The Sign of the Weeping Virgin (Five Star Mystery Series)

by Alana White

  Silence.

  He sensed eyes boring into him. What the hell did this bastard want? He ducked into the passageway alongside the church and pressed against the raw, wet stones. There he waited, dagger raised. He heard a flurry of motion as someone hurried after him into the black maw. All right, then: one of them would die.

  The sound of singing pricked Guid'Antonio's ears. He must be raving mad! No—the singing came from the direction of the bridge, drunken and off-key, accompanied by a lute. It was a gang of young men returning home from some tavern or house of prostitution across the river. From the bridge, they stumbled into the piazza, laughing. “Whoo-hoo, Piccarda! Can you come out to play?”

  Trapped between his prey and the youths soaked in rain and wine—armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight, undoubtedly—Guid'Antonio's pursuer shrank into his cloak. “Whoever you are, come on,” Guid'Antonio whispered. He motioned with his free hand. “Do it. Please.”

  The scrape of the gate opening on the opposite side of the piazza and the drunks falling through it told them both that in a moment they would again face one another alone. “Come on!”

  The hooded figure gave a smothered cry. “No!”

  He turned and fled, Guid'Antonio's last sight of him the hem of his soaked robe.

  “What the hell?” Guid'Antonio leaned against the wall, shaking. In his hand, his dagger felt slippery, drenched with rainwater and sweat. He pulled himself together, quit the alley, and emerged into Piazza Goldoni. Why had the man tailed him? To relieve him of his crimson cloak for resale to the used-clothes dealers? Possibly. To kill him? Why? Christ's nails, he'd only been home one day!

  In the coming hours, he would watch his back and warn Amerigo to guard his own safety, too.

  Ognissanti Church sat ahead on his right, just beyond Via Porcellana, the street where Sandro Botticelli lived with his family and kept his workshop, Botticelli and Company. Guid'Antonio slipped past the narrow black passage. Beneath his fingers, the church door pushed slowly in. Cool air stung his nostrils. Incense, damp, stone: the smell of loneliness. In the darkness, a few candles flickered here and there.

  By Florentine standards, Ognissanti was not a large church. Still, Guid'Antonio's presence disturbed the quiet when he traversed the nave in his cloak, now completely wet and as dark as blood. At this hour the side chapels were deserted, their only inhabitants the bodies of the dead in the lower vaults. His family. On his right, barely visible in the lack of light, were the two frescoes Domenico Ghirlandaio had painted on the Vespucci Chapel's outer wall, the Madonna of Mercy and, directly below this, the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, with Ghirlandaio's renderings of Amerigo and his black-garbed uncle Giorgio Vespucci, staring back at Guid'Antonio. Next on the south wall came—oh, yes, Sandro's Saint Augustine, the old man garbed in luminous robes of white and orange-gold. Guid'Antonio would know Sandro's hand anywhere, even if Brother Giorgio hadn't mentioned the fresco earlier this evening. He passed the wall painting without a second look, boots squishing as he walked beneath Ognissanti's slender arches toward the painting propped on the altar.

  At the altar, he stopped, his gaze fastened on the Virgin Mary of Santa Maria Impruneta.

  Encircled in a ring of low burning light, the Virgin stared blankly into space. He strode onto the altar, removed a burning candle from a saucer, and held the flame toward her painted eyes, orbs as dry as dust in a vapid face. Glancing up into the lifting vault, he saw only darkness. No ropes and pulleys, no leak in the ceiling. Which reminded him: what had the weather been last Wednesday, when the painting first wept? Had it been raining then? And what about the days from Wednesday to Saturday, when the tears slowed and ceased completely?

  He circled the panel: no tiny holes pierced in the wood, no water bucket. Had he truly expected such an easy resolution? He shook his head to clear it. He would begin fresh in the morning. Question people in a quiet way.

  He dropped a coin into the collection box, lit a candle, and placed it on a nearby table beside a host of others. Kneeling at the rail, he murmured a prayer for Maria's mother, while from the sacristy on his right there came the soft susurration of voices, the Benedictine brothers of the Humiliati going about some nocturnal business, most like.

  And then he heard a brief, whirring sound, and some violent thing dropped down on him from overhead. “Lucifer!” He leapt up, slipped, and knocked against the wooden table. Flaming candles tilted toward the floor. He scanned the altar for his attacker, clasping his knife in one hand, and steadied the table with the other—God! A fire in the church? Appalling! A flurry of sound beat around his shoulders. He slapped at it and ducked. A bird! Trapped in the church and panicky, wings thrumming about its body with the same sense of terror pounding through it as through him. As quickly as it had appeared, the tiny bird flew up and was lost in the void. Guid'Antonio slumped at the altar rail.

  “Guid'Antonio,” the painting said.

  He spun around. The candles at the Virgin Mary's feet guttered and fell still. Her painted eyes watched him blankly. Good Christ. He drew an aching breath, then another, and another, until his breathing slowed. Was it just this morning a distraught young monk had fled this church, giving him and Amerigo such a knock in the street? Brother Martino: a solitary Benedictine, dark eyes all aglow, the hem of his black robe flying behind him as he sprinted toward the Prato Gate with two others of the Humiliati order fast on his heels. Craziness. An apt beginning to a day that slowly and steadily had descended straight to hell.

  Near the church front, still shaky, Guid'Antonio stood before Sandro Botticelli's fresco of Saint Augustine.

  Botticelli's luminous white, gold, and scarlet brushstrokes brightened the gloomy wall. No surprise there. Guid'Antonio's eye followed the direction of the saint's upward gaze. Toward what? Heaven and the promise of salvation?

  But there was something else, too. He squinted, but seeing was difficult in this shadowy atmosphere. At the top of the painting, Sandro had drawn a vermillion shield with a band of blue, and on the blue, a few golden wasps. Brother Giorgio Vespucci had commissioned the wall painting, and so, of course, Sandro had decorated it with the Vespucci family seal. Guid'Antonio made out a fringed tablecloth and a couple of books, one leather bound, the other open to a page scribbled with a few odd markings and, hidden as it was in the shadows, a bit of text he could not make out.

  Like Guid'Antonio's spirit, all the rest of Sandro's masterful work was lost in a world of dark, and so he turned away.

  NINE

  “Here, Tesoro!” Camilla Rossi da Vinci calls plaintively, and wakes. Hidden in the woods deep in the rustling night, she sits bolt upright on her pallet, the sturdy arms and kind voice of her nurse soothing her within the moment, as she takes Camilla to her breast and holds her close, gently rocking back and forth.

  “My girl, sweet girl, it's all right,” Margherita coos, “sweet, motherless girl, you're all right, just here now, try to sleep.”

  “Sleep? How, when I'm held captive? Where's Tesoro? Where?” Camilla glances around, bewildered. “He's taken away my beautiful black treasure, too?” Her thin body shudders, she is chilled despite the tower's oppressive heat, chilled as she remembers her captor's fierce eyes flaring and catching fire when she tore the scarf from his wounded, wild face. She had screamed, she remembers clearly, or is that the sound of her present cries scorching her ears?

  “My face! You've seen my face! I ought to kill you for that!” he had railed, grasping her violently, throwing her over his steed like a feather merchant's sack of down. “I ought—!”

  “Taken away, yes,” Margherita is saying now. “But Tesoro is all right. I'm sure the little horse is fine.”

  “You're sure? But how?”

  Margherita clamps her mouth shut.

  At the barred window, Camilla stands alone, a prisoner in a room carved from stone, the hem of her shift touching her bare toes. Behind her, Margherita sits on a stool near the wooden door fixed on the outside with three iron bolts. The n
urse is released from the cell from time to time, allowed to come and go every few days to bring food and wine and empty the chamber pot. And always, always Margherita's master accompanies her.

  In the darkness Camilla's lustrous hair shines, thick and curling like Tesoro's blue-black mane, brushed with silver in the pearly wash of moonlight. If Camilla thrust her slender hand past the bars, she would feel her fingers lashed by stinging wind and rain. The rain's harsh tears separate her from Florence, where she has lived with her husband, Castruccio Senso, these past few years. But there is no need to reach out for tears; she has her own, glistening wet pools filling her blue eyes. Surrendering to sorrow, she weeps.

  In Ognissanti Church, the sanctuary door wheezes shut behind Guid'Antonio, and the candles at the altar flame up, gathering strength, casting the Virgin Mary of Santa Maria Impruneta in a veil of glowing yellow light. Silver, shining tears dampen the Virgin Mary's painted cheeks, and a sigh rises in the empty church. Listen and hear its soft, singing hush: Praise Her, Ever Virgin. Praise Her, the blessed one who weeps.

  TEN

  She troubled Guid'Antonio's dreams, smiling tenderly at him, always just out of reach. Again and again, he beckoned her. He could see her in the mist, her tousled hair caressing her naked breasts. . . .

  He sat up in bed, fatigued rather than refreshed after a fitful night of sleep. The chamber felt deadly still, the sheets on the other side of the mattress lukewarm beneath the palm of his reaching hand. Gray fingers of light poked at the window shutters.

  He propped the shutters open, bathed under his arms, and dressed in the white tunic embroidered with creamy-colored wasps Cesare had put out for him sometime during the night, slipping in and out on hosed feet. Or had Cesare found some magical method of moving about without sound, like a dryad traveling undetected through the forest and the trees?

  He was halfway down the stairs when he heard a child's loud cries and a solid thumping sound. He walked into the sunshine, frowning. Last night's storm had left the atmosphere clear and the sky a lusty shade of pink. He shivered, remembering the hooded figure hunting him in the rain the previous evening, and how the Virgin had said his name in the shadows of Ognissanti.

  Two rug beaters, ruddy-faced, muscular men, had tied a rope across the garden and were flogging a tapestry with straw brooms. Dust flew into their faces, making them sneeze. A clothesline had been stretched across the grass just opposite these men. Cesare, in the act of pinning Guid'Antonio's cloak up to dry, glanced over with a grim expression, then nodded toward little Giovanni, who was weeping beside the fountain.

  Guid'Antonio narrowed his gaze. Amerigo's mother, Elisabetta Vespucci, hovered over the boy, fussing, whilst his nurse, Olimpia, down on her knees, rump poking the air, searched the ground at the older woman's tightly shod feet.

  Beneath the sole of Guid'Antonio's boots, the grass was whispery and wet. Elisabetta spun around. Only a few years older than Guid'Antonio, Elisabetta Vespucci ruled the household and all therein, exactly as she did her husband, Nastagio, and her sons. Or so she liked to believe.

  Her face tightened. “So, Guid'Antonio Vespucci. How good of you to join us before the bells toll midday.”

  “Why is my son crying?” he said.

  Her fists flew to her ample waist. “He weeps like a girl! Over nothing! He should save his tears for true sorrow and grief.”

  Giovanni snuffled, “It's something to me.”

  “Giovanni, see? I told you I would find it.” Olimpia jumped up, rosy-cheeked and smiling, straightening her shift. She handed the boy the small object she had plucked from the ground. “Don't cry, my little lamb.”

  Elisabetta snorted. “He bleats all the time.”

  Guid'Antonio's silent gaze passed over Amerigo's mother like a cool breeze. “Son, what had you lost?”

  The rug beaters, cursing as they wrestled the leaden-weight wall-hanging from the sagging rope, maneuvered it into a fat sausage on the ground, heaving and kicking their brooms from under their bare feet. Silently Giovanni regarded his toes.

  “Messer Vespucci, it's a seashell.” Olimpia brushed grass from her bodice and sneezed. Her breasts jiggled. The rug beaters stared. One called out a rude remark. Cesare, marching over, slapped both men on the face, grabbed them by the backs of their shirts, shoved them to the gate, and pitched the brooms after them out onto Borg'Ognissanti.

  A smile touched Guid'Antonio's lips.

  “Cesare!” Elisabetta huffed. “In God's name, what do you think you're doing?”

  “I, Signora?” Cesare anchored one hand on his hip. “In a moment, I'm off to find two rug beaters who should know better than to insult our house. Particularly the—” He scanned Olimpia up and down and touched his heart. “Particularly the fair ladies who live herein.”

  Olimpia blushed, cutting her eyes up at him.

  “Our house? Cesare Ridolfi, you presume too much!” Elisabetta said. “Before you go anywhere, I mean to ask you about a certain woolen blanket missing from Ognissanti's winter donation box. The blanket is plain brown with narrow blue and yellow stripes at each end. I paid to have the moth holes patched and this morning the blanket's gone.” Her voice dropped menacingly. “Stolen from the poor in these hard times.”

  Cesare's countenance paled. “I know nothing of any stolen woolen blanket.”

  “Don't lie to me!” Elisabetta said loud enough for the entire Unicorn district to hear. “You know everything!”

  Guid'Antonio had had enough of Elisabetta Vespucci's bullying. “Elisabetta,” he said in a voice as dangerous as it was composed. “You've insulted my child, and now Cesare, who made this girl a noble gesture, and who has no need ever to steal a blanket, new, old, or otherwise.” But then, last night had not Cesare filched leftover pork from the loin his mother had cooked for the evening meal?

  Guid'Antonio turned to Olimpia. “Now, for God's sake, Giovanni had lost a shell?”

  “Show him, Giovanni,” Olimpia said, tossing a speculative glance toward Cesare, who was already halfway out the gate, chasing the rug men.

  “Only because you asked me,” Giovanni said.

  “There!” Elisabetta Vespucci said. “You see what a rotten egg he is? I'll box your ears later, Cesare!” she called toward the borgo. “Something nasty is going on in this house, and I'll not rest till you confess it to me!”

  “Elisabetta,” Guid'Antonio said evenly, “there's a contest of wills many people would pay several gold florins to see.” She glared into his eyes, her heart all but consumed by anger, or so to him it seemed.

  Giovanni glanced from Guid'Antonio to his red-faced aunt and back again. “It has the sea in it,” he said. Ivory-colored with a curve of delicate pink, the small shell fit Giovanni's outstretched hand to perfection.

  “Does it?” Guid'Antonio leaned down toward the boy. “That's lovely. May I listen?”

  “No!” Giovanni yanked back his hand, gripping the shell so tightly, Guid'Antonio feared it might cut his flesh and cause it to bleed. “Just Mama, Olimpia, and me!”

  “Giovanni,” Guid'Antonio said, but Elisabetta shook Giovanni vigorously.

  “Terrible, terrible boy! Where are your manners, you uncivilized beast?”

  “Where are yours?” Guid'Antonio roared. “Release him. Now!”

  Giovanni kicked her. Olimpia sucked in her breath, her brown eyes round and startled. “God's wounds!” Elisabetta screamed. “The wicked boy attacked me!”

  Guid'Antonio grasped his son by the arm. “Giovanni! Look at me. I said look!”

  Giovanni did as bidden; still, Guid'Antonio felt every fiber in his son's thin body straining to escape his grip. “Giovanni,” he said. “Never, ever strike an adult. Do so again, and you'll see grave trouble, indeed.”

  Giovanni stuck out his lower lip. “Cesare struck an adult. Two of them, those rug beaters. I saw him. And then he threw them out the gate and pursued them.”

  Still clutching the shell, Giovanni glared back at Guid'Antonio, his dark eyes sparking with
an intensity of emotion that seemed to Guid'Antonio to border on hate. “When's my mother coming home?” the boy said.

  “I don't know.” Guid'Antonio released him. “Cesare Ridolfi is an adult. You'd do well to remember that, Giovanni. Olimpia, take my son to the nursery.”

  The two went upstairs, Giovanni pressing the prized seashell to his ear with one hand and holding tight to Olimpia's shift with the other.

  Guid'Antonio's white-hot gaze swept toward Elisabetta Vespucci. “Elisabetta, if ever I hear you address my son in like manner again, you will be much the worse for it, I swear.”

  The woman went rigid. “How dare you, you arrogant pretender? You are not the head of this household. My husband, Nastagio, is! And Brother Giorgio, daring to drag him off at dawn today like—like—”

  “Nastagio's gone? Where?” Guid'Antonio said.

  “San Felice! As if you didn't know.” Her voice broke. “Like some common criminal or dog you wish to destroy. And why? Why? To keep him from speaking the truth about Lorenzo de' Medici and ruining all your dreams of glory. You're Lorenzo's puppet dancing to the devil's strings! Why wouldn't the Virgin Mary weep?”

  In a flurry of dark skirts, Elisabetta Vespucci swept up the stone staircase after Olimpia and Giovanni, tossing a terrible glance over her shoulder. “Tell Cesare if he continues to thwart me, I'll have his ears sliced off!”

  “Welcome home,” Guid'Antonio muttered, crossing the garden to the kitchen. “God help me.”

  “It's true, 'Tonio—”

  Amerigo was leaning against the kitchen doorframe with his back to the courtyard, talking to his brother and popping glossy red cherries into his mouth as quickly as Domenica Ridolfi washed the fruit and put it into the pottery bowl on the trestle table beside a basket of mushrooms.