Primavera

by Mary Jane Beaufrand

  Now I did. I had seen a bench earlier in the courtyard where the penalty had been carried out.

  “I remember you now,” Andrea said, searching my face. “You are that thin boy from Fiesole. You loved my sister. I marked it often.”

  “Then you were more observant than she was,” I said.

  Andrea sighed. “Go to her,” he said. “Take her far away. I fear she is too close.”

  “Closer than you think,” I said.

  “Venice. She wanted to see Venice. Take her there.”

  “Your sister is stubborn,” I said. “She has no teeth for adventure anymore.”

  “It’s because of me, isn’t it?” he said.

  I had no answer for him. All I could do was shrug.

  “Then we need to hatch a plot, you and I. You must tell her that you’ve seen me and that I’m already dead. That will set her free.”

  “No!” I said a little too loudly. “She will wonder why you don’t hang with your brothers outside.”

  “I don’t know. Tell her anything. Tell her that I was to be dumped in the Arno. Please, I don’t care what you tell her. Just get her out of the city. And quickly.”

  I gathered myself. “No. I will not lie for you. But I will tell her this: that you promised me you will try to stay alive if she leaves. And I must have your word that it will be so. You must see, Signor Andrea, that you are the only family she has left.”

  “Our mother and sisters still breathe,” he said.

  “Do I need to say it?” I told him through gritted teeth. “You are the only one who matters. To her, that is.”

  I saw my brother’s eyes well up. “I thought . . . ,” he began, then stopped and shook his head. “What you ask isn’t easy. To survive this ordeal I’ve been telling myself that I’m made of stone. Stone can’t feel.”

  I shook my head. “Not stone,” I said. “Gold. Gold can be melted and broken and even tortured . . .” I forced myself to say that last word, even though I knew that by saying it I gave the word power. “But it always keeps its value.”

  The moaning of the prisoners on the far end of the hall grew louder. The jailer was coming back.

  Andrea looked to the end of the hall. He reached his good hand through the bars and clasped my fingers. “Bene. We have a deal,” he said in a rush. “Mind you, hold her dear. Just take her away. Venice, Rome, Naples . . . perhaps Milan. Frederico Barbarossa has no love for the Medici.”

  “I will hold you to your promise,” I said. “You will stay alive.”

  “And I to yours,” he said. “Now throw it.” He retreated into a crouch in the corner of his cell.

  I had forgotten about the cabbage. “Throw it!” he repeated, this time more forcefully.

  I did as he said. “And may you burn in hell,” I spat. The cabbage impacted on the wall behind him and shreds of it landed on his clumpy hair. He said nothing, nor did he wipe it away. He had already reverted to his molten state.

  I turned around and pretended I hadn’t seen the jailer coming. “You,” Signor Butternut said, motioning to me and smiling in a way I didn’t like. “The sheriff wants a word.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I was ushered to a small room on the fourth floor of the prison, the Arno side. My jailer friend showed me in.

  “Here’s the boy you wanted, Signor Valentini,” he said, and closed the door behind him. As soon as the door was shut, the screams of the prisoners became muffled. Signor Valentini? The monster who persecuted children for not eating their mush?

  A man in an elaborate brocade tunic was standing behind a desk. On his desk was a marble bust of Dante. I recognized it as one of the objects from our old Madonna gallery.

  Signor Valentini stood with his back to me, staring out a window to the hills beyond the river. He had a lovely view. From here it almost seemed a reasonable room of a reasonable man in a gentle town of reasonable people.

  “I never forget a face, you know,” he said, still with his back turned. With his words, it felt as though he hacked off all my bravery until it fell in shards about my feet. I balled my hands to fists at my sides to still the shaking.

  He turned around. Madonna! I knew this man. He no longer wore the simple tunic of the Medici guard, but it was the same man from our palazzo — the one who read the proclamation, beheaded Captain Umberto, and ordered my father drawn and quartered. He hunted and tortured and killed us. He was my enemy.

  “You’re the goldsmith’s apprentice,” he said. “I see you through the window bent over a workbench. Tell me: what business have you with the last living Pazzi?”

  “Curiosity,” I muttered, willing my voice as low as it could go. I was amazed I could even utter words.

  “Indeed?” he said, and produced from behind his back the gold ring I’d slipped to the jailer out front. He leaned across his desk. “This is a lavish bribe for someone only satisfying idle curiosity. A joint of beef would have served just as well.”

  This must be how it started for all the others, I thought. Brought in here, asked an insinuating question by a narrow man with a piercing glare.

  In the face of such a glare, I decided the best lie was the one that contained the most truth.

  “I knew Signor Andrea. I was once a worker in the Pazzi palazzo. A member of the guard.”

  “Ah . . . ,” the sheriff said, savoring my statement as though it were some delicate wine. “A Pazzi sympathizer. I should have known.”

  “Not entirely,” I said. “I had little love for most of them. Signor Jacopo was a greedy, conniving man, and most of the sons were no better. And compared to Signora Maddelena those cretins were all modesty and virtue.”

  The sheriff waved me off. “Empty words from a boy trying to save his own skin,” he said. “Nothing I haven’t heard a thousand times before.”

  “But,” I continued, “Signor Andrea was cut from a different cloth than the rest. He studied at Pisa. He valued reason above money. He is an honest man, sir.”

  The sheriff walked around his desk, stroking his chin with his hand. Not once did he look me in the face.

  “Listen, he needs help. The flesh around his arm is diseased. It needs to be treated or else he will die.”

  I said the last part quickly before I lost my nerve.

  “Basta,” the sheriff said. “I am uninterested in righteousness. I am more interested in guilt. Now I want to know: does your current master know you use his gold for jailer’s bribes?”

  I forced myself to breathe. He had me. He knew it; I knew it.

  “No, signore. He knows nothing about this.”

  “But the gold. It is yours? He gave it to you freely?”

  “No, signore.”

  “Then you took it?”

  “Si, signore. I picked up little flecks of gold from the floor. The leftovers from engraving. He didn’t miss them.”

  “Whether he misses them or not the fact is you took them without asking. Do you know what that makes you?”

  My throat was dry; I swallowed hard. “It makes me a thief, signore.”

  The sheriff looked me in the eye. I looked back.

  “Bene. So we are clear on that point. You are a thief and a conspirator. By all rights you deserve to die. Il Magnifico himself has declared it: this town has been infested with Pazzi. We must purge ourselves of them and anyone who knew them lest we ourselves become tainted.”

  Slowly, he walked around me, inspecting me.

  “Let me share something with you,” he said, stopping by my left ear. “I was there,” he whispered, an uncomfortable buzz.

  I know; I saw you at the palazzo, I wanted to say. But I held my tongue and tried not to stare at the blade strapped to his belt.

  That wasn’t what he was talking about, anyway. “Easter morning at the duomo, when the assassins killed Giuliano,” he said. “As I mentioned before: I never forget a face. So I know something Il Magnifico doesn’t like to remember. A Pazzi saved his life.”

  As he said those words I began to reme
mber, a lean face urging me toward the sacristy. This way, signorina . . .

  “It was a Pazzi daughter, no older than you are. She rushed forward to save Il Magnifico when the whole town, myself included, stood still as a statue from shock and confusion.

  “At first I thought she was the daughter we’d all heard about, the renowned beauty. But then her veil came off and I saw it was a different daughter. The one who helped her nonna tend to the sick. Her name was Lorenza. Everyone knew her as . . .” He sniffed the air, as though he could divine my name through his nose.

  “Flora,” I finished for him.

  “Flora. Just so. She had a boy with her. That one was no coward, either. I saw him slit the neck of one of the assassins from ear to ear. The two of them acted with great bravery. Without them my master’s life would have been forfeit as well as his brother’s. Such courage is not easily forgotten. So you see, you can’t fool me. I remember you, Emilio.”

  And with that, even though nothing in the room had changed, I felt him release me.

  He walked back to his desk, tossing my ring up and down, up and down. “You realize, of course, that I must pretend that all Pazzi and everyone who ever knew the Pazzi are vipers. So if you come back inside the prison I will be forced to arrest you. You do not want that.”

  He tried my ring on one crooked finger, then another, until he found one that fit.

  “This is a fine piece of craftsmanship. Done by your own hand, you say?”

  I nodded.

  “Young talent should be encouraged. If you were to send more such pieces, with or without your master’s blessing, I might be persuaded to have Signor Andrea’s wounds seen to. I might even be persuaded to make his life tolerable. But know this: tolerable is all I can manage. Il Magnifico will never pardon him. He will die here, never again seeing the outside of his cell. I tell you this so you will not entertain false hope.”

  I nodded. “May I leave now?”

  He motioned me out. “As long as we understand each other.”

  I opened the door, letting in a blast of torment like heat from a forge.

  “Emilio,” the sheriff called. I turned around. He came back to me, stood in front of my face so close I could see the fine wrinkles like tiny brooms gathered around his eyes, and the tufts of dark hair growing in his nostrils. He shot me a soft look — one that was not narrow and mean. Then he reached up a hand and caressed my cheek with calloused fingers. I did not flinch.

  “If you see Signorina Flora, tell her to stay hidden. She had a kind face. I would like to see it remain on her neck.”

  When my master and his wife came back from mass that afternoon they found me hunched over my workbench as though nothing unusual had happened. Signora Maria sniffed the air around me distastefully. “Time for a bath, Emilio. It’s been over a month. Fetch some water from the well and I’ll put the tub out.”

  “Is that wise, Maria? Sending her out like that?” Orazio asked.

  I convinced them that it would be fine for me to go to the well if I wore a kerchief over my nose. As indeed I did.

  It took at least twelve trips to the well to fetch sufficient water to fill the tub. It should have taken me six, but I shook so hard I spilled half. Along the way I tried to puzzle through how much the sheriff knew, whether he thought me Emilio or Flora. I never forget a face, he’d said. And the expression in his eyes when he’d caressed my cheek at the end of the interview — it was tender, the closest I would ever come to a lover’s embrace. Did he truly know me or not? In the end I decided it didn’t matter. Caught was caught. I had been disguised as a boy so my nose was forfeit. I had been stealing so my right hand was forfeit. I had been born a Pazzi so my head was forfeit. I lived only because of his grace. That was the message he’d wanted to send. Every bone in my body told me I needed to leave town and leave now.

  And yet I stayed as weeks turned to seasons and seasons turned to years. I spent my time hunched over a workbench, little marking the world outside other than to know that my Andrea never swung from the prison walls. I collected metal shavings from the floor. I crafted things — rings, crosses, salt shakers, and small blades: daggers and squarcatos. And every fourth Sunday while my master and mistress were at mass, I crossed the street and delivered my trinkets to the squash-shaped guard who stood in front of the Bargello. Signor Butternut I still called him, but never to his face.

  I tried to be quiet about it every time; every time he greeted me expansively. “Emilio! Fratello mio!” he would call, and kiss me sloppily on the cheek.

  “How fares the prisoner?” I would whisper.

  “Not so good,” he said. “You know how things are.” At first his answer startled me into believing that Andrea was worse than I had last seen. But Signor Butternut answered the same each time, and I began to understand that not so good meant not dead, and that Andrea had held to his promise to stay alive.

  Slowly, I began to think of my brother less. That is to say, not every instant of every day. And my mind turned to other things. Memories crowded in. And with them, Nonna’s voice, saying I had left something undone. But what? I asked myself. Mamma was safe; Domenica was safe. Andrea was alive; the rest were dead. Even Emilio, wielding his wheel of cheese. Dead through my lie.

  Then finally, on Easter morning I remembered another Easter a full year before, and cradling a man’s head as his life bled out of him onto steps of an altar, and I remembered my promise.

  My first gift to Giuliano’s son was a little silver spoon. Into the handle I cast a frolicking puppy, something to make a small boy laugh. When I was done, I stole away to the confessionals at the duomo, waited for the one with Father Alberto to empty, and knelt within.

  “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,” he said. I couldn’t see his face behind the grille.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have killed at least three men; two with a knife; one with a lie. I disrespected my father and mother. I hated my sister. I spat in the soup.”

  There was silence on the other side. “Do you repent any of this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I repent it all.” He was about to speak but I didn’t let him. If I didn’t finish this task then I never would. “I have brought an object with me. I desire you to deliver this to the ironmonger’s shop by Fort Belvedere. The ironmonger has a daughter named Carolina. This is a present for her son.”

  Then I fled again, not waiting for my penance.

  When I was outside I pulled a dirty kerchief over my face as I did whenever I went out. I did this partly so that no one would recognize me, partly a self-imposed penance for my role in that terrible day the year before. I was no innocent to be frolicking in any Eden. So I deprived myself of fresh air. It was a small penance but I convinced myself that God took note.

  Two days later we awoke before dawn to a banging on our door.

  I sprinted up from my pallet. “I’ll get it,” I muttered to my master and mistress, and fumbled for a candle to light my way.

  “Wait, Emilio,” Orazio called after me. “It’s not safe!”

  The banging continued downstairs. I pulled a mazzochio over my head and unbarred the door. Signor Valentini came in. Alone. He slammed the door behind him.

  “You,” he said, pointing a finger at me, “are a very foolish young man.”

  His voice and face were hard.

  “What’s going on down here?” My master came down the stairs hastily, only half-dressed. He saw the face of our guest and nearly tripped over his feet. He recovered himself as best he could. “Signor Valentini. Welcome. What brings you to our humble shop?”

  “This,” Signor Valentini said. With a gloved hand he reached into the purse attached to his belt and pulled out the silver spoon. “Is this your work?”

  My master examined the spoon, the form and the engravings, then shot me a thunderous look. “No, indeed, signor. There is no stamp. I stamp all my work. A point of honor.”

  “Pity,” he said, sitting down on a bench by the windo
w, putting his dirty boots up on a table. “I have been charged by my mistress with finding its maker.”

  “Your mistress?”

  “Signora Lucrezia de Medici. Mistress to us all. This was a gift to her poor overlooked grandson, Giulianino, the natural son of Giuliano de Medici.”

  “Was it indeed,” my master said, and I took a step back, trying to seem part of the woodwork.

  “Signora de Medici is a shrewd woman,” Signor Valentini said, placing special emphasis on the word shrewd, as though it were an insult. “But she loves her children. She will never get over the death of her poor, murdered son.”

  “I understand, Signor Valentini. I too know what it is to have lost a child.”

  “Allora. Then you will know that Giulianino is her only comfort, and why she was pleased to find someone else had not forgotten him.”

  Maestro Orazio stroked his beard. “Pleased?” he repeated.

  “Deeply,” said Signor Valentini, and he took from his belt a purse of coins and threw it at him.

  With great difficulty, my master tore his eyes away from the purse and examined the spoon I’d made. “May I take this item with me to the next goldsmith’s meeting? Perhaps someone there will know.”

  “Bene,” Signor Valentini said. “Tell them there are more florins for the artist if more baubles could be made. One more thing: perhaps it is best for us all if the artist does not step forward. Tell him to use Father Alberto. Whatever you do, do not send the lackwit who opened the door.” He pointed to me.

  “Emilio?” my master said, cuffing me on the head. “He will make a fine craftsman one day, sir. But I fear he lacks common sense.”

  “See you drill it into him, sir. These are bleak times, Orazio. I have been a busy man.”

  “Well have we marked it,” my master said blandly.

  “Then you will also have marked that I perform my duties with relish. But persecuting innocents? I don’t bother with that if I can help it. There is no sport to it.”

  “I’m sure you are a just man, Signor Valentini. I shall do as you bid.”

  As soon as he left Maestro Orazio dealt me a blow that set my right eye spinning in my socket. The flesh around it swelled up and by midmorning it looked like an eggplant. Then he picked me up off the floor and bade me confess all. I told him about everything — the little shavings I’d picked up after engraving, my visit to the Bargello, my bribes to Signor Valentini, my drop-off at Father Alberto’s confessional. When I was done I could see he wanted to kill me with his bare hands, and would have but for the purse of coins jangling on the tabletop. That much I knew to be true: I was becoming an accomplished craftsman. He needed money; therefore, he needed me. And the blow? It wasn’t repeated; my eye healed. I began to understand later that he hit me in the one particular place Signor Valentini was likely to see from across the street.