The Medici Seal

by Theresa Breslin

  And Father Albieri had been shocked, for he had thought Sandino was working for the Medici. And the priest saw that he had been betrayed in this. But it was too late for him to escape. Sandino killed the priest by hitting him with his cudgel. So I tried to run away.

  But Sandino came after me and I fell in the river and the companions of Leonardo da Vinci rescued me. They wrapped me up in the cloak of Felipe, the master of the household. As I revived after almost drowning they asked me my name and, next to my cheek, I saw the pilgrim badge that Felipe wore on his cloak, and I recognized it as the badge of St Matthew. Felipe, who was trained and employed to do accounts, had a devotion to the disciple of Christ called Matthew, who had been a tax collector. So, not wishing to tell my real name, I took that one for my own.

  Thus, as the boy Matteo, I came to Perela. I was happy to be with the dell’Orte family, and I loved them and was fearful to tell the truth in case they cast me out. And when we left I believed I was safe and did not know that Sandino would track me there. But when I was at Senigallia I heard Sandino’s men speak of the planned attack on Perela, so I had ridden as fast as I could to warn them. But I was too late. Thus it was my fault that they had suffered in such a way. I did not deserve to have Paolo and her call me brother. I did not merit their good grace.

  ‘It was not Paolo the brigands sought when they ransacked your father’s keep,’ I told her. ‘I was the boy they searched for.’

  ‘I know some of this already, Matteo,’ said Elisabetta.

  I stared at her. ‘How can you know any of this?’

  ‘I have had years to ponder on what befell my family,’ she replied. ‘There was always a mystery there. I was unable to think properly as Paolo and I journeyed to Milan, but after we settled on my uncle’s farm I began to go over in my mind the things that had taken place. I thought about what the monk in the hospital in Averno had asked us, and then, when he wrote to me with more information, I pieced it together. For the men who attacked our keep did not ask for Paolo by name, they asked about a boy. And I came to believe the boy they sought was you, Matteo.

  ‘Also’ – she paused – ‘I read through your grandmother’s papers that were in the box you gave me alongside her recipe book.’

  ‘Her papers?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elisabetta. ‘She—’

  A hellish hammering began at the main door of the church.

  ‘Open up! Open up in there!’

  ‘Sanctuary!’ the people around us wailed together. ‘Sanctuary!’

  There came the thud of a battering ram and the sound of splintering wood.

  An older woman hoisted herself up to one of the windows and called to those outside.

  ‘This is a church where women and children are sheltering. Go and take what you want in the town and leave us in peace.’

  ‘There are soldiers in there!’ a voice shouted. ‘We saw them go in.’

  The woman looked at me, then she called back, ‘The soldiers were wounded and have since died. There are only women and children here now.’

  Beside Eleanora an old man got up from his seat.

  ‘You!’ He pointed at me. ‘Get out there and fight. By remaining here you jeopardize us all.’

  The thudding on the door started up again.

  ‘I will go,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Elisabetta. ‘It’s a trick to get us to open the door. Then they will rampage through.’

  ‘I will go out via the bell tower,’ I said, and as she began to protest I went on, ‘It sounds more like a mob out there than proper troops. Perhaps I can draw them away from here.’

  ‘If you go out, Matteo, you will die.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But then, perhaps you will not.’

  ‘Do not go out for that reason.’

  ‘Not only for that reason,’ I said. ‘Look at them.’ I indicated the children huddled in against the sides of their mothers and the old people. They were mainly peasants or workers, those too poor to afford to have arms to defend themselves, the weak, those who could not escape in time, or buy their ransom. ‘For all of them,’ I said.

  We went into the bell tower and climbed the wooden ladders to the top. I pulled up the rope of one of the bells. ‘I am going to throw this outside and climb down. Cut the rope, or draw it up quickly when I reach the ground,’ I instructed Elisabetta, ‘else they may gain access this way.’

  She took my face into her hands and kissed me. ‘Know this,’ she said. ‘You are my brother and nothing you ever were, or said or did, will ever make me think ill of you.’

  I turned away quickly to save us both from tears. Then I flung the rope from the top of the tower and, grasping it hand over hand, I lowered myself down.

  When I was ten feet or more from the ground I spun round to look below me. The buildings around the piazza were on fire and groups of soldiers were rushing about carrying their spoils of war. The mob in front of the church had temporarily stopped their assault on the door. They could not have spotted me or they would have rushed to attack me. I slid down the rest of the way as fast as I could, then I yanked on the rope end to signal to Elisabetta to cut it at the top or pull it up quickly.

  Drawing my sword, I ran to the front door of the church. Immediately I saw the reason the battering on the church door had stopped. On the front steps, facing a mob of mercenaries and camp followers, stood two figures. One, dressed in red, was the Cardinal de’ Medici. The other, holding a sword, was Jacopo de’ Medici.

  Upon seeing me Jacopo de’ Medici pulled a pistol from his belt.

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  I STOOD STILL. At this range a sword was no defence against shot.

  ‘Here,’ he said to me. ‘Take this and stand with us.’

  I stared at him stupidly.

  ‘To me, Matteo! Or whatever you call yourself. Now!’

  I jumped to beside him and took the pistol.

  Just in time, for the mob, seeing their attention diverted, surged towards us.

  Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici was fat, and in his robes he made a huge red splash against the door of the church. ‘Stop!’ he bellowed. ‘In the name of the Lord God. In the name of the Vatican, and of the Pope in Rome, I command you to turn away from this house of God!’

  But a dragon unleashed cannot be re-chained. These men were mad with battle lust, ravenous with the need to satisfy themselves with gold, loot, women and killing. It was a lost cause. You cannot plead or reason with a mob.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he thundered. ‘Anyone who steps across this threshold will suffer the wrath of the Medici!’

  That checked them, but it was plain that it would only last a moment. Then they would be upon us and tear us apart.

  Instead of moving back Jacopo de’ Medici stepped forward to meet them. He addressed the two or three at the forefront of the main group.

  ‘What is your name?’ He pointed to the man in the centre.

  The man would not reply, but someone in the crowd shouted, ‘Luca! His name is Luca!’

  ‘Matteo!’ Jacopo commanded me in a loud voice. ‘Strike your flint and aim your pistol. If anyone in the crown moves, anyone at all, shoot first this man named Luca.’

  I raised my pistol and took aim, placing the weapon along my arm to try to keep my hand from shaking.

  The man Luca stepped back quickly.

  ‘The cardinal and I will kill the men on either side of him,’ Jacopo added with a malicious sneer.

  Luca’s two companions looked at each other in confusion. Then they too moved back a pace or two.

  ‘Shoot them in the belly,’ Jacopo added loudly. ‘That way you have less chance of missing. And they will die in agony.’

  ‘Let us aim lower,’ advised the cardinal. ‘That way, even if they survive, they will be fit for nothing.’

  One of Luca’s companions slid into the crowd behind him and disappeared. Luca and the one who was left exchanged desperate glances.

  ‘We’ll find another place,’ said Luca’s fr
iend. ‘There are plenty of other buildings in this town for looting.’

  ‘Yes.’ Luca turned to the crowd behind him. He raised his hands high above his head. ‘To the town hall!’ he shouted. ‘To the town hall!’

  The crowd shuffled and turned about.

  But Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici was not finished with him. ‘Know this, Luca,’ he shouted after him in a loud voice. ‘If this church is violated I will seek you out. The retribution of Heaven and Earth will descend upon you.’

  My legs weakened and I leaned against the door.

  Jacopo de’ Medici grabbed me roughly and turned me round, pushing my face against the door of the church. With his fingers he gripped me by my neck. Then he took the pistol from my hand.

  ‘I have no skill in marksmanship,’ I told him. ‘I doubt if I could have made true aim at him.’

  ‘It would have made no difference had you done so,’ said Jacopo. ‘The weapon is not loaded.’

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  AS CARDINAL GIOVANNI de’ Medici organized soldiers to guard the church, I made a plea to Jacopo de’ Medici for the safety of Elisabetta and the old lady Donna Cosma, and a decent burial for Paolo dell’Orte.

  Jacopo de’ Medici agreed to my requests on condition that I gave my word that I would not try to escape him again. He detailed armed men to escort me until he would summon me to his presence.

  A priest was called and he conducted a funeral service for Paolo, and my bond brother was laid to rest in the crypt of the basilica. Then the Medici men-at-arms carried Donna Cosma in a litter to her house and I helped Elisabetta settle her there.

  ‘I must leave you now,’ I said to her, ‘and go and discover what fate the Medici have planned for me.’

  ‘Before you do,’ she replied, ‘there is something you should know.’

  She unwrapped the bundle in which she had carried the medicines and food to the church. ‘With your grandmother’s recipe book were these documents, Matteo. You have never read them, have you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘As I young child I did not know how to read.’

  ‘To compile these books your grandmother must have been able to read and write. Didn’t you think it strange that she never taught you these skills?’

  ‘I didn’t think about it.’

  ‘I believe I know why she wanted you to remain illiterate,’ said Elisabetta. ‘These documents pertain to you. She would not have wanted you to read them. If you had understood the information they contained when you were a child, you might have spoken about them, and put yourself in danger.’

  ‘In what kind of danger?’

  ‘All kinds of danger. Most particularly abduction or murder.’

  ‘I do not understand. Let me see.’

  ‘There are several things here, letters and other documents, but the most important is this.’ Elisabetta handed me a piece of parchment. It was a baptismal notice with the date, 1492, and the child’s name written upon it: Jacomo.

  ‘What has this to do with me?’ I asked her.

  ‘That is your baptismal certificate, Matteo.’

  ‘That cannot be,’ I said. ‘I am Janek. It is the name my grandmother always called me.’

  ‘She would do that to protect you.’

  I looked again at the certificate. The priest had signed it along the bottom: Albieri d’Interdo. Albieri d’Interdo. The same priest who had led me to the Medici Seal in Ferrara.

  ‘The rest of these papers leave no doubt, Matteo,’ Elisabetta went on. ‘You are that boy child.’

  I looked again at the baptismal certificate, and this time I read it more carefully: On this day at the twelfth hour I baptized a boy child, newly born to the woman Melissa and the man, Jacopo de’ Medici.

  I saw the name written there.

  My father.

  Jacopo de’ Medici.

  Chapter Ninety

  MEDICI.

  I am Medici.

  The Medici.

  Selfish, arrogant, proud, greedy, disdainful, brutal.

  Wise, artistic, noble, generous, stately, compassionate.

  For two days the conquering troops raged through Prato. Men gone mad – slashed and pillaged and set fires and destroyed the town, killing more than two thousand people.

  Florence surrendered. Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, his brother and his cousins entered the city. Pier Soderini had fled and Niccolò Machiavelli was banished.

  Florence was returned to the descendants of Cosimo and Lorenzo the Magnificent.

  Jacopo de’ Medici summoned me to his presence. He was ensconced in a house near their former palace on the Via Larga and my guards took me to where he sat in an upper room behind a huge desk.

  ‘I have had great difficulty in finding you these last years,’ he said. ‘You were expert in eluding those I sent to track you down.’

  ‘I thought you meant to have me killed,’ I said. ‘I have only just now discovered that we have kinship.’

  ‘I would term it more than mere kinship!’ he snapped. ‘I am your father.’

  I met his angry look with one of equal force. ‘While you pursued your own life, others fulfilled that role.’

  He glared at me. Then his look softened. ‘I will relate to you the circumstances of your birth and then you may judge me.’

  He told me he had been my age when I was conceived. The Medici used Castel Barta as a hunting lodge and my mother was the daughter of the housekeeper who lived there to look after the building. The housekeeper was an intelligent and honest woman, part Romany and very skilled in folklore, with great knowledge of natural things. Melissa, her daughter, my mother, was only fifteen when she and Jacopo de’ Medici fell in love.

  ‘I did love your mother most passionately,’ Jacopo said. ‘You were the result. But I was contracted in marriage to another family and I could not legitimize your birth. So you stayed there with your mother and grandmother and I visited as often as I could. Your mother died in the summer of 1494, when you were about two years old. Those were troubled times. A few months later there were riots and unrest and the Medici were driven from Florence. Our enemies would have killed you. The safest thing I could do was to make you disappear. We obtained a gypsy wagon and your grandmother took you away. It was at this point that the Great Seal of the Medici was given into the safekeeping of a kinsman of the Medici, the one priest that I trusted, Father Albieri, of the parish of Castel Barta.

  ‘The Medici were dispossessed, and had to wander round the courts of Europe seeking help where we could. I was a hunted man myself and could not even send your grandmother money for fear it would be found out. And then I lost track of where you were. Your grandmother had travelled as far north as Venice so that you would be safe, but the Plague was rampant in the last place I knew you had been. I came to believe that you and your grandmother had perished.

  ‘To begin with, the brigand Sandino was an agent of the family of the woman I had married. She was not wicked but she was very jealous, and a woman knows when she is not loved. The years passed and there was no child. She would fly into rages, accusing me of being unable to give her children, and I, in anger, one day declared that I knew my seed could bring forth a son as it had already done so.

  ‘She said nothing.

  ‘One should fear rage that is silent. Anger that boils and rants is a perceivable danger and can be dealt with, but quiet malice is a deadly foe.

  ‘My wife found out that you had been born at Castel Barta and she engaged Sandino to hunt you down and kill you. But to begin with he could find no trace of you.

  ‘Then Cesare Borgia entered the Romagna to try to secure the papal territories by any means, and he also used Sandino as one of his many spies. By this time Sandino had picked up your trail by means of information from an assassin he knew. This man had bought poison from an old gypsy woman he said was keeping a young boy concealed in her wagon.’

  ‘Why, I remember that man!’ I exclaimed. ‘He forced my grandmother to make some poppy juice for him
. She was very frightened, and as soon as he left we moved on through the mountains during the night.’

  ‘She was wise to do so,’ said Jacopo, ‘for now Sandino was very close to you. But he needed to be sure that you were the boy he sought. He knew where you had been born so he went to the parish priest of Castel Barta, Father Albieri, and pretended he was working for me and that I wanted to find you to bestow money and title upon you. Father Albieri said he did not know where you were but that he would be able to recognize you if he did meet you again.’

  ‘But how could he?’ I asked. ‘He had not seen me since I was a young child. My grandmother did not take me anywhere near Castel Barta until she knew she was dying.’

  Jacopo de’ Medici got up and came from behind his desk. He turned my head round in the same manner as he had done when pushing my face into the church door at Prato. ‘Just below your hairline there is a mark on each side of your neck.’

  The mark of the midwife’s fingers. I recalled the quip made by Giulio, Wardrobe Master of the castle in Averno, when advising me to have my hair cut.

  ‘Father Albieri was a good man, but naive,’ Jacopo went on. ‘He told Sandino that if you were indeed Jacomo de’ Medici then you were the true owner of the Medici Seal, which he had been given to keep in trust.

  ‘Sandino saw the opportunity to make a great deal of money. The seal could be used to forge many kinds of documents, bank orders, letters of conspiracy, enough even to bring down the Council of Florence. He knew that Cesare Borgia would pay him well if he could bring it to him. Therefore Sandino devised a plan whereby he would have both you and the Medici Seal.

  ‘For safety Father Albieri had hidden the seal in the garden of his cousin in Ferrara. He did not tell Sandino the location of the seal but said that he was travelling to Ferrara to attend the wedding of Lucrezia Borgia and Duke Alfonso. He told Sandino to arrange for you to come to him on some pretext, and if you were truly Jacomo he would bring both you and the Medici Seal to an agreed rendezvous point. He did this in the belief that Sandino was intent on taking you safely back to your true family.’