Free After Hannibal by Barry Unsworth

in one or two cases hostile. Perhaps my true nature, he thought now as he waited, the truth of me coming out under this stress, a desire to control, an unwillingness to share intellectual space, to admit the disorder that comes from free and equal converse. It is not because she left that I am like this, he thought. I was always like this and perhaps that is why she left.
    “You will remember the name of Fortebraccio’s second-in-command?” he said. “A fateful name for Perugia.”
    It was one of the girls who answered, the rather severe-looking one who took notes continuously and never smiled. “It was Malatesta Baglioni,” she said.
    “Exactly. The real power of the family starts here and with it the beginning of the end for Perugia as a free republic. The Baglioni were just a squabbling faction before that, one among many. The first thing that Malatesta Baglioni did on his return from exile, rich from the blackmail of Bologna—the city paid a hundred thousandflorins to escape being pillaged and a good portion of that must have gone to Malatesta … What was the first thing he did?”
    Monti waited again. “Establish the power of his family,” he heard someone say. “Right,” he said, “but how exactly? What was the first step?”
    No one answered this and after some moments Monti supplied the answer himself. “He did it by acquiring a good part of the site on which the Guidalotti houses had been built. The houses had been destroyed, you will remember, eighteen years previously by the vengeful mob. He acquired the site and set about building his palace there, with towers and courtyards and terraces, all expensively furnished from the proceeds of plunder and rapine.”
    Monti sat back and folded his arms. This business of the houses worked extremely well as a symbolic chain of power; he was pleased by the neatness of it. Some sense of this should have been registered by the students too, but he saw nothing much on their faces as they gathered themselves for departure. The young man in the corner, Millucci, was looking at him in a steady way that might have been a prelude to speech. Monti felt an impulse to circumvent this if possible. “Well,” he said, “if there are no further questions …”
    “On what grounds do you say the Guidalotti looked back and saw their houses burning?” Millucci asked.
    The question had been abrupt and Monti paused a moment before replying. On the face of the student he saw a certain complacent antagonism and he felt a gathering of dislike within himself, perhaps only for this youthful smoothness and imperviousness of expression: Millucci looked too young to be vulnerable, too youngto be betrayed. Only those could be truly betrayed who had made a gift of their weakness. “No grounds at all,” he said. “Sometimes we can use imagination, or fancy even, to help us make new associations, open up new lines of thought. I wanted to establish the connection between the transactions of power and the transactions of property.”
    “In other words, you had no evidence at all for your statement.” On the student’s face, as he rose, there was an expression of triumph.
    “Well, no, but it wasn’t exactly a statement, as I have just tried to explain,” Monti said. “I am sorry if my approach seems romantic to the severity of your youth.” He transferred his gaze rather pointedly from Millucci. “Next week,” he said, “we will be taking a further look at the fortunes of the Baglioni—and of their houses.”
    When the last of the students had left, he sat quite still for some minutes at his desk, allowing the silence to settle around him. The annoyance he had felt faded quickly. He thought again about Malatesta Baglioni, true founder of the family’s power. Acquiring property on prime sites had not been his only way of marking his return from the years of exile. Among the prisoners taken at the capture of Assisi in October of 1419 was a certain Gragnuola of Porta San