vowed vengeance, after the old custom of the Vocero, against his murderers.  Other members of the family indicated Massimiliano as the probable assassin; but he meantime had escaped, with three of his retainers, to a villa of his mother’s at S. Pancrazio, whence he managed to take the open country and place himself in temporary safety.  During this while, the judicial authorities of Lucca were not idle.  The Podesta issued a proclamation inviting evidence, under the menace of decapitation and confiscation of goods for whomsoever should be found to have withheld information.  To this call a certain Orazio Carli, most imprudently, responded.  He confessed to having been aware that Massimiliano was plotting the assassination of somebody—­not Lelio; and said that he had himself facilitated the flight of the assassins by preparing a ladder, which he placed in the hands of a bravo called Ottavio da Trapani.  This revelation delivered him over, bound hand and foot, to the judicial authorities, who at the same time imprisoned Vincenzo da Coreglia, the soldier present at the murder.

Massimiliano and his men meanwhile had made their way across the frontier to Garfagnana.  Their flight, and the suspicions which attached to them, rendered it tolerably certain that they were the authors of the crime.  But justice demanded more circumstantial information, and the Podesta decided to work upon the two men already in his clutches.  On June 4, Carli was submitted to the torture.  The rack elicited nothing new from him, but had the result of dislocating his arms.  He was then placed upon an instrument called the ‘she-goat,’ a sharp wooden trestle, to which the man was bound with weights attached to his feet, and where he sat for nearly four hours.  In the course of this painful exercise, he deposed that Massimiliano and Lucrezia had been in the habit of meeting in the house of Vincenzo del Zoppo and Pollonia his wife, where the bravi also congregated and kept their arms.  Grave suspicion was thus cast on Lucrezia.  Had she perchance connived at her husband’s murder?  Was she an accomplice in the tragedy?

Lucrezia’s peril now became imminent.  Her brother, Giovan Lorenzo Malpigli, who remained her friend throughout, thought it best for her to retire as secretly as possible into a convent.  The house chosen was that of S. Chiara in the town of Lucca.  On June 5, she assumed the habit of S. Francis, cut her hair, changed her name from Lucrezia to Umilia, and offered two thousand crowns of dower to this monastery.  Only four days had elapsed since her husband’s assassination.  But she, at all events, was safe from immediate peril; for the Church must now be dealt with; and the Church neither relinquished its suppliants, nor disgorged the wealth they poured into its coffers.  The Podesta, when news of this occurrence reached him, sent at once to make inquiries.  His messenger, Ser Vincenzo Petrucci, was informed by the Abbess that