The Medici Seal

by Theresa Breslin

  ‘You want to find out why the heart stopped beating?’ I asked.

  ‘I would also like to know how it began beating.’

  This I did not comprehend. Did he mean how a life began? Surely he must know how young are made. Even I, as a boy, knew this. I had seen it happen often enough with the horses at the gypsy camps. Each year in the season a stallion is brought to the mares for covering. Many gypsies would meet up for this event and pay for a special stallion to impregnate their mares. The male of the species has the organ for that function and that is why he has been given it. It is much the same between a man and a woman. My grandmother explained it to me. The seed comes from the man. Within the cavity of the woman’s body is a chamber where the baby grows until it is time to be born. The man must plant his seed in the woman, and this happens when the man goes into the woman when they lie together. It gives great pleasure to do this. It can happen that they do it once only, in error, in lust, or in love, and a child can be formed. And once formed it cannot be unformed. But equally a man and a woman can do this thing many times and a child may not appear.

  To bring forth sons to rule, and women to attend to them, requires more than copulation. Even though my grandmother sold medicine to women desperate to conceive, there were some she knew whose wombs would never bear fruit. And all the money and power in the world cannot guarantee that you will have a child just because you want one. The King of France had to petition the Pope to have his marriage annulled because his first wife could not produce an heir.

  The Maestro spoke again. ‘When we are not, at what point do we become?’

  I could not reply. For I had grasped no shape of his thoughts. I understood neither what he said nor his intent behind it.

  ‘Yes,’ he went on. ‘That is what I would like to know. But for the moment I will content myself with discerning how this heart ceased to move.’

  ‘Father Benedict told us,’ I murmured. ‘It was God’s will.’

  ‘These passages here’ – my master pointed a bloodied finger – ‘are the ones crucial to its function.’

  ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘I have dissected animal bodies, for my own interest . . . and previously done some work on human remains.’

  By this time I had already guessed that he had experience of performing dissections on dead humans. I supposed it must have been on criminals executed for crimes and therefore, although useful for studying anatomy for painting or sculpture, it would not be of so much interest for investigating the cause of death, this being whatever method the executioner had employed.

  ‘I think we can conclude that it was the man’s great age that caused the heart to stop. The passageways are narrowed and the blood has been halted.’

  ‘As rivers silt up and slow down the water flow?’ I questioned him.

  ‘Indeed!’ He looked at me with approval. ‘Exactly like that.’

  I thought of my grandmother’s heart, struggling inside the cage of her chest. Her body reducing as she entered old age. Her skin and bones like those of the vagrant, Umberto, lying dead before me, dry and thin.

  This man whom I called Maestro, with his sharp knives and even keener mind, ventured into an unknown land. And he did it for more than passing curiosity. For I could see the truth, at least in part, of what he had said to the mortuary monk. If we discover a problem we can explore a way to solve it. For it was plain what had happened here to the heart of Umberto. With age the canals going in and out had narrowed and restricted the blood flow. But knowing did not help. There would have been no way to clear those pathways so that my grandmother could have lived longer. In the last months she was alive, her heart was staggering under the weight of her years.

  I recalled my grandmother taking my hand and placing it upon her thin chest. Under the rickle of bones beneath her withered breasts I felt the flickering, unsteady rhythm. Within the cavity of her body her heart fluttered, shook, then steadied itself. My grandmother had known that her body was wearing out, but she did not know exactly what was happening.

  ‘Perhaps this is how my grandmother died,’ I said.

  ‘What age was she?’

  I could not answer that question. With us age was a thing not measured in years. The seasons are how we mark our passing through this life. She had lived many seasons on this earth. This was the second summer that had passed since I had buried her metal goods and papers and watched her wagon burn. I shrugged. ‘Very old,’ I replied.

  My master looked at me curiously. ‘I didn’t know that you knew your grandmother, Matteo. You’ve never mentioned her before.’

  My fingers gripped the lamp. I did not speak. When I’d related my life history in those first days that we’d spent in the keep of Perela I’d declared myself an abandoned orphan. I had not referred to my grandmother.

  I had been caught out!

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘YOUR GRANDMOTHER?’

  I blinked.

  My master paused in his examination. ‘Matteo?’ he prompted me. ‘You said that your grandmother was old when she died.’

  ‘I – I . . .’ I cast my eyes down and mumbled a few noncommittal words.

  He returned to his work. While he was busy with this other part of the anatomy I would have time to contrive some fictitious stories about my grandmother. I relaxed a little.

  ‘Were there more in your family than your grandmother?’

  I wasn’t ready to reply, but he didn’t seem to notice my upset and went on smoothly, ‘I noted that when you told your story in Perela at one point you said “we”.’

  My gaze flickered in alarm.

  ‘It was when you were talking of the time you were in Venice.’ He smiled encouragingly. ‘You indicated that you were with others when you watched the boats in the lagoon. Was it your grandmother you were with then? And when you said “we”, did you mean only your grandmother, or are there others in your family?’

  My heart turned with fear.

  ‘I – I don’t remember saying “we”,’ I stammered. ‘It is nothing. A way of speech . . . bad grammar. I am not educated.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not that. Your grammar’s very good, though a little old fashioned. If it was from your grandmother that you learned speech and vocabulary, then she taught you well. You say you were originally from a hill farm in the Apennines, and yet in their speech some vowel sounds have an edge that you don’t often hear anywhere else. It’s because of how they position the tongue when forming the “u” and the “o”. They place it more to the front part of the mouth. You don’t do this, Matteo. But if you spent time with your grandmother, whose family roots are elsewhere, then you probably picked up some of her speech inflections. But where was she raised? Do you know? It would be interesting to find out. There are phrases you pronounce with an almost eastern flavour.’

  I did not reply. I could not. Was he a magician that he knew these things? To discover so much about me in the few weeks that we had been together meant he must have been studying me closely, yet I had not been aware of his attention.

  He gave me a quizzical glance. ‘And your use of “we” contains more than linguistic meaning. It’s as though you think of yourself as being different.’ He looked at me carefully. ‘At first I took you to be a gypsy, but now I’m not so sure. Your skin tone is lighter than most of those folk. Although that was not the only reason, because skin tone is not consistent in any race. The travelling people are supposed to have smaller hands and feet, and you appear to have this feature. But it’s more than that. It’s to do with your independent way. You hold yourself distinct . . . apart.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You should not be ashamed of your origins, Matteo.’

  At this I raised my head and looked at him fiercely. I had no shame of my grandmother or her people.

  ‘Ah!’ He recoiled. ‘There, I touched a nerve.’

  He had stopped working and was looking at me curiously. I dipped my head to avoid his gaze.

 
‘Now here is a mystery,’ he said slowly. ‘When we were at Perela I learned from your own lips that you were a bastard child and that you were embarrassed by this. I know that you feel humbled at having been born out of wedlock because you told me so yourself. Yet’ – he stretched forward and tipped up my chin so that he could see my face – ‘yet when I mention your origins you glare at me in fury.’

  He took a moment to study my face. But the pad of cloth he had given me concealed my mouth and nose, and I had recovered myself enough to veil the expression in my eyes.

  ‘Well?’

  I was not going to escape without replying.

  ‘I am not angry,’ I said. ‘I take any slight to my grandmother as a personal insult. Yes, you are right, she did look after me . . . for a while.’

  ‘And she was your first teacher.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your only teacher?’

  I nodded my head. And then, feeling compelled to defend the one person who had ever shown me love in my early life, I said, ‘She taught me many things. She was full of knowledge, but more with the wisdom of years and lore learned from nature than with any book learning.’

  ‘But that’s the best kind!’ my master cried. ‘I don’t despise that at all. As a child I wasn’t taught Latin so the texts of the great minds of the past were denied to me. I feel that loss deeply and have taken pains to try to remedy the situation. I’ve learned Latin so that I may study certain writings in the original. These have included treatises on the human body and I absorbed their teachings. But now, as I progress in my own study of animal life forms, and when I anatomize a human body, I am beginning to find that I shouldn’t lean too heavily on received wisdom.’

  He waited. He seemed to expect me to contribute to the conversation. And I was beginning to learn that not to speak when you were expected to could attract more attention than remaining silent.

  ‘My grandmother made her own observations and deductions on illness and injury to the body,’ I said. ‘At times she was in conflict with the doctors.’

  ‘She was a healer?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then she was a wise woman to trust her own wisdom. There’s only one way to truly know a subject, and that’s to explore and examine it oneself. I am compiling my own treatise on each subject that interests me, using drawing and text to combine the fullest coverage than I am able to make.’ He indicated the cavity of the body open before him. ‘This is why it is important that I conduct my own dissections, that I examine every part in detail, and make drawings and notes of each aspect as I see it.’ He pointed to the paper lying on the smaller table, on which he had paused to draw and write from time to time.

  I glanced at the paper. And then again.

  At first I did not realize what was written there, because at that time I did not know many words to read. My grandmother had instructed me in her folklore, so I knew most plants and herbs and how to make healing preparations from them. I could not spell the words for dog or cat, but I knew the Latin, Sicilian, Florentine, French, Catalan and Spanish for cold cures, stomach ache, pox, plague, gout and the cramps that women take when they have their monthly flux. I could recognize some words my grandmother had taught me, but those words were mainly names. Firstly my own name, Janek, and then others to memorize. This was so that I was able to deliver orders to our customers. I had to take care of this in every town we passed through.

  The family Scutari in the Via Veneto require an ointment to help with an outbreak of boils.

  Maria Dolmetto, who lives above the shop of the candle maker, needs a salve for her bunions.

  A poultice for the child of Ser Antonio. You will find the father at the notary office just off the Piazza Angelo.

  Deliver this flask to Alfredo, who keeps the inn at the Mereno gate. He has the falling sickness and needs an infusion.

  And not only for people but for horses also. The horse trainers from the noble households sought out our remedies for their prize stallions, the brood mares, or sickly foals. We were cheaper than the apothecaries and our medicines sometimes more effective. My grandmother had a reputation for healing and easing pain.

  So, though I could not read fully, I was familiar with the forms of the Florentine language that my master spoke and wrote. But the words that he marked on the paper this night were not in any script that I had seen before. At first I thought it the language of the Jews, or the letters used by the Turks and the Muslim men, yet as I looked more closely I saw that it was not either language.

  And then I saw another thing. There was an oddity in how he placed the pen to his paper. When he drew he would use both hands, transferring the chalk or pen from one to the other, from right to left, seemingly without noticing. But when he wrote he used his left hand. Yet his act of writing was not awkward, as was the norm with left-handed people, the paper at an angle and the hand bent like a hook. The Maestro wrote seamlessly from right to left. I watched as he did it. This was a clever trick, so that his hand did not obscure the work.

  But still I could not puzzle it out. How could he read it then? How could anyone read it? Were the words in the wrong order? Or did he think backwards inside his head, and write it that way upon the paper to enable the reader to read in the correct order. I leaned closer. I peered at his writing, but I could make nothing of it.

  Then I saw why, and my soul chilled like marble.

  His writing was running left to right. Not the words in reverse order but the letters themselves. All of it. It was mirror writing – to be read by the Devil.

  He must have heard my intake of breath.

  ‘You will find it difficult to read this writing, Matteo.’

  ‘Why do you write thus?’ I asked him. ‘How is it that you can read what you yourself have written?’

  ‘I’ve become accustomed to it.’ And then, without pausing, he said, ‘Tell me more of your grandmother.’

  ‘There is nothing much to tell.’ In my head I had constructed a story to satisfy him which I now related. ‘I lived with her at different times of my life. But she was old and could not take care of me, so I found work here and there. Then she died and I was on my own.’

  ‘How did she live? No, let me guess,’ he added before I could reply. ‘She was a healer and she sold her medicines to those who had need of them?’

  I nodded warily.

  ‘And she didn’t charge much. Being poor herself and simpatico, she would not wish to make a profit from the pain of others.’

  How could he do this? Assess so accurately the character of my grandmother, never having met her, and with the briefest of information from me?

  His eyes gleamed as he saw from my expression that he was correct.

  ‘My guess is that, as her reputation grew, people with money and title sought her out and preferred her remedies to those of the doctors and the established apothecaries.’ He waited for my reaction. I was still too stunned to speak but gave a slight incline of my head. He went on in the manner of a man hunting, who sees his prey ready to be caught. ‘So I think . . . I think then that these professionals and guildsmen would see her as a threat and she, not being wealthy and of little status, could easily be driven out of her business. She would probably have to move on from town to town. Did you meet up with her when this was happening? Yes, that would explain your complexion. You have lived outdoors for a great part of your life, Matteo.’

  Now that he had made me disclose the existence of my grandmother, what else did he wish to know? Or already guess at?

  Chapter Twelve

  IT WAS ALMOST daylight when we returned from the mortuary.

  Cold dawn was beating back the winter dark. Thin fog drifted up from the river. This is when the dead who have walked abroad hurry back to their graves before daylight catches them and destroys their soul.

  I stayed close to my master, almost running to keep up with his long stride. He was humming a catchy folk tune that country people sing at harvest time. He had worked through the nigh
t, cutting, exploring, dissecting; uncovering layer upon layer of once-living organs. I held the lamp while he measured and made notes, checking and rechecking dimensions, then sketching what he saw; sometimes swiftly and precisely in one smooth flow, at other times painstakingly, with tiny strokes, delineating the minute threads of blood vessels and veins.

  The lamp was not heavy but my arm ached with the effort of keeping it held in one place. Once he reached behind him blindly with one hand while the other held some part of the body unknown to me. I realized that he required scissors and I picked them up and gave them to him. He gave a start, and I saw then that, far from appreciating my efforts at standing still for so long and keeping the light steady, he had forgotten I was there. He did not rest until we heard the chanting of the monks at their morning office and the stirrings of the hospital making ready for a new day.

  Now I was exhausted, yet he strode towards the castle, energy thrumming through his whole being.

  We had to wait until the night guards identified us properly before we were admitted. The gatekeepers gave him curious glances but did not ask what business he had been about. They knew the Maestro to be under the protection of their commander, Cesare Borgia, and that it would go ill with anyone who questioned or delayed him. But their security was tight, and we had to pass three checkpoints before we entered under the ramparts. These soldiers did not operate in the same relaxed fashion as the ones at Perela. Being closer to the Borgia headquarters at Imola meant that the guards here were vigilant at all times.

  The castle of Averno was much larger than the keep of Captain dell’Orte, and its fortifications more robust. In addition to the castle wall it had a moat and a drawbridge. My master was instructing the builders in raising the wall and making abutments to install more cannon. Every day he drew plans for strengthening the defences, and constructed diagrams and models of complicated war machines. Copies of the drawings were dispatched with messengers for inspection by Cesare Borgia, while the models were placed on shelves in his studio awaiting the day Il Valentino would arrive at the castle to approve them.