The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  I went to bed and felt my blood flow.

  Ten

  MY MOTHER ARRIVED HOME BEFORE ANY OF US HAD RISEN. She and my father ate behind closed doors. At ten o’clock Erila woke me to say I had been summoned to his study. When she saw the blood she gave me a sly smile, changed my sheets, and brought me cloth to bind into my undergarments.

  “Not a word,” I said. “Do you understand? Not a word to anyone until I say so.”

  “Then you’d better say so fast. Maria will sniff you out in no time.”

  Erila dressed me quickly and I presented myself. At the dining table I met Luca, bleary-eyed, stuffing himself with bread and pork jelly. I felt too sick to eat. He scowled at me. I scowled back. My mother and father were waiting. Tomaso arrived a few minutes later. Despite a change of clothes, he had the look of someone who had not been to bed.

  My father’s study was situated at the back of his showroom at the side of the palazzo, where the ladies of the town would bring their tailors to pick the latest fabrics. The place reeked of camphor and other salts suspended in pomades from the ceiling to keep away the moths, and the smell permeated his room. These areas were usually out of bounds for us children, particularly for Plautilla and me, and for that reason of course I loved them even more. From his small parchment-lined office my father ran a small empire of trade throughout Europe and parts of the East. As well as wool and cotton from England, Spain, and Africa, he imported many of the rainbow dyes: vermilion and realgar from the Red Sea, cochineal and oricello from the Mediterranean, gall nuts from the Balkans, and, from the Black Sea, the rock alum with which to fix them. Once the cloth was finished, the bolts that did not go into Florentine fashion went back onto the ships to feed the luxury markets in the countries they came from. When I look back on it now, I think my father lived with the weight of the world on his shoulders, because while we prospered I know there were times when the news was bad—when the loss of a ship to storms or piracy had him in his room through the night and my mother kept us on tiptoe next day lest we should wake him. Certainly in my memory he was forever at his ledgers or his letters, tallying the columns of profit and loss and sending dispatches to merchants, agents, and cloth manufacturers who lived in cities with names I could barely pronounce, sometimes in places where they didn’t believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, though their heathen fingers understood beauty and truth enough within a bale of cloth. Such letters flew daily out of our house like carrier pigeons, signed, sealed, and wrapped in waterproof cloths against the elements, painstakingly copied and filed in case of mishap or loss on the road.

  With such business upon him, it was no wonder that my father had so little time for matters of the home. But that morning he looked particularly weary, his face more jowly and lined than I remembered it. He was seventeen years older than my mother and would have been in his fifties at this time. He was rich and well thought of and had twice been chosen for minor offices of state, the most recent his place on the Security Council. Had he been more strategic with his influence he might have promoted himself quicker, but while he was shrewd at business he was also a simple man, more suited to the transport of cloth than politics. I believe he loved us children and he was good enough at lecturing Tomaso and Luca when their behavior demanded it, but in some ways he was more at ease in his factories than his home. His education had only been sufficient unto the fact of his trade—his father had done it before him—and he had none of my mother’s knowledge or her golden tongue. But he could tell if the color in a bolt of cloth was uneven from a single glance, and he always knew which shade of red would please the ladies most when the sun shone.

  So the speech he gave that morning was, for him, long and one to which he, and I suspect my mother, had given much thought.

  “First I have good news to give you. Plautilla is well. Your mother stayed the night with her, and she is recovered.”

  My mother sat back straight, hands folded in her lap. She had long since perfected the art of female quiescence. If you had not known, you would think she was feeling nothing.

  “But there is other news, which, since you will hear it soon enough from gossip, we have decided that you should learn first at home.”

  I shot a glance at Tomaso. Was he really going to talk of naked women with cocks in their mouths? Not my father, surely.

  “The Signoria have been meeting through the night because there are events abroad that affect our security. The king of France is arrived in the north at the head of an army to pursue his claim on the Duchy of Naples. He has destroyed the Neapolitan fleet at Genoa and signed treaties with Milan and Venice. But to go farther south he must come through Tuscany, and he has sent envoys asking for our support of his claim and safe passage for his army.”

  I could see from Tomaso’s smirk at me that he had known more than he’d told me all along. But then of course women are not fit for politics.

  “So will there be fighting?” Luca’s eyes shone like gold medallions. “I hear the French are fierce warriors.”

  “No, Luca. There will not be fighting. There is more glory in peace than in war,” said my father sternly, no doubt aware of how the demand for fine cloth diminishes during conflict. “The Signoria, with the advice of Piero de’ Medici, will offer neutrality but no support for his claim. In that way we shall show strength mixed with prudence.”

  Had Piero’s name been spoken even six months before it would probably have soothed us all, but even I knew that his reputation had crumbled since his father’s death. Rumor was that he had trouble pulling on his own boots without whining or losing his temper. How was he possibly going to have the charm or the cunning to negotiate with a king who didn’t need to flatter our city-state when he could just walk in and trample all over it? Though such thoughts were not for me to voice.

  “If we pin our hopes on Piero, we might as well open the gates today and welcome them in.”

  My father sighed. “And which gossipmonger tells you that?” Tomaso shrugged. “I am telling you the Signoria has faith in the Medici name. There is no one else who commands such a level of respect with a foreign king.”

  “Well, I don’t think we should let them just walk through. I think we should fight them,” said Luca, as usual having listened but not heard a thing.

  “No, we will not fight them. We will talk to them and make terms with them, Luca. Their battle is not with us. It will be an agreement among equals. They might even give us something in return.”

  “What? You think Charles will fight our disputes for us and deliver Pisa into our hands?” I had never heard Tomaso so outrightly quarrelsome in front of my father before. My mother was looking at him sternly, but he did not or would not notice. “He will simply do what he pleases. He knows he only has to threaten and our great Republic will cave in like a house of cards.”

  “And you are a boy trying to speak like a man and making a risible job of it,” said my father. “Until you have the years to take on such matters, you would do better to keep such treacherous opinions to yourself. I will not hear them in this house.”

  There was a shimmering little silence where I kept my eyes away from both of them. Then Tomaso said sullenly, “Very well, sir.”

  “And if they do come?” said Luca, still oblivious. “Will they come inside the city? Would we let them go that far?”

  “This is something to be decided when we know more.”

  “What about Alessandra?” my mother asked quietly.

  “My dear, if the French come upon us, Alessandra will be sent to a convent with all the other young girls of the city. Plans have already been discussed—”

  “No,” I blurted out.

  “Alessandra—”

  “No. I don’t want to be sent away. If—”

  “You will do as I see fit,” said my father, his tone very angry now. He was not used to this level of rebellion in the family. But then he had forgotten how we had all grown older.

  My mother, more pragmatic and wiser, si
mply looked down at her folded hands again and said softly, “I think before we say any more you should know that your father has other news to deliver.”

  They glanced at each other and she smiled slightly. He took her guidance gratefully.

  “I . . . it is possible that within the foreseeable future I will be called to the honor of the office of Priore.”

  One of the Council of Eight. Honor indeed, even though his early knowledge of such elevation was proof that the selection process was corrupt. Looking back now I can still feel the pride in his voice as he said it. So much so that it would have been churlish even to think that at a time of such crisis our city might have been better served by wiser, more experienced men, because to acknowledge that would have meant also acknowledging that something was seriously wrong within the state, and I don’t think any of us at that moment, even Tomaso, wanted to go that far.

  “Father,” I said, when it was clear that neither of my brothers was going to, “you do our family great honor by this news.” And I came and knelt before him and kissed his hand, a dutiful daughter again.

  My mother glanced approvingly in my direction as I rose.

  “Why, thank you, Alessandra,” he said. “I will remember that, if and when I take my place in the government.”

  But as we smiled at each other I couldn’t help thinking of those butchered bodies and all the blood they would have left under the pews of Santo Spírito, and how Savonarola could use them powerfully against a city where the threat of a foreign invasion now made him an even greater prophet in the people’s eyes.

  MY MOTHER IS SITTING BY THE WINDOW IN HER ROOM. FOR A moment I think she might be praying. For as long as I can remember, she has had a way of being alone with her stillness that makes her seem almost absent. But whether it is thought or prayer I cannot always tell, and I do not have the courage to ask. Watching her from the door I see how beautiful she still is, though she is well past her youth and her beauty is more fragile in the harsh morning light. How does it feel when your family is slipping away from you and your first daughter is to become a mother? Is there triumph that you have navigated her through the waters of Scylla and Charybdis, or do you wonder what you will do with yourself now she has gone? Lucky for her that she still had me to worry about.

  I waited till she noticed me, which she did without turning.

  “I am very tired, Alessandra,” she said quietly. “If this is not important I would prefer if it could wait till later.”

  I took a deep breath. “I want you to know that I won’t go into a convent.”

  She frowned. “That decision is still some way off. Though if it comes to it, you will do as you are told.”

  “But you said yourself—”

  “No! I am not talking about this now. You heard what your father said: If the French come—and as yet that is by no means certain—the city will not be safe for young women.”

  “But he said they wouldn’t come as enemies. If we make a truce—”

  “Look,” she said firmly, turning to me at last. “It is not women’s business to know about the affairs of state. And you in particular will only add to your burdens by showing that you do. But it does not mean you should stay stupid in private. No army occupies a city without having some rights over it. And when soldiers are at war, they are not citizens, only mercenaries, and young virgins are most at risk. You will go to a convent.”

  I took a breath. “What if I was married? No longer a virgin, and with the protection of a husband? I would be safe then.”

  She stared at me. “But you don’t want to be married.”

  “I don’t want to be sent away.”

  She sighed. “You are still young.”

  “Only in years,” I said. Why, I thought, must there always be two conversations, one that women have when there are men present and one we have when we are alone? “In other ways I am older than all of them. If I have to get married in order to stay, that is what I will do.”

  “Oh, Alessandra. That is not a good enough reason.”

  “Mama,” I said, “it’s all changed anyway. Plautilla is gone, I am at war with Tomaso, and Luca lives in his own thick fog. I can’t study forever. Maybe that means I’m ready.” And for that second I think I really believed it.

  “But you know you are not ready.”

  “I am now,” I said bluntly. “I started to bleed last night.”

  “Oh.” Her hands went up and then down to her lap, in the way they always did when she sought to steady herself. “Oh!” And then she laughed and stood up, and I could see that she was also crying. “Oh, my dear child,” she said, as she took me into her arms. “My dear, dear child.”

  Eleven

  WITH CHARLES AND HIS ARMY ON THE TUSCAN BORDER AND panic sniffing around the city gates, Florence took herself to church. There were so many people in Santa Maria del Fiore that Sunday that the crowd spewed out onto the steps below. My mother said it was the greatest gathering she had ever seen for a service, but it felt to me as if we were waiting for Judgment Day. Gazing up into the dome, I felt—as I always did—a sudden vertigo, as if its very scale unbalanced one’s mind.

  My father says Brunelleschi’s wonder is still the talk of Europe—how such a great structure could have risen without the traditional help of supporting beams. Even now when I imagine the final coming I think of Santa Maria del Fiore filled with the mass of the godly risen from the grave, the dome alive with the beating of angel wings.

  Still, I would hope Judgment Day might smell better, since the stink of so many bodies hung in the air like a fog of foul incense that day. Already a number of the poorer women had fainted, but then the more devout had apparently begun fasting, on Savonarola’s orders, to bring the city back to God. It would take longer for the rich to swoon, though I noticed they had been careful to dress down; this was not the time to risk being found guilty of vanity.

  By the time Savonarola climbed into the pulpit the place was humming with godliness, but it fell deathly silent upon his arrival. It was the supreme irony of the age that Florence’s ugliest man was also her most godly. Yet it was a testimony to his eloquence that when he preached you forgot his dwarf body, his drilling little eyes, and the nose hooked like an eagle’s beak. Together he and his archenemy Lorenzo would have been the stuff of gargoyles. One could almost imagine the diptych in which their profiles confronted each other, their noses as powerful as their personalities, the city of Florence—their battlefield—in the background. But who would risk such a painting now? Who would dare to commission it?

  His enemies said he was so small that to raise himself up he stood on books, translations of Aristotle and the classics that his monks procured for him so his feet could despoil them. Others claimed he used the stool from his cell, one of the few pieces of furniture that he allowed himself in a life of extreme asceticism. It was said that his was the only cell in San Marco without a devotional painting, so much suspicion did he have about the power of art to undermine the purity of faith, and that he stilled any cravings of the flesh by whipping himself daily. While there had always been those in the church with an appetite for flagellation, it was a delicacy of suffering that did not appeal to everyone. Looking back on it now, I think we Florentines were always a people more interested in pleasure than pain, though at times of crisis fear bred its own desire for self-punishment.

  He stood for a moment in silence, his hands clutching the edge of the stone, his eyes raking the great crowd around him. “It is written that the shepherd should welcome his flock. But today I do not welcome you.” The voice that came out began as a hiss, growing louder with each succeeding word until it filled the cathedral and rose up unto the heaven of the dome. “For today you crowd into God’s house only because fear and despair lick at your feet like the flames of hell and because you long for redemption.

  “So you come to me, to a man whose own unworthiness is matched only by the Lord’s generosity in making him His mouthpiece. Yes, the Lord shows Himself
to me. He blesses me with His vision and unveils the future. The army that waits on our border was foretold. It is the sword I saw hanging above the city. There is no fury like the fury of God. ‘They shall cast their silver in the streets and their gold shall be removed: all their silver and gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord.’ And Florence lies like a carcass swarming with flies in the burning path of His vengeance.”

  Even for those who knew their scriptures well it was hard to see the seams. He was working up a sweat now, his hood thrown back, the nose moving to and fro like a great beak pecking at sparrows. At first, when he began preaching, it was said that his voice was thin and wheezy and that, in response to his sermons, old women would fall asleep and dogs would howl at the church door. He had found his voice now, and it rolled out like thunder. The Greeks might call it demagoguery, but there was more to it than that. He spoke to everyone; in his godliness, sin was the great leveler, undermining power and wealth. He knew how to mix his message with the yeast of politics, which is why the privileged feared him so much. But these thoughts came later. At the time you just listened.

  From out of his robes he pulled a small mirror. He held it up toward the crowd. At a certain angle it caught a blaze of candlelight and sent it spinning around the church. “See this, Florence? I hold up a mirror to your soul and what does it show? Decay and rot. This, which was once a godly city, now pours more filth down its streets than the Arno on a flooding tide. ‘Enter not the path of the wicked and go not in the way of evil men.’ But Florence has blocked her ears to the words of the Lord. When the night comes down, the beast starts to walk and the battle for her soul begins.”

  Next to me I felt Luca shift in his seat. In the study room the only texts he ever showed any interest in were the ones that had war and bloodshed in them. If there was fighting to be done, whoever the enemy, he would want to be there.