her husband had reproved some men upon
the road for singing obscene songs, whereupon they turned and murdered
him. The corpse was exposed in the Church of the Servi, where multitudes
of people gathered round it; and there an ancient dame of the Buonvisi
house, flinging herself upon her nephew's body, vowed vengeance, after
the old custom of the _Vocero_, against his murderers. Other members of
the family indicated Massimiliano as the probable assassin; but he
meantime had escaped, with three of his retainers, to a villa of his
mother's at S. Pancrazio, whence he managed to take the open country
and place himself in temporary safety. During this while, the judicial
authorities of Lucca were not idle. The Podesta issued a proclamation
inviting evidence, under the menace of decapitation and confiscation of
goods for whomsoever should be found to have withheld information. To
this call a certain Orazio Carli, most imprudently, responded. He
confessed to having been aware that Massimiliano was plotting the
assassination of somebody--not Lelio; and said that he had himself
facilitated the flight of the assassins by preparing a ladder, which he
placed in the hands of a _bravo_ called Ottavio da Trapani. This
revelation delivered him over, bound hand and foot, to the judicial
authorities, who at the same time imprisoned Vincenzo da Coreglia, the
soldier present at the murder.

Massimiliano and his men meanwhile had made their way across the
frontier to Garfagnana. Their flight, and the suspicions which attached
to them, rendered it tolerably certain that they were the authors of the
crime. But justice demanded more circumstantial information, and the
Podesta decided to work upon the two men already in his clutches. On
June 4, Carli was submitted to the torture. The rack elicited nothing
new from him, but had the result of dislocating his arms. He was then
placed upon an instrument called the 'she-goat,' a sharp wooden trestle,
to which the man was bound with weights attached to his feet, and where
he sat for nearly four hours. In the course of this painful exercise,
he deposed that Massimiliano and Lucrezia had been in the habit of
meeting in the house of Vincenzo del Zoppo and Pollonia his wife, where
the _bravi_ also congregated and kept their arms. Grave suspicion was
thus cast on Lucrezia. Had she perchance connived at her husband's
murder? Was she an accomplice in the tragedy?

Lucrezia's peril now became imminent. Her br