And thus, at the age of thirty-three, Catherine was for the second time after five years of marriage, the widow of a murdered husband. CHAPTER VIII. Guilty or not guilty again.—Medieval clanship.—A woman's vengeance.—Funeral honours.—Royal-mindedness.—Its costliness; and its mode of raising the wind.—Taxes spent in alms to ruined tax-payers.—Threatening times.—Giovanni de'Medici.—Catherine once more wife, mother, and widow. Catherine, with two of her sons in the carriage with her, had advanced but a few yards beyond the spot where the murder was committed, when, alarmed by the cries of the conspirators and of her own retinue, she looked back, and became at once aware of the truth. The whole of the attendants, except two, who made a futile attempt to kill or arrest the assassins, immediately dispersed themselves, and fled in different directions. The seven conspirators did likewise; and Catherine and her sons, hastily throwing themselves on horses taken from the grooms, galloped at full speed to the fortress. And the murdered man's body was left alone in a ditch near the spot where he was slain, till late that night it was removed to a neighbouring church by "some decent and compassionate people" who lived hard by. The ballet-master historian[130] Cobelli went to look on it, as it lay in the ditch, and pours forth a flood of voluble lamentations over the beauty of the body thus mutilated and disfigured, and that of his gold brocade jacket and rose-coloured pantaloons besmeared with mud.[131] Necessity for providing for their own safety may furnish some excuse for Catherine and her sons' precipitate retreat to the citadel. Her husband was beyond all need of assistance, and her sons' security, and that of her dominions, was in imminent danger. For it was probable enough, that the assassination just committed almost under her eyes was the first outbreak of one of those plans for restoring the old dynasty that were so constantly occurring. Such, however, does not seem to have been the case. The popular indignation against the perpetrators of Feo's murder was at once strongly manifested. They were that night hunted through the town, and most of them dragged prisoners to the piazza before the morning.