorted Fabrizio to take flight, and not to allow his soul to be debased and his body destroyed by the eleven years of captivity which he had still to undergo.
At this point a detail which is essential and will explain in part the courage that the Duchessa had found to recommend to Fabrizo so dangerous a flight, obliges us to interrupt for a moment the history of this bold enterprise.
Like all parties which are not in power, the Raversi party was not closely united.
Cavaliere Riscara detested the Fiscal Rassi, whom he accused of having made him lose an important suit in which, as a matter of fact, he, Riscara, had been in the wrong.
From Riscara the Prince received an anonymous message informing him that a copy of Fabrizio's sentence had been officially addressed to the governor of the citadel.
The Marchesa Raversi, that skilled party leader, was extremely annoyed by this false move, and at once sent word of it to her friend the Fiscal General; she found it quite natural that he should have wished to secure something from the Minister Mosca while Mosca remained in power.
Rassi presented himself boldly at the Palace, thinking that he would get out of the scrape with a few kicks; the Prince could not dispense with a talented jurist, and Rassi had procured the banishment as Liberals of a judge and a barrister, the only two men in the country who could have taken his place.
The Prince, beside himself with rage, hurled insults at him and advanced upon him to strike him.
"Why, it is only a clerk's mistake," replied Rassi with the utmost coolness; "the procedure is laid down by the law, it should have been done the day after Signor del Dongo was confined in the citadel.
The clerk in his zeal thought it had been forgotten, and must have made me sign the covering letter as a formality."
"And you expect to take me in with a clumsy lie like that?" cried the Prince in a fury; "why not confess that you have sold yourself to that rascal Mosca, and that this is why he gave you the Cross.
But, by heaven, you shall not escape with a thrashing: I shall have you brought to justice, I shall disgrace you publicly."
"I defy you to bring me to justice," replied Rassi with assurance; he knew that this was a sure way of calming the Prince: "the law is on my side, and you have not a second Rassi to find you a way round it.
You will not disgrace me, because there are moments when your nature is severe; you then feel a thirst for blood, but at the same time you seek to retain the esteem of reasonable Italians; that esteem is a sine qua non for your ambition.
And so you will recall me for the first act of severity of which your nature makes you feel the need, and as usual I shall procure you a quite regular sentence passed by timid judges who are fairly honest men, which will satisfy your passions.
Find another man in your States as useful as myself!"
So saying, Rassi fled; he had got out of his scrape with a sharp reprimand and half-a-dozen kicks.
On leaving the Palace he started for his estate of Riva; he had some fear of a dagger-thrust in the first impulse of anger, but had no doubt that within a fortnight a courier would summon him back to the capital.
He employed the time which he spent in the country in organising a safe method of correspondence with Conte Mosca; he was madly in love with the title of Barone, and felt that the Prince made too much of that sublime thing, nobility, ever to confer it upon him; whereas the Conte, extremely proud of his own birth, respected nothing but nobility proved by titles anterior by the year 1400.
The Fiscal General had not been out in his forecast: he had been barely eight days on his estate when a friend of the Prince, who came there by chance, advised him to return to Parma without delay; the Prince received him with a laugh, then assumed a highly serious air, and made him swear on the Gospel that he would keep secret what was going to be confided to him.
Rassi swore with great solemnity, and the Prince, his eye inflamed by hatred, cried that he would no longer be master in his own house so long as Fabrizio del Dongo was alive.
"I cannot," he went on, "either drive the Duchessa away or endure her presence; her eyes defy me and destroy my life."
Having allowed the Prince to explain himself at great length, Rassi, affecting extreme embarrassment, finally exclaimed:
"Your Highness shall be obeyed, of course, but the matter is one of a horrible difficulty: there is no possibility of condemning a del Dongo to death for the murder of a Giletti; it is already a masterly stroke to have made twelve years' imprisonment out of it.
Besides, I suspect the Duchessa of having discovered three of the contadini who were employed on the excavations at Sanguigna, and were outside the trench at the moment when that brigand Giletti attacked del Dongo."
"And where are these witnesses?" said the Prince, irritated.
"Hiding in Piedmont, I suppose.
It would require a conspiracy against Your Highness's life… ."
"There is a danger in that," said the Prince, "it makes people think of the reality."
"Well," said Rassi with a feint of innocence, "that is all my official arsenal."
"There remains poison… ."
"But who is to give it?
Not that imbecile Conte?"
"From what one hears, it would not be his first attempt… ."
"He would have to be roused to anger first," Rassi went on; "and besides, when he made away with the captain he was not thirty, and he was in love, and infinitely less of a coward than he is in these days.
No doubt, everything must give way to reasons of State; but, taken unawares like this and at first sight, I can see no one to carry out the Sovereign's orders but a certain Barbone, registry clerk in the prison, whom Signor del Dongo knocked down with a cuff in the face on the day of his admission there."
Once the Prince had been put at his ease, the conversation was endless; he brought it to a close by granting his Fiscal General a month in which to act; Rassi wished for two.
Next day he received a secret present of a thousand sequins.
For three days he reflected; on the fourth he returned to his original conclusion, which seemed to him self-evident:
"Conte Mosca alone will have the heart to keep his word to me, because, in making me a Barone, he does not give me anything that he respects; secondly, by warning him, I save myself probably from a crime for which I am more or less paid in advance; thirdly, I have my revenge for the first humiliating blows which Cavaliere Rassi has received."
The following night he communicated to Conte Mosca the whole of his conversation with the Prince.
The Conte was secretly paying his court to the Duchessa; it is quite true that he still did not see her in her own house more than once or twice in a month, but almost every week, and whenever he managed to create an occasion for speaking of Fabrizio, the Duchessa, accompanied by Cecchina, would come, late in the evening, to spend a few moments in the Conte's gardens.