Zo

by Leanne Owens

  This troubled him. He frowned, a whole new thought pattern emerging in his mind at the words spoken by this child.

  ‘I need to go back to the villa,’ he told her. ‘Thank you for your words. I did not think I wanted anyone to disturb me in my grief, but I feel that perhaps you should always feel free to disturb me.’

  ‘My mother says I can be quite disturbing,’ she grinned at him, her cheeks dimpling.

  Once more, he laughed, surprised he could find any joy on this day. This child had captivated him. Who would have thought that someone so young could be so entertaining?

  As they left the stable of Perseus, Elli took his arm and asked shyly if he would like the drawing she had done of his horse.

  ‘I did it while hiding behind a statue in the villa as everyone ran around with the news of your grandfather’s passing. I thought Perseus would be unhappy to know of what had happened, so I tried to make him look sad.’

  Lorenzo took the proffered paper and saw the hand of an experienced artist in the drawing of his horse, from the detail of his mane and forelock to the expression captured in the dark eyes. Again, he doubted her ability to create art of this standard, and when she saw the misgiving in his eyes, she frowned impatiently at him, took out her charcoal and in a series of quick strokes, created a perfect likeness of Perseus with simple lines that captured his essence.

  ‘I did do it,’ she looked at him, holding out the sketch, her eyes stormy. ‘I don’t lie.’

  Laying his hand over his heart, Lorenzo offered her an apology, ‘You are an artist far exceeding the abilities of most who are twice your age – you must understand my reservations. Your talent humbles me. It is a shame you are a girl when you have a gift like this.’

  ‘If I was a boy, I would become an artist and never have to marry anyone old and fat and ugly.’

  He laughed, then said seriously, ‘Our world is filled with ifs but, unfortunately, we have to make do with what we have. If only you were a boy. If only girls could become artists. If only my grandfather had not died. But we cannot change what has already been, we can only hope that we can change what is yet to be as we move into the future.’

  ‘Your grandfather was a good man,’ Elli sighed, her violet eyes troubled as she thought of the man who had been kind to her when they met, now lying dead in the villa. ‘The world is a sadder place with him gone, but you will always have his words written in your heart.’ She raised her eyes to his, imploringly. ‘If it is not too much to ask, could you share something he told you? So, I, too, can have some of his wisdom in my heart? Maybe it will help me change the future.’

  Lorenzo smiled at her, appreciating the earnestness in her gaze. She hungered for knowledge and wisdom, an appetite his grandfather had always admired. ‘He often told me that it is our duty to protect those who are weaker than us. There are those who think they become strong by crushing all around them and walking over their remains, but the strongest are those who raise the lives around them, making great fires grow from small sparks that they see within others. It is what I will strive to do in order to honour him. I will light the fires in others so that they burn bright and illuminate the world.’

  He briefly touched the back of his hand to her cheek and walked away, leaving Elli to watch him walk along the path back to the villa. She did not know that when he went to bed that night, he placed her drawing next to his pillow so that it was the first thing he saw when he woke up. It reminded him of small miracles and kindnesses - a girl from Ferrara who could draw like a master and who made him laugh in a time of darkness.

  He hoped she would not have to marry someone like she described, and he hoped that her mean boy, Giro, did not cause her much grief when she returned to Ferrara. He had no inkling that in twenty-eight years’ time, he would be lying on his death bed in this villa with the violet-eyed girl guarding him in his final hours, and her hated Giro, who would become his nemesis, would visit to deliver a parting message.

  ***

  ‘And when Elli went to sleep that night,’ Ally told her spellbound audience, ‘I woke up. I had every memory of all her life up to that point, but she had no knowledge of me, apart from that moment of confusion when our minds seemed to fuse. I didn’t know what it was but I knew it wasn’t a dream because of all the detail. I could remember everything. The names. The places. The feel of the Florentine sun on my skin. The smell of the flowers in their garden. The sense of sadness about the death of Cosimo de’ Medici because he had been kind to me. It was as though I suddenly had two lives, both as clear as each other. I still had every memory and feeling about this life but had suddenly gained every memory from the ten-year-old life of Eliga Spini of Ferrara. She had no knowledge of me, but I knew everything of her.’

  She paused and looked at her friends, her violet eyes glowing with fervour as she shared her memories. The story entranced Nick and Marcus and they felt the power of her love and belief weave around them. Like her friends, they stared at her as though hypnotised. They did not see a woman, nearly sixty, suffering from mental illness, they saw the child, the teenager, the young woman. They saw beauty and intensity, passion, sincerity, and strength. Most of all, they saw and felt feelings of love as they looked at her.

  ‘If that was madness or mental illness,’ she whispered to them, the light in her eyes beginning to fade, ‘then we should all be that mad.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Alice Lamore and Eliga Spini

  ‘I’m tired now,’ Ally informed them, her energy visibly draining as she sank back in her chair. She waved a weary hand at them and closed her eyes. ‘You need a chance to talk about this and try to prove that it is a break with reality, a hallucination, an invention of a sick mind. That is fine, I understand that from your point of view, it is inconceivable that it is real. I was a child with an imaginative mind.’

  Looking at her pale face, Peter motioned for the others to leave and he buzzed for the nurses to take Ally back to her room for a rest. He worried that the talking took too much from her, but he hadn’t seen her so animated and alive since she’d been there. The haunted look of loss that had been on her face since her arrival had transformed to the expression of someone who remembered love.

  ‘What do you think?’ Lynette asked them as they sat over lunch in the cafeteria, enjoying the dishes that were more like the fare of a five-star restaurant than hospital food.

  Nick replied first, ‘I think it is the most fascinating story I’ve ever heard. I don’t care if it’s real or imagined, I want to hear all about it.’

  Listening intently to his words, Sandy nodded, ‘You’re right, Nick, when you just listen to it and don’t fight the reality of it, it is a fantastic story.’

  ‘I want to know,’ Marcus looked to Peter, ‘if she will be able to continue this afternoon. I want to know more about Eliga Spini and Lorenzo. I Googled them both and, though I found no mention of the girl, all the other dates and people she mentioned were correct.’

  ‘But did she really experience that at age nine?’ Peter put the question to them. ‘Or did she learn about these people later, and then imagined it happened when she was nine? Is it a story woven from her imagination and longing in the years after her parents died?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Andrew smiled at his friend, thinking that accepting the story could be more important than dissecting the story. ‘Perhaps Nick is right and we should just sit back and enjoy what she tells us and not try and work out when she experienced it, what she experienced, and what she made up… she is telling a story for us, and I want to hear it.’

  ‘And I remember that she told us those things in primary school,’ Sandy looked at Peter, thinking of the young warrior who had protected them when they were children. ‘Not about Zo, but the things that he told her. She said it was our duty to protect those who are weaker than us. I remember her telling us that there are those who think they become strong by hurting or destroying the lives around them, but the truly strong are those who are strong en
ough to raise the lives around them. She said she wasn’t changing us, she was merely feeding the sparks so that great fires would grow, and we would illuminate the world.’

  Peter nodded, thoughtfully, ‘So, we are left to ask, was she repeating the words told to her five hundred years earlier, or did she weave her own words into an imaginative story?'

  It was four o’clock before they were able to see Ally again. She had slept most of the day since their first visit. Gina’s disapproval about the visit was abundantly clear, but Ally insisted that she would not be able to rest unless she spoke to them for at least an hour. The doctor’s eyes glinted dangerously at the six as they took up position in chairs around their story-teller.

  Ally looked at their faces thinking that they hadn’t changed much since they were children. She could still read them like so many open books. Sandra had become better at concealing her emotions, but she could see the misgiving in her eyes as she waited for the next instalment of the story. ‘Do you have some questions before I begin?’

  ‘How long after that first episode,’ began Andrew, reaching up to hold Ally’s hand gently in his own, ‘before you experienced another visit to Elli?’

  ‘I’m not sure of exact time frames,’ Ally gazed at him fondly. ‘At first, it was only during those attacks of pain that I could visit. The pain would start and I’d close my eyes and this world disappeared, along with the pain, and I became Elli, growing up in Italy, with brothers and a sister, and parents who believed the purpose of daughters was to marry men who could improve the lot of the family’s life. Some of the visits were just an hour doing embroidery or a half day visiting neighbours. The time there seemed to be irrelevant to this time. If my mind wandered for twenty minutes during one of the painful attacks, I might have twenty minutes as Elli, or it might be several days.’

  ‘In those first years that we knew you,’ Sandy narrowed her eyes remembering back, ‘you were experiencing this dual life and you never let on?’

  Ally shook her head and smiled affectionately at her friend. ‘I wasn’t stupid. I knew that I couldn’t share. I had the combined knowledge of two girls, and I knew how Elli had to hide her abilities and her dreams, so it was easy to copy her. I just built the secret into my life, along with the pain itself, and kept that separate from all of you. If I had difficulty understanding it, and it was happening to me, how much more difficult would it have been for you to understand?’

  With a laugh, Sandy agreed, ‘I see your point. I guess it explains why you were so much more mature than us, juggling two lives and learning about two places and two families while we were barely getting by with one.’

  ‘Did you see Lorenzo de’ Medici much in those early years?’ Marcus asked, fascinated by what he’d read of the man in the past hour.

  ‘Zo had a hectic life,’ replied Ally, her eyes losing focus as she remembered back to her childhood. ‘You have to understand that he was in training to become a great leader of people and commerce, so there were always lessons and trips to meet important people. At sixteen and seventeen, he represented his family and travelled to meet with the Pope in Rome and other dignitaries around Italy. You’d think he wouldn’t have much time for a starry-eyed girl amongst the throngs of other admirers, but he was always patient and kind. And funny – he loved to laugh, and he thought it was a lark that Elli dressed up as a boy and went hunting with him and his friends. Wherever he went, there were devotees - he was like the movie star of his time – and he liked that Elli was always honest with him. Brutally honest. Sometimes, Elli and her mother stayed with his mother and he would encourage her to paint, even though she was a girl. He let me paint in his own studio using his equipment, though I had to dress as a boy when others were around as my parents would have skinned me if they’d known I was painting.’

  ‘You think of Elli’s parents as your parents?’ Lynette asked, noticing how Ally had changed from speaking of Elli in third person to first.

  ‘I see them as Elli’s parents,’ Ally shrugged, ‘but I see Elli and me as interchangeable, so they also seem like my parents.’

  ‘And she was a year older than you?’ Andrew queried, trying to get the timelines organised in his head.

  ‘Less than a year. In that first visit as a nine-year-old, Elli was ten. Then, we shared being ten for several months before her next birthday.’

  ‘And you managed to keep that all secret from your friends?’ Marcus looked around at the faces, wondering how they could have missed that.

  ‘I was used to keeping secrets,’ she lifted one shoulder. ‘In the first years of our friendship, I’d simply file it all away in a compartment in my mind and not think of it.’

  ‘Were you talking Italian as Elli?’ asked Sandra.

  ‘Absolutely. I knew every word of Italian that she knew from that first moment of being her. I didn’t have to learn it - I had all her memories of it.’

  A frown appeared on Andrew’s face, ‘But I remember you learning Italian when we were at high school. Are you saying you didn’t have to learn it, you already knew it?’

  Ally snorted in amusement, ‘I knew fifteenth century Florentine Italian, Andy-man, I needed to learn modern Italian. You might be surprised how many differences there are between languages of five hundred odd years ago and now.’

  ‘Back to you and Zo,’ said Nick. He found her story mesmerizing and had no trouble accepting everything she told them. It didn’t matter to him if there was an actual Elli who lived half a millennium earlier, or if Ally’s imagination gave birth to her – she was a character about whom he wanted to know more. ‘When did you start spending more time with him as, I gather, we have a love story.’

  ‘Yes, eventually,’ Ally’s violet eyes creased in a smile as she looked at him. ‘We were friends for many years, first. When I was twelve and he was seventeen, we stayed at his family’s house and I managed to dress as a page and join him on a hunt. He loved to hunt. We did that many times after that first wild ride where I outrode most of his friends.’

  Once more, her eyes seemed to focus on something far away. ‘For those early years, he treated me as though I was a cousin who amused him with my drawing and my ability to ride a horse alongside the best in the hunt. It tickled him that I would slip out of my home dressed as a boy. But matters of state kept him so busy, and back then I was no more than a tossed pebble in the pond that was his life. Everything changed when I turned fifteen, and I transformed from a pebble making small ripples to a big thorn in his side.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Sandy leaned forward, her eyes alight with curiosity, ‘let me guess. Didn’t you say earlier that your family expected you to be married by fifteen?’

  ‘Yes. Elli was quite beautiful, when she wasn’t dressing as a boy and running wild. The marriage market at the time was filled with older men who wanted a young wife.’

  ‘What’s changed?’ joked Sandy, then pulled a wry face as she realised that she was often pursued by much younger men, so added, ‘Scratch that. Some things have changed, but there are still plenty of men who want a younger woman.’

  ‘Back then, though,’ Ally told her, ‘they could buy them from families who were willing to trade their daughters for the chance to climb the social ladder. I don’t think it’s quite that bad today. Elli’s parents had been going through potential suitors for her and decided on a d’Este of Ferrara. Not of the main branch, but a cousin - a wealthy man who had seen Elli when we were staying with Lucrezia, Lorenzo’s mother. Elli had made it to fifteen when others were married at fourteen, so we were lucky, I guess, but our time was up. Papa expected me to marry and make his life better.’

  Everyone noticed how her personal pronouns were mixing up as she spoke of Elli, but they were growing used to it, so it somehow made sense as she talked about the two girls as ‘me’, ‘her’, and ‘we’.

  Making herself more comfortable in her bed, Ally told of the night that changed her relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici.

  ***

&nbs
p; Elli, her parents, and a few of her siblings were staying in her grandparent’s house in Florence, not far from the Arno River that cut through the city. Her father, Enzo, had been negotiating with Silvio d’Este, a man keen to claim the blonde beauty as his own as soon as possible.

  ‘You will marry him, daughter.’ Enzo told her, his face stern.

  ‘I will not marry him,’ Elli stomped her foot and pursed her lips in anger. ‘He is disgusting, and he smells, and he is older than you.’

  ‘None of that matters,’ Enzo waved the objections away with a flick of his hand. ‘He is wealthier than our family, and it is a step up for us. He is a d’Este and he has important family members. He says he is friends with Lorenzo de’ Medici, which is important if our family is to advance here in Florence.’

  ‘I can be friends with Lorenzo,’ Elli insisted. ‘Mamma is friends with his mother and he speaks to me. He’s fond of me. I don’t need to marry some smelly old man to help our family become favourites with the de’ Medici family.’

  Enzo roared and slammed his hand down on the wooden table that stood between them. ‘I will not have my daughter prostituting herself to Lorenzo like a harlot from the brothel. Women do not become friends with powerful men unless they marry them or are their whores. And you cannot marry Lorenzo. We all know that can never happen.’

  ‘I know he can’t marry me,’ Elli said, stung by her father’s words and knowing them to be true, ‘but we are friends. He likes my drawings. I could be an artist. Why do I have to be a wife?’

  ‘Because you are a woman!’ Enzo threw his hands in the air at the stupidity of his daughter. ‘You are not an artist. You are not a friend of Lorenzo de’ Medici. You are a woman and you will marry who I say you will marry. You will marry Silvio d’Este and you will have his children, and our families will be like this.’ He held his hands together, the fingers interlaced.