by Leanne Owens
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, known as Sandro to those close to him, and Botticelli to history, often visited Lorenzo’s private rooms as another of his enlightened and trusted friends. The place had become a secret club for sharing thoughts and ideals. Like Leonardo, he showed great talent, and Lorenzo believed he had a brilliant future. Lorenzo intended to do all he could to fan the flames of greatness in these men so that their light would shine from Florence through the centuries to come.
‘If you are unable to help, then I shall ask Sandro,’ said Lorenzo, stopping as the screen slid aside and a neatly dressed boy with wet blonde ringlets surrounding his angelic face, stepped out from the makeshift bathing area.
‘Now, I want to paint him,’ Leonardo sighed as he gazed on the vision of perfect youth.
‘Elli, meet my young friend Leonardo da Vinci. Leo, this is Eliga Spini.’
Elli met the intelligent eyes of Leonardo and bobbed her head in courtesy, ‘It is an honour to meet you. I can see you are an artist.’
‘He hopes to be one,’ Lorenzo smirked, ‘but he is young and his thoughts jump all over the place, from flowers to faces, weapons to lightning, war, politics, and worms to the matters of the universe.’
‘How wonderful!’ Elli’s eyes lit up. ‘All things I want to talk about. I can now, can’t I? Now that I’m a boy?’
Lorenzo cast an eye down her shapely figure outlined in the rather tightly fitting boy’s clothes and realised they had work ahead of them if they were to convince anyone that this heavenly body belonged to a male.
Seeing his friend’s eyes wander over the decidedly female form in front of them, Leonardo spoke up. ‘We may have to work on you being a boy, but I look forward to many exciting discussions in years to come with a boy called Elli.’
‘So, I can stay?’ she asked Lorenzo, her eyes shining with hope.
He shrugged, ‘I’m not going to turn you out on the street, and I’m not sending you home where you’ll be handed over to Silvio d’Este. So, until I can think of what to do with you, or who to foist you on to, you can stay here in these rooms. Or with Leo. I’m sure he will help.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Leonardo laughingly declined involvement.
‘She might be your muse,’ Lorenzo suggested. ‘Elli is the one who suggested I write my poetry in Tuscan rather than Latin. When she and her mother were staying with my mother a few years ago, I regaled her with the goings-on from our latest hunt with my crazy band of friends, and she said I should write a poem about it, so The Partridge Hunt owes itself to Elli’s influence. She may inspire you, as well.’
‘I paint,’ Leonardo drawled dryly, ‘I do not need a muse to give me inspiration for poetry.’
Handing a square of paper and a sliver of charcoal to Elli, Lorenzo instructed her to draw a horse. He then watched Leonardo’s expression as the anatomically correct horse appeared on the sheet, its neck arched, its mane and tail rippling in the wind, its muscles bunched ready for action. Within a few minutes, the horse came to life on the paper. Leo looked on with astonishment.
‘That is…’ he shook his head as he held the drawing out in front of him, ‘…remarkable. Perhaps we can use an extra hand in the studio.’ He eyed her clothes and how her pert breasts pushed the shirt out, and grimaced. ‘First, we will work on clothes that make you look more like a boy. That,’ he waved a hand in the general direction of her chest, ‘is most off-putting.’
‘Between us,’ Lorenzo nodded, ‘we will keep you safe. It would be best if you did not go anywhere else apart from these rooms for now. Clarice Orsini and I will have our official wedding in a few days, and I doubt she’d appreciate seeing a pretty boy with breasts following me around.’
‘She would be fine with it,’ Leonardo winked at Elli. ‘On the other hand, Lucrezia Donati might want to rip your throat out, but the Orsini girl is very devout – she will merely pray for your soul.’
Elli made a sound of disgust.
‘Our Elli is not as devout as some,’ Lorenzo explained with a chuckle. ‘She says her priest is often a stranger to the truth. Plus, she has to warn the little boys to avoid him.’
‘Ah,’ Leonardo nodded knowingly, ‘and yet we must not speak of these things openly, or we will pay dearly for our words.’
‘Yes, I know. They tell me God is a male god,’ Elli’s eyes glittered dangerously, her anger bubbling to the surface, ‘conveniently written about by men for men, with all the control given to men. It is not a good religion for women. Did you know there used to be religions where women had as much power as men?’
‘And it looks as though you wish to bring them back,’ Lorenzo patted her hand placatingly, ‘but not tonight. Morning is not far away and we don’t have time to swap the Pope and all the Cardinals and priests for something more equitable for women, but I assure you, we shall talk on this again.’
‘Though, not publicly,’ Leonardo repeated, looking at her pointedly. ‘Many of us come here to Lorenzo’s private rooms to speak of whatever we wish, including our issues with certain aspects of religion, but our words must not be taken from here. Such words can ruin lives for the speakers.’
‘I know, I know,’ Elli sighed at the unfairness of life. ‘Our words are controlled by others, but none more so than the words spoken by women. We must not speak up about this or that. We must accept our lot in life. Pwah! I will not sit in a circle sewing flowers on cushion covers, chatting only of things that women should talk about. I want to talk politics and commerce and all the things that men discuss. Important things.’
Listening to her fiery words and seeing her blazing eyes, Leonardo slapped his own leg and laughed uproariously. ‘Good luck with this project, Lor. I am going to enjoy seeing where this goes because there seems to be too much wildcat here to remain locked in these rooms.’
‘She won’t remain locked here,’ said Lorenzo, thinking of all the possibilities for Elli-the-boy. ‘You will be taking her to your studio and teaching her to paint. And Sandro will help, too. I will expect my friends to be there for me in this. And, soon, I will be in the country at our villa at Barberino di Mugello. The child can stay there.’
***
‘And Zo’s friends did help him with me, well, with Elli,’ Ally told her audience. ‘Several of them learned that the new page with Zo was a girl, and they treated me well and looked out for me. I had to avoid Clarice as she suspected Zo had a penchant for the pretty boy who trailed after him, and she found my presence very distasteful.
‘He spent more time at the Medici villa of Cafaggiolo near Barberino di Mugello than in Florence, so I spent most of the year there. His passing obsession with Lucrezia Donati wore off after a few children with Clarice and some poems he wrote to her. As for Elli, I had a freedom I’d never known before, as Elli or as me in the 1970s. I often went with Zo to places and to meetings that excluded women, and he discussed things with me as though he accepted me as a young man with a mind for politics and commerce. Starting in my early teens, I had access to some of the greatest minds of the Renaissance. In turn, because of those men and their thoughts, I was able to help the four of you.’
She stopped and looked at them serenely, as though there would be calm acceptance of her words as the undeniable truth. There remained a glimmer of humour in her eyes that hinted at the fact that she knew they would fight any acceptance of her story.
‘Hang on a minute,’ Sandy narrowed her eyes, ‘are you saying that those gems of wisdom that you dropped on us as we were growing up, those words of advice that shaped us, were coming from the people you knew in fifteenth century Florence?’
Ally nodded.
‘I remember,’ Sandy continued, thinking back to their childhood, ‘that you often said that all we would ever be, would grow from what we were then. Were they your words?’
‘Sandro’s words,’ Ally informed her with a small smile as she recalled the man’s amusement about Lorenzo having a girl disguised as a boy tagging around Florence after him. ‘Yo
u would know him as Botticelli.’
‘No,’ Sandy drew the syllable out into a doubtful sound. It was difficult to think that they had received advice from Botticelli with only one degree of separation. No. It was impossible. ‘What about those bits of advice about the fires that burn within? And how, once ignited, we would light the world?’
‘Leo's words,’ Ally grinned, shaking her head as she recalled her favourite of Zo’s friends. ‘He loved dramatic expressions. Of course, he borrowed them from Zo who had them from his grandfather. Leo was very good at picking up words from others and making them his own.’
‘And you were fifteen when you moved in with Lorenzo and his friends?’ Lynette asked, connecting that fact to Ally’s life in the 1970s. ‘They were the years your parents passed away, weren’t they?’
Ally nodded, a slight wariness in her eyes.
‘So, did they help you deal with the loss of your parents?’ Lynette felt curious about how the world of Elli impacted on Ally’s handling of her parents’ deaths. As she remembered the events, Ally had seemed very philosophical about losing both her parents in a relatively short time, and rarely even mentioned her aunt who came to live with her as a guardian.
‘After seeing life in Florence,’ Ally chose her words carefully, ‘losing my parents did not seem as bad as it could have to someone who only knew life in the ‘60s and ‘70s. By the time my mother passed away, Elli had seen many people die. Zo’s words about understanding that one of the great purposes of our lives was to endure no matter what happened gave me strength. He taught me that grief is not to be avoided, and we must carry on with our duties despite the grief.’
She paused and closed her eyes, remembering back to the dark period of her life when she lost both parents. For a moment she felt nausea clutching her stomach and a taste of bile tainted her memory. You do what you must do in order to survive, Zo had told her shortly before her father died, and you don’t look back – always look forward, and keep going.
‘And I did continue with my duties,’ she told them as she opened her eyes. ‘Leo often told me to take charge of my life and do what had to be done in order to succeed, and I did. He told me stories of intrigue, death, and murder, all justified at the time by the need to survive. By the time my father died here, I had experienced many losses in fifteenth century Florence, and I had a deep understanding of tragedy and loss – and survival. I coped, as my Florentine friends had taught me. Without them, I don’t know what would have happened to me in those years.’
‘And you’re still sure,’ Peter asked her tentatively, hoping to avoid upsetting her, ‘that it wasn’t the stress of losing your parents that triggered this alternate life? Are you positive that it existed prior to them passing?’
Her eyes lacked any anger or frustration as she regarded her friend, only gentle understanding that the story seemed impossible. ‘That is how I know it to be, Peter, but I don’t have any proof, only my words. I hope that if I can tell the whole story like this, rather than how I tried to tell it before, in hints and isolated segments, that you will start to see that this is not mental illness. Although,’ she tucked up one side of her mouth in a wry smile, ‘I admit, I can see your side when you consider the last few decades of my life, living eccentrically, alone with my memories. And, I admit, trying to kill myself is not indicative of great mental health.’
‘I, for one,’ declared Nick, stretching his arms out and dropping one over Lynette’s shoulders, pulling her closer to him, ‘don’t care how or why the story originated. It’s a brilliant tale that deserves our attention. It makes me appreciate how prehistoric people sat around campfires and listened to travellers who came back to tell them of what lay beyond the mountains and across the deserts. You are like the traveller who tells us of what lies beyond our lives, and I want to hear it all.’
‘What about your work?’ Lynette twisted so that she could look up into his eyes, feeling the sense of drowning as soon as she met their depths.
‘I have good people,’ he winked at her, ‘and if I can’t take an unscheduled break to be a part of something as amazing as what is going on here,’ he waved his free hand around at the gathering, ‘then I’m working for the wrong reasons. If you can walk out on the alternative energy talks and Sandy can walk out on her movie, I sure as heck can let others run the office for a while.’
‘Thank you, Nick,’ Ally graced him with one of those tranquil looks that made him feel as though the Madonna had blessed him. ‘I’m glad you’re a part of this. And you, too, Marcus. Now, you can all toddle off and let me rest,’ she waved a languid hand at the door as though her energy was waning fast. ‘If Dr Gina is alright with it, come back after dinner for another instalment. Perhaps some verbal snapshots of my life there so that you can see it’s not all exciting and dramatic, I had many quiet moments. You can ask me questions. If it’s real, I should be able to answer. If it’s an alternate reality I’ve fabricated to help cope with stress, then my answers should falter, or so you’d think.’
After they left her, Ally closed her eyes and sighed. Talking of Florence felt good. She doubted they would believe her as she knew that words were not proof. She had heard people claim any number of fantastic things that were not true. No, words were not evidence. In fact, she secretly admitted to herself, it occasionally worried her that everything about Zo and Florence had been a trick of the mind, invented at first to escape the childhood pain, and then maintained as a substitute for what her life lacked. Perhaps she clung to believing in Elli and Zo because, if she had imagined it all, life lost so much meaning.
Telling them about Zo felt like an act of healing. There had been so many decades, hiding away from life, living in shadows in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as she surreptitiously basked in the faded light of Renaissance Italy. Letting the sunlight burn away those shadows, and revealing everything to the people she loved, felt right. Although they had nearly destroyed her once before because of her revelations, she did not blame them. They behaved according to their beliefs at the time, and now they listened because of the years when they heard nothing from her.
There would be healing, she thought as she drifted to sleep, reaching for the hand that stretched out to her in dreams.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Questions and Answers
Peace settled onto Kamekura in the evening, with the occasional cries of a storm bird telling lies about approaching storms on the clear night. The band of friends made their way back to Ally’s room, crossing the gardens in silence, each meandering through their own thoughts.
Peter’s mind kept circling back to the guilt about subjecting Ally to the treatment that drove her away decades ago. They should have listened to her then. If only they had done this all those years ago. If only they had taken the time to sit and let her talk instead of drawing back in fear. It scared them, seeing the sanest and strongest person they had ever known talking about things that made them question the nature of sanity.
Did it matter, he wondered, if she made this up in order to create a fictional world where she found happiness? No, it didn’t. Was it important if she imagined it all, and her mind wandered between reality and hallucination? No, if it made her happy, he approved of the altered reality. Would it change anything if it was real and, somehow, she had experienced an existence in fifteenth century Florence? Since there was no way to prove this, it didn’t matter. Having Ally back in their lives mattered. The central part in all of it lay with having their friendship intact, and keeping it together.
As Andrew walked, his shoulder occasionally bumping into Marcus, he managed to put aside the guilt and focus on Ally’s story. He did not believe it, but he could appreciate her view of reality because it helped explain so much about their enigmatic friend. In a way, it highlighted her genius and set her mind apart from others. Instead of being able to create new worlds of mathematical or scientific understanding, she created a world of stories. He enjoyed hearing them as it helped him understand her.
He could accept her life in Florence just as he would accept her if she developed cancer or lost her sight. Love did not depend on her being perfect, physically or mentally.
Sandy believed that Ally spoke the truth. At first, she only pretended to believe, but she had acted long enough to know honesty when it appeared. Ally wasn’t making up a story and acting a role – Sandy recognised the truth in her words. In her spare moments, she had been frantically learning about Lorenzo de’ Medici, and he seemed like the perfect partner for Ally, although, clearly, the half millennium between them proved an obstacle. Just as Lorenzo had sought to raise the lives of those around him, like Botticelli, da Vinci, and Michelangelo, so had she worked to lift the lives of her friends. As she glanced at Peter’s back, she found herself envying Ally. Ever since they were children, she imagined having Peter love her, but he loved Ally. Sadly, she had no doubt of that reality.
Wanting it to be real didn’t make it real, Lynette thought as she walked next to Nick, her hand in his. But, like Peter, she decided it didn’t matter. Ally told the story, it made her unique, and, since she loved her friend, she acknowledged this was part of her. Nick squeezed her hand and she glanced up at him, her heart behaving like a giddy teen’s heart. She wondered how she could feel these irresistible, sensational, and addictive emotions at nearly sixty years of age. She had thought they belonged in the teenage years when emotions soared and dived like rollercoasters, but this…this exceeded anything she had experienced before, and her mind struggled to stay focussed on anything else when he was near. As though reading her thoughts, he looked down at her and smiled, causing her heart to increase its crazy palpitations.
They found Ally dressed in loose fitting white cotton pants and a white tee-shirt, sitting cross legged on her bed, her eyes closed as she thought of something that made her smile like the Mona Lisa. Her eyes opened when she heard them, their depths as kind and wise as they’d always been, even in childhood.
