by Philip Kazan
‘Girolamo Ellebori!’ I said. He frowned. I pointed my dagger at him. ‘I am Comandante Onorio Celavini, and I am arresting you in the name of the Otto di Guardia.’
He spat. ‘Go to hell,’ he said, and grinned. Taking a couple of paces back, he dropped into a low guard. The young men were all jabbering and shaking their swords. I needed to get away from them. ‘Put down your blades, or I’ll lock all of you up,’ I said, stepping beyond the wavering points, knowing that they were as likely to go for me as for the man who was facing me, his dagger point down and his arm flexed to strike.
Girolamo Ellebori. He had been a rather thin, pale boy with a long and freckled face, given to throwing stones at cats and bullying the village children, but also to crying when he lost even the most trivial games. Two years younger than me, he was always telling tales on his brother Federigo and getting us into trouble. It was hard to believe that this man, sinewy and sunburnt, with a beard and a curled moustache, was the same person. But his face was still long, and his eyes … His eyes looked like the eyes of his brother, Augusto. I could almost feel the tension, the power in his body. It seemed to be reaching across the space between us, pressing against me, forcing me backwards. The air, already thick, tightened around me, plastering itself against my face like wet linen. Like bedsheets soaked with my own blood. The leash tightened around my neck. I couldn’t breathe. He’s found me, a voice inside my head was whining. Onoria’s voice. He’s come back for me. Then one of the drunken gentlemen cursed and lunged past me with his sword, his arm jogging my shoulder.
‘You bastard,’ he yelled, and aimed a thrust at Girolamo. It was weak and badly timed, and Girolamo turned it aside with a deft twist of his blade and lashed out, catching the man across the forehead. The man dropped his sword and staggered back, his face a veil of red. Girolamo dropped his dagger, bent down and scooped up the sword. He was laughing. Suddenly, though, my body, if not my mind, was awake. It knew what this was. It understood battle.
I have always disliked fighting with only a dagger. It usually means that something has gone badly wrong, that you’ve miscalculated or wandered into the wrong tavern. As I watched Girolamo, I wondered why he hadn’t kept hold of his own dagger in his left hand. Then I saw that he was holding it wrong: his wrist was bent, and the fingers crabbed. He must have fallen on it and damaged it somehow. That was good. I stepped to the side and watched him track me with his eyes. The sword was long and new-looking, something for a young lord to wave around, but Girolamo knew what he was doing with it. I moved again, trying to get away from the drunkards. Perhaps there was a police patrol nearby, I thought. They usually came up and down this street a few times a night. I needed to arrest Girolamo and hand him over to the Eight alive. But a crowd was gathering. A half-naked girl hanging onto the neck of a fat merchant was yelping at us as though she was at a cockfight. I should have let him run, I was thinking. He couldn’t have left the city. We’d have hunted him down tomorrow.
‘Put down the sword,’ I said, in my most reasonable policeman’s voice, but it came out as a twisted rasp. I could still feel the leash against my throat. Girolamo grinned.
‘Get fucked, you Florentine queer,’ he said, and lunged. I was holding the blade of my dagger along my forearm and I parried easily, knocking his sword wide and jumping back out of range. He came at me again, probing. I still wasn’t sure what I was going to do. A woman was screaming somewhere above us, calling for the police and God to help her. Girolamo swished his blade, took a decorative guard and leered at me, posing like a drawing in a fencing manual. He stepped forward, and I stepped back. I could sense the shadows growing behind me and realised that he was backing me into a doorway, a tight space where I wouldn’t be able to use my arms. He lunged again, and this time I trapped him, trying to stab his arm but instead catching it between my blade and my own forearm, at the same time as I tried to get a leg across his body and throw him. But he was strong, and angry, and twisted himself free, wrenching his arm back so that the hilts of our weapons tangled, and the dagger was nearly pulled from my hand. I grabbed his blade with my free hand, turned my back to him and kicked backwards with all my strength. My heel struck his shin, and he grunted and punched my head with his injured hand, making my ears ring. I was twisting the quillons of my dagger and they suddenly came free. Still holding his blade, I jabbed my elbow back into his face and pulled the edge of my dagger up across the inside of his arm. He shouted, and the sword clattered out of his limp fingers. Turning, I grabbed his neck and put my dagger against his face.
‘Girolamo Ellebori, I’m arresting you for the murders of Zanobia Linucci, Pietro Vennini and Simone da Fiesole, and for plotting the murder of your own sister, Donna Smeralda Salvucci. We’re going to the Bargello, and the Otto are going to ask you a lot of questions. You know how the Otto asks questions, don’t you? And when they’re done with you, you’ll hang.’
Girolamo bared his teeth at me. ‘My arm, you cunt. You’ve ruined my arm! May your balls shrivel up and be eaten by pigs!’
‘That should be interesting,’ I said. ‘Save your stinking breath for the magistrates.’ He opened his mouth to say something else, and I twisted my hand around his ruff in warning when suddenly he went limp and the flimsy lace was tearing in my fist as he dropped to his knees. I looked up to see one of the young aristocrats trying to pull his sword out of Girolamo’s side. It had gone in under one right armpit and come out near the other.
‘What … what have you done?’ I said to the young fool, who was grinning with bloodlust and wine-kindled pride. ‘In Jesus’s name …’ Girolamo’s mouth was making a noise like air escaping from a bloated horse’s punctured belly, and his eyes were rolling back in his head. I knelt in front of him, took hold of his hair and leant in so that my lips were almost touching his ear.
‘Do you remember the Ormanis?’ I whispered. ‘I can tell you that they have never forgotten you. I can tell you …’ But his head was lolling in my grasp. I let go of him, and his body folded sideways onto the paving stones.
A patrol, with Lieutenant Poverini at its head, had only been two streets away. When they finally arrived, I had put the idiot who had killed Girolamo Ellebori under arrest, and a whore was bandaging the head of his friend, who had bled all over several hundred scudi worth of silk doublet. The Misericordia were summoned to take the body away. The rest of the patrol was detailed to guard Smeralda’s house, in case there were more assassins in the city. I walked back to the Bargello with Poverini and the young nobleman, who had passed through rage and threats, and was now gibbering with terror. I doubted anything would happen to him beyond a small fine, perhaps, and the inconvenience of being summoned by the Eight. I would see to it that he spent a few uncomfortable hours in a cell, though. I made my report to the magistrates’ clerk on duty. He told me that Simone da Fiesole was still alive, though not expected to live.
By the time I got back to the house, the sky was already beginning to glow faintly, and Venus was shining high in the east. As I undressed in my curtained room, I found that my beautiful silver-spangled sleeves were covered in blood. It was on my hands as well. It was almost blissful to unbind the cloth around my chest, and there was blood on the cloth between my legs too. I stood in front of the mirror and studied myself. A pale woman, lean and muscled, with a scarred neck and small, reddened, cloth-marked breasts. Delicate face too tired to be anything but a blank. I cocked my hip, rested one stained hand on the curve of it and saw the statue of David in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vecchio: the sexless boy, deed done; the monster’s head lolling, pointless now, nothing but meat, underfoot. David had girls’ hair and a boy’s prick, and I had neither, so I was his reverse. If Donatello had cast me in bronze I would have been just as baffling, just as unnatural. There was no giant’s head at my feet, but I had a monster’s blood on my hands, and I felt just as forlorn as David looked, his work done, and the world still the same.
I went outside and washed in cold water from the well, tipping th
e bucket over my head and listening to the rats scuttle away at the sound of the water. Then I put on some shapeless clothes, slipped out into the streets and let myself into the church of San Biaggio. I was gone long before anyone else was awake, and as I stretched myself out between sheets that were fleetingly cool, I repeated to myself the promise I’d whispered to Zanobia Linucci through the cracks in the stone floor, above the place where they’d lowered her into the dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I rose late, which felt strange, because it has never been my habit, or one which life has allowed me. I heard Gherarda let herself in, and the sounds of the fire being lit, pans being moved around: ordinary, domestic sounds, which I still found as exotic, in their way, as the skirl of a Turkish military band. When I got up, I found that I had bled a little on the sheets. Muttering, I stripped them from the bed, made it up again with clean linen from the press, and hid the soiled sheets beneath the neatly folded ones. I would take them out again tonight and use them until my bleeding stopped. Then I would have to boil them at night, or if they were too bad, leave them outside the Pietà when no one was looking, for the girls to clean and use. Gherarda was forbidden to come into my bedroom, but though I felt almost content to give her the run of the rest of my house, in the end I didn’t trust her. I didn’t trust anyone.
I was getting dressed when I heard Gherarda calling out, ‘Coming, sirs! Coming!’ and unlatch the front door. I knew she was irritated by my insistence on keeping the street door locked, and as I buttoned my doublet – green velvet the colour of bottle glass, which I sometimes wore in the summer when I was off duty – I pictured her limping across the courtyard. Her feet were bad: she had bunions that made her big toes lie across their neighbours, but she was inclined to exaggerate her aches and pains when it suited her. It was something I envied, in a way, this ability to be oneself, to display one’s infirmities as badges of selfhood, as virtues. I would never be able to complain about the burdens of my own flesh. The cramps in my belly, the headaches, the swelling of my breasts: I had never told a soul about them. My mother had never known me as a woman. I had never sat down in a comfortable room with others of my sex, and talked of … what? I couldn’t even imagine it. I sighed as I did up my hose and stepped into my shoes. Drawing back the curtains, I looked down into the street. Some girls from the Pietà were walking by, chatting together, happy and apparently carefree, but the greyish-white of their skin gave that the lie. They were orphans or abandoned by their parents for lack of money or kindness, or thrown out of home for being raped, or sick, or deformed. The women who ran the house were kind in their way, but pragmatic above all, and the girls below me spent most of their waking hours unravelling silk cocoons in one of the ill-lit rooms above the chapel. Some of them escaped into service and a few into marriage – the lucky ones. Many others left on a stretcher wrapped in a stained bedsheet, on their way to a perfunctory burial. I supposed their names must be written down somewhere, because if not, they might never have lived at all.
‘Don Onorio!’ Gherarda was calling up the stairs. ‘A gentleman has visited you!’
‘I’m coming.’ I ran my hands down my front, wincing at the pressure against my breasts but satisfied that the bulge of the peascod doublet and the fashionably baggy folds of my hose had satisfactorily transformed me.
I never had visitors unless they were colleagues from the sbirri, so I assumed that one of them was waiting for me downstairs. Instead, standing elegantly in the hallway and pretending to admire the rather shabby Brussels tapestry that hung near the door, was the hollow-eyed man who had been at the funeral last night. The courtier. The Grand Duke’s spy.
‘Comandante Celavini,’ he said. ‘Let me congratulate you on your actions last night.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It was no more than my duty as a servant of His Highness. How may I be of service to you, Don …?’
‘Angelo Ruspi.’ He bowed in the elaborate manner of the court, and I replied in kind, not without noticing Gherarda’s raised eyebrows as she watched the ritual.
‘Gherarda, could you fetch some of that good Malvasia wine and something to eat?’ I asked, but Ruspi held up his hand.
‘I would adore a glass of your wine, but actually I’m here to bring you to the Signoria. The Grand Duke desires to speak with you.’
‘The Grand Duke?’ I repeated. I felt a lurch of unease, which Ruspi must have noticed. He was probably used to it.
‘About last night and the unfortunate circumstances surrounding it,’ he said. ‘The Grand Duke feels that you are the man who understands them best.’
‘Of course, signore.’ I buckled on my sword and dagger, gave Gherarda some vague instructions on what she might leave me for my supper, and followed Ruspi out into the courtyard. ‘I need to put this place to rights,’ I said apologetically, but the courtier just smiled.
‘Nonsense! Doesn’t do to be too ostentatious,’ he said, and led me out into Borgo Ognissanti.
‘The man who was attacked, Donna Zanobia’s steward, is likely to live after all, his doctor says,’ he told me as we walked. ‘If he does, he has you to thank.’
‘I’m glad,’ I said. ‘He seems like a good fellow. Loyal.’
‘Ah, loyalty. An excellent quality, but only if offered to the right party. Otherwise it becomes the source of boundless difficulty, wouldn’t you say? He arranged the funeral. Do you think he let anyone know about her death – outside Florence?’
‘If you mean her family in Pitigliano, I don’t think he knew that Donna Zanobia was an Orsini by birth. She seems to have been a secretive person.’
‘Ah. And the other servants?’
‘I don’t think any of them are bright enough, or curious enough, to have looked into it.’
‘Good. Very good.’ We walked in what might have been companionable silence for a while. ‘You were a soldier, weren’t you, Comandante? With Don Orazio del Forese.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You don’t seem like the usual run of soldier, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘Oh? Why so?’
‘You aren’t a drunkard, or a braggart. You’re a famous swordsman – don’t deny it. Witnesses say you could easily have killed that fellow last night.’
‘Instead I let some wine-soaked boy do it for me,’ I said ruefully.
‘Young Pitti? Yes, that was unfortunate. He’s an idiot in a family of idiots. But there, you see? You are a modest man. Modest home, modest dress. Soft-spoken.’
‘I don’t have much choice in the matter,’ I told him, pointing to my scarred throat.
‘Oh, it isn’t a criticism, Celavini. It’s a compliment. In any case, Girolamo Ellebori is better off dead.’
‘I’d like to have brought him to justice.’
‘I’m inclined to think that justice was served. Here we are,’ he added, as we started across the Piazza Signoria. ‘Have you met His Highness before?’
‘Once, after I joined the sbirri. I bowed, and he nodded.’
‘Then you know what to expect,’ Ruspi said, and I was pondering the ambiguity of this as we passed through the doorway on the piazza and into the courtyard beyond. There was the bronze boy leaning on his huge sword, and opposite him Judith about to behead Holofernes. I had seen them a hundred times before, but this morning they seemed more alive, somehow, the naked, sexless boy and the hooded, merciless girl. I followed Ruspi up to the first floor and waited while he spoke to the guard outside an unassuming door. The guard knocked, there was an indistinct noise from within, and Ruspi opened the door. ‘I’ll wait for you downstairs,’ he said.
I had never been inside the Studiolo of Don Francesco, though I had heard a great deal about it. Nothing that I had heard prepared me for the reality, though. I had expected something grand and strange. The room I entered was certainly strange, but there was no grandeur. Instead, as the guard discreetly closed the door behind me, I found myself inside an alarmingly small room, a narrow rectangle with a high, barrel
-vaulted ceiling. Virtually the whole of the floor, from where I stood to the back wall, was crammed with a promiscuous jumble of lecterns, telescopes, a printing press, various stoves of different sizes, tripods and braziers, pestles and mortars, one of them so tall that I could have climbed inside it. There were glass alembics, spirals of copper tubing, sacks of charcoal spilling out onto the grimy floor, bellows and tongs. One of the braziers was alight, and a huge pear-shaped glass vessel full of greenish-yellow liquid was bubbling above it. A layer of smoke hung just above my head. The walls themselves were lined with paintings, which added a further layer of hysteria to the room’s atmosphere.
‘What is it?’ An impatient voice came from somewhere within the thicket of implements. I blinked – my eyes were already smarting from the acrid fumes that were almost stifling me – and saw a dark shape crouching behind the lit brazier. A man stood up, batting at the smoke rising from the handful of fresh charcoal that he had just dropped onto the fire. He had close-cropped black hair and a beard to match, a thin mouth and large eyes, red and running with tears, that seemed to hint at some great disappointment with the world. His black doublet was buttoned up to his neck and the white ruff that spread above his collar was no longer white, but grey with ash and sweat.
‘Comandante Onorio Celavini of the sbirri, Your Highness,’ I said, standing to attention. ‘You sent for me, sir,’ I added, when the man showed no sign of recognition. The large eyes kept straying to the bubbling liquid, and to the sheaf of dog-eared papers in his hand.
