How do you mean? No, no! Don't tell me.' He held up both hands before himself in alarm, his face grown pale. 'We have never spoken of this.'

'I have studied hard how to bring pressure on Cossa to make him accept. I have worked out the single uncontestable solution in this world. You, will easily be able to, persuade Cossa to be pope.' 'How?'

She told him how, and irrevocably – although I did not know it until much later – they became my enemies.

Since the day she had brought him the good news, the marchesa had lunched every Friday with the pope at his palace. She brought him delicious gossip from the world; titbits which her daughters had searched out in the corners of all the high places in Europe, and the sweet old pope was enormously entertained by the merry innocence of it all. Gossip was not all she brought with her. She brought powders which she had commanded since her earliest days as a ruffian, when young women had come to her crying for vengeance against men whose lives they wished to put away without suspicion being cast upon themselves. Between the peals of his laughter and the sips of his, wine, the marchesa palmed her potions into his drink and poisoned Pope Alexander V to death. This I know, for I was in the room when she admitted it.

30

On 2 May 1410, Cossa and I were in Forlimpopolo, beyond Forli on.the way to Ravenna, besieging 200 horse and 200 foot of Ladislas's stragglers, when he was recalled to Bologna because the pope was dying. When we reached the papal palace, Alexander was sinking fast. Cossa didn't go into the sick room to see the pope immediately. On the way to his apartments, he found a committee of senior cardinals waiting for him in the anteroom. Covered with dust and wearing war gear, he excused himself. I went into the pope's room, and spoke to the doctors, then I went to Cossa, in his apartment, and said, `The pope is finished and the word is out.'

'What does that mean?'

`It means that couriers' have come in to say that Pierre D'Ailly and the Duke of Burgundy are on their way from France, and John of Nassau is coming from Mainz.'

`How did they find out the pope was dying that far away.'

`He's been ill for about three weeks. Now we know he's dying.'

'There is something very odd going on here,' Cossa said.

'That's not all. Cosimo di Medici is on his way from Florence.'

'What do they all want, for Christ's sake?'

'On the surface it's a crisis, isn't it? I mean, in a sense, it's the natural thing to do. They are running out of popes. They have to keep up the inventory.'

`Help me out of this gear. Tell those old farts to come in here in ten minutes. Tell them I'm having a bath.' As an afterthought he said, 'Every one of them has been bribed to the hairline.'

`After Pisa last year, you should know,' I told him.

When the committee came in, Cossa was ready for them. As ready as he would ever be, I thought. While he was dressing, he had told me he was soaked by a premonition of loss, except that he hadn't lost anything. He said he was trying to think of Catherine Visconti and the Milan gold which would buy him all the condottieri he needed to bring him to power in Italy, then make him perhaps King of the Romans, then perhaps Holy Roman Emperor: I didn't laugh at him. It was real to him. But he said that even that beautiful thought wouldn't stay with him because he knew the cardinals and the bankers and the princes wanted to make him pope.

He greeted the cardinals as they entered the room and apologized for keeping them waiting. They rumbled their acknowledgements. There were four of them: Jean de Brogny, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, most senior; Antonius Calvus,; Cardinal of Mileto; Pierre Gerard, Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum; Ladulfus Maramaur, Cardinal Deacon of San Nicolo in Cacere Tulliano, a Neapolitan. They were quite accustomed to having me at all meetings. Privately, they called me the Witness.

`His Holiness grows weaker and weaker,' de Brogny said:' `An excellent man in the whole course of his life, gifted in sweetness and prayer. But he has very few hours left.'

`He shines with goodness,' Cossa said.

`Cossa, in a few hours your Church will need you,' Maramaur said in the Neapolitan dialect. Cossa stared at him coldly. He began to feel the stirrings of panic. He had; been about to begin his march upon the conquest of Italy but these old men were going to insist upon something else for him.

`Soon there will be a conclave,' de Brogny said. `We must have the assurance of your consent to your election as pope, as should have happened in Pisa.'

Cossa sat down heavily. `Please – he said, `sit down, my friends.' He took a deep breath as they remained standing in a semi-circle around him. `My reasons are the best reasons,' he said. `I am not fit for the papacy. I lack the holiness.'

`We will surround you with holiness like high walls,' de Brogny said. 'We will elevate you as upon a cloud which will hold you above all on earth, shining with holiness.'

'Three would be no one to run the Church.'

'You will run the Church.' The pope. As it should be.'

`The Church is in shards,' Antonius Calves said harshly. 'At this moment the Church, must have a leader who is more of a king than a pope. Holiness is the last thing which is required during this terrible confusion of triple schism. We need a strong man who will dispose of two anti-popes where the Council of Pisa and Alexander failed. We need a great lawyer. We need a soldier.'

`Elect Caracciola.'

`We choose you.'

`You are priests,' Cossa said, his voice rising as the Panic inundated him. `I am a lawyer, not a churchman. I am a layman in all but title.'

`All the more reason!' Maramaur said. `They are pressing us for reform! It is a serious thing! Everyone is after reform, from the King of France to the coalmine owners in Silesia and bankers in Greece. Do we want reform? No, they want it. We have to live with the church on an hour-to-hour basis but they want reform. Reform for the businessman is the end of the schism. Reform for the theologians is something else, but Church reform we can cope with. We have to have a cunning lawyer – you – to stand them off effecting compromises. Can a priest be of any, use at that? What would we do with a pastoral pope at a time like this?'

`I – please give me time. I must think about this.'

Luca Salvadore, Cardinal of Santa Giovanna di Cernobbio, came into the room, stricken. `Alexander is nearly on his way to God,'

The cardinals turned away from Cossa and left the room.

Cossa nearly ran through the rooms to the private door behind an arras which led to the private staircase to the marchesa's `office': She was sitting in front of a mirror brushing her short, darkening hair. `Filargi is nearly, gone,' he said numbly. `They are pressing down upon me.’

Did you accept?' she asked mildly.

`Accept?’

'Never mind, Cossa. You will be turned around just the same and without a word from me.'

`Bitch! Whore!' he shouted.

`Please make. up your mind what you want from me, Cossa. If I speak, you tell me I am trying to force you against your will, or now – that I am a bitch-whore. If I stay silent, you scream at me because I must speak about the one thing on which we don't agree. You are frightened. I won't ask you why, but you have lost' your nerve.'

`Frightened? All right! Yes!, I am frightened of having to say two masses a day for the rest of my life and being expected to pour out my sins to some smelly Franciscan every time I have an unclean thought.'

'You have heard everything I have to say on this.'

`What has happened to everyone?' he asked wildly. `Who is going to defend the papacy against Ladislas? Who will lead the armies, run – the curia, bring in the money which every one of us and the Church has to have? Those ramshackle wrecks who were just in there making their insane demands would be the first to scream if reform cut off their servitia.'