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In the time that followed, the ring weighed heavily on his soul.
He told no one about it, as he updated the prison's ledgers and monitored the prisoners' rations and replaced the tallow candles once they had burnt too low. Outside, up on the platform, they were mopping more blood off the flagstones; with the French approaching so swiftly, the execution orders had piled on, for the Neapolitans clearly intended to inflict as severe a blow as possible on their foes, before retreating from the city. None of it sat easily with him—the senseless brutality of it all, the lack of any intelligible process that might have made justice out of carnage (his father-in-law once had been an advocate in Civitavecchia, and so his wife cared deeply about such things). Still, unless he wanted to face the firing squad himself, there was nothing to do but continue to turn the keys in the heavy iron locks of the cells, letting men and women pass through on their paths to Heaven or Hell.
He had kept the Cavalier's letter as well, God only knew why. He had not read it out of courtesy to the deceased, and he suspected it was unfinished, as its intended recipient had appeared at the Castel Sant'Angelo in the flesh before the sender had had time to set down his borrowed pen. Still, the scrap of paper, folded and smudged faintly with the Cavalier's bloodied fingerprints, remained wadded tightly around the ring, wedged into a corner of his coat pocket beneath his handkerchief and his pipe. He had palmed the little wad of paper-wrapped gold nervously in the frenzy of activity after the soprano had leapt from the parapets, sitting in his dim little office as the rest of the fortress flew into an uproar, letting others do their jobs now that he had done his. He had never held any illusions that he was a brave man, but he would not stoop to following the masses beyond his assigned duties, if it meant going against his conscience.
Because his wife was the daughter of an advocate, she had a great many opinions about the law generally, and perhaps this was why he did not tell her about the ring and how he had acquired it. "It was a fair exchange!" she would have argued. "It's not your fault you couldn't uphold your end of the bargain, and you would have done your best to deliver the note! Why wouldn't you be able to keep or sell the ring as you chose, then?" Perhaps she was right in a strictly legal sense, but he still felt a twinge of guilt for even accepting the ring, in the first place. He would not have been the first jailer to take such a bribe from a dead man walking, he knew; and yet, if he were a better man, he would have offered to deliver a lover's farewell without payment of any sort, or at least returned the ring before any shots were fired. The Cavalier had faced his fate with as much dignity and courage as one could expect, but for all his attempted stoicism, his fear was all too apparent in his eyes, even as he tried to distract himself from his concealed panic. No matter what their crime, condemned men were all too pitiably human when facing their fates, and the Cavalier at least had been poised and ever so polite in his hour of death. Common courtesy meant far more than a golden ring, in the end.
The Neapolitans retreated as the French arrived; the uniforms of the guards and soldiers around the Castel Sant'Angelo changed colors as the Pope re-entered the Vatican and the bells of the great basilica pealed in welcome. Out in the fields north of the fortress, the shepherd boys continued to sing the same plaintive songs, heedless of the upheavals occurring just within the city's walls.
On his way home a few weeks later, he sought out a jeweller near the Piazza Navona and asked for an appraisal of the ring. The jeweller raised his eyebrows suspiciously when handed the item, but looked it over and provided his honest assessment. "Early Florentine Renaissance, I'd say. You see rings cut like this in old portraits of the Medicis; this one looks remarkably like the ring in that portrait of Lauretta Donati in the Uffizi. I'd say it's worth at least a thousand scudi, maybe more."
A thousand scudi! With wealth like that, he could quit his job at the prison and perhaps buy a nice plot of land out in the countryside. His wife would no doubt be upset to leave the city, but he would be glad to breathe freely in the world outside the tight-knit, treacherous streets of the capital, away from the constantly shifting politics, carefree as the shepherds.
And yet, instead of offering the ring to the jeweller for sale, he instead offered his thanks, then wadded the little circle of gold and gems back into the undelivered letter for which it had been exchanged. The entirety returned to his pocket, and there it remained for some weeks longer, always hidden but never forgotten.
Until one day, without any conscious decision to do so, he sat down at his desk and pulled a sheaf from the same stack of paper he had once offered a doomed Cavalier, then began to write, not knowing where he would send the letter, not knowing if it would be understood once received, not knowing if anyone was left to receive it. Yet when he asked a pimply young soldier in passing whether it seemed possible that a letter addressed to any Cavaradossi residence in Paris would reach its destination, the young soldier smiled and said it seemed entirely likely. And so he handed the thick, lumpy envelope to the soldier, and immediately he felt a weight lift from his shoulders.
He had not expected a response, and yet one arrived, months later, to his home rather than to his workplace (he had included the address in his missive). To his surprise, the envelope contained the same telltale lump as the one he had sent to Paris. When he popped open the wax seal, out fell the ring, free of its previous wrapping. Perplexed, he unfolded the letter slipped into the envelope, which still carried the faint scent of jasmine that one might find on a lady's dressing table.
I was surprised and grateful to receive your message, and I now return to you the ring you so graciously sent back to us. However dire the circumstances in which it was given to you initially, please let your mind rest at ease to know that this time, it is given in thanks for the kindness you showed our Mario in his hour of need. It is no small thing to be reminded that some goodness remains in the world, when all hope otherwise is lost. God bless and keep you and yours. - F. Cavaradossi
The letter was written in flawless Italian, although this should have been unsurprising, given the Cavalier's relatives in Paris no doubt spoke Italian as fluently as he had. In fact, the most curious part of the letter was the signature, which was rendered as neatly as the rest of the letter, unlike the untidy scrawls that patterned the ledgers of his prison records, the Cavalier's included. Still, his mother had always told him never to look a gift horse in the mouth, and who was he to question the penmanship of the late Cavalier's sister or aunt or cousin? When he pocketed the ring this time, it weighed no more than the gold and gems of which it was made. And if he still questioned whether to tell his wife of his good fortune, it was because not even the promise of a parcel of land beyond the Leonine Walls seemed worth the price of parting with a generous gift from a brave and noble Roman.