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Updated: September 24, 2025
The Lord of Pagliano could not meet the gaze of those steel coloured eyes. "O God!" he groaned. "How shall I tell you?" "Is he dead?" asked Galeotto, his voice hard. "No, no not dead. But... But..." The plight of one usually so strong, so full of mastery and arrogance, was pitiful. "But what?" demanded the condottiero. "Gesu!
Is there not Pagliano for you? Would not that, at need, be lordship enough?" "The meanest cottage of the countryside were lordship enough so that you shared it," I answered passionately, as many in like case have answered before and since. "You see, then, that you are wrong to attach importance to so slight a thing as this Imperial decree where you and I are concerned.
But deeply and strenuously had I expiated, and the heaviest burden of my expiation had been that endured in the past year at Pagliano beside my gentle Bianca who was another's wedded wife.
I was in command at Pagliano, holding it in Bianca's name, as Bianca's lieutenant and castellan, and I made oath that I would never lower the bridge to admit an enemy. But Cosimo's message aroused in us a memory that had lain dormant these days. She was no longer for my wooing. She was the wife of another.
Of your chivalry, my lord Duke, you must perceive that I could not do else." It was the simplest way in which he could have told Farnese that he cared nothing for the rank of either, and of reminding his excellency that Pagliano, being an Imperial fief, was not a place where the Duke of Parma might ruffle it unchecked. Messer Pier Luigi hesitated, entirely out of countenance.
But then, he is not really a Piacentino himself. He holds his fief direct from the Emperor. Pagliano is part of the State of Milan, and Cavalcanti is no subject of Farnese. His case, therefore, is exceptional and he has less than the usual cause for timidity. But the others..." Again he shrugged. "What man can do to stir them, that will I do. You shall hear from me soon again, my lord."
Ever since she had seen me step into that gold-and-purple dining-room at Pagliano, the incarnation of her vision, as she was the incarnation of mine, Bianca must have waited confidently for this hour, knowing that it was foreordained to come. Bitterness and disillusion were all that it had brought her.
In an instant a group of our men surrounded him, others made a living barrier before the guard-house, whilst two or three dismounted, drew the bolts, and dragged the great gates open. We rode on, crossing the river, and heading straight for Pagliano.
The lilac was in bloom when we came to the grey walls of Pagliano in that May of '45, and its scent, arousing the memory of my return to the world, has ever since been to me symbolical of the world itself. Mine was no half-hearted, backward-glancing return. Having determined upon the step, I took it resolutely and completely at a single stride.
I was not so tutored merely for the sake of repairing a grave omission in my education. It had a definite scope, as Galeotto frankly told me, informing me that the time approached in which to avenge my father and strike a blow for my own rights. And then at the end of a week a man rode into the courtyard of Pagliano one day, and flung down from his horse shouting to be led to Messer Galeotto.
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