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Updated: June 11, 2025
She shuddered under his rough speech. Then answered without looking up, and with no trace of anger in her voice: "You are restored to health and strength by now, Messer Falcone. The seneschal shall have orders to pay you ten gold ducats in discharge of all that may be still your due from us. See that by night you have left Mondolfo."
It happened that a month or so after old Falcone had left us there wandered one noontide into the outer courtyard of the castle two pilgrim fathers, on their way as they announced from Milan to visit the Holy House at Loreto. It was my mother's custom to receive all pilgrim wayfarers and beggars in this courtyard at noontide twice in each week to bestow upon them food and alms.
"Ay, go, sir," answered the Duke abstractedly, puzzling now with knitted brows over the coin that bore his image. "Come, Falcone," said Galeotto, and with his equerry at his heels he set his foot on the first step. Cosimo leaned forward, a sneer on his white hawk-face, "I trust, Ser Galeotto, that you are a better condottiero than a charlatan."
To Galeotto this proud, stern baron seemed most oddly dispirited. "I see that we must talk," he said. "Things are speeding well and swiftly now," he added, dropping his voice. "But more of that presently. I have much to tell you." When they had reached the chamber that was Galeotto's, and the doors were closed and Falcone was unbuckling his master's spurs "Now for my news," said the condottiero.
We fell apart upon her entrance, each with a guilty feeling, like children caught in a forbidden orchard, for all that Falcone held himself proudly erect, his grizzled head thrown back, his eyes cold and hard. A long while it seemed ere she spoke, and once or twice I shot her a furtive comprehensive glance, and saw her as I shall ever see her to my dying day. Her eyes were upon me.
"Very well, this child is the first of his race to commit treason." Fortunato's sobs and gasps redoubled as Falcone kept his lynx-eyes upon him. Then he struck the earth with his gun-stock, shouldered the weapon, and turned in the direction of the mâquis, calling to Fortunato to follow. The boy obeyed. Giuseppa hastened after Mateo and seized his arm.
And so it came to pass that daily thereafter did we practise for an hour or so in the armoury with sword and buckler, and with every lesson my proficiency with the iron grew in a manner that Falcone termed prodigious, swearing that I was born to the sword, that the knack of it was in the very blood of me.
I had been on the point of citing Falcone; and suddenly I perceived that to do so would be to ruin Falcone without helping myself. I looked at my cousin. "In that case," said I, "I will not name them." Falcone, however, was minded to name himself, for with a grunt he made suddenly to rise. But Galeotto stretched an arm across Bianca, and forced the equerry back into his seat.
And as the years passed under such influences as had been at work upon me from the cradle, influences which had known no check save that brief one afforded by Gino Falcone, I became perforce devout and pious from very inclination.
Thus was it that for the first time I made the acquaintance an acquaintance held by few men in those days of those marvellous guards of Marozzo's devising; Falcone showed me the difference between the mandritto and the roverso, the false edge and the true, the stramazone and the tondo; and he left me spellbound by that marvellous guard appropriately called by Marozzo the iron girdle a low guard on the level of the waist, which on the very parry gives an opening for the point, so that in one movement you may ward and strike.
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