“The possession of Biancomonte has from my cradle been the goal of all my hopes.  It is patrimony enough for me, and there, with Madonna Paola, I’ll take a long farewell of ambition, which is but the seed of discontent.”

“Why, as you will,” he sighed.  And then, before more could be said, there came from the adjoining room a piercing scream.

Cesare raised his head, and his lips parted in the faintest vestige of a smile.

“They are exacting the truth from the Governor of Cesena,” said he.  “I think, Madonna, that we had better move a little farther off.  Ramiro’s voice makes indifferent music for a lady’s ear.”

She was white as death at the horrid noise and all the things of which it may have reminded her, and so we passed from the antechamber and sought the more distant places of the castle.

Here let me pause.  We were married on the morrow which was Christmas eve, and in the grey dawn of the Christmas morning we set out for Biancomonte with the escort which Cesare Borgia placed at our disposal.

As we rode out from the Citadel of Cesena, we saw the last of Ramiro del’ Orca.  Beyond the gates, in the centre of the public square, a block stood planted in the snow.  On the side nearer the castle there was a dark mass over which a rich mantle had been thrown; it was of purple colour, and in the uncertain light it was not easy to tell where the cloak ended, and the stain that embrued the snow began.  On the other side of the block a decapitated head stood mounted on an upright pike, and the sightless eyes of Ramiro del’ Orca looked from his grinning face upon the town of Cesena, which he had so wantonly misruled.

Madonna shuddered and turned her head aside as we rode past that dread emblem of the Borgia justice.

To efface from her mind the memory of such a thing on such a day, I talked to her, as we cantered out into the country, of the life to come, of the mother that waited to welcome us, and of the glad tidings with which we were to rejoice her on that Christmas day.

There is no moral to my story.  I may not end with one of those graceful admonitions beloved of Messer Boccacci to whom in my jester’s days I owed so much.  Not mine is it to say with him “Wherefore, gentle ladies”—­or “noble sirs—­beware of this, avoid that other thing.”

Mine is a plain tale, written in the belief that some account of those old happenings that befell me may offer you some measure of entertainment, and written, too, in the support of certain truths which my contemporaries have been shamefully inclined and simoniacally induced to suppress.  Many chroniclers set forth how the Lord Vitellozzo Vitelli and his associates were barbarously strangled by Cesare’s orders at Sinigaglia, and wilfully—­for I cannot believe that it results from ignorance—­are they silent touching the reason, leaving you to imagine that it was done in obedience to a ruthlessness of character beyond parallel, so that you may come to consider Cesare Borgia as black as they were paid to paint him.