The Medici Seal

by Theresa Breslin

I saw that he had done this deliberately to distract Elisabetta from her upset at her uncle’s manners.

  ‘A Swiss mercenary tried to disembowel me with his pike,’ he said cheerfully. ‘My innards were hanging out. I had to clutch them to me and hold myself together while I screamed for help. If I hadn’t been heard by my cousin, the Comte de Céline, who brought his own surgeon to stitch me up, I would have perished there on the battlefield.’

  ‘Was it very painful?’ Elisabetta asked him.

  ‘Horribly so,’ Charles admitted. ‘All the while I was being stitched I bawled like a baby.’

  I shuddered as I imagined how that must have been for him. I recalled one night in the mortuary of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence: the Maestro had removed for examination the great coils of glistening intestine looped inside a man’s belly. I thought about this. Charles’s attacker must have pierced the stomach wall but perhaps not the intestine itself. Else he would not have been able to eat so heartily at dinner just now. Though one of the anatomies my master had done showed a man with a damaged intestine and my master said he believed it had been that way for years yet the man had lived with it. In any case the Comte de Céline’s surgeon must have been very skilful to repair Charles’s wound.

  Baldassare, who had joined us at dinner, coughed discreetly. Charles hurriedly closed over his shirt and sat down.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I can become quite carried away at my own exploits.’

  I helped Elisabetta clear the table and we talked for a little while in the kitchen. The conversation and the company had brought a light into her eyes and she chatted and told me of the progress of the herb garden that she had been planting when I had last visited the farm at Easter.

  From outside we could hear the clatter of swordplay. Despite the heat of the afternoon Paolo had persuaded Charles to teach him a few sword thrusts and the use of the short dagger in close combat.

  ‘Do you remember, Matteo,’ Elisabetta asked me, ‘the time when you drew the dagger on Paolo?’

  ‘I do.’

  She was looking at me now with eyes that were older and wiser than they had been at the time of that incident. ‘You were used to handling such a thing, were you not, Matteo?

  Her question was more of a statement.

  I managed to shrug and nod at the same time.

  ‘Travelling on the road,’ I replied, ‘I had to learn to take care of myself.’

  ‘You travelled on the roads?’

  My blood chilled. What had I just said? I tried to gather my thoughts for an explanation to make a ragged patch over the things I had told her of my personal history when at Perela.

  ‘Why yes,’ I continued. ‘When I first ran away from my uncle I walked for many miles before I found employment.’ My mind cast about for some way to change the course of the conversation. ‘But you,’ I went on, ‘you are not too unhappy with this uncle of yours here?’

  ‘No, it’s not so bad,’ Elisabetta agreed. ‘He is very ill humoured but I find I can win him round with soft words. Paolo is too proud to do that. Also Paolo hates the farm work. He still dreams of taking arms to avenge our family.’

  ‘But where would he seek revenge?’ I asked her. ‘These men are long since scattered, possibly dead.’

  ‘Paolo thinks now that they worked for someone else and not just Cesare Borgia. There may be a link to the Medici. You remember the monk at Averno who gave us shelter when we were being hunted?’

  I nodded. My stomach cramped. That night sheltering with the Plague victims. How could I forget?

  ‘The monk wrote to his sister at the convent in Melte and she wrote to me here with some information. He found out that the men who were searching for us were led by a ruffian called Sandino.’

  Sandino.

  My gorge rose. His name said out loud in Elisabetta’s sweet voice on a hot summer’s day drove a chill of fear into my soul.

  ‘This man Sandino is a spy and an assassin,’ she went on. ‘The monk wrote to tell me that he is a brigand who sells his favours to the highest bidder and he is a treacherous double agent.’

  ‘Then how can we know for whom he was working when he attacked Perela?’ I asked her.

  ‘You know the good monk of Averno, Father Benedict, better than I,’ Elisabetta replied. ‘His reputation is such that I would take his word. He said that he believed that when Perela was attacked Sandino was in the pay of the Borgia.’

  ‘Although that does not make sense,’ I said, hoping to confuse her thoughts. ‘Perela was a Borgia stronghold. My master had been instructed to go there to check the fortifications. Cesare Borgia wanted it strengthened, not destroyed.’

  ‘Something must have changed his mind.’ Elisabetta considered my statement. ‘And in fact,’ she went on, ‘they did not destroy our keep. It was something else within it that they sought.’

  My throat was now constricted so that I could not speak.

  ‘But who could know the mind of Cesare Borgia?’ said Elisabetta.

  ‘Who indeed?’ I managed to reply. ‘And now Cesare Borgia is dead. He was killed over a year ago in Navarre. So there is an end to Paolo’s quest for retribution.’

  Elisabetta turned to look at me. ‘But surely you know, Matteo, that Paolo lays the blame for all our troubles with the Papacy. The thought of harming the Vatican in any way is what occupies my brother’s mind. He will not rest until he has exacted some revenge.’

  Chapter Fifty

  CHARLES NEEDED TO return to his barracks to report to his commanding officer but Elisabetta begged me to remain a while longer.

  In the yard I watched Charles prepare to ride back to Milan with the stable lad.

  The Frenchman bent his head again over Elisabetta’s hand. ‘It is very difficult for a soldier on active service to conduct any kind of correspondence with a lady,’ he said. ‘But I would ask permission to write to you, if I may?’

  ‘Sir, I will look forward to your letters,’ Elisabetta replied.

  ‘And I would be honoured if you deigned to reply.’ Charles smiled at her.

  As he mounted his horse she said, ‘Please try not to encounter any more Swiss mercenaries on your travels.’

  She smiled up at him. And it occurred to me that I had not seen Elisabetta smile or speak in such a light-hearted way for a very long time.

  After they left, Elisabetta and I walked quietly in the garden. She led me through her herbarium and we exchanged information about the drying of plants and the best way to make various preparations. I took from inside my shirt some seeds I had bought for her in the market in Milan. ‘You must wait until the spring,’ I said, ‘but these will grow if given a shady place.’

  ‘I have made this place my retreat,’ she said. ‘My uncle does not mind me spending so much time here as there is income to be gained from the plants. I take the dried herbs and sell them in the village, and one of the apothecaries in the next town has asked me to supply him with particular products.’

  She seemed pleased with her project, and I promised to ask in Milan if any of the apothecaries there needed supplies.

  I also spoke to Paolo before I left. His manner too was less heavy and more excited than was usual on my visits. But it was not my company that had affected him in this way, more his conversation and sparring session with the French captain.

  ‘Charles says there are plenty of opportunities for fighting men,’ he told me.

  We had paused to talk before I led my horse out from their barn.

  ‘You would not join the French army?’ I asked him.

  ‘I would not side with the Pope in any fight. But there are many independent condottieri looking for an able-bodied man with some experience in swordsmanship.’ Paolo kicked the stable door in frustration. ‘If only I had enough money to buy a set of arms and a horse!’

  It was dusk as I made my own way back to Milan.

  I approached the turn in the road where we had met the Romany with caution. But, as I expected, they had disappeared. There
was no sign of their passing. They had untied the trees, collected their belongings and buried the embers of their fire. It was if they’d never been there.

  Apart from one thing.

  The coin.

  I saw it shining on the earth.

  I knew why the man, poor though he was, did not stoop to pick it up. We are not dogs, to be thrown a bone and scrabble for it in the dirt. Had Charles allowed the Romany some dignified leeway to accept his money, then the man would have taken it and gladly. The French captain should have made a semblance of trade, asked the man some information about the land, or even undergone the pretence of fortune telling. Or, if it was meant as a gift, he should have dismounted from his horse and offered the coin for the Romany to accept. But to throw it at a man’s feet is demeaning. Romany pride prevented him from lifting it.

  I left the coin lying on the earth.

  A mistake.

  I should have picked it up. They used it later as a marker.

  It served to indicate a place I had passed, and was therefore worth watching, as I might pass that way again.

  It showed the best spot on the road to effect an ambush.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  BEFORE THE END of the year I was in Pavia with the Maestro.

  His friend, Professor Marcantonio della Torre, lectured at the university there and conducted his anatomies in a theatre set aside for the purpose. When we attended these sessions the Maestro occupied a place of honour. He had a special chair near the anatomy table in front of the student benches and I stood beside him. On dissection days we had to push our way through the crowds of students and the few members of the public who had paid a high price for a ticket to attend. Throngs of pedlars stood at the university gates chaffering with these people over pieces of perfumed paper, scarves, and little silk sachets filled with chypre, all designed to overcome foul odours.

  The first anatomy I attended was performed on a young man who had died of an internal abscess. His stomach was grossly distended and full of bile, and the smell when the barber surgeon pierced it was so disgusting that I wished I’d had a coin to buy one of the scented sachets on sale outside. My master did not seem to be aware of the stench. He rose to his feet to see the contents of the stomach as the doctor in attendance poured the green fluid into a glass container. Professor della Torre presided upon a raised platform, a naked live man on one side of him and a skeleton on the other. With a long pointer he indicated on both these figures where the barber was making his incisions, and discoursed on the organs held up by the doctor. As the abscess burst open, a woman in the public gallery fainted and had to be carried out. Her place was taken up at once by someone from the crowd of people in the corridor anxious to get in.

  My master nudged me and indicated the attendants sprinkling quantities of vinegar about, and the braziers burning rosemary.

  ‘More pleasant than using one’s own urine to deaden the smell,’ he said. ‘But I’ll warrant less effective once the surgeon fully exposes the internal organs.’

  As the anatomy progressed many of the audience began to cough and gag. I heard the people crammed on the benches behind me whisper that the body was part decomposed, and must therefore have been taken from a grave.

  That night at dinner my master asked Professor della Torre about this. Grave robbing is a crime punished by execution, but the professor told us that sometimes students would travel far outside the town to steal a body to anatomize for their own information.

  ‘Not without hazard,’ he said. ‘Country folk now guard their burial places zealously, and attack anyone approaching their cemeteries by night.’

  ‘Let your students but follow the various armies in Italy,’ my master said heavily. ‘There will be bodies aplenty in the wake of their progress.’

  ‘You think this war has not ended with the French chasing the Venetians back into their northern state?’

  ‘By allying themselves with the Pope the French think that they have consolidated their position in Italy,’ said Graziano. ‘But they have lain down with a fox. A cunning old fox. He will turn on them.’

  ‘The Holy Father seeks unity,’ Felipe, who was pious and traditional in his beliefs, argued, ‘and to do this he needs to drive out foreign occupiers, bring down republics like Florence and install rulers in the city states that are sympathetic to the Papacy.’

  ‘He would bring the Sforza back to Milan?’ asked Professor della Torre.

  ‘I believe he would,’ said Felipe, ‘and give Florence once again to the Medici.’

  In addition to his dissections the Maestro at this time compiled notebooks of his studies on water and optics. And he worked on the painting of Donna Lisa.

  He had visited her when he had to return to Florence to settle a dispute with his brothers regarding the inheritance from an uncle. He did not speak directly of this haggle over a piece of land, but I had heard Felipe mention to Graziano that the Maestro was forced to be plaintiff. Such a thing would not have happened to a true-born child. Thus the stigma of bastardy followed him into old age.

  But when he had been in Florence he discovered that, in the Via della Stufa, the Donna Lisa had been safely delivered of a live baby boy.

  The child was named Giocondo.

  So we passed the winter in Pavia. And I discovered that it was not only for his own studies that the Maestro had come to the university; it was for my benefit also. The library held magnificent books and, with his guidance, I began to extend my reading.

  One day as I set out pen and ink for him to draw the details of the sinews of the man’s arm he said to me, ‘Look at that, and marvel.’

  He did not mean his own exquisite draughtsmanship. He was not so boastful. He meant the intricate and effective construction of the human body.

  ‘Man is a machine,’ he said, ‘a most beautiful piece of engineering.’

  I recalled the time of the chicken legs at Perela. He had taken the legs chopped from a newly slaughtered capon, and to the tendons within he had attached lengths of thin cord. Paolo and I had hidden these in our sleeves and crept silently upon Elisabetta and Rossana. We had touched the girls’ necks with these leg stumps, pulling on the cords to make the claws open and close. They had screamed in fright and we had chased them until they ran shrieking to their mother to complain about us.

  I had not seen that this childish game could be a practical lesson in anatomy. I held out my hand in front of me then I held it up so that it was between my eyes and the sun. Through the skin I could discern the darker shadow of the bone. If there could be made a light bright enough to shine through it then we might not need to dissect to observe the internal workings of the body in action. I curled my fingers into my palm and then straightened them again.

  ‘What are you thinking, Matteo?’

  He was watching me.

  ‘I was wondering how it is that I can make a fist without thinking of it.’ I told my master of seeing baby Dario at Perela sleeping in his crib. When the girls went to wake him they extended their little finger and placed it in his palm. In his sleep his fingers curled automatically around theirs. ‘Why did he do that?’

  ‘I believe it to be an instinctive reaction. One that serves some purpose in the development of a child, and necessary for its survival. But’ – he paused – ‘a theologian might say that God made it thus.’

  ‘Why did God make it thus?’

  He regarded me in amusement. ‘There was a time, Matteo, when you would have thought that to phrase such a question constituted heresy.’

  ‘I do not see that to discover the true meaning of things is wrong.’

  ‘There are those who would disagree. They have a fear of finding out.’

  ‘But God cannot be afraid of His own Creation,’ I argued.

  My master nodded his head in agreement. ‘Not if He is the Truth, as the Church claims Him to be.’

  ‘There is a legend from ancient times that says that it was Prometheus that fashioned man from clay. But he was punishe
d for this.’

  ‘Yes. He was considered a skilled metal worker and alchemist.’

  ‘Like Zoroastro,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ My master sighed. ‘Like Zoroastro.’ And his face drooped and the lines of his brow and mouth hollowed his features in sadness.

  I never thought of him as old. His face, his eyes especially, were always alive with interest or intent as his mind pursued some question. As he worked – painted or modelled or wrote – the concentration brought a refinement to his features as though the genius that pulsated through him energized his being. But, at the mention of his friend who had perished so cruelly at Fiesole, I saw how he was ageing.

  ‘Do you think we could ever know how to repair even such grievous injuries?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But now I am tired, Matteo. Leave me to rest.’

  The next morning I rose early to be at my books. The sky darkened at evening now and I needed to make use of as many hours of daylight as I could. I was sitting in an inner courtyard, wrapped up against the chill morning air, when Graziano found me.

  ‘The carrier has just been with some parcels. There is post here for you.’

  As I reached out my hand to take it from him I saw on the outside of the paper writing that I recognized. It was a letter from Elisabetta dell’Orte.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  My dear Matteo,

  I write to tell you that my uncle is very ill. He fell down in the field one day where he was working. Paolo was away to the market in Milan and I was busy about the house. My uncle could not move or cry for help so he may have lain there for some time. I only found out what had happened when he did not return for the midday meal and I went to look for him and discovered him lying upon the ground. I knew that I could not lift him by myself so I ran then to the farmhouse of Baldassare. He brought a blanket and between us we managed to roll my uncle onto it and thus we dragged him to the house.

  My uncle has lost the use of his limbs on one side and can barely speak to be understood, but must make signs to indicate what he wants. Baldassare has been very good to us and he paid for a doctor to come. The doctor bled my uncle twice from his arm. This has not helped and I believe has only made him weaker. I am administering hot compresses and feeding him barley broth and milk possets with preparations of camomile and valerian. I do not know what else to do to aid my uncle’s recovery or give him relief from his discomfort.